But in dividing such a continuum we have at least the warrant of our senses. We remain practical. When we attempt to divide up the continuum perceived only by the inner self, such guides are lacking. We have to depend upon psychologists. And if we try to go further and cut the inner self, itself doing the cutting, we only commit subjective _hari-kari_, the sensation of which is very uncomfortable. This is the sort of metaphysics which is indeed but methodical befuddlement. Yet it is practiced, not by metaphysicians but by men calling themselves scientists; men who profess for the most part to despise both metaphysics and philosophy--dogmatic men, who never lose an opportunity for expressing their horror of dogma. Such misbehavior entitles anyone to the title “misbehaviorist,” whether he be a Watsonian or a Freudian, and McDougall, for all his agreeable manners, will have to be convicted. R. H. Hingley, B.A., who signs himself a “research student in psychology, Edinburgh University,” picking and choosing such verbalization as pleases him, even attempts to reconcile McDougall with the impalpable Boris Sidis. Hingley writes as a friend of the accused, and in his book, “Psycho-Analysis,” proves it by defining “self-consciousness” as “a recognized and acknowledged synthesis of ... impulses.”[45] If that is all self-consciousness is, it is this same familiar nothing with which we have already had so much to do. Can you imagine a “synthesis” as existing by itself? In the case of gin, perhaps, for the atoms in synthetic gin are real atoms in good standing in their several communities brought together by no fault of their own. Nor even yet do they exist as gin except as there is something outside of themselves capable of conceiving of them as gin. They belong to the physical continuum--and generally it is safer to leave them where they belong. I won’t ask what is to be expected of a synthesis of McDougallian hormic impulses. Another verbal whirlwind threatens to blow, and it will be better to keep out of it. But let us make a synthesis of matches. Arrange a number of matches on the table before you so that they form a cross, a star, or any other geometrical figure. Then sweep them up in your hand and forget all about it. Where is the figure now? What has become of it? Have you at last succeeded in defying “natural law,” and annihilated something? No; the figure did not exist, as a figure, except in you. And if some trace of it be not in you now, as an “unconscious idea” or what not, it can be nowhere. It was only a form, and form is an entity only by grace of the perceiver of form.