[NOTE: The reception of this essay proved that I was unreasonably sanguine in thinking that the foot-note of warning, appended to the title, would forfend radical misapprehension. I see now that it was unreasonable to expect that the word “immediate” in a philosophic writing could be generally understood to apply to anything except _knowledge_, even though the body of the essay is a protest against such limitation. But I venture to repeat that the essay is not a denial of the necessity of “mediation,” or reflection, in knowledge, but is an assertion that the inferential factor must _exist_, or must occur, and that all existence is direct and vital, so that philosophy can pass upon its nature--as upon the nature of all of the rest of its subject-matter--only by first ascertaining what it exists or occurs _as_. I venture to repeat also another statement of the text: I do not mean by “immediate experience” any aboriginal stuff out of which things are evolved, but I use the term to indicate the necessity of employing in philosophy the direct descriptive method that has now made its way in all the natural sciences, with such modifications, of course, as the subject itself entails. There is nothing in the text to imply that things exist in experience atomically or in isolation. When it is said that a thing as cognized is _different_ from an earlier non-cognitionally experienced thing, the saying no more implies lack of continuity between the things, than the obvious remark that a seed is different from a flower or a leaf denies their continuity. The amount and kind of continuity or discreteness that exists is to be discovered by recurring to what actually occurs in experience.