the act of representing it, is an immediate experience raised
to its highest power: it is the Life of Reason. In vain, then, will a
philosophy of intellectual abstention limit so Platonic a term as
reality to the immediate aspect of existence, when it is the ideal
aspect that endows existence with character and value, together with
representative scope and a certain lien upon eternity.

More legitimate, therefore, would be the assertion that knowledge
reaches reality when it touches its ideal goal. Reality is known when,
as in mathematics, a stable and unequivocal object is developed by
thinking. The locus or material embodiment of such a reality is no
longer in view; these questions seem to the logician irrelevant. If
necessary ideas find no illustration in sense, he deems the fact an
argument against the importance and validity of sensation, not in the
least a disproof of his ideal knowledge. If no site be found on earth
for the Platonic city, its constitution is none the less recorded and
enshrined in heaven; nor is that the only true ideal that has not where
to lay its head. What in the sensualistic or mystical system was called
reality will now be termed appearance, and what there figured as an
imaginary construction borne by the conscious moment will now appear to
be a prototype for all existence and an eternal standard for its
estimation.

It is this rationalistic or Platonic system (little as most men may
suspect the fact) that finds a first expression in ordinary perception.
When you distinguish your sensations from their cause and laugh at the
idealist (as this kind of sceptic is called) who says that chairs and
tables exist only in your mind, you are treating a figment of reason as
a deeper and truer thing than the moments of life whose blind experience
that reason has come to illumine. What you call the evidence of sense is
pure confidence in reason. You will not be so idiotic as to make no
inferences from your sensations; you will not pin your faith so
unimaginatively on momentary appearance as to deny that the world exists
when you stop thinking about it. You feel that your intellect has wider
scope and has discovered many a thing that goes on behind the scenes,
many a secret that would escape a stupid and gaping observation. It is
the fool that looks to look and stops at the barely visible: you not
only look but _see_; for you understand.

[Sidenote: Identity and independence predicated of things.]