![]() But when reflexion begins to play upon these objects they are dissipated under its influence the cohesive force seems suspended like some trick of magic each object is loosed into a group of impressions-colour, odour, texture-in the mind of the observer. At first sight experience seems to bury us under a flood of external objects, pressing upon us with a sharp and importunate reality, calling us out of ourselves in a thousand forms of action. There it is no longer the gradual darkening of the eye, the gradual fading of colour from the wall-movements of the shore-side, where the water flows down indeed, though in apparent rest-but the race of the mid-stream, a drift of momentary acts of sight and passion and thought. Or if we begin with the inward world of thought and feeling, the whirlpool is still more rapid, the flame more eager and devouring. This at least of flamelike our life has, that it is but the concurrence, renewed from moment to moment, of forces parting sooner or later on their ways. That clear, perpetual outline of face and limb is but an image of ours, under which we group them-a design in a web, the actual threads of which pass out beyond it. Far out on every side of us those elements are broadcast, driven in many currents and birth and gesture and death and the springing of violets from the grave are but a few out of ten thousand resultant combinations. Like the elements of which we are composed, the action of these forces extends beyond us: it rusts iron and ripens corn. Perpetual motion of them-the passage of the blood, the waste and repairing of the lenses of the eye, the modification of the tissues of the brain under every ray of light and sound- processes which science reduces to simpler and more elementary forces.
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