(1) 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
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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 out 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.
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