of both sorts; or rather to evolve images which in their finer texture
and vibration are images of matter, but which grouped and
foreshortened in various ways are images of minds. The idea of nature
and the idea of consciousness are two apperceptions or syntheses of
the same stuff of experience. The two worlds thus become substantially
identical, continuous, and superposable; each can merge insensibly
into the other. "To perceive all the influences of all the points of
all bodies would be to sink to the condition of a material object."[4]
To perceive some of these influences, by having created organs that
shut out the others, is to be a mind.

[Footnote 4: _Matière et Mémoire_, p. 38.]

This solution is obtained by substituting, as usual, the ideas of
things for the things themselves and cheating the honest man who was
talking about objects by answering him as if he were talking about
himself. Certainly, if we could limit ourselves to feeling life flow
and the whole world vibrate, we should not raise the question debated
between realists and idealists; but not to raise a question is one
thing and to have solved it is another. What has really been done is
to offer us a history, _on the assumption of idealism,_ of the idea of
mind and the idea of matter. This history may be correct enough
psychologically, and such as a student of the life of reason might
possibly come to; but it is a mere evasion of the original question
concerning the relation of this mental evolution to the world it
occurs in. In truth, an enveloping world is assumed by these
hereditary idealists not to exist; they rule it out _a priori,_ and
the life of reason is supposed by them to constitute the whole
universe. To be sure, they say they transcend idealism no less than
realism, because they mark the point where, by contrast or selection