Animal faith, being an expression of hunger, pursuit, shock, or fear, is directed upon things; that is, it assumes the existence of alien self-developing beings, independent of knowledge, but capable of being affected by action. While things are running on in the dark, they may be suddenly seized, appropriated, or destroyed. In other words, animal faith posits substances, and indicates their locus in the field of action of which the animal occupies the centre. Being faith in action and inspired by action, it logically presupposes that the agent is a substance himself, that can act on other things and be affected by them; although temporally the substantial existence of the self may not be posited until later, as one of the things in the world of things. Meantime in this animal faith, and even in the choice of one essence rather than another to be presented to intuition, spirit suffers violence, since spirit is inherently addressed to everything impartially and is always, in its own principle, ready to be omniscient and just. For by spirit I understand simply the pure light or actuality of thought, common to all intuitions, in which essences are bathed if they are given. At first, as we see in children, spirit is carried away by the joy of doing or seeing anything; it adopts any passion unquestioningly, not being a respecter of persons nor at all squeamish; it is innocently happy in accepting any task and watching any world, if the body welcomes it. Ultimately, however, the spirit may come to wonder why it regards all things from the point of view of one body in particular, which seems to have no prerogative over the others in their common realm. Justice and charity will then seem to lie in rescinding this illegitimate pre-eminence of one’s own body: and it may come to be an ideal of the spirit, not only to extend its view over all time and all existence, but to exchange its accidental point of view for every other, and adopt every insight and every interest: an effort which, by a curious irony, might end in abolishing all interests and all views.

Such moral enlightenment is dangerous to animal life, and incidentally to the animal faith on which the recognition of existing things hangs in the first place. If the qualms and ambitions of spirit prevailed in anybody altogether, as they tend to do in the saint and even in the philosopher, he would not be able to halt at the just sympathy by which, preserving animal faith, he would admit and respect the natural interests of others as he does his own. He would be hurried on to rebel against these natural interests in himself, would call them vain or sinful, since the spirit of itself could never justify them, and would initiate some discipline, mortifying the body and transfiguring the passions, so as to free himself from that ignominy and bondage. He would not succeed: but for speculative purposes I will suppose for a moment that he succeeded. What would occur? He would be happier fasting than eating, freezing than loving. Not sharing the impulses of his body, he would regard it as a ridiculous mechanism; and the bodies of others would be ridiculous mechanisms too, with which he could feel no sympathy. His sympathy, if it survived at all, would be sublimated into pity for the spirits chained to those bodies by their sin and ignorance, and perhaps not even struggling to be free, but suffering in those prisons perpetual pain and dishonour. He might aspire to save the spirit in others as in himself; but hardened to his own animal vicissitudes he would be steeled to theirs (a result even easier to accomplish), and would be all scorn and lamentations for the life of the world.

I suspend all consideration of this moral issue, and revert to the variations which animal faith may undergo during this long and always imperfect transformation.

Things when they are posited are known to be substances. It would be impossible for a child to be frightened without implicitly believing in a substance at hand; and it would be impossible for him to attempt to frighten other people (as children like to do in play) without implicitly assuming that he is a substance himself. But though his assurance of substance, in both cases, is complete, his knowledge of it is superficial. In conceiving his own nature especially, he begins building at the wrong end, from the weathercock down, not from the foundations up. Although in action he identifies himself with his body, as also in vanity and all the passions, yet when he asks himself deliberately what he is, he may be tempted to say that he is his thoughts. Or, less analytically, he may feel that he is a soul, a living spiritual power, a deep will at work in his body and in the world; and though what he posits in other things is primarily their physical presence, he will conceive this substance of theirs, particularly when they are animals, in the same moral terms in which he conceives himself. He will imagine them to be souls, passionate powers, wills guiding events. He will not think people spirits to the exclusion of their bodies, but will conceive their persons confusedly, as souls inhabiting and using bodies, or as bodies breaking out into some thought or passion which, once existing, agitates and governs the body that bred it.

