ce into a man's presence or even into his body, to take
possession of it. Sense and fancy, in a word, had not been
distinguished. As to be aware of vision is a great sign of imagination,
so to be aware of imagination is a great sign of understanding.

The spirit had other prerogatives, of a more rational sort. The truth,
the right were also spirits; for though often invisible and denied by
men, they could emerge at times from their invisible lairs to deal some
quick blow and vindicate their divinity. The intermittance proper to
phenomena is universal and extreme; only the familiar conception of
nature, in which the flux becomes continuous, now blinds us in part to
that fact. But before the days of scientific thinking only those things
which were found unchanged and which seemed to lie passive were
conceived to have had in the interval a material existence. More
stirring apparitions, instead of being referred to their material
constituents and continuous basis in nature, were referred to spirit. We
still say, for instance, that war _comes on_. That phrase would once
have been understood literally. War, being something intermittent, must
exist somehow unseen in the interval, else it would not return; that
rage, so people would have fancied, is therefore a spirit, it is a god.
Mars and Ares long survived the phase of thought to which they owed
their divinity; and believers had to rely on habit and the witness of
antiquity to support their irrational faith. They little thought how
absolutely simple and inevitable had been the grammar by which those
figures, since grown rhetorical, had been first imposed upon the world.

[Sidenote: The notion of sense.]

Another complication soon came to increase this confusion. When material
objects were discovered and it became clear that they had comparatively
fixed natures, it also became clear that with the motions of one's body
all other things seemed to vary in ways which did not amount to a
permanent or real metamorphosis in them; for these things might be found
again unchanged. Objects, for instance, seemed to grow smaller when we
receded from them, though really, as we discovered by approaching and
measuring them anew, they had remained unchanged. These private aspects
or views of things were accordingly distinguished from the things
themselves, which were lodged in an intelligible sphere, raised above
anybody's sensibility and existing independently. The variable aspects
were du