And now I will return once more for a moment to the idealistic argument. I have no doubt that many of you will have felt a difficulty in accepting the position that the world with which we come in contact is merely a state of our own or anybody else's consciousness. It is so obvious that in our experience we are in contact with a world which we do not create; which is what it is whether we like it or not; which opposes itself at every turn to our desires and {50} inclinations. You may have been convinced that we know nothing of any external world except the effects which it produces upon consciousness. But, you will say to yourselves, there must have been something to cause these effects. You are perfectly right in so thinking. Certainly in our experience of the world we are in contact with a Reality which is not any state of our own mind, a Reality which we do not create but simply discover, a Reality from which are derived the sensations which we cannot help feeling, and the objects which we cannot help thinking. So far you are quite right. But very often, when the Realist insists that there must be something to cause in my mind this appearance, which I call my consciousness of a table, he assumes all the while that this something--the real table, the table in itself--is _there_, inside or behind the phenomenal table that I actually see and feel; out there, in space. But if we were right in our analysis of space, if we were right in arguing that space is made up of intellectual relations[7] and that {51} intellectual relations can have no being and no meaning except in and for a mind which apprehends them, then it is obvious that you must not think of this Reality which is the cause of our experience of external objects, as being _there_, as occupying space, as being 'external.' If space be a form of our thought, or (in Kantian language) a form of our sensibility, then the Reality which is to have an existence in itself, cannot be in space. A reality which is not in space can no longer be thought of as matter: whatever else matter (as commonly conceived) means, it is certainly something which occupies space. Now we know of no kind of existence which is not in space except Mind. On the idealistic view to which I have been endeavouring to lead you, we are, indeed, justified in saying that there is a Reality which is the underlying cause or ground of our experiences, but that that Reality is one which we may describe as Thought no less than as Will. It may interest some of you to know how near one who is often considered the typical representative of naturalistic, if not materialistic, modes of thought, ultimately came to accepting this identification. Let me read to you a passage from one of Mr. Spencer's later works--the third volume of his _Sociology_:--