almost transparent, for the artist and the poet.  What fairy wove that veil?  Was it done in malice or in friendliness?  We had to live, and life demands that we grasp things in their relations to our own needs.  Life is action.  Life implies the acceptance only of the utilitarian side of things in order to respond to them by appropriate reactions:  all other impressions must be dimmed or else reach us vague and blurred.  I look and I think I see, I listen and I think I hear, I examine myself and I think I am reading the very depths of my heart.  But what I see and hear of the outer world is purely and simply a selection made by my senses to serve as a light to my conduct; what I know of myself is what comes to the surface, what participates in my actions.  My senses and my consciousness, therefore, give me no more than a practical simplification of reality.  In the vision they furnish me of myself and of things, the differences that are useless to man are obliterated, the resemblances that are useful to him are emphasised; ways are traced out for me in advance, along which my activity is to travel.  These ways are the ways which all mankind has trod before me.  Things have been classified with a view to the use I can derive from them.  And it is this classification I perceive, far more clearly than the colour and the shape of things.  Doubtless man is vastly superior to the lower animals in this respect.  It is not very likely that the eye of a wolf makes any distinction between a kid and a lamb; both appear t o the wolf as the same identical quarry, alike easy to pounce upon, alike good to devour.  We, for our part, make a distinction between a goat and a sheep; but can we tell one goat from another, one sheep from another?  The individuality of things or of beings escapes us, unless it is materially to our advantage to perceive it.  Even when we do take note of it—­as when we distinguish one man from another—­it is not the individuality itself that the eye grasps, i.e., an entirely original harmony of forms and colours, but only one or two features that will make practical recognition easier.

In short, we do not see the actual things themselves; in most cases we confine ourselves to reading the labels affixed to them.  This tendency, the result of need, has become even more pronounced under the influence of speech; for words—­with the exception of proper nouns—­all denote genera.  The word, which only takes note of the most ordinary function and commonplace aspect of the thing, intervenes between it and ourselves, and would conceal its form from our eyes, were that form not already masked beneath the necessities that brought the word into existence.  Not only external objects, but even our own mental states, are screened from us in their inmost, their personal aspect, in the original life they possess.  When we feel love or hatred, when we are gay or sad, is it really the feeling itself that reaches our consciousness