But such assumptions are an offence to the expert empiricist. The moment he comes upon the scene we feel that all we thought experience had taught us is going to be disproved. "Do you admit," he begins by asking, "that nothing can be more real than experience?" We do admit it. "And can you ever know anything that is not experience?" Perhaps not; and yet would experience be very distinct or very significant if it was experience of nothing? "Of nothing, indeed," he retorts, withering us with a scornful glance and the consciousness of his masked batteries; "as if experience itself was nothing! Experience is everything; and when you have experience of experience what more could you ask for, even if you were Doctor Faustus in person? What spurious little non-empirical particle is this _of_ of yours? And what illegitimate ghost is this _something else_ that experience should be _of_? Can you, without confessing to an adulterous intercourse with what is not experience, explain these natural but disreputable members of your intellectual family?" We cannot explain them, and we blush. Yet why should experience arise at all if there is no occasion for it? "Occasion!" cries the empiricist; "another illegal figment, the old notion of cause! Is it not notorious that causation is nothing but the habit which some parts of experience have of following upon others? How then should the whole of it follow upon any part? Experience cannot spring from anything, it cannot express anything, and it cannot know anything, because experience is all there is." Here is a considerable retrenchment in the scope of our philosophy: no material world, no soul, and (in the proper sense of the words) no God and no knowledge. Retrenchment, however, is often a sign of wisdom, and the retrenching empiricist deserves to be followed, like the retrenching hermit, into his psychological wilderness, not with a vow never to return to the world, for that would be precipitate, but in the hope of sounding, in one direction, the depths of spiritual discipline and disillusion. And the empirical eremite can taste rare pleasures. All things, for him, become the appanage of the inner man; and we need not wonder that the pensive Englishman is ready to be empirical in this sense and to become an idealist. The _lessons_ of experience, if he was forced to take them seriously, might tend to dethrone his inner man and lead him to materialism; but fortunately the lessons of experience, for an empiricist, can be nothing but little epicycles within it, or cross-references to its literal text; they cannot spoil its intimate and romantic nature, which is to be no end of pulsations and no end of pictures. How dead would anything external or permanent be, even if we thought we could find it! How abstract would be anything common to all times and places, how terrible a mocking truth that should overarch them for ever!