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Autumn in Bloomington, late Friday afternoon in Sycamore Hall. The visiting philosopher concludes the lecture without a word on practical reasoning. Hector, detonating his soda can, is about to pounce. Outside, beyond the leaded library window, the nearly last, mottled, mostly red maple leaf leaves the canopy and flutters into the trickling Jordan. The little stream meanders through campus hoping, after recruiting several other creeks, to find first the White River, then the Ohio and finally the Mississippi. This, that the migrating leaf might head to the Gulf of Mexico and a chance at Guatemala beyond. But whether or not it should ever arrive in the Gulf, the leaf is now, as it drifts in a tributary to a tributary to a tributary, heading for the Gulf. Remarkable that a thing so simple as a lost leaf can point to so distant and disguised a destination. Remarkable too that this leaf illustrates how the mind manages to represent.

DOI: 10.1007/978-94-011-5052-1_9

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