ideas must arise somehow in the mind, and since they are not
meant to be without application to the world of experience, it is
interesting to discover the point of contact between the two and the
nature of their interdependence. This would have been found in the
mind's initial capacity to frame objects of two sorts, those compacted
of sensations that are persistently similar, and those compacted of
sensations that are momentarily fused. In empirical philosophy the
applicability of logic and mathematics remains a miracle or becomes a
misinterpretation: a miracle if the process of nature independently
follows the inward elaboration of human ideas; a misinterpretation if
the bias of intelligence imposes _a priori_ upon reality a character and
order not inherent in it. The mistake of empiricists--among which Kant
is in this respect to be numbered--which enabled them to disregard this
difficulty, was that they admitted, beside rational thinking, another
instinctive kind of wisdom by which men could live, a wisdom the
Englishmen called experience and the Germans practical reason, spirit,
or will. The intellectual sciences could be allowed to spin themselves
out in abstracted liberty while man practised his illogical and inspired
art of life.

Here we observe a certain elementary crudity or barbarism which the
human spirit often betrays when it is deeply stirred. Not only are
chance and divination welcomed into the world but they are reverenced
all the more, like the wind and fire of idolaters, precisely for not
being amenable to the petty rules of human reason. In truth, however,
the English duality between prudence and science is no more fundamental
than the German duality between reason and understanding.[A] The true
contrast is between impulse and reflection, instinct and intelligence.
When men feel the primordial authority of the animal in them and have
little respect for a glimmering reason which they suspect to be
secondary but cannot discern to be ultimate, they readily imagine they
are appealing to something higher than intelligence when in reality they
are falling back on something deeper and lower. The rudimentary seems to
them at such moments divine; and if they conceive a Life of Reason at
all they despise it as a mass of artifices and conventions. Reason is
indeed not indispensable to life, nor needful if living anyhow be the
sole and indeterminate aim; as the existence of animals and of most men
sufficiently pr