and of whose ontological existence we are made aware by its phenomenal projections, or effects in consciousness.’ The sentence takes our breath away, and makes us sympathise with Bishop Berkeley when he says, ‘We metaphysicians have first raised a dust, and then complain we cannot see.’ It prepares us also for Kant’s final admission that nothing can really be proved by metaphysics concerning the attributes, or even the existence, of the soul; though, on the other hand, as it cannot be disproved, its reality may for moral purposes be assumed. It appears, therefore, that the efforts of the sublimest transcendentalists do not carry us one step farther than the conclusions of the commonest common-sense, viz. that there are certain fundamental conditions of thought, such as space, time, consciousness, personal identity, and freedom of will, which we cannot explain, but cannot get rid of. The sublimest speculations of a Plato and a Kant bring us back to the homely conclusions of the old woman in the nursery ballad, in whose mind grave questions as to her personal identity were raised by the felonious abstraction of the lower portion of her petticoat. If I be I, as I think I be, I’ve a little dog at home, and he’ll know me. It is a safe ‘working hypothesis’ that when I go home in the afternoon, my wife, children, and little dog will recognise me as being ‘I myself I;’ but why or how I am I, whether I was I before I was born, or shall be so after I am dead, I really know no more than the little dog who wags his tail and yelps for joy when he recognises my personal identity as something distinct from his own, when he sees me coming up the walk.