What he abhorred was the belief that such methods of interpreting experience were ultimate and truly valid, and that by thinking after the fashion of “mathematical atheists” we could understand experience as well as it can be understood. If the flux of ideas had no other key to it than that system of associations and algebraic substitutions which is called the natural world we should indeed know just as well what to expect in practice and should receive the same education in perception and reflection; but what difference would there be between such an idealist and the most pestilential materialist, save his even greater wariness and scepticism? Berkeley at this time—long before days of “Siris” and tar-water—was too ignorant and hasty to understand how inane all spiritual or poetic ideals would be did they not express man’s tragic dependence on nature and his congruous development in her bosom. He lived in an age when the study and dominion of external things no longer served directly spiritual uses. The middle-men had appeared, those spirits in whom the pursuit of the true and the practical never leads to possession of the good, but loses itself, like a river in sand, amid irrational habits and passions. He was accordingly repelled by whatever philosophy was in him, no less than by his religious prejudices, from submergence in external interests, and he could see no better way of vindicating the supremacy of moral goods than to deny the reality of matter, the finality of science, and the constructive powers of reason altogether. With honest English empiricism he saw that science had nothing absolute or sacrosanct about it, and rightly placed the value of theory in its humane uses; but the complementary truth escaped him altogether that only the free and contemplative expression of reason, of which science is a chief part, can render anything else humane, useful, or practical. He was accordingly a party man in philosophy, where partisanship is treason, and opposed the work of reason in the theoretical field, hoping thus to advance it in the moral. [Sidenote: Puerility in morals.]