first indispensable products of
intelligence, which arise by the fusion of successive images in
discourse, and transcend the particular in time, peopling the mind with
permanent and recognisable objects, and strengthening it with a
synthetic, dramatic apprehension of itself and its own experience.
Concretion in existence, on the contrary, yields essentially detached
and empirical unities, foreign to mind in spite of their order, and
unintelligible in spite of their clearness. Reason fails to assimilate
in them precisely that which makes them real, namely, their presence
here and now, in this order and number. The form and quality of them we
can retain, domesticate, and weave into the texture of reflection, but
their existence and individuality remain a datum of sense needing to be
verified anew at every moment and actually receiving continual
verification or disproof while we live in this world.

"This world" we call it, not without justifiable pathos, for many other
worlds are conceivable and if discovered might prove more rational and
intelligible and more akin to the soul than this strange universe which
man has hitherto always looked upon with increasing astonishment. The
materials of experience are no sooner in hand than they are transformed
by intelligence, reduced to those permanent presences, those natures and
relations, which alone can live in discourse. Those materials,
rearranged into the abstract summaries we call history or science, or
pieced out into the reconstructions and extensions we call poetry or
religion, furnish us with ideas of as many dream-worlds as we please,
all nearer to reason's ideal than is the actual chaos of perceptual
experience, and some nearer to the heart's desire. When an empirical
philosophy, therefore, calls us back from the irresponsible flights of
imagination to the shock of sense and tries to remind us that in this
alone we touch existence and come upon fact, we feel dispossessed of our
nature and cramped in our life. The actuality possessed by external
experience cannot make up for its instability, nor the applicability of
scientific principles for their hypothetical character. The dependence
upon sense, which we are reduced to when we consider the world of
existences, becomes a too plain hint of our essential impotence and
mortality, while the play of logical fancy, though it remain inevitable,
is saddened by a consciousness of its own insignificance.

[Sidenote: Her inexpe