The essence which is the object of intuition is probably not simple. Perhaps nothing that has a character recognisable in reflection can be utterly simple. The datum may seem purely qualitative, like a smell or like absolute Being, and yet some plurality may lurk in its very diffuseness or continuity, giving a foothold for discrimination of different moments or parts within it. Usually this inward complexity of given essences is very marked, and a chief element in their nature; but it is not at all incompatible with the æsthetic and logical individuality which makes them terms for possible recognition and discourse. Essences, like things, may be perfectly unambiguous objects to name or to point to, and may be counted as units, without prejudice to their internal complexity. My dog is one and the same dog unmistakably, without prejudice to the possibly infinite complexity of his organism or the interpenetration of his qualities. In the same way Euclidean space is a single and definite essence; yet its character is subject to analysis. I may say it has three dimensions, is necessarily infinite, without scale, etc. These implications, which I may enumerate successively, lie in the essence together, and lie there from the beginning, even if my intuition is slow to disentangle them, or never does so at all. The simplicity of the essence given at first was a pregnant simplicity; it had enough character to be identified with the total and unitary aspect of another essence—Euclidean space analysed—which may appear later.

Intuition therefore is a view of essence, attention fixed upon it, and not that essence itself. When I say Euclidean space has three dimensions, I am counting them; I am proceeding from one specious plane, or felt direction of motion, to another, and perhaps back again, for the sake of verification. If this operation is to be a valid survey of the essence proposed, the plane or directions specified must, so to speak, stay in their places. Each must remain itself, so that in passing from it to another, as I do in counting, I may pass to something truly different, and may be able to revert from this to the original element, and find it still there, identical with its former self. But, as I have already discovered, this self-identity of a term to which I revert cannot be given either in the first intuition of it, nor in the second. All that either intuition can yield while it endures is the nature of the datum there, with the terms and relations which are displayed there within it. Intuition can never yield the relation of its total datum to anything not given. It cannot refer to the latent at all, since its object, by definition, is just what is given immediately. To take the leap from one intuition to another, and assert that they view the same essence, or have the same intent, I must take my life in my hands and trust to animal faith. Otherwise all dialectic would be arrested.

Let me assume in the first place that I may steadily peruse the same essence, and may revert to it on occasion. Let me assume further that in so doing I may turn passive intuition into analysis, and analysis into some fresh synthesis of the elements identified and distinguished in the given essence. Intuition will thus pick up and group together, in various ways, terms which by hypothesis are identical in these various settings. It will scrutinise essences piecemeal and successively, although in their own realm they compose a simultaneous and eternal manifold. Suppose, for instance, I have reached the conclusion of a calculation, and the final equation is before me: the inner relations between its terms are parts of a given essence. Intuition, not demonstration, synthesises this manifold. This synthetic essence is therefore no conclusion; it is not an answer nor a deduction; it is not true. It is simply the pattern of terms which it is; no one of these terms, for aught I know, having ever figured in any other equation. Thus any survey which is analytic, so that it gives foothold for demonstration, or any definition following upon such analysis, presupposes the repetition of the same essences in different contexts. This presupposition cannot be justified by the intuition occupying the mind at any one time. No more can the assurance that a term remains the same in two successive instances and in two different contexts, nor that what is asserted by a predicate is asserted of the very subject which before had been intuited without that predicate. Explication is a process, a deduction is an event; and although the force of logical analysis or synthesis does not depend on assuming that fact, but rather on ignoring it, this fact may be deduced from faith in the validity of demonstration, which would lapse if this fact were denied. The validity of demonstration is accordingly a matter of faith only, depending on the assumption of matters of fact incapable of demonstration. I must believe that I noted the terms of the argument separately and successively if I am to assert anything in identifying them or pronouncing them equivalent, or if the conclusion in which they appear now is to be relevant in any way to the premises in which they appeared originally.

