The hypostasised total of rational and just discourse is the truth. Like the physical world, the truth is external and in the main potential. Its ideal consistency and permanence serve to make it a standard and background for fleeting assertions, just as the material hypostasis called nature is the standard and background for all momentary perceptions. What exists of truth in direct experience is at any moment infinitesimal, as what exists of nature is, but all that either contains might be represented in experience at one time or another.[G]
The tensions and relations of words which make grammar or make poetry are immediate in essence, the force of language being just as empirical as the reality of things. To ask a thinker what he means by meaning is as futile as to ask a carpenter what he means by wood; to discover it you must emulate them and repeat their experience—which indeed you will hardly be able to do if some sophist has so entangled your reason that you can neither understand what you see nor assert what you mean. But as the carpenter’s acquaintance with wood might be considerably refined if he became a naturalist or liberalised if he became a carver, so a casual speaker’s sense of what he means might be better focussed by dialectic and more delicately shaded by literary training. Meantime the vital act called intent, by which consciousness becomes cognitive and practical, would remain at heart an indescribable experience, a sense of spiritual life as radical and specific as the sense of heat.
It demands conventional expression.
Significant language forms a great system of ideal tensions, contained in the mutual relations of parts of speech, and of clauses in propositions. Of these tensions the intent in a man’s mind at any moment is a living specimen. Experience at that moment may have a significance, a transitive force, that asks to be enshrined in some permanent expression; the more acute and irrevocable the crisis is, the more urgent the need of transmitting to other moments some cognisance of what was once so great. But were this experience to exhale its spirit in a vacuum, using no conventional and transmissible medium of expression, it would be foiled in its intent. It would leave no monument and achieve no immortality in the world of representation; for the experience and its expression would remain identical and perish together, just as a perception and its object would remain identical and perish together if there were no intelligence to discover the material world, to which the perplexing shifts of sensation may be habitually referred. Spontaneous expression, if it is to be recognisable and therefore in effect expressive, labours under the necessity of subordinating itself to an ideal system of expressions, a permanent language in which its spontaneous utterances may be embedded. By virtue of such adoption into a common medium expression becomes interpretable; a later moment may then reconstruct the past out of its surviving memorial.
Intent, beside the form it has in language, where it makes the soul of grammar, has many other modes of expression, in mathematical and logical reasoning, in action, and in those contemplated and suspended acts which we call estimation, policy, or morals. Moral philosophy, the wisdom of Socrates, is merely a consideration of intent. In intent we pass over from existence to ideality, the nexus lying in the propulsive nature of life which could not have been capped by any form of knowledge which was not itself in some way transitive and ambitious. Intent, though it looks away from existence and the actual, is the most natural and pervasive of things. Physics and dialectic meet in this: that the second brings to fruition what the first describes, namely, existence, and that both have their transcendental root in the flux of being. Matter cannot exist without some form, much as by shedding every form in succession it may proclaim its aversion to fixity and its radical formlessness or infinitude. Nor can form, without the treacherous aid of matter, pass from its ideal potentiality into selected and instant being.
A fable about matter and form.
In order to live—if such a myth may be allowed—the Titan Matter was eager to disguise his incorrigible vagueness and pretend to be something. He accordingly addressed himself to the beautiful company of Forms, sisters whom he thought all equally beautiful, though their number was endless, and equally fit to satisfy his heart. He wooed them hypocritically, with no intention of wedding them; yet he uttered their names in such seductive accents (called by mortals intelligence and toil) that the virgin goddesses offered no resistance—at least such of them as happened to be near or of a facile disposition. They were presently deserted by their unworthy lover; yet they, too, in that moment’s union, had tasted the sweetness of life. The heaven to which they returned was no longer an infinite mathematical paradise. It was crossed by memories of earth, and a warmer breath lingered in some of its lanes and grottoes. Henceforth its nymphs could not forget that they had awakened a passion, and that, unmoved themselves, they had moved a strange indomitable giant to art and love.
FOOTNOTES:
[F] Cf. the motto on the title-page.