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Wittgenstein’s account of meaning and use has much in common with the above. Thus, Wittgenstein repeatedly claimed that the world does not ‘force concepts upon us’. He believed that we were free to unite anything with anything in forming a concept, and that human nature and most especially human needs and purposes play a vital though unseen part in this process. In short, a constrained but nonetheless limitless freedom exists in concept formation, rather as a limitless freedom exists according to Sartre as we project our individual futures on the ground of a particular past.

It is a kind of mental flower, and in any case no sort of intentional psychic artefact. But conversely the thinking process precisely is what happens to the dream when the mind comes under the guiding hand of its owner. It follows that one cannot apprehend reality unless one actively takes charge of one’s own mind. This is the treadmill we cannot get off so long as we are awake: bane of insomniacs – who experience it as an alien compulsion – perpetual treachery of self to self – since reason or inclination impel them one way even as the projecting mind’s desires push them in another – themselves impaled in the middle!

Namely, as serving a vital function. It seems that the natural goal of enhancing life is something that the minds of the healthy living cannot do without, even if the means adopted can take increasingly elevated form. It also seems that the means adopted for such a furtherance of life have in general to take the form of intentional action. Just as the primary and indeed essential function of the mouth is nourishment, despite its use in speech and in other ways, so the essential function of mental phenomena in all creatures is the generation of such purposive acts as further the life of animal, species, etc.