ances are the qualities of reality, else realities
would be without place, time, character, or interrelation. In knowing
that Napoleon was a Corsican, a short man with a fine countenance, we
know appearances only; but these appearances are true of the reality.
And if the presumable inner appearances, Napoleon's long soliloquy, were
separated from the others, those inner appearances would not belong to
Napoleon nor have any home in the knowable world. That which physics,
with its concomitant psychology, might discover in a man is the sum of
what is true about him, seeing that a man is a concretion in existence,
the fragment of a world, and not a definition. Appearances define the
constituent elements of his reality, which could not be better known
than through their means.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote E: Aristotle called the soul the first entelechy of such a
body. This first entelechy is what we should call life, since it is
possessed by a man asleep. The French I know but do not use is in its
first entelechy; the French I am actually speaking is in its second.
Consciousness is therefore the second or actualised entelechy of its
body.]

CHAPTER VI

THE NATURE OF INTENT

[Sidenote: Dialectic better than physics.]

Common knowledge passes from memory to history and from history to
mechanism; and having reached that point it may stop to look back, not
without misgivings, over the course it has traversed, and thus become
psychology. These investigations, taken together, constitute physics, or
the science of existence. But this is only half of science and on the
whole the less interesting and less fundamental half. No existence is of
moment to a man, not even his own, unless it touches his will and
fulfils or thwarts his intent. Unless he is concerned that existences
should be of specific kinds, unless he is interested in form, he can
hardly be interested in being. At the very least in terms of pleasure
versus pain, light versus darkness, comfort versus terror, the flying
moment must be loaded with obloquy or excellence if its passage is not
to remain a dead fact, and to sink from the sphere of actuality
altogether into that droning limbo of potentialities which we call
matter. Being which is indifferent to form is only the material of
being. To exist is nothing if you have nothing to do, if there is
nothing to choose or to distinguish, or if those things which belong to
a chosen form are not gathered into it befor