nity of apperception only what can fall within
it harmoniously, completely, and delightfully. Such an understanding,
impervious to anything but the beautiful, might be a fine thing in
itself, but would not chronicle the fortunes of that organism to which
it was attached. It would yield an experience--doubtless a highly
interesting and elaborate experience--but one which could never serve as
an index to successful action. It would totally fail to represent its
conditions, and consequently would imply nothing about its continued
existence. It would be an experience irrelevant to conduct, no part,
therefore, of a Life of Reason, but a kind of lovely vapid music or
parasitic dream.

Now such dreams are in fact among the first and most absorbing
formations in the human mind. If we could penetrate into animal
consciousness we should not improbably find that what there accompanies
instinctive motions is a wholly irrelevant fancy, whose flaring up and
subsidence no doubt coincide with the presence of objects interesting to
the organism and causing marked reactions within it; yet this fancy may
in no way represent the nature of surrounding objects nor the eventual
results, for the animal's consciousness, of its own present experience.

[Sidenote: Tentative rational worlds.]

The unlimited number of possible categories, their arbitrariness and
spontaneity, may, however, have this inconvenience, that the categories
may be irrelevant to one another no less than to the natural life they
ought to express. The experience they respectively synthesise may
therefore be no single experience. One pictured world may succeed
another in the sphere of sensibility, while the body whose sensibility
they compose moves in a single and constant physical cosmos. Each little
mental universe may be intermittent, or, if any part of it endures while
a new group of ideas comes upon the stage, there may arise
contradictions, discords, and a sense of lurking absurdity which will
tend to disrupt thought logically at the same time that the processes of
nutrition and the oncoming of new dreams tend to supplant it
mechanically. Such drifting categories have no mutual authority. They
replace but do not dominate one another, and the general conditions of
life--by conceiving which life itself might be surveyed--remain entirely
unrepresented.

What we mean, indeed, by the natural world in which the conditions of
consciousness are found and in reference to whic