n which Augustine used the word. We are conscious
of _time_, of "crude" time, and from this we can pass to a knowledge of
real time, and can determine its parts with precision.

[1] Book XI, Chapters 14 and 15.

III. PROBLEMS TOUCHING THE MIND

CHAPTER VIII

WHAT IS THE MIND?

30. PRIMITIVE NOTIONS OF MIND.--The soul or mind, that something to
which we refer sensations and ideas of all sorts, is an object that men
do not seem to know very clearly and definitely, though they feel so
sure of its existence that they regard it as the height of folly to
call it in question. That he has a mind, no man doubts; what his mind
is, he may be quite unable to say.

We have seen (section 7) that children, when quite young, can hardly be
said to recognize that they have minds at all. This does not mean that
what is mental is not given in their experience. They know that they
must open their eyes to see things, and must lay their hands upon them
to feel them; they have had pains and pleasures, memories and fancies.
In short, they have within their reach all the materials needed in
framing a conception of the mind, and in drawing clearly the
distinction between their minds and external things. Nevertheless,
they are incapable of using these materials; their attention is
engrossed with what is physical,--with their own bodies and the bodies
of others, with the things that they can eat, with the toys with which
they can play, and the like. It is only later that there emerges even
a tolerably clear conception of a self or mind different from the
physical and contrasted with it.

Primitive man is almost as material in his thinking as is the young
child. Of this we have traces in many of the words which have come to
be applied to the mind. Our word "spirit" is from the Latin
_spiritus_, originally a breeze. The Latin word for the soul, the word
used by the great philosophers all through the Middle Ages, _anima_
(Greek, anemos), has the same significance. In the Greek New
Testament, the word used for spirit (pneuma) carries a similar
suggestion. When we are told in the Book of Genesis that "man became a
living soul," we may read the word literally "a breath."

What more natural than that the man who is just awakening to a
consciousness of that elusive entity the mind should confuse it with
that breath which is the most striking outward and visible sign that
distinguishes a living man from a dead one?

That tho