s and inveterate preference for form and identification. Water
does not run down hill more persistently than attention turns experience
into constant terms. The several repetitions of one essence given in
consciousness will tend at once to be neglected, and only the essence
itself--the character shared by those sundry perceptions--will stand and
become a term in mental discourse. After a few strokes of the clock,
the reiterated impressions merge and cover one another; we lose count
and perceive the quality and rhythm but not the number of the sounds. If
this is true of so abstract and mathematical a perception as is
counting, how emphatically true must it be of continuous and infinitely
varied perceptions flowing in from the whole spatial world. Glimpses of
the environment follow one another in quick succession, like a regiment
of soldiers in uniform; only now and then does the stream take a new
turn, catch a new ray of sunlight, or arrest our attention at some
break.

The senses in their natural play revert constantly to familiar objects,
gaining impressions which differ but slightly from one another. These
slight differences are submerged in apperception, so that sensation
comes to be not so much an addition of new items to consciousness as a
reburnishing there of some imbedded device. Its character and relations
are only slightly modified at each fresh rejuvenation. To catch the
passing phenomenon in all its novelty and idiosyncrasy is a work of
artifice and curiosity. Such an exercise does violence to intellectual
instinct and involves an aesthetic power of diving bodily into the stream
of sensation, having thrown overboard all rational ballast and escaped
at once the inertia and the momentum of practical life. Normally every
datum of sense is at once devoured by a hungry intellect and digested
for the sake of its vital juices. The result is that what ordinarily
remains in memory is no representative of particular moments or
shocks--though sensation, as in dreams, may be incidentally recreated
from within--but rather a logical possession, a sense of acquaintance
with a certain field of reality, in a word, a consciousness of
_knowledge_.

[Sidenote: Can the transcendent be known?]

But what, we may ask, is this reality, which we boast to know? May not
the sceptic justly contend that nothing is so unknown and indeed
unknowable as this pretended object of knowledge? The sensations which
reason treats so cavalierly w