rinciple of choice is
not deducible from mere ideas, and no interest is involved in the formal
relations of things. All survey needs an arbitrary starting-point; all
valuation rests on an irrational bias. The absolute flux cannot be
physically arrested; but what arrests it ideally is the fixing of some
point in it from which it can be measured and illumined. Otherwise it
could show no form and maintain no preference; it would be impossible to
approach or recede from a represented state, and to suffer or to exert
will in view of events. The irrational fate that lodges the
transcendental self in this or that body, inspires it with definite
passions, and subjects it to particular buffets from the outer
world--this is the prime condition of all observation and inference, of
all failure or success.

[Sidenote: Primary dualities.]

Those sensations in which a transition is contained need only analysis
to yield two ideal and related terms--two points in space or two
characters in feeling. Hot and cold, here and there, good and bad, now
and then, are dyads that spring into being when the flux accentuates
some term and so makes possible a discrimination of parts and directions
in its own movement. An initial attitude sustains incipient interests.
What we first discover in ourselves, before the influence we obey has
given rise to any definite idea, is the working of instincts already in
motion. Impulses to appropriate and to reject first teach us the points
of the compass, and space itself, like charity, begins at home.

[Sidenote: First gropings. Instinct the nucleus of reason.]

The guide in early sensuous education is the same that conducts the
whole Life of Reason, namely, impulse checked by experiment, and
experiment judged again by impulse. What teaches the child to
distinguish the nurse's breast from sundry blank or disquieting
presences? What induces him to arrest that image, to mark its
associates, and to recognise them with alacrity? The discomfort of its
absence and the comfort of its possession. To that image is attached the
chief satisfaction he knows, and the force of that satisfaction
disentangles it before all other images from the feeble and fluid
continuum of his life. What first awakens in him a sense of reality is
what first is able to appease his unrest.

Had the group of feelings, now welded together in fruition, found no
instinct in him to awaken and become a signal for, the group would never
have per