llating it with your
own intent. If some one says two and two are five, you are no
counter-mathematician when you conscientiously put it down that he said
so. Your science is not relevant to his intent until you run some risk
yourself in that arena and say, No: two and two are four.

[Sidenote: It is analogous to flux in existence]

Feelings and ideas, when plucked and separately considered, do not
retain the intent that made them cognitive or living; yet in their
native medium they certainly lived and knew. If this ideality or
transcendence seems a mystery, it is such only in the sense in which
every initial or typical fact is mysterious. Every category would be
unthinkable if it were not actually used. The mystery in this instance
has, however, all that can best serve to make a mystery homely and
amiable. It is supported by a strong analogy to other familiar
mysteries. The fact that intellect has intent, and does not constitute
or contain what it envisages, is like the fact that time flows, that
bodies gravitate, that experience is gathered, or that existence is
suspended between being and not being. Propagation in animals is
mysterious and familiar in the same fashion. Cognition, too, is an
expedient for vanquishing instability. As reproduction circumvents
mortality and preserves a semblance of permanence in the midst of
change, so intent regards what is not yet, or not here, or what exists
no longer. Thus the pulverisation proper to existence is vanquished by
thought, which in a moment announces or commemorates other moments,
together with the manner of their approach or recession. The mere image
of what is absent constitutes no knowledge of it; a dream is not
knowledge of a world like it existing elsewhere; it is simply another
more fragile world. What renders the image cognitive is the intent that
projects it and deputes it to be representative. It is cognitive only in
use, when it is the vehicle of an assurance which may be right or wrong,
because it takes something ulterior for its standard.

[Sidenote: It expresses natural life.]

We may give intent a somewhat more congenial aspect if we remember that
thought comes to animals in proportion to their docility in the world
and to their practical competence. The more plastic a being is to
experience, so long as he retains vital continuity and a cumulative
structure, the more intelligent he becomes. Intelligence is an
expression of adaptation, of impressionable