Such a thought or passion, while evidently animating the body and expressing its situation, does not exactly lie within the body; to localise it there with any literalness or precision is absurd; and a man feels in his own case that his thoughts and passions come into his heart, that they are influences visiting him, perhaps demons or obsessions. He thinks they may pass from one man to another, or perhaps exist suspended and ambient, in the form of gods or mighty laws. Hence the notion of spiritual substances; a self-contradictory notion at bottom, because substance is a material and spirit is an entelechy, or perfection of function realised; so that (if I may parody Aristotle), if a candle were a living being, wax would be its substance and light its spirit. Nevertheless, in the history of philosophy, and even in current discourse, the notion of spiritual substance was unavoidable. In the haste of practical life, I count the lights without counting the candles. Feelings and thoughts pass for the principles of action; I inevitably stop there, and conceive my enemy as an evil purpose, and my contradictor as a false thought. And it is in these imagined thoughts and purposes that I lodge the power which, in action, I am contending with: although I should be truly contending with ghosts, and trying to drive essences out of the realm of essence (where each is immovable) if I did not oppose that power or defeat that purpose in the precise places and bodies in which it operates. The spirit can be confused with substance only when it is spirit incarnate. Animal faith could hardly light on such metaphysical objects unless it was called forth by a material influence, to which animal faith is the natural response; but the mind has but vague notions of what a material influence can be, and therefore attributes the substantiality of which it is intimately aware to hybrid essences floating before it: hence superstition, myth, metaphysics, and the materialisation of words.

It is a task for natural philosophy to remove these ghosts, by discovering the true movement of that living substance on which animal faith means to be directed, the substance on which the animal depends and on which he can act. But the human mind naturally breathes its own atmosphere of myth and dialectic, and evidence of fact pierces this atmosphere with difficulty, only after much experience of error. Gradually the wiser heads see that all substances fall together into one system called nature; and then various metaphysical substances, which at first seem to inhabit or compose nature, are discovered to be modes of the single familiar substance called matter. The second Book of Realms of Being will be devoted to this subject; meantime, I will here draw up a list of the chief false substances which human faith may rest on when the characteristic human veil of words and pictures hides the modes of matter which actually confront the human race in action, and which therefore, throughout, are the intended object of its faith.

1. Souls.—These are essentially moral forces, that is, passions or interests not necessarily self-conscious, conceived as magically ruling animal bodies and dictating their acts.

This notion fuses three different things, belonging to three distinct realms of being. The first is a mode of matter, the inherited mechanism and life of the body, which I am calling the psyche. This is a true dynamic unit, forming and using the outer organs of the body, a system of habits relatively complete and self-centred; but it is only the fine quick organisation within the material animal, and not a different thing. This is the original soul which savages conceive as leaving the body in sleep or death, itself a tenuous body of similar aspect and powers; because they feel that bodily life and action have a principle which is not visible on the surface, and yet they have no means of conceiving this principle except as an image or ghost of that very body which it is needed to control. Were wandering souls and ghosts more often met with and studied, the question of the true souls of these creatures would present itself anew: for nothing would be found on the surface of a ghost to explain its words or its motions, and it would soon be observed to give up the ghost in its turn. Even in spirit-land the judicious would have recourse in the end to a behaviourist psychology. For at the other extreme of human philosophising, the material psyche reappears. Observation can trace back motions only to other motions, and outward actions to activities hidden within, but essentially no less observable; so that the mechanism of the body and its habits are really the only conceivable mainspring of its behaviour. The soul again becomes a subtler body within the body: only that instead of a shadow of the whole man, even as in life he stood, it is a prodigious network of nerves and tissues, growing in each generation out of a seed.

Habit, though it is a mode of matter, has a unity or rhythm which reappears in many different instances: it is a form not of matter but of behaviour. Matter makes a vortex which reproduces itself, and plays as a unit amongst the other vortices near it; and the eye can follow the pleasing figures of the dance, without discerning the atoms or the laws that compose it. Now the habits of animals exercise a strong influence, sympathetic or antipathetic, over the kindred observer. He feels what those habits seek; he reads them as purposes, as tendencies, as efforts hostile or friendly to the free play of his own habits. The soul agitating those bodies is therefore in his eyes more than another ghostly body, which might quit them; it is a passion or a will which is expressed there. And this unit of discourse, which if actual belongs to the realm of truth, he regards superstitiously as a substance and a power. He fancies that he himself is a will and a power reacting upon other wills and powers: as if these habits or relations could be prior to the terms that compose them, or could create those terms. It is this element in the notion of souls that becomes predominant in the belief in gods and in devils. Something subjective and moral, the dramatic value which habits in nature have for the observer, is projected by him, and conceived as a metaphysical power creating those habits. Passions, in men, are often arrested on words. They are often arrested, as in poetic love, upon images. And yet the magic of images and words is vicarious: they would be empty, did not subtle material influences flow through them, and hide behind them, rendering them exciting to the material soul of the observer, who in his poetic ecstasy may think he is living in a pure world of discourse.

