materialists, or the
seat and false knowledge of it, as with the transcendentalists, or
perhaps after all, as with the pan-psychists, mind means exactly matter
itself.[D]

[Sidenote: Origin of self-consciousness.]

To see how equivocal everything is in this region, and possibly to catch
some glimpse of whatever science or sciences might some day define it,
we may revert for a moment to the origin of human notions concerning the
mind. If either everything or nothing that men came upon in their
primitive day-dream had been continuous in its own category and
traceable through the labyrinth of the world, no mind and no
self-consciousness need ever have appeared at all. The world might have
been as magical as it pleased; it would have remained single, one
budding sequence of forms with no transmissible substance beneath them.
These forms might have had properties we now call physical and at the
same time qualities we now call mental or emotional; there is nothing
originally incongruous in such a mixture, chaotic and perverse as it may
seem from the vantage-ground of subsequent distinctions. Existence might
as easily have had any other form whatsoever as the one we discover it
to have in fact. And primitive men, not having read Descartes, and not
having even distinguished their waking from their dreaming life nor
their passions from their environment, might well stand in the presence
of facts that seem to us full of inward incongruity and contradiction;
indeed, it is only because original data were of that chaotic sort that
we call ourselves intelligent for having disentangled them and assigned
them to distinct sequences and alternative spheres.

The ambiguities and hesitations of theory, down to our own day, are not
all artificial or introduced gratuitously by sophists. Even where
prejudice obstructs progress, that prejudice itself has some ancient and
ingenuous source. Our perplexities are traces of a primitive total
confusion; our doubts are remnants of a quite gaping ignorance. It was
impossible to say whether the phantasms that first crossed this earthly
scene were merely instinct with passion or were veritable passions
stalking through space. Material and mental elements, connections
natural and dialectical, existed mingled in that chaos. Light was as yet
inseparable from inward vitality and pain drew a visible cloud across
the sky. Civilised life is that early dream partly clarified; science is
that dense mythology