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ready to make in common with it, is a question of more doubt. We, in our position, arrive at them by an inferential knowledge both of matter and mind, by a discovery of their mutually impenetrable character. If we were, as idealism asserts, in every way debarred access to matter --- to matter as believed in by the masses of men it would certainly not be so plain how we could come so universally to form a distinct, uniform and controlling idea of its character, and be able also to affirm, that this most omnipresent and fixed of our notions is, in its essential features, a mere figment of the brain. Why a series of physical conceptions which is removed by the very nature of mind from even the bare possibility both of knowledge and being should nevertheless be the most uniform and universal of mental states, is not explained by idealism. How a form of thought, necessarily false, comes to be a fixed product and characteristic of mind; how it happens that we continually talk, think and act in reference to matter matter which by the constitution of the mind, is beyond all forms of knowledge; how science and philosophy come to so utterly differ from each other in their beliefs, are mysteries which must ever, to the straightforward, practical thinker, reflect the highest improbability on idealism, and leave it among those strange, remote conclusions, which when not directly disproved are too far off to disturb the orbit of our daily life. When philosophy subverts knowledge, instead of expounding it, and denies the validity of the most settled, familiar and unavoidable judgments of the mind, it assumes an anarchical character, removing the foundations, if not of thought, yet of conviction.

We believe the true doctrine of perception to be, that the state of consciousness therein is purely subjective both in action and object, indeed that the action and object are inseparable. To perceive a color, is to put forth a complete,