it lapses, it knows
not why, or is crossed and overwhelmed by some contrary power. Thus the
vital elements, which in their comparative isolation in the lower
animals might have yielded simple little dramas, each with its obvious
ideal, its achievement, and its quietus, when mixed in the barbarous
human will make a boisterous medley. For they are linked enough together
to feel a strain, but not knit enough to form a harmony. In this way the
unity of apperception seems to light up at first nothing but disunion.
The first dawn of that rational principle which involves immortality
breaks upon a discovery of death. The consequence is that ideality seems
to man something supernatural and almost impossible. He finds himself at
his awakening so confused that he puts chaos at the origin of the world.
But only order can beget a world or evoke a sensation. Chaos is
something secondary, composed of conflicting organisations interfering
with one another. It is compounded like a common noise out of jumbled
vibrations, each of which has its period and would in itself be musical.
The problem is to arrange these sounds, naturally so tuneful, into
concerted music. So long as total discord endures human life remains
spasmodic and irresolute; it can find no ideal and admit no total
representation of nature. Only when the disordered impulses and
perceptions settle down into a trained instinct, a steady, vital
response and adequate preparation for the world, do clear ideas and
successful purposes arise in the mind. The Life of Reason, with all the
arts, then begins its career.

The forces at play in this drama are, first, the primary impulses and
functions represented by elementary values; second, the thin network of
signals and responses by which those functions are woven into a total
organ, represented by discursive thought and all secondary mental
figments, and, third, the equilibrium and total power of that new
organism in action represented by the ideal. Spirituality, which might
have resided in the elementary values, sensuous or passionate, before
the relational process supervened, can now exist only in the ultimate
activity to which these processes are instrumental. Obstacles to
spirituality in human life may accordingly take the form of an arrest
either at the elementary values--an entanglement in sense and
passion--or at the instrumental processes--an entanglement in what in
religious parlance is called "the world."

[Sidenote: On