76 Life and Matter [chap. v. 



have enabled him to become what he is ; so 

 that having become keenly alive to the truth 

 that all we are directly aware of is the fruit 

 of our own sensations and consciousness, he 

 proceeds to the grotesque supposition that 

 these sensations and consciousness may be all 

 that really exists, and that the information 

 which for ages our senses have conveyed to 

 us concerning external things may be illusory, 

 not only in form and detail and appearance, 

 but in substantial fact. 



He must be pleased, also, with the enter- 

 prise of those eager philosophers who are so 

 strenuously impressed with the truth of 

 some ultimate monistic unification, as to be 

 unwilling to concede the multifariousness of 

 existence who decline to speak of mind and 

 matter, or of body and spirit, or of God and 

 the world, as in any sense separate entities 

 who stigmatise as dualistic anything which 

 does not manifestly and consciously strain after 

 an ultimate monistic view and who then, 

 as a climax, on the strength of a few years' 

 superficial experience on a planet, by the aid 



