l experience, a sense
and connection of things which actually never gets fully translated in
any moment of our lives, but is always simply presupposed as the
interpretation which a wider view of life _would_ verify. Thus bounded
in the nutshell of the passing instant, we count ourselves (in one way
or another, and whatever our opinions), kings of the infinite realm of
experience, or would do so were it not that, like Hamlet, we have so
many "bad dreams," which make us doubt the correctness of our
interpretations, and feel our need of an escape from this stubborn
natural prison of our own form of consciousness. We therefore appeal,
in all our truth-seeking, to a wider view than our own present view.

Our most systematic mode of indirect escape from the consequences of
our narrow span of consciousness, is the mode which our thinking
processes, that is, our dealings with abstract and general ideas
exemplify.

{265}

Such abstract and general ideas, as we earlier saw, are means to
ends--never ends in themselves. By means of generalisation or
abstraction we can gradually come to choose signs which we can more or
less successfully substitute for long series of presented objects of
experience; and we can also train ourselves into active ways of
estimating or of describing things--ways such, that by reminding
ourselves of these our active attitudes toward the business of life,
we can seem to ourselves to epitomise in an instant the sense of years
or even of ages of human experience. Such signs and symbols and
attitudes constitute our store of general and abstract ideas. Our more
or less systematic and voluntary thinking is a process of observing,
at one or another instant, the connections and the meanings of a very
few of these our signs and attitudes at once. We actively put together
these ideas of ours, and watch, at the instant, the little connections
that then and there are able to appear, despite the narrowness of our
span of consciousness. That, for instance, is what happens when we add
up columns of figures, or think out a problem, or plan our practical
lives. But because each of the ideas used, each of these signs or
symbols or attitudes, can be more or less safely substituted for some
vast body of facts of experience, what we observe only in and through
our narrow span can indirectly help us to appreciate something whose
real meaning only a very wide range of experience, a consciousness
whose {266} span is enormous