COSMIC PHILOSOPHY 



in the room or in the landscape are not in con- 

 tact with his body ; and it is only after a sim- 

 ilar elaborate comparison that the young child 

 achieves the feat of looking at an object in a 

 given direction, or of recognizing by vision its 

 father or mother. Accordingly, when looking 

 about the room, all that you really see is a con- 

 geries of coloured spots. Your knowledge of 

 the presence of divers objects — chairs, win- 

 dows, mirror, mantelpiece — is not given in 

 the act of vision, but is the result of an exceed- 

 ingly complex, though apparently instantaneous, 

 process of reasoning. Your seemingly immedi- 

 ate knowledge that a certain group of coloured 

 spots means a chair is due to the fact that from 

 early infancy this group of coloured spots, or 

 some other like group, has been associated with 

 sundry impressions of touch and resistance, and 

 with sensations yielded by the little muscles 

 which turn the eye hither and thither. The 

 frequency with which the association has been 

 repeated has rendered the process of inference 

 automatic, just as, to a less-marked extent, the 

 process of reading, at first accompanied by a 

 conscious classification of every letter, has be- 

 come automatic, so that we are not aware of 

 cognizing the letters at all. Nevertheless, al- 

 though too rapid to rise into consciousness, the 

 process is still one of inference, implying, like 

 any other process of inference, the grouping of 



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