Thus, if we read the history of philosophy with patience and with discrimination, it grows luminous.  We come to feel nearer to the men of the past.  We see that we may learn from their successes and from their failures; and if we are capable of drawing a moral at all, we apply the lesson to ourselves.

CHAPTER XXIV

SOME PRACTICAL ADMONITIONS

88.  BE PREPARED TO ENTER UPON A NEW WAY OF LOOKING AT THINGS.—­We have seen that reflective thought tries to analyze experience and to attain to a clear view of the elements that make it up—­to realize vividly what is the very texture of the known world, and what is the nature of knowledge.  It is possible to live to old age, as many do, without even a suspicion that there may be such a knowledge as this, and nevertheless to possess a large measure of rather vague but very serviceable information about both minds and bodies.

It is something of a shock to learn that a multitude of questions may be asked touching the most familiar things in our experience, and that our comprehension of those things may be so vague that we grope in vain for an answer.  Space, time, matter, minds, realities,—­with these things we have to do every day.  Can it be that we do not know what they are?  Then we must be blind, indeed.  How shall we set about enlightening our ignorance?

Not as we have enlightened our ignorance heretofore.  We have added fact to fact; but our task now is to gain a new light on all facts, to see them from a different point of view; not so much to extend our knowledge as to deepen it.

It seems scarcely necessary to point out that our world, when looked at for the first time in this new way, may seem to be a new and strange world.  The real things of our experience may appear to melt away, to be dissolved by reflection into mere shadows and unrealities.  Well do I remember the consternation with which, when almost a schoolboy, I first made my acquaintance with John Stuart Mill’s doctrine that the things about us are “permanent possibilities of sensation.”  To Mill, of course, chairs and tables were still chairs and tables, but to me they became ghosts, inhabitants of a phantom world, to find oneself in which was a matter of the gravest concern.

I suspect that this sense of the unreality of things comes often to those who have entered upon the path of reflection, It may be a comfort to such to realize that it is rather a thing to be expected.  How can one feel at home in a world which one has entered for the first time?  One cannot become a philosopher and remain exactly the man that one was before.  Men have tried to do it,—­Thomas Reid is a notable instance (section 50); but the result is that one simply does not become a philosopher.  It is not possible to gain a new and a deeper insight into the nature of things, and yet to see things just as one saw them before one attained to this.