Absolute Idealism is not merely a phrase; it is a grand and glorious fact. Immersed in matter, stuck in our senses, we may insist on looking at sensuous phenomena as our friend John Jasper looked at the sun, with honest contempt for Copernicus and Newton. "De earf do _not_ move roun' de sun," exclaimed the sturdy preacher, "but de bressed sun move roun' de earf. Dere she go now: don't I see her wi' dese very eyes?" Parson Jasper did see the sun moving round the earth, and in the same way we all see the objects of our senses existing in perfect independence of ourselves. Still, as surely as astronomy has proved the delusion of taking the sun's movement from the eye, philosophy, with the aid of "practical science," has proved the delusion of taking objective re-presentations as not constructed through subjective being. The inevitable end of this proof is the dissolution of noumena as anything "material," and the inclusion of all things in Universal Spirit. Of such spirit, finite subjectivity is a function--a necessary participative reflex, through which the Universal Spirit is life, manifestation, self-evolution. CHAPTER XVII. SOME SEQUENCES OF ABSOLUTE IDEALISM. Since Kant, we have said, "no philosophy, no rational theology, no ultimate science, not referring to the results of his work, has had any real basis in thought." It must be added that since the fulfilment of Kant's _Critique_, especially by Hegel, there has not been one stone left as a foundation for "materialism." It goes right on, however, in multifarious forms, its defunct exponents still imagining they live. Surgical psychology, in special, is still as active with scalpel and microscope as if ours were the day of Coudillac and Erasmus Darwin. The knife goes into the brain, and the eye peers after it, with the funny expectation of seeing, with Dr. Cabanis, some spicule or plexus of matter, there, "which secretes thought as the liver secretes bile." The work is excellent as anatomy, and may have a plenty of important uses. But we, here, if we have had the capacity and patience to grasp the findings of Immanuel Kant, know that mind can never be derived from any physical correspondence of its nature and action. We know that every possible attempt at such derivation is merely a side-show of Parson Jasper's great astronomical comedy, which Copernicus exploded four hundred years ago. We know that every fiber, every solid or liquid, of the brain, with every movement of every atom it contains, is a ready-made physical object in a ready-made space and a ready-made time. But if we know Kant, we know, without a misgiving, that space and time, with all things in them, are not only dependencies but are literal creations and manufactures of a universal principle named _mind_. We know it is this principle which furnishes the form, the unity, and so the very existence of every phenomenon. Hence we know, finally, that the first step in the