f his effect in us, the counterpart or shadow of those
emotions is regarded as the first and deepest factor in his causality.
It is his divine life, more than aught else, that underlies his
apparitions and explains the influences which he propagates. The
substance or independent existence attributed to objects is therefore by
no means only or primarily a physical notion. What is conceived to
support the physical qualities is a pseudo-psychic or vital force. It is
a moral and living object that we construct, building it up out of all
the materials, emotional, intellectual, and sensuous, which lie at hand
in our consciousness to be synthesised into the hybrid reality which we
are to fancy confronting us. To discriminate and redistribute those
miscellaneous physical and psychical elements, and to divorce the god
from the material sun, is a much later problem, arising at a different
and more reflective stage in the Life of Reason.

[Sidenote: Causes and essences contrasted.]

When reflection, turning to the comprehension of a chaotic experience,
busies itself about recurrences, when it seeks to normalise in some way
things coming and going, and to straighten out the causes of events,
that reflection is inevitably turned toward something dynamic and
independent, and can have no successful issue except in mechanical
science. When on the other hand reflection stops to challenge and
question the fleeting object, not so much to prepare for its possible
return as to conceive its present nature, this reflection is turned no
less unmistakably in the direction of ideas, and will terminate in logic
or the morphology of being. We attribute independence to things in order
to normalise their recurrence. We attribute essences to them in order to
normalise their manifestations or constitution. Independence will
ultimately turn out to be an assumed constancy in material processes,
essence an assumed constancy in ideal meanings or points of reference in
discourse. The one marks the systematic distribution of objects, the
other their settled character.

[Sidenote: Voracity of intellect.]

We talk of recurrent perceptions, but materially considered no
perception recurs. Each recurrence is one of a finite series and holds
for ever its place and number in that series. Yet human attention, while
it can survey several simultaneous impressions and find them similar,
cannot keep them distinct if they grow too numerous. The mind has a
native bia