Yet he never explains what the intellectual transitions would be like in case we had them. He only defines them negatively--they are not spatial, temporal, predicative, or causal; or qualitatively or otherwise serial; or in any way relational as we naïvely trace relations, for relations _separate_ terms, and need themselves to be hooked on _ad infinitum_. The nearest approach he makes to describing a truly intellectual transition is where he speaks of _A_ and _B_ as being 'united, each from its own nature, in a whole which is the nature of both alike.'[64] But this (which, _pace_ Mr. Bradley, seems exquisitely analogous to 'taking' a congeries in a 'lump,' if not to 'swamping') suggests nothing but that _conflux_ which pure experience so abundantly offers, as when 'space,' 'white' and 'sweet' are confluent in a 'lump of sugar,' or kinesthetic, dermal, and optical sensations confluent in 'my hand.'[65] All that I can verify in the transitions which Mr. Bradley's intellect desiderates as its _proprius motus_ is a reminiscence of these and other sensible conjunctions (especially space-conjunctions), but a reminiscence so vague that its originals are not recognized. Bradley in short repeats the fable of the dog, the bone, and its image in the water. With a world of particulars, given in loveliest union, in conjunction definitely various, and variously definite, the 'how' of which you 'understand' as soon as you see the fact of them,[66] for there is no 'how' except the constitution of the fact as given; with all this given him, I say, in pure experience, he asks for some ineffable union in the abstract instead, which, if he gained it, would only be a duplicate of what he has already in his full possession. Surely he abuses the privilege which society grants to all us philosophers, of being puzzle-headed. Polemic writing like this is odious; but with absolutism in possession in so many quarters, omission to defend my radical empiricism against its best known champion would count as either superficiality or inability. I have to conclude that its dialectic has not invalidated in the least degree the usual conjunctions by which the world, as experienced, hangs so variously together. In particular it leaves an empirical theory of knowledge[67] intact, and lets us continue to believe with common sense that one object _may_ be known, if we have any ground for thinking that it _is_ known, to many knowers. In [the next essay] I shall return to this last supposition, which seems to me to offer other difficulties much harder for a philosophy of pure experience to deal with than any of absolutism's dialectic objections. FOOTNOTES: [43] [Reprinted from _The Journal of Philosophy, Psychology and Scientific Methods_, vol. II, No. 2, January 19, 1905. Reprinted also as Appendix A in _A Pluralistic Universe_, pp. 347-369. The author's corrections have been adopted in the present text. ED.]