body, which the soul has come to represent.

In other words, mind raises to an actual existence that _form_ in
material processes which, had the processes remained wholly material,
would have had only ideal or imputed being--as the stars would not have
been divided into the signs of the Zodiac but for the fanciful eye of
astrologers. Automata might arise and be destroyed without any value
coming or going; only a form-loving observer could say that anything
fortunate or tragic had occurred, as poets might at the budding or
withering of a flower. Some of nature's automata, however, love
themselves, and comment on the form they achieve or abandon; these
constellations of atoms are genuine beasts. Their consciousness and
their interest in their own individuality rescues that individuality
from the realm of discourse and from having merely imputed limits.

[Sidenote: Mind the existence in which form becomes actual.]

That the basis of mind lies in the body's interests rather than in its
atoms may seem a doctrine somewhat too poetical for psychology; yet may
not poetry, superposed on material existence and supported by it, be
perhaps the key to mind? Such a view hangs well together with the
practical and prospective character of consciousness, with its total
dependence on the body, its cognitive relevance to the world, and its
formal disparity from material being. Mind does not accompany body like
a useless and persistent shadow; it is significant and it is
intermittent. Much less can it be a link in physiological processes,
processes irrelevant to its intent and incompatible with its immaterial
essence. Consciousness seems to arise when the body assumes an attitude
which, being an attitude, supervenes upon the body's elements and cannot
be contained within them. This attitude belongs to the whole body in its
significant operation, and the report of this attitude, its expression,
requires survey, synthesis, appreciation--things which constitute what
we call mentality. This remains, of course, the mentality of that
material situation; it is the voice of that particular body in that
particular pass. The mind therefore represents its basis, but this basis
(being a _form_ of material existence and not matter itself) is neither
vainly reduplicated by representation nor used up materially in the
process.

Representation is far from idle, since it brings to focus those
mechanical unities which otherwise would have existed only p