Now the human intelligence arises late in the history of things and is altogether a secondary and derivative thing. Consequently the world is not really what it is for my consciousness. My _Weltanschauung_ is false in proportion as my mind is complex and derivative. Conversely, the _Weltanschauung_ of each being approximates to truth and becomes less and less illusive in proportion as the eject which it in reality is approaches the primitive simplicity of mind-stuff. I am _really_ very little of what I am _consciously_. If you want a truer exponent of the truth of things you must go to the amœba or lower still. It, as compared with me, is _consciously_ most of what it is _really_. The absolutely simple atom is probably the only being who is quite free from delusions. The conclusion then to which Clifford conducts us is this: that the universe is not really such as it appears to our intelligence, still less, I presume, such as it would appear to a higher intelligence than ours. It is really such and such only as it would appear to the being whose eject is the lowest rung in the ladder of mind-stuff. Our universe spread out in space and time, with all its splendours and harmonies, is a delusion; nay, more, the human soul with its æsthetic and moral sensibilities, its fears and aspirations, is the parent delusion which breeds the delusion of a cosmos. “We are such stuff as dreams are made of.” The loose way in which Clifford used the word feeling, as equivalent to any form of consciousness, blinded him to the fact that a qualified thing as such is not given in feeling at all and led him to suppose that the universe as we know it would continue to stand in the absence of all complex ejects whatever. Mr. Green has shown that all theories of the object which ignore the workmanship of thought manifest therein and identify the _esse_ of things with their _percipi_ lead straight to nihilism. To such nihilism Clifford’s doctrine, like Hume’s which it resembles, immediately bring us. But Hume did not take seriously the demolition of reality involved in his theory that things are only real as they are felt and that feelings are “entirely loose and separate” (Treatise I, 559) while the solid framework of reality is an illusion bred of a propensity of our minds to feign connections and relations where there are none. Hume tells us that he regarded his own speculations as “philosophical melancholy and delirium,” as “clouds to be dispelled” (Treatise I, 501). He writes “I dine, I play a game of backgammon, I converse and am merry with my friends; and when, after three or four hours’ amusement, I would return to these speculations, they appear so cold, and strained, and ridiculous, that I cannot find it in my heart to enter into them any further.” But Clifford, like Huxley, took Hume _au grand serieux_, forgetting that feeling as such does not reveal an object at all. There is a passage in a letter of Clifford’s written to Professor