68 Tlie Concept of Method 



into the past and forward into the future, integrating the past 

 in the present experience, and shaping future aims and actions 

 upon that basis. And yet in my experience, anterior and pos- 

 terior elements are involved. Thought is no more actually con- 

 cerned with mere perception as a material for its activity than 

 it is with memory which brings past experience up to date, and 

 with imagination which deals with possible experience in the 

 future. The comparatively unrelated elements in our present ex- 

 perience have little educational value : they must be organised 

 into the experience of some particular personality. One of the 

 characteristics of our minds is this organising psychic activity 

 which binds together past, present, and future into one expression 

 of a threefold temporal unity — three times in one time. And this 

 same is true of Space : for the activity of the imagination in 

 thought brings together in one unitary experience the uttermost 

 parts of the earth with at the same time the realisation that one 

 is sitting in a chair here and now. 



To sum up, then, there is this threefold aspect of experience, 

 past, present and future, which finds its psychic coordinate in 

 memory, perception, and imagination, which are in turn but con- 

 sciously analysed aspects of one unitary process of thought. One 

 of the things, therefore, that we do when we think is the sub- 

 sumption or organisation of the diversity of phenomenal percep- 

 tion under the unity of thought through the activity manifested 

 by a living personality in his experience. 



There are several implications of the organising activity of 

 thinking that require consideration : 



(i) There must be some community between the mind that 

 thinks and the object thought about — i. e. some correspondence 

 between the course of nature and the mind of man. Disparate 

 elements, unhomogeneous particulars, cannot be organically re- 

 lated in the unity of conception. There must be a certain mutual 

 adaptation between the mind that thinks and that material about 

 which it thinks. A thought can have no human signification 

 apart from the thinking process. 



(2) Hence, the distinction between the subjective and objec- 

 tive is never made in the actual process of thinking. It is a 

 psychological impossibility to place the thought as a reality self- 

 existent outside the mind. Thought is thinking, and is a form 

 of experience; and part of our experience is thought. Exter- 



