selves together.  _Prima_facie, if you should
liken the universe of absolute idealism to an
aquarium, a crystal globe in which goldfish
are swimming, you would have to compare the
empiricist universe to something more like one
of those dried human heads with which the
Dyaks of Borneo deck their lodges.  The skull
forms a solid nucleus; but innumerable feathers,
leaves, strings, beads, and loose appendices
of every description float and dangle
from it, and, save that they terminate in it, seem
to have nothing to do with one another.  Even
so my experiences and yours float and dangle,

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terminating, it is true, in a nucleus of common
perception, but for the most part out of sight
and irrelevant and unimaginable to one another.
This imperfect intimacy, this bare relation
of _withness) between some parts of the
sum total of experience and other parts, is the
fact that ordinary empiricism over-emphasizes
against rationalism, the latter always tending
to ignore it unduly.  Radical empiricism, on
the contrary, is fair to both the unity and the
disconnection.  It finds no reason for treating
either as illusory.  It allots to each its definite
sphere of description, and agrees that there
appear to be actual forces at work which tend,
as time goes on, to make the unity greater.

     The conjunctive relation that has given
most trouble to philosophy is _the_co-conscious_
_transition_, so to call it, by which one experience
passes into another when both belong to the
same self.  My experiences and your experiences are
'with' each other in various external ways, but
mine pass into mine, and yours pass into yours
in a way in which yours and mine never pass

48
into one another.  Within each of our personal
histories, subject, object, interest and purpose
_are_continuous_or_may_be_continuous_.(1)  Personal
histories are processes of change in time, and
_the_change_itself_is_one_of_the_things_immediately_
_experienced._  'Change' in this case means continuous
as opposed to discontinuous transition.
But continuous transition is one sort of a
conjunctive relation; and to be a radical empiricist
means to hold fast to this conjunctive
relation of all others, for this is the strategic
point, the position through which, if a hole be
made, all the corruptions of dialectics and all
the metaphysical fictions pour into our philosophy.
The holding fast to this relation means
taking it at its face value, neither less nor more;
and to take it at its face value means first of all
to take it just as we feel it, and not to confuse
ourselves with abstract talk _about_ it, involving
words that drive us to invent secondary
conceptions in order to neutralize their

---

   1 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 own _Principles_of_Psychology_, as well
as to S.H.Hodgson's _Metaphysics_of_Experience_, vol I., ch. VII and
VIII.
---

49
suggestions and to make our actual experience
again seem rationally possible.
what I do feel simply when a later moment
of my experience succeeds an earlier one is that
though they are two moments, the transition
from the one to the other is _continuous_.  Continuity
here is a definite sort of experience; just
as definite as is the _discontinuity-experience_
which I find it impossible to avoid when I seek
to make the transition from an experience of
my own to one of yours.  In this latter case I
have to get on and off again, to pass from a
thing lived to another thing only conceived,
and the break is positively experienced and
noted.  Though the functions exerted by my
experience and by yours may be the same (.e.g.,
the same objects known and the same purposes
followed), yet the sameness has in this case to
be ascertained expressly (and often with difficulty
and uncertainly) after the break has been
felt; whereas in passing from one of my own
moments to another the sameness of object and
interest is unbroken, and both the earlier and
the later experience are of things directly lived.

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