not consent to have them forced upon him: he knows that they cannot be so forced, or impose themselves at all without his consent and approval. They must legitimate their claim to be received. In their first appearance he even welcomes them as stimulus and material for his special activity. The spectacle presented by Reality to our first, i.e. our most unthinking view, is so far from discouraging to him that he recognizes it as the necessary occasion of his peculiar work.
All this is, I am well aware, rather a confession of faith than a reasoned argument. The proof of it cannot be given now, but can be produced only in and by its development.
To unify—if that be possible—what we call 'Nature' is not commonly acknowledged to be the business of the philosopher, nor is he generally thought to possess any competence for that task. His proper—or at least his primary—business is thought to be that of setting his own house in order. He is bidden to restrict his ordering function to the inner world—the world of Mind or Spirit. Tecum habita ut noris quam sit tibi curta supellex. If he accepts this limitation, there is evident a rather gleeful insistence on the difficulties of his accepted task. Here, too, is the same spectacle of endless detail and difference. Even after Psychology, as the science of the inner world, continuing the work begun by practical common sense, has reduced to classes and brought under laws the immense variety of mental phenomena, the result of its arbitrary abstractions and artificial simplifications—themselves without producible justification—is still so complex and so disintegrated as to present little hope to the would-be assertor or discoverer of a single well-ordered system or harmonious and self-explanatory unity. It may here be remarked that the philosopher does not expect or assert
