All these incongruous elements are mingled like a witches' brew. And
more: there are indications that inner sensations, such as those of
digestion, have an overpowering influence on the primitive mind, which
has not learned to articulate or distinguish permanent needs. So that to
the whirl of outer sensations we must add, to reach some notion of what
consciousness may contain before the advent of reason, interruptions and
lethargies caused by wholly blind internal feelings; trances such as
fall even on comparatively articulate minds in rage, lust, or madness.
Against all these bewildering forces the new-born reason has to
struggle; and we need not wonder that the costly experiments and
disillusions of the past have not yet produced a complete
enlightenment.

[Sidenote: Transcendental qualms.]

The onslaught made in the last century by the transcendental philosophy
upon empirical traditions is familiar to everybody: it seemed a
pertinent attack, yet in the end proved quite trifling and unavailing.
Thought, we are told rightly enough, cannot be accounted for by
enumerating its conditions. A number of detached sensations, being each
its own little world, cannot add themselves together nor conjoin
themselves in the void. Again, experiences having an alleged common
cause would not have, merely for that reason, a common object. Nor would
a series of successive perceptions, no matter how quick, logically
involve a sense of time nor a notion of succession. Yet, in point of
fact, when such a succession occurs and a living brain is there to
acquire some structural modification by virtue of its own passing
states, a memory of that succession and its terms may often supervene.
It is quite true also that the simultaneous presence or association of
images belonging to different senses does not carry with it by intrinsic