Page:The World and the Individual, Second Series (1901).djvu/89

64 is to repeat, deliberately, a process which, in a still blinder form, one sees in the early life of any being that is destined to win intelligence. Not knowing what it craves, the young creature first acts vaguely, driven by unconscious impulses. Its action is so far planless and disorganized. When trial and error have led to some few little successes, it then begins to organize its life in a more definite way — how? By watching its environment. By discriminating. By engaging in a sort of action which involves, in a sense, a temporary resignation of all more immediate efforts towards self-expression. This stage of growing intelligence surrenders itself to what, in us men, becomes the deliberate undertaking to describe the facts of experience as they come, and so to win indirectly a plan for what may prove to be the expression of the Self.

This effort, to be sure, is still a kind of action. It is creative as well as passive. It involves in its least movement an acknowledgment of what is not given, as well as an observation of what is given; for, as we have seen, there is no rational conception of experience except by means of a linking of present and past experience; and this act of linking is always a transcending of what is merely found. But then, this watchful, discriminating activity is seeking to attend to what is conceived as already there in the vast background of the world; and it abandons, for the time, the immediate effort to win the expression of any other purpose but the purpose to wait, and to distinguish. So (to use an example from what appears to us as the workings of a far lower form of intelligence than our own) I see,