an it be that we do not know what
they are? Then we must be blind, indeed. How shall we set about
enlightening our ignorance?

Not as we have enlightened our ignorance heretofore. We have added
fact to fact; but our task now is to gain a new light on all facts, to
see them from a different point of view; not so much to extend our
knowledge as to deepen it.

It seems scarcely necessary to point out that our world, when looked at
for the first time in this new way, may seem to be a new and strange
world. The real things of our experience may appear to melt away, to
be dissolved by reflection into mere shadows and unrealities. Well do
I remember the consternation with which, when almost a schoolboy, I
first made my acquaintance with John Stuart Mill's doctrine that the
things about us are "permanent possibilities of sensation." To Mill,
of course, chairs and tables were still chairs and tables, but to me
they became ghosts, inhabitants of a phantom world, to find oneself in
which was a matter of the gravest concern.

I suspect that this sense of the unreality of things comes often to
those who have entered upon the path of reflection, It may be a comfort
to such to realize that it is rather a thing to be expected. How can
one feel at home in a world which one has entered for the first time?
One cannot become a philosopher and remain exactly the man that one was
before. Men have tried to do it,--Thomas Reid is a notable instance
(section 50); but the result is that one simply does not become a
philosopher. It is not possible to gain a new and a deeper insight
into the nature of things, and yet to see things just as one saw them
before one attained to this.

If, then, we are willing to study philosophy at all, we must be willing
to embrace new views of the world, if there seem to be good reasons for
so doing. And if at first we suffer from a sense of bewilderment, we
must have patience, and must wait to see whether time and practice may
not do something toward removing our distress. It may be that we have
only half understood what has been revealed to us.

89. BE WILLING TO CONSIDER POSSIBILITIES WHICH AT FIRST STRIKE ONE AS
ABSURD.--It must be confessed that the philosophers have sometimes
brought forward doctrines which seem repellent to good sense, and
little in harmony with the experience of the world which we have all
our lives enjoyed. Shall we on this account turn our backs upon them
and refuse them