The ordinary metaphysician makes his own task easy and his thoughtful reader's a burden, by plunging too lightly _in medias res._ He wants patience--often, perhaps, because he thinks too much of his reader's impatience at analysis--to unravel the tangled mass which human experience, when first looked at, presents. He is apt to catch at any end which promises to effect a temporary clearance. True philosophy, on the contrary, must show that it has got hold of what it means to discuss: it has to construct its subject-matter: and it constructs it by tracing every step and movement in its construction shown in actual history. The mind is what it has been made and has made itself; and to see what it is we must consider it not as an Alpha and Omega of research, as popular conception and language tend to represent it, but in the stages constituting its process, in the fluidity of its development, in the elements out of which it results. We must penetrate the apparent fixity and simplicity under which it comes forward, and see through it into the process which bears it into being. For, otherwise, the object of our investigation is taken, as if it were the most unmistakable thing of sense and fancy,--as if everybody were agreed that this and no other were the point in question. But in this matter of stability and the reverse, there is a broad distinction between the natural and the spiritual world. In Nature every step in the organisation, by which the Cosmos is developed, has an independent existence of its own: and the lowest formation confronts the highest, each standing by itself beside the other. Matter and motion, for example, are not merely found as subordinate elements entering into the making of a plant or an animal. They have a free existence of their own: and the free existence of matter in motion is seen in the shape of the planetary system. So, too, chemical or electrical phenomena can be observed by themselves, operating in spheres where they are untrammeled by the influence of biological conditions. It seems, at least at first sight, to be different in the case of mind. There the specific types or several stages in the integrating process of mental development seem to have no substantive existence in the earlier part of the range, and to appear only as states or factors entering into, and merged in, the higher grades of development. This causes a peculiar difficulty in the study of mind. We cannot seize a formation in an independent shape of its own: we must trace it in the growth of the whole. Mental fusion and coalescence of elements is peculiarly close, and hardly leaves any traces of its constituent factors[2]. Sensation, for instance, in its purity, as mere sensation, is apparently something which we can never study in isolation. All the sensation which we can, in the strictly psychological (as opposed to the physiological) mode of study, examine, i. e. which we can reproduce in ourselves, is more than mere sensation: