§ 3. To return to our detailed investigation of the connection between Reality as now defined for the metaphysician, and Experience. We can now see more completely than before why it is only in _immediate_ experience that reality is to be found. Our reason for identifying reality with immediate experience has nothing to do with the theory according to which “sensations,” being the product of a something “without the mind,” are supposed to carry with them a direct certificate of the independent existence of their “external” cause. For we have seen: (1) that immediacy means simply indissoluble union with a whole of feeling, and that this immediacy belongs to every mental state as actually lived through; (2) that the dependence of sensations in particular on an “external” cause, is in no sense an immediate datum of experience, but a reflective hypothesis which, like all such hypotheses, demands examination and justification before it can be pronounced legitimate; (3) that it is a philosophical blunder to identify the real with the merely “independent” of ourselves. What is merely independent, as we have now seen, would for us be the merely unreal. Presence in immediate experience is a universal character of all that is real, because it is only in so far as anything is thus presented in immediate unity with the concrete life of feeling that it can be given as a condition or fact of which an individual interest must take account, on pain of not reaching accomplishment. Actual life, as we have already learned, is always a concrete unity of feeling in which the two distinguishable aspects of a psychical fact, its existence and its content, the that and the what, though distinguishable, are inseparable. Scientific reflection on the given we found to be always abstract, in the sense that its very essence is the mental separation of the content from the process. By such separation we mediately get to know the character of the separated content better, but our knowledge, with all its fulness, still remains abstract; it is still knowledge referring to and about an object outside itself. It is only when, as a result of the reflective process, we find fresh meaning in the individual process-content on its recurrence that we return once more to the concrete actuality of real existence.