attained to that idea. Such an atrophy might indeed become general, and
God would in that case disappear from human experience as music would
disappear if universal deafness attacked the race. Such an event is made
conceivable by the loss of allied imaginative habits, which is
observable in historic times. Yet possible variations in human faculty
do not involve the illegitimacy of such faculties as actually subsist;
and the abstract world known to science, unless it dries up the ancient
fountains of ideation by its habitual presence in thought, does not
remove those parallel dramatisations or abstractions which experience
may have suggested to men.

What enables men to perceive the unity of nature is the unification of
their own wills. A man half-asleep, without fixed purposes, without
intellectual keenness or joy in recognition, might graze about like an
animal, forgetting each satisfaction in the next and banishing from his
frivolous mind the memory of every sorrow; what had just failed to kill
him would leave him as thoughtless and unconcerned as if it had never
crossed his path. Such irrational elasticity and innocent improvidence
would never put two and two together. Every morning there would be a new
world with the same fool to live in it. But let some sobering passion,
some serious interest, lend perspective to the mind, and a point of
reference will immediately be given for protracted observation; then the
laws of nature will begin to dawn upon thought. Every experiment will
become a lesson, every event will be remembered as favourable or
unfavourable to the master-passion. At first, indeed, this keen
observation will probably be animistic and the laws discovered will be
chiefly habits, human or divine, special favours or envious punishments
and warnings. But the same constancy of aim which discovers the
dramatic conflicts composing society, and tries to read nature in terms
of passion, will, if it be long sustained, discover behind this glorious
chaos a deeper mechanical order. Men's thoughts, like the weather, are
not so arbitrary as they seem and the true master in observation, the
man guided by a steadfast and superior purpose, will see them revolving
about their centres in obedience to quite calculable instincts, and the
principle of all their flutterings will not be hidden from his eyes.
Belief in indeterminism is a sign of indetermination. No commanding or
steady intellect flirts with so miserable a possib