 Merleau-Ponty emphasizes throughout The Structure of Behavior that form, even though ontologically fundamental, cannot be accounted for in the terms of traditional realism; since form is fundamentally perceptual, an “immanent signification”, it retains an essential relationship with consciousness. But the “perceptual consciousness” at stake here is not the transcendental consciousness of critical philosophy. The last chapter of The Structure of Behavior clarifies this revised understanding of consciousness in dialogue with the classical problem of the relation between the soul and the body in order to account for the relative truths of both transcendental philosophy and naturalism. The issue concerns how to reconcile the perspective of consciousness as “universal milieu” (i.e., transcendental consciousness) with consciousness as “enrooted in the subordinated dialectics”, that is, as a Gestalt emerging from lower-order Gestalts (i.e., perceptual consciousness) (SC: 199/184). In the natural attitude of our pre-reflective lives, we are committed to the view that our perceptual experience of things is always situated and perspectival (i.e., that physical objects are presented through “profiles”, Husserl’s Abschattungen), but also that we thereby experience things “in themselves”, as they really are in the mind-independent world; the perspectival character of our opening onto the world is not a limitation of our access but rather the very condition of the world’s disclosure in its inexhaustibility. At the level of this prereflective faith in the world, there is no dilemma of the soul’s separation from the body; “the soul remains coextensive with nature” (SC: 203/189).