SPACE AND TIME 153 



with stored impresses of past hardnesses and pains, yet I 

 project the sense-impression hardness into something out- 

 side self, but the pain I consider as something pecuHar to 

 my inside. I speak of my pain and your pain ; yet not 

 of my hardness and your hardness, but of hardness as 

 something pecuhar to the table - leg. I thus give an 

 objective reality to one group of sense-impressions, which 

 I refuse to another. 



Now this distinction seems to me to have arisen from 

 the historical fact that the stored sense-impresses with 

 which we associate hardness have been drawn from the 

 tangible and visible world " outside skin," while those with 

 which we associate pain have been largely drawn from the 

 intangible and invisible world " inside skin." Even as 

 our knowledge develops and " inside skin " becomes less 

 intangible and invisible, even as we learn to associate pain 

 with the stored impresses of various local organs " inside 

 skin," we still feel it a somewhat doubtful use of language 

 to talk of pain as " existing in space." Gradually, how- 

 ever, the skin has ceased to be a well-marked boundary 

 between outside and inside. Self, like the soul of the 

 metaphysicians, has disappeared from body and been con- 

 centrated in consciousness. Self, seated (metaphorically, 

 not physically) in the telephonic brain exchange, receives 

 an infinite variety of messages, which we can only assume 

 to reach self in precisely the same manner. Yet self 

 classes some groups of these messages together, and speaks 

 of them as objects existing in space, while to other groups 

 it has denied in the past, or still denies, this spacial 

 existence. How far is this distinction logical, how far 

 historical ? ^ 



Now we shall find that the instant we associate a 

 number of sense -impressions in a group, and separate 

 them in perception from other groups, we consider them 

 " to exist in space." Space is thus, in the first place, a 



1 By historical I mean that which arises in the natural history of man 

 from imperfect knowledge and illogical inference. Thus the belief in ghosts, 

 witches, and storm-spirits is a perfectly intelligible stage in the natural history 

 of man, but not a logical inference from any natural phenomena in the light 

 of more perfect knowledge. 



