As he conceives it at first, experience does not merely exist, it teaches. In a sporadic fashion it yields sound satisfactions, clear warnings, plain facts. It admonishes him to trust his senses, the reports of reputable travellers and naturalists, Christianity, and the British constitution, all when duly revised; and on the other hand to shun popery, scholastic quibbles, absolutism, and revolution. But evidently experience could never teach him these things if his inner man did not contribute its decided cravings and aversions. His inner man detests dictation and loves opportunity; in ideas it prefers timeliness to finality. Therefore, when his philosophers come upon the scene they cannot appeal to him by coercive proofs, nor by the impressive architecture of their systems, nor by disentangling and setting clearly before him any ultimate ideal. To win his ear they must rather drive his current convictions home, nearer to their source in himself; they must invite him to concentrate his empiricism. For instance, he trusts his senses; and the philosophers can deeply interest him if they ask him what, precisely, his senses vouch for. Is it external things? But can he actually see anything except colours, or touch anything except resistances? Can he feel anything except his own sensations? By appealing to his honesty, the sophists catch him in a trap, and he changes his mind in trying to utter it. It will appear presently, as he pursues his inquiry, that he has no knowledge of those external things and events which he had been so sure of; they were mere empty notions, and his genuine experience contained nothing but the pulses of his inner life, changes in his ideas and vital temperature, which an accurate autobiography might record. And the more scrupulously he considers these pulses of his inner life the less and less will he find in them. He and his whole experience will soon be reduced to a series of sensations in single file, with nothing behind them. In reality even this is too much. Although the inertia of psychological conventions and the romantic habit of self-consciousness have kept him from perceiving it, even to this day, yet the fact that a sensation is occurring is not revealed by that sensation itself; no date, place, or relation to a mind is included in its deliverance, and no relation to anything before or beyond; so that the bare datum of sensation is an aesthetic being, not a mental one; an ideal term, not an event; a universal essence, not a particular fact; and immersion in sense or in absolute immediate experience, when animal faith and intelligence are taken away from it, would remove from us every vestige of the notion that anything exists or that anything happens. But without pushing analysis so far, the empirical philosophers left John Bull, when he listened to them, singularly bereft of those comfortable impedimenta with which he had expected to travel through life--without