Intent is vital and indescribable.
Intent is one of many evidences that the intellect’s essence is practical. Intent is action in the sphere of thought; it corresponds to transition and derivation in the natural world. Analytic psychology is obliged to ignore intent, for it is obliged to regard it merely as a feeling; but while the feeling of intent is a fact like any other, intent itself is an aspiration, a passage, the recognition of an object which not only is not a part of the feeling given but is often incapable of being a feeling or a fact at all. What happened to motion under the Eleatic analysis happens to intent under an anatomising reflection. The parts do not contain the movement of transition which makes them a whole. Moral experience is not expressible in physical categories, because while you may give place and date for every feeling that something is important or is absurd, you cannot so express what these feelings have discovered and have wished to confide to you. The importance and the absurdity have disappeared. Yet it is this pronouncement concerning what things are absurd or important that makes the intent of those judgments. To touch it you have to enter the moral world; that is, you have to bring some sympathetic or hostile judgment to bear on those you are considering and to meet intent, not by noting its existence, but by estimating its value, by collating it with your own intent. If some one says two and two are five, you are no counter-mathematician when you conscientiously put it down that he said so. Your science is not relevant to his intent until you run some risk yourself in that arena and say, No: two and two are four.
It is analogous to flux in existence
Feelings and ideas, when plucked and separately considered, do not retain the intent that made them cognitive or living; yet in their native medium they certainly lived and knew. If this ideality or transcendence seems a mystery, it is such only in the sense in which every initial or typical fact is mysterious. Every category would be unthinkable if it were not actually used. The mystery in this instance has, however, all that can best serve to make a mystery homely and amiable. It is supported by a strong analogy to other familiar mysteries. The fact that intellect has intent, and does not constitute or contain what it envisages, is like the fact that time flows, that bodies gravitate, that experience is gathered, or that existence is suspended between being and not being. Propagation in animals is mysterious and familiar in the same fashion. Cognition, too, is an expedient for vanquishing instability. As reproduction circumvents mortality and preserves a semblance of permanence in the midst of change, so intent regards what is not yet, or not here, or what exists no longer. Thus the pulverisation proper to existence is vanquished by thought, which in a moment announces or commemorates other moments, together with the manner of their approach or recession. The mere image of what is absent constitutes no knowledge of it; a dream is not knowledge of a world like it existing elsewhere; it is simply another more fragile world. What renders the image cognitive is the intent that projects it and deputes it to be representative. It is cognitive only in use, when it is the vehicle of an assurance which may be right or wrong, because it takes something ulterior for its standard.
It expresses natural life.
We may give intent a somewhat more congenial aspect if we remember that thought comes to animals in proportion to their docility in the world and to their practical competence. The more plastic a being is to experience, so long as he retains vital continuity and a cumulative structure, the more intelligent he becomes. Intelligence is an expression of adaptation, of impressionable and prophetic structure. What wonder, then, that intelligence should speak of the things that inspire it and that lend it its oracular and practical character, namely, of things at that moment absent and merely potential, in other words, of the surrounding world? Mere feeling might suffice to translate into consciousness each particle of protoplasm in its isolation; but to translate the relations of that particle to what is not itself and to express its response to those environing presences, intent and conscious signification are required. Intellect transcends the given and means the absent because life, of which intellect is the fulfilment or entelechy, is itself absorbed from without and radiated outward. As life depends on an equilibrium of material processes which reach far beyond the individual they sustain in being, so intent is a recognition of outlying existences which sustain in being that very sympathy by which they are recognised. Intent and life are more than analogous. If we use the word life in an ideal sense, the two are coincident, for, as Aristotle says, the act proper to intellect is life.[F] The flux is so pervasive, so subtle in its persistency, that even those miracles which suspend it must somehow share its destiny. Intent bridges many a chasm, but only by leaping across. The life that is sustained for years, the political or moral purpose that may bind whole races together, is condemned to be partly a memory and partly a plan and wholly an ideal. Its scope is nothing but the range to which it can continually extend its sympathies and its power of representation. Its moments have nothing in common except their loyalties and a conspiring interest in what is not themselves.
It has a material basis.
This moral energy, so closely analogous to physical interplay, is of course not without a material basis. Spiritual sublimation does not consist in not using matter but in using it up, in making it all useful. When life becomes rational it continues to be mechanical and to take up room and energy in the natural world. That new direction of attention upon form which finds in facts instances of ideas, does not occur without a certain heat and labour in the brain. In its most intimate and supernatural functions intellect has natural conditions. In dreams and madness intent is confused and wayward, in idiocy it is suspended altogether; nor has discourse any other pledge that it is addressing kindred interlocutors except that which it receives from the disposition and habit of bodies. People who have not yet been born into the world have not yet begun to think about it.
There is, of course, an inner dialectical relevance among all propositions that have the same ideal theme, no matter how remote or unknown to one another those who utter the propositions may be; but the medium in which this infinite dialectical network is woven is motionless, and indifferent to the direction in which thought might traverse it; in other words, it is not discourse or intelligence but eternal truth. From the point of view of experience this prior dialectical relation of form to form is merely potential; for the thoughts between which it would obtain need never exist or be enacted. There is society only among incarnate ideas; and it is only by expressing some material situation that an idea is selected out of the infinity of not impossible ideas and promoted to the temporal dignity of actual thought.