attention is consecutive and learning easy; a multitude
of details can be gathered into a single cycle of memory or of potential
regard. Under such circumstances action is the unimpeded expression of
healthy instinct in an environment squarely faced. Conduct from the
first then issues in progress, and, by reinforcing its own organisation
at each rehearsal, makes progress continual. For there will subsist not
only a readiness to act and a great precision in action, but if any
significant circumstance has varied in the conditions or in the
interests at stake, this change will make itself felt; it will check the
process and prevent precipitate action. Deliberation or well-founded
scruple has the same source as facility--a plastic and quick
organisation. To be sensitive to difficulties and dangers goes with
being sensitive to opportunities.

[Sidenote: Art is reason propagating itself.]

Of all reason's embodiments art is therefore the most splendid and
complete. Merely to attain categories by which inner experience may be
articulated, or to feign analogies by which a universe may be conceived,
would be but a visionary triumph if it remained ineffectual and went
with no actual remodelling of the outer world, to render man's dwelling
more appropriate and his mind better fed and more largely transmissible.
Mind grows self-perpetuating only by its expression in matter. What
makes progress possible is that rational action may leave traces in
nature, such that nature in consequence furnishes a better basis for the
Life of Reason; in other words progress is art bettering the conditions
of existence. Until art arises, all achievement is internal to the
brain, dies with the individual, and even in him spends itself without
recovery, like music heard in a dream. Art, in establishing instruments
for human life beyond the human body, and moulding outer things into
sympathy with inner values, establishes a ground whence values may
continually spring up; the thatch that protects from to-day's rain will
last and keep out to-morrow's rain also; the sign that once expresses an
idea will serve to recall it in future.

Not only does the work of art thus perpetuate its own function and
produce a better experience, but the process of art also perpetuates
itself, because it is teachable. Every animal learns something by
living; but if his offspring inherit only what he possessed at birth,
they have to learn life's lessons over again from the