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Likewise in regard to the "summit of perception" or maximum perceptible, any increase of excitation is no longer felt if above a determinate limit. Moreover, in order that an increase or diminution be felt between these two extreme limits, it is necessary that both have a constant relation differential threshold as is expressed in Weber's law.
Now, with respect to this disposition: Nature furnishes its basis; but it is the external structure of circumstance, built up or building about childhood, to shelter or imprison, which, more than all else, gives it its determinate character; and though this outward structure may in after-life be thoroughly obliterated, or replaced by its opposite, porcelain by clay, or clay by porcelain, yet will the tendencies originally developed remain and hold a sway almost uninterrupted over life.
Do the areas which have subsided, as indicated by the presence of atolls and barrier-reefs, and the areas which have remained stationary or have been upraised, as shown by fringing-reefs, bear any determinate relation to each other; and are the dimensions of these areas such as harmonise with the greatness of the subterranean changes, which, it must be supposed, have lately taken place beneath them?
But they retired not unmolested. This straggling discharge on our part seemed to be the signal to the Americans to begin the battle, and they poured in such a volley, as must have proved, had any determinate object been opposed to it, absolutely murderous.
It is by conceiving what we endure to be the appearance of something beyond us, that we reach knowledge that something exists beyond us, and that it plays in respect to us a determinate rôle. There could be no knowledge of reality if what conveyed that knowledge were not felt to be appearance; nor can a medium of knowledge better than appearance be by any possibility conceived.
Like life itself, like any form of determinate existence, it is altogether autonomous and unjustifiable from the outside. It must lean on its own vitality; to sanction reason there is only reason, and to corroborate sense there is nothing but sense. Inferential thought is a venture not to be approved of, save by a thought no less venturesome and inferential.
Now our determinate state of condition springs up in time, and it is thus that man, as a phenomenon or appearance, must have a beginning, though in him pure intelligence is eternal. Without time, that is, without a becoming, he would not be a determinate being; his personality would exist virtually no doubt, but not in action.
While we gain this mastery of the formless, however, we should not lose the more necessary capacity of seeing form in those things which happen to have it. In respect to most of those things which are determinate as well as natural, we are usually in that state of aesthetic unconsciousness which the peasant is in in respect to the landscape.
But if the state of the brain is also determinate when the state of the mind is given, it must be exactly as true to regard matter as subject to mind as it would be to regard mind as subject to matter. We could, theoretically, work out the history of mind without ever mentioning matter, and then, at the end, deduce that matter must meanwhile have gone through the corresponding history.
As we have already seen, the popular view of the doctrine of Atonement presumes that this foul deed was in some way, as the scripture has it, by "the determinate counsel and foreknowledge of God." Was it really so? Was the whole dreadful drama merely a programme to be gone through in all its appointed stages, ending with the cry of the victim, "It is finished"?
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