Page:Reason in Common Sense (1920).djvu/167

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Jehovah than a moral order, a principle giving vice and virtue their appropriate fruits.

True society, then, is limited to similar beings living similar lives and enabled by the contagion of their common habits and arts to attribute to one another, each out of his own experience, what the other actually endures. A fresh thought may be communicated to one who has never had it before, but only when the speaker so dominates the auditor’s mind by the instrumentalities he brings to bear upon it that he compels that mind to reproduce his experience. Analogy between actions and bodies is accordingly the only test of valid inference regarding the existence or character of conceived minds; but this eventual test is far from being the source of such a conception. Its source is not inference at all but direct emotion and the pathetic fallacy. In the beginning, as in the end, what is attributed to others is something directly felt, a dream dreamed through and dramatically enacted, but uncritically attributed to the object by whose motions it is suggested and controlled. In a single case, however, tertiary qualities happen to correspond to an experience actually animating the object to which they are assigned. This is the case in which the object is a body similar in structure and action to the percipient himself, who assigns to that body a passion he has caught by contagion from it and by imitation of its actual attitude. Such are the conditions of intelligible expression and true com-