“If I let myself believe anything on insufficient evidence, there may be no great harm done by the mere belief; it may be true after all, or I may never have occasion to exhibit it in outward acts. But I cannot help doing this great wrong towards man, that I make myself credulous. The danger to society is not merely that it should believe wrong things, though that is great enough; but that it should become credulous, and lose the habit of testing things and inquiring into them; for then it must sink back into savagery.... If a man, holding a belief which he was taught in childhood or persuaded of afterwards, keeps down and pushes away any doubts which arise about it in his mind, purposely avoids the reading of books and the company of men that call in question or discuss it, and regards as impious those questions which cannot easily be asked without disturbing it—the life of that man is one long sin against mankind.” The essay on the nature of things in themselves marks the furthest limit at which Clifford’s speculation arrived. In it Clifford begins by discarding the ordinary distinction between reality and ideas, eternal object and eternal subject, of feeling and thing. The distinction is really between two orders of feeling; there is the subjective or inner order, in which sorrow succeeds the hearing of bad news, and the objective or outward in which the feeling of letting go is followed by sight of falling object. It is with the latter order that physical science concerns itself, and all the inferences of natural science are inferences of my real or possible feeling. Since an object is a set of changes _in_ my consciousness and not anything out of it, is just my feeling real or possible and therefore part of me, it might seem as if we were shut up in ourselves and excluded from participation in any other reality. So we should be, says Clifford, if we made no other inferences beside those of physical science; but when I come to the conclusion that _you_ are conscious and that you have objects in your consciousness similar to those in mine, I am not inferring any actual or possible feelings of my own, but _your_ feelings, which are not and can never be objects in my consciousness. To feelings and consciousness thus inferred to exist in another, Clifford gives the name of _eject_, because in the very act of inference they are _thrown out_ of my consciousness, recognised as outside of it, as _not_ being a part of me. “The existence of my conception of you in my consciousness carries with it a belief in the existence of you outside of my consciousness.... How this inference is justified, how consciousness can testify to the existence of anything outside of itself I do not pretend to say; I need not untie a knot which the world has cut for me long ago.” (Vol. II, p. 73.)