ts and then their
general system. The elements of experience not taken up into the
constitution of objects remain attached to them as their life. In the
end the dynamic skeleton, without losing its articulation, would be
clothed again with its flesh. Suppose my notions of astronomy allowed me
to believe that the sun, sinking into the sea, was extinguished every
evening, and that what appeared the next morning was his younger
brother, hatched in a sun-producing nest to be found in the Eastern
regions. My theory would have robbed yesterday's sun of its life and
brightness; it would have asserted that during the night no sun existed
anywhere; but it would have added the sun's qualities afresh to a matter
that did not previously possess them, namely, to the imagined egg that
would produce a sun for to-morrow. Suppose we substitute for that
astronomy the one that now prevails: we have deprived the single
sun--which now exists and spreads its influences without
interruption--of its humanity and even of its metaphysical unity. It has
become a congeries of chemical substances. The facts revealed to
perception have partly changed their locus and been differently deployed
throughout nature. Some have become attached to operations in the human
brain. Nature has not thereby lost any quality she had ever manifested;
these have merely been redistributed so as to secure a more systematic
connection between them all. They are the materials of the system, which
has been conceived by making existences continuous, whenever this
extension of their being was needful to render their recurrences
intelligible. Sense, which was formerly regarded as a sad distortion of
its objects, now becomes an original and congruent part of nature, from
which, as from any other part, the rest of nature might be
scientifically inferred.

Spirit is not less closely attached to nature, although in a different
manner. Taken existentially it is a part of sense; taken ideally it is
the form or value which nature acquires when viewed from the
vantage-ground of any interest. Individual objects are recognisable for
a time not because the flux is materially arrested but because it
somewhere circulates in a fashion which awakens an interest and brings
different parts of the surrounding process into definable and prolonged
relations with that interest. Particular objects may perish yet others
may continue, like the series of suns imagined by Heraclitus, to perform
the s