and prophetic structure.
What wonder, then, that intelligence should speak of the things that
inspire it and that lend it its oracular and practical character,
namely, of things at that moment absent and merely potential, in other
words, of the surrounding world? Mere feeling might suffice to translate
into consciousness each particle of protoplasm in its isolation; but to
translate the relations of that particle to what is not itself and to
express its response to those environing presences, intent and conscious
signification are required. Intellect transcends the given and means
the absent because life, of which intellect is the fulfilment or
entelechy, is itself absorbed from without and radiated outward. As life
depends on an equilibrium of material processes which reach far beyond
the individual they sustain in being, so intent is a recognition of
outlying existences which sustain in being that very sympathy by which
they are recognised. Intent and life are more than analogous. If we use
the word life in an ideal sense, the two are coincident, for, as
Aristotle says, the act proper to intellect is life.[F] The flux is so
pervasive, so subtle in its persistency, that even those miracles which
suspend it must somehow share its destiny. Intent bridges many a chasm,
but only by leaping across. The life that is sustained for years, the
political or moral purpose that may bind whole races together, is
condemned to be partly a memory and partly a plan and wholly an ideal.
Its scope is nothing but the range to which it can continually extend
its sympathies and its power of representation. Its moments have nothing
in common except their loyalties and a conspiring interest in what is
not themselves.

[Sidenote: It has a material basis.]

This moral energy, so closely analogous to physical interplay, is of
course not without a material basis. Spiritual sublimation does not
consist in not using matter but in using it up, in making it all useful.
When life becomes rational it continues to be mechanical and to take up
room and energy in the natural world. That new direction of attention
upon form which finds in facts instances of ideas, does not occur
without a certain heat and labour in the brain. In its most intimate and
supernatural functions intellect has natural conditions. In dreams and
madness intent is confused and wayward, in idiocy it is suspended
altogether; nor has discourse any other pledge that it is addressing
k