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on through the flux and has changing and external relations — is a life, discourse itself, the voluminous adventures of the mind in its wholeness. This is also what novelists and literary psychologists endeavour to record or to imagine; and the particular data, hardly distinguishable by the aid of a word clapped on to them, are only salient sparks or abstract points of reference for an observer intent on ulterior events. It is ulterior events, the whole of human experience and history as conventionally reported, that is the object of belief in this school, and the true existence.

Ostensibly empiricists seek to reduce this unmanageable object to particular data, and to attribute existence to each scintilla taken separately; but in reality all the relations of these intuitions (which are not relations between the data), their temporal order, subordination to habit and passion, associations, meaning, and embosoming intelligence, are interpolated as if they were matters of course; and indeed they are, because these are the tides of animal life on which the datum sparkles for a moment. Empiricists are interested in practice, and wish to work with as light an intellectual equipment as possible; they therefore attribute existence to “ideas” — meaning intuitions but professing to mean data. If they were interested in these data for their own sake, they would perceive that they are only symbols, like words, used to mark or express the crises in their practical career; and becoming fervid materialists again in their beliefs, as they have always been in their allegiances, they might soon go so far as to deny that there is intuition of data at all: which is a radical way of denying their existence. Discourse and experience would thus drop out of sight altogether, and instead of data of intuition there would be only the pictorial elements of physics — the other possible form in which anything given may be asserted to exist.