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primary, simple act of knowing, complete in that something is known; primary in that no further explanation can be forced upon it, the act standing in its own light, apprehensible for what it is in itself; and simple in that it is incapable of successful analysis. On the occasion of such a perception, the mind, of its own interpreting action, under the notion of causation, infers an external source of the impression, which, as a necessary, certain and uniform conclusion, becomes to it as valid as any that it ever makes. Its validity, like the validity of all mental acts, is referable to the clearness and constancy with which it is made and repeated. We reach, then, the external world not directly by perception, but indirectly, inferentially, along a bridge of thought, whose farther abutment our rational nature supplies, and whose connections are established by varied, repeated and protracted experience. Shifting the figure we strike the shore with the grapple of causation, and by this guy we swing.

If asked why the mind supplies the idea in connection with one mental state, that of perception, more than with another, as that of thought; how it knows where and when to fling into the air its coil of rope, that it may thereby be lashed to the physical world, the answer comes: It is the fruit of varied experience. A sensation is found to be a new, distinct, sudden, independent state. As such it demands explication in an outside cause. A thought is a consecutive, evolved, dependent product, that can be renewed in the mind at pleasure, and by this fact finds explication through the mind itself. The various senses also, in their diverse yet independent reports, mutually aid and guide the mind in this reference of sensations to external causes. Impressions in distinct organs are found always to accompany each other in certain forms, under a fixed order. Thus experience is constantly disclosing the character of