to neglecting knowledge
altogether and to hugging instead various irrational ideas. On the one
hand it lapses into dreams which, while obviously irrelevant to
practice, express the mind's vegetative instincts; hence art and
mythology, which substitute play-worlds for the real one on correlation
with which human prosperity and dignity depend. On the other hand, the
mind becomes wedded to conventional objects which mark, perhaps, the
turning-points of practical life and plot the curve of it in a schematic
and disjointed fashion, but which are themselves entirely opaque and, as
we say, material. Now as matter is commonly a name for things not
understood, men materially minded are those whose ideas, while
practical, are meagre and blind, so that their knowledge of nature, if
not invalid, is exceedingly fragmentary. This grossness in common sense,
like irrelevance in imagination, springs from the fact that the mind's
representative powers are out of focus with its controlling conditions.

[Sidenote: Its articulation inferior to that of its objects.]

In other words, sense ought to correspond in articulation with the
object to be represented--otherwise the object's structure, with the
fate it imports; cannot be transferred into analogous ideas. Now the
human senses are not at all fitted to represent an organism on the scale
of the human body. They catch its idle gestures but not the inner
processes which control its action. The senses are immeasurably too
gross. What to them is a _minimum visibile_, a just perceptible atom, is
in the body's structure, very likely, a system of worlds, the inner
cataclysms of which count in producing that so-called atom's behaviour
and endowing it with affinities apparently miraculous. What must the
seed of animals contain, for instance, to be the ground, as it
notoriously is, for every physical and moral property of the offspring?
Or what must the system of signals and the reproductive habit in a brain
be, for it to co-ordinate instinctive movements, learn tricks, and
remember? Our senses can represent at all adequately only such objects
as the solar system or a work of human architecture, where the unit's
inner structure and fermentation may be provisionally neglected in
mastering the total. The architect may reckon in bricks and the
astronomer in planets and yet foresee accurately enough the practical
result. In a word, only what is extraordinarily simple is intelligible
to man, while only