y a relative chaos, first because it probably
carried values of its own which rendered it an order in a moral and
eulogistic sense, and secondly because it was potentially, by virtue of
its momentum, a basis for the second moment's values as well.

[Sidenote: In experience order is relative to interests, which determine
the moral status of all powers.]

Human life, when it begins to possess intrinsic value, is an incipient
order in the midst of what seems a vast though, to some extent, a
vanishing chaos. This reputed chaos can be deciphered and appreciated by
man only in proportion as the order in himself is confirmed and
extended. For man's consciousness is evidently practical; it clings to
his fate, registers, so to speak, the higher and lower temperature of
his fortunes, and, so far as it can, represents the agencies on which
those fortunes depend. When this dramatic vocation of consciousness has
not been fulfilled at all, consciousness is wholly confused; the world
it envisages seems consequently a chaos. Later, if experience has fallen
into shape, and there are settled categories and constant objects in
human discourse, the inference is drawn that the original disposition
of things was also orderly and indeed mechanically conducive to just
those feats of instinct and intelligence which have been since
accomplished. A theory of origins, of substance, and of natural laws may
thus be framed and accepted, and may receive confirmation in the further
march of events. It will be observed, however, that what is credibly
asserted about the past is not a report which the past was itself able
to make when it existed nor one it is now able, in some oracular
fashion, to formulate and to impose upon us. The report is a rational
construction based and seated in present experience; it has no cogency
for the inattentive and no existence for the ignorant. Although the
universe, then, may not have come from chaos, human experience certainly
has begun in a private and dreamful chaos of its own, out of which it
still only partially and momentarily emerges. The history of this
awakening is of course not the same as that of the environing world
ultimately discovered; it is the history, however, of that discovery
itself, of the knowledge through which alone the world can be revealed.
We may accordingly dispense ourselves from preliminary courtesies to the
real universal order, nature, the absolute, and the gods. We shall make
their acqua