bell-stroke.' When I see a thing _M_, with _L_ to the left of it and _N_ to the right of it, I see it _as_ one _M_; and if you tell me I have had to 'take' it twice, I reply that if I 'took' it a thousand times, I should still _see_ it as a unit.[1] Its unity is aboriginal, just as the multiplicity of my successive takings is aboriginal. It comes unbroken as _that M_, as a singular which I encounter; they come broken, as _those_ takings, as my plurality of operations. The unity and the separateness are strictly co-ordinate. I do not easily fathom why my opponents should find the separateness so much more easily understandable that they must needs infect the whole of finite experience with it, and relegate the unity (now taken as a bare postulate and no longer as a thing positively perceivable) to the region of the absolute's mysteries. I do not easily fathom this, I say, for the said opponents are above mere verbal quibbling; yet all that I can catch in their talk is the substitution of what is true of certain words for what is true of what they signify. They stay with the words,--not returning to the stream of life whence all the meaning of them came, and which is always ready to reabsorb them. [Footnote 1: I may perhaps refer here to my _Principles of Psychology_, vol. i, pp. 459 ff. It really seems 'weird' to have to argue (as I am forced now to do) for the notion that it is one sheet of paper (with its two surfaces and all that lies between) which is both under my pen and on the table while I write--the 'claim' that it is two sheets seems so brazen. Yet I sometimes suspect the absolutists of sincerity!] IV For aught this argument proves, then, we may continue to believe that one thing can be known by many knowers. But the denial of one thing in many relations is but one application of a still profounder dialectic difficulty. Man can't be good, said the sophists, for man is _man_ and _good_ is good; and Hegel and Herbart in their day, more recently H. Spir, and most recently and elaborately of all, Mr. Bradley, inform us that a term can logically only be a punctiform unit, and that not one of the conjunctive relations between things, which experience seems to yield, is rationally possible.