_The first sensation which an infant gets is for him the Universe._ And the Universe which he later comes to know is nothing but an amplification and an implication of that first simple germ which, by accretion on the one hand and intussusception on the other, has grown so big and complex and articulate that its first estate is unrememberable. In his dumb awakening to the consciousness of _something there_, a mere _this_ as yet (or something for which even the term _this_ would perhaps be too discriminative, and the intellectual acknowledgment of which would be better expressed by the bare interjection 'lo!'), the infant encounters an object in which (though it be given in a pure sensation) all the 'categories of the understanding' are contained. _It has objectivity, unity, substantiality, causality, in the full sense in which any later object or system of objects has these things._ Here the young knower meets and greets his world; and the miracle of knowledge bursts forth, as Voltaire says, as much in the infant's lowest sensation as in the highest achievement of a Newton's brain. The physiological condition of this first sensible experience is probably nerve-currents coming in from many peripheral organs at once. Later, the one confused Fact which these currents cause to appear is perceived to be many facts, and to contain many qualities.[9] For as the currents vary, and the brain-paths are moulded by them, other thoughts with other 'objects' come, and the 'same thing' which was apprehended as a present _this_ soon figures as a past _that_, about which many unsuspected things have come to light. The principles of this development have been laid down already in Chapters XII and XIII, and nothing more need here be added to that account. "THE RELATIVITY OF KNOWLEDGE." To the reader who is tired of so much _Erkenntnisstheorie_ I can only say that I am so myself, but that it is indispensable, in the actual state of opinions about Sensation, to try to clear up just what the word means. Locke's pupils seek to do the impossible with sensations, and against them we must once again insist that sensations 'clustered together' cannot build up our more intellectual states of mind. Plato's earlier pupils used to admit Sensation's existence, grudgingly, but they trampled it in the dust as something corporeal, non-cognitive, and vile.[10] His latest followers seem to seek to crowd it out of existence altogether. The only reals for the neo-Hegelian writers appear to be _relations_, relations without terms, or whose terms are only speciously such and really consist in knots, or gnarls of relations finer still _in infinitum_.