The radical rub, in this instance, is in the near improbability of anyone’s mind ever clearly comprehending the full picture of a laboratory in which there is nothing but a single microscope, engaged in the single effort to examine itself: to put itself under the light of its own lens, and from such observations, obtain objective understanding thereof.
Under the routine conditions of ordinary men’s lives, consciousness handles this non rationally handle-able problem by the invention of a fictional character; by referring to itself as a noun: “mind,” rather than the verb that it in truth be.
The microscope is not an object – it is an operation. Consciousness is not a tangible solid, but a vaporous restlessness. At the cellular level, consciousness understands this, and in an attempt to yet make possible a study of itself, (in spite of such apparently prohibitive conditions), it has given itself the alternative name, “mind,” treating it almost like an imaginary playmate, and assuming the position of it now being something apart from mind, and thus capable of making outside judgments.
Thus does consciousness perform its duties by seeing life in terms of objects, which facilitates being able to conceive of, then rearrange, the physical conditions of the environment to its advantage.
Consciousness slows and reduces the ceaseless blur of uninterrupted, reality-the-verb, into stilled, separate, and mentally-manageable, perceptions-of-life-being-nouns. Consciousness thus assumes the expedient position of considering itself to be a thing – “the mind,” (a noun, rather than a more difficult to handle, verb), and it also employs this same useful fiction in its view of life.
J.