ontradiction
of the discontinuity. If the white must partake of space, the heat of
time, and so forth,--do not whiteness and space, heat and time,
mutually call for or help to create each other?

Yes; a few such _a priori_ couplings must be admitted. They are the
axioms: no feeling except as occupying some space and time, or as a
moment in some ego; no motion but of something moved; no thought but of
an object; no time without a previous time,--and the like. But they
are limited in number, and they obtain only between excessively broad
genera of concepts, and leave quite undetermined what the
specifications of those genera shall be. What feeling shall fill
_this_ time, what substance execute _this_ motion, what qualities
combine in _this_ being, are as much unanswered questions as if the
metaphysical axioms never existed at all.

The existence of such syntheses as they are does then but slightly
mitigate the jolt, jolt, jolt we get when we pass over the facts of the
world. Everywhere indeterminate variables, subject only to these few
vague enveloping laws, independent in all besides.--such seems the
truth.

In yet another way, too, ideal and real are so far {269} apart that
their conjunction seems quite hopeless. To eat our cake and have it,
to lose our soul and save it, to enjoy the physical privileges of
selfishness and the moral luxury of altruism at the same time, would be
the ideal. But the real offers us these terms in the shape of mutually
exclusive alternatives of which only one can be true at once; so that
we must choose, and in choosing murder one possibility. The wrench is
absolute: "Either--or!" Just as whenever I bet a hundred dollars on an
event, there comes an instant when I am a hundred dollars richer or
poorer without any intermediate degrees passed over; just as my
wavering between a journey to Portland or to New York does not carry me
from Cambridge in a resultant direction in which both motions are
compounded, say to Albany, but at a given moment results in the
conjunction of reality in all its fulness for one alternative and
impossibility in all its fulness for the other,--so the bachelor joys
are utterly lost from the face of being for the married man, who must
henceforward find his account in something that is not them but is good
enough to make him forget them; so the careless and irresponsible
living in the sunshine, the 'unbuttoning after supper and sleeping upon
benches in the aft