We do not here propose to offer any of the usual arguments in support of this system, apart from the palpable fact that it appears to offer to each faculty, sensitive and intellective, appropriate material for operation, but to contrast its adequacy with the confessed impotency of Spencer’s “transfigured realism.” And, indeed, not only is this latter impotent but eminently fallacious. In endeavoring to prove that the mind transfigures its sensations in such a manner that there can exist no correspondence between the sensation and the object, Mr. Spencer allows the decision to rest on his test-case of sound. With respect to the sensation produced on the auditory nerve by aërial undulations, he says that “the subjective state no more resembles its objective cause than the pressure which moves the trigger of a gun resembles the explosion which follows.” And again, summarizing the argument, he says: “All the sensations produced in us by environing things are but symbols of actions out of ourselves, the natures of which we cannot even conceive.” The fallacy of this statement it is not difficult to perceive; for Mr. Spencer rules out the action of the intellect, which can alone determine the value and significance of a sensation, and takes account only of the sensation itself, deeming it able to pronounce upon its own correspondence with its exciting object. Indeed, there can be no more correspondence between a visual object and the sense of vision than there can be between sound and a vibration of the air, except in so far as the mind pronounces this to be the case after a due investigation of the respective conditions pertaining to both sensations. It is the mind alone which can determine that the sensation we call sound is the result of air undulations, just as it is the mind which determines that the color and outline of visual objects are as represented in vision. The fault, therefore, of Mr. Spencer’s view is that, having constituted sensation the sole and sufficient judge of its own objective validity and correspondence with external objects, he is compelled at once to fly to his chosen refuge and cherished haven of the “unknown and the unknowable.” Again is he guilty of another transparent fallacy when he asserts that a series of successive independent sensations are mistaken for a whole individual one, which we accordingly speak of as such. The instance he adduces is that of musical sound, “which is,” he says, “a seemingly simple feeling clearly resolvable into simpler feelings.” The implied inference is that, since experience proves this not to be a simple feeling, but resolvable into simpler ones, there can be no reciprocity between our sensations and their exciting causes. This reasoning might be accredited with ingenuity, were it not so extremely shallow. For what is a sensation but that which we feel? And if we feel it as one, it must be one. It matters not if each separate beat, contributing to produce musical sound, should, when