But here again I must forestall another wrong identification likely to jump into the reader’s mind: to wit, of Proteus with Intelligence. On the contrary: Proteus, multiform and ever-elusive, represents that which Intelligence (lighter equipped than specialized Intellect for such rapid hunts) can sometimes catch sight of and, for however brief a contact, sometimes even clutch. Proteus, in my mythology, is the mysterious whole which we know must exist, but know not how to descry: Reality. For, whatever else we may believe it to be, Reality when thus partially revealed, is never twice the same. Nor merely because of what we call waxing and waning, growth and decay, and whatever other phases of individual and racial transformation biology has made us superficially familiar with. There may well be some πάντα ῤεῖ outside and irrespective of our thoughts; indeed, it may have been in miming the universal flux that our thoughts themselves have grown _protean_. Look, for instance, at that strange (well named _auxiliary_) verb whereby we testify belief in reality, _esse_, _to be_; which holds in its emptiness the possibility of all qualities and happenings and implies in its assertion of mere blank existence the assurance of continual change: a future and past. For, whenever we speak of what we call a _thing_, its mere name, like the name of Virgil’s Proteus, is a spell making us witness aspect after aspect, take stock of relation after relation, admit likelihood after likelihood. And our belief in that thing’s reality, in its being _that thing_ and no other, means that it has had a certain, however unknown; past, and will have a more or less certain future. In this sense _Reality_, the fact of aspects perceived, remembered and expected in regularly connected sequences and combinations, _that_ is what I mean by Proteus. Maybe that Proteus does not change at all except in our narrow, and shifting, field of vision. Maybe that the multiform Virgilian Proteus might turn out to undergo but one first and last transformation, into that great auxiliary _esse_, _to be_, holding in its stark emptiness all that, for us, is things and happenings.... Such a transcendent and sole real Reality I leave to metaphysicians, not without wondering secretly whence, save from occasional experience of this (to them) unreal Proteus, they ever got to think about Reality at all.