showing that mind-stuff is but a bashful
name for matter. Mind-stuff, like matter, can be only an element in any
actual being. To make a thing or a thought out of mind-stuff you have to
rely on the _system_ into which that material has fallen; the
substantive ingredients, from which an actual being borrows its
intensive quality, do not contain its individuating form. This form
depends on ideal relations subsisting between the ingredients, relations
which are not feelings but can be rendered only by propositions.]

CHAPTER V

PSYCHOLOGY

[Sidenote: Mind reading not science.]

If psychology is a science, many things that books of psychology contain
should be excluded from it. One is social imagination. Nature, besides
having a mechanical form and wearing a garment of sensible qualities,
makes a certain inner music in the beholder's mind, inciting him to
enter into other bodies and to fancy the new and profound life which he
might lead there. Who, as he watched a cat basking in the sun, has not
passed into that vigilant eye and felt all the leaps potential in that
luxurious torpor? Who has not attributed some little romance to the
passer-by? Who has not sometimes exchanged places even with things
inanimate, and drawn some new moral experience from following the
movement of stars or of daffodils? All this is idle musing or at best
poetry; yet our ordinary knowledge of what goes on in men's minds is
made of no other stuff. True, we have our own mind to go by, which
presumably might be a fair sample of what men's minds are; but
unfortunately our notion of ourselves is of all notions the most biassed
and idealistic. If we attributed to other men only such obvious
reasoning, sound judgment, just preferences, honest passions, and
blameless errors as we discover in ourselves, we should take but an
insipid and impractical view of mankind.

In fact, we do far better: for what we impute to our fellow-men is
suggested by their conduct or by an instant imitation of their gesture
and expression. These manifestations, striking us in all their novelty
and alien habit, and affecting our interests in all manner of awkward
ways, create a notion of our friends' natures which is extremely vivid
and seldom extremely flattering.

Such romancing has the cogency proper to dramatic poetry; it is
persuasive only over the third person, who has never had, but has always
been about to have, the experience in question. Drawn from the pot