Let us, then, agree with the plain man in affirming that the mind is nonextended, but let us avoid misconception. The mind is constituted of experiences of the subjective order. None of these are in space--real space. But some of them have apparent extension, and we must not overlook all that this implies. Now for the mind as immaterial. We need not delay long over this point. If we mean by the mind the phenomena of the subjective order, and by what is material the phenomena of the objective order, surely we may and must say that the mind is immaterial. The two classes of phenomena separate themselves out at once. [1] "The Passions," Articles 34 and 42. CHAPTER IX MIND AND BODY 35. IS THE MIND IN THE BODY?--There was a time, as we have seen in the last chapter (section 30), when it did not seem at all out of the way to think of the mind as in the body, and very literally in the body. He who believes the mind to be a breath, or a something composed of material atoms, can conceive it as being in the body as unequivocally as chairs can be in a room. Breath can be inhaled and exhaled; atoms can be in the head, or in the chest, or the heart, or anywhere else in the animal economy. There is nothing dubious about this sense of the preposition "in." But we have also seen (section 31) that, as soon as men began to realize that the mind is not material, the question of its presence in the body became a serious problem. If I say that a chair is in a room, I say what is comprehensible to every one. It is assumed that it is in a particular place in the room and is not in some other place. If, however, I say that the chair is, as a whole, in every part of the room at once, I seem to talk nonsense. This is what Plotinus and those who came after him said about the mind. Are their statements any the less nonsensical because they are talking about minds? When one speaks about things mental, one must not take leave of good sense and utter unmeaning phrases. If minds are enough like material things to be in anything, they must be in things in some intelligible sense of the word. It will not do to say: I use the word "in," but I do not really mean _in_. If the meaning has disappeared, why continue to use the word? It can only lead to mystification. Descartes seemed to come back to something like an intelligible meaning when he put the mind in the pineal gland in the brain. Yet, as we have seen, he clung to the old conception. He could not go back to the frank materialization of mind. And the plain man to-day labors under the same difficulty. He puts the mind in the body, in the brain, but he does not put it there frankly and unequivocally. It is in the brain and yet not exactly in the brain. Let us see if this is not the case.