Page:The Distinction between Mind and Its Objects.djvu/46

 whole but a whole centering in mind, and no self-existent whole but a concrete whole. I do not appeal to the idea of "self," at least in its current sense. Opinions differ, for example, as to whether society has a self; and therefore it is clear that the notion of self is too indefinite to use in establishing the notion which verbally appeals to it—the notion of self-existence or of a self-maintaining whole of experience.

How then do we compare the reality thus conceived with the world of the physical realist? We may illustrate by an old description of matter as mens momentanea, that is, I suppose, as what reality would be if the conditions of its full and explicit concreteness were removed, and its retention and continuity cut down to a vanishing point. We have most of us actual experience of some such stages as we pass under the influence of an anæsthetic, when continuity in space and time, concrete system, retentiveness, are gradually wiped out, and we feel ourselves stage by stage reduced from mind