ts
pass simultaneously into art in a wholly different region. Spontaneous
expression, such as song, comes when internal growth in an animal system
vents itself, as it were, by the way. At the same time animal economy
has playful manifestations concerned with outer things, such as
burrowing or collecting objects. These practices are not less
spontaneous than the others, and no less expressive; but they seem more
external because the traces they leave on the environment are more
clearly marked.

To change an object is the surest and most glorious way of changing a
perception. A shift in posture may relieve the body, and in that way
satisfy, but the new attitude is itself unstable. Its pleasantness,
like its existence, is transient, and scarcely is a movement executed
when both its occasion and its charm are forgotten. Self-expression by
exercise, in spite of its pronounced automatism, is therefore something
comparatively passive and inglorious. A man has hardly _done_ anything
when he has laughed or yawned. Even the inspired poet retains something
of this passivity: his work is not his, but that of a restless,
irresponsible spirit passing through him, and hypnotising him for its
own ends. Of the result he has no profit, no glory, and little
understanding. So the mystic also positively gloats on his own
nothingness, and puts his whole genuine being in a fancied
instrumentality and subordination to something else. Far more virile and
noble is the sense of having actually done something, and left at least
the temporary stamp of one's special will on the world. To chop a stick,
to catch a fly, to pile a heap of sand, is a satisfying action; for the
sand stays for a while in its novel arrangement, proclaiming to the
surrounding level that we have made it our instrument, while the fly
will never stir nor the stick grow together again in all eternity. If
the impulse that has thus left its indelible mark on things is constant
in our own bosom, the world will have been permanently improved and
humanised by our action. Nature cannot but be more favourable to those
ideas which have once found an efficacious champion.

[Sidenote: Such effects fruitful.]

Plastic impulses find in this way an immediate sanction in the sense of
victory and dominion which they carry with them; it is so evident a
proof of power in ourselves to see things and animals bent out of their
habitual form and obedient instead to our idea. But a far weightier