Finally, in the notion of souls there is a projection of mental discourse: this, when it really exists in animals, is a mode of spirit. Animal life sometimes reaches its entelechy in a stream of intuitions, expressive of its modifications by the presence of other bodies, or by the ferments of its own blood. These modes of spirit are in themselves intangible, unobservable, volatile, and fugitive; and if anything actual, about which truth and error may arise, may be called unsubstantial, they are as unsubstantial as possible. But as they arise in the operations of substance, and are read into these operations when a sympathetic being observes them, they seem to be a part of what is observed. But they are in quite another dimension of being, in the realm of spirit; and spirit, or the intuitions in which it exists, is not a part of the substance on which animal faith is directed, nor a mode of it, nor a natural substance at all. It cannot by any possibility be met with in action, perceived, fought with, nor (if we consider it from within, in its own being) can it be lodged anywhere in space nor even in time. It belongs to nature only by its individual outlook and moral relevance: and we may say of it only by courtesy that it lodges in the place and time which its organ occupies and in the world which, by affecting that organ, enters into its specious perspectives. When a man believes in another man’s thoughts and feelings, his faith is moral, not animal. Such a spiritual dimension in the substances on which he is reacting can be revealed to him only by dramatic imagination; only his instant sympathy can shape, or can correct, his notion of them. In origin, these tertiary qualities of bodies, imputed to them by literary psychology (which is an exercise of dramatic insight) are as superstitious and mythical as the purposes and powers of magical metaphysics; but the intuitions assigned to other people are possible existences, as those metaphysical chimeras are not; and when the creature that imputes the intuitions and the one that has them are the same, or closely akin and close together, he may be absolutely clairvoyant in imputing them. The mind as conceived by literary psychology, or as represented by dramatic historians, is hypothetical discourse, composed of what this psychology calls sensations, ideas, and emotions. It may exist, or may have existed, very much as conceived; it would be a substance if idealism were true; but in fact it is a translation into moral terms, rapid, summary, and prophetic, of an animal life going on very laboriously and persistently in the dark; and this animal life is itself no special substance, but a special mode or vortex in the general substance of nature.

2. Master-types, or Platonic Ideas.—This is an assimilation of substances to their names. Words and grammar are professedly notes indicating the identities and relations of things; but in practice everything, in being expressed, is conventionalised. The terms of discourse mark only the forms which things wear on the average, or at their best, or approximately; and in discourse these conventional terms soon acquire their own identity and relations, and form a pattern quite different from that of their objects. Philosophers, who necessarily employ language, are like naturalists who should study zoology only in a farmyard: the jungle would disconcert them. An argumentative and dialectical mind trusts its verbal logic: but a logic, however cogent in itself, is always of problematical application to facts, since it describes only one possible world out of an infinite number, and (unless it is secretly founded on observation) is not likely to describe the actual one. The logicians themselves, when men of open mind, notice this fact and lament it; and they bear the actual world a great grudge for showing so little fidelity to their principles. It is false, they are convinced, to its true nature, to the ideal it ought to realise, to the function which you see at every turn that it is endeavouring to fulfil. So that the dialectician can easily become an idealist of the Platonic type, by conceiving that the substance of things is not the moving matter that to-day is one thing and to-morrow another, and that never is anything perfectly, but that this matter is only what the voice is to a song, or a book to its message or spirit—a treacherous and subordinate vehicle of expression; whereas the true object to look for, the source of the applicability of words to facts at all, is the eternal nature which an actual thing may illustrate: so that the form of things and not their matter is their true substance or οὐσία.

