ions; they have the
same directness, although not the same localization. Their seat is
not open to our daily observation, and therefore we leave them
disembodied, and fancy they are peculiarly spiritual and intimate to
the soul. Or we try to think that they flow by some logical
necessity from the essences of objects simultaneously in our mind.
We involve ourselves in endless perplexities in trying to deduce
excellence and beauty, unity and necessity, from the describable
qualities of things; we repeat the rationalistic fiction of turning the
notions which we abstract from the observation of facts into the
powers that give those facts character and being.

We have, for instance, in the presence of two images a sense of
their incongruity; and we say that the character of the images
causes this emotion; whereas in dreams we constantly have the
most rapid transformations and patent contradictions without any
sense of incongruity at all; because the brain is dozing and the
necessary shock and mental inhibition is avoided. Add this
stimulation, and the incongruity returns. Had such a shock never
been felt, we should not know what incongruity meant; no more
than without eyes we should know the meaning of blue or yellow.

In saying this, we are not really leaning upon physiological theory.
The appeal to our knowledge of the brain facilitates the conception
of the immediacy of our feelings of relation; but that immediacy
would be apparent to a sharp introspection. We do not need to
think of the eye or skin to feel that light and heat are ultimate data;
no more do we need to think of cerebral excitements to see that
right and left, before and after, good and bad, one and two, like and
unlike, are irreducible feelings. The categories are senses without
organs, or with organs unknown. Just as the discrimination of our
feelings of colour and sound might never have been distinct and
constant, had we not come upon the organs that seem to convey
and control them; so perhaps our classification of our inner
sensations will never be settled until their respective organs are
discovered; for psychology has always been physiological, without
knowing it. But this truth remains -- quite apart from physical
conceptions, not to speak of metaphysical materialism -- that
whatever the historical conditions of any state of mind may be said
to be, it exists, when it does exist, immediately and absolutely;
each of its distinguishable parts might co