ility, which in so far
as it actually prevailed would make virtue impotent and experience, in
its pregnant sense, impossible.

[Sidenote: Mind the erratic residue of existence.]

We have said that those objects which cannot be incorporated into the
one space which the understanding envisages are relegated to another
sphere called imagination. We reach here a most important corollary. As
material objects, making a single system which fills space and evolves
in time, are conceived by abstraction from the flux of sensuous
experience, so, _pari passu_, the rest of experience, with all its other
outgrowths and concretions, falls out with the physical world and forms
the sphere of mind, the sphere of memory, fancy, and the passions. We
have in this discrimination the _genesis of mind_, not of course in the
transcendental sense in which the word mind is extended to mean the sum
total and mere fact of existence--for mind, so taken, can have no origin
and indeed no specific meaning--but the genesis of mind as a determinate
form of being, a distinguishable part of the universe known to
experience and discourse, the mind that unravels itself in meditation,
inhabits animal bodies, and is studied in psychology.

Mind, in this proper sense of the word, is the residue of existence, the
leavings, so to speak, and parings of experience when the material world
has been cut out of the whole cloth. Reflection underlines in the
chaotic continuum of sense and longing those aspects that have practical
significance; it selects the efficacious ingredients in the world. The
trustworthy object which is thus retained in thought, the complex of
connected events, is nature, and though so intelligible an object is not
soon nor vulgarly recognised, because human reflection is perturbed and
halting, yet every forward step in scientific and practical knowledge is
a step toward its clearer definition. At first much parasitic matter
clings to that dynamic skeleton. Nature is drawn like a sponge heavy and
dripping from the waters of sentience. It is soaked with inefficacious
passions and overlaid with idle accretions. Nature, in a word, is at
first conceived mythically, dramatically, and retains much of the
unintelligible, sporadic habit of animal experience itself. But as
attention awakes and discrimination, practically inspired, grows firm
and stable, irrelevant qualities are stripped off, and the mechanical
process, the efficacious infallible order, i