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And we solemnly begin to prate about chlorophyll. Oh, imbeciles, idiots, inexcusable owls! The whole of a child's development goes on from the great dynamic centers, and is basically non-mental. To introduce mental activity is to arrest the dynamic activity, and stultify true dynamic development.
May it not be, if we really are shut up to the circle of our experiences, that the physical things, which we have been accustomed to look upon as non-mental, are nothing more than complexes of sensations?
And then also, as a result, the mind wakens to its impressions and to its incipient control. For at first the control is non-mental, even non-cerebral. The brain acts only as a sort of switchboard. The business of the father, in all this incipient child-development, is to stand outside as a final authority and make the necessary adjustments.
It is chiefly in this sense that Berkeley denies matter; that is to say, he does not deny that the sense-data which we commonly take as signs of the existence of the table are really signs of the existence of something independent of us, but he does deny that this something is non-mental, that it is neither mind nor ideas entertained by some mind.
And no fact about the constitution of our minds could make it true that two and two are four. Thus our a priori knowledge, if it is not erroneous, is not merely knowledge about the constitution of our minds, but is applicable to whatever the world may contain, both what is mental and what is non-mental.
It transfers its voice and its fire to the great hypogastric plexus, which governs, with the help of the sacral ganglion, the flow of urine through us, but which also voices the deep swaying of the blood in sex passion. Sex is our deepest form of consciousness. It is utterly non-ideal, non-mental. It is pure blood-consciousness.
There never was a more risky motto than that: Know thyself. You've got to know yourself as far as possible. But not just for the sake of knowing. You've got to know yourself so that you can at last be yourself. "Be yourself" is the last motto. The whole field of dynamic and effectual consciousness is always pre-mental, non-mental.
But in common language we speak of the sensible object experienced in a painful sensation as a pain, and it is this way of speaking which causes the confusion upon which the plausibility of Berkeley's argument depends. It would be absurd to attribute the quality of painfulness to anything non-mental, and hence it comes to be thought that what we call a pain in the toe must be mental.
Even if you incline toward a Non-mental Infinite, still if you are familiar with the results of modern scientific investigation, and know that Science has seen Matter resolve itself into something like Electric Energy, you will know that the Truth must lie behind and beyond Matter. Then is it Pure Energy? you may ask. Pure Energy? what's that?
Otherwise how could it maintain a definite and progressively developing relation to her? This consciousness, however, is utterly non-ideal, non-mental, purely dynamic, a matter of dynamic polarized intercourse of vital vibrations, as an exchange of wireless messages which are never translated from the pulse-rhythm into speech, because they have no need to be.
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