The conjunctive relation that has given most trouble to philosophy is
the _co-conscious transition_, so to call it, by which one experience
passes into another when both belong to the same self. About the facts
there is no question. My experiences and your experiences are 'with'
each other in various external ways, but mine pass into mine, and yours
pass into yours in a way in which yours and mine never pass into one
another. Within each of our personal histories, subject, object,
interest and purpose _are continuous or may be continuous_.[28] Personal
histories are processes of change in time, and _the change itself is one
of the things immediately experienced_. 'Change' in this case means
continuous as opposed to discontinuous transition. But continuous
transition is one sort of a conjunctive relation; and to be a radical
empiricist means to hold fast to this conjunctive relation of all
others, for this is the strategic point, the position through which, if
a hole be made, all the corruptions of dialectics and all the
metaphysical fictions pour into our philosophy. The holding fast to this
relation means taking it at its face value, neither less nor more; and
to take it at its face value means first of all to take it just as we
feel it, and not to confuse ourselves with abstract talk _about_ it,
involving words that drive us to invent secondary conceptions in order
to neutralize their suggestions and to make our actual experience again
seem rationally possible.
What I do feel simply when a later moment of my experience succeeds an
earlier one is that though they are two moments, the transition from the
one to the other is _continuous_. Continuity here is a definite sort of
experience; just as definite as is the _discontinuity-experience_ which
I find it impossible to avoid when I seek to make the transition from an
experience of my own to one of yours. In this latter case I have to get
on and off again, to pass from a thing lived to another thing only
conceived, and the break is positively experienced and noted. Though the
functions exerted by my experience and by yours may be the same (_e.g._,
the same objects known and the same purposes followed), yet the sameness
has in this case to be ascertained expressly (and often with difficulty
and uncertainty) after the break has been felt; whereas in passing from
one of my own moments to another the sameness of object and interest is
unbroken, and both the earlier and the later experience are of things
directly lived.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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