e, after the blow has fallen may turn to
sublime wisdom. This wisdom has cast out the fear of material evils, and
dreads only that the divine should not come down and be worthily
entertained among us. In art, in politics, in that form of religion
which is superior, and not inferior, to politics and art, we define and
embody intent; and the intent embodied dignifies the work and lends
interest to its conditions. So, in science, it is dialectic that makes
physics speculative and worthy of a free mind. The baser utilities of
material knowledge would leave life itself perfectly vain, if they did
not help it to take on an ideal shape. Ideal life, in so far as it
constitutes science, is dialectical. It consists in seeing how things
hang together perspicuously and how the later phases of any process fill
out--as in good music--the tendency and promise of what went before.
This derivation may be mathematical or it may be moral; but in either
case the data and problem define the result, dialectic being insight
into their inherent correspondence.

[Sidenote: Intent is vital and indescribable.]

Intent is one of many evidences that the intellect's essence is
practical. Intent is action in the sphere of thought; it corresponds to
transition and derivation in the natural world. Analytic psychology is
obliged to ignore intent, for it is obliged to regard it merely as a
feeling; but while the feeling of intent is a fact like any other,
intent itself is an aspiration, a passage, the recognition of an object
which not only is not a part of the feeling given but is often incapable
of being a feeling or a fact at all. What happened to motion under the
Eleatic analysis happens to intent under an anatomising reflection. The
parts do not contain the movement of transition which makes them a
whole. Moral experience is not expressible in physical categories,
because while you may give place and date for every feeling that
something is important or is absurd, you cannot so express what these
feelings have discovered and have wished to confide to you. The
importance and the absurdity have disappeared. Yet it is this
pronouncement concerning what things are absurd or important that makes
the intent of those judgments. To touch it you have to enter the moral
world; that is, you have to bring some sympathetic or hostile judgment
to bear on those you are considering and to meet intent, not by noting
its existence, but by estimating its value, by co