Daily Inspiration Quote by Samuel Alexander

Alexander is trying to dynamite a reflex most of us don’t even notice: the assumption that whatever shows up in consciousness must be, at bottom, “in the mind.” His sentence sounds like a riddle because it’s engineered to short-circuit that habit. When you perceive a tree, what you experience is not a private mental replica labeled “tree,” but the tree-as-presented, carrying the stubborn feel of externality. The perceived thing arrives with a built-in “not-me-ness.” That phenomenological fact - the world’s felt independence - is doing real philosophical labor here.

The intent is polemical, aimed at the long shadow of idealism and representationalism: theories that treat perception as contact with internal ideas, impressions, or sense-data. Alexander wants to insist that perception is not primarily the mind inspecting its own contents. It is a relation in which the object is given as non-mental. The subtext is a refusal to let epistemology bully ontology: just because perception is an act of mind doesn’t mean its object is mental. He’s separating the “act” (mental) from the “thing” (experienced as worldly), and he’s treating that separation as basic, not optional.

Context matters: Alexander’s early-20th-century realist project (especially in Space, Time, and Deity) tries to rebuild metaphysics with the world, not the psyche, as the starting point. The line’s clipped awkwardness is part of its force: it performs the split it argues for, making you feel how quickly language tries to re-mentalize what experience gives as outside.