riphery of experience, the surd at its core; and intelligence is but
one centrifugal ray darting from the slime to the stars. Thought must
execute a metamorphosis; and while this is of course mysterious, it is
one of those familiar mysteries, like motion and will, which are more
natural than dialectical lucidity itself; for dialectic grows cogent by
fulfilling intent, but intent or meaning is itself vital and
inexplicable.

[Sidenote: Perception cumulative and synthetic]

The process of counting is perhaps as simple an instance as can be found
of a mental operation on sensible data. The clock, let us say, strikes
two: if the sensorium were perfectly elastic and after receiving the
first blow reverted exactly to its previous state, retaining absolutely
no trace of that momentary oscillation and no altered habit, then it is
certain that a sense for number or a faculty of counting could never
arise. The second stroke would be responded to with the same reaction
which had met the first. There would be no summation of effects, no
complication. However numerous the successive impressions might come to
be, each would remain fresh and pure, the last being identical in
character with the first. One, one, one, would be the monotonous
response for ever. Just so generations of ephemeral insects that
succeeded one another without transmitting experience might repeat the
same round of impressions--an everlasting progression without a shadow
of progress. Such, too, is the idiot's life: his liquid brain transmits
every impulse without resistance and retains the record of no
impression.

Intelligence is accordingly conditioned by a modification of both
structure and consciousness by dint of past events. To be aware that a
second stroke is not itself the first, I must retain something of the
old sensation. The first must reverberate still in my ears when the
second arrives, so that this second, coming into a consciousness still
filled by the first, is a different experience from the first, which
fell into a mind perfectly empty and unprepared. Now the newcomer finds
in the subsisting One a sponsor to christen it by the name of Two. The
first stroke was a simple 1. The second is not simply another 1, a mere
iteration of the first. It is 1^{1}, where the coefficient represents
the reverberating first stroke, still persisting in the mind, and
forming a background and perspective against which the new stroke may be
distinguished. The mean