the real stride, that which he was aware of taking,
would have been complete at the stumbling-point. It is certain that
consciousness comes in stretches, in breaths: all its data are
aesthetic wholes, like visions or snatches of melody; and we should
never be aware of anything were we not aware of something all at once.

When a man has taught himself--and it is a difficult art--to revert in
this way to rudimentary consciousness and to watch himself live, he
will be able, if he likes, to add a plausible chapter to speculative
psychology. He has unearthed in himself the animal sensibility which
has thickened, budded, and crystallised into his present somewhat
intellectual image of the world. He has touched again the vegetative
stupor, the multiple disconnected landscapes, the "blooming buzzing
confusion" which his reason has partly set in order. May he not have
in all this a key to the consciousness of other creatures? Animal
psychology, and sympathy with the general life of nature, are vitiated
both for naturalists and for poets by the human terms they must use,
terms which presuppose distinctions which non-human beings probably
have not made. These distinctions correct the illusions of immediate
appearance in ways which only a long and special experience has
imposed upon us, and they should not be imported into other souls. We
are old men trying to sing the loves of children; we are wingless
bipeds trying to understand the gods. But the data of the immediate
are hardly human; it is probable that at that level all sentience is
much alike. From that common ground our imagination can perhaps start
safely, and follow such hints as observation furnishes, until we learn
to live and feel as other living things do, or as nature may live and
feel as a whole. Instinct, for instance, need not be, as our human
prejudice suggests, a rudimentary intelligence; it may be a parallel
sort of sensibility, an imageless awareness of the presence and
character of other things, with a superhuman ability to change oneself
so as to meet them. Do we not feel something of this sort ourselves in
love, in art, in religion? M. Bergson is a most delicate and charming
poet on this theme, and a plausible psychologist; his method of
accumulating and varying his metaphors, and leaving our intuition to
itself under that artful stimulus, is the only judicious and
persuasive method he could have employed, and his knack at it is
wonderful. We recover, as we