The force of dialectic, then, lies in identifying terms in isolation with the same terms in relation; so that even an analytic judgement is synthetic. To say, for instance, that in “extended colour” “extension” is involved is analysis; yet to identify the element of extension abstracted from the first essence with the second essence as a whole, is synthesis; and it is far from inconceivable that this synthesis should be erroneous. In the identification of an essence given in one intuition with something given in another intuition in a superadded context, there is a postulate that in transcendent intent I am hitting a hidden target. It is not two similar intuitions taken existentially that are identified; they are not only admittedly distinct numerically and as events in the world, but they have, by hypothesis, different total data before them. It is mind, a spiritual counterpart of attitude and action, that intends in both cases to consider the same essence. There is repetition posited; and repetition, if actual, involves adventitious differences accruing to a term that remains individually identical. There is a difference in the setting of the same essence here and its setting there. In judgement, accordingly, there is more than intuition; there is assumed discourse, involving time, transcendent reference, and various adventitious surveys of identical objects. Thus if I wish to believe that any demonstration whatsoever is significant or correct, I must assume (what I can never demonstrate) that there is an active intelligence at work, capable of reverting to an old idea like the dog returning to his vomit: an operation utterly extraneous to the timeless identity of each element recovered.

In other words, demonstration is an event, even when the thing demonstrated is not an event. Without adventitious choice of some starting-point, without selective and cumulative advance, and without recapitulation, there would be no dialectic. Premises and conclusions would all be static and separate terms; the dialectical nerve of their relation would not be laid bare and brought to intuition. I should know nothing about essence, in the sense of possessing such sciences of it as mathematics or rhetoric, if the argument were not adventitious to the subject-matter, casting the light of intuition now along this path and now along that in a field posited as static, so as to enlarge and confirm my apprehension of it; for if I lost at one end all that I gained at the other, my progress would not enrich apprehension, nor ever twice mean the same thing. Dialectic therefore is a two-edged sword: on the one hand, if valid, it involves a realm of essence, independent of it, over which it may range; and on the other hand it involves its own temporal and progressive existence; since it is a name for the fact that some part of that realm of essence has been chosen for perusal, considered at leisure, folded upon itself, as it were, and recognised as having this or that articulation. Even pure intuition shares (as I shall try to show presently) this spiritual existence, distinct from the logical or æsthetic being proper to the essences it apprehends; intuition itself can hardly be prolonged without winking or re-survey. But this coming and going of attention, in flashes and in varied assaults, is even more conspicuous in dialectic; and the validity and advance of insight in such cases depends on the essences in hand being constant, in spite of the pulsations of attention upon them and the variety of relations disclosed successively.

Thus belief in the existence of mental discourse (which is a sort of experience), whilst of course not demonstrable in itself, is involved in the validity of any demonstration; and I come to the interesting insight that dialectic would lose all its force if I renounced my instinctive faith in my ability to pick up old meanings, to think consecutively, to correct myself without changing my subject-matter, and in fine to discourse and to live rationally. Challenge this faith, and demonstration collapses into the illusion that a demonstration has been made. If I confine myself to the given essence without admitting discourse about it, I exclude all analysis of that essence, or even examination of it. I must simply stare at it, in a blank and timeless æsthetic trance. If this does not happen, the reason is not dialectical. No logic could drive me from the obvious, unless I read omens in it which are not there. The reason for my proclivity to play with ideas, to lose them and catch them, and pride myself on my ability to keep them circling without confusion in the air, is a vital reason. This logic is a fly-wheel in my puffing engine; it is not logic at all. The animal life which underlies discourse is concerned to discharge its predetermined responses, which are but few, whenever an occasion presents itself which will at all do; and all such occasions it calls the same. It claps some recurrent name on different objects, which is one source of error or of perpetual inaccuracy in its knowledge of things; but even before that, in identifying the various instances of that name, alleging the essence present now to be the same present before, it runs a risk of error and may slip into self-contradiction. Is the round square an essence? Certainly; but not in the geometry of Euclid, because in his geometry the square is one essence and the circle another, definitely and irreparably distinct from it. The round square is an essence of comic discourse, actualised when, having confused names, definitions and ideas, a fumbling or an impudent mind sets about to identify two incompatibles; and this attempt is no more impossible to a mind—which is subject to animal vapours—than it is impossible for such a mind to look for a lost word. The psyche has the lost word in store, as it has the intuitions of the circle and the square; but the loss of memory or the confusion of ideas may arise notwithstanding, because the movement in discourse which should culminate in those intuitions may be intercepted mechanically, and arrested at a stage where the name is not yet recovered, or where the words circle and square have fused their associations and are striving to terminate in the intuition of both as one. Such stammerings and contradictions make evident the physical basis of thought and the remote level from which it turns to its ideal object, like the moth to the star; but this physical basis is really just as requisite for correcting a logical error as for falling into it. Thus dialectic, which in intent and deliverance does not trespass beyond the realm of essence, but only defines some fragment of the same, yet in fact, if it is to be cogent, must presuppose time, change, and the persistence of meanings in progressive discourse.

