what they are. The consequences which their present disappearance may
have for subsequent experience are in no wise foreseen or estimated,
much less are any inexperienced feelings invented and attached to that
retreating figure, otherwise a mere puppet. What happens is that by the
loss of an absorbing stimulus the whole chaotic mind is thrown out of
gear; the child cries, the lover faints, the mystic feels hell opening
before him. All this is a present sensuous commotion, a derangement in
an actual dream. Yet just at this lowest plunge of experience, in this
drunkenness of the soul, does the overwhelming reality and externality
of the other mind dawn upon us. Then we feel that we are surrounded not
by a blue sky or an earth known to geographers but by unutterable and
most personal hatreds and loves. For then we allow the half-deciphered
images of sense to drag behind them every emotion they have awakened. We
endow each overmastering stimulus with all its diffuse effects; and any
dramatic potentiality that our dream acts out under that high
pressure--and crude experience is rich in dreams--becomes our notion of
the life going on before us. We cannot regard it as our own life,
because it is not felt to be a passion in our own body, but attaches
itself rather to images we see moving about in the world; it is
consequently, without hesitation, called the life of those images, or
those creatures' souls.

[Sidenote: "Pathetic fallacy" normal yet ordinarily fallacious.]

The pathetic fallacy is accordingly what originally peoples the imagined
world. All the feelings aroused by perceived things are merged in those
things and made to figure as the spiritual and invisible part of their
essence, a part, moreover, quite as well known and as directly perceived
as their motions. To ask why such feelings are objectified would be to
betray a wholly sophisticated view of experience and its articulation.
They do not need to be objectified, seeing they were objective from the
beginning, inasmuch as they pertain to objects and have never, any more
than those objects, been "subjectified" or localised in the thinker's
body, nor included in that train of images which as a whole is known to
have in that body its seat and thermometer. The thermometer for these
passions is, on the contrary, the body of another; and the little dream
in us, the quick dramatic suggestion which goes with our perception of
his motions, is our perception of his thought