But he cannot by any possibility step out of himself and pass over into these other existences, or draw them into himself. In this respect Matthew Arnold's lines are as true as they are poignantly beautiful: —
Yes! in the sea of life enisled,
With echoing straits between us thrown,
Dotting the shoreless watery wild,
We mortal millions live alone.
The islands feel the enclasping flow,
And then their endless bounds they know.
But, as I have said, to wish to overpass these limits is to rebel against the very nature of selfhood, and epistemologically to kick against the very notion of knowledge. That very self which is a principle of isolation in existence is the principle on which all communion, all fellowship rests, alike in knowing and in feeling. But knowledge is not a fusion of knower and known, nor is it all explained by being regarded as a kind of physical continuity or immediate contact between the knowing subject and the object known. Though science may prove all perception to be dependent on the existence of a physical medium between the object perceived and the sense-organs, thus reducing all the senses to varieties of touch, the psychical facts which result are yet totally different, and as it were apart from the series of physical movements from which they result. Physical nearness or remoteness does not affect the epistemological question. The table which is in immediate contact with my organism is as completely and inexorably outside the world of my consciousness as the most distant "star and system" visible upon the bosom of the night. Though I press my hand against it, it is no more present in consciousness than is the friend on the other side of the globe whose image rises at the moment in my mind. There are in fact two worlds, and to that fundamental antithesis we return. To the one world belong, in Berkeley's language though not in Berkeley's sense, all the choir of heaven and furniture of the earth, to the other the thoughts and feelings of the individual who is consciously aware of this system of things in which he himself draws his breath and has
