FACT AND IDEA. 1097 
that of consciousness. And it is this unity of consciousness, whose 
form is infinite duration, that gives the final unity and justification 
to all our voluntary modification of the world—intellectual, moral, 
zesthetic. 
The modification is equivalent to a recreation. 
One procedure—that of the intellect with regard to spatial 
perception, otherwise material bodies—demands, at the present 
moment, attention. 
The bodies are regarded as apart from all human feeling ; and 
their properties are measured by certain standards of space and 
time—-standards absolute only in so far as they are purely 
arbitrary. 
They being converted into concepts, the concepts of their inter- 
action (otherwise laws) are sought, with this aim—to reduce them 
to a unity : an ideal, is it not ? 
Observing certain interactions of complete empirical bodies, 
the intellect extends these laws into the infinite, transforming, 
ideally, those aspects of bodies which are the objects of the visual, 
auditory, olfactory, caloric senses into results of the object of our 
crudest sense—that which contains for us the most interest from 
the point of view of ourselves as space-occupying bodies—Touch. 
Time was, when this transformation was attempted from another 
standpoint ; but the strongest interest in this domain of space- 
occupying bodies has, as was only right, gained the day. 
What stronger proof, from another side, of the intellectual 
need to obtain a conceptual unity in this matter selected and re- 
arranged according to a physical need, than the reduction of the 
object of Touch, Resistance, to a minimum, an Atom, colourless, 
odourless, tasteless, without light, and without heat, perfectly hard 
and perfectly elastic, unfelt, unloved, unhated, not regarded as a 
reality, yet used as a concept explanatory of all this full and rich 
world of colour, sound, taste and odour, light and heat, which we 
love and hate, fear and live in, with whose skies and tempers our 
feelings seem inwoven ;—what other is it than the Ideal, set in the 
void and formless infinite, to represent an Idea—that of material 
nature reduced to concept, and spied out by thought in all her 
forms? If we endowed an atom with all attributes, still it would 
in the last resort only satisfy the intellect, conceiving even this 
possible, being used as an intellectual explanation of these attri- 
butes existing phenomenally. Further, it would frustrate the 
spirit of ideal progress, which here would be barred by a rigid 
absolute, devoid of mystery and wonder. 
One thing is plain—that this reduction of sensory phenomena 
to the effects of various interactions, measured by arbitrary stan- 
dards, of arbitrary minima of resistance-offering matter, is per- 
formed by the intellect (since this cannot choose its points of 
