ther is as such _not_ appearance-apart, the world _qua_
many is not the world _qua_ one, as absolutism claims. If we hold to
Hume's maxim, which later intellectualism uses so well, that whatever
things are distinguished are as separate as if there were no manner of
connexion between them, there seemed no way out of the difficulty save
by stepping outside of experience altogether and invoking different
spiritual agents, selves or souls, to realize the diversity required.
But this rescue by 'scholastic entities' I was unwilling to accept any
more than pantheistic idealists accept it.

Yet, to quote Fechner's phrase again, 'nichts wirkliches kann
unmoeglich sein,' the actual cannot be impossible, and what _is_ actual
at every moment of our lives is the sort of thing which I now
proceed to remind you of. You can hear the vibration of an electric
contact-maker, smell the ozone, see the sparks, and feel the thrill,
co-consciously as it were or in one field of experience. But you can
also isolate any one of these sensations by shutting out the rest. If
you close your eyes, hold your nose, and remove your hand, you can get
the sensation of sound alone, but it seems still the same sensation
that it was; and if you restore the action of the other organs, the
sound coalesces with the feeling, the sight, and the smell sensations
again. Now the natural way of talking of all this[3] is to say that
certain sensations are experienced, now singly, and now together
with other sensations, in a common conscious field. Fluctuations of
attention give analogous results. We let a sensation in or keep it out
by changing our attention; and similarly we let an item of memory in
or drop it out. [Please don't raise the question here of how these
changes _come to pass_. The immediate condition is probably cerebral
in every instance, but it would be irrelevant now to consider it, for
now we are thinking only of results, and I repeat that the natural way
of thinking of them is that which intellectualist criticism finds so
absurd.]

The absurdity charged is that the self-same should function so
differently, now with and now without something else. But this it
sensibly seems to do. This very desk which I strike with my hand
strikes in turn your eyes. It functions at once as a physical object
in the outer world and as a mental object in our sundry mental worlds.
The very body of mine that _my_ thought actuates is the body whose
gestures are _your_ visu