FOOTNOTES:

FOOTNOTES:[25][Reprinted from theJournal of Philosophy, Psychology and Scientific Methods, vol. I, 1904, No. 20, September 29, and No. 21, October 13. Pp. 52-76 have also been reprinted, with some omissions, alterations and additions, inThe Meaning of Truth, pp. 102-120. The alterations have been adopted in the present text. This essay is referred to inA Pluralistic Universe, p. 280, note 5.Ed.][26][Cf. Berkeley:Principles of Human Knowledge, Introduction; Hume:An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, sect.vii, partii(Selby-Bigge’s edition, p. 74); James Mill:Analysis of the Phenomena of the Human Mind, ch.viii; J. S. Mill:An Examination of Sir William Hamilton’s Philosophy, ch.xi,xii; W. K. Clifford:Lectures and Essays, pp. 274 ff.][27][See “The Experience of Activity,” below, pp.155-189.][28]The psychology books have of late described the facts here with approximate adequacy. I may refer to the chapters on ‘The Stream of Thought’ and on the Self in my ownPrinciples of Psychology, as well as to S. H. Hodgson’sMetaphysic of Experience, vol.i, ch.viiandviii.[29][See “The Thing and its Relations,” below, pp.92-122.][30]For brevity’s sake I altogether omit mention of the type constituted by knowledge of the truth of general propositions. This type has been thoroughly and, so far as I can see, satisfactorily, elucidated in Dewey’sStudies in Logical Theory. Such propositions are reducible to theS-is-Pform; and the ‘terminus’ that verifies and fulfils is theSPin combination. Of course percepts may be involved in the mediating experiences, or in the ‘satisfactoriness’ of thePin its new position.[31][See above, pp.9-15.][32][“On the Function of Cognition,”Mind, vol.x, 1885, and “The Knowing of Things Together,”Psychological Review, vol.ii, 1895. These articles are reprinted, the former in full, the latter in part, inThe Meaning of Truth, pp. 1-50.Ed.] These articles and their doctrine, unnoticed apparently by any one else, have lately gained favorable comment from Professor Strong. [“A Naturalistic Theory of the Reference of Thought to Reality,”Journal of Philosophy, Psychology and Scientific Methods, vol.i, 1904.] Dr. Dickinson S. Miller has independently thought out the same results [“The Meaning of Truth and Error,”Philosophical Review, vol.ii, 1893; “The Confusion of Function and Content in Mental Analysis,”Psychological Review, vol.ii, 1895], which Strong accordingly dubs the James-Miller theory of cognition.[33][Cf. H. Lotze:Metaphysik, §§ 37-39, 97, 98, 243.][34]Mr. Bradley, not professing to know his absolutealiunde, nevertheless derealizes Experience by alleging it to be everywhere infected with self-contradiction. His arguments seem almost purely verbal, but this is no place for arguing that point out. [Cf. F. H. Bradley;Appearance and Reality, passim;and below, pp.106-122.][35]Of which all that need be said in this essay is that it also can be conceived as functional, and defined in terms of transitions, or of the possibility of such. [Cf.Principles of Psychology, vol.i, pp. 473-480, vol.ii, pp. 337-340;Pragmatism, p. 265;Some Problems of Philosophy, pp. 63-74;Meaning of Truth, pp. 246-247, etc.Ed.][36][Cf. below, pp.93ff.][37][Cf. “How Two Minds Can Know One Thing,” below, pp.123-136.][38]The notion that our objects are inside of our respective heads is not seriously defensible, so I pass it by.[39][The argument is resumed below, pp.101sq.Ed.][40]Our minds and these ejective realities would still have space (or pseudo-space, as I believe Professor Strong calls the medium of interaction between ‘things-in-themselves’) in common. These would existwhere, and begin to actwhere, we locate the molecules, etc., andwherewe perceive the sensible phenomena explained thereby. [Cf. Morton Prince:The Nature of Mind, and Human Automatism, parti, ch.iii,iv; C. A. Strong:Why the Mind Has a Body, ch.xii.][41][Cf. below, p.188;A Pluralistic Universe, Lect.iv-vii.][42]I have said something of this latter alliance in an article entitled ‘Humanism and Truth,’ inMind, October, 1904. [Reprinted inThe Meaning of Truth, pp. 51-101. Cf. also “Humanism and Truth Once More,” below, pp.244-265.]

[25][Reprinted from theJournal of Philosophy, Psychology and Scientific Methods, vol. I, 1904, No. 20, September 29, and No. 21, October 13. Pp. 52-76 have also been reprinted, with some omissions, alterations and additions, inThe Meaning of Truth, pp. 102-120. The alterations have been adopted in the present text. This essay is referred to inA Pluralistic Universe, p. 280, note 5.Ed.]

[26][Cf. Berkeley:Principles of Human Knowledge, Introduction; Hume:An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, sect.vii, partii(Selby-Bigge’s edition, p. 74); James Mill:Analysis of the Phenomena of the Human Mind, ch.viii; J. S. Mill:An Examination of Sir William Hamilton’s Philosophy, ch.xi,xii; W. K. Clifford:Lectures and Essays, pp. 274 ff.]

[27][See “The Experience of Activity,” below, pp.155-189.]

[28]The psychology books have of late described the facts here with approximate adequacy. I may refer to the chapters on ‘The Stream of Thought’ and on the Self in my ownPrinciples of Psychology, as well as to S. H. Hodgson’sMetaphysic of Experience, vol.i, ch.viiandviii.

[29][See “The Thing and its Relations,” below, pp.92-122.]

[30]For brevity’s sake I altogether omit mention of the type constituted by knowledge of the truth of general propositions. This type has been thoroughly and, so far as I can see, satisfactorily, elucidated in Dewey’sStudies in Logical Theory. Such propositions are reducible to theS-is-Pform; and the ‘terminus’ that verifies and fulfils is theSPin combination. Of course percepts may be involved in the mediating experiences, or in the ‘satisfactoriness’ of thePin its new position.

[31][See above, pp.9-15.]

[32][“On the Function of Cognition,”Mind, vol.x, 1885, and “The Knowing of Things Together,”Psychological Review, vol.ii, 1895. These articles are reprinted, the former in full, the latter in part, inThe Meaning of Truth, pp. 1-50.Ed.] These articles and their doctrine, unnoticed apparently by any one else, have lately gained favorable comment from Professor Strong. [“A Naturalistic Theory of the Reference of Thought to Reality,”Journal of Philosophy, Psychology and Scientific Methods, vol.i, 1904.] Dr. Dickinson S. Miller has independently thought out the same results [“The Meaning of Truth and Error,”Philosophical Review, vol.ii, 1893; “The Confusion of Function and Content in Mental Analysis,”Psychological Review, vol.ii, 1895], which Strong accordingly dubs the James-Miller theory of cognition.

