t is not only earthquakes and floods, summer
and winter, that bring human musings sharply to book. Love and ambition
are unmistakable blossomings of material forces, and the more intense
and poetical a man's sense is of his spiritual condition the more loudly
will he proclaim his utter dependence on nature and the identity of the
moving principle in him and in her.

Mankind and all its works are undeniably subject to gravity and to the
law of projectiles; yet what is true of these phenomena in bulk seems to
a superficial observation not to be true of them in detail, and a person
may imagine that he subverts all the laws of physics whenever he wags
his tongue. Only in inorganic matter is the ruling mechanism open to
human inspection: here changes may be seen to be proportionate to the
elements and situation in which they occur. Habit here seems perfectly
steady and is called necessity, since the observer is able to deduce it
unequivocally from given properties in the body and in the external
bodies acting upon it. In the parts of nature which we call living and
to which we impute consciousness, habit, though it be fatal enough, is
not so exactly measurable and perspicuous. Physics cannot account for
that minute motion and pullulation in the earth's crust of which human
affairs are a portion. Human affairs have to be surveyed under
categories lying closer to those employed in memory and legend. These
looser categories are of every sort--grammatical, moral, magical--and
there is no knowing when any of them will apply or in what measure.
Between the matters covered by the exact sciences and vulgar experience
there remains, accordingly, a wide and nebulous gulf. Where we cannot
see the mechanism involved in what happens we have to be satisfied with
an empirical description of appearances as they first fall together in
our apprehension; and this want of understanding in the observer is what
popular philosophy calls intelligence in the world.

[Sidenote: Yet presumably pervasive.]

That this gulf is apparent only, being due to inadequacy and confusion
in human perception rather than to incoherence in things, is a
speculative conviction altogether trustworthy. Any one who can at all
catch the drift of experience--moral no less than physical--must feel
that mechanism rules the whole world. There are doubleness and diversity
enough in things to satiate the greatest lover of chaos; but that a
cosmos nevertheless underlies the su