e the fluent sense of life again, and let redemption
take the place of innocence. The perfection with which any philosophy
may do this is the measure of its human success and of its importance in
philosophic history. In [the last essay], 'A World of Pure Experience,'
I tried my own hand sketchily at the problem, resisting certain first
steps of dialectics by insisting in a general way that the immediately
experienced conjunctive relations are as real as anything else. If my
sketch is not to appear too _naif_, I must come closer to details, and
in the present essay I propose to do so.

I

'Pure experience' is the name which I gave to the immediate flux of life
which furnishes the material to our later reflection with its conceptual
categories. Only new-born babes, or men in semi-coma from sleep, drugs,
illnesses, or blows, may be assumed to have an experience pure in the
literal sense of a _that_ which is not yet any definite _what_, tho'
ready to be all sorts of whats; full both of oneness and of manyness,
but in respects that don't appear; changing throughout, yet so
confusedly that its phases interpenetrate and no points, either of
distinction or of identity, can be caught. Pure experience in this state
is but another name for feeling or sensation. But the flux of it no
sooner comes than it tends to fill itself with emphases, and these
salient parts become identified and fixed and abstracted; so that
experience now flows as if shot through with adjectives and nouns and
prepositions and conjunctions. Its purity is only a relative term,
meaning the proportional amount of unverbalized sensation which it still
embodies.

Far back as we go, the flux, both as a whole and in its parts, is that
of things conjunct and separated. The great continua of time, space, and
the self envelope everything, betwixt them, and flow together without
interfering. The things that they envelope come as separate in some ways
and as continuous in others. Some sensations coalesce with some ideas,
and others are irreconcilable. Qualities compenetrate one space, or
exclude each other from it. They cling together persistently in groups
that move as units, or else they separate. Their changes are abrupt or
discontinuous; and their kinds resemble or differ; and, as they do so,
they fall into either even or irregular series.

In all this the continuities and the discontinuities are absolutely
co-ordinate matters of immediate feeling. The conjunct