is strange by means of what is
well-known. We try to express the unfamiliar in terms of the familiar.
We shall find that language always seeks to express the mental by the
analogy of the physical. We speak of a man as a "clear" thinker.
"Clear" is an attribute of physical objects. Water is clear if it has
no extraneous matter in it. We say that a man's ideas are "luminous,"
thus taking a metaphor from physical light. We talk of having an idea
"at the back of the mind." "At the back of"? Has the mind got a front
and a back? We are thinking of it as if it were a physical thing in
space. We speak of mental habits of "attention." "Attention" means
stretching or turning the mind in a special direction. We "reflect."
"Reflection" means bending our thoughts back upon themselves. But,
literally speaking, only physical objects can be stretched, turned,
and bent. Whenever we wish to express something mental we do it by a
physical analogy. We talk of it in terms of physical things. This
shows how deep-rooted our materialism is. If the mental world were
more familiar and real to us than the material, language would have
been constructed on the opposite principle. The earliest words of
language would have expressed mental facts, and we should afterwards
have tried to express physical things by means of mental analogies.

In the East one commonly hears Oriental idealism contrasted with
Western materialism. Such phrases may possess a certain relative
truth. But if they mean that there is in the East, or anywhere else in
the world, {11} a race of men who are naturally idealists, they are
nonsense. Materialism is ingrained in all men. We, Easterns or
Westerns, are born materialists. Hence when we try to think of objects
which are commonly regarded as non-material, such as God or the soul,
it requires continual effort, a tremendous struggle, to avoid
picturing them as material things. It goes utterly against the grain.
Perhaps hundreds of thousands of years of hereditary materialism are
against us. The popular idea of ghosts will illustrate this. Those who
believe in ghosts, I suppose, regard them as some sort of disembodied
souls. The pictures of ghosts in magazines show them as if composed of
matter, but matter of some _thin_ kind, such as vapour. Certain Indian
systems of thought, which are by way of regarding themselves as
idealistic, nevertheless teach that thought or mind is an extremely
subtle kind of matter, far subtler than any