him in an aside, almost yawning, and looking at the clock to see if it is time for luncheon; and at the flood of hazy light falling aslant on the whole scene from the high windows. Is not the floating picture, in my waking trance, the actual reality, and the whole world of existence and business but a perpetual fable, which this trance sustains?
The theory that the universe is nothing but a flux of appearances is plausible to the sceptic; he thinks he is not believing much in believing it. Yet the residuum of dogma is very remarkable in this view; and the question at once will assail him how many appearances he shall assert to exist, of what sort, and in what order, if in any, he shall assert them to arise; and the various hypotheses that may be suggested concerning the character and distribution of appearances will become fresh data in his thought; and he will find it impossible to decide whether any such appearances, beyond the one now passing before him, are ever actual, or whether any of the suggested systems of appearances actually exists. Thus existence will loom again before him, as something problematical, at a distance from that immediacy into which he thought he had fled.
Existence thus seems to re-establish itself in the very world of appearances, so soon as these are regarded as facts and events occurring side by side or one after the other. In each datum taken separately there would be no occasion to speak of existence. It would be an obvious appearance; whatever appeared there would be seul and wholly apparent, and the fact that it appeared (which would be the only fact involved) would not appear in it at all. This fact, the existence of the intuition, would not be asserted until the appearance ceased to be actual, and was viewed from the outside, as something that presumably had occurred, or would occur, or was occurring elsewhere.
