ed and that even the actors themselves have a mechanism within them,
so that not only their smiles and magnificent gestures, but their heated
fancy itself and their conception of their roles are but outer effects
and dramatic illusions produced by the natural stage-carpentry in their
brains. Yet such eventual scientific conclusions have nothing to do with
the tentative first notions of men when they begin to experiment in the
art of living. As the seeds of lower animals have to be innumerable, so
that in a chance environment a few may grow to maturity, so the seeds
of rational thinking, the first categories of reflection, have to be
multitudinous, in order that some lucky principle of synthesis may
somewhere come to light and find successful application. Science, which
thinks to make belief in miracles impossible, is itself belief in
miracles--in the miracles best authenticated by history and by daily
life.

[Sidenote: Early selection of categories.]

When men begin to understand things, when they begin to reflect and to
plan, they divide the world into the hateful and the delightful, the
avoidable and the attainable. And in feeling their way toward what
attracts them, or in escaping what they fear, they at first follow
passively the lead of instinct: they watch themselves live, or rather
sink without reserve into their living; their reactions are as little
foreseen and as naturally accepted as their surroundings. Their ideas
are incidents in their perpetual oscillation between apathy and passion.
The stream of animal life leaves behind a little sediment of knowledge,
the sand of that auriferous river; a few grains of experience remain to
mark the path traversed by the flood. These residual ideas and
premonitions, these first categories of thought, are of any and every
sort. All the contents of the mind and all the threads of relation that
weave its elements together are alike fitted, for all we can then see,
to give the clue to the labyrinth in which we find ourselves wandering.

There is _prima facie_ no ground for not trying to apply to experience
such categories, for instance, as that of personal omnipotence, as if
everything were necessarily arranged as we may command or require. On
this principle children often seem to conceive a world in which they are
astonished not to find themselves living. Or we may try aesthetic
categories and allow our reproductive imagination--by which memory is
fed--to bring under the u