ger be a function of life but merely a static order, so existence is
indistinguishable from an absolute motionless experience, which should
no longer be a foreshortening or representation of anything. This
existence would be motionless in the sense that it would "mark time,"
for of course every fact in it might be a fact of transition. The whole
system, however, would have a static ideal constitution, since the fact
that things change in a certain way or stand in a certain order is as
much a fact as any other; and it is not a logical necessity, either, but
a brute matter of fact that might well have been otherwise.]

CHAPTER VII

DIALECTIC

[Sidenote: Dialectic elaborates given forms.]

The advantage which the mechanical sciences have over history is drawn
from their mathematical form. Mathematics has somewhat the same place in
physics that conscience has in action; it seems to be a directive
principle in natural operations where it is only a formal harmony. The
formalistic school, which treats grammar in all departments as if it
were the ground of import rather than a means of expressing it, takes
mathematics also for an oracular deliverance, springing full-armed out
of the brain, and setting up a canon which all concrete things must
conform to. Thus mathematical science has become a mystery which a myth
must be constructed to solve. For how can it happen, people ask, that
pure intuition, retreating into its cell, can evolve there a prodigious
system of relations which it carries like a measuring-rod into the world
and lo! everything in experience submits to be measured by it? What
pre-established harmony is this between the spinning cerebral silkworm
and nature's satins and brocades?

If we but knew, so the myth runs, that experience can show no patterns
but those which the prolific Mind has woven, we should not wonder at
this necessary correspondence. The Mind having decreed of its own
motion, while it sat alone before the creation of the world, that it
would take to dreaming mathematically, it evoked out of nothing all
formal necessities; and later, when it felt some solicitation to play
with things, it imposed those forms upon all its toys, admitting none of
any other sort into the nursery. In other words, perception perfected
its grammar before perceiving any of its objects, and having imputed
that grammar to the materials of sense, it was able to perceive objects
for the first time and to legislate f