We are now so familiar with the order that these notions have woven for us out of the everlasting weather of our perceptions that we find it hard to realize how little of a fixed routine the perceptions follow when taken by themselves.  The word weather is a good one to use here.  In Boston, for example, the weather has almost no routine, the only law being that if you have had any weather for two days, you will probably but not certainly have another weather on the third.  Weather-experience as it thus comes to Boston, is discontinuous and chaotic.  In point of temperature, of wind, rain or sunshine, it may change three times a day.  But the Washington weather-bureau intellectualizes this disorder by making each successive bit of Boston weather episodic.  It refers it to its place and moment in a continental cyclone, on the history of which the local changes everywhere are strung as beads are strung upon a cord.

Now it seems almost certain that young children and the inferior animals take all their experiences very much as uninstructed Bostonians take their weather.  They know no more of time or space as world-receptacles, or of permanent subjects and changing predicates, or of causes, or kinds, or thoughts, or things, than our common people know of continental cyclones.  A baby’s rattle drops out of his hand, but the baby looks not for it.  It has ‘gone out’ for him, as a candle-flame goes out; and it comes back, when you replace it in his hand, as the flame comes back when relit.  The idea of its being a ‘thing,’ whose permanent existence by itself he might interpolate between its successive apparitions has evidently not occurred to him.  It is the same with dogs.  Out of sight, out of mind, with them.  It is pretty evident that they have no general tendency to interpolate ‘things.’  Let me quote here a passage from my colleague G. Santayana’s book.

“If a dog, while sniffing about contentedly, sees afar off his master arriving after long absence...the poor brute asks for no reason why his master went, why he has come again, why he should be loved, or why presently while lying at his feet you forget him and begin to grunt and dream of the chase—­all that is an utter mystery, utterly unconsidered.  Such experience has variety, scenery, and a certain vital rhythm; its story might be told in dithyrambic verse.  It moves wholly by inspiration; every event is providential, every act unpremeditated.  Absolute freedom and absolute helplessness have met together:  you depend wholly on divine favour, yet that unfathomable agency is not distinguishable from your own life. ...[But] the figures even of that disordered drama have their exits and their entrances; and their cues can be gradually discovered by a being capable of fixing his attention and retaining the order of events. ...In proportion as such understanding advances each moment of experience becomes consequential and prophetic of the rest.  The calm places in