Page:The Distinction between Mind and Its Objects.djvu/25

 is not, as Spinoza called it, the idea of your body, and of other things only through that. You open your eyes, and are aware of a tree before you. This is a fact just like that of a table being on the floor. Only in this case one of the existents is a mind. The other is, just as the mind is aware of it, an external physical reality.

And, as I understand the argument, the tree itself is made up of objects corresponding to your mental acts; of what you "sense," of what you perceive, of what you think—that is, of flashes or fulgurations of its qualities, of qualities themselves, something more permanent than the flashes, and of a universal nature or real law governing the combination and action of its qualities. We have of course to resist being led away by the sound of this doctrine, to impute to the realist an extreme idealism. When you read that a physical thing, a material substance, 'is made up of sensa, percepta, and thoughts' you have hard work to remember