face. The will moves every nerve and muscle to do its work. The soul pours through the body as water through a sieve, and thus manifests its whole inner life. Not only the tongue speaks, but the eye is eloquent, the flushed face is charged with meaning, and every feature blabs. So, also, the body acts upon the soul, conveying to it thought, stirring up its feelings, moving its will, causing it to leap with joy or cry out with pain, and thus pouring in through all its sluices quickening influences that flood the soul. We not only express ourselves through the body, but it is largely through the body that we know ourselves. Knowing how the soul and body are thus closely connected as causes or signs of each other's condition, from the state of the one we can infallibly infer the state of the other. From seeing the face we can tell the state of the soul, and from the state of the soul we can describe the features of the face. This fact has an important bearing upon our next argument.

(4) Let us now take a still further look into the great complex current of our experience with its bright stream of phenomena and its parallel faint stream of thought. We see in the bright stream certain spots or units of phenomena that are strikingly similar to our own phenomenal body. These bodies are sections of the stream of phenomena in that they affect us as phenomena and are subject to all the laws of the phenomenal world. But they also differ from this stream just as our own body does. They move and speak and in all respects act like

our own body. We can speak with them, and in every way they respond to us as beings with like thoughts and passions as our own. Now we know how to interpret our own body as the expression of our consciousness. Our bodily movements are the phenomenal symbols of our inner life. The logical step, therefore, is direct and conclusive by which we infer that these phenomenal bodies are the expression of inner life, or of souls, like our own. We thus know that these bodies which appear as phenomena in the stream of our own experience are the bodies of other souls; and as such souls must be ultimate reality like our own soul, we have thus reached objective reality and placed it upon solid ground.

Solipsism is thus logically undermined; its cell of isolation is ruptured. Even if the solipsist were to take the position that these phenomenal bodies are only points in his own experience and so belong to him, we answer that such bodies, animated as they are like our own, explainable only as having inner life like our own, are what we mean by other persons; and if the solipsist insists that these other persons are still only a part of himself, there is some truth in his contention; for we are all connected up in one vast organism of souls, and each one may view himself as the center of the whole. this fact of the organic solidarity of souls is not solipsism, for it depends on the existence of distinct souls or personalities.

But

We have now reached a world to move. It embraces other souls, but it also embraces that vast and mysterious

framework of being that lies back of the permanent order of phenomena we call nature. To move this world of nature, to penetrate into its inner meaning and lay bare the secret of its reality, is the great problem and adventure of metaphysics, and to this problem we now advance.

CHAPTER VIII

THE NATURE OF OBJECTIVE REALITY

The individual soul works through the shows of sense
(Which, ever proving false, still promise to be true)
Up to an outer soul as individual too;

And, through the fleeting, lives to die into the fixed,
And reach at length God, man, or both together mixed.

THE world hangs before us as a vast many-colored curtain or veil. The great question of metaphysics is, What is the nature of this curtain? What lies behind this veil ?

I. THE WORLD AS PHENOMENON

Our reasoning thus far has shown that this veil is a phenomenon, or stream of phenomena; that is, it is not a reality in itself, but is an appearance occasioned in the mind by some objective cause acting upon it. A stone or a star is the product of some reality acting on the mind, which reacts in accordance with its own constitution so as to erect and project this object of experience. The various sensational qualities of the object of experience, its color, sonance, odor, taste, and touch, are states of the mind, and as such they cannot exist in extended matter. Furthermore, this subjectivity of the object of

experience includes its spatial form, which is also a subjective appearance imposed on our sensational experiences by the constitution of the mind, and is not a form of the noumenal reality itself. That curtain of the world, then, is not matter according to our common meaning of this term: it is not an extended and insensate substance with the various qualities we ascribe to matter. This reasoning destroys the materiality of the world, but it does not show us its real nature; it is neg. ative and destructive, but not positive and constructive.

We are still left to inquire, What is the nature of this world-curtain? The fact, however, that the reality of the world is not extended matter, raises a presumption that it is spirit or mind. The only kind of reality other than matter we know or can conceive is mind, and, matter having been resolved into a phenomenon, only mind is left. This alternative is not conclusive, for there may be kinds of reality that lie beyond our experience or our power to know. We have so far only a presumption in favor of the idealistic view.

2. THE WORLD AS MIND IN MAN

There is one point, or rather millions of points, in the curtain of the world where we have pierced through it into its noumenal reality; namely, the point of human personality. We have seen that the stream of the phenomenal world contains sections or units which are proved to be the bodies of other minds like our own. The reality in every one of these bodies is known to us to be