short of absolute precision people recognise that thought is not dynamic
or, as they call it, not real. The idea of the physical world is the
first flower or thick cream of practical thinking. Being skimmed off
first and proving so nutritious, it leaves the liquid below somewhat
thin and unsavoury. Especially does this result appear when science is
still unpruned and mythical, so that what passes into the idea of
material nature is much more than the truly causal network of forces,
and includes many spiritual and moral functions.

The material world, as conceived in the first instance, had not that
clear abstractness, nor the spiritual world that wealth and interest,
which they have acquired for modern minds. The complex reactions of
man's soul had been objectified together with those visual and tactile
sensations which, reduced to a mathematical baldness, now furnish terms
to natural science. Mind then dwelt in the world, not only in the warmth
and beauty with which it literally clothed material objects, as it still
does in poetic perception, but in a literal animistic way; for human
passion and reflection were attributed to every object and made a
fairy-land of the world. Poetry and religion discerned life in those
very places in which sense and understanding perceived body; and when so
much of the burden of experience took wing into space, and the soul
herself floated almost visibly among the forms of nature, it is no
marvel that the poor remnant, a mass of merely personal troubles, an
uninteresting distortion of things in individual minds, should have
seemed a sad and unsubstantial accident. The inner world was all the
more ghostly because the outer world was so much alive.

[Sidenote: Hypostasis and criticism both need control.]

This movement of thought, which clothed external objects in all the
wealth of undeciphered dreams, has long lost its momentum and yielded to
a contrary tendency. Just as the hypostasis of some terms in experience
is sanctioned by reason, when the objects so fixed and externalised can
serve as causes and explanations for the order of events, so the
criticism which tends to retract that hypostasis is sanctioned by reason
when the hypostasis has exceeded its function and the external object
conceived is loaded with useless ornament. The transcendental and
functional secret of such hypostases, however, is seldom appreciated by
the headlong mind; so that the ebb no less than the flow of
obj