Page:The Distinction between Mind and Its Objects.djvu/21

 mind is mental; the table, its object, is external or physical, even down to its colour as I have sensation of it. This is the essential experience of cognition and sense-perception; and this is all there is about it.

What is here the line between my mind and its object? How much belongs to my mind and how much to the table?

To grasp the realist's answer we must insist on a distinction which all twentieth century thinkers acknowledge, though not all admit the same degree of distinctness between its terms. I speak, of course, of the distinction between the act and the object—between the act of seeing and the colour which I see; between the act of perceiving and the present thing which I perceive; between the act of thinking and the thing, it may be, absent, of which I think. Opinions differ as to the assignment of these objects, especially such an object or content as seems directly present in sensation, to the mind on the one hand, or to the external or physical reality on the other. But the realist whom