Physical things are perceptual things. They also arise within the act... It is in the operation with these perceptual or physical things which lie wi… - George Herbert Mead

George Herbert Mead (1927;314), as cited in: Marcus Persson (2007), Mellan människor och ting. En interaktionistisk analys av samlandet, p. 19

Man lives in a world of Meaning. What he sees and hears means what he will or might handle.

There is, of course, the critical difference between the pressure of hands against each other, and that of the stone against the hand: that in the case of the pressure of the hands against each other there is the sense of effort in each hand, while in the case of the stone there is only the sense of resistance in the stone against the pressing hand. However, the resistance remains an identical content of the two. Furthermore, the resistance of the hand arises only over against that of the stone. The stone defines the hand as necessarily as the hand the hand. It is a fundamental experience in which each object involves the other. It is that from which geometrical congruence is abstracted. Each surface, that of the hand and that of the stone, is given as immediately as the other, and the resistance of the one is given as immediately as that of the other. The abstraction of it in physical science is inertia. Out of the experience arise the physical thing and the organism. Neither is prior.