Whatever justification at the source we accept to vindicate the reality of the external world, it can scarcely fail to admit on the same footing much that is outside physical science. Although no long chains of regularised inference depend from them we recognise that other fibres of our being extend in directions away from sense-impressions. I am not greatly concerned to borrow words like “existence” and “reality” to crown these other departments of the soul’s interest. I would rather put it that any raising of the question of reality in its transcendental sense (whether the question emanates from the world of physics or not) leads us to a perspective from which we see man not as a bundle of sensory impressions, but conscious of purpose and responsibilities to which the external world is subordinate. From this perspective we recognise a spiritual world alongside the physical world. Experience—that is to say, the self cum environment—comprises more than can be embraced in the physical world, restricted as it is to a complex of metrical symbols. The physical world is, we have seen, the answer to one definite and urgent problem arising in a survey of experience; and no other problem has been followed up with anything like the same precision and elaboration. Progress towards an understanding of the non-sensory constituents of our nature is not likely to follow similar lines, and indeed is not animated by the same aims. If it is felt that this difference is so wide that the phrase spiritual world is a misleading analogy, I will not insist on the term. All I would claim is that those who in the search for truth start from consciousness as a seat of self-knowledge with interests and responsibilities not confined to the material [Pg 289] plane, are just as much facing the hard facts of experience as those who start from consciousness as a device for reading the indications of spectroscopes and micrometers.