precise affinities and reactions have been
set up between its organs and the surrounding objects.

On these affinities and reactions sense and intellect are grafted. The
plants are of different nature, yet growing together they bear excellent
fruit. It is as the organs receive appropriate stimulations that
attention is riveted on definite sensations. It is as the system
exercises its natural activities that passion, will, and meditation
possess the mind. No syllogism is needed to persuade us to eat, no
prophecy of happiness to teach us to love. On the contrary, the living
organism, caught in the act, informs us how to reason and what to enjoy.
The soul adopts the body's aims; from the body and from its instincts
she draws a first hint of the right means to those accepted purposes.
Thus reason enters into partnership with the world and begins to be
respected there; which it would never be if it were not expressive of
the same mechanical forces that are to preside over events and render
them fortunate or unfortunate for human interests. Reason is significant
in action only because it has begun by taking, so to speak, the body's
side; that sympathetic bias enables her to distinguish events pertinent
to the chosen interests, to compare impulse with satisfaction, and, by
representing a new and circular current in the system, to preside over
the formation of better habits, habits expressing more instincts at once
and responding to more opportunities.

CHAPTER III--THE DISCOVERY OF NATURAL OBJECTS

[Sidenote: Nature man's home.]

At first sight it might seem an idle observation that the first task of
intelligence is to represent the environing reality, a reality actually
represented in the notion, universally prevalent among men, of a cosmos
in space and time, an animated material engine called nature. In trying
to conceive nature the mind lisps its first lesson; natural phenomena
are the mother tongue of imagination no less than of science and
practical life. Men and gods are not conceivable otherwise than as
inhabitants of nature. Early experience knows no mystery which is not
somehow rooted in transformations of the natural world, and fancy can
build no hope which would not be expressible there. But we are grown so
accustomed to this ancient apparition that we may be no longer aware how
difficult was the task of conjuring it up. We may even have forgotten
the possibility that such a vision should never have arise