s somehow amenable to logic
and finds uses for the reason it breeds.

Now, in the relation of a natural being to similar beings in the same
habitat there is just the occasion we require for introducing a
miraculous transcendence in knowledge, a leap out of solipsism which,
though not prompted by reason, will find in reason a continual
justification. For tertiary qualities are imputed to objects by
psychological or pathological necessity. Something not visible in the
object, something not possibly revealed by any future examination of
that object, is thus united with it, felt to be its core, its
metaphysical truth. Tertiary qualities are emotions or thoughts present
in the observer and in his rudimentary consciousness not yet connected
with their proper concomitants and antecedents, not yet relegated to
his private mind, nor explained by his personal endowment and situation.
To take these private feelings for the substance of other beings is
evidently a gross blunder; yet this blunder, without ceasing to be one
in point of method, ceases to be one in point of fact when the other
being happens to be similar in nature and situation to the mythologist
himself and therefore actually possesses the very emotions and thoughts
which lie in the mythologist's bosom and are attributed by him to his
fellow. Thus an imaginary self-transcendence, a rash pretension to grasp
an independent reality and to know the unknowable, may find itself
accidentally rewarded. Imagination will have drawn a prize in its
lottery and the pathological accidents of thought will have begotten
knowledge and right reason. The inner and unattainable core of other
beings will have been revealed to private intuition.

[Sidenote: Limits of insight]

This miracle of insight, as it must seem to those who have not
understood its natural and accidental origin, extends only so far as
does the analogy between the object and the instrument of perception.
The gift of intuition fails in proportion as the observer's bodily habit
differs from the habit and body observed. Misunderstanding begins with
constitutional divergence and deteriorates rapidly into false
imputations and absurd myths. The limits of mutual understanding
coincide with the limits of similar structure and common occupation, so
that the distortion of insight begins very near home. It is hard to
understand the minds of children unless we retain unusual plasticity and
capacity to play; men and women do no