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these judgments, and as the process accompanies us all the way through life, we see but little occasion to ascribe their presence to a blind, organic tendency. Moreover, such a movement would not prepare the way for conscious, rational action, would not put the mind in possession of itself, but would tend in action to anticipate order, and so prevent such a result.

The fifth consideration is the nature and certainty of our knowledge of the internal and external world. The mind under any view has the most immediate knowledge of its own impressions. The interior phenomenal world is necessarily known to it. Here knowledge gathers its primary force. The chief difficulty is found in the relation of this knowledge to real being, internal or external. The dependence seems to us simple. We believe, with Descartes, that under the action of causation we infer decisively and correctly external agents from fixed, involuntary impressions. The reality and relations of these external causes are more and more disclosed to us by perception with its enlarging judgments, and are more and more completely clothed with the phenomenal impressions in the mind which are attributed to them. This knowledge of causes in their effects is all the knowledge that is proper to them, and the effort to resolve the cause itself into a second phenomenon, serves only to push the cause one step farther back. In repeated instances this process, by which the mind habilitates the underlying reality with its appropriate phenomena, has, in the case of vision gained in later years, passed on under observation. There is no element of real doubt in this knowledge; its links are close and sufficient; its chief mysteries lie, as is wont to be the case, in first terms, in the perceptive and sensational elements, and in the completeness with which these are made objective. This last point is abundantly illustrated by facts like those of