sky rather than to the ground, and feel suggestions of a
more buoyant sort of locomotion.

Understanding has to be described in terms of its potential outcome,
since the incandescent process itself, as it exists in transit, will
not suffer stable terms to define it. Potentiality is something which
each half of reality reproaches the other with; things are potential to
feeling because they are not life, and feelings are potential to science
because they elude definition. To understand, therefore, is to know what
to do and what to say in the sign's presence; and this practical
knowledge is far deeper than any echo casually awakened in fancy at the
same time. Instinctive recognition has those echoes for the most
superficial part of its effect. Because I understand what "horse" means,
the word can make me recall some episode in which a horse once figured.
This understanding is instinctive and practical and, if the phrase may
be pardoned, it is the body that understands. It is the body, namely,
that contains the habit and readiness on which understanding hangs; and
the sense of understanding, the instant rejection of whatever clashes
and makes nonsense in that context, is but a transcript of the body's
education. Actual mind is all above board; it is all speculative,
vibrant, the fruit and gift of those menial subterranean processes. Some
generative processes may be called psychic in that they minister to mind
and lend it what little continuity it can boast of; but they are not
processes in consciousness. Processes in consciousness are aesthetic or
dialectical processes, focussing a form rather than ushering in an
existence. Mental activity has a character altogether alien to
association: it is spiritual, not mechanical; an entelechy, not a
genesis.

[Sidenote: Suggestion a fancy name for automatism,]

For these and other reasons association has fallen into some disrepute;
but it is not easy to say what, in absolute psychology, has come to take
its place. If we speak of suggestion, a certain dynamic turn seems to be
given to the matter; yet in what sense a perception suggests its future
development remains a mystery. That a certain ripening and expansion of
consciousness goes on in man, not guided by former collocations of
ideas, is very true; for we do not fall in love for the first time
because this person loved and these ardent emotions have been habitually
associated in past experience. And any impassioned discourse, o