, has no other
origin.

The objects thus conceived and distinguished from our ideas of
them, are at first compacted of all the impressions, feelings, and
memories, which offer themselves for association and fall within
the vortex of the amalgamating imagination. Every sensation we
get from a thing is originally treated as one of its qualities.
Experiment, however, and the practical need of a simpler
conception of the structure of objects lead us gradually to reduce
the qualities of the object to a minimum, and to regard most
perceptions as an effect of those few qualities upon us. These few
primary qualities, like extension which we persist in treating as
independently real and as the quality of a substance, are those
which suffice to explain the order of our experiences. All the rest,
like colour, are relegated to the subjective sphere, as merely effects
upon our minds, and apparent or secondary qualities of the object.

But this distinction has only a practical justification. Convenience
and economy of thought alone determine what combination of our
sensations we shall continue to objectify and treat as the cause of
the rest. The right and tendency to be objective is equal in all, since
they are all prior to the artifice of thought by which we separate the
concept from its materials, the thing from our experiences.

The qualities which we now conceive to belong to real objects are
for the moat part images of sight and touch. One of the first classes
of effects to be treated as secondary were naturally pleasures and
pains, since it could commonly conduce very little to intelligent
and successful action to conceive our pleasures and pains as
resident in objects. But emotions are essentially capable of
objectification, as well as impressions of sense; and one may well
believe that a primitive and inexperienced consciousness would
rather people the world with ghosts of its own terrors and passions
than with projections of those luminous and mathematical concepts
which as yet it could hardly have formed.

This animistic and mythological habit of thought still holds its own
at the confines of knowledge, where mechanical explanations are
not found. In ourselves, where nearness makes observation
difficult, in the intricate chaos of animal and human life, we still
appeal to the efficacy of will and ideas, as also in the remote night
of cosmic and religious problems. But in all the intermediate realm
of vulgar day, where