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One of the chief labors of the philosopher is to keep independent faculties, so recognized on adequate grounds, from devouring each other; from making incursions into fields alien to them, from refusing to accept what has not been submitted to themselves, and received their peculiar seal. The imagination and the understanding belong especially to these intrusive faculties, while the intuition of cause, having swept through the entire physical world, is ever bent on a raid into spiritual realms. To be ready to recognize, in their unrestricted forms, the facts of consciousness as revealed in the mind, in language, in history; to analyze these cautiously, without bias and perversion, for the discovery of the simple activities or faculties they reveal; and afterward to hold fast to every affirmation of these faculties, is the duty of the wise cultivator of mental science. "We have a love for science above that for philosophy, because of this inductive element it so obviously includes.

The confusion which arises from undue emphasis laid upon a single faculty is seen in our knowledge of the thing-in-itself, of mind-in-itself. These, we are said, not to know, because we can not conceive them. To wish to conceive them is the futile desire to put a second circle of phenomena below the first circle. Such a movement could admit of no pause. The noumena must either be resolved into phenomena, or always escape the imagination. But do we not know the noumena, things-in-themselves? Do we not know the whole circle of effects which express them? What more could we wish to know; unless forsooth, we we are dissatisfied with our circle of senses and wish a larger one? To desire to know a thing in one way, when its very nature only allows us to know it in another way, is certainly an irrational impulse.

The independent validity both of causation and of liberty