, and dragged philosophy with
it. Yet the escape was as easy as the egg of Columbus to the insight of
genius. William James had merely to invert the problem. Instead of
assuming with Hume that because some experiences seemed to attest the
presence of distinct objects, all connections were illusory and all
experience must ultimately consist of psychical atoms, James had merely
to maintain that this separation was secondary and artificial, and that
experience was initially a continuum. Once this is pointed out, the fact
is obvious. The stream of experience no doubt contains what it is
afterwards possible to single out as 'sensations,' but it presents them
also as connected by 'relations.' Moreover, the 'sensations' or
'qualities' and their 'relations' exhibit the immediate indiscerptible
unity of a fluid rather than a succession of flashes. Temporal and
spatial relations with all the connections they sustain are perceived
just as directly as what we come to distinguish as the 'things' in them.
'Consciousness,' James insists, 'does not appear to itself chopped up in
bits,' and 'we ought to say a feeling of _and_, a feeling of _if_, a
feeling of _but_, and a feeling of _by_, quite as readily as we say a
feeling of _blue_ or a feeling of _cold_. All things in experience
naturally 'compenetrate,' to use a phrase of Bergson's; they are
distinct and they are united at the same time.

The great crux in Hume is thus seen to be illusory. Immediate experience
does not require 'synthesis': it calls for 'analysis.' It is not a
jigsaw puzzle, to be pieced together without glue: it is a confused
whole which has to be divided and set in order for clear thinking.
Hume's mistake was to have started from experience _as partly analysed_
by common sense, and not from the flux _as given_. His 'sensations' were
the qualities already analysed out of the flux; he took these selections
for the whole and neglected the other less obvious features in it--viz.,
the relations which floated them.

Thus the puzzle 'How do "relations" relate?' received its solution in
this new account of experience. Philosophers are puzzled by this
question because they confuse percepts with concepts. Percepts are
_given_ in relation; but concepts, being ideal dissections of the
perceptual flux, are discontinuous terms which have to be related by an
act of thought, because they were made for this very purpose of
distinction. Thus the eye sees cats sitting upon walls, as