nts, or objects, or members--call them what
you will) of the experience-continuum, is just one of those conjunctive
features of it, on which I am obliged to insist so emphatically.[48] For
samenesses are parts of experience's indefeasible structure. When I hear
a bell-stroke and, as life flows on, its after image dies away, I still
hark back to it as 'that same bell-stroke.' When I see a thing _M_, with
_L_ to the left of it and _N_ to the right of it, I see it _as_ one _M_;
and if you tell me I have had to 'take' it twice, I reply that if I
'took' it a thousand times I should still _see_ it as a unit.[49] Its
unity is aboriginal, just as the multiplicity of my successive takings
is aboriginal. It comes unbroken as _that M_, as a singular which I
encounter; they come broken, as _those_ takings, as my plurality of
operations. The unity and the separateness are strictly co-ordinate. I
do not easily fathom why my opponents should find the separateness so
much more easily understandable that they must needs infect the whole of
finite experience with it, and relegate the unity (now taken as a bare
postulate and no longer as a thing positively perceivable) to the region
of the Absolute's mysteries. I do not easily fathom this, I say, for the
said opponents are above mere verbal quibbling; yet all that I can catch
in their talk is the substitution of what is true of certain words for
what is true of what they signify. They stay with the words,--not
returning to the stream of life whence all the meaning of them came, and
which is always ready to reabsorb them.

IV

For aught this argument proves, then, we may continue to believe that
one thing can be known by many knowers. But the denial of one thing in
many relations is but one application of a still profounder dialectic
difficulty. Man can't be good, said the sophists, for man is _man_ and
_good_ is good; and Hegel[50] and Herbart in their day, more recently A.
Spir,[51] and most recently and elaborately of all, Mr. Bradley, informs
us that a term can logically only be a punctiform unit, and that not one
of the conjunctive relations between things, which experience seems to
yield, is rationally possible.

Of course, if true, this cuts off radical empiricism without even a
shilling. Radical empiricism takes conjunctive relations at their face
value, holding them to be as real as the terms united by them.[52] The
world it represents as a collection, some parts of which ar