I should be condemned for ever to blank watching and to sheer wonder. The very belief in experience is a suggestion of instinct, not of experience itself. The steadfastness of my nature, doggedly retaining its prejudices and assuming its power, supplies and imposes a routine upon my experience which is far from existing in my direct intuitions, very shifty in their quality (even when signs of the same external object) and much mixed with dream. Even the naturalist has to make up by analogy and presumption (which perhaps he calls induction) the enormous spaces between and beyond his actual observations.
Belief in experience is the beginning of that bold instinctive art, more plastic than the instinct of most animals, by which man has raised himself to his earthly eminence: it opens the gates of nature to him, both within him and without, and enables him to transmute his apprehension, at first merely esthetic, into mathematical science. This is so great a step that most minds cannot take it. They stumble, and remain entangled in poetry and in gnomic wisdom. Science and reasonable virtue, which plunge their roots in the soil of nature, are to this day only partially welcome or understood. Although they bring freedom in the end, the approach to them seems sacrificial, and many prefer to live in the glamour of intuition, not having the courage to believe in experience.
