s what won't necessarily (though of course it may) put out
even a mental fire. Mental knives may be sharp, but they won't cut real
wood. Mental triangles are pointed, but their points won't wound. With
'real' objects, on the contrary, consequences always accrue; and thus
the real experiences get sifted from the mental ones, the things from
our thoughts of them, fanciful or true, and precipitated together as the
stable part of the whole experience-chaos, under the name of the
physical world. Of this our perceptual experiences are the nucleus, they
being the originally strong experiences. We add a lot of conceptual
experiences to them, making these strong also in imagination, and
building out the remoter parts of the physical world by their means; and
around this core of reality the world of laxly connected fancies and
mere rhapsodical objects floats like a bank of clouds. In the clouds,
all sorts of rules are violated which in the core are kept. Extensions
there can be indefinitely located; motion there obeys no Newton's laws.

VII

There is a peculiar class of experiences to which, whether we take them
as subjective or as objective, we _assign_ their several natures as
attributes, because in both contexts they affect their associates
actively, though in neither quite as 'strongly' or as sharply as things
affect one another by their physical energies. I refer here to
_appreciations_, which form an ambiguous sphere of being, belonging with
emotion on the one hand, and having objective 'value' on the other, yet
seeming not quite inner nor quite outer, as if a diremption had begun
but had not made itself complete.[23]

Experiences of painful objects, for example, are usually also painful
experiences; perceptions of loveliness, of ugliness, tend to pass muster
as lovely or as ugly perceptions; intuitions of the morally lofty are
lofty intuitions. Sometimes the adjective wanders as if uncertain where
to fix itself. Shall we speak of seductive visions or of visions of
seductive things? Of wicked desires or of desires for wickedness? Of
healthy thoughts or of thoughts of healthy objects? Of good impulses, or
of impulses towards the good? Of feelings of anger, or of angry
feelings? Both in the mind and in the thing, these natures modify their
context, exclude certain associates and determine others, have their
mates and incompatibles. Yet not as stubbornly as in the case of
physical qualities, for beauty and ugliness, love a