ctive and moral character of
his feelings, on finding himself so surrounded, does not destroy their
cognitive value. These feelings, as Locke says, are signs: to take them
for signs is the essence of intelligence. Animals that are sensitive
physically are also sensitive morally, and feel the friendliness or
hostility which surrounds them. Even pain and pleasure are no idle
sensations, satisfied with their own presence: they violently summon
attention to the objects that are their source. Can love or hate be felt
without being felt towards something--something near and potent, yet
external, uncontrolled, and mysterious? When I dodge a missile or pick a
berry, is it likely that my mind should stop to dwell on its pure
sensations or ideas without recognising or pursuing something material?
Analytic reflection often ignores the essential energy of mind, which is
originally more intelligent than sensuous, more appetitive and dogmatic
than aesthetic. But the feelings and ideas of an active animal cannot help
uniting internal moral intensity with external physical reference; and the
natural conditions of sensibility require that perceptions should owe
their existence and quality to the living organism with its moral bias,
and that at the same time they should be addressed to the external objects
which entice that organism or threaten it.

All ambitions must be defeated when they ask for the impossible. The
ambition to know is not an exception; and certainly our perceptions cannot
tell us how the world would look if nobody saw it, or how valuable it
would be if nobody cared for it. But our perceptions, as Locke again said,
are sufficient for our welfare and appropriate to our condition. They are
not only a wonderful entertainment in themselves, but apart from their
sensuous and grammatical quality, by their distribution and method of
variation, they may inform us most exactly about the order and mechanism
of nature. We see in the science of today how completely the most accurate
knowledge--proved to be accurate by its application in the arts--may shed
every pictorial element, and the whole language of experience, to become a
pure method of calculation and control. And by a pleasant compensation,
our aesthetic life may become freer, more self-sufficing, more humbly
happy in itself: and without trespassing in any way beyond the modesty of
nature, we may consent to be like little children, chirping our human
note; since the life of