world and the knowledge of it are identical; but if it is talked about or thought about it is denaturalised, although convention and utility may compel the poor human being to talk and to think, exiled as he is from reality in his Babylon of abstractions.  Life, like the porcupine when not ruffled by practical alarms, can let its fretful quills subside.  The mystic can live happy in the droning consciousness of his own heart-beats and those of the universe.

With this we seem to have reached the extreme of self-concentration and self-expansion, the perfect identity and involution of everything in oneself.  And such indeed is the inevitable goal of the malicious theory of knowledge, to which this school is committed, remote as that goal may be from the boyish naturalism and innocent intent of many of its pupils.  If all knowledge is of experience and experience cannot be knowledge of anything else, knowledge proper is evidently impossible.  There can be only feeling; and the least self-transcendence, even in memory, must be an illusion.  You may have the most complex images you will; but nothing pictured there can exist outside, not even past or alien experience, if you picture it.[1] Solipsism has always been the evident implication of idealism; but the idealists, when confronted with this consequence, which is dialectically inconvenient, have never been troubled at heart by it, for at heart they accept it.  To the uninitiated they have merely murmured, with a pitying smile and a wave of the hand:  What! are you still troubled by that?  Or if compelled to be so scholastic as to labour the point they have explained, as usual, that oneself cannot be the absolute because the idea of oneself, to arise, must be contrasted with other ideas.  Therefore, you cannot well have the idea of a world in which nothing appears but the idea of yourself.

[Footnote 1:  Perhaps some unsophisticated reader may wonder if I am not trying to mislead him, or if any mortal ever really maintained anything so absurd.  Strictly the idealistic principle does not justify a denial that independent things, by chance resembling my ideas, may actually exist; but it justifies the denial that these things, if they existed, could be those I know.  My past would not be my past if I did not appropriate it; my ideas would not refer to their objects unless both were ideas identified in my mind.  In practice, therefore, idealists feel free to ignore the gratuitous possibility of existences lying outside the circle of objects knowable to the thinker, which, according to them, is the circle of his ideas.  In this way they turn a human method of approach into a charter for existence and non-existence, and their point of view becomes the creative power.  When the idealist studies astronomy, does he learn anything about the stars that God made?  Far from him so naive a thought!  His astronomy consists of two activities of his own (and he is very fond of activity):  star-gazing and calculation.  When