Obviously no new kind of condition would have to be supplied. All that
we should have to postulate would be a second subsequent experience,
collateral and contemporary with the first subsequent one, in which a
similar act of appropriation should occur. The two acts would interfere
neither with one another nor with the originally pure pen. It would
sleep undisturbed in its own past, no matter how many such successors
went through their several appropriative acts. Each would know it as
'my' percept, each would class it as a 'conscious' fact.
Nor need their so classing it interfere in the least with their classing
it at the same time as a physical pen. Since the classing in both cases
depends upon the taking of it in one group or another of associates, if
the superseding experience were of wide enough 'span' it could think the
pen in both groups simultaneously, and yet distinguish the two groups.
It would then see the whole situation conformably to what we call 'the
representative theory of cognition,' and that is what we all
spontaneously do. As a man philosophizing 'popularly,' I believe that
what I see myself writing with is double--I think it in its relations to
physical nature, and also in its relations to my personal life; I see
that it is in my mind, but that it also is a physical pen.
The paradox of the same experience figuring in two consciousnesses seems
thus no paradox at all. To be 'conscious' means not simply to be, but to
be reported, known, to have awareness of one's being added to that
being; and this is just what happens when the appropriative experience
supervenes. The pen-experience in its original immediacy is not aware of
itself, it simply _is_, and the second experience is required for what
we call awareness of it to occur.[72] The difficulty of understanding
what happens here is, therefore, not a logical difficulty: there is no
contradiction involved. It is an ontological difficulty rather.
Experiences come on an enormous scale, and if we take them all
together, they come in a chaos of incommensurable relations that we can
not straighten out. We have to abstract different groups of them, and
handle these separately if we are to talk of them at all. But how the
experiences ever _get themselves made_, or _why_ their characters and
relations are just such as appear, we can not begin to understand.
Granting, however, that, by hook or crook, they _can_ get themselves
made, and can appear in the successions that I have so schematically
described, then we have to confess that even although (as I began by
quoting from the adversary) 'a feeling only is as it is felt,' there is
still nothing absurd in the notion of its being felt in two different
ways at once, as yours, namely, and as mine. It is, indeed, 'mine' only
as it is felt as mine, and 'yours' only as it is felt as yours. But it
is felt as neither _by itself_, but only when 'owned' by our two several
remembering experiences, just as one undivided estate is owned by
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