sisted; its loose elements would have been allowed to pass by
unnoticed and would not have been recognised when they recurred.
Experience would have remained absolute inexperience, as foolishly
perpetual as the gurglings of rivers or the flickerings of sunlight in a
grove. But an instinct was actually present, so formed as to be aroused
by a determinate stimulus; and the image produced by that stimulus, when
it came, could have in consequence a meaning and an individuality. It
seemed by divine right to signify something interesting, something real,
because by natural contiguity it flowed from something pertinent and
important to life. Every accompanying sensation which shared that
privilege, or in time was engrossed in that function, would ultimately
become a part of that conceived reality, a quality of that thing.

The same primacy of impulses, irrational in themselves but expressive of
bodily functions, is observable in the behaviour of animals, and in
those dreams, obsessions, and primary passions which in the midst of
sophisticated life sometimes lay bare the obscure groundwork of human
nature. Reason's work is there undone. We can observe sporadic growths,
disjointed fragments of rationality, springing up in a moral wilderness.
In the passion of love, for instance, a cause unknown to the sufferer,
but which is doubtless the spring-flood of hereditary instincts
accidentally let loose, suddenly checks the young man's gayety, dispels
his random curiosity, arrests perhaps his very breath; and when he looks
for a cause to explain his suspended faculties, he can find it only in
the presence or image of another being, of whose character, possibly, he
knows nothing and whose beauty may not be remarkable; yet that image
pursues him everywhere, and he is dominated by an unaccustomed tragic
earnestness and a new capacity for suffering and joy. If the passion be
strong there is no previous interest or duty that will be remembered
before it; if it be lasting the whole life may be reorganised by it; it
may impose new habits, other manners, and another religion. Yet what is
the root of all this idealism? An irrational instinct, normally
intermittent, such as all dumb creatures share, which has here managed
to dominate a human soul and to enlist all the mental powers in its more
or less permanent service, upsetting their usual equilibrium. This
madness, however, inspires method; and for the first time, perhaps, in
his life, the man