otentially
and at the option of a roving eye. In evoking consciousness nature makes
this delimination real and unambiguous; there are henceforth actual
centres and actual interests in the mechanical flux. The flux continues
to be mechanical, but the representation of it supervening has created
values which, being due to imputation, could not exist without being
imputed, while at the same time they could not have been imputed without
being attached to one object or event rather than to another. Material
dramas are thus made moral and raised to an existence of their own by
being expressed in what we call the souls of animals and men; a mind is
the entelechy of an organic body.[E] It is a region where form breeds an
existence to express it, and destiny becomes important by being felt.
Mind adds to being a new and needful witness so soon as the constitution
of being gives foothold to apperception of its movement, and offers
something in which it is possible to ground an interest.

That Aristotle has not been generally followed in views essentially so
natural and pregnant as these is due no doubt to want of thoroughness in
conceiving them, not only on the part of his readers but even on his
own part; for he treated the soul, which should be on his own theory
only an expression and an unmoved mover, as a power and an efficient
cause. Analysis had not gone far enough in his day to make evident that
all dynamic principles are mechanical and that mechanism can obtain only
among objects; but by this time it should no longer seem doubtful that
mental facts can have no connection except through their material basis
and no mutual relevance except through their objects.

[Sidenote: Attempt at idealistic physics.]

There is indeed a strange half-assumption afloat, a sort of reserved
faith which every one seems to respect but nobody utters, to the effect
that the mental world has a mechanism of its own, and that ideas
intelligently produce and sustain one another. Systematic idealists, to
be sure, have generally given a dialectical or moral texture to the
cosmos, so that the passage from idea to idea in experience need not be
due, in their physics, to any intrinsic or proportionate efficacy in
these ideas themselves. The march of experience is not explained at all
by such high cosmogonies. They abandon that practical calculation to
some science of illusion that has to be tolerated in this provisional
life. Their own understanding is