Another consequence of the dynamic idealism and the “radical empiricism” of Pragmatism is the “immediacy” of our contact with reality, for which it is naturally inclined to stand in the matter of what we may call the philosophy of perception. What this new “immediacy” and this new directness of our contact with reality would mean to philosophical and scientific thought can be fully appreciated only by those who have made the effort of years to live in a “thought world,” in which the first reality is what the logicians term “mediation”[284] or inference, a world of thoughts without the reality of a really effective thinker, or the reality of a world of real action--a world from which it is somehow impossible to escape either honestly or logically. It would be a return, of course, on the part of the thinker to the direct sense of life with which we are familiar in instinct and in all true living and in all real thought,[285] in all honest effort and accomplishment, and yet not a “return” in any of the impossible senses in which men have often (and with a tragic earnestness) sought to return to Nature[286] and to the uncorrupted reality of things. And we have not indeed done justice to the “instrumentalism” and the “hypothetical” treatment of ideas and of systems of thought for which Pragmatism and Humanism both stand until we see that so far from its being (almost in any sense) the duty of the thinker to justify, to his philosophy, this _direct contact_ with the _infinite life_ of the world, that has been the common possession of countless mortals who have lived their life, it is, on the contrary, his duty to justify (to himself and to his public) the various thought-systems of metaphysic, by setting forth the various points of departure and the various points of contact they have in the reality of the life of things.[287] We spoke at the close of our fourth chapter of the strange irony that may be discovered in the fate of philosophers who have come to attach a greater importance to their own speculations and theories than to the great reality (whatever it may be, or whatever it may prove itself to be) of which all philosophy is but an imperfect (although a necessary) explanation. And the reader has doubtless come across the cynical French definition of metaphysics as the “art of losing one’s way systematically”[288] (_l’art de s’égarer avec méthode_). In view of all this, and in view of all the inevitable pain and difficulty of the solitary thinkers of all time, it is indeed not the least part of the service of Pragmatism and Humanism, and of the “vitalistic” and “voluntaristic” philosophy with which it may be naturally associated to-day, to have compelled even metaphysicians to _feel_ that it is the living reality of the world that we _know_ and that we _experience_, that is first, last, and foremost the real subject-matter of philosophy.