THE RATIONALE OF PHILOSOPHICAL THOUGHT. 781 



learnt to consider as the outer world. This we have in 



common with other persons whose existence we had, as 



it were, to discover in our infancy, and who have taught 



us through signs and language to assign to our own self 



a modest and retiring position among men and things. 



The explorer of the firmament of the soul will have to 42. 



recognise as equally real those regions in the field of contrasted 



with the 



consciousness which are less fixed, more changing, con- "^s^e. 

 taining experiences which do not recur with similar 

 regularity, and which, in consequence, we do not ex- 

 ternalise ; which we share with other minds in vague 

 forms not lending themselves to exact definition. Such 

 exact definition — this term being employed as it is when 

 we speak of the definition of an object under the micro- 

 scope or the telescope — is dependent on location in space. 

 We may indeed perhaps be right in maintaining that all 

 definite and clear knowledge depends ultimately upon 

 the spatial nature of the constellations or complexes of 

 our sensations ; that even logic, with its laws of identity 

 and contradiction, rests upon spatial distinction ; and that 

 through this qualification, what in the field of conscious- 

 ness partakes, and only so far as it partakes, of the 

 spatial property, is capable of rising into the clear day- 

 light of exact thought. Such a view seems implied, if 

 not emphatically stated, by Kant when he maintained 

 that any knowledge was only so far scientific as it 

 partook of mathematics. The whole edifice of this exact 

 knowledge, as it has been built up through generations 

 of thinking minds and as it is largely imparted to each 

 of us individually through intersubjective communion 

 with others, includes and rests upon a conception of 



