Page:Mind-a quarterly review of psychology and philosophy, vol33, no130 (1924).djvu/5

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27. we concentrate our attention on the whole content of our mind, we find that this content exhibits one universal characteristic of which the mind is aware before it begins to analyse it into parts, the characteristic, namely, of activity, becoming, perpetual and all-pervading change. The content of our mind tells us in the first instance and before all else that something is going on; and whether we premise that it is going on within us or outside us—that this activity is the activity of the mind itself or that a part of this activity is the reflexion of an external fact—activity, becoming, is an incontestable fact which the mind observes in its content.

If we divide the content of the mind into the perceptual and non-perceptual, and, contenting ourselves with the “social” criterion of the difference between the two, say that the former is received by the mind from the external world, from nature, and that the latter is produced out of the mind itself, then nature appears to us in our perceptions as a process, as a swarm or succession of events, each of which is marked by this characteristic of its being.

Time.—28. If we reflect upon the content of the mind as a whole, and try to find some formative relation which is valid of this whole, we always come upon this dual character of the mind: the perceptual part of the content we can order under certain perceptual attributes, the non-perceptual part under non-perceptual attributes, but, as a general rule, we cannot order parts of the one class under an attribute of the other.