in conjunction. It
gives a vitiated personal view of these realities. Its pleasures are
dangerous and unintelligent, and it perishes as it goes.

[Sidenote: Spirit and sense defined by their relation to nature.]

Such are, for primitive apperception, the three great realms of being:
nature, sense, and spirit. Their frontiers, however, always remain
uncertain. Sense, because it is insignificant when made an object, is
long neglected by reflection. No attempt is made to describe its
processes or ally them systematically to natural changes. Its
illusions, when noticed, are regarded as scandals calculated to foster
scepticism. The spiritual world is, on the other hand, a constant theme
for poetry and speculation. In the absence of ideal science, it can be
conceived only in myths, which are naturally as shifting and
self-contradictory as they are persistent. They acquire no fixed
character until, in dogmatic religion, they are defined with reference
to natural events, foretold or reported. Nature is what first acquires a
form and then imparts form to the other spheres. Sense admits definition
and distribution only as an effect of nature and spirit only as its
principle.

[Sidenote: Vague notions of nature involve vague notions of spirit.]

The form nature acquires is, however, itself vague and uncertain and can
ill serve, for long ages, to define the other realms which depend on it
for definition. Hence it has been common, for instance, to treat the
spiritual as a remote or finer form of the natural. Beyond the moon
everything seemed permanent; it was therefore called divine and declared
to preside over the rest. The breath that escaped from the lips at
death, since it took away with it the spiritual control and miraculous
life that had quickened the flesh, was itself the spirit. On the other
hand, natural processes have been persistently attributed to spiritual
causes, for it was not matter that moved itself but intent that moved
it. Thus spirit was barbarously taken for a natural substance and a
natural force. It was identified with everything in which it was
manifested, so long as no natural causes could be assigned for that
operation.

[Sidenote: Sense and spirit the life of nature, which science
redistributes but does not deny.]

If the unification of nature were complete sense would evidently fall
within it; it is to subtend and sustain the sensible flux that
intelligence acknowledges first stray material objec