The Interpretation of Experience 67 



ing what we call the secrets of nature ; the physician is daily face 

 to face with the mysteries of the human body, and yet the 

 teacher, who is not dealing with mere stocks and stones, nor yet 

 with the physical body, but with the intangible intellectual and 

 spiritual nature of the child, is so seldom conscious of the fact 

 that he is face to face with a greater mystery than those of 

 either scientist or the physician — with the mystery of human 

 personality — which is one that will yield itself only to the same 

 patient, conscientious, and devoted self-sacrifice that is cheer- 

 fully given to the discovery of the secrets of the inorganic and 

 the organic realms of nature. 



If, then, we take our experience as it is, here and now, we 

 find that it includes far more than appears on the surface — more 

 than actual paper and pen and thoughts that constitute the super- 

 ficial activity of the present moment. There is, as it were, a 

 psychic background, a margin of consciousness, that is crowded 

 with a moving throng of ideas and feelings, some of them past 

 experiences, others anticipations, hopes, beliefs, attitudes to fu- 

 ture experiences ; yet all, past, present, and future, are part of 

 my thinking and feeling, are part of me, of my experience, and 

 all take part in the conscious or unconscious modification and 

 regulation of the particular activity of the moment. 



There is then a twofold unity in my experience : there is on 

 the one hand this more or less external unity of activity in which 

 all that I do, express, or actually control and take part in, is the 

 deed and the expression of my own individual activity ; and there 

 is on the other hand that 'inner psychic intellectual or spiritual 

 unity of thought which is but another aspect of the same unitary 

 experience. 



Space and Time are two concepts whose regulative control of 

 our activities has been somewhat misrepresented since the time 

 of Kant, owing to a proper idealistic interpretation of them as 

 forms of experience. Space and Time are not to be regarded as 

 self-existent entities apart from human experience but rather 

 as regulative phases of the thought-process, and of the method 

 of our experience. The failure to regard them as merely regu- 

 lative and not constitutive of experience has been to some extent 

 responsible for the conception of our mental life as consisting of 

 the actual perceptual content (Space) of the mind at a given 

 moment (Time) and not as a psychic continuum stretching back 



