104 
MAGICK WITHOUT TEARS 
From one point of view (bless your heart!) you are nothing 
at all but a bundle of memories. When you say "this is 
happening now," you are a falsifier of God's sacred truth! 
When I say "I see a horse," the truth is that "I record in 
those terms my private hieroglyphic interpretation of the 
unknown and unknowable phenomenon (or 'point-event') 
which has more or less recently taken place at the other end 
of my system of receiving impressions." 
Well, then! You realize, of course, how many millions or 
billions of memories there must be to compose any average 
well-trained mind. Those strings of adjectives all sprang 
spontaneously; I did not look them up in books of reference; 
so imagine the extent of my full vocabulary! And words are 
but the half-baked bricks with which one constructs. 
See to it, then, that you accept no worthless material; that 
you select, and select again, always in proper order and 
proportion; organize, structuralize your thought, always with 
the one aim in view of accomplishing the Great Work. 
Well, now, before going further into this, I must behave 
like an utter cad, and disgrace my family tree, and blot my 
'scutcheon 
and my copybook by confusing you about 
"realism." Excuse: not my muddle; it was made centuries ago 
by a gang of cursed monks, headed by one Duns 
Scotus-sQ-called 
because he was Irish-or 
if not by 
somebody else equally objectionable . They held to the 
Platonic dogma of archetypes. They maintained that there 
was an original (divine) idea such as "greenness" or a "pig," 
and that a green pig, as observed in nature, was just one 
example of these two ideal essences. They were opposed by 
the "nominalists," 
who said, to the contrary, 
that 
"greenness" or "a pig" were nothing in themselves; they were 
mere names (nominalism from Lat. nomen, a name) invented 
for convenience 
of grouping. This doctrine is plain 
commonsense, and I shall waste no time in demolishing the 
realists. 
All a priori thinking, the worst kind of thinking, goes with 
"realism" in this sense.