§ 4. We have already seen that to identify reality with experience does not mean identifying it with my own experience just as it comes to me in actual life, still less with my own experience as I mentally reconstruct it in the light of some conscious or unconscious philosophical theory. My own experience, in fact, is very far from satisfying the conditions of completeness and harmony which we found in our last book to be essential to a “pure” or perfect experience. Its defectiveness is principally manifested in three ways. (1) As we have already seen, its contents are always fragmentary. It never contains more than the poorest fragment of the whole wealth of existence. The purposes or interests which make up my conscious life are narrowly limited. The major portion of the facts of the universe, _i.e._ of the conditions of which note has to be taken by its inhabitants if their aims are to be fulfilled, lie outside the range of my individual interests—at least, of those which I ever become explicitly aware. Hence, being without significance for my individual purposes, they do not directly enter into my special experience. I either know nothing of them at all, or know of them only indirectly and through the testimony of others for whose lives they have real and direct significance. And these others again are, in virtue of the individual interests which differentiate them from me, only partially cognisant of the same factual reality as I am. (2) Again, my insight even into my own aims and interests is of a very limited kind. For one thing, it is only a fragment of them which is ever given in the form of what is immediately felt in an actual moment of experience. I have largely to interpret the actually felt by theoretical intellectual constructions which reach, in the form of memory, into the past, and, in the form of anticipation, into the future. And both these types of intellectual construction, though indispensable, are notoriously vitiated by fallacies. For another, even with the fullest aid of such intellectual construction, I never succeed in completely grasping the whole meaning of my life as the embodiment of a single coherent purpose. Many of my purposes never rise sufficiently into clear consciousness to be distinctly realised, and those that do often wear the appearance of having no systematic connection with one another. Small wonder, then, that the realities or “facts” of which I learn to take note for the execution of my aims more often than not appear to belong to a chaos rather than to the orderly system which we cannot help believing the world to be, could we see it as it truly is.