were not, and every trace of the unassimilable truth has vanished from our thought. Genius, in truth, means little more than the faculty of perceiving in an unhabitual way. On the other hand, nothing is more congenial, from babyhood to the end of life, than to be able to assimilate the new to the old, to meet each threatening violator or burster of our well-known series of concepts, as it comes in, see through its unwontedness, and ticket it off as an old friend in disguise. This victorious assimilation of the new is in fact the type of all intellectual pleasure. The lust for it is scientific curiosity. The relation of the new to the old, before the assimilation is performed, is wonder. We feel neither curiosity nor wonder concerning things so far beyond us that we have no concepts to refer them to or standards by which to measure them.[43] The Fuegians, in Darwin's voyage, wondered at the small boats, but took the big ship as a 'matter of course.' Only what we partly know already inspires us with a desire to know more. The more elaborate textile fabrics, the vaster works in metal, to most of us are like the air, the water, and the ground, absolute existences which awaken no ideas. It is a matter of course that an engraving or a copper-plate inscription should possess that degree of beauty. But if we are shown a _pen_-drawing of equal perfection, our personal sympathy with the difficulty of the task makes us immediately wonder at the skill. The old lady admiring the Academician's picture says to him: "And is it really all done _by hand_?" =The Physiological Process in Perception.=--Enough has now been said to prove the general law of perception, which is this: that _whilst part of what we perceive comes through our senses from the object before us, another part_ (and it may be the larger part) _always comes out of our own mind_. At bottom this is but a case of the general fact that our nerve-centres are organs for reacting on sense-impressions, and that our hemispheres, in particular, are given us that records of our past private experience may coöperate in the reaction. Of course such a general statement is vague. If we try to put an exact meaning into it, what we find most natural to believe is that the _brain reacts_ by paths which the previous experiences have worn, _and which make us perceive the probable thing_, i.e., the thing by which on the previous occasions the reaction was most frequently aroused. The reaction of the hemispheres consists in the lighting up of a certain system of paths by the current entering from the outer world. What corresponds to this mentally is a certain special pulse of thought, the thought, namely, of that most probable object. Farther than this in the analysis we can hardly go.