ivided in Cartesian psychology by an
artificial chasm, are inseparable in existence and are, for natural
history, two parts of the same event. That an image should exist for
consciousness is, abstractly regarded, a fact which neither involves
motion nor constitutes knowledge; but that natural relation to ulterior
events which endows that image with a cognitive function identifies it
at the same time with the motor impulse which accompanies the idea. If
the image involved no bodily attitude and prophesied no action it would
refer to no eventual existence and would have no practical meaning. Even
if it _meant_ to refer to something ulterior it would, under those
circumstances, miss its aim, seeing that no natural relation connected
it with any object which could support or verify its asseverations. It
might _feel_ significant, like a dream, but its significance would be
vain and not really self-transcendent; for it is in the world of events
that logic must find application, if it cares for applicability at all.
This needful bond between ideas and the further existences they forebode
is not merely a logical postulate, taken on trust because the ideas in
themselves assert it; it is a previous and genetic bond, proper to the
soil in which the idea flourishes and a condition of its existence. For
the idea expresses unawares a present cerebral event of which the
ulterior event consciously looked to is a descendant or an ancestor; so
that the ripening of that idea, or its prior history, leads materially
to the fact which the idea seeks to represent ideally.

[Sidenote: Sustained sensation involves reproduction.]

In some such fashion we may come to conceive how imitative art is simply
the perfection and fulfilment of sensation. The act of apperception in
which a sensation is reflected upon and understood is already an
internal reproduction. The object is retraced and gone over in the
mind, not without quite perceptible movements in the limbs, which sway,
as it were, in sympathy with the object's habit. Presumably this
incipient imitation of the object is the physical basis for apperception
itself; the stimulus, whatever devious courses it may pursue,
reconstitutes itself into an impulse to render the object again, as we
acquire the accent which we often hear. This imitation sometimes has the
happiest results, in that the animal fights with one that fights, and
runs after one that runs away from him. All this happens initially,