So this polisher of lenses bequeathed to the century which followed him its greatest inheritance and set for it its greatest task: the inner life as the supreme concern of the philosopher and the discovery of its laws and the interpretations of its realities the supreme task of philosophy. Those who continued his work began far enough, apparently, from the point where he left off and went a road strangely remote from his. Having taken the inner life for their study they sought to lay bare its very foundations. Nowadays, if we are so minded, we dictate to machines which write our words curiously enough in shallow lines upon wax cylinders and when the cylinders are full shave off the fragile record and begin again. This is what the eighteenth century did for the mind. It reduced it to a virgin surface, it affirmed the reality of nothing except the impressions thereupon registered by what sense supplied. We owe to experience and to experience only "all that vast store which the busy and boundless fancy of man has painted on it [the white paper of the mind] with an almost endless variety." We have nothing with which to begin but sensation; we have nothing to go on with but reflection. "These two, namely external, material things as the objects of sensation, and the operations of our own minds within as the objects of reflection, are the only originals from whence all our ideas take their beginnings."[60] Such things as these are perhaps enough to begin with, but they are not enough to go on with as our thinkers soon enough discover. Some way must be found to relate the material thus supplied and to build it up into a glowing, continuous, reasonable and conscious inner life. [Footnote 60: Locke, "Essay Concerning the Human Understanding."] So in turn the philosophers laboured at their problem. They made much not only of reflection but of association; they found a place for memory and imagination; they discovered that we may as truly define experience in terms of ideas as of sensation; they discovered finally that by no possible process even of the most ingenious reasoning can you get the full wealth of life out of a mind which was nothing more to begin with than a piece of white paper, any more than you can get Hamlet (if we may suppose Shakespeare to have used a dictaphone) out of a wax cylinder, a needle and a diaphragm.