APPENDIX A
THE THING AND ITS RELATIONS[1]
Experience in its immediacy seems perfectly fluent. The active sense of living which we all enjoy, before reflection shatters our instinctive world for us, is self-luminous and suggests no paradoxes. Its difficulties are disappointments and uncertainties. They are not intellectual contradictions.
When the reflective intellect gets at work, however, it discovers incomprehensibilities in the flowing process. Distinguishing its elements and parts, it gives them separate names, and what it thus disjoins it cannot easily put together. Pyrrhonism accepts the irrationality and revels in its dialectic elaboration. Other philosophies try, some by ignoring, some by resisting, and some by turning the dialectic procedure against itself, negating its first negations, to restore the fluent sense of life again, and let redemption take the place of innocence. The perfection with which any philosophy may do this is the measure of its human success and of its importance in philosophic history. In an article entitled 'A world of pure experience,[2] I tried my own hand sketchily at
[Footnote 1: Reprinted from the Journal of Philosophy, Psychology, and Scientific Methods, vol. ii, New York, 1905, with slight verbal revision.]
[Footnote 2: Journal of Philosophy, Psychology, and Scientific
Methods, vol. i, No. 20, p. 566.]
the problem, resisting certain first steps of dialectics by insisting in a general way that the immediately experienced conjunctive relations are as real as anything else. If my sketch is not to appear too näif, I must come closer to details, and in the present essay I propose to do so.