sciousness is one element, moment, factor--call it what you
like--of an experience of essentially dualistic inner constitution, from
which, if you abstract the content, the consciousness will remain
revealed to its own eye. Experience, at this rate, would be much like a
paint of which the world pictures were made. Paint has a dual
constitution, involving, as it does, a menstruum[8] (oil, size or what
not) and a mass of content in the form of pigment suspended therein. We
can get the pure menstruum by letting the pigment settle, and the pure
pigment by pouring off the size or oil. We operate here by physical
subtraction; and the usual view is, that by mental subtraction we can
separate the two factors of experience in an analogous way--not
isolating them entirely, but distinguishing them enough to know that
they are two.

II

Now my contention is exactly the reverse of this. _Experience, I
believe, has no such inner duplicity; and the separation of it into
consciousness and content comes, not by way of subtraction, but by way
of addition_--the addition, to a given concrete piece of it, of other
sets of experiences, in connection with which severally its use or
function may be of two different kinds. The paint will also serve here
as an illustration. In a pot in a paint-shop, along with other paints,
it serves in its entirety as so much saleable matter. Spread on a
canvas, with other paints around it, it represents, on the contrary, a
feature in a picture and performs a spiritual function. Just so, I
maintain, does a given undivided portion of experience, taken in one
context of associates, play the part of a knower, of a state of mind, of
'consciousness'; while in a different context the same undivided bit of
experience plays the part of a thing known, of an objective 'content.'
In a word, in one group it figures as a thought, in another group as a
thing. And, since it can figure in both groups simultaneously we have
every right to speak of it as subjective and objective both at once. The
dualism connoted by such double-barrelled terms as 'experience,'
'phenomenon,' 'datum,' '_Vorfindung_'--terms which, in philosophy at any
rate, tend more and more to replace the single-barrelled terms of
'thought' and 'thing'--that dualism, I say, is still preserved in this
account, but reinterpreted, so that, instead of being mysterious and
elusive, it becomes verifiable and concrete. It is an affair of
relations, it falls outside,