Does not this case of extension now put us on the track of truth in the
case of other qualities? It does; and I am surprised that the facts
should not have been noticed long ago. Why, for example, do we call a
fire hot, and water wet, and yet refuse to say that our mental state,
when it is 'of' these objects, is either wet or hot? 'Intentionally,' at
any rate, and when the mental state is a vivid image, hotness and
wetness are in it just as much as they are in the physical experience.
The reason is this, that, as the general chaos of all our experiences
gets sifted, we find that there are some fires that will always burn
sticks and always warm our bodies, and that there are some waters that
will always put out fires; while there are other fires and waters that
will not act at all. The general group of experiences that _act_, that
do not only possess their natures intrinsically, but wear them
adjectively and energetically, turning them against one another, comes
inevitably to be contrasted with the group whose members, having
identically the same natures, fail to manifest them in the 'energetic'
way.[22] I make for myself now an experience of blazing fire; I place it
near my body; but it does not warm me in the least. I lay a stick upon
it, and the stick either burns or remains green, as I please. I call up
water, and pour it on the fire, and absolutely no difference ensues. I
account for all such facts by calling this whole train of experiences
unreal, a mental train. Mental fire is what won't burn real sticks;
mental water is what won't necessarily (though of course it may) put out
even a mental fire. Mental knives may be sharp, but they won't cut real
wood. Mental triangles are pointed, but their points won't wound. With
'real' objects, on the contrary, consequences always accrue; and thus
the real experiences get sifted from the mental ones, the things from
our thoughts of them, fanciful or true, and precipitated together as the
stable part of the whole experience-chaos, under the name of the
physical world. Of this our perceptual experiences are the nucleus, they
being the originally strong experiences. We add a lot of conceptual
experiences to them, making these strong also in imagination, and
building out the remoter parts of the physical world by their means; and
around this core of reality the world of laxly connected fancies and
mere rhapsodical objects floats like a bank of clouds. In the clouds,
all sorts of rules are violated which in the core are kept. Extensions
there can be indefinitely located; motion there obeys no Newton's laws.
VII
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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