the English mind seems instinctively to distrust, and which English philosophy had sought to resolve away into component parts.  The Englishman as a philosopher is by nature very much like the Englishman as a mechanic or as a business man.  He wants to touch and see, to test and handle, before he is convinced of reality.  ’I desire that it be produced’ is the frequent remark of Hume—­Scotsman in some respects, but very English in this—­whenever he is dealing with some conception not readily verifiable in experience.  English philosophy left to itself was not inclined to do justice to the subtler, more evasive notions that are not readily defined.  It did not allow enough for what we may call the imponderable elements.  German idealism has had just the opposite fault.  It has been too ready to take its thoughts for realities, too prone to use large and perhaps vague conceptions as if they were solid coin and not tokens that needed a good deal of scrutiny to determine their value.  We may see an example in a branch of political thought which has been a good deal under discussion of late.  To some German thinkers the conception of the State presents itself in a manner which by no means comes natural to the Englishman.  To the German the State is an entity as obvious, real, and apparent as the individual citizen.  It is not just the head of Germany, or the sixty-five millions of Germans, or the Kaiser, or the army, or the Government.  It is just itself, the State, and it has attributes and powers, is the object of duties and possessor of rights just like any Hamburg merchant or Prussian Junker.  To the natural Englishman all this seems half mystical, half superficial.  Talk to him of the State and if he is to grasp the conception at all he must get it into terms of persons or things.  He pictures it perhaps as the Government, perhaps simply as the income-tax collector, perhaps as the miscellaneous millions living in the United Kingdom.  If he discusses its well-being, its success or its failure, he does so under the reserve that all this is a shorthand for the well-being of great numbers of men and women.  If its honour and good faith are in question what he will ask is whether Sir E. Grey fulfilled a definite pledge at a given moment after the manner of an English gentleman.  Now for my own part, whether through national prejudice or not, I believe this habit of checking and resolving large conceptions to be the safest and most scientific way of dealing with them.  Yet I can also see that it may lead to a good deal of crudity and may lead men to ignore important elements for which they cannot readily find some concrete expression.  In this very matter of the State, for example, we are dealing with an organization of individuals, and if our way of talking about it makes us overlook the flesh and blood of which it is composed, the other way may obscure in our minds the vital differences introduced by the very fact of organization.  The Germans have often seen the wood more clearly when