has something to live for. The blind affinity that
like a magnet draws all the faculties around it, in so uniting them,
suffuses them with an unwonted spiritual light.

[Sidenote: Better and worse the fundamental categories.]

Here, on a small scale and on a precarious foundation, we may see
clearly illustrated and foreshadowed that Life of Reason which is simply
the unity given to all existence by a mind _in love with the good_. In
the higher reaches of human nature, as much as in the lower, rationality
depends on distinguishing the excellent; and that distinction can be
made, in the last analysis, only by an irrational impulse. As life is a
better form given to force, by which the universal flux is subdued to
create and serve a somewhat permanent interest, so reason is a better
form given to interest itself, by which it is fortified and propagated,
and ultimately, perhaps, assured of satisfaction. The substance to which
this form is given remains irrational; so that rationality, like all
excellence, is something secondary and relative, requiring a natural
being to possess or to impute it. When definite interests are recognised
and the values of things are estimated by that standard, action at the
same time veering in harmony with that estimation, then reason has been
born and a moral world has arisen.

CHAPTER II--FIRST STEPS AND FIRST FLUCTUATIONS

[Sidenote: Dreams before thoughts.]

Consciousness is a born hermit. Though subject, by divine dispensation,
to spells of fervour and apathy, like a singing bird, it is at first
quite unconcerned about its own conditions or maintenance. To acquire a
notion of such matters, or an interest in them, it would have to lose
its hearty simplicity and begin to reflect; it would have to forget the
present with its instant joys in order laboriously to conceive the
absent and the hypothetical. The body may be said to make for
self-preservation, since it has an organic equilibrium which, when not
too rudely disturbed, restores itself by growth and co-operative action;
but no such principle appears in the soul. Foolish in the beginning and
generous in the end, consciousness thinks of nothing so little as of its
own interests. It is lost in its objects; nor would it ever acquire even
an indirect concern in its future, did not love of things external
attach it to their fortunes. Attachment to ideal terms is indeed what
gives consciousness its continuity; its parts have no re