ly useless and inconsequential; it
can neither have produced its own occasion nor now insure its own
recurrence. Nevertheless, being proof positive that whatever basis it
needs is actual, insight is also an indication that the extant
structure, if circumstances maintain it, may continue to operate with
the same moral results, maintaining the vision which it has once
supported.

[Sidenote: The useful naturally stable.]

When men find that by chance they have started a useful change in the
world, they congratulate themselves upon it and call their persistence
in that practice a free activity. And the activity is indeed rational,
since it subserves an end. The happy organisation which enables us to
continue in that rational course is the very organisation which enabled
us to initiate it. If this new process was formed under external
influences, the same influences, when they operate again, will
reconstitute the process each time more easily; while if it was formed
quite spontaneously, its own inertia will maintain it quietly in the
brain and bring it to the surface whenever circumstances permit. This is
what is called learning by experience. Such lessons are far from
indelible and are not always at command. Yet what has once been done may
be repeated; repetition reinforces itself and becomes habit; and a clear
memory of the benefit once attained by fortunate action, representing as
it does the trace left by that action in the system, and its harmony
with the man's usual impulses (for the action is felt to be
_beneficial_), constitutes a strong presumption that the act will be
repeated automatically on occasion; _i.e._, that it has really been
learned. Consciousness, which willingly attends to results only, will
judge either the memory or the benefit, or both confusedly, to be the
ground of this readiness to act; and only if some hitch occurs in the
machinery, so that rational behaviour fails to takes place, will a
surprised appeal be made to material accidents, or to a guilty
forgetfulness or indocility in the soul.

[Sidenote: Intelligence is docility.]

The idiot cannot learn from experience at all, because a new process, in
his liquid brain, does not modify structure; while the fool uses what he
has learned only inaptly and in frivolous fragments, because his
stretches of linked experience are short and their connections insecure.
But when the cerebral plasm is fresh and well disposed and when the
paths are clear,