This substantiation of ideals, besides leaning on language, leans on a sort of pragmatism or utilitarianism. Things are called beds if people may sleep well upon them, and bridles if they serve to rein in a horse: this function is their essence, in so far as they are beds or bridles at all, and they are excellent in proportion to the perfection with which they fulfil this function. And here an ascetic and supernaturalistic motive begins to play a part in Platonism. For since the substance and excellence of things lie merely in their moral essence, or in the fulfilment of the function designated by their names, all superfluous ornaments, all variations, all hybrid combinations are monstrous. Things should have only the barely necessary matter in them, and that wholly obedient to the mastering form. What am I saying? Need things have any matter in them at all? What could be more ideal than the idea itself, or more perfect than the function exercised by magic, and without an instrument? Away, then, with all material embodiments of ideas, even if these embodiments seem perfect for a moment. Being material, they will be treacherous and unstable: there will be some alloy of imperfection in them, some unreality. Fly, then, to the heaven of ideas, absolute and eternal, as the realm of essence contains them. There at last you will find the substance which in this world of phenomena you sought in vain. Things are only appearances; in minding and loving them, and thinking they can wound us, we are befooled; for the only bread that can feed the soul is celestial, and the only death that can overtake her is moral disintegration and the darkness of merely existing without loyalty to what she ought to be.

This is good ethics: not because our ideal is our substance nor because our soul in heaven is our true self, but because life is a harmony in material motions, reproducing themselves, and happiness is a consciousness of this harmony; so that substance would have no value and its formations no name but for the choice they make of some eternal essence to embody, and the purity with which they manifest it. But the flux of substance is by no means limited to producing but one type of perfection, or one circle of types. The infinite is open to all variations; and any particular idea is so far from being the substance of things, that it acquires its ideal prerogative, as a goal of aspiration, only when substance has blindly chosen it as a practicable harmony tending to establish itself and to recur in the local motions of that substance; and nowhere else, and not for a moment longer, does any eternal essence possess any authority, express any aspiration, or even seem to exercise any power.

3. Phenomena.—When master-types were regarded as the true objects of knowledge, the instances of these types found in the natural world were called their appearances or phenomena; but they were not conceived to be unsubstantial images, thrown off by the celestial type impartially into all parts of space, like rays from a luminary. Phenomena were understood to be existences, confined to particular places and times; indeed, in contrast to the superior sort of being possessed by the types in heaven, these phenomena were existences par excellence: and it was to them that the philosophy of Heraclitus, that admirable description of existence, continued to apply. That phenomena appeared was therefore not the doing of the types alone: these, from their eternal seats, rained down influence and, as it were, a perpetual invitation to things to imitate and to mirror them; but before this invitation could be accepted, or this influence gathered and obeyed, matter must exist variously distributed and predisposed; so that of all the Ideas, equally radiating virtue, here one and there another might find expression, and that imperfectly and for a time only.

Phenomena, then, for Platonism, are simply things: and they are called appearances not because they are supposed not to exist except in the mind, but because they are believed to be copies of an original in heaven far more ideal and akin to the mind than themselves: and also perhaps because they are so unstable and indefinable, that they elude our exact knowledge and betray our affections.

Phenomena, however, were supposed to be revealed to us by sense, whereas thought revealed their types: and this way of putting things has led to a shift in the meaning of the word phenomenon, so that in modern times it has been confused with what is called an idea in the mind. Sense would not reveal phenomena in nature (where Plato supposed them to arise) if sense meant passive intuition. It would then reveal essences only: that is, just what Plato found thought to reveal: only that being merely æsthetic intuition, and not thought about nature and politics and moral life, the essences revealed would not be Platonic Ideas; for these were only such essences as expressed the categories of Greek speech, the perfections of animals, or the other forms of the good. But sense, as opposed to dialectic, meant for the ancients animal perception and faith: it included understanding, sagacity, and a belief in matter: indeed, common speech identified immersion in sense with materialism. Modern philosophers have conceived sense passively, as mere sensation or feeling or vision of inert ideas: and the word phenomenon has sometimes been attracted into the same subjective vortex, and has come to mean a datum of intuition. So that phenomenalism suggests less a belief in the phenomena of nature than a disbelief in them, and a reduction of all natural events to images in particular minds.

