[16] Of course, this very element may be the precarious, the ideal, and possibly fanciful of some other situation. But it is to change the historic into the absolute to conclude that therefore everything is uncertain, all at once, or as such. This gives metaphysical skepticism as distinct from the working skepticism which is an inherent factor in all reflection and scientific inquiry. [17] But this is a slow progress within reflection. Plato, who was influential in bringing this general distinction to consciousness, still thought and wrote as if "image" were itself a queer sort of objective existence; it was only gradually that it was disposed of as psychical, or a phase of immediate experience. [18] Of course, this means that what is excluded and so left behind in the problem of determination of _this_ objective content is regarded as psychical. With reference to other problems and aims this same psychic existence is initial, not survival. Released from its prior absorption in some unanalyzed experience it gains standing and momentum on its own account; _e. g._, the "personal equation" represents what is eliminated from a given astronomic time-determination as being purely subjective, or "source-of-error." But it is initiatory in reference to new modes of technique, re-readings of previous data--new considerations in psychology, even new socio-ethical judgments. Moreover, it remains a fact, and even a worthful fact, as a part of one's own "inner" experience, as an immediate _psychical reality_. That is to say, there is a region of _personal_ experience (mainly emotive or affectional) already recognized as a sphere of value. The "source of error" is disposed of by making it a _fact_ of this region. The recognition of falsity does not _originate_ the psychic (p. 38, note). [19] Of course, this is a further reflective distinction. The plain man and the student do not determine the extraneous, irrelevant, and misleading matter as image in a _psychological_ sense, but only as _fanciful_ or fantastic. Only to the psychologist and for _his_ purpose does it break up into image and meaning. [20] Bradley, more than any other writer, has seized upon this double antithesis, and used it first to condemn the logical as such, and then turned it around as the impartial condemnation of the psychical also. See _Appearance and Reality_. In chap. 15 he metes out condemnation to "thought" because it can never take in the psychical existence or reality which is present; in chap. 19, he passes similar judgment upon the "psychical" because it is brutally fragmentary. Other epistemological logicians have wrestled--or writhed--with this problem, but I believe Bradley's position is impregnable--from the standpoint of ready-made differences. When the antithesis is treated as part and lot of the process of defining the truth of a particular subject-matter, and thus as historic and relative, the case is quite otherwise. [21] Vol. I, pp. 28-34.