willing to give it up!"

     To this challenge the reply is easy.  Although
for fluency's sake I myself spoke early in this
article of a stuff of pure experience, I have now
to say that there is no _general_ stuff of which experience
at large is made.  There are as many
stuffs as there are 'natures' in the things experienced.
If you ask what any one bit of pure
experience is made of, the answer is always the

27
same:  "It is made of _that_, of just what appears,
of space, of intensity, of flatness, brownness,
heaviness, or what not."  Shadworth Hodgson's
analysis here leaves nothing to be desired.(1)
Experience is only a collective name
for all these sensible natures, and save for time
and space (and, if you like, for 'being') there
appears no universal element of which all
things are made.

                              VI

     The next objection is more formidable, in
fact it sounds quite crushing when one hears
it first.

     "If it be the self-same piece of pure experience,
taken twice over, that serves now as thought and now as thing" -- so the
objection runs -- "how comes it that its attributes
should differ so fundamentally in the two takings.
As thing, the experience is extended; as
thought, it occupies no space or place.  As
thing, it is red, hard, heavy; but who ever heard

28
of a red, hard or heavy thought?  Yet even
now you said that an experience is made of
just what appears, and what appears is just
such adjectives.  How can the one experience
in its thing-function be made of them, consist
of them, carry them as its own attributes, while
in its thought-function it disowns them and
attributes them elsewhere.  There is a self-contradiction
here from which the radical dualism
of thought and thing is the only truth that can
save us.  Only if the thought is one kind of
being can the adjectives exist in it 'intentionally'
(to use the scholastic term); only if the
thing is another kind, can they exist in it constituitively
and energetically.  No simple subject
can take the same adjectives and at one
time be qualified by it, and at another time be
merely 'of' it, as of something only meant or
known."

     The solution insisted on by this objector, like
many other common-sense solutions, grows
the less satisfactory the more one turns it in
one's mind.  To begin with, _are_ thought and
thing as heterogeneous as is commonly said?

29

     No one denies that they have some categories
in common.  Their relations to time are identical.
Both, moreover, may have parts (for
psychologists n general treat thoughts as having
them); and both may be complex or simple.
Both are of kinds, can be compared, added and
subtracted and arranged in serial orders.  All
sorts of adjectives qualify our thoughts which
appear incompatible with consciousness, being
as such a bare diaphaneity.  For instance, they
are natural and easy, or laborious.  They are
beautiful, happy, intense, interesting, wise,
idiotic, focal, marginal, insipid, confused,
vague, precise, rational, causal, general, particular,
and many things besides.  Moreover,
the chapters on 'Perception' in the psychology-
books are full of facts that make for the
essential homogeneity of thought with thing.
How, if 'subject' and 'object' were separated
'by the whole diameter of being,' and had no
attributes and common, could it be so hard to
tell, in a presented and recognized material
object, what part comes in thought the sense-
organs and what part comes 'out of one's own

30
head'?  Sensations and apperceptive ideas fuse
here so intimately that you can no more tell
where one begins and the other ends, than you
can tell, in those cunning circular panoramas
that have lately been exhibited, where the real
foreground and the painted canvas join together.(1)

     Descartes for the first time defined thought
as the absolutely unextended, and later philosophers