[33][Cf. H. Lotze:Metaphysik, §§ 37-39, 97, 98, 243.]

[34]Mr. Bradley, not professing to know his absolutealiunde, nevertheless derealizes Experience by alleging it to be everywhere infected with self-contradiction. His arguments seem almost purely verbal, but this is no place for arguing that point out. [Cf. F. H. Bradley;Appearance and Reality, passim;and below, pp.106-122.]

[35]Of which all that need be said in this essay is that it also can be conceived as functional, and defined in terms of transitions, or of the possibility of such. [Cf.Principles of Psychology, vol.i, pp. 473-480, vol.ii, pp. 337-340;Pragmatism, p. 265;Some Problems of Philosophy, pp. 63-74;Meaning of Truth, pp. 246-247, etc.Ed.]

[36][Cf. below, pp.93ff.]

[37][Cf. “How Two Minds Can Know One Thing,” below, pp.123-136.]

[38]The notion that our objects are inside of our respective heads is not seriously defensible, so I pass it by.

[39][The argument is resumed below, pp.101sq.Ed.]

[40]Our minds and these ejective realities would still have space (or pseudo-space, as I believe Professor Strong calls the medium of interaction between ‘things-in-themselves’) in common. These would existwhere, and begin to actwhere, we locate the molecules, etc., andwherewe perceive the sensible phenomena explained thereby. [Cf. Morton Prince:The Nature of Mind, and Human Automatism, parti, ch.iii,iv; C. A. Strong:Why the Mind Has a Body, ch.xii.]

[41][Cf. below, p.188;A Pluralistic Universe, Lect.iv-vii.]

[42]I have said something of this latter alliance in an article entitled ‘Humanism and Truth,’ inMind, October, 1904. [Reprinted inThe Meaning of Truth, pp. 51-101. Cf. also “Humanism and Truth Once More,” below, pp.244-265.]

Experience in its immediacy seems perfectly fluent. The active sense of living which we all enjoy, before reflection shatters our instinctive world for us, is self-luminous and suggests no paradoxes. Its difficulties are disappointments and uncertainties. They are not intellectual contradictions.

When the reflective intellect gets at work, however, it discovers incomprehensibilities in the flowing process. Distinguishing its elements and parts, it gives them separate names, and what it thus disjoins it can not easily put together. Pyrrhonism accepts the irrationality and revels in its dialectic elaboration. Other philosophies try, some by ignoring, some by resisting, and some by turning the dialectic procedure against itself, negating its first negations, to restore the fluent sense of life again, and let redemption take the place of innocence. The perfection with which any philosophy may do this is the measure of its human success and of its importance in philosophic history. In [the last essay], ‘A World of Pure Experience,’ I tried my own hand sketchily at the problem, resisting certain first steps of dialectics by insisting in a general way that the immediately experienced conjunctive relations are as real as anything else. If my sketch is not to appear toonaïf, I must come closer to details, and in the present essay I propose to do so.

‘Pure experience’ is the name which I gave to the immediate flux of life which furnishes the material to our later reflection with its conceptual categories. Only new-born babes, or men in semi-coma from sleep, drugs, illnesses, or blows, may be assumed to have an experience pure in the literal sense of athatwhich is not yet any definitewhat, tho’ ready to be all sorts of whats; full both of onenessand of manyness, but in respects that don’t appear; changing throughout, yet so confusedly that its phases interpenetrate and no points, either of distinction or of identity, can be caught. Pure experience in this state is but another name for feeling or sensation. But the flux of it no sooner comes than it tends to fill itself with emphases, and these salient parts become identified and fixed and abstracted; so that experience now flows as if shot through with adjectives and nouns and prepositions and conjunctions. Its purity is only a relative term, meaning the proportional amount of unverbalized sensation which it still embodies.

Far back as we go, the flux, both as a whole and in its parts, is that of things conjunct and separated. The great continua of time, space, and the self envelope everything, betwixt them, and flow together without interfering. The things that they envelope come as separate in some ways and as continuous in others. Some sensations coalesce with some ideas, and others are irreconcilable. Qualitiescompenetrate one space, or exclude each other from it. They cling together persistently in groups that move as units, or else they separate. Their changes are abrupt or discontinuous; and their kinds resemble or differ; and, as they do so, they fall into either even or irregular series.

In all this the continuities and the discontinuities are absolutely co-ordinate matters of immediate feeling. The conjunctions are as primordial elements of ‘fact’ as are the distinctions and disjunctions. In the same act by which I feel that this passing minute is a new pulse of my life, I feel that the old life continues into it, and the feeling of continuance in no wise jars upon the simultaneous feeling of a novelty. They, too, compenetrate harmoniously. Prepositions, copulas, and conjunctions, ‘is,’ ‘isn’t,’ ‘then,’ ‘before,’ ‘in,’ ‘on,’ ‘beside,’ ‘between,’ ‘next,’ ‘like,’ ‘unlike,’ ‘as,’ ‘but,’ flower out of the stream of pure experience, the stream of concretes or the sensational stream, as naturally as nouns and adjectives do, and they melt into it again as fluidly when we apply them to a new portion of the stream.

If now we ask why we must thus translate experience from a more concrete or pure into a more intellectualized form, filling it with ever more abounding conceptual distinctions, rationalism and naturalism give different replies.

The rationalistic answer is that the theoretic life is absolute and its interests imperative; that to understand is simply the duty of man; and that who questions this need not be argued with, for by the fact of arguing he gives away his case.

The naturalist answer is that the environment kills as well as sustains us, and that the tendency of raw experience to extinguish the experient himself is lessened just in the degree in which the elements in it that have a practical bearing upon life are analyzed out of the continuum and verbally fixed and coupled together, so that we may know what is in the wind for us and get ready to react in time. Had pure experience, the naturalist says, been always perfectly healthy, there would neverhave arisen the necessity of isolating or verbalizing any of its terms. We should just have experienced inarticulately and unintellectually enjoyed. This leaning on ‘reaction’ in the naturalist account implies that, whenever we intellectualize a relatively pure experience, we ought to do so for the sake of redescending to the purer or more concrete level again; and that if an intellect stays aloft among its abstract terms and generalized relations, and does not reinsert itself with its conclusions into some particular point of the immediate stream of life, it fails to finish out its function and leaves its normal race unrun.

Most rationalists nowadays will agree that naturalism gives a true enough account of the way in which our intellect arose at first, but they will deny these latter implications. The case, they will say, resembles that of sexual love. Originating in the animal need of getting another generation born, this passion has developed secondarily such imperious spiritual needs that, if you ask why another generation ought to be born at all, the answer is: ‘Chieflythat love may go on.’ Just so with our intellect: it originated as a practical means of serving life; but it has developed incidentally the function of understanding absolute truth; and life itself now seems to be given chiefly as a means by which that function may be prosecuted. But truth and the understanding of it lie among the abstracts and universals, so the intellect now carries on its higher business wholly in this region, without any need of redescending into pure experience again.

