instinctively, in view of the known circumstances in which the absent
experience is conceived to have occurred. The only instrument for
conceiving experience at large is accordingly private imagination; and
such imagination cannot be tested, although it may be guided and perhaps
recast by fresh observations or reports concerning the action and language
of other people. For action and language, being contagious, and being the
material counterpart of experience in each of us, may voluntarily or
involuntarily suggest our respective experience to one another, by causing
each to re-enact more or less accurately within himself the experience of
the rest. Thus alien thoughts and feelings are revealed or suggested to us
in common life, not without a subjective transformation increasing, so to
speak, as the square of the distance: and even the record of experience in
people's own words, when these are not names for recognisable external
things, awakens in the reader, in another age or country, quite
incommensurable ideas. Yet, under favourable circumstances, such
suggestion or revelation of experience, without ever becoming science, may
become public unanimity in sentiment, and may produce a truthful and
lively dramatic literature.

All modern philosophy, in so far as it is a description of experience and
not of nature, therefore seems to belong to the sphere of literature, and
to be without scientific value.




II

FIFTY YEARS OF BRITISH IDEALISM[10]