necessity any fusion of such images nor any notion of an object having
them for its qualities. Yet, in point of fact, such a group of
sensations does often merge into a complex image; instead of the
elements originally perceptible in isolation, there arises a familiar
term, a sort of personal presence. To this felt presence, certain
instinctive reactions are attached, and the sensations that may be
involved in that apparition, when each for any reason becomes emphatic,
are referred to it as its qualities or its effects.

Such complications of course involve the gift of memory, with capacity
to survey at once vestiges of many perceptions, to feel their
implication and absorption in the present object, and to be carried, by
this sense of relation, to the thought that those perceptions have a
representative function. And this is a great step. It manifests the
mind's powers. It illustrates those transformations of consciousness the
principle of which, when abstracted, we call intelligence. We must
accordingly proceed with caution, for we are digging at the very roots
of reason.

[Sidenote: Thought an aspect of life and transitive]

The chief perplexity, however, which besets this subject and makes
discussions of it so often end in a cloud, is quite artificial. Thought
is not a mechanical calculus, where the elements and the method exhaust
the fact. Thought is a form of life, and should be conceived on the
analogy of nutrition, generation, and art. Reason, as Hume said with
profound truth, is an unintelligible instinct. It could not be otherwise
if reason is to remain something transitive and existential; for
transition is unintelligible, and yet is the deepest characteristic of
existence. Philosophers, however, having perceived that the function of