If the contrasted tendencies which I thus designate as naturalistic and rationalistic are not recognized by the reader, perhaps an example will make them more concrete. Mr. Bradley, for instance, is an ultra-rationalist. He admits that our intellect is primarily practical, but says that, for philosophers, the practical need is simply Truth. Truth, moreover, must be assumed ‘consistent.’ Immediate experience has to be broken into subjects and qualities, terms and relations, to be understood as truth at all. Yet when so broken it is less consistent than ever. Taken raw, it is allun-distinguished. Intellectualized, it is all distinction without oneness. ‘Such an arrangement maywork, but the theoretic problem is not solved.’ The question is ‘howthe diversity can exist in harmony with the oneness.’ To go back to pure experience is unavailing. ‘Mere feeling gives no answer to our riddle.’ Even if your intuition is a fact, it is not anunderstanding. ‘It is a mere experience, and furnishes no consistent view.’ The experience offered as facts or truths ‘I find that my intellect rejects because they contradict themselves. They offer a complex of diversities conjoined in a way which it feels is not its way and which it can not repeat as its own.... For to be satisfied, my intellect must understand, and it can not understand by taking a congeries in the lump.’[44]So Mr. Bradley, in the sole interests of ‘understanding’ (as he conceives that function), turns his back on finite experience forever. Truth must lie in the opposite direction, the direction of the Absolute; and this kind of rationalism and naturalism, or (as I will now call it) pragmatism, walk thenceforward upon opposite paths. For the one, those intellectual products are most true which, turning their face towards the Absolute, come nearest to symbolizing its ways of uniting the many and the one. For the other, those are most true which most successfully dip back into the finite stream of feeling and grow most easily confluent with some particular wave or wavelet. Such confluence not only proves the intellectual operation to have been true (as an addition may ‘prove’ that a subtraction is already rightly performed), but it constitutes, according to pragmatism, all that we mean by calling it true. Only in so far as they lead us, successfully or unsuccessfully, back into sensible experience again, are our abstracts and universals true or false at all.[45]

In Section VI of [the last essay], I adopted in a general way the common-sense belief that one and the same world is cognized by our different minds; but I left undiscussed the dialectical arguments which maintain that this is logically absurd. The usual reason given for its being absurd is that it assumes one object (to wit, the world) to stand in two relations at once; to my mind, namely, and again to yours; whereas a term taken in a second relation can not logically be the same term which it was at first.

I have heard this reason urged so often in discussing with absolutists, and it would destroy my radical empiricism so utterly, if it were valid, that I am bound to give it an attentive ear, and seriously to search its strength.

For instance, let the matter in dispute be termM, asserted to be on the one hand related toL, and on the other toN; and let the two cases of relation be symbolized byL—MandM—Nrespectively. When, now, I assume that the experience may immediately come and be given in the shapeL—M—N, with no trace of doubling or internal fission in theM, I am told that this is all a popular delusion; thatL—M—Nlogically means two different experiences,L—MandM—N, namely; and that although the Absolute may, and indeed must, from its superior point of view, read its own kind of unity intoM’s two editions, yet as elements in finite experience the twoM’s lie irretrievably asunder, and the world between them is broken and unbridged.

In arguing this dialectic thesis, one must avoid slipping from the logical into the physical point of view. It would be easy, in taking a concrete example to fix one’s ideas by, to choose one in which the letterMshould stand for a collective noun of some sort, which noun, being related toLby one of its parts and toNby another, would inwardly be two things when it stood outwardly in both relations. Thus, one might say: ‘David Hume, who weighed so many stone by his body, influences posterity by his doctrine.’ The body and the doctrine are two things, between which our finite minds can discover no real sameness, though the same name covers both of them.And then, one might continue: ‘Only an Absolute is capable of uniting such a non-identity.’ We must, I say, avoid this sort of example, for the dialectic insight, if true at all, must apply to terms and relations universally. It must be true of abstract units as well as of nouns collective; and if we prove it by concrete examples we must take the simplest, so as to avoid irrelevant material suggestions.

Taken thus in all its generality, the absolutist contention seems to use as its major premise Hume’s notion ‘that all our distinct perceptions are distinct existences, and that the mind never perceives any real connexion among distinct existences.’[46]Undoubtedly, since we use two phrases in talking first about ‘M’s relation toL’ and then about ‘M’s relation toN,’ we must be having, or must have had, two distinct perceptions;—and the rest would then seem to follow duly. But the starting-point of the reasoning here seems to be the fact of the twophrases; and this suggests that the argument may be merely verbal. Can it be that the whole dialectic consists in attributing to the experience talked-about a constitution similar to that of the language in which we describe it? Must we assert the objective double-ness of theMmerely because we have to name it twice over when we name its two relations?

Candidly, I can think of no other reason than this for the dialectic conclusion;[47]for, if we think, not of our words, but of any simple concrete matter which they may be held to signify, the experience itself belies the paradox asserted. We use indeed two separate concepts in analyzing our object, but we know them all the while to be but substitutional, and that theMinL—Mand theMinM—N mean(i.e., are capable of leading to and terminating in) one self-same piece,M, of sensible experience. This persistent identity of certain units (or emphases, or points, or objects, or members—call them what you will) of the experience-continuum, is just one of those conjunctivefeatures of it, on which I am obliged to insist so emphatically.[48]For samenesses are parts of experience’s indefeasible structure. When I hear a bell-stroke and, as life flows on, its after image dies away, I still hark back to it as ‘that same bell-stroke.’ When I see a thingM, withLto the left of it andNto the right of it, I see itasoneM; and if you tell me I have had to ‘take’ it twice, I reply that if I ‘took’ it a thousand times I should stillseeit as a unit.[49]Its unity is aboriginal, just as the multiplicity of my successive takings is aboriginal. It comes unbroken asthat M, as a singular which I encounter; they come broken, asthosetakings, as my plurality of operations. The unity and the separateness are strictly co-ordinate. I do not easily fathom why my opponents should find the separateness so much more easily understandable that they must needs infect the whole of finite experience with it, and relegate the unity (now taken as a bare postulate and no longer as a thing positively perceivable) to the region of the Absolute’s mysteries. I do not easily fathom this, I say, for the said opponents are above mere verbal quibbling; yet all that I can catch in their talk is the substitution of what is true of certain words for what is true of what they signify. They stay with the words,—not returning to the stream of life whence all the meaning of them came, and which is always ready to reabsorb them.

For aught this argument proves, then, we may continue to believe that one thing can be known by many knowers. But the denial of one thing in many relations is but one application of a still profounder dialectic difficulty. Man can’t be good, said the sophists, for man ismanandgoodis good; and Hegel[50]and Herbart in their day, more recently A. Spir,[51]and most recently and elaborately of all, Mr. Bradley, informs us that a term can logically only be a punctiform unit, and that not one of the conjunctive relations between things, which experience seems to yield, is rationally possible.

