f the mind in point of
retentiveness and wealth of images is as much an advance in knowledge as
is its development in point of organisation. The structure may be
widened at the base as well as raised toward its ideal summit, and while
a mass of information imperfectly digested leaves something still for
intelligence to do, it shows at the same time how much intelligence has
done already.

The function of reason is to dominate experience; and obviously
openness to new impressions is no less necessary to that end than is the
possession of principles by which new impressions may be interpreted.

CHAPTER IX--HOW THOUGHT IS PRACTICAL

[Sidenote: Functional relations of mind and body.]

Nothing is more natural or more congruous with all the analogies of
experience than that animals should feel and think. The relation of mind
to body, of reason to nature, seems to be actually this: when bodies
have reached a certain complexity and vital equilibrium, a sense begins
to inhabit them which is focussed upon the preservation of that body and
on its reproduction. This sense, as it becomes reflective and expressive
of physical welfare, points more and more to its own persistence and
harmony, and generates the Life of Reason. Nature is reason's basis and
theme; reason is nature's consciousness; and, from the point of view of
that consciousness when it has arisen, reason is also nature's
justification and goal.

To separate things so closely bound together as are mind and body,
reason and nature, is consequently a violent and artificial divorce, and
a man of judgment will instinctively discredit any philosophy in which
it is decreed. But to avoid divorce it is well first to avoid unnatural
unions, and not to attribute to our two elements, which must be
partners for life, relations repugnant to their respective natures and
offices. Now the body is an instrument, the mind its function, the
witness and reward of its operation. Mind is the body's entelechy, a
value which accrues to the body when it has reached a certain
perfection, of which it would be a pity, so to speak, that it should
remain unconscious; so that while the body feeds the mind the mind
perfects the body, lifting it and all its natural relations and impulses
into the moral world, into the sphere of interests and ideas.

No connection could be closer than this reciprocal involution, as nature
and life reveal it; but the connection is natural, not dialectical. The