ient
and omnipotent; those impulses in itself which really represent the
inertia and unspent momentum of its last dream it regards as the
creative forces of nature.

The first lines of cleavage and the first recognisable bulks at which
attention is arrested are in truth those shadowy Fichtean divisions:
such are the rude beginnings of logical architecture. In its inability
to descry anything definite and fixed, for want of an acquired empirical
background and a distinct memory, the mind flounders forward in a dream
full of prophecies and wayward identifications. The world possesses as
yet in its regard only the superficial forms that appear in revery, it
has no hidden machinery, no third dimension in which unobserved and
perpetual operations are going on. Its only terms, in a word, are
concretions in discourse, ideas combined in their aesthetic and logical
harmonies, not in their habitual and efficacious conjunctions. The
disorder of such experience is still a spontaneous disorder; it has not
discovered how calculable are its unpremeditated shocks. The cataclysms
that occur seem to have only ideal grounds and only dramatic meaning.
Though the dream may have its terrors and degenerate at moments into a
nightmare, it has still infinite plasticity and buoyancy. What
perceptions are retained merge in those haunting and friendly presences,
they have an intelligible and congenial character because they appear as
parts and effluences of an inner fiction, evolving according to the
barbaric prosody of an almost infant mind.

This is the fairy-land of idealism where only the miraculous seems a
matter of course and every hint of what is purely natural is
disregarded, for the truly natural still seems artificial, dead, and
remote. New and disconcerting facts, which intrude themselves
inopportunely into the story, chill the currents of spontaneous
imagination and are rejected as long as possible for being alien and
perverse. Perceptions, on the contrary, which can be attached to the old
presences as confirmations or corollaries, become at once parts of the
warp and woof of what we call ourselves. They seem of the very substance
of spirit, obeying a vital momentum and flowing from the inmost
principle of being; and they are so much akin to human presumptions that
they pass for manifestations of necessary truth. Thus the demonstrations
of geometry being but the intent explication of a long-consolidated
ideal concretion which we call