And this is universally true; it is not that we must rise to the higher by a long and laborious process. We may have a long and laborious process to go through, but, when we find the higher, it is this: we discover our true selves, our essential being, the fact of our lives. In this case, we pass from the ridiculous limitation, to which our eyes and hands seem to be subject, of acting in a mere section of space, to the fuller knowledge and feeling of space as it is. How do we pass to this truer intellectual life? Simply by observing, by laying aside our intellectual powers, and by looking at what is. We take that which is easiest to observe, not that which is easiest to define; we take that which is the most definitely limited real thing, and use it as our touchstone whereby to explore nature. As it seems to me, Kant made the great and fundamental statement in philosophy when he exploded all previous systems, and all physics were reft from off the perceiving soul. But what he did once and for all, was too great to be a practical means of intellectual work. The dynamic form of his absolute insight had to be found; and it is in other works that the practical instances of the Kantian method are to be found. For, instead of looking at the large foundations of knowledge, the ultimate principles of experience, late writers turned to the details of experience, and tested every phenomenon, not with the question, What is this? but with the question, “What makes me perceive thus?” And surely the question, as so put, is more capable of an answer; for it is only the percipient, as a subject of thought, about which we can speak. The absolute soul, since it is the thinker, can never be the subject of thought; but, as physically conditioned, it can be thought about. Thus we can never, without committing a ludicrous error, think of the mind of man except as a material organ of some kind; and the path of discovery lies in investigating what the devious line of his thought history is due to, which winds between two domains of physics--the unknown conditions which affect the perceiver, the partially known physics which constitute what we call the external world. It is a pity to spend time over these reflections; if they do not seem tame and poor compared to the practical apprehension which comes of working with the models, then there is nothing in the whole subject. If in the little real objects which the reader has to handle and observe does not lie to him a poetry of a higher kind than any expressed thought, then all these words are not only useless, but false. If, on the other hand, there is true work to be done with them, then these suggestions will be felt to be but mean and insufficient apprehensions.