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 8 WILLIAM JAMES. contrast removed by the way in which they lie together in the synthetic unity of the relation in which they are per- ceived. Such a third psychic entity cannot be a compound of the ideas themselves ; for ideas cannot compound them- selves, and if they could the result would be a merging into a "mean" and not, as here, a preservation of individuality intact ; it cannot be a link or hyphen l or any sort of inter- mediary to make the ideas continuous, for that, though between, would be really external to, both ideas, and be merely a third feeling on its own account, as ignorant of the other two as they are ignorant of each other. Not any of these things can it be ; not any fact of sensibility what- ever, but a fact of an altogether higher order, to which all facts of sensibility are as the dust it treads on, an act, umiarneable but by its own name, which is intelligence, inimitable in its function, which is relating, unique in its agent, which is the Ego, self, or me. Both schools make then the same baseless hypothesis at the outset the hypothesis that feeling is discontinuous by nature. The Kantians, Platonisers, or whatever one may please to call them, make another hypothesis to neutra- lise it, and so save the appearances. 2 The Sensationalists, 1 Such "hyphens," it may be said in passing, seem to be the feelings of relation Mr. Spencer has in mind in the section of his Psychology to which reference was made a short time back. 2 Our Hegelian Platonisers will of course protest that their withers are unwrung by this indictment, and that the Ego they contend for is no quasi- mechanical power working from without on detached materials, but only a name for the fact that what we have called the segments of the stream are consciously for each other. The question is a delicate one to decide. My own impression is that practically they are often tempted ; and that the form the temptation takes is that of dropping into the old-fashioned psychic dualism. The Platonising mood is essentially dualistic, for it is essentially worshipful ; and every object of worship needs the foil of a principle of evil to set off its lustre. Sentiency as a detached principle is, therefore almost indispensable to this habit of philosophising. Every church needs its devil, and sense and its works are the devil of the Platonic congregation. The most amusing proof of the Platonic demand for a dualistic psychology is given by the always delicious Terrier, who, in Proposition 10 of his Institutes, affirms Plato to have meant nothing more by his intelligible world than ordinary men mean by their sensible world ; but who, instead of remaining satisfied with this promising reduction, immediately adds : " but then his sensible world must be moved a peg downwards. It must be thrust into the regions of nonsense. It must be called, as we have properly called it, ... the nonsensical world, the world of pure infatuation, of downright contradiction, of unalloyed absurdity." Why? Not for any evidence he gives that such a world as this exists, any more intra than extra mentem ; but apparently for the sole reason that an evil principle may never fail to be at hand, on which our higher nature may, when occasion requires, exert its powers of disdain.