question the fleeting object, not so much to prepare for its possible
return as to conceive its present nature, this reflection is turned no
less unmistakably in the direction of ideas, and will terminate in logic
or the morphology of being. We attribute independence to things in order
to normalise their recurrence. We attribute essences to them in order to
normalise their manifestations or constitution. Independence will
ultimately turn out to be an assumed constancy in material processes,
essence an assumed constancy in ideal meanings or points of reference in
discourse. The one marks the systematic distribution of objects, the
other their settled character.

[Sidenote: Voracity of intellect.]

We talk of recurrent perceptions, but materially considered no
perception recurs. Each recurrence is one of a finite series and holds
for ever its place and number in that series. Yet human attention, while
it can survey several simultaneous impressions and find them similar,
cannot keep them distinct if they grow too numerous. The mind has a
native bias and inveterate preference for form and identification. Water
does not run down hill more persistently than attention turns experience
into constant terms. The several repetitions of one essence given in
consciousness will tend at once to be neglected, and only the essence
itself--the character shared by those sundry perceptions--will stand and
become a term in mental discourse. After a few strokes of the clock,
the reiterated impressions merge and cover one another; we lose count
and perceive the quality and rhythm but not the number of the sounds. If
this is true of so abstract and mathematical a perception as is
counting, how emphatically true must it be of continuous and infinitely
varied perceptions flowing in from the whole spatial world. Glimpses of
the environment follow one another in quick succession, like a regiment