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“Idealists . . . object that an image [or thing] in an original state of innocence is a delusion and cannot exist, that no image ever comes to us which does not imply the world of ideas, that there is ‘no percept without a concept.’ There is something in it. Every property discovered in an image is a universal property, and nothing discovered in the image is marvelous in kind though it may be pinned down historically or statistically as a single instance. But there is this to be understood too: the image which is not remarkable in any particular property is marvelous in its assemblage of many properties, a manifold of properties, like a mine or a field, something to be explored for the properties; yet science can manage the image, which is infinite in properties, only by equating it to the one property with which the science is concerned; for science at work is always a science, and committed to a special interest. It is not by refutation but by abstraction that science destroys the image. It means to get its ‘value’ out of the image, and we may be sure that it has no use for the image in its original state of freedom. People who are engrossed with their pet ‘values’ become habitual killers. Their game is the images, or the things, and they acquire the ability to shoot them as far off as they can be seen, and do. It is thus that we lose the power of imagination, or whatever faculty it is by which we are able to contemplate things as they are in their rich and contingent materiality. But our dreams reproach us, for in dreams they come alive again. Likewise our memory; which makes light of our science by recalling the images in their panoply of circumstance and with their morning freshness upon them.”

“By intention I mean an appetite at the beginning intellectually to do something in a characteristic way—either consciously or unconsciously, but at any rate in a language that always (or nearly always) shows signs of the beginning intention in some form and is always engaged purposefully in the production of meaning. With regard to a given work or body of work, a beginning intention is really nothing more than the created inclusiveness within which the work develops.”

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“Every sort of writing establishes explicit and implicit rules of pertinence for itself: certain things are admissible; certain others not. I call these rules of pertinence authority—both in the sense of explicit law and guiding force (what we usually mean by the term) and in the sense of that implicit power to generate another word that will belong to the writing as a whole.”

“Really, universally, relations stop nowhere, and the exquisite problem of the artist is eternally but to draw, by a geometry of his own, the circle within which they shall happily appear to do so.”