mony between these supposed separate entities demands philosophic deduction. The relation, to be sure, may be itself a metaphysical figment. We hold that it is. We shall try to show hereafter the baselessness of this notion of a world of external fact on one side, in the barren isolation of its transcendental reality, with an equally lonesome thinker on the other side, somehow magically bound to follow after the facts of that world. We hold, to put it in plain language, that neither the external world nor the individual thinker has any such reality as traditional popular beliefs, together with most metaphysical schools, have desired us to assume. But, for the first, we cannot yet undertake to trouble the reader with this our philosophic speculation. That will come in its good time, we hope not too unintelligibly, and it will have its place in our religious doctrine.
We begin, however, with the popular metaphysical concept, of a separate external world, and of a thinker bound somehow to repeat the facts of it in his thought. We ask, with popular metaphysics: How can we be sure that he does this? And from metaphysical systems, both popular and unpopular, we get an amazing jargon of answers.
The most popular answer, after all, is a threat, a threat repeated endlessly in all sorts of apologetic books, but still a mere base, abject, wholly unphilosophical threat. It is said to us that we must believe our human thinker to be capable of thinking correctly the facts of this supposed external world, because, if he does not, the result will be disastrous
