osophy. Those who continued his work began far enough, apparently,
from the point where he left off and went a road strangely remote from
his. Having taken the inner life for their study they sought to lay bare
its very foundations. Nowadays, if we are so minded, we dictate to
machines which write our words curiously enough in shallow lines upon
wax cylinders and when the cylinders are full shave off the fragile
record and begin again.

This is what the eighteenth century did for the mind. It reduced it to a
virgin surface, it affirmed the reality of nothing except the
impressions thereupon registered by what sense supplied. We owe to
experience and to experience only "all that vast store which the busy
and boundless fancy of man has painted on it [the white paper of the
mind] with an almost endless variety." We have nothing with which to
begin but sensation; we have nothing to go on with but reflection.
"These two, namely external, material things as the objects of
sensation, and the operations of our own minds within as the objects of
reflection, are the only originals from whence all our ideas take their
beginnings."[60] Such things as these are perhaps enough to begin with,
but they are not enough to go on with as our thinkers soon enough
discover. Some way must be found to relate the material thus supplied
and to build it up into a glowing, continuous, reasonable and conscious
inner life.

[Footnote 60: Locke, "Essay Concerning the Human Understanding."]

So in turn the philosophers laboured at their problem. They made much
not only of reflection but of association; they found a place for memory
and imagination; they discovered that we may as truly define experience
in terms of ideas as of sensation; they discovered finally that by no
possible process even of the most ingenious reasoning can you get the
full wealth of life out of a mind which was nothing more to begin with
than a piece of white paper, any more than you can get Hamlet (if we may
suppose Shakespeare to have used a dictaphone) out of a wax cylinder, a
needle and a diaphragm.

So Kant ended what Spinoza began, by reaffirming the creative power of
the mind itself. It does far more than passively receive, it interprets,
organizes, contributes, creates. True enough, it is not an unconditioned
creator, it has laws of its own in obedience to which it finds both its
freedom and its power. It must take the material which experience
supplies and yet, in it