For this purpose it is needful to direct our attention to the moment of their formation, which, as has been said, is not at all theoretical, but practical; and to ask ourselves in what way and with what end the practical spirit can intervene in representations and concepts previously produced, manipulate them and make of them conceptual fictions. The view that the work of the practical spirit can give rise to new knowledge, not previously attained, must be resolutely excluded: the practical spirit is such, precisely because it is non-cognitive; as regards knowledge it is altogether sterile. If, then, it accomplishes those manipulations, and says to a cat: "You will represent for me all cats"; or to a rose: "See, I draw you in my treatise on botany, and you will represent all roses"; and to the triangle: "It is true I cannot think you, nor represent you; but I suppose that you are the same as what I draw with rule and compass, and I make use of you to measure the approximate triangles of reality";--in so doing, it recognizes that it does not accomplish any act of _knowledge._ But does it, in that case, accomplish an act of _anti-knowledge_--that is, does it make these manipulations and fictions in order to place obstacles in the way of knowledge and to simulate its products, so that it leads astray the seeker for truth? If this were so, the "practical spirit" would be synonymous with the spirit of confusion; and the contriver of conceptual fictions would deserve the reprobation that attaches to forgers of documents, sophists, rhetoricians, and charlatans; whereas, on the contrary, he receives the applause and gratitude of every one. Each one of us, at every instant, would be guilty of a plot against the truth, because at every instant each of us forms and employs those fictions; whereas the moral consciousness, delicate and intolerant though it be, makes no reproof, but indeed offers encouragement. Therefore, the act of forming intellectual fictions is an act neither of knowledge nor of anti-knowledge; it is not logically rational, but neither is it logically irrational; it is rational, indeed, but _practically_ rational. [Sidenote: _The practical end and mnemonic utility._]