sm is intrenched in the very structure of human reason,
empiricism represents all those energies of the external universe which,
as Spinoza says, must infinitely exceed the energies of man. If
meditation breeds science, wisdom comes by disillusion, even on the
subject of science itself. Docility to the facts makes the sanity of
science. Reason is only half grown and not really distinguishable from
imagination so long as she cannot check and recast her own processes
wherever they render the moulds of thought unfit for their
subject-matter. Docility is, as we have seen, the deepest condition of
reason's existence; for if a form of mental synthesis were by chance
developed which was incapable of appropriating the data of sense, these
data could not be remembered or introduced at all into a growing and
cumulative experience. Sensations would leave no memorial; while logical
thoughts would play idly, like so many parasites in the mind, and
ultimately languish and die of inanition. To be nourished and employed,
intelligence must have developed such structure and habits as will
enable it to assimilate what food comes in its way; so that the
persistence of any intellectual habit is a proof that it has some
applicability, however partial, to the facts of sentience.

[Sidenote: Applicable thought and clarified experience.]

This applicability, the prerequisite of significant thought, is also its
eventual test; and the gathering of new experiences, the consciousness
of more and more facts crowding into the memory and demanding
co-ordination, is at once the presentation to reason of her legitimate
problem and a proof that she is already at work. It is a presentation of
her problem, because reason is not a faculty of dreams but a method in
living; and by facing the flux of sensations and impulses that
constitute mortal life with the gift of ideal construction and the
aspiration toward eternal goods, she is only doing her duty and
manifesting what she is. To accumulate facts, moreover, is in itself to
prove that rational activity is already awakened, because a
consciousness of multitudinous accidents diversifying experience
involves a wide scope in memory, good methods of classification, and
keen senses, so that all working together they may collect many
observations. Memory and all its instruments are embodiments, on a
modest scale, of rational activities which in theory and speculation
reappear upon a higher level. The expansion o