CONSCIOUSNESS AND EXPERIENCE 263 



ing is more out of date than to suppose that 

 interest in genesis is interest in reducing higher 

 forms to cruder ones : it is interest in locating the 

 exact and objective conditions under which a 

 given fact appears, and in relation to which ac 

 cordingly it has its meaning. Nothing is more 

 naive than to suppose that in pursuing &quot; natural 

 history &quot; (term of scorn in which yet resides 

 the dignity of the world-drama) we simply learn 

 something of the temporal conditions under which 

 a given value appears, while its own eternal 

 essential quality remains as opaque as before. Na 

 ture knows no such divorce of quality and circum 

 stance. Things come when they are wanted and 

 as they are wanted; their quality is precisely the 

 response they give to the conditions that call for 

 them, while the furtherance they afford to the 

 movement of their whole is their meaning. The 

 severance of analysis and genesis, instead of serv 

 ing as a ready-made test by which to try out the 

 empirical, temporal events of psychology from the 

 rational abiding constitution of philosophy, is a 

 brand of philosophic dualism : the supposition 

 that values are externally obtruded and statically 

 set in irrelevant rubbish. 



There are those who will admit that &quot; states of 

 consciousness &quot; are but the cross-sections of flow of 

 behavior, arrested for inspection, made in order 

 that we may reconstruct experience in its life- 



