"At first sight experience seems to bury us under a flood of external objects, pressing upon us with a sharp and importunate reality, calling us out of ourselves in a thousand forms of action. But when reflexion begins to act upon those objects they are dissipated under its influence; the cohesive force seems suspended like a trick of magic; each object is loosed into a group of impressions--color, odor, texture--in the mind of the observer. . . . Experience, already reduced to a swarm of impressions, is ringed round for each one of us by that thick wall of personality through which no real voice has ever pierced on its way to us, or from us to that which we can only conjecture to be without. Every one of these impressions is the impression of the individual in his isolation, each mind keeping as a solitary prisoner its own dream of a world." The Protagorean generalization is due to the reflection that all experience is some individual experience, that no subject of discourse escapes the imputation of belonging to some individual's private history. The individual must start with his own experiences and ideas, and he can never get beyond them, for he cannot see outside his own vision, or even think outside his own mind. The scepticism of this theory is explicit, and the formulas of Protagoras--the famous "_Man is the measure of all things_," and the more exact formula, "_The truth is what appears to each man at each time_"[271:5]--have been the articles of scepticism throughout the history of thought. [Sidenote: Phenomenalism and Spiritualism.] § 127. There is, therefore, nothing really surprising in the reception accorded the "new philosophy" of Bishop Berkeley. A sceptical relativism is the earliest phase of subjectivism, and its avoidance at once becomes the most urgent problem of any philosophy which proposes to proceed forth from this principle. And this problem Berkeley meets with great adroitness and a wise recognition of difficulties. But his sanguine temperament and speculative interest impel him to what he regards as the extension of his first principle, the reintroduction of the conception of substance under the form of spirit, and of the objective order of nature under the form of the mind of God. In short, there are two motives at work in him, side by side: the epistemological motive, restricting reality to perceptions and thoughts, and the metaphysical-religious motive, leading him eventually to the definition of reality in terms of perceiving and thinking spirits. And from the time of Berkeley these two principles, _phenomenalism_ and _spiritualism_, have remained as distinct and alternating phases of subjectivism. The former is its critical and dialectical conception, the latter its constructive and practical conception. [Sidenote: Phenomenalism as Maintained by Berkeley. The Problem Inherited from Descartes and Locke.]