14- RECONSTRUCTION. 



mensurable aspects of things. But all these 

 discordant aspects are activities of the same self ; 

 the thought and feeling which conflict are both 

 *' mine " ; my ''self" unites "my" thoughts and 

 "my" feeling into a single consciousness. It gives 

 us the unity as an accomplished fact, and leaves us 

 the task of discovering how the miracle was, 

 effected. 



Hence we are justified in provisionally accepting 

 the parallelism of thought and feeling as a fact, and 

 assuming that the conclusions we prove concerning 

 the thought symbols representing reality will hold 

 good of the facts. At any rate we cannot go wrong 

 in sticking to realities which unite thouMit and 

 feeling, like the conscious self. It may be false to 

 be guided by the felt objects of perception, or by the 

 abstractions of our thought, but the procedure by 

 means of selves which both think and feel must 

 surely be true. Thus the reality of the Self restores 

 to us, even though only provisionally, the use of the 

 categories and first principles of our thought with a 

 view to the interpretation of things. 



And it justifies further a bold solution of the diffi- 

 culty into which the hopeless conflict of thought and 

 perception had involved us. VVe had ventured to 

 express a suspicion (ch. iv. § 23), that possibly the 

 excessive deference shown to phenomenal facts and 

 the perceptions of our senses was responsible for 

 the dire straits to which Pessimism reduced us. 

 Pessimism was the natural inference to draw from 

 the apparent supremacy of Becoming in the pheno- 

 menal world, and Becoming was unknowable and 

 irreconcilably at variance with the principles of our 

 thought. But was it not, after all, a prejudice to 

 suppose the appearance of Becoming higher than the 



