known in the ordinary sense. It is true that, thus misinterpreting me in December, Prof. Green, writing again in March, puts into the mouth of an imagined advocate the true statement of my view;[48] though he (Prof. Green) then proceeds to deny that I can mean what this imagined advocate rightly says I mean: taking occasion to allege that I use the phrase “states of consciousness” “to give a philosophical character” to what would else seem “written too much after the fashion of a newspaper correspondent.”[49] Even, however, had he admitted that intended meaning which he sees, but denies, the rectification would have been somewhat unsatisfactory, coming three months after various {329} absurdities, based on his misinterpretation, had been ascribed to me. But the most serious allegation made by Mr. Hodgson against Prof. Green, and which I here repeat, is that he habitually says I regard the object as constituted by “the aggregate of vivid states of consciousness,” in face of the conspicuous fact that I identify the object with the _nexus_ of this aggregate. In his defence Prof. Green says― “If I had made any attempt to show that Mr. Spencer believes the object to be no more than an aggregate of vivid states of consciousness, Mr. Hodgson’s complaint, that I ignore certain passages in which a contrary persuasion is stated, would have been to the purpose.” Let us look at the facts. Treating of the relation between my view and the idealistic and sceptical views, he imagines addresses made to me by Berkeley and Hume. “‘You agree with me,’ Berkeley might say, ‘that when we speak of the external world we are speaking of certain lively ideas connected in a certain manner;’”[50] and this identification of the world with ideas, I am tacitly represented as accepting. Again, Hume is supposed to say to me—“You agree with me that what we call the world is a series of impressions;”[51] and here, as before, I am supposed silently to acquiesce in this as a true statement of my view. Similarly throughout his argument, Prof. Green continually states or implies that the object is, in my belief, constituted by the vivid aggregate of states of consciousness. At the outset of his second article,[52] he says of me:—“He there” [in the _Principles of Psychology_] “identifies the object with a certain aggregate of vivid states of consciousness, which he makes out to be independent of another aggregate, consisting of faint states, and identified with the subject.” And admitting that he thus describes my view, he nevertheless alleges that he does not misrepresent me, because, as he says,[53] “there is scarcely a page of my article in {330} which Mr. Spencer’s conviction of the externality and independence of the object, in the various forms in which it is stated by him, is not referred to.” But what if it is referred to in the process of showing that the externality and independence of the object is utterly inconsistent with the conception of it as an