this is, to me, part of the world
which is external to me. But I am not now speaking of what we know by
inference, but only of what we directly perceive. I cannot directly
perceive your mind, but only your physical body. In the last resort it
will be found that I am aware of the existence of your mind only by
inference from perceived physical facts, such as the movements of your
body and the sounds that issue from your lips. The only mind which I
can immediately perceive is my own. There is then a physical world
external to us, and an internal mental world.

Which of these will naturally be regarded as the most real? Men will
regard as the most real that which is the most familiar, that which
they came first into {9} contact with, and have most experience of.
And this is unquestionably the external material world. When a child
is born, it turns its eyes to the light, which is an external physical
thing. Gradually it gets to know different objects in the room. It
comes to know its mother, but its mother is, in the first instance, a
physical object, a body. It is only long afterwards that its mother
becomes for the child a mind or a soul. In general, all our earliest
experiences are of the material world. We come to know of the mental
world only by introspection, and the habit of introspection comes in
youth or manhood only, and to many people it hardly comes at all. In
all those early impressionable years, therefore, when our most durable
ideas of the universe are formed, we are concerned almost exclusively
with the material world. The mental world with which we are much less
familiar consequently tends to appear to all of us something
comparatively unreal, a world of shadows. The bent of our minds
becomes materialistic.

What I have said of the individual is equally true of the race.
Primitive man does not brood over the facts of his own mind. Necessity
compels him to devote most of his life to the acquisition of food, and
to warding off the dangers which continually threaten him from other
physical objects. And even among ourselves, the majority of men have
to spend most of their time upon considering various aspects of things
external to them. By the individual training of each man, and by long
hereditary habit, then, it comes about that men tend to regard the
physical world as more real than the mental.

{10}

Abundant evidences of this are to be found in the structure of human
language. We seek to explain what