From this it follows that when any one, whether Realist, or Idealist, or unreflective man, feels justified in asserting that what he perceives to-day is the same object he perceived yesterday, he is led to make this assertion on the strength of some distinction in his immediate experience, and he refers only secondarily, if at all, to anything beyond and external to this. The distinction which he marks by the word is this: He has reason to believe that the two percepts in question belong to the one series,--to the one life history, so to speak. He believes that had he cared to do so he could have filled up the gap between them by a continuous series of percepts, each conditioned by the preceding, and forming the one chain. Each represents to him the one object, in that each stands for the whole series, and his thought is much more taken up with the series as a whole than with the individuals composing it. He knows that the percepts in such a series can only be successive, never simultaneous. Had he reason to suspect that the two percepts we are discussing belong to different series of this kind, and that there is nothing in the nature of the case to prevent their being simultaneous, he would decide for two trees. But each percept contains more than one mental element, and just as we may regard each percept as representing the whole series, so we may regard each element as representing the whole complex which may be experienced at one time, and through this the whole series of percepts. I say that the orange I smell is the same with the one I see; that I can reveal by striking a light the chair I fell over in the dark; that I hear rattling down the street the coach I stepped out of a few moments ago. It is not worth while to distinguish this use from the use of the word same just mentioned, for they agree in making a single experience stand for a whole group or series, which is assumed to be at least potentially present with each one. When we have had two experiences thus representing the one group, we say that we have in two ways, or on two occasions, experienced the same object. In this sense has the man in our illustration seen yesterday and to-day the same tree. In this sense could he at the one time see and touch the same tree.