Of course, if true, this cuts off radical empiricism without even a shilling. Radical empiricism takes conjunctive relations at their face value, holding them to be as real as the terms united by them.[52]The world it represents as a collection, some parts of which are conjunctively and others disjunctively related. Two parts, themselves disjoined, may nevertheless hang together by intermediaries with which they are severally connected, and the whole world eventually may hang together similarly, inasmuch assomepath of conjunctive transition by which to pass from one of its parts to another may always be discernible. Such determinately various hanging-together may be calledconcatenatedunion, to distinguish it from the ‘through-and-through’ type of union,‘each in all and all in each’ (union oftotal conflux, as one might call it), which monistic systems hold to obtain when things are taken in their absolute reality. In a concatenated world a partial conflux often is experienced. Our concepts and our sensations are confluent; successive states of the same ego, and feelings of the same body are confluent. Where the experience is not of conflux, it may be of conterminousness (things with but one thing between); or of contiguousness (nothing between); or of likeness; or of nearness; or of simultaneousness; or of in-ness; or of on-ness; or of for-ness; or of simple with-ness; or even of mere and-ness, which last relation would make of however disjointed a world otherwise, at any rate for that occasion a universe ‘of discourse.’ Now Mr. Bradley tells us that none of these relations, as we actually experience them, can possibly be real.[53]My next duty, accordingly, must be to rescue radical empiricism from Mr. Bradley. Fortunately, as it seems to me, his general contention, that the very notion of relation is unthinkable clearly, has been successfully met by many critics.[54]

It is a burden to the flesh, and an injustice both to readers and to the previous writers, to repeat good arguments already printed. So, in noticing Mr. Bradley, I will confine myself to the interests of radical empiricism solely.

The first duty of radical empiricism, taking given conjunctions at their face-value, is to class some of them as more intimate and some as more external. When two terms aresimilar, their very natures enter into the relation.Beingwhatthey are, no matter where or when, the likeness never can be denied, if asserted. It continues predicable as long as the terms continue. Other relations, thewhereand thewhen, for example, seem adventitious. The sheet of paper may be ‘off’ or ‘on’ the table, for example; and in either case the relation involves only the outside of its terms. Having an outside, both of them, they contribute by it to the relation. It is external: the term’s inner nature is irrelevant to it. Any book, any table, may fall into the relation, which is createdpro hac vice, not by their existence, but by their casual situation. It is just because so many of the conjunctions of experience seem so external that a philosophy of pure experience must tend to pluralism in its ontology. So far as things have space-relations, for example, we are free to imagine them with different origins even. If they could get tobe, and get into space at all, then they may have done so separately. Once there, however, they areadditivesto one another, and, with no prejudice to their natures, all sorts of space-relations may supervenebetween them. The question of how things could come to be anyhow, is wholly different from the question what their relations, once the being accomplished, may consist in.

Mr. Bradley now affirms that such external relations as the space-relations which we here talk of must hold of entirely different subjects from those of which the absence of such relations might a moment previously have been plausibly asserted. Not only is thesituationdifferent when the book is on the table, but thebook itselfis different as a book, from what it was when it was off the table.[55]He admits that “such external relations seem possible and even existing.... That you do not alter what you compare or rearrange in space seems to common sense quite obvious, and that onthe other side there are as obvious difficulties does not occur to common sense at all. And I will begin by pointing out these difficulties.... There is a relation in the result, and this relation, we hear, is to make no difference in its terms. But, if so, to what does it make a difference? [Doesn’t it make a difference to us onlookers, at least?] and what is the meaning and sense of qualifying the terms by it? [Surely the meaning is to tell the truth about their relative position.[56]] If, in short, it is external to the terms, how can it possibly be true of them? [Is it the ‘intimacy’ suggested by the little word ‘of,’ here, which I have underscored, that is the root of Mr. Bradley’s trouble?] ... If the terms from their inner nature do not enter into the relation, then, so far as they are concerned, they seem related for no reason at all.... Things are spatially related, first in one way, and then become related in another way, and yet in no way themselves are altered; for the relations, it is said, are but external. But I reply that, ifso, I can notunderstandthe leaving by the terms of one set of relations and their adoption of another fresh set. The process and its result to the terms, if they contribute nothing to it [Surely they contribute to it all there is ‘of’ it!] seem irrational throughout. [If ‘irrational’ here means simply ‘non-rational,’ or nondeductible from the essence of either term singly, it is no reproach; if it means ‘contradicting’ such essence, Mr. Bradley should show wherein and how.] But, if they contribute anything, they must surely be affected internally. [Why so, if they contribute only their surface? In such relations as ‘on’ ‘a foot away,’ ‘between,’ ‘next,’ etc., only surfaces are in question.] ... If the terms contribute anything whatever, then the terms are affected [inwardly altered?] by the arrangement.... That for working purposes we treat, and do well to treat, some relations as external merely I do not deny, and that of course is not the question at issue here. That question is ... whether in the end and in principle a mere external relation [i.e., a relation which can change without forcing its termsto change their nature simultaneously] is possible and forced on us by the facts.”[57]

Mr. Bradley next reverts to the antinomies of space, which, according to him, prove it to be unreal, although it appears as so prolific a medium of external relations; and he then concludes that “Irrationality and externality can not be the last truth about things. Somewhere there must be a reason why this and that appear together. And this reason and reality must reside in the whole from which terms and relations are abstractions, a whole in which their internal connection must lie, and out of which from the background appear those fresh results which never could have come from the premises.” And he adds that “Where the whole is different, the terms that qualify and contribute to it must so far be different.... They are altered so far only [How far? farther than externally, yet not through and through?] but still they are altered.... I must insist that in each case the terms are qualified by their whole [Qualified how?—Do their externalrelations, situations, dates, etc., changed as these are in the new whole, fail to qualify them ‘far’ enough?], and that in the second case there is a whole which differs both logically and psychologically from the first whole; and I urge that in contributing to the change the terms so far are altered.”

Not merely the relations, then, but the terms are altered:und zwar‘so far.’ But justhowfar is the whole problem; and ‘through-and-through’ would seem (in spite of Mr. Bradley’s somewhat undecided utterances[58]) to be the full Bradleyan answer. The ‘whole’ which he here treats as primary and determinative of each part’s manner of ‘contributing,’ simplymust, when it alters, alter in its entirety. Theremustbe total conflux of its parts, each into and through each other. The ‘must’ appears here as aMachtspruch, as anipse dixitof Mr. Bradley’s absolutistically tempered ‘understanding,’ for he candidly confesses that how the partsdodiffer as they contribute to different wholes, is unknown to him.[59]

Although I have every wish to comprehend the authority by which Mr. Bradley’s understanding speaks, his words leave me wholly unconverted. ‘External relations’ stand with their withers all unwrung, and remain, for aught he proves to the contrary, not only practically workable, but also perfectly intelligible factors of reality.

