bnormal in
their existence, any more than there is in the bursting of a bottle.[8]
But they may be abnormal, from the standpoint of their influence, of
their operation as stimuli in calling out responses to modify the
future. Dreams have often been taken as prognostics of what is to
happen; they have modified conduct. A hallucination may lead a man to
consult a doctor; such a consequence is right and proper. But the
consultation indicates that the subject regarded it as an indication of
consequences which he feared: as a symptom of a disturbed life. Or the
hallucination may lead him to anticipate consequences which in fact flow
only from the possession of great wealth. Then the hallucination is a
disturbance of the normal course of events; the occurrence is wrongly
_used_ with reference to eventualities.

To regard reference to use and to desired and intended consequences as
involving a "subjective" factor is to miss the point, for this has
regard to the future. The uses to which a bottle are put are not mental;
they do not consist of physical states; they are further correlations of
natural existences. Consequences in use are genuine natural events; but
they do not occur without the intervention of behavior involving
anticipation of a future. The case is not otherwise with an
hallucination. The differences it makes are in any case differences in
the course of the one continuous world. The important point is whether
they are good or bad differences. To use the hallucination as a sign of
organic lesions that menace health means the beneficial result of seeing
a physician; to respond to it as a sign of consequences such as actually
follow only from being persecuted is to fall into error--to be abnormal.
The persecutors are "unreal"; that is, there are no things which act as
persecutors act; but the hallucination exists. Given its conditions it
is as natural as any other event, and poses only the same kind of
problem as is put by the occurrence of, say, a thunderstorm. The
"unreality" of persecution is not, however, a subjective matter; it
means that conditions do not exist for producing the _future_
consequences which are now anticipated and reacted to. Ability to
anticipate future consequences and to respond to them as stimuli to
present behavior may well _define_ what is meant by a mind or by
"consciousness."[9] But this is only a way of saying just what kind of a
real or natural existence the subject is; it is not to f