and fruitfulness hang upon his miraculous revolutions. His coming and
going are life and death to the world. As the sensations of light and
heat are projected upward together to become attributes of his body, so
the feelings of pleasure, safety, and hope which he brings into the soul
are projected into his spirit; and to this spirit, more than to
anything else, energy, independence, and substantiality are originally
attributed. The emotions felt in his presence being the ultimate issue
and term of his effect in us, the counterpart or shadow of those
emotions is regarded as the first and deepest factor in his causality.
It is his divine life, more than aught else, that underlies his
apparitions and explains the influences which he propagates. The
substance or independent existence attributed to objects is therefore by
no means only or primarily a physical notion. What is conceived to
support the physical qualities is a pseudo-psychic or vital force. It is
a moral and living object that we construct, building it up out of all
the materials, emotional, intellectual, and sensuous, which lie at hand
in our consciousness to be synthesised into the hybrid reality which we
are to fancy confronting us. To discriminate and redistribute those
miscellaneous physical and psychical elements, and to divorce the god
from the material sun, is a much later problem, arising at a different
and more reflective stage in the Life of Reason.

[Sidenote: Causes and essences contrasted.]

When reflection, turning to the comprehension of a chaotic experience,
busies itself about recurrences, when it seeks to normalise in some way
things coming and going, and to straighten out the causes of events,
that reflection is inevitably turned toward something dynamic and
independent, and can have no successful issue except in mechanical
science. When on the other hand reflection stops to challenge and