There is no other _nature_, no other whatness
than this absence of break and this sense of
continuity in that most intimate of all conjunctive
relations, the passing of one experience
into another when the belong to the same self.
And this whatness is real empirical 'content,'
just as the whatness of separation and discontinuity
is real content in the contrasted case.
Practically to experience one's personal continuum
in this living way is to know the originals
of the ideas of continuity and sameness, to
know what the words stand for concretely, to
own all that they can ever mean.  But all experiences
have their conditions; and over-subtle
intellects, thinking about the facts here, and
asking how they are possible, have ended by
substituting a lot of static objects of conception
for the direct perceptual experiences.
"Sameness," they have said, "must be a stark
numerical identity; it can't run on from next to
next.  Continuity can't mean mere absence of
gap; for if you say two things are in immediate
contact, _at_ the contact how can they be two?
If, on the other hand, you put a relation of

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transition between them, that itself is a third
thing, and needs to be related or hitched to its
terms. An infinite series is involved," and so
on.  The result is that from difficulty to difficulty,
the plain conjunctive experience has
been discredited by both schools, the empiricists
leaving things permanently disjoined, and
the rationalist remedying the looseness by their
Absolutes or Substances, or whatever other fictitious
agencies of union may have employed.
From all which artificiality we can
be saved by a couple of simple-reflections:  first,
that conjunctions and separations are, at all
events, co-ordinate phenomena which, if we
take experiences at their face value, must be
accounted equally real; and second, that if we
insist on treating things as really separate
when they are given as continuously joined,
invoking, when union is required, transcendental
principles to overcome the separateness
we have assumed, then we ought to stand
ready to perform the converse act.  We ought
to invoke higher principles of _dis_union, also, to

52
make our merely experienced _dis_junctions more
truly real.  Failing thus, we ought to let the
originally given continuities stand on their own
bottom.  We have no right to be lopsided or to
blow capriciously hot and cold.

                III. THE COGNITIVE RELATION

     The first great pitfall from which such a radical
standing by experience will save us is an
artificial conception of the _relations_between_
_knower_and_known_.  Throughout the history of
philosophy the subject and its object have been
treated as absolutely discontinuous entities;
and thereupon the presence of the latter to the
former, or the 'apprehension' by the former of
the latter, has assumed a paradoxical character
which all sorts of theories had to be invented
to overcome.  Representative theories
put a mental 'representation,' 'image,' or
'content' into the gap, as a sort of intermediary.
Common-sense theories left the gap
untouched, declaring our mind able to clear
it by a self-transcending leap.  Transcendentalist
theories left it impossible to traverse by

53
finite knowers, and brought an Absolute in to
perform the saltatory act.  All the while, in
the very bosom of the finite experience, every
conjunction required to make the relation intelligible
is given in full.  Either the knower
and the known are:

     (1) The self-same piece of experience taken
twice over in different contexts; or they are

     (2) two pieces of _actual_ experience belonging
to the same subject, with definite tracts of
conjunctive transitional experience between
them; or

     (3) the known is a _possible_ experience either
of that subject or another, to which the said
conjunctive transitions _would_lead, if sufficiently
prolonged.

     To discuss all the ways in which one experience
may function as the knower of another,