Mr. Bradley’s understanding shows the most extraordinary power of perceiving separations and the most extraordinary impotence in comprehending conjunctions. One would naturally say ‘neither or both,’ but not so Mr. Bradley. When a common man analyzes certainwhatsfrom out the stream of experience, he understands their distinctnessas thus isolated. But this does not prevent him from equally well understanding their combination with each otheras originally experienced in the concrete, or their confluence with new sensible experiences in which they recur as ‘the same.’ Returning into the stream of sensible presentation, nouns and adjectives, andthatsand abstractwhats, grow confluent again, and the word ‘is’ names all these experiences of conjunction. Mr. Bradley understands the isolation of the abstracts, but to understand the combination is to him impossible.[60]“To understand a complexAB,” he says, “I must begin withAorB. And beginning, say withA, if I then merely findB, I have either lostA, or I have got besideA, [the word ‘beside’ seems here vital, as meaning a conjunction ‘external’ and therefore unintelligible] something else, and in neither case have I understood.[61]For my intellect can not simply unite a diversity, nor has it in itself any form or way of togetherness, and you gain nothing if, besideAandB, you offer me their conjunction in fact. For to my intellect that is no more than another external element. And ‘facts,’ once for all, are for my intellect not true unless they satisfy it.... The intellect has in its nature no principle of mere togetherness.”[62]

Of course Mr. Bradley has a right to define ‘intellect’ as the power by which we perceive separations but not unions—provided he give due notice to the reader. But why then claim that such a maimed and amputated power must reign supreme in philosophy, and accuse on its behoof the whole empirical world of irrationality? It is true that he elsewhere attributes to the intellect aproprius motusof transition, but says that when he looks forthesetransitions in the detail of living experience, he ‘is unable to verify such a solution.’[63]

Yet he never explains what the intellectual transitions would be like in case we had them. He only defines them negatively—they are not spatial, temporal, predicative, or causal; or qualitatively or otherwise serial; or in any way relational as we naïvely trace relations, for relationsseparateterms, and need themselves to be hooked onad infinitum. The nearest approach he makes to describing a truly intellectual transition is where he speaks ofAandBas being ‘united, each from its own nature, in a whole which is the nature of both alike.’[64]But this (which,paceMr. Bradley, seems exquisitely analogous to ‘taking’ a congeries in a ‘lump,’ if not to ‘swamping’) suggests nothing but thatconfluxwhich pure experience so abundantly offers, as when ‘space,’ ‘white’ and ‘sweet’ are confluent in a ‘lump of sugar,’ or kinesthetic, dermal, and optical sensations confluent in ‘my hand.’[65]All that I can verify in the transitions which Mr. Bradley’s intellect desiderates as itsproprius motusis a reminiscence of these and other sensible conjunctions (especially space-conjunctions), but a reminiscence so vague that its originals are not recognized. Bradley in short repeats the fable of the dog, the bone, and its image in the water. With a world of particulars, given in loveliest union, in conjunction definitely various, and variously definite, the ‘how’ of which you ‘understand’ as soon as you see the fact of them,[66]for there is no ‘how’ except the constitution of the fact as given; with all this given him, I say, in pure experience, he asks for some ineffable union in the abstract instead, which, if he gained it, would only be a duplicate of what he has already in his full possession. Surely he abuses the privilege which society grants to all us philosophers, of being puzzle-headed.

Polemic writing like this is odious; but with absolutism in possession in so many quarters, omission to defend my radical empiricism against its best known champion would count as either superficiality or inability. I have to conclude that its dialectic has not invalidated in the least degree the usual conjunctions by which the world, as experienced, hangs so variously together. In particular it leaves an empirical theory of knowledge[67]intact, and lets us continue to believe with common sense that one objectmaybe known, if we have any ground for thinking that itisknown, to many knowers.

In [the next essay] I shall return to this last supposition, which seems to me to offer other difficulties much harder for a philosophy of pure experience to deal with than any of absolutism’s dialectic objections.

