Men believed whatever they thought with any liveliness, and they
mixed their dreams with their realities inextricably. The categories
of 'thought' and 'things' are indispensable here--instead of being
realities we now call certain experiences only 'thoughts.' There is
not a category, among those enumerated, of which we may not imagine
the use to have thus originated historically and only gradually
spread.
That one Time which we all believe in and in which each event has
its definite date, that one Space in which each thing has its
position, these abstract notions unify the world incomparably; but
in their finished shape as concepts how different they are from the
loose unordered time-and-space experiences of natural men!
Everything that happens to us brings its own duration and extension,
and both are vaguely surrounded by a marginal 'more' that runs into
the duration and extension of the next thing that comes. But we soon
lose all our definite bearings; and not only do our children make no
distinction between yesterday and the day before yesterday, the
whole past being churned up together, but we adults still do so
whenever the times are large. It is the same with spaces. On a map I
can distinctly see the relation of London, Constantinople, and Pekin
to the place where I am; in reality I utterly fail to FEEL the facts
which the map symbolizes.
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