ee one consequence and one point of
connection with the reflex-action theory of mind. Any mind,
constructed on the {123} triadic-reflex pattern, must first get its
impression from the object which it confronts; then define what that
object is, and decide what active measures its presence demands; and
finally react. The stage of reaction depends on the stage of
definition, and these, of course, on the nature of the impressing
object. When the objects are concrete, particular, and familiar, our
reactions are firm and certain enough,--often instinctive. I see the
desk, and lean on it; I see your quiet faces, and I continue to talk.
But the objects will not stay concrete and particular: they fuse
themselves into general essences, and they sum themselves into a
whole,--the universe. And then the object that confronts us, that
knocks on our mental door and asks to be let in, and fixed and decided
upon and actively met, is just this whole universe itself and its
essence.

What are _they_, and how shall I meet _them_?

The whole flood of faiths and systems here rush in. Philosophies and
denials of philosophy, religions and atheisms, scepticisms and
mysticisms, confirmed emotional moods and habitual practical biases,
jostle one another; for all are alike trials, hasty, prolix, or of
seemly length, to answer this momentous question. And the function of
them all, long or short, that which the moods and the systems alike
subserve and pass into, is the third stage,--the stage of action. For
no one of them itself is final. They form but the middle segment of
the mental curve, and not its termination. As the last theoretic pulse
dies away, it does not leave the mental process complete: it is but the
forerunner of the practical moment, in which alone the cycle of
mentality finds its rhythmic pause.

{124}

We easily delude ourselves about this middle stage. Sometimes we think
it final, and sometimes we fail to see, amid the monstrous diversity in
the length and complication of the cogitations which may fill it, that
it can have but one essential function, and that the one we have
pointed out,--the function of defining the direction which our
activity, immediate or remote, shall take.

If I simply say, "Vanitas vanitatum, omnia vanitas!" I am defining the
total nature of things in a way that carries practical consequences
with it as decidedly as if I write a treatise De Natura Rerum in twenty
volumes. The treatise may