FOOTNOTES:[43][Reprinted fromThe Journal of Philosophy, Psychology and Scientific Methods, vol.ii, No. 2, January 19, 1905. Reprinted also as Appendix A inA Pluralistic Universe, pp. 347-369. The author’s corrections have been adopted in the present text.Ed.][44][F. H. Bradley:Appearance and Reality, second edition, pp. 152-153, 23, 118, 104, 108-109, 570.][45]Compare Professor MacLennan’s admirableAuseinandersetzungwith Mr. Bradley, inThe Journal of Philosophy, Psychology and Scientific Methods, vol. I, [1904], pp. 403 ff., especially pp. 405-407.[46][Hume:Treatise of Human Nature, Appendix, Selby-Bigge’s edition, p. 636.][47]Technically, it seems classable as a ‘fallacy of composition.’ A duality, predicable of the two wholes,L—MandM—N, is forthwith predicated of one of their parts,M.[48]See above, pp.42ff.[49]I may perhaps refer here to myPrinciples of Psychology, vol.i, pp. 459 ff. It really seems ‘weird’ to have to argue (as I am forced now to do) for the notion that it is one sheet of paper (with its two surfaces and all that lies between) which is both under my pen and on the table while I write—the ‘claim’ that it is two sheets seems so brazen. Yet I sometimes suspect the absolutists of sincerity![50][For the author’s criticism of Hegel’s view of relations, cf.Will to Believe, pp.278-279.Ed.][51][Cf. A. Spir:Denken und Wirklichkeit, parti, bk.iii, ch.iv(containing also account of Herbart).Ed.][52][See above, pp.42,49.][53]Here again the reader must beware of slipping from logical into phenomenal considerations. It may well be that weattributea certain relation falsely, because the circumstances of the case, being complex, have deceived us. At a railway station we may take our own train, and not the one that fills our window, to be moving. We here put motion in the wrong place in the world, but in its original place the motion is a part of reality. What Mr. Bradley means is nothing like this, but rather that such things as motion are nowhere real, and that, even in their aboriginal and empirically incorrigible seats, relations are impossible of comprehension.[54]Particularly so by Andrew Seth Pringle-Pattison, in hisMan and the Cosmos; by L. T. Hobhouse, in chapterxii(“The Validity of Judgment”) of hisTheory of Knowledge; and by F. C. S. Schiller, in hisHumanism, essayxi. Other fatal reviews (in my opinion) are Hodder’s, in thePsychological Review, vol.i, [1894], p. 307; Stout’s in theProceedings of the Aristotelian Society, 1901-2, p. 1; and MacLennan’s in [The Journal of Philosophy, Psychology and Scientific Methods, vol.i, 1904, p. 403].[55]Once more, don’t slip from logical into physical situations. Of course, if the table be wet, it will moisten the book, or if it be slight enough and the book heavy enough, the book will break it down. But such collateral phenomena are not the point at issue. The point is whether the successive relations ‘on’ and ‘not-on’ can rationally (not physically) hold of the same constant terms, abstractly taken. Professor A. E. Taylor drops from logical into material considerations when he instances color-contrast as a proof thatA, ‘as contra-distinguished fromB, is not the same thing as mereAnot in any way affected’ (Elements of Metaphysics, p. 145). Note the substitution, for ‘related’ of the word ‘affected,’ which begs the whole question.[56]But “is there any sense,” asks Mr. Bradley, peevishly, on p. 579, “and if so, what sense in truth that is only outside and ‘about’ things?” Surely such a question may be left unanswered.[57]Appearance and Reality, second edition, pp. 575-576.[58]I say ‘undecided,’ because, apart from the ‘so far,’ which sounds terribly half-hearted, there are passages in these very pages in which Mr. Bradley admits the pluralistic thesis. Read, for example, what he says, on p. 578, of a billiard ball keeping its ‘character’ unchanged, though, in its change of place, its ‘existence’ gets altered; or what he says, on p. 579, of the possibility that an abstract quality A, B, or C, in a thing, ‘may throughout remain unchanged’ although the thing be altered; or his admission that in red-hairedness, both as analyzed out of a man and when given with the rest of him, there may be ‘no change’ (p. 580). Why does he immediately add that for the pluralist to plead the non-mutation of such abstractions would be anignoratio elenchi? It is impossible to admit it to be such. The entireelenchusand inquest is just as to whether parts which you can abstract from existing wholes can also contribute to other wholes without changing their inner nature. If they can thus mould various wholes into newgestaltqualitäten, then it follows that the same elements are logically able to exist in different wholes [whether physically able would depend on additional hypotheses]; that partial changes are thinkable, and through-and-through change not a dialectic necessity; that monism is only an hypothesis; and that an additively constituted universe is a rationally respectable hypothesis also. All the theses of radical empiricism, in short, follow.[59]Op. cit., pp. 577-579.[60]So far as I catch his state of mind, it is somewhat like this: ‘Book,’ ‘table,’ ‘on’—how does the existence of these three abstract elements result inthisbook being livingly onthistable. Why isn’t the table on the book? Or why doesn’t the ‘on’ connect itself with another book, or something that is not a table? Mustn’t somethingineach of the three elements already determine the two others toit, so that they do not settle elsewhere or float vaguely? Mustn’t thewhole fact be pre-figured in each part, and existde jurebefore it can existde facto? But, if so, in what can the jural existence consist, if not in a spiritual miniature of the whole fact’s constitution actuating every partial factor as its purpose? But is this anything but the old metaphysical fallacy of looking behind a factin essefor the ground of the fact, and finding it in the shape of the very same factin posse? Somewhere we must leave off with aconstitutionbehind which there is nothing.[61]Apply this to the case of ‘book-on-table’! W. J.[62]Op. cit., pp. 570, 572.[63]Op. cit., pp. 568, 569.[64]Op. cit., p. 570.[65]How meaningless is the contention that in such wholes (or in ‘book-on-table,’ ‘watch-in-pocket,’ etc.) the relation is an additional entitybetweenthe terms, needing itself to be related again to each! Both Bradley (op. cit., pp. 32-33) and Royce (The World and the Individual, vol.i, p. 128) lovingly repeat this piece of profundity.[66]The ‘why’ and the ‘whence’ are entirely other questions, not under discussion, as I understand Mr. Bradley. Not how experience gets itself born, but how it can be what it is after it is born, is the puzzle.[67]Above, p.52.

[43][Reprinted fromThe Journal of Philosophy, Psychology and Scientific Methods, vol.ii, No. 2, January 19, 1905. Reprinted also as Appendix A inA Pluralistic Universe, pp. 347-369. The author’s corrections have been adopted in the present text.Ed.]

[44][F. H. Bradley:Appearance and Reality, second edition, pp. 152-153, 23, 118, 104, 108-109, 570.]

[45]Compare Professor MacLennan’s admirableAuseinandersetzungwith Mr. Bradley, inThe Journal of Philosophy, Psychology and Scientific Methods, vol. I, [1904], pp. 403 ff., especially pp. 405-407.

[46][Hume:Treatise of Human Nature, Appendix, Selby-Bigge’s edition, p. 636.]

[47]Technically, it seems classable as a ‘fallacy of composition.’ A duality, predicable of the two wholes,L—MandM—N, is forthwith predicated of one of their parts,M.

[48]See above, pp.42ff.

[49]I may perhaps refer here to myPrinciples of Psychology, vol.i, pp. 459 ff. It really seems ‘weird’ to have to argue (as I am forced now to do) for the notion that it is one sheet of paper (with its two surfaces and all that lies between) which is both under my pen and on the table while I write—the ‘claim’ that it is two sheets seems so brazen. Yet I sometimes suspect the absolutists of sincerity!

[50][For the author’s criticism of Hegel’s view of relations, cf.Will to Believe, pp.278-279.Ed.]

[51][Cf. A. Spir:Denken und Wirklichkeit, parti, bk.iii, ch.iv(containing also account of Herbart).Ed.]

[52][See above, pp.42,49.]

[53]Here again the reader must beware of slipping from logical into phenomenal considerations. It may well be that weattributea certain relation falsely, because the circumstances of the case, being complex, have deceived us. At a railway station we may take our own train, and not the one that fills our window, to be moving. We here put motion in the wrong place in the world, but in its original place the motion is a part of reality. What Mr. Bradley means is nothing like this, but rather that such things as motion are nowhere real, and that, even in their aboriginal and empirically incorrigible seats, relations are impossible of comprehension.

[54]Particularly so by Andrew Seth Pringle-Pattison, in hisMan and the Cosmos; by L. T. Hobhouse, in chapterxii(“The Validity of Judgment”) of hisTheory of Knowledge; and by F. C. S. Schiller, in hisHumanism, essayxi. Other fatal reviews (in my opinion) are Hodder’s, in thePsychological Review, vol.i, [1894], p. 307; Stout’s in theProceedings of the Aristotelian Society, 1901-2, p. 1; and MacLennan’s in [The Journal of Philosophy, Psychology and Scientific Methods, vol.i, 1904, p. 403].

[55]Once more, don’t slip from logical into physical situations. Of course, if the table be wet, it will moisten the book, or if it be slight enough and the book heavy enough, the book will break it down. But such collateral phenomena are not the point at issue. The point is whether the successive relations ‘on’ and ‘not-on’ can rationally (not physically) hold of the same constant terms, abstractly taken. Professor A. E. Taylor drops from logical into material considerations when he instances color-contrast as a proof thatA, ‘as contra-distinguished fromB, is not the same thing as mereAnot in any way affected’ (Elements of Metaphysics, p. 145). Note the substitution, for ‘related’ of the word ‘affected,’ which begs the whole question.

