Page:The Function of Reason.pdf/38

 bodily experience. It is the experience of forms of definiteness in respect to their disconnection from any particular physical experience, but with abstract evaluation of what they can contribute to such experience. Consciousness is no necessary element in mental experience. The lowest form of mental experience is blind urge towards a form of experience, that is to say, an urge towards a form for realization. These forms of definiteness are the Platonic forms, the Platonic ideas, the medieval universals.

In its essence, mentality is the urge towards some vacuous definiteness, to include it in matter-of-fact which is non-vacuous enjoyment. This urge is appetition. It is emotional purpose: it is agency. Mentality is no more vacuous thanis physical enjoyment. But it brings the sheer vacuity of the form into the realization of experience. In physical experience, the forms are the defining factors: in mental experience the forms connect the immediate occasions with occasions which lie beyond. The connection of immediate fact with the future resides in its appetitions.

The higher forms of intellectual experience only arise when there are complex integrations, and reintegrations, of mental and physical experience. Reason then appears as a criticism of appetitions. It is a second-order type of mentality. It is the appetition of appetitions.

Mental experience is the organ of novelty, the urge beyond. It seeks to vivify the massive physical