It is easy to interpret this miraculous gift of grace in the light of what has been said. The data are in truth precisely that which is selected and set aside _as_ present, as immediate. Thus they are _given_ to _further_ thought. But the selection has occurred in view of the need for thought; it is a listing of the capital in the way of the undisturbed, the undiscussed, which thought can count upon in this particular problem. Hence it is not strange that it has a peculiar fitness of adaptation for thought's further work. Having been selected with precisely that end in view, the wonder would be if it were not so fitted. A man may coin counterfeit money for use upon others, but hardly with the intent of passing it off upon himself.
Our only difficulty here is that the mind flies away from the logical interpretation of sense-datum to a ready-made notion of it brought over from abstract psychological inquiry. The belief in sensory quales as somehow forced upon us, and forced upon us at large, and thus conditioning thought wholly _ab extra_, instead of determining it as instrumentalities or elements in its own scheme, is too fixed. Such qualities _are_ forced upon us, but _not_ at large. The sensory data of experience, as distinct from the psychologists' constructs, always come _in a context_; they always appear as variations in a continuum of values. Even the thunder which breaks in upon me (to take the extreme of apparent discontinuity and irrelevancy) disturbs me because it is taken as a part of the same space-world as that in which my chair and room and house are located; and it is taken as an influence which interrupts and disturbs, _because_ it is part of my common world of causes and effects. The solution of continuity is itself practical or teleological, and thus presupposes and affects continuity of purpose, occupations, and means in a life-process. It is not metaphysics, it is biology which enforces the idea that actual sensation is not only determined as an event in a world of events,[23] but is an occurrence occurring at a certain period in the evolution of experience, marking a certain point in its cycle, and, consequently--having always its own conscious context and bearings--is a characteristic function of reconstruction in experience.[24]