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which the impression of nearness is received, may interest and surprise him, but does not so shake his confidence in his own conclusions as to be told that the external world, in which he has so fully believed that he has never so much as thought of its existence as a matter of belief, is a mere creation of the mind, one portion of its own acts being thrown into opposition to another portion. The one assertion arrests and throws back in confused, eddying currents, the whole stream of intellectual action; the other merely shows that analysis reveals more elements in mental phenomena than those at first caught sight of. There is no reason why the statement that there is a simple judgment involved in a belief of the existence of matter and of mind, should be regarded as any more destructive to the faith to be reposed in our faculties, than the generally accepted doctrine, that sight includes many judgments dependent on protracted experience. The assertion of Hamilton, "that consciousness gives a knowledge of the ego, in relation and contrast to the non-ego," even if it were readily intelligible to all, would hardly, I think, be regarded as a satisfactory statement of a general and unwavering belief, when contrasted with the statement, there is found that in consciousness from which we directly and inevitably infer the existence of matter and mind. Most would doubtless regard the two statements as open to consideration, as lying alike in the line of the common belief in the external world. Indeed, to say that the mind is conscious of itself, or is conscious of matter, gives a shock at once to thought, and is far from being that explicit, indefeasible statement of the common faith which all at once recognize.

The exact ground of the general belief is certainly open to inquiry, and one statement which accepts its validity is no more exposed to the charge of a denial of the integrity of the human faculties than another. Indeed the