You may object that you cannot imagine a time when nothing existed in any phenomenal form, Were there not volcanoes, and dust-storms and starlight long before there was any life on Earth? Did not the sun rise in the East and set in the West? Did not water flow downhill, and light travel faster than sound? The answer is that if you had been there, that is indeed the way the phenomena would have appeared to you. But you were not there: no one was. And because no one was there, there was not - at this mindless stage of history - anything that counted as a volcano, or a dust-storm, and so on. I am not suggesting that the world had no substance to it whatsoever. We might say, perhaps, that it consisted of 'worldstuff'. But the properties of this worldstuff had yet to be represented by a mind. (Humphrey, 1993, p. 17)
Humphrey, N. 1993 A History of the Mind, Vintage, London