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 persisted; its loose elements would have been allowed to pass by
unnoticed and would not have been recognised when they recurred.
Experience would have remained absolute inexperience, as foolishly
perpetual as the gurglings of rivers or the flickerings of sunlight in a
grove. But an instinct was actually present, so formed as to be aroused
by a determinate stimulus; and the image produced by that stimulus, when
it came, could have in consequence a meaning and an individuality. It