290 THE PROBLEM OF KNOWLEDGE 



we get any personal contact with reality, and 

 f hence, any genuine guarantee of vital truth. 

 / Thought is pale, and remote from the concrete 

 stuff of knowledge and experience. It only formu 

 lates and duplicates ; it only divides and recombines 

 that fullness of vivid reality got directly and at 

 first hand in sense experience. Reason, compared 

 with sense, is indirect, emasculate, and faded. 



Moreover, reason and thought in their very 

 generality seem to lie beyond and outside the in 

 dividual. In this remoteness, when they claim any 

 final value, they violate the very first principle of 

 the modern consciousness. What is the distin 

 guishing characteristic of modern life, unless it be 

 precisely that the individual shall not simply get, 

 I and reason about, truth in the abstract, but shall 

 make it his own in the most intimate and personal 

 way? He has not only to know the truth in the 

 sense of knowing about it, but he must feel it. 

 What is sensation but the answer to this demand 

 for the most individual and intimate contact with 

 reality? Show me a sensationalist and I will show 

 you not only one who believes that he is on the 

 side of concreteness and definiteness, as against 

 washed-out abstractions and misty general no 

 tions : but also one who believes that he is identified 

 with the cause of the individual as distinct from 

 that of external authority. We have only to go 

 to our Locke and our Mill to see that opposition 



