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 proportion as such understanding advances
each moment of experience becomes consequential and prophetic of the
rest. The calm places in life are filled with power and its spasms with
resource. No emotion can overwhelm the mind, for of none is the basis or
issue wholly hidden; no event can disconcert it altogether, because it
sees beyond. Means can be looked for to escape from the worst
predicament; and whereas each moment had been formerly filled with
nothing but its own adventure and surprised emotion, each now makes room
for the lesson of what went before and surmises what may be the plot of
the whole.