true about
sentient moments, without stopping particularly to sink abstractedly
into their inner quality or private semblance. It would approach and
describe the immediate as a sentient factor in a natural situation, and
show us to what extent that situation was represented in that feeling.
This representation, by which the dignity and interest of pure sentience
would be measured, might be either pictorial or virtual; that is, a
conscious moment might represent the environing world either
scientifically, by understanding its structure, or practically, by
instinctive readiness to meet it.

[Sidenote: Mind knowable and important in so far as it represents other
things.]

What, for instance, is the reality of Napoleon? Is it what a telepathic
poet, a complete Browning, might reconstruct? Is it Napoleon's life-long
soliloquy? Or to get at the reality should we have to add, as scientific
psychology would, the conditions under which he lived, and their
relation to his casual feelings? Obviously if Napoleon's thoughts had
had no reference to the world we should not be able to recover them; or
if by chance such thoughts fell some day to our share, we should
attribute them to our own mental luxuriance, without suspecting that
they had ever visited another genius. Our knowledge of his life, even
where it is imaginative, depends upon scientific knowledge for its
projection; and his fame and immortality depend on the degree to which
his thoughts, being rooted in the structure of the world and pertinent
to it, can be rationally reproduced in others and attributed to him.
Napoleon's consciousness might perhaps be more justly identified with
the truth or reality of him than could that of most people, because he
seems to have been unusually cognisant of his environment and master of
the forces at work in it and in himself. He understood his causes and
function, and knew that he had _arisen_, like all the rest of history,
and that he stood for the transmissible force and authority of greater
things. Such a consciousness can be known in proportion as we, too,
possess knowledge, and is worth the pains; something which could not be
said of the absolute sentience of Dick or Harry, which has only material
being, brute existence, without relevance to anything nor understanding
of itself.

The circumstances, open to science, which surround consciousness are
thus real attributes of a man by which he is truly known and
distinguished. Appear