elations
give practical force to the thought that expresses them, and the
thought in turn gives significance and value to the forces that subserve
it. Fulfilment is mutual, in one direction bringing material
potentialities to the light and making them actual and conscious, and in
the other direction embodying intent in the actual forms of things and
manifesting reason. Nothing could be more ill-considered than the desire
to disembody reason. Reason cries aloud for reunion with the material
world which she needs not only for a basis but, what concerns her even
more, for a theme.

In private and silent discourse, when words and grammar are swathed in
reverie, the material basis and reference of thought may be forgotten.
Desire and intent may then seem to disport themselves in a purely ideal
realm; moral or logical tensions alone may seem to determine the whole
process. Meditative persons are even inclined to regard the disembodied
life which they think they enjoy at such times as the true and native
form of experience; all organs, applications, and expressions of thought
they deprecate and call accidental. As some pious souls reject dogma to
reach pure faith and suspend prayer to enjoy union, so some mystical
logicians drop the world in order to grasp reality. It is an exquisite
suicide; but the energy and ideal that sustain such a flight are
annihilated by its issue, and the soul drops like a paper balloon
consumed by the very flame that wafted it. No thought is found without
an organ; none is conceivable without an expression which is that
organ's visible emanation; and none would be significant without a
subject-matter lying in the world of which that organ is a part.

[Sidenote: The basis of intent becomes appreciable in language.]

The natural structure underlying intent is latent in silent thought, and
its existence might be denied by a sceptical thinker over whose mind the
analogies and spirit of physics exercised little influence. This
hypothetical structure is not, however, without obvious extensions which
imply its existence even where we do not perceive it directly. A smile
or a blush makes visible to the observer movements which must have been
at work in the body while thought occupied the mind--even if, as more
often happens, the blush or smile did not precede and introduce the
feeling they suggest, the feeling which in our verbal mythology is said
to cause them. No one would be so simple as to suppose that