The _Commonplace Book_ steadily recognises the adverse influence of one insidious foe. Its world-transforming-Principle has been obscured by “the mist and veil of words.” The abstractions of metaphysicians, which poison human language, had to be driven out of the author’s mind before he could see the light, and must be driven out of the minds of others before they could be got to see it along with him: the concrete world as realisable only in percipient mind is with difficulty introduced into the vacant place. “The chief thing I pretend to is only to remove the mist and veil of words.” He exults in the transformed mental scene that then spontaneously rises before him. “My speculations have had the same effect upon me as visiting foreign countries,—in the end I return where I was before, get my heart at ease, and enjoy myself with more satisfaction. The philosophers lose their abstract matter; the materialists lose their abstract extension; the profane lose their extended deity. Pray what do the rest of mankind lose?” This beneficent revolution seemed to be the issue of a simple recognition of the fact, that the true way of regarding the world we see and touch is to regard it as consisting of ideas or phenomena that are presented to human senses, somehow regularly ordered, and the occasions of pleasure or pain to us as we conform to or rebel against their natural order. This is the surrounding universe—at least in its relations to us, and that is all in it that we have to do with. “I know not,” he says, “what is meant by things considered in themselves, i.e. in abstraction. This is nonsense. Thing and idea are words of much about the same extent and meaning. Existence is not conceivable without perception and volition. I only declare the meaning of the word _existence_, as far as I can comprehend it.”