to moment, of forces parting sooner
or later on their ways.

Or if we begin with the inward world of thought and feeling, the
whirlpool is still more rapid, the flame more eager and devouring. There
it is no longer the gradual darkening of the eye and fading of colour
from the wall,--the movement of the shore-side, where the water flows
down indeed, though in apparent rest,--but the race of the mid-stream, a
drift of momentary acts of sight and passion and thought. At first sight
experience seems to bury us under a flood of external objects, pressing
upon us with a sharp and importunate reality, calling us out of ourselves
in a thousand forms of action. But when reflexion begins to act upon
those objects they are dissipated under its influence; the cohesive force
seems suspended like a trick of magic; each object is loosed into a group
of impressions--colour, odour, texture--in the mind of the observer. And
if we continue to dwell in thought on this world, not of objects in the
solidity with which language invests them, but of impressions unstable,
flickering, inconsistent, which burn and are extinguished with our
consciousness of them, it contracts still further; the whole scope of
observation is dwarfed to the narrow chamber of the individual mind.
Experience, already reduced to a swarm of impressions, is ringed round
for each one of us by that thick wall of personality through which no
real voice has ever pierced on its way to us, or from us to that which we
can only conjecture to be without. Every one of those impressions is the
impression of the individual in his isolation, each mind keeping as a
solitary prisoner its own dream of a world. Analysis goes a step farther
still, and assures us that those impressions of the individual mind to
which, for each one of us, experience dwindles down, are in perpetual
flight; that each of them is limited by time, and that as time is
infinitely divisible, each of them is infinitely divisible also; all that
is actual in it being a single moment, gone while we try to apprehend it,
of which it may ever be more truly said that it has ceased to be than
that it is. To such a tremulous wisp constantly re-forming itself on the
stream, to a single sharp impression, with a sense in it, a relic more or
less fleeting, of such moments gone by, what is real in our life fines
itself down. It is with this movement, with the passage and dissolution
of impressions, images, sensations, that analy