hen, our minds meet in a world of objects which they share
in common, which would still be there, if one or several of the minds
were destroyed. I can see no formal objection to this supposition's
being literally true. On the principles which I am defending, a 'mind'
or 'personal consciousness' is the name for a series of experiences run
together by certain definite transitions, and an objective reality is a
series of similar experiences knit by different transitions. If one and
the same experience can figure twice, once in a mental and once in a
physical context (as I have tried, in my article on 'Consciousness,' to
show that it can), one does not see why it might not figure thrice, or
four times, or any number of times, by running into as many different
mental contexts, just as the same point, lying at their intersection,
can be continued into many different lines. Abolishing any number of
contexts would not destroy the experience itself or its other contexts,
any more than abolishing some of the point's linear continuations would
destroy the others, or destroy the point itself.

I well know the subtle dialectic which insists that a term taken in
another relation must needs be an intrinsically different term. The crux
is always the old Greek one, that the same man can't be tall in relation
to one neighbor, and short in relation to another, for that would make
him tall and short at once. In this essay I can not stop to refute this
dialectic, so I pass on, leaving my flank for the time exposed.[39] But
if my reader will only allow that the same '_now_' both ends his past
and begins his future; or that, when he buys an acre of land from his
neighbor, it is the same acre that successively figures in the two
estates; or that when I pay him a dollar, the same dollar goes into his
pocket that came out of mine; he will also in consistency have to allow
that the same object may conceivably play a part in, as being related to
the rest of, any number of otherwise entirely different minds. This is
enough for my present point: the common-sense notion of minds sharing
the same object offers no special logical or epistemological
difficulties of its own; it stands or falls with the general possibility
of things being in conjunctive relation with other things at all.

In principle, then, let natural realism pass for possible. Your mind and
mine _may_ terminate in the same percept, not merely against it, as if
it were a third external