The senses imprison us, and we help them with
metres as limitary, — with a pair of scales and a
foot-rule and a clock. How long it took to find
out what a day was, or what this sun, that makes
days ! It cost thousands of years only to make the
motion of the earth suspected. Slowly, by compar-
ing thousands of observations, there dawned on
some mind a theory of the sun, — and we found
the astronomical fact. But the astronomy is in the
mind : the senses affirm that the earth stands still
and the sun moves. The senses collect the surface
facts of matter. The intellect acts on these brute
reports, and obtains from them results which are
the essence or intellectual form of the experiences.
It compares, distributes, generalizes and uplifts
them into its own sphere. It knows that these
transfigured results are not the brute experiences,
just as souls in heaven are not the red bodies they
once animated. Many transfigurations have be-
fallen them. The atoms of the body were once
nebulae, then rock, then loam, then com, then
chyme, then chyle, then blood; and now the be-,
holding and co-energizing mind sees the same refin-



IMAGINATION, 29

ing and ascent to the third, the seventh, or the
tenth power of the daily accidents which the senses
report, and which make the raw material of knowl-
edge. It was sensation; when memory came, it was
experience ; when mind acted, it was knowledge ;
when mind acted on it as knowledge, it was thought.
