it envisages seems consequently a chaos. Later, if experience has fallen
into shape, and there are settled categories and constant objects in
human discourse, the inference is drawn that the original disposition
of things was also orderly and indeed mechanically conducive to just
those feats of instinct and intelligence which have been since
accomplished. A theory of origins, of substance, and of natural laws may
thus be framed and accepted, and may receive confirmation in the further
march of events. It will be observed, however, that what is credibly
asserted about the past is not a report which the past was itself able
to make when it existed nor one it is now able, in some oracular
fashion, to formulate and to impose upon us. The report is a rational
construction based and seated in present experience; it has no cogency
for the inattentive and no existence for the ignorant. Although the
universe, then, may not have come from chaos, human experience certainly
has begun in a private and dreamful chaos of its own, out of which it
still only partially and momentarily emerges. The history of this
awakening is of course not the same as that of the environing world
ultimately discovered; it is the history, however, of that discovery
itself, of the knowledge through which alone the world can be revealed.
We may accordingly dispense ourselves from preliminary courtesies to the
real universal order, nature, the absolute, and the gods. We shall make
their acquaintance in due season and better appreciate their moral
status, if we strive merely to recall our own experience, and to retrace
the visions and reflections out of which those apparitions have grown.

[Sidenote: The discovered conditions of reason not its beginning.]

To revert to primordial feeling is an exercise in mental disintegration,
not a feat of science. We might, indeed, as in animal psychology,
retrace the situations in which instinct and sense seem first to appear