of the so-called material forms of nature from the beginning. Mind, then, within itself, must be the perfect embodiment of all facts and all possibilities of the universe. It precedes all things that seem; and from it all things are projected. It apprehends them subjectively before it creates them objectively.
But is this true? The facts we are able to glean show us that the very reverse is the case. Ideas do not appear in our consciousness until extraneous things have produced upon us sensations which in their turn give rise to the intellectual conceptions of the objects that produce them. No human mind can conceive of a flame, for instance, until the sensation of light from without has been produced upon it. Nor can any conception of darkness dwell in our consciousness until the outward senses have experienced the actual absence of light.
The growth of perception in infants will very soon show how the development of the mind takes place through sensations from without—that the intellectual faculties are not the force from which all things have their being, but that they are the product of growth, produced to a large extent by the environment in which God has set them. In
