general, and especially for an accelerated modern life, has doubtless
contributed to this revulsion, but the speculative consideration of
the immediate might have led to it independently. For in the immediate
there is marked expectancy, craving, prayer; nothing absorbs
consciousness so much as what is not quite given. Therefore it is a
good reading of the immediate, as well as a congenial thing to say to
the contemporary world, that reality is change, growth, action,
creation. Similarly the sudden materialisation of mind, the
unlooked-for assertion that consciousness does not exist, has its
justification in the same quarter. In the immediate what appears is
the thing, not the mind to which the thing appears. Even in the
passions, when closely scanned introspectively, you will find a new
sensitiveness or ebullition of the body, or a rush of images and
words; you will hardly find a separate object called anger or love.
The passions, therefore, when their moral essence is forgotten, may be
said to be literally nothing but a movement of their organs and their
objects, just as ideas may be said to be nothing but fragments or
cross-threads of the material world. Thus the mind and the object are
rolled into one moving mass; motions are identified with passions,
things are perceptions extended, perceptions are things cut down. And,
by a curious revolution in sentiment, it is things and motions that
are reputed to have the fuller and the nobler reality. Under cover of
a fusion or neutrality between idealism and realism, moral
materialism, the reverence for mere existence and power, takes
possession of the heart, and ethics becomes idolatrous. Idolatry,
however, is hardly possible if you have a cold and clear idea of
blocks and stones, attributing to them only the motions they are
capable of; and accordingly idealism, by way of compensation, has to
take possession of physics. The idol begins to wink and drop tears
under the wistful gaze of the worshipper. Matter is felt to yearn, and