ions, and the habits of
nature. Thus the spiritual value of various philosophies rests in the
last instance on the kind of good which originally attached the mind to
that habit and plane of ideation.

[Sidenote: Concretions in discourse express instinctive reactions.]

We have said that perceptions must be recognised before they can be
associated by contiguity, and that consequently the fusion of temporally
diffused experiences must precede their local fusion into material
objects. It might be urged in opposition to this statement that concrete
objects can be recognised in practice before their general qualities
have been distinguished in discourse. Recognition may be instinctive,
that is, based on the repetition of a felt reaction or emotion, rather
than on any memory of a former occasion on which the same perception
occurred. Such an objection seems to be well grounded, for it is
instinctive adjustments and suggested action that give cognitive value
to sensation and endow it with that transitive force which makes it
consciously representative of what is past, future, or absent. If
practical instinct did not stretch what is given into what is meant,
reason could never recognise the datum for a copy of an ideal object.

[Sidenote: Idealism rudimentary.]

This description of the case involves an application or extension of our
theory rather than an argument against it. For where recognition is
instinctive and a familiar action is performed with absent-minded
confidence and without attending to the indications that justify that
action, there is in an eminent degree a qualitative concretion in
experience. Present impressions are merged so completely in structural
survivals of the past that instead of arousing any ideas distinct enough
to be objectified they merely stimulate the inner sense, remain imbedded
in the general feeling of motion or life, and constitute in fact a
heightened sentiment of pure vitality and freedom. For the lowest and
vaguest of concretions in discourse are the ideas of self and of an
embosoming external being, with the felt continuity of both; what Fichte
would call the Ego, the Non-Ego, and Life. Where no particular events
are recognised there is still a feeling of continuous existence. We
trail after us from our whole past some sense of the continuous energy
and movement both of our passionate fancies and of the phantasmagoria
capriciously at work beyond. An ignorant mind believes itself omnisc