The old common-sense way of rationalizing them is by a set of
concepts of which the most important are these:
Thing;
The same or different;
Kinds;
Minds;
Bodies;
One Time;
One Space;
Subjects and attributes;
Causal influences;
The fancied;
The real.
We are now so familiar with the order that these notions have woven
for us out of the everlasting weather of our perceptions that we
find it hard to realize how little of a fixed routine the
perceptions follow when taken by themselves. The word weather is a
good one to use here. In Boston, for example, the weather has almost
no routine, the only law being that if you have had any weather for
two days, you will probably but not certainly have another weather
on the third. Weather-experience as it thus comes to Boston, is
discontinuous and chaotic. In point of temperature, of wind, rain or
sunshine, it MAY change three times a day. But the Washington
weather-bureau intellectualizes this disorder by making each
successive bit of Boston weather EPISODIC. It refers it to its place
and moment in a continental cyclone, on the history of which the
local changes everywhere are strung as beads are strung upon a cord.
Now it seems almost certain that young children and the inferior
animals take all their experiences very much as uninstructed
Bostonians take their weather.
Pages:
125
126
127
128
129
130
131
132
133
134
135
136
137
138
139
140
141
142
143
144
145
146
147
148
149