ely practical or intellectual ends.

I will say nothing here of the persistent ambiguity of _relations_. They
are undeniable parts of pure experience; yet, while common sense and
what I call radical empiricism stand for their being objective, both
rationalism and the usual empiricism claim that they are exclusively the
'work of the mind'--the finite mind or the absolute mind, as the case
may be.

* * * * *

Turn now to those affective phenomena which more directly concern us.

We soon learn to separate the ways in which things appeal to our
interests and emotions from the ways in which they act upon one another.
It does not _work_ to assume that physical objects are going to act
outwardly by their sympathetic or antipathetic qualities. The beauty of
a thing or its value is no force that can be plotted in a polygon of
compositions, nor does its 'use' or 'significance' affect in the
minutest degree its vicissitudes or destiny at the hands of physical
nature. Chemical 'affinities' are a purely verbal metaphor; and, as I
just said, even such things as forces, tensions, and activities can at a
pinch be regarded as anthropomorphic projections. So far, then, as the
physical world means the collection of contents that determine in each
other certain regular changes, the whole collection of our appreciative
attributes has to be treated as falling outside of it. If we mean by
physical nature whatever lies beyond the surface of our bodies, these
attributes are inert throughout the whole extent of physical nature.

Why then do men leave them as ambiguous as they do, and not class them
decisively as purely spiritual?

The reason would seem to be that, although they are inert as regards the
rest of physical nature, they are not inert as regards that part of
physical nature which our own skin covers. It is those very appreciative
attributes of things, their dangerousness, beauty, rarity, utility,
etc., that primarily appeal to our attention. In our commerce with
nature these attributes are what give _emphasis_ to objects; and for an
object to be emphatic, whatever spiritual fact it may mean, means also
that it produces immediate bodily effects upon us, alterations of tone
and tension, of heart-beat and breathing, of vascular and visceral
action. The 'interesting' aspects of things are thus not wholly inert
physically, though they be active only in these small corners of
physical nature which our bo