m--a profound truth when he said
of time that he knew what it was when no one asked him, but if any one
asked him he did not know; which may be restated by saying that time is
an intuition, an aspect of crude experience, which science may work with
but which it can never arrive at.

[Sidenote: Constancy and progress in intent.]

When a concretion is formed in discourse and an intent is attained in
consciousness, predicates accrue to the subject in a way which is
perfectly empirical. Dialectic is not retrospective; it does not consist
in recovering ground previously surveyed. The accretion of new
predicates comes in answer to chance questions, questions raised, to be
sure, about a given theme. The subject is fixed by the mind's intent and
it suffices to compare any tentative assertion made about it with that
intent itself to see whether the expression suggested for it is truly
dialectical and thoroughly honest. Dialectic verifies by
reconsideration, by equation of tentative results with fixed intentions.
It does not verify, like the sciences of existence, by comparing a
hypothesis with a new perception. In dialectic no new _perception_ is
wanted; the goal is to understand the old fact, to give it an aureole
and not a progeny. It is a transubstantiation of matter, a passage from
existence to eternity. In this sense dialectic is "synthetic _a
priori_"; it analyses an intent which demanded further elucidation and
had fixed the direction and principle of its expansion. If this intent
is abandoned and a new subject is introduced surreptitiously, a fallacy
is committed; yet the correct elucidation of ideas is a true progress,
nor could there be any progress unless the original idea were better
expressed and elicited as we proceeded; so that constancy in intent and
advance in explication are the two requisites of a cogent deduction.

The question in dialectic is always what is true, what can be said,
about _this_; and the demonstrative pronoun, indicating an act of
selective attention, raises the object it selects to a concretion in
discourse, the relations of which in the universe of discourse it then
proceeds to formulate. At the same time this dialectical investigation
may be full of surprises. Knowledge may be so truly enriched by it that
_knowledge_, in an ideal sense, only begins when dialectic has given
some articulation to being. Without dialectic an animal might follow
instinct, he might have vivid emotions, expectat