view to ultimate action. It is true that this second choice is much less strictly determined than the first, because our past experience is an individual and no longer a common experience, because we have always many different recollections equally capable of squaring with the same actual situation, and because nature cannot here, as in the case of perception, have one inflexible rule for delimiting our representations. A certain margin is, therefore, necessarily left in this case to fancy; and though animals scarcely profit by it, bound as they are to material needs, it would seem that the human mind ceaselessly presses with the totality of its memory against the door which the body may half open to it: hence the play of fancy and the work of imagination—so many liberties which the mind takes with nature. It is none the less true that the orientation of our consciousness towards action appears to be the fundamental law of our psychical life.
Strictly, we might stop here, for this work was undertaken to define the function of the body in the life of the spirit. But, on the one hand, we have raised by the way a metaphysical problem which we cannot bring ourselves to leave in suspense; and on the other, our researches, although mainly psychological, have on several occasions given us glimpses, if not of the means of solving the problem, at any rate of the side on which it should be approached.
This problem is no less than that of the union of
