runs through us
when we look at him, just as immediately as do his warmth and light. The
fact that these imaginative suggestions are not constant does not impede
the instant perception that they are actual, and for crude experience
whatever a thing possesses in appearance it possesses indeed, no matter
how soon that quality may be lost again. The moment when things have
most numerous and best defined tertiary qualities is accordingly, for
crude experience, the moment when they are most adequately manifested
and when their inner essence is best revealed; for it is then that they
appear in experience most splendidly arrayed and best equipped for their
eventual functions. The sun is a better expression of all his ulterior
effects when he is conceived to be an arrogant and all-seeing spirit
than when he is stupidly felt to be merely hot; so that the attentive
and devout observer, to whom those tertiary qualities are revealed,
stands in the same relation to an ordinary sensualist, who can feel only
the sun's material attributes, as the sensualist in turn stands in to
one born blind, who cannot add the sun's brightness to its warmth
except by faith in some happier man's reported intuition. The
mythologist or poet, before science exists, is accordingly the man of
truest and most adequate vision. His persuasion that he knows the heart
and soul of things is no fancy reached by artificial inference or
analogy but is a direct report of his own experience and honest
contemplation.

[Sidenote: Tertiary qualities transposed.]

More often, however, tertiary qualities are somewhat transposed in
projection, as sound in being lodged in the bell is soon translated into
sonority, made, that is, into its own potentiality. In the same way
painfulness is translated into malice or wickedness, terror into hate,
and every felt tertiary quality into whatever tertiary quality is in
experience its more quiescent or potential form. So religion, which
remains for the most part on the level of crude experience, attributes
to the gods not only happiness--the object's direct tertiary
quality--but goodness--its tertiary quality transposed and made
potential; for goodness is that disposition which is fruitful in
happiness throughout imagined experience. The devil, in like manner, is
cruel and wicked as well as tormented. Uncritical science still
attributes these transposed tertiary qualities to nature; the mythical
notion of force, for instance, being