oduct of mind, more a product of mind,
if you will, than an idea, since ideas arise, so to speak, by the
mind's inertia and conceptions of things by its activity.

[Sidenote: Things concretions of concretions.]

Ideas are mental sediment; conceived things are mental growths. A
concretion in discourse occurs by repetition and mere emphasis on a
datum, but a concretion in existence requires a synthesis of disparate
elements and relations. An idea is nothing but a sensation apperceived
and rendered cognitive, so that it envisages its own recognised
character as its object and ideal: yellowness is only some sensation of
yellow raised to the cognitive power and employed as the symbol for its
own specific essence. It is consequently capable of entering as a term
into rational discourse and of becoming the subject or predicate of
propositions eternally valid. A thing, on the contrary, is discovered
only when the order and grouping of such recurring essences can be
observed, and when various themes and strains of experience are woven
together into elaborate progressive harmonies. When consciousness first
becomes cognitive it frames ideas; but when it becomes cognitive of
causes, that is, when it becomes practical, it perceives things.

[Sidenote: Ideas prior in the order of knowledge, things in the order of
nature.]

Concretions of qualities recurrent in time and concretions of qualities
associated in existence are alike involved in daily life and
inextricably ingrown into the structure of reason. In consciousness and
for logic, association by similarity, with its aggregations and
identifications of recurrences in time, is fundamental rather than
association by contiguity and its existential syntheses; for
recognition identifies similars perceived in succession, and without
recognition of similars there could be no known persistence of
phenomena. But physiologically and for the observer association by
contiguity comes first. All instinct--without which there would be no
fixity or recurrence in ideation--makes movement follow impression in an
immediate way which for consciousness becomes a mere juxtaposition of
sensations, a juxtaposition which it can neither explain nor avoid. Yet
this juxtaposition, in which pleasure, pain, and striving are prominent
factors, is the chief stimulus to attention and spreads before the mind
that moving and variegated field in which it learns to make its first
observations. Facts--the burdens