It is true that the romantic empiricist is not very radical; he commonly stops short of any doubts on the validity of memory, with all the yarns it spins; his past adventures and his growth are too fascinating for him to doubt their reality. Sometimes he even trusts a superstitious prophecy, under the name of logical evolution, foretelling what his destiny is somehow compelled to be. At other times he prefers to leave the future ambiguous, so that the next step may lead him anywhere, perhaps to heaven, provided it is understood that his career, even there, is always to remain an unfinished voyage in an uncharted sea. In strictness, however, he has no right to this fond interest in himself. If he became a perfect empiricist he would trust experience only if it taught him absolutely nothing, even about his own past. This is hard for the flesh, and it may not be fair to ask an empiricist to be heroic in the interests of logic; but if he could screw his courage up for the plunge, his spirit might find itself perfectly at home in the new situation. What he might have been or might have thought, he would dismiss as a dead issue; he would watch only his present life as it flowed, and he would love exclusively what he was becoming. There is a sense of safety in being and not thinking which probably all the animals know, and there is a mystical happiness in accepting existence without understanding it; but the sense of safety does not render the animals really safe, and the price they pay for living in the moment is that they carry nothing over from one moment to another except bare existence itself. The disadvantage of radical empiricism is that it shuts out experience. 47 THE BRITISH HEGELIANS