This negative character of reason will, I hope, explain itself away as we proceed. The primary point on which I want to insist is not why reason is thus treated as negative, but how it comes that reason can be supposed to conflict with or control desire at all. I speak for the present of Desire, not of Will, because the meaning of desire is clearer; whereas it is a doubt, until we have explained the nature of active reason, what Will is, and whether it is distinguishable from desire. Now, on the other hand, there is a sentence of Aristotle “Intelligence as such moves nothing,” and this seems to come home to us quite as naturally as the idea that reason controls action. All plain or unambiguous instances of reason or reasoning or intelligence, seem to deal with discovery of fact, couched in a form which is capable of truth and falsehood. For our purpose we may treat it as elaborate perception, whether direct or assisted through inference, such as calculation. Calculation is the old meaning of reasoning, both in Greek and Latin. How do we get across from perception or calculation to anything that can interfere with desire? Of course there is a meeting-point in the idea that attends desire. Human desire, at least, is not blind. It is desire of something, which is before the mind as an idea; and in the case of desire which issues in action this something must be mentally specified in respect of the particular means needed to bring it about. And also, the end or purpose which is desired for its own sake, is, in the connection of cause and effect, itself _de facto_ a means to other results _ad infinitum_, more or less of which are foreseen by the person who acts. Thus the act, as fully presented to the mind in idea, is a complication of external circumstances, which are ideally distinguished, supposing the act to be reflected on, as means, realisation of the purpose, and foreseen consequences both of the means and of the realisation of the purpose. It is, I think, all-important to remember, that these distinctions are distinctions of relation to the acting subject, drawn very lightly by the acting subject on the shifting surface of a complicated set of results presented in idea, and are not at all complete distinctions, and lend themselves very readily to self-deception. We shall see the importance of this remark directly.