gether. Many animals probably have this form of experience;
they are not wholly submerged in a vegetative stupor; they can discern
what they love or fear. Yet all this is still a disordered apparition
that reels itself off amid sporadic movements, efforts, and agonies. Now
gorgeous, now exciting, now indifferent, the landscape brightens and
fades with the day. If a dog, while sniffing about contentedly, sees
afar off his master arriving after long absence, the change in the
animal's feeling is not merely in the quantity of pure pleasure; a new
circle of sensations appears, with a new principle governing interest
and desire; instead of waywardness subjection, instead of freedom love.
But the poor brute asks for no reason why his master went, why he has
come again, why he should be loved, or why presently while lying at his
feet you forget him and begin to grunt and dream of the chase--all that
is an utter mystery, utterly unconsidered. Such experience has variety,
scenery, and a certain vital rhythm; its story might be told in
dithyrambic verse. It moves wholly by inspiration; every event is
providential, every act unpremeditated. Absolute freedom and absolute
helplessness have met together: you depend wholly on divine favour, yet
that unfathomable agency is not distinguishable from your own life. This
is the condition to which some forms of piety invite men to return; and
it lies in truth not far beneath the level of ordinary human
consciousness.

[Sidenote: Causes at last discerned.]

The story which such animal experience contains, however, needs only to
be better articulated in order to disclose its underlying machinery. The
figures even of that disordered drama have their exits and their
entrances; and their cues can be gradually discovered by a being capable
of fixing his attention and retaining the order of events. Thereupon a
third step is made in imaginative experience. As pleasures and pains
were formerly distributed among objects, so objects are now marshalled
into a world. _Felix qui potuit rerum cognoscere causas_, said a poet
who stood near enough to fundamental human needs and to the great answer
which art and civilisation can make to them, to value the Life of Reason
and think it sublime. To discern causes is to turn vision into knowledge
and motion into action. It is to fix the associates of things, so that
their respective transformations are collated, and they become
significant of one another. In pro