ing to the conceptual system. What is immediately
given in the single and particular instance is always something pooled
and mutual, something with no dark spot, no point of ignorance. No one
elementary bit of reality is eclipsed from the next bit's point of
view, if only we take reality sensibly and in small enough pulses--and
by us it has to be taken pulse-wise, for our span of consciousness is
too short to grasp the larger collectivity of things except nominally
and abstractly. No more of reality collected together at once is
extant anywhere, perhaps, than in my experience of reading this page,
or in yours of listening; yet within those bits of experience as
they come to pass we get a fulness of content that no conceptual
description can equal. Sensational experiences _are_ their 'own
others,' then, both internally and externally. Inwardly they are one
with their parts, and outwardly they pass continuously into their next
neighbors, so that events separated by years of time in a man's life
hang together unbrokenly by the intermediary events. Their _names_,
to be sure, cut them into separate conceptual entities, but no cuts
existed in the continuum in which they originally came.

If, with all this in our mind, we turn to our own particular
predicament, we see that our old objection to the self-compounding of
states of consciousness, our accusation that it was impossible for
purely logical reasons, is unfounded in principle. Every smallest
state of consciousness, concretely taken, overflows its own
definition. Only concepts are self-identical; only 'reason' deals with
closed equations; nature is but a name for excess; every point in
her opens out and runs into the more; and the only question, with
reference to any point we may be considering, is how far into the
rest of nature we may have to go in order to get entirely beyond its
overflow. In the pulse of inner life immediately present now in each
of us is a little past, a little future, a little awareness of our own
body, of each other's persons, of these sublimities we are trying to
talk about, of the earth's geography and the direction of history,
of truth and error, of good and bad, and of who knows how much more?
Feeling, however dimly and subconsciously, all these things, your
pulse of inner life is continuous with them, belongs to them and they
to it. You can't identify it with either one of them rather than with
the others, for if you let it develop into no mat