dies occupy. That, however, is enough to
save them from being classed as absolutely non-objective.

The attempt, if any one should make it, to sort experiences into two
absolutely discrete groups, with nothing but inertness in one of them
and nothing but activities in the other, would thus receive one check.
It would receive another as soon as we examined the more distinctively
mental group; for though in that group it be true that things do not act
on one another by their physical properties, do not dent each other or
set fire to each other, they yet act on each other in the most energetic
way by those very characters which are so inert extracorporeally. It is
by the interest and importance that experiences have for us, by the
emotions they excite, and the purposes they subserve, by their affective
values, in short, that their consecution in our several conscious
streams, as 'thoughts' of ours, is mainly ruled. Desire introduces them;
interest holds them; fitness fixes their order and connection. I need
only refer for this aspect of our mental life, to Wundt's article 'Ueber
psychische Causalitaet,' which begins Volume X. of his _Philosophische
Studien_.[84]

It thus appears that the ambiguous or amphibious _status_ which we find
our epithets of value occupying is the most natural thing in the world.
It would, however, be an unnatural status if the popular opinion which I
cited at the outset were correct. If 'physical' and 'mental' meant two
different kinds of intrinsic nature, immediately, intuitively, and
infallibly discernible, and each fixed forever in whatever bit of
experience it qualified, one does not see how there could ever have
arisen any room for doubt or ambiguity. But if, on the contrary, these
words are words of sorting, ambiguity is natural. For then, as soon as
the relations of a thing are sufficiently various it can be sorted
variously. Take a mass of carrion, for example, and the
'disgustingness' which for us is part of the experience. The sun
caresses it, and the zephyr wooes it as if it were a bed of roses. So
the disgustingness fails to _operate_ within the realm of suns and
breezes,--it does not function as a physical quality. But the carrion
'turns our stomach' by what seems a direct operation--it _does_ function
physically, therefore, in that limited part of physics. We can treat it
as physical or as non-physical according as we take it in the narrower
or in the wider context, and conversely,