y be the
interests that exist. And if some initial demand has proved hopeless,
there is the greater reason for cultivating other sources of
satisfaction, possibly more abundant and lasting. Now, reflection is a
vital function; memory and imagination have to the full the rhythm and
force of life. But these faculties, in envisaging the past or the ideal,
envisage the eternal, and the man in whose mind they predominate is to
that extent detached in his affections from the world of flux, from
himself, and from his personal destiny. This detachment will not make
him infinitely long-lived, nor absolutely happy, but it may render him
intelligent and just, and may open to him all intellectual pleasures and
all human sympathies.

There is accordingly an escape from death open to man; one not found by
circumventing nature, but by making use of her own expedients in
circumventing her imperfections. Memory, nay, perception itself, is a
first stage in this escape, which coincides with the acquisition and
possession of reason. When the meaning of successive perceptions is
recovered with the last of them, when a survey is made of objects whose
constitutive sensations first arose independently, this synthetic moment
contains an object raised above time on a pedestal of reflection, a
thought indefeasibly true in its ideal deliverance, though of course
fleeting in its psychic existence. Existence is essentially temporal
and life foredoomed to be mortal, since its basis is a process and an
opposition; it floats in the stream of time, never to return, never to
be recovered or repossessed. But ever since substance became at some
sensitive point intelligent and reflective, ever since time made room
and pause for memory, for history, for the consciousness of time, a god,
as it were, became incarnate in mortality and some vision of truth, some
self-forgetful satisfaction, became a heritage that moment could
transmit to moment and man to man. This heritage is humanity itself, the
presence of immortal reason in creatures that perish. Apprehension,
which makes man so like a god, makes him in one respect immortal; it
quickens his numbered moments with a vision of what never dies, the
truth of those moments and their inalienable values.

[Sidenote: Reason makes man's divinity.]

To participate in this vision is to participate at once in humanity and
in divinity, since all other makes bonds are material and perishable,
but the bond between two th