ectification goes on blindly and impulsively, and is carried to
absurd extremes. An age of mythology yields to an age of subjectivity;
reason being equally neglected and exceeded in both. The reaction
against imagination has left the external world, as represented in many
minds, stark and bare. All the interesting and vital qualities which
matter had once been endowed with have been attributed instead to an
irresponsible sensibility in man. And as habits of ideation change
slowly and yield only piecemeal to criticism or to fresh intuitions,
such a revolution has not been carried out consistently, but instead of
a thorough renaming of things and a new organisation of thought it has
produced chiefly distress and confusion. Some phases of this confusion
may perhaps repay a moment's attention; they may enable us, when seen in
their logical sequence, to understand somewhat better the hypostasising
intellect that is trying to assert itself and come to the light through
all these gropings.

[Sidenote: Comparative constancy in objects and in ideas]

What helps in the first place to disclose a permanent object is a
permanent sensation. There is a vast and clear difference between a
floating and a fixed feeling; the latter, in normal circumstances, is
present only when continuous stimulation renews it at every moment.
Attention may wander, but the objects in the environment do not cease to
radiate their influences on the body, which is thereby not allowed to
lose the modification which those influences provoke. The consequent
perception is therefore always at hand and in its repetitions
substantially identical. Perceptions not renewed in this way by
continuous stimulation come and go with cerebral currents; they are rare
visitors, instead of being, like external objects, members of the
household. Intelligence is most at home in the ultimate, which is the
object of intent. Those realities which it can trust and continually
recover are its familiar and beloved companions. The mists that may
originally have divided it from them, and which psychologists call the
mind, are gladly forgotten so soon as intelligence avails to pierce
them, and as friendly communication can be established with the real
world. Moreover, perceptions not sustained by a constant external
stimulus are apt to be greatly changed when they reappear, and to be
changed unaccountably, whereas external things show some method and
proportion in their variations. Even