sable groups of sensations. This coherence
and recurrence force the intellect, if it would master experience at all
or understand anything, to frame the idea of such a reality. If we wish
to defend the use of such an idea and prove to ourselves its necessity,
all we need do is to point to that coherence and recurrence in external
phenomena. That brave effort and flight of intelligence which in the
beginning raised man to the conception of reality, enabling him to
discount and interpret appearance, will, if we retain our trust in
reason, raise us continually anew to that same idea, by a no less
spontaneous and victorious movement of thought.

CHAPTER IV--ON SOME CRITICS OF THIS DISCOVERY

[Sidenote: Psychology as a solvent.]

The English psychologists who first disintegrated the idea of substance,
and whose traces we have in general followed in the above account, did
not study the question wholly for its own sake or in the spirit of a
science that aims at nothing but a historical analysis of mind. They had
a more or less malicious purpose behind their psychology. They thought
that if they could once show how metaphysical ideas are made they would
discredit those ideas and banish them for ever from the world. If they
retained confidence in any notion--as Hobbes in body, Locke in matter
and in God, Berkeley in spirits, and Kant, the inheritor of this
malicious psychology, in the thing-in-itself and in heaven--it was
merely by inadvertence or want of courage. The principle of their
reasoning, where they chose to apply it, was always this, that ideas
whose materials could all be accounted for in consciousness and referred
to sense or to the operations of mind were thereby exhausted and
deprived of further validity. Only the unaccountable, or rather the
uncriticised, could be true. Consequently the advance of psychology
meant, in this school, the retreat of reason; for as one notion after
another was clarified and reduced to its elements it was _ipso facto_
deprived of its function.

So far were these philosophers from conceiving that validity and truth
are ideal relations, accruing to ideas by virtue of dialectic and use,
that while on the one hand they pointed out vital affinities and
pragmatic sanctions in the mind's economy they confessed on the other
that the outcome of their philosophy was sceptical; for no idea could be
found in the mind which was not a phenomenon there, and no inference
could be drawn from