er's acquaintance with wood might be considerably refined if
he became a naturalist or liberalised if he became a carver, so a casual
speaker's sense of what he means might be better focussed by dialectic
and more delicately shaded by literary training. Meantime the vital act
called intent, by which consciousness becomes cognitive and practical,
would remain at heart an indescribable experience, a sense of spiritual
life as radical and specific as the sense of heat.

[Sidenote: It demands conventional expression.]

Significant language forms a great system of ideal tensions, contained
in the mutual relations of parts of speech, and of clauses in
propositions. Of these tensions the intent in a man's mind at any moment
is a living specimen. Experience at that moment may have a significance,
a transitive force, that asks to be enshrined in some permanent
expression; the more acute and irrevocable the crisis is, the more
urgent the need of transmitting to other moments some cognisance of what
was once so great. But were this experience to exhale its spirit in a
vacuum, using no conventional and transmissible medium of expression, it
would be foiled in its intent. It would leave no monument and achieve no
immortality in the world of representation; for the experience and its
expression would remain identical and perish together, just as a
perception and its object would remain identical and perish together if
there were no intelligence to discover the material world, to which the
perplexing shifts of sensation may be habitually referred. Spontaneous
expression, if it is to be recognisable and therefore in effect
expressive, labours under the necessity of subordinating itself to an
ideal system of expressions, a permanent language in which its
spontaneous utterances may be embedded. By virtue of such adoption into
a common medium expression becomes interpretable; a later moment may
then reconstruct the past out of its surviving memorial.

Intent, beside the form it has in language, where it makes the soul of
grammar, has many other modes of expression, in mathematical and logical
reasoning, in action, and in those contemplated and suspended acts which
we call estimation, policy, or morals. Moral philosophy, the wisdom of
Socrates, is merely a consideration of intent. In intent we pass over
from existence to ideality, the nexus lying in the propulsive nature of
life which could not have been capped by any form of knowledge wh