"I say, then, that belief is nothing but a more vivid, lively, forcible, firm, steady conception of an object than the imagination alone is ever able to attain.... It consists not in the peculiar nature or order of the ideas, but in the _manner_ of their conception and in their _feeling_ to the mind. I confess that it is impossible perfectly to explain this feeling or manner of conception.... Its true and proper name... is _belief_, which is a term that everyone sufficiently understands in common life. And in philosophy we can go no farther than assert that belief is something felt by the mind, which distinguishes the idea of the judgment from the fictions of the imagination.[298] It gives them more weight and influence; makes them appear of greater importance; enforces them in the mind; gives them a superior influence on the passions, and renders them the governing principle in our actions."[299] Or as Prof. Bain puts it: "In its essential character, belief is a phase of our active nature--otherwise called the Will."[300] * * * * * The object of belief, then, reality or real existence, is something quite different from all the other predicates which a subject may possess. Those are properties intellectually or sensibly intuited. When we add any one of them to the subject, we increase the intrinsic content of the latter, we enrich its picture in our mind. But adding reality does not enrich the picture in any such inward way; it leaves it inwardly as it finds it, and only fixes it and stamps it in to _us_. "The real," as Kant says, "contains no more than the possible. A hundred real dollars do not contain a penny more than a hundred possible dollars.... By whatever, and by however many, predicates I may think a thing, nothing is added to it if I add that the thing exists.... Whatever, therefore, our concept of an object may contain, we must always step outside of it in order to attribute to it existence."[301]