My reply to this is my last word, and I greatly grieve that to many it will sound materialistic. I can not help that, however, for I, too, have my intuitions and I must obey them. Let the case be what it may in others, I am as confident as I am of anything that, in myself, the stream of thinking (which I recognize emphatically as a phenomenon) is only a careless name for what, when scrutinized, reveals itself to consist chiefly of the stream of my breathing. The 'I think' which Kant said must be able to accompany all my objects, is the 'I breathe' which actually does accompany them. There are other internal facts besides breathing (intracephalic muscular adjustments, etc., of which I have said a word in my larger Psychology), and these increase the assets of 'consciousness,' so far as the latter is subject to immediate perception;[24] but breath, which was ever the original of 'spirit,' breath moving outwards, between the glottis and the nostrils, is, I am persuaded, the essence out of which philosophers have constructed the entity known to them as consciousness. _That entity is fictitious, while thoughts in the concrete are fully real. But thoughts in the concrete are made of the same stuff as things are._ I wish I might believe myself to have made that plausible in this article. In another article I shall try to make the general notion of a world composed of pure experiences still more clear. FOOTNOTES: [2] [Reprinted from the _Journal of Philosophy, Psychology and Scientific Methods_, vol. I, No. 18, September 1, 1904. For the relation between this essay and those which follow, cf. below, pp. 53-54. ED.] [3] Articles by Baldwin, Ward, Bawden, King, Alexander and others. Dr. Perry is frankly over the border. [4] [Similarly, there is no "activity of 'consciousness' as such." See below, pp. 170 ff., note. ED.] [5] In my _Psychology_ I have tried to show that we need no knower other than the 'passing thought.' [_Principles of Psychology_, vol. I, pp. 338 ff.] [6] G. E. Moore: _Mind_, vol. XII, N. S., [1903], p. 450. [7] Paul Natorp: _Einleitung in die Psychologie_, 1888, pp. 14, 112. [8] "Figuratively speaking, consciousness may be said to be the one universal solvent, or menstruum, in which the different concrete kinds of psychic acts and facts are contained, whether in concealed or in obvious form." G. T. Ladd: _Psychology, Descriptive and Explanatory_, 1894, p. 30. [9] [For a parallel statement of this view, cf. the author's _Meaning of Truth_, p. 49, note. Cf. also below, pp. 196-197. ED.]