1 Mr. Bradley, not professing to know his absolute _aliunde_,
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.
---

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be true, but the percept's existence as the
terminus of the chain of intermediaries _creates_
the function.  Whatever terminates that chain
was, because it now proves itself to be, what
the concept 'had in mind.'

     The towering importance for human life of
this kind of knowing lies in the fact that an
experience that knows another can figure as
its _representative_, not in any quasi-miraculous
'epistemological' sense, but in the definite
practical sense of being its _substitute_ in various
operations, sometimes physical and sometimes
mental, which lead us to its associates and results.
By experimenting on our ideas of reality,
we may save ourselves the trouble of experimenting
on the real experiences which they
severally mean.  The ideas form related systems,
corresponding point for point to the systems
which the realities form; and by letting an
ideal term call up its associates systematically,
we may be led to a terminus which the corresponding
real term would have led to in case
we had operated on the real world.  And this
brings us to the general question of substitution.
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            IV. SUBSTITUTION

     In Taine's brilliant book on 'Intelligence,'
substitution was for the first time named as
a cardinal logical function, though of course
the facts had always been familiar enough.
What, exactly, in a system of experiences, does
the 'substitution' of one of them for another
mean?

     According to my view, experience as a whole
is a process in time, whereby innumerable
particular terms lapse and are superseded by
others that follow upon them by transitions
which, whether disjunctive or conjunctive in
content, are themselves experiences, and must
in general be accounted at least as real as
the terms which they relate.  What the nature
of the event called 'superseding' signifies, depends
altogether on the kind of transition
that obtains.  Some experiences simply abolish
their predecessors without continuing them
in any way.  Others are felt to increase or to
enlarge their meaning, to carry out their purpose,
or to bring us nearer to their goal.  They

63
'represent' them, and may fulfil their function
better than they fulfilled it themselves.  But to
'fulfil a function' in a world of pure experience
can be conceived and defined in only one possible
way.  IN such a world transitions and
arrivals (or terminations) are the only events
that happen, though they happen by so many
sorts of path.  The only experience that one experience
can perform is to lead into another
experience; and the only fulfilment we can
speak of is the reaching of a certain experienced
end.  When one experience leads to (or
can lead to) the same end as another, they
agree in function.  But the whole system of
experiences as they are immediately given
presents itself as a quasi-chaos through which
one can pass out of an initial term in many
directions and yet end in the same terminus,
moving from next to next by a great many
possible paths.

     Either one of these paths might be a functional
substitute for another, and to follow one
rather than another might on occasion be
an advantageous thing to do.  As a matter of

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fact, and in a general way, the paths that
run through conceptual experiences, that is,
through 'thoughts' or 'ideas' that 'know' the
things in which they terminate, are highly advantageous
paths to follow.  Not only do they
yield inconceivably rapid transitions; but, owing
to the 'universal' character(1) which they
frequently possess, and to their capacity for
association with one another in great systems,
they outstrip the tardy consecutions of the
things themselves, and sweep us on towards
our ultimate termini in a far more labor-saving