ould effect. He would examine on the one hand the properties
of the nutritive material, and on the other hand the acts of the
organism in appropriating and digesting. Such reflection upon experience
gives rise to a distinction of what we experience (the experienced) and
the experiencing--the how. When we give names to this distinction we
have subject matter and method as our terms. There is the thing seen,
heard, loved, hated, imagined, and there is the act of seeing, hearing,
loving, hating, imagining, etc.

This distinction is so natural and so important for certain purposes,
that we are only too apt to regard it as a separation in existence and
not as a distinction in thought. Then we make a division between a self
and the environment or world. This separation is the root of the dualism
of method and subject matter. That is, we assume that knowing, feeling,
willing, etc., are things which belong to the self or mind in its
isolation, and which then may be brought to bear upon an independent
subject matter. We assume that the things which belong in isolation to
the self or mind have their own laws of operation irrespective of the
modes of active energy of the object. These laws are supposed to furnish
method. It would be no less absurd to suppose that men can eat without
eating something, or that the structure and movements of the jaws,
throat muscles, the digestive activities of stomach, etc., are not what
they are because of the material with which their activity is engaged.
Just as the organs of the organism are a continuous part of the very
world in which food materials exist, so the capacities of seeing,
hearing, loving, imagining are intrinsically connected with the subject
matter of the world. They are more truly ways in which the environment
enters into experience and functions there than they are independent
acts brought to bear upon things. Experience, in short, is not a
combination of mind and world, subject and object, method and subject
matter, but is a single continuous interaction of a great diversity
(literally countless in number) of energies.

For the purpose of controlling the course or direction which the moving
unity of experience takes we draw a mental distinction between the
how and the what. While there is no way of walking or of eating or of
learning over and above the actual walking, eating, and studying, there
are certain elements in the act which give the key to its more effective
control.