The other, and proper, meaning of phenomenon seems to be retained by the positivists, who deprecate metaphysics, and even literary psychology, and wish to be satisfied with the data of science. But why use the word phenomenon for an event or an existence that is substantial, and manifests nothing deeper? Is it because another substance, not internal to those events and existences, is supposed to exist somewhere and to be unknowable? Or is it because the laws of nature, raised to a magical authority, are made manifest or phenomenal in the facts? Or is it because the positivists are at heart rather afraid of the psychological critics of knowledge, and by calling things and events phenomena think that they may pass for critics themselves, no less prudent and scientific than if they talked of immediate experience or of ideas in the mind? If so, it is a sorry expedient and a poor defence. If phenomena are essences given in intuition they are not the objects nor the themes of science, nor the facts or events in nature: and essences, such as the absolutely unprejudiced and unpractical mind may behold them, are the last things on which a positivist should pin his faith. As to immediate experience, conceived as an existing process or life, and as to ideas in the mind, they are names for discourse—the theme of just that literary psychology which the positivist disdains. And if phenomena are simply things, as they were to Plato, the positivist (who does not regard things as weak efforts of nature to realise divine Ideas) should not call them phenomena, but substances; unless indeed he is a metaphysician without knowing it, and believes in some unknowable substance which is not in things.

4. Truth.—Memory presents many a scene which is not substantial, as is the world before me now: yet this now is fleeting, and the unsubstantiality which vitiates the past is in the act of invading the present. Is not the pre-eminence of the present, then, an illusion, and is not the reality that panorama which all those presents would present when equalised and seen under the form of eternity? Is not the invidious actuality of any part of things a mere appearance, and is not the substance of them all merely their truth?

This suggestion of memory is reinforced by the suggestions of doubt, of disputation, and of information by hearsay. In our perplexities we seem always to be appealing to a metaphysical plenum or standard, which we call the truth: there all facts are not only evident, but judicial: they settle our quarrels: they correct our ignorance: they vindicate our faith. To the discoursing mind, therefore, present things and material forces may come to seem of little consequence, negligible and unsubstantial in comparison with the truth which remains immovable, while things pass before it like clouds across the constellations.

This is legitimate tragedy: the truth is the realm of being to which the earnest intellect is addressed. The senses and passions may feed on matter, and fancy may sport in the wilderness of essence: to the earnest intellect the one exercise seems instrumental and the other wasteful: what concerns it is the truth. But why is mere experience though it may fall short of truth, relevant to truth, and helpful in discovering it? And why is play of fancy, or definition of mere essences, not an avenue to truth? Because the truth, if not a substance, is a luminous shadow or penumbra which substance, by its existence and movements, casts on the field of essence: so that unless a substance existed which was more physical than truth, truth itself would have no nucleus, and would fade into identity with the infinite essence of the non-existent. The truth, however nobly it may loom before the scientific intellect, is ontologically something secondary. Its eternity is but the wake of the ship of time, a furrow which matter must plough upon the face of essence. Truth must have a subject-matter, it must be the truth about something: and it is the character of this moving object, lending truth and definition to the truth itself, that is substantial and fundamental in the universe. A sign that truth is simply fact, though described under the form of eternity, is the heat and haste of men in asserting what they think true. It is an object of animal faith, not of pure contemplation.

5. Fact.—Those who appeal to fact with unction are philosophers justly dissatisfied with theory and discourse: they are looking in the direction of substance. Yet in the conception of fact there is an element of an opposite kind, for fact is supposed to be obvious as well as fundamental. Not substance, says the empirical philosopher, which indeed would be the fact if it existed, but immediate fact, however unsubstantial, if I can only be sure of it. Unfortunately, the immediate datum is not a fact at all, but an essence: and even the intuition of that essence, which he may say is the fact he means, is only a bit of discourse or theory: the very thing of which he was so distrustful, and from which his common sense was appealing to the facts. The love of fact indeed has its revenges, and the word comes sometimes to be used for inarticulate feeling or intuition of the unutterable—a perfectly possible and rather common intuition. But at this point a triple confusion perhaps arises between the given essence of the unutterable, the incidental intuition of that essence, and the substance of the natural world which the philosopher is trying to discover. The unutterableness of the given essence is absurdly transferred to this substance, which would need to be no less articulate than appearance, if appearance was to arise from it or express it at all. Such a formless substance is as far as possible from being the object of animal faith posited in action and described in perception spontaneously and more deliberately in theory and discourse. It is as far as possible from being a fact. And the intuition (which is a fact) will yield cold comfort to the philosopher who wanted “facts” rather than intuitions. The facts he wanted were things, and he has been looking for them in the wrong direction.

