encased in a protective shell of ignorance and insensibility which keeps
him from being exhausted and confused by this too complicated world; but
that integument blinds him at the same time to many of his nearest and
highest interests. He is amused by the antics of the brute dreaming
within his breast; he gloats on his passionate reveries, an amusement
which sometimes costs him very dear. Thus the best human intelligence is
still decidedly barbarous; it fights in heavy armour and keeps a fool at
court.

[Sidenote: Internal order supervenes.]

If consciousness could ever have the function of guiding conduct better
than instinct can, in the beginning it would be most incompetent for
that office. Only the routine and equilibrium which healthy instinct
involves keep thought and will at all within the limits of sanity. The
predetermined interests we have as animals fortunately focus our
attention on practical things, pulling it back, like a ball with an
elastic cord, within the radius of pertinent matters. Instinct alone
compels us to neglect and seldom to recall the irrelevant infinity of
ideas. Philosophers have sometimes said that all ideas come from
experience; they never could have been poets and must have forgotten
that they were ever children. The great difficulty in education is to
get experience out of ideas. Shame, conscience, and reason continually
disallow and ignore what consciousness presents; and what are they but
habit and latent instinct asserting themselves and forcing us to
disregard our midsummer madness? Idiocy and lunacy are merely reversions
to a condition in which present consciousness is in the ascendant and
has escaped the control of unconscious forces. We speak of people being
"out of their senses," when they have in fact fallen back into them; or
of those who have "lost their mind," when they have lost merely that