Page:Symbolism, Its Meaning and Effect.pdf/32

20 11. Mental and Physical.

By way of being as intelligible as possible we might tacitly assign symbolic reference to mental activity, and thereby avoid some detailed explanation. It is a matter of pure convention as to which of our experiential activities we term mental and which physical. Personally I prefer to restrict mentality to those experiential activities which include concepts in addition to percepts. But much of our perception is due to the enhanced subtlety arising from a concurrent conceptual analysis. Thus in fact there is no proper line to be drawn between the physical and the mental constitution of experience. But there is no conscious knowledge apart from the intervention of mentality in the form of conceptual analysis.

It will be necessary later on to make some slight reference to conceptual analysis; but at present I must assume consciousness and its partial analysis of experience, and return to the two modes of pare perception. The point that I want to make here is, that the reason why low-grade purely physical organisms cannot make mistakes is not primarily their absence of thought, but their absence of presentational immediacy. Aesop’s dog, who was a