1.  One man will meet the difficulty boldly, and say—­“X Y and Z certainly lie within the circle, but I believe they lie without it. How this should be, I know not.  I merely state what I conceive to be the fact.  The modus operandi is beyond my comprehension.”  This man’s answer is contradictory, and will never do.

2.  Another man will deny the possibility of the transference—­“X Y and Z,” he will say, “are generated within the circle in obedience to its own laws.  They form part and parcel of the sphere; and every endeavour to regard them as endowed with an extrinsic existence, must end in the discomfiture of him who makes the attempt.”  This man declines giving any answer to the problem.  We ask him how X Y and can be projected beyond the circle without transgressing its limits; and he answers that they never are, and never can be so projected.

3.  A third man will postulate as the cause of X Y Z a transcendent X Y Z—­that is, a cause lying external to the sphere; and by referring the former to the latter, he will obtain for X Y X, not certainly a real externality, which is the thing wanted, but a quasi-externality, with which, as the best that is to be had, he will in all probability rest contented.  “X Y and Z,” he will say, “are projected, as it were, out of the circle.”  This answer leaves the question as much unsolved as ever.  Or,

4.  A fourth man (and we beg the reader’s attention to this man’s answer, for it forms the fulcrum or cardinal point on which our whole demonstration turns)—­a fourth man will say, “If the circle could only be brought within itself, so—­

[Illustration]

then the difficulty would disappear—­the problem would be completely solved.  X Y Z must now of necessity fall as extrinsic to the circle A; and this, too, (which is the material part of the solution,) without the limits of the circle A being overstepped.”

Perhaps this may appear very like quibbling; perhaps it may be regarded as a very absurd solution—­a very shallow evasion of the difficulty.  Nevertheless, shallow or quibbling as it may seem, we venture to predict, that when the breath of life shall have been breathed into the bones of the above dead illustration, this last answer will be found to afford a most exact picture and explanation of the matter we have to deal with.  Let our illustration, then, stand forth as a living process.  The large circle A we shall call our whole sphere of sense, in so far as it deals with objective existence—­and X Y Z shall be certain sensations of colour, figure, weight, hardness, and so forth, comprehended within it.  The question then is—­how can these sensations, without being ejected from the sphere of sense within which they lie, assume the status and the character of real independent existences?  How can they be objects, and yet remain sensations?

Nothing will be lost on the score of distinctness, if we retrace, in the living sense, the footprints we have already trod in explicating the inanimate illustration.  Neither will any harm be done, should we employ very much the same phraseology.  We answer, then, that here, too, there are just four conceivable ways in which this question can be met.