[56]But “is there any sense,” asks Mr. Bradley, peevishly, on p. 579, “and if so, what sense in truth that is only outside and ‘about’ things?” Surely such a question may be left unanswered.

[57]Appearance and Reality, second edition, pp. 575-576.

[58]I say ‘undecided,’ because, apart from the ‘so far,’ which sounds terribly half-hearted, there are passages in these very pages in which Mr. Bradley admits the pluralistic thesis. Read, for example, what he says, on p. 578, of a billiard ball keeping its ‘character’ unchanged, though, in its change of place, its ‘existence’ gets altered; or what he says, on p. 579, of the possibility that an abstract quality A, B, or C, in a thing, ‘may throughout remain unchanged’ although the thing be altered; or his admission that in red-hairedness, both as analyzed out of a man and when given with the rest of him, there may be ‘no change’ (p. 580). Why does he immediately add that for the pluralist to plead the non-mutation of such abstractions would be anignoratio elenchi? It is impossible to admit it to be such. The entireelenchusand inquest is just as to whether parts which you can abstract from existing wholes can also contribute to other wholes without changing their inner nature. If they can thus mould various wholes into newgestaltqualitäten, then it follows that the same elements are logically able to exist in different wholes [whether physically able would depend on additional hypotheses]; that partial changes are thinkable, and through-and-through change not a dialectic necessity; that monism is only an hypothesis; and that an additively constituted universe is a rationally respectable hypothesis also. All the theses of radical empiricism, in short, follow.

[59]Op. cit., pp. 577-579.

[60]So far as I catch his state of mind, it is somewhat like this: ‘Book,’ ‘table,’ ‘on’—how does the existence of these three abstract elements result inthisbook being livingly onthistable. Why isn’t the table on the book? Or why doesn’t the ‘on’ connect itself with another book, or something that is not a table? Mustn’t somethingineach of the three elements already determine the two others toit, so that they do not settle elsewhere or float vaguely? Mustn’t thewhole fact be pre-figured in each part, and existde jurebefore it can existde facto? But, if so, in what can the jural existence consist, if not in a spiritual miniature of the whole fact’s constitution actuating every partial factor as its purpose? But is this anything but the old metaphysical fallacy of looking behind a factin essefor the ground of the fact, and finding it in the shape of the very same factin posse? Somewhere we must leave off with aconstitutionbehind which there is nothing.

[61]Apply this to the case of ‘book-on-table’! W. J.

[62]Op. cit., pp. 570, 572.

[63]Op. cit., pp. 568, 569.

[64]Op. cit., p. 570.

[65]How meaningless is the contention that in such wholes (or in ‘book-on-table,’ ‘watch-in-pocket,’ etc.) the relation is an additional entitybetweenthe terms, needing itself to be related again to each! Both Bradley (op. cit., pp. 32-33) and Royce (The World and the Individual, vol.i, p. 128) lovingly repeat this piece of profundity.

[66]The ‘why’ and the ‘whence’ are entirely other questions, not under discussion, as I understand Mr. Bradley. Not how experience gets itself born, but how it can be what it is after it is born, is the puzzle.

[67]Above, p.52.

In [the essay] entitled ‘Does Consciousness Exist?’ I have tried to show that when we call an experience ‘conscious,’ that does not mean that it is suffused throughout with a peculiar modality of being (‘psychic’ being) as stained glass may be suffused with light, but rather that it stands in certain determinate relations to other portions of experience extraneous to itself. These form one peculiar ‘context’ for it; while, taken in another context of experiences, we class it as a fact in the physical world. This ‘pen,’ for example, is, in the first instance, a baldthat, a datum, fact, phenomenon, content, or whatever other neutral or ambiguous name you may prefer to apply. I called it in that article a ‘pure experience.’ To get classed either as a physical pen or as some one’s percept of a pen, it must assume afunction, and that can only happen in a more complicated world. So far as in that world it is a stable feature, holds ink, marks paper and obeys the guidance of a hand, it is a physical pen. That is what we mean by being ‘physical,’ in a pen. So far as it is instable, on the contrary, coming and going with the movements of my eyes, altering with what I call my fancy, continuous with subsequent experiences of its ‘having been’ (in the past tense), it is the percept of a pen in my mind. Those peculiarities are what we mean by being ‘conscious,’ in a pen.

In Section VI of another [essay][69]I tried to show that the samethat, the same numerically identical pen of pure experience, can enter simultaneously into many conscious contexts, or, in other words, be an object for many different minds. I admitted that I had not space to treat of certain possible objections in that article; but in [the last essay] I took some of the objections up. At the end of that [essay] I said that still more formidable-sounding objections remained; so, to leave my pure-experience theory in as strong a state as possible, I propose to consider those objections now.

The objections I previously tried to dispose of were purely logical or dialectical. No one identical term, whether physical or psychical, it had been said, could be the subject of two relations at once. This thesis I sought to prove unfounded. The objections that now confront us arise from the nature supposed to inhere in psychic facts specifically. Whatever may be the case with physical objects, a fact of consciousness, it is alleged (and indeed very plausibly), can not, without self-contradiction, be treated as a portion of two different minds, and for the following reasons.

In the physical world we make with impunity the assumption that one and the same material object can figure in an indefinitely large number of different processes at once. When, for instance, a sheet of rubber is pulled at its four corners, a unit of rubber in the middle of the sheet is affected by all four of thepulls. Ittransmitsthem each, as if it pulled in four different ways at once itself. So, an air-particle or an ether-particle ‘compounds’ the different directions of movement imprinted on it without obliterating their several individualities. It delivers them distinct, on the contrary, at as many several ‘receivers’ (ear, eye or what not) as may be ‘tuned’ to that effect. The apparent paradox of a distinctness like this surviving in the midst of compounding is a thing which, I fancy, the analyses made by physicists have by this time sufficiently cleared up.

But if, on the strength of these analogies, one should ask: “Why, if two or more lines can run through one and the same geometrical point, or if two or more distinct processes of activity can run through one and the same physical thing so that it simultaneously plays a rôle in each and every process, might not two or more streams of personal consciousness include one and the same unit of experience so that it would simultaneously be a part of the experience of all the different minds?” one would be checked by thinking of a certain peculiarity bywhich phenomena of consciousness differ from physical things.

While physical things, namely, are supposed to be permanent and to have their ‘states,’ a fact of consciousness exists but once andisa state. Itsesseissentiri; it is only so far as it is felt; and it is unambiguously and unequivocally exactlywhatis felt. The hypothesis under consideration would, however, oblige it to be felt equivocally, felt now as part of my mind and again at the same timenotas a part of my mind, but of yours (for my mind isnotyours), and this would seem impossible without doubling it into two distinct things, or, in other words, without reverting to the ordinary dualistic philosophy of insulated minds each knowing its object representatively as a third thing,—and that would be to give up the pure-experience scheme altogether.

