iverse like Dante's,
with its internal hell, purgatory, and heaven. Cut off, as those
experiences were, from all vistas and from sympathy with things remote,
they would contain a closed circle of interests, a flying glimpse of
eternity. So an infant living in his mystical limbo, without trailing
in a literal sense any clouds of glory from elsewhere, might well repeat
on a diminutive scale the beatific vision, insomuch as the only function
of which he was conscious at all might be perfectly fulfilled by him and
felt in its ideal import. Sucking and blinking are ridiculous processes,
perhaps, but they may bring a thrill and satisfaction no less ideal than
do the lark's inexhaustible palpitations. Narrow scope and low
representative value are not defects in a consciousness having a narrow
physical basis and comparatively simple conditions.

[Sidenote: Spirit crossed by instrumentalities.]

The spirit's foe in man has not been simplicity, but sophistication. His
instincts, in becoming many, became confused, and in growing permanent,
grew feeble and subject to arrest and deviation. Nature, we may say,
threw the brute form back into her cauldron, to smelt its substance
again before pouring it into a rational mould. The docility which
instinct, in its feebleness, acquired in the new creature was to be
reason's opportunity, but before the larger harmony could be established
a sorry chaos was bound to reign in the mind. Every peeping impulse
would drop its dark hint and hide its head in confusion, while some
pedantic and unjust law would be passed in its absence and without its
vote. Secondary activities, which should always be representative, would
establish themselves without being really such. Means would be pursued
as if they were ends, and ends, under the illusion that they were
forces, would be expected to further some activity, itself without
justification. So pedantry might be substituted for wisdom, tyranny for
government, superstition for morals, rhetoric for art.

This sophistication is what renders the pursuit of reason so perplexing
and prolonged a problem. Half-formed adjustments in the brain and in the
body politic are represented in consciousness by what are called
passions, prejudices, motives, animosities. None of these felt
ebullitions in the least understands its own causes, effects, or
relations, but is hatched, so to speak, on the wing and flutters along
in the direction of its momentary preference until