But no:  analysis of immediate experience will never disclose any fixed order in it; the surface of experience, when not interpreted materialistically, is an inextricable dream.  Berkeley and his followers, when they look in this direction, towards nature and the rationale of experience and science, are looking away from their own system, and relying instead on the automatic propensity of human nature to routine, so that we spontaneously prepare for repeating our actions (not our experience) and even anticipate their occasions; a propensity further biased by the dominant rhythms of the psyche, so that we assume a future not so much similar to the past, as better.  When developed, this propensity turns into trust in natural or divine laws; but it is contrary to common sense to expect such laws to operate apart from matter and from the material continuity of external occasions.  This appears clearly in our trust in persons—­a radical animal propensity—­which is consonant with common sense when these persons are living bodies, but becomes superstitious, or at least highly speculative, when these persons are disembodied spirits.

It is a pity that the beautiful system of Berkeley should have appeared in an unspiritual age, when religion was mundane and perfunctory, and the free spirit, where it stirred, was romantic and wilful.  For that system was essentially religious:  it put the spirit face to face with God, everywhere, always, and in everything it turned experience into a divine language for the monition and expression of the inner man.  Such an instrument, in spiritual hands, might have served to dispel all natural illusions and affections, and to disinfect the spirit of worldliness and egotism.  But Berkeley and his followers had no such thought.  All they wished was to substitute a social for a material world, precisely because a merely social world might make worldly interests loom larger and might induce mankind, against the evidence of their senses and the still small voice in their hearts, to live as if their worldly interests were absolute and must needs dominate the spirit.

Morally this system thus came to sanction a human servitude to material things such as ancient materialists would have scorned; and theoretically the system did not escape the dogmatic commitments of common sense against which it protested.  For far from withdrawing into the depths of the private spirit, it professed to describe universal experience and the evolution of all human ideas.  This notion of “experience” originally presupposed a natural agent or subject to endure that experience, and to profit by it, by learning to live in better harmony with external circumstances.  Each agent or subject of experience might, at other times, become an object of experience also:  for they all formed part of a material world, which they might envisage in common in their perceptions.  Now the criticism which repudiates this common material medium, like all criticism or doubt, is secondary