have accepted the description as correct.
But what possible meaning has it to say
that, when we think of a foot-rule or a square
yard, extension is not attributable to our
thought?  Of every extended object the _adequate_
mental picture must have all the extension
of the object itself.  The difference between
objective and subjective extension is
one of relation to a context solely.  In the mind
the various extents maintain no necessarily
stubborn order relatively to each other, while

---

   1 Spencer's proof of his 'Transfigured Realism' (his  doctrine that
there is an absolutely non-mental reality) comes to mind as a splendid
instance of the impossibility of establishing radical heterogeneity
between thought and thing.  All his painfully accumulated points of
difference run gradually into their opposites, and are full of
exceptions.
---

31
in the physical world they bound each other
stably, and, added together, make the great
enveloping Unit which we believe in and call
real Space.  As 'outer,' they carry themselves
adversely, so to speak, to one another, exclude
one another and maintain their distances;
while, as 'inner,' their order is loose, and they
form a _durcheinander_ in which unity is lost.(1)
But to argue from this that inner experience is
absolutely inextensive seems to me little short
of absurd.  The two worlds differ, not by the
presence or absence of extension, but by the
relations of the extensions which in both
worlds exist.

     Does not this case of extension now put us
on the track of truth in the case of other qualities?
It does; and I am surprised that the facts
should not have been noticed long ago.  Why,
for example, do we call a fire hot, and water
wet, and yet refuse to say that our mental
state, when it is 'of' these objects, is either wet
or hot?  'Intentionally,' at any rate, and when

32
the mental state is a vivid image, hotness and
wetness are in it just as much as they are in the
physical experience.  The reason is this, that,
as the general chaos of all our experiences gets
sifted, we find that there are some fires that
will always burn sticks and always warm our
bodies, and that there are some waters that
will always put out fires; while there are other
fires and waters that will not act at all.  The
general group of experiences that _act_, that do
not only possess their natures intrinsically, but
wear them adjectively and energetically, turning
them against one another, comes inevitably
to be contrasted with the group whose members,
having identically the same natures, fail
to manifest them in the 'energetic' way.(1)  I
make for myself now an experience of blazing
fire; I place it near my body; but it does not
warm me in the least.  I lay a stick upon it, and
the stick either burns or remains green, as I
please.  I call up water, and pour it on the fire,
and absolutely no difference ensues.  I account

33
for all such facts by calling this whole train
of experiences unreal, a mental train.  Mental
fire is what won't burn real sticks; mental water
is what won't necessarily (though of course
it may) put out even a mental fire.  Mental
knives may be sharp, but they won't cut real
wood.  Mental triangles are pointed, but their
points won't wound.  With 'real' objects, on
the contrary, consequences always accrue; and
thus the real experiences get sifted from the
mental ones, the things from out thoughts of
them, fanciful or true, and precipitated together
as the stable part of the whole experience-
chaos, under the name of the physical
world.  Of this our perceptual experiences are
the nucleus, they being the originally _strong_
experiences.  We add a lot of conceptual experiences
to them, making these strong also in
imagination, and building out the remoter
parts of the physical world by their means;
and around this core of reality the world
of laxly connected fancies and mere rhapsodical
objects floats like a bank of clouds.
In the clouds, all sorts of rules are violated

34
which in the core are kept.  Extensions there
can be indefinitely located; motion there obeys