At the threshold of reason there is a kind of choice. Not all
impressions contribute equally to the new growth; many, in fact, which
were formerly equal in rank to the best, now grow obscure. Attention
ignores them, in its haste to arrive at what is significant of something
more. Nor are the principles of synthesis, by which the aristocratic few
establish their oligarchy, themselves unequivocal. The first principles
of logic are like the senses, few but arbitrary. They might have been
quite different and yet produced, by a now unthinkable method, a
language no less significant than the one we speak. Twenty-six letters
may suffice for a language, but they are a wretched minority among all
possible sounds. So the forms of perception and the categories of
thought, which a grammarian's philosophy might think primordial
necessities, are no less casual than words or their syntactical order.
Why, we may ask, did these forms assert themselves here? What principles
of selection guide mental growth?

[Sidenote: Attention guided by bodily impulse.]

To give a logical ground for such a selection is evidently impossible,
since it is logic itself that is to be accounted for. A natural ground
is, in strictness, also irrelevant, since natural connections, where
thought has not reduced them to a sort of equivalence and necessity, are
mere data and juxtapositions. Yet it is not necessary to leave the
question altogether unanswered. By using our senses we may discover, not
indeed why each sense has its specific quality or exists at all, but
what are its organs and occasions. In like manner we may, by developing
the Life of Reason, come to understand its conditions. When
consciousness awakes the body has, as we long afterward discover, a
definite organisation. Without guidance from reflection bodily processes
have been going on, and most precise affinities and reactions have been