Belief in demonstration, when it is admitted, has inversely some steadying influence on belief in matters of fact. When poetic idealists cry that life is a dream, they are indulging in a hyperbole, if they still venture to compare one illusion with another in beauty or in duration. Poetry, like demonstration, would not be possible if intuition of essences could not be sustained and repeated in various contexts. The poet could not otherwise express cumulative passions nor develop particular themes. But life is no dream, if it justifies dialectic; because dialectic explores various parts of the realm of essence—where everything is steadfast, distinct, and imperishable—with a continuous and coherent intent, and reaches valid insight into their structure; and this amount of wakefulness and sanity the dialectical or poetic mind would have in any case, even in the absence of a material world, of all moral interests, and of any life except the life of discourse itself.

Nevertheless, if discourse were always a pellucid apprehension of essential relations, its existence would be little noted; only a very scrupulous philosopher would insist on it, in view of the selective order and direction of survey which discourse adds to its subject-matter. There is, however, a much louder witness to the fact that discourse exists and is no part of essence, but rather a function of animal life; and this witness is error. Thought becomes obvious when things betray it; as they cannot have been false, something else must have been so, and this something else, which we call thought, must have existed and must have had a different status from that of the thing it falsified. Error thus awakens even the laziest philosophy from the dream of supposing that its own meanderings are nothing but strands in the texture of its object.

I have now, by the mere consideration of the way in which essence presents itself, managed to snatch from the jaws of scepticism one belief familiar to me before I encountered that romantic dragon; namely, belief in the existence of discourse, or of mind thinking. But be it observed that I have so far seen reason for reinstating this belief only in a very attenuated form. Thought here means nothing more than the fact that some essence is contemplated, and discourse means only that this essence is approached and surveyed repeatedly or piecemeal, with partiality, succession, and possible confusion in describing it. Save for this distinction of intuition from the essence intuited, I have as yet no object before me that claims existence or solicits belief. The whole datum is still simply an essence; but by the mere study of that datum, when this study is reflected upon and admitted, I have reintroduced a belief which relieves me of what was most obnoxious to the flesh in my radical scepticism. I have found that even when no change is perceived in the image before me, my discourse changes its phases and makes progress in surveying it; so that in discourse I now admit a sphere of events in which real variations are occurring. I may now assert, when I perceive a motion, that this intuition of change is true; that is, that it has actually followed upon the intuition of a static first term, from which my attention has passed to this intuition of change; and this I may now assert without confusing the essences given successively, or trying, like animal perception, to knead one concrete thing out of their incompatible natures. The existence of changing things or events in nature I may still deny or doubt or ignore; in the object I shall, with perfect clearness, see only an essence, and if this happens to be the essence of change, and to present the image of some motion, that theme will seem to me as determinate, as ideal and as unchanging as any other, and as little prone to lapse into any different theme. Any motion seen will be but a fixed image of motion. Actual flux and actual existence will have their appropriate and sufficient seat in my thought; I shall conceive and believe, when I reflect on my rapt contemplations, that I have been ruminating, and passing from one to another; but these objects will be only the several essences, the several images or tunes or stories, each always itself, which my mind picks up or invents or reconsiders.