tion is not passive or idle
knowledge; it truly _informs_ or shapes the mind, giving it new
aptitudes. As an efficacious memory modifies instinct, by levelling it
with a wider survey of the situation, so a memory of what human
experience has been, a sense of what it is likely to be under specific
circumstances, gives the will a new basis. What politics or any large
drama deals with is a will cast into historic moulds, an imagination
busy with what we call great interests. Great interests are a gift which
history makes to the heart. A barbarian is no less subject to the past
than is the civic man who knows what his past is and means to be loyal
to it; but the barbarian, for want of a trans-personal memory, crawls
among superstitions which he cannot understand or revoke and among
persons whom he may hate or love, but whom he can never think of raising
to a higher plane, to the level of a purer happiness. The whole dignity
of human endeavour is thus bound up with historic issues; and as
conscience needs to be controlled by experience if it is to become
rational, so personal experience itself needs to be enlarged ideally if
the failures and successes it reports are to touch impersonal interests.

CHAPTER III

MECHANISM

[Sidenote: Recurrent forms in nature.]

A retrospect over human experience, if a little extended, can hardly
fail to come upon many interesting recurrences. The seasons make their
round and the generations of men, like the forest leaves, repeat their
career. In this its finer texture history undoubtedly repeats itself. A
study of it, in registering so many recurrences, leads to a description
of habit, or to natural history. To observe a recurrence is to divine a
mechanism. It is to analyse a phenomenon, distinguishing its form, which
alone recurs, from its existence, which is irrevocable; and that the
flux of phenomena should turn out, on closer inspection, to be composed
of a multitude of recurring forms, regularly interwoven, is the ideal of
mechanism. The forms, taken ideally and in themselves, are what
reflection first rescues from the flux and makes a science of; they
constitute that world of eternal relations with which dialectic is
conversant. To note here and there some passing illustration of these
forms is one way of studying experience. The observer, the poet, the
historian merely _define_ what they see. But these incidental
illustrations of form (called by Plato phenomena) may have a