I have heard this reason urged so often in discussing with absolutists, and it would destroy my radical empiricism so utterly, if it were valid, that I am bound to give it an attentive ear, and seriously to search its strength. For instance, let the matter in dispute be term _M_, asserted to be on the one hand related to _L_, and on the other to _N_; and let the two cases of relation be symbolized by _L--M_ and _M--N_ respectively. When, now, I assume that the experience may immediately come and be given in the shape _L--M--N_, with no trace of doubling or internal fission in the _M_, I am told that this is all a popular delusion; that _L--M--N_ logically means two different experiences, _L--M_ and _M--N_, namely; and that although the Absolute may, and indeed must, from its superior point of view, read its own kind of unity into _M_'s two editions, yet as elements in finite experience the two _M_'s lie irretrievably asunder, and the world between them is broken and unbridged. In arguing this dialectic thesis, one must avoid slipping from the logical into the physical point of view. It would be easy, in taking a concrete example to fix one's ideas by, to choose one in which the letter _M_ should stand for a collective noun of some sort, which noun, being related to _L_ by one of its parts and to _N_ by another, would inwardly be two things when it stood outwardly in both relations. Thus, one might say: 'David Hume, who weighed so many stone by his body, influences posterity by his doctrine.' The body and the doctrine are two things, between which our finite minds can discover no real sameness, though the same name covers both of them. And then, one might continue: 'Only an Absolute is capable of uniting such a non-identity.' We must, I say, avoid this sort of example, for the dialectic insight, if true at all, must apply to terms and relations universally. It must be true of abstract units as well as of nouns collective; and if we prove it by concrete examples we must take the simplest, so as to avoid irrelevant material suggestions. Taken thus in all its generality, the absolutist contention seems to use as its major premise Hume's notion 'that all our distinct perceptions are distinct existences, and that the mind never perceives any real connexion among distinct existences.'[46] Undoubtedly, since we use two phrases in talking first about '_M_'s relation to _L_' and then about '_M_'s relation to _N_,' we must be having, or must have had, two distinct perceptions;--and the rest would then seem to follow duly. But the starting-point of the reasoning here seems to be the fact of the two _phrases_; and this suggests that the argument may be merely verbal. Can it be that the whole dialectic consists in attributing to the experience talked-about a constitution similar to that of the language in which we describe it? Must we assert the objective double-ness of the _M_ merely because we have to name it twice over when we name its two relations?