_and_the_separation_of_it_into_consciousness_
_and_content_comes,_not_by_way_of_subtraction,_
_but_by_way_of_addition_ -- the addition, to a
given concrete piece of it, other sets of experiences,
in connection with which severally its
use or function may be of two different kinds.
The paint will also serve here as an illustration.
In a pot in a paint-shop, along with other
paints, it serves in its entirety as so much saleable
matter.  Spread on a canvas, with other
paints around it, it represents, on the contrary,
a feature in a picture and performs a spiritual
function.  Just so, I maintain, does a given undivided
portion of experience, taken in one
context of associates, play the part of a knower,
of a state of mind, of 'consciousness'; while in
a different context the same undivided bit of
experience plays the part of a thing known, of

10
an objective 'content.'  In a word, in one group
it figures as a thought, in another group as a
thing.  And, since it can figure in both groups
simultaneously we have every right to speak of
it as subjective and objective, both at once.
The dualism connoted by such double-barrelled
terms as 'experience,' 'phenomenon,'
'datum,' '_Vorfindung_' -- terms which, in philosophy
at any rate, tend more and more to replace
the single-barrelled terms of 'thought'
and 'thing' -- that dualism, I say, is still preserved
in this account, but reinterpreted, so
that, instead of being mysterious and elusive,
it becomes verifiable and concrete.  It is an affair
of relations, it falls outside, not inside, the
single experience considered, and can always
be particularized and defined.

     The entering wedge for this more concrete
way of understanding the dualism was fashioned
by Locke when he made the word 'idea'
stand indifferently for thing and thought, and
by Berkeley when he said that what common
sense means by realities is exactly what the
philosopher means by ideas.  Neither Locke

11
nor Berkeley thought his truth out into perfect
clearness, but it seems to me that the conception
I am defending does little more than consistently
carry out the 'pragmatic' method
which they were the first to use.

     If the reader will take his own experiences,
he will see what I mean.  Let him begin with a
perceptual experience, the 'presentation,' so
called, of a physical object, his actual field of
vision, the room he sits in, with the book he is
reading as its centre; and let him for the present
treat this complex object in the common-
sense way as being 'really' what it seems to be,
namely, a collection of physical things cut out
from an environing world of other physical
things with which these physical things have
actual or potential relations.  Now at the same
time it is just _those_self-same_things_ which his
mind, as we say, perceives; and the whole philosophy
of perception from Democritus's time
downwards has just been one long wrangle over
the paradox that what is evidently one reality
should be in two places at once, both in outer
space and in a person's mind.  'Representative'

12
theories of perception avoid the logical
paradox, but on the other hand the violate the
reader's sense of life, which knows no intervening
mental image but seems to see the room
and the book immediately just as they physically
exist.

     The puzzle of how the one identical room can
be in two places is at bottom just the puzzle of
how one identical point can be on two lines.  It
can, if it be situated at their intersection; and
similarly, if the 'pure experience' of the room
were a place of intersection of two processes,
which connected it with different groups of associates
respectively, it could be counted twice
over, as belonging to either group, and spoken
of loosely as existing in two places, although it
would remain all the time a numerically single
thing.

     Well, the experience is a member of diverse
processes that can be followed away from it
along entirely different lines.  The one self-
identical thing has so many relations to the
rest of experience that you can take it in disparate
systems of association, and treat it as