Now if it is not the causal connections which
we are concerned with, then the activities of the mind lie open
before us. And when we are worried about the nature of
thinking, the puzzlement which we wrongly interpret to be one about
the nature of a medium is a puzzlement caused by the mystifying use
of our language. This kind of mistake recurs again and
again in philosophy, e.g. when we are puzzled
about the nature of time; when time seems to us a queer
thing. We are most strongly tempted to think that here
are things hidden, something we can see from the outside but which
we can't look into. And yet nothing of the sort
is the case. It is not new facts about time which we
want to know. All the facts that concern us lie open
before us. But it is the use of the substantive
“time” which mystifies us. If we look
into
10.
the grammar of that word,
we shall feel that it is no less astounding that man should have
conceived of a deity of time than it would be to conceive of a
deity of negation or disjunction.