More often, however, fact is a name for any pronounced and conspicuous feature of the natural world, or event assumed to occur in that physical medium; so that such a fact may well be a mode of substance. It obviously could neither arise nor be discovered except in a context no less substantial than itself; for if each fact was a detached existence it would form a universe by itself, and the eulogistic title of fact could not belong to it with any better right than to any intuition. Intuitions, discourse, theories too, taken bodily, are facts; but if they had no locus in nature, they could convey no knowledge of fact, being insignificant sensations or isolated worlds, occurring at no assignable time.

Fact, therefore, when honestly pointed to without metaphysical interpretation, means a thing or an event against which the speaker has indubitably run up: as it is a fact that the Atlantic Ocean separates Europe from America, or that men die. If understood not to mean such natural facts, but rather the impressions or notions of the mind that notes them, facts become an impossible sublimation of things: either actual intuitions, revealing not facts but essences: or alleged intuitions postulated by literary psychology (which assumes the natural world, without confessing it, as the field in which these intuitions are deployed); or finally an undiscoverable atom of sentience cut off from all relations in a metaphysical void. Such an atom, although it would be a substance in an absolute sense, if it existed, yet could neither act nor be acted upon, and therefore would not be the sort of substance that a practical mind, in love with facts, would be tempted to believe in.

6. Events.—Although things rather than events are the object of animal faith, ordinarily it is some event that calls attention to a thing: and it is intelligible that philosophers, reverting to the study of nature after their long quarantine in psychological scepticism, should dare to speak of events as constituting the woof of nature, before they dare to speak of them as things in flux or as modes of substance. Yet events can be nothing less. Events are changes, and change implies continuity and derivation of event from event: otherwise there might be variety in existence, but there could be no variation, since the phases of the alleged changes would not follow one another. This continuity and derivation essential to events suffice to render them events in substance, or changes in things. Both the medium of events (requisite to render any two events successive or contiguous) and the quantitative heritage of each (which it derives from the quantity of its antecedents) are substantial. Not so any event taken separately, and conceived merely as a passage of attention from one essence to another: for though the intuition spanning this transition would be a fact, neither it nor the terms it played with would be events. I can imagine an exception to this principle, if a total event exists including the whole process of creation. Such a total event (also any minute irreducible event if such existed) would be actually identical with a changing thing or a substance in flux. But every intermediate event would have arbitrary limits, being composed of minor events and embedded in greater ones. Perhaps there is no total and no rudimentary event: the men of science must decide that point if they can, although I am not confident, that after they had decided it on the best of evidence, their decision would prevent the flux of nature from stopping, if they said it must go on, or from going on, if they said it must stop. However, the mere possibility that there should be no comprehensive and no least event shows on what slippery ground we stand if we attempt to make events the ultimate objects of belief. They are really only half of what changing existence implies: the other half is substance.

In the effort to halt at events without positing things there is some vestige of the psychological confusion which identifies intuition with the essences present to it. An intuition may present a specious event: it does not follow that it is an event itself, or occurs in time. Intuitions would indeed not be events if they had no locus in physical time, and were not members of a series of events occurring in quite another realm of being from the visionary events which those intuitions might picture. In order to be events in physical time (even so to speak by marriage) intuitions must have organs which are parts of the moving substance of nature. Otherwise they would be pure spirits, out of time, and out of relation to one another. They are events only because a natural event, not an intuition, envelops them and lends them a natural status. Were they only specious events present to another intuition they would not be events at all, but eternal essences contemplated by an eternal mind.

Nevertheless, the notion of events comes very near to that of things, as posited and required in action, and as analysed in physics. The substance of these things is, by definition, the ground of changing appearance and the agent in perpetual action: it is therefore essentially in flux. I cannot say whether this flux is pervasive, so that nothing whatever in substance remains for any time unchanged, the constant element in it being only a constant form or quantity of change: but on the level and scale of human experience, substance is everywhere the substance of events, not of things immutable. If Heraclitus and modern physics are right in telling us that the most stable of the Pyramids is but a mass of events, this truth about substance does not dissolve substance into events that happen nowhere and to nothing: that supposition, on the contrary, would paralyse the events. If an event is to have individual identity and a place amongst other events, it must be a change which substance undergoes in one of its parts. Otherwise, like facts and truths taken hypostatically, events would be metaphysical abstractions, utterly incompatible with that natural status which must belong to the things posited by animal faith in the heat of action—the only things in which there is any reason for believing.