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in which it lies, and in which flying intuition discloses it for a moment, is the very realm of non-existence, of inert or ideal being. The Indians, in asserting the non-existence of every term in possible experience, not only free the spirit from idolatry, but free the realm of spirit (which is that of intuition) from limitation; because if nothing that appears exists, anything may appear without the labour and expense of existing; and fancy is invited to range innocently — fancies not murdering other fancies as an existence must murder other existences. While life lasts, the field is thus cleared for innocent poetry and infinite hypothesis, without suffering the judgement to be deceived nor the heart enslaved.

European philosophers, even when called idealists, have seldom reconciled themselves to regarding experience as a creature of fancy. Instead of looking beneath illusion for some principle that might call it forth or perhaps dispel it, as they would if endeavouring to interpret a dream, they have treated it as dreams are treated by the superstitious; that is, they have supposed that the images they saw were themselves substances, or powers, or at least imperfect visions of originals resembling them. In other words, they have been empiricists, regarding appearances as constituents of substance. There have been exceptions, but some of them only prove the rule. Parmenides and Democritus certainly did not admit that the data of sense or imagination existed otherwise than as illusions or conventional signs: but their whole interest, for this reason, skipped over them, and settled heavily on “Being,” or on the atoms and the void, which they severally supposed underlay appearance. Appearance itself thereby acquired a certain vicarious solidity, since it was thought to be the garment of substance; somehow within the visionary datum, or beneath it, the most unobjectionable substance was always to be