ling presences has the contrary character: it is unmanageable, vague, and ill-defined.
But for all their vagueness, for all their lack of definition, these controlling presences, these sources of power, these things with an inner life, with their own richness of content, these beings, with the destiny of the world hidden in their natures, are what we want to know about. As we cross a road busy with traffic, we see the colour of the cars, their shapes, the gay colours of their occupants; but at the moment we are absorbed in using this immediate show as a symbol for the forces determining the immediate future.
We enjoy the symbol, but we also penetrate to the meaning. The symbols do not create their meaning: the meaning, in the form of actual effective beings reacting upon us, exists for us in its own right. But the symbols discover this meaning for us. They discover it because, in the long course of adaptation of living organisms to their environment, nature[1] taught their use. It developed us so that cur projected sensations indicate in general those regions which are the seat of important organisms.
- ↑ Cf. Prolegomena to an Idealist Theory of Knowledge, by Norman Kemp Smith, Macmillan and Co., London, 1924.
