thing, but by inserting themselves into it and
coalescing with it, for such is the sort of conjunctive union that
appears to be experienced when a perceptual terminus 'fulfils.' Even so,
two hawsers may embrace the same pile, and yet neither one of them touch
any other part except that pile, of what the other hawser is attached
to.

It is therefore not a formal question, but a question of empirical fact
solely, whether, when you and I are said to know the 'same' Memorial
Hall, our minds do terminate at or in a numerically identical percept.
Obviously, as a plain matter of fact, they do _not_. Apart from
color-blindness and such possibilities, we see the Hall in different
perspectives. You may be on one side of it and I on another. The percept
of each of us, as he sees the surface of the Hall, is moreover only his
provisional terminus. The next thing beyond my percept is not your
mind, but more percepts of my own into which my first percept develops,
the interior of the Hall, for instance, or the inner structure of its
bricks and mortar. If our minds were in a literal sense _con_terminous,
neither could get beyond the percept which they had in common, it would
be an ultimate barrier between them--unless indeed they flowed over it
and became 'co-conscious' over a still larger part of their content,
which (thought-transference apart) is not supposed to be the case. In
point of fact the ultimate common barrier can always be pushed, by both
minds, farther than any actual percept of either, until at last it
resolves itself into the mere notion of imperceptibles like atoms or
ether, so that, where we do terminate in percepts, our knowledge is only
speciously completed, being, in theoretic strictness, only a virtual
knowledge of those remoter objects which conception carries out.

Is natural realism, permissible in logic, refuted then by empirical
fact? Do our minds have no object in common after all?

Yes, they certainly have _Space_ in common. On pragmatic principles we
are obliged to predicate sameness wherever we can predicate no
assignable point of difference. If two named things have every quality
and function indiscernible, and are at the same time in the same place,
they must be written down as numerically one thing under two different
names. But there is no test discoverable, so far as I know, by which it
can be shown that the place occupied by your percept of Memorial Hall
differs from the place occupied by mine. Th