intance in due season and better appreciate their moral
status, if we strive merely to recall our own experience, and to retrace
the visions and reflections out of which those apparitions have grown.

[Sidenote: The discovered conditions of reason not its beginning.]

To revert to primordial feeling is an exercise in mental disintegration,
not a feat of science. We might, indeed, as in animal psychology,
retrace the situations in which instinct and sense seem first to appear
and write, as it were, a genealogy of reason based on circumstantial
evidence. Reason was born, as it has since discovered, into a world
already wonderfully organised, in which it found its precursor in what
is called life, its seat in an animal body of unusual plasticity, and
its function in rendering that body's volatile instincts and sensations
harmonious with one another and with the outer world on which they
depend. It did not arise until the will or conscious stress, by which
any modification of living bodies' inertia seems to be accompanied,
began to respond to represented objects, and to maintain that inertia
not absolutely by resistance but only relatively and indirectly through
labour. Reason has thus supervened at the last stage of an adaptation
which had long been carried on by irrational and even unconscious
processes. Nature preceded, with all that fixation of impulses and
conditions which gives reason its tasks and its _point-d'appui_.
Nevertheless, such a matrix or cradle for reason belongs only externally
to its life. The description of conditions involves their previous
discovery and a historian equipped with many data and many analogies of
thought. Such scientific resources are absent in those first moments of
rational living which we here wish to recall; the first chapter in
reason's memoirs would no more entail the description of its real
environment than the first chapter in human history would include true
accounts of astronomy, psychology, and animal evolution.

[Sidenote: The flux first.]

In order to begin at the beginning we must try to fall back on
uninterpreted feeling, as the mystics aspire to do. We need not expect,
however, to find peace there, for the immediate is in flux. Pure feeling
rejoices in a logical nonentity very deceptive to dialectical minds.
They often think, when they fall back on elements necessarily
indescribable, that they have come upon true nothingness. If they are
mystics, distrusting thought an