Can we see, then, any way in which a unit of pure experience might enter into and figure in two diverse streams of consciousness without turning itself into the two units which, on our hypothesis, it must not be?

There is a way; and the first step towards it is to see more precisely how the unit enters into either one of the streams of consciousness alone. Just what, from being ‘pure,’ does its becoming ‘conscious’oncemean?

It means, first, that new experiences have supervened; and, second, that they have borne a certain assignable relation to the unit supposed. Continue, if you please, to speak of the pure unit as ‘the pen.’ So far as the pen’s successors do but repeat the pen or, being different from it, are ‘energetically’[70]related to it, it and they will form a group of stably existing physical things. So far, however, as its successors differ from it in another well-determined way, the pen will figure in their context, not as a physical, but as a mental fact. It will become a passing ‘percept,’mypercept of that pen. What now is that decisive well-determined way?

In the chapter on ‘The Self,’ in myPrinciplesof Psychology, I explained the continuous identity of each personal consciousness as a name for the practical fact that new experiences[71]come which look back on the old ones, find them ‘warm,’ and greet and appropriate them as ‘mine.’ These operations mean, when analyzed empirically, several tolerably definite things, viz.:

1. That the new experience has past time for its ‘content,’ and in that time a pen that ‘was’;

2. That ‘warmth’ was also about the pen, in the sense of a group of feelings (‘interest’ aroused, ‘attention’ turned, ‘eyes’ employed, etc.) that were closely connected with it and that now recur and evermore recur with unbroken vividness, though from the pen of now, which may be only an image, all such vividness may have gone;

3. That these feelings are the nucleus of ‘me’;

4. That whatever once was associated with them was, at least for that one moment, ‘mine’—my implement if associated with hand-feelings, my ‘percept’ only, if only eye-feelings and attention-feelings were involved.

The pen, realized in this retrospective way as my percept, thus figures as a fact of ‘conscious’ life. But it does so only so far as ‘appropriation’ has occurred; and appropriation ispart of the content of a later experiencewholly additional to the originally ‘pure’ pen.Thatpen, virtually both objective and subjective, is at its own moment actually and intrinsically neither. It has to be looked back upon andused, in order to be classed in either distinctive way. But its use, so called, is in the hands of the other experience, whileitstands, throughout the operation, passive and unchanged.

If this pass muster as an intelligible account of how an experience originally pure can enter into one consciousness, the next question is as to how it might conceivably enter into two.

Obviously no new kind of condition would have to be supplied. All that we should have to postulate would be a second subsequentexperience, collateral and contemporary with the first subsequent one, in which a similar act of appropriation should occur. The two acts would interfere neither with one another nor with the originally pure pen. It would sleep undisturbed in its own past, no matter how many such successors went through their several appropriative acts. Each would know it as ‘my’ percept, each would class it as a ‘conscious’ fact.

Nor need their so classing it interfere in the least with their classing it at the same time as a physical pen. Since the classing in both cases depends upon the taking of it in one group or another of associates, if the superseding experience were of wide enough ‘span’ it could think the pen in both groups simultaneously, and yet distinguish the two groups. It would then see the whole situation conformably to what we call ‘the representative theory of cognition,’ and that is what we all spontaneously do. As a man philosophizing ‘popularly,’ I believe that what I see myself writing with is double—I think it in its relations to physical nature, andalso in its relations to my personal life; I see that it is in my mind, but that it also is a physical pen.

The paradox of the same experience figuring in two consciousnesses seems thus no paradox at all. To be ‘conscious’ means not simply to be, but to be reported, known, to have awareness of one’s being added to that being; and this is just what happens when the appropriative experience supervenes. The pen-experience in its original immediacy is not aware of itself, it simplyis, and the second experience is required for what we call awareness of it to occur.[72]The difficulty of understanding what happens here is, therefore, not a logical difficulty: there is no contradiction involved. It is an ontological difficulty rather. Experiences come on an enormous scale, and if we takethem all together, they come in a chaos of incommensurable relations that we can not straighten out. We have to abstract different groups of them, and handle these separately if we are to talk of them at all. But how the experiences everget themselves made, orwhytheir characters and relations are just such as appear, we can not begin to understand. Granting, however, that, by hook or crook, theycanget themselves made, and can appear in the successions that I have so schematically described, then we have to confess that even although (as I began by quoting from the adversary) ‘a feeling only is as it is felt,’ there is still nothing absurd in the notion of its being felt in two different ways at once, as yours, namely, and as mine. It is, indeed, ‘mine’ only as it is felt as mine, and ‘yours’ only as it is felt as yours. But it is felt as neitherby itself, but only when ‘owned’ by our two several remembering experiences, just as one undivided estate is owned by several heirs.

One word, now, before I close, about the corollaries of the views set forth. Since the acquisition of conscious quality on the part of an experience depends upon a context coming to it, it follows that the sum total of all experiences, having no context, can not strictly be called conscious at all. It is athat, an Absolute, a ‘pure’ experience on an enormous scale, undifferentiated and undifferentiable into thought and thing. This the post-Kantian idealists have always practically acknowledged by calling their doctrine anIdentitätsphilosophie. The question of theBeseelungof the All of things ought not, then, even to be asked. No more ought the question of itstruthto be asked, for truth is a relation inside of the sum total, obtaining between thoughts and something else, and thoughts, as we have seen, can only be contextual things. In these respects the pure experiences of our philosophy are, in themselves considered, so many little absolutes, the philosophy of pure experiencebeing only a more comminutedIdentitätsphilosophie.[73]

Meanwhile, a pure experience can be postulated with any amount whatever of span or field. If it exert the retrospective and appropriative function on any other piece of experience, the latter thereby enters into its own conscious stream. And in this operation time intervals make no essential difference. After sleeping, my retrospection is as perfect as it is between two successive waking moments of my time. Accordingly if, millions of years later, a similarly retrospective experience should anyhow come to birth, my present thought would form a genuine portion of its long-span conscious life. ‘Form a portion,’ I say, but not in the sense that the two things could be entitatively or substantively one—they cannot, for they are numerically discrete facts—but only in the sense that thefunctionsof my present thought, its knowledge, its purpose, its content and ‘consciousness,’ in short, being inherited, would be continued practicallyunchanged. Speculations like Fechner’s, of an Earth-soul, of wider spans of consciousness enveloping narrower ones throughout the cosmos, are, therefore, philosophically quite in order, provided they distinguish the functional from the entitative point of view, and do not treat the minor consciousness under discussion as a kind of standing material of which the wider onesconsist.[74]

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