of successive moments--are all
associated by contiguity, from the first facts of perception and passion
to the last facts of fate and conscience. We undergo events, we grow
into character, by the subterraneous working of irrational forces that
make their incalculable irruptions into life none the less wonderfully
in the revelations of a man's heart to himself than in the cataclysms of
the world around him. Nature's placid procedure, to which we yield so
willingly in times of prosperity, is a concatenation of states which can
only be understood when it is made its own standard and law. A sort of
philosophy without wisdom may seek to subjugate this natural life, this
blind budding of existence, to some logical or moral necessity; but this
very attempt remains, perhaps, the most striking monument to that
irrational fatality that rules affairs, a monument which reason itself
is compelled to raise with unsuspected irony.

[Sidenote: Aristotle's compromise.]

Reliance on external perception, constant appeals to concrete fact and
physical sanctions, have always led the mass of reasonable men to
magnify concretions in existence and belittle concretions in discourse.
They are too clever, as they feel, to mistake words for things. The most
authoritative thinker on this subject, because the most mature,
Aristotle himself, taught that things had reality, individuality,
independence, and were the outer cause of perception, while general
ideas, products of association by similarity, existed only in the mind.
The public, pleased at its ability to understand this doctrine and
overlooking the more incisive part of the philosopher's teaching, could
go home comforted and believing that material things were primary and
perfect entities, while ideas were only abstractions, effects those
realities produced on our incapable minds. Aristotle, however, had a
juster view of general concepts and made in the end the whole material
universe gravitate around them and feel their influence, though in a
metaphysical and magic fashion to which a more advanced natural science
need no longer appeal. While in the shock of life man was always coming
upon the accidental, in the quiet of reflection he could not but recast
everything in ideal moulds and retain nothing but eternal natures and
intelligible relations. Aristotle conceived that while the origin of
knowledge lay in the impact of matter upon sense its goal was the
comprehension of essences, and that