other in nature
project into the human mind images which represent them. To the
relations between phenomena, therefore, correspond symmetrically
relations between the ideas. And the most general laws of nature, in
which the relations between phenomena are condensed, are thus found to
have engendered the directing principles of thought, into which the
relations between ideas have been integrated. Nature, therefore, is
reflected in mind. The intimate structure of our thought corresponds,
piece by piece, to the very skeleton of things--I admit it willingly;
but, in order that the human mind may be able to represent relations
between phenomena, there must first be phenomena, that is to say,
distinct facts, cut out in the continuity of becoming. And once we posit
this particular mode of cutting up such as we perceive it to-day, we
posit also the intellect such as it is to-day, for it is by relation to
it, and to it alone, that reality is cut up in this manner. Is it
probable that mammals and insects notice the same aspects of nature,
trace in it the same divisions, articulate the whole in the same way?
And yet the insect, so far as intelligent, has already something of our
intellect. Each being cuts up the material world according to the lines
that its action must follow: it is these lines of _possible action_
that, by intercrossing, mark out the net of experience of which each
mesh is a fact. No doubt, a town is composed exclusively of houses, and
the streets of the town are only the intervals between the houses: so,
we may say that nature contains only facts, and that, the facts once
posited, the relations are simply the lines running between the facts.
But, in a town, it is the gradual portioning of the ground into lots
that has determined at once the place of the houses, their general
shape, and the direction of the streets: to this portioning we must go
back if we wish to understand the particular mode of subdivision that
causes each house to be where it is, each street to run as it does.
Now, the cardinal error of Spencer is to take experience already
allotted as given, whereas the true problem is to know how the allotment
was worked. I agree that the laws of thought are only the integration of
relations between facts. But, when I posit the facts with the shape they
have for me to-day, I suppose my faculties of perception and
intellection such as they are in me to-day; for it is they that portion
the real into lots, the