levance or
relation to one another save what they acquire by depending on the same
body or representing the same objects. Even when consciousness grows
sophisticated and thinks it cares for itself, it really cares only for
its ideals; the world it pictures seems to it beautiful, and it may
incidentally prize itself also, when it has come to regard itself as a
part of that world. Initially, however, it is free even from that honest
selfishness; it looks straight out; it is interested in the movements it
observes; it swells with the represented world, suffers with its
commotion, and subsides, no less willingly, in its interludes of calm.

Natural history and psychology arrive at consciousness from the outside,
and consequently give it an artificial articulation and rationality
which are wholly alien to its essence. These sciences infer feeling from
habit or expression; so that only the expressible and practical aspects
of feeling figure in their calculation. But these aspects are really
peripheral; the core is an irresponsible, ungoverned, irrevocable dream.
Psychologists have discussed perception _ad nauseam_ and become horribly
entangled in a combined idealism and physiology; for they must perforce
approach the subject from the side of matter, since all science and all
evidence is external; nor could they ever reach consciousness at all if
they did not observe its occasions and then interpret those occasions
dramatically. At the same time, the inferred mind they subject to
examination will yield nothing but ideas, and it is a marvel how such a
dream can regard those natural objects from which the psychologist has
inferred it. Perception is in fact no primary phase of consciousness; it
is an ulterior practical function acquired by a dream which has become
symbolic of its conditions, and therefore relevant to its own destiny.
Such relevance and symbolism are indirect and slowly acquired; their
status cannot be understood unless we regard them as forms of
imagination happily grown significant. In imagination, not in
perception, lies the substance of experience, while knowledge and reason
are but its chastened and ultimate form.

[Sidenote: The mind vegetates uncontrolled save by physical forces.]

Every actual animal is somewhat dull and somewhat mad. He will at times
miss his signals and stare vacantly when he might well act, while at
other times he will run off into convulsions and raise a dust in his own
brain to no p