ions are as
primordial elements of 'fact' as are the distinctions and disjunctions.
In the same act by which I feel that this passing minute is a new pulse
of my life, I feel that the old life continues into it, and the feeling
of continuance in no wise jars upon the simultaneous feeling of a
novelty. They, too, compenetrate harmoniously. Prepositions, copulas,
and conjunctions, 'is,' 'isn't,' 'then,' 'before,' 'in,' 'on,' 'beside,'
'between,' 'next,' 'like,' 'unlike,' 'as,' 'but,' flower out of the
stream of pure experience, the stream of concretes or the sensational
stream, as naturally as nouns and adjectives do, and they melt into it
again as fluidly when we apply them to a new portion of the stream.

II

If now we ask why we must thus translate experience from a more concrete
or pure into a more intellectualized form, filling it with ever more
abounding conceptual distinctions, rationalism and naturalism give
different replies.

The rationalistic answer is that the theoretic life is absolute and its
interests imperative; that to understand is simply the duty of man; and
that who questions this need not be argued with, for by the fact of
arguing he gives away his case.

The naturalist answer is that the environment kills as well as sustains
us, and that the tendency of raw experience to extinguish the experient
himself is lessened just in the degree in which the elements in it that
have a practical bearing upon life are analyzed out of the continuum and
verbally fixed and coupled together, so that we may know what is in the
wind for us and get ready to react in time. Had pure experience, the
naturalist says, been always perfectly healthy, there would never have
arisen the necessity of isolating or verbalizing any of its terms. We
should just have experienced inarticulately and unintellectually
enjoyed. This leaning on 'reaction' in the naturalist account implies
that, whenever we intellectualize a relatively pure experience, we ought
to do so for the sake of redescending to the purer or more concrete
level again; and that if an intellect stays aloft among its abstract
terms and generalized relations, and does not reinsert itself with its
conclusions into some particular point of the immediate stream of life,
it fails to finish out its function and leaves its normal race unrun.

Most rationalists nowadays will agree that naturalism gives a true
enough account of the way in which our intellect arose at first, b