of extracting
that which is useful to its creative life, and thus finds in the
cosmos the means of salvation. Without this characteristic activity,
the intelligence cannot construct itself; it would be like an
attention that wanders from thing to thing without ever fixing upon
any one of them, and like a will that can never decide upon any
definite action.

"It is possible to suppose," says James, "that a God could, without
impairing his activity, simultaneously behold all the minutest
portions of the world. But if our human attention should be thus
dissipated, we should merely contemplate all things vacuously, without
ever finding occasion to do any particular act."

It is one of the marvelous phenomena of life that it is impossible to
realize anything, without determining limits; that mysterious law
which ordains that every living being has its "form" and "stature,"
unlike the minerals, which are indefinite in form and dimensions, is
repeated in the psychical life. Its development, its auto-creation, is
nothing but a determination even more precise, a progressive
"concentration"; it is thus that from the primitive chaos our internal
characteristic form is gradually shaped and chiselled.

The capacity for forming a conception of a thing, for judging and
reasoning, has always this foundation. When, after having noted the
usual qualities of a column, we abstract the general truth that the
column is a support, this synthetic idea is based upon a selected
quality. Thus in the judgment we may pronounce: columns are
cylindrical, we have abstracted one quality from among the many others
we could have adduced, as, columns are cold, they are hard, they are a
composition of carbonate of lime, etc. It is only the capacity for
such a selection which makes reasoning possible. When, for example, in
the demonstration of the theorem of Pythagoras, children handle the
various pieces of the metal insets, they should start from the point
at which they become aware that a rectangle is equal to the rhomb, and
a square is equal to the same rhomb. It is the perception of this
truth which makes it possible to go on to the following reasoning:
therefore the square and the rectangle are equal to each other. If it
had not been possible to determine this attribute, the mind could not
have arrived at any conclusion. The mind has succeeded in discovering
an attribute common to two dissimilar figures; and it is this
discovery which may lead to a