Such apologists for a shallow and ignoble idealism are in the habit of declaring that "the tendency of modern thought" is to render "materialism" unthinkable; but when these people speak of materialism they are thinking of the austere limits of that vast objective spectacle into which we are all born. This spectacle is indeed mysterious. It is indeed staggering and awful. But it is irrevocably _there_. And no vague talk about the "evasiveness" and "over-brimmingness" of life can alter one jot or tittle of its eternal outlines.
From the sublime terror of this extraordinary drama such persons are anxious to escape, because the iron of it has entered into their souls. They do not see that the only "escape" offered by the reality of things is a change of attitude towards this spectacle, not an assertion that the form of this spectacle is unfixed and wavering. No psychological or mathematical speculation has the power to alter the essential outlines of this spectacle.
If such speculations could alter it, then the aesthetic sense of humanity would be driven to transform itself; and a new aesthetic sense, adapted to this new "evasiveness of life," would have to take its place. Attempts are indeed being made at this very hour to "start fresh" with a new aesthetic sense and only the winnowing process of time and the pressure of personal experience can refute such attempts. Meanwhile all we can do is to note the rejection of such attempts by the verdict of the complex vision; a rejection which indicates that if such attempts are to be successful they must imply the substitution of a new complex vision for the one which humanity has used since the beginning.
In other words they must imply a radical change in the basic attributes of human nature. Humanity, to justify them, must become some sort of super-humanity; and a new world inhabited by a new race must take the place of the world we know. Such an attempt to substitute a new humanity for the old is already conscious of itself in those curious experiments of psychical research which are based upon the hypothesis that some completely new organs of sense are on the point of being discovered. Philosophers who believe in the inherent unchangeableness of our present instrument of research--the complex vision as it now exists--can only look on at these experiments with an attitude of critical detachment; and wait until time and experience have justified or refuted them.