Page:Reason in Common Sense (1920).djvu/142

 was identified with everything in which it was manifested, so long as no natural causes could be assigned for that operation.

If the unification of nature were complete sense would evidently fall within it; since it is to subtend and sustain the sensible flux that intelligence acknowledges first stray material objects and then their general system. The elements of experience not taken up into the constitution of objects remain attached to them as their life. In the end the dynamic skeleton, without losing its articulation, would be clothed again with its flesh. Suppose my notions of astronomy allowed me to believe that the sun, sinking into the sea, was extinguished every evening, and that what appeared the next morning was his younger brother, hatched in a sun-producing nest to be found in the Eastern regions. My theory would have robbed yesterday’s sun of its life and brightness; it would have asserted that during the night no sun existed anywhere; but it would have added the sun’s qualities afresh to a matter that did not previously possess them, namely, to the imagined egg that would produce a sun for to-morrow. Suppose we substitute for that astronomy the one that now prevails: we have deprived the single sun—which now exists and spreads its influences without interruption—of its humanity and even of its metaphysical unity. It has become a congeries of chemical substances. The facts