of soldiers in uniform; only now and then does the stream take a new
turn, catch a new ray of sunlight, or arrest our attention at some
break.

The senses in their natural play revert constantly to familiar objects,
gaining impressions which differ but slightly from one another. These
slight differences are submerged in apperception, so that sensation
comes to be not so much an addition of new items to consciousness as a
reburnishing there of some imbedded device. Its character and relations
are only slightly modified at each fresh rejuvenation. To catch the
passing phenomenon in all its novelty and idiosyncrasy is a work of
artifice and curiosity. Such an exercise does violence to intellectual
instinct and involves an æsthetic power of diving bodily into the stream
of sensation, having thrown overboard all rational ballast and escaped
at once the inertia and the momentum of practical life. Normally every
datum of sense is at once devoured by a hungry intellect and digested
for the sake of its vital juices. The result is that what ordinarily
remains in memory is no representative of particular moments or
shocks--though sensation, as in dreams, may be incidentally recreated
from within--but rather a logical possession, a sense of acquaintance
with a certain field of reality, in a word, a consciousness of
_knowledge_.

[Sidenote: Can the transcendent be known?]

But what, we may ask, is this reality, which we boast to know? May not
the sceptic justly contend that nothing is so unknown and indeed
unknowable as this pretended object of knowledge? The sensations which
reason treats so cavalierly were at least something actual while they
lasted and made good their momentary claim to our interest; but what is