en, but it
brings its own point of view out clearly, and admits of a perfectly
straight reply.

The argument (unless I fail to catch it) can be expressed as follows:

If a series of experiences be supposed, no one of which is endowed
immediately with the self-transcendent function of reference to a
reality beyond itself, no motive will occur within the series for
supposing anything beyond it to exist. It will remain subjective, and
contentedly subjective, both as a whole and in its several parts.

Radical empiricism, trying, as it does, to account for objective
knowledge by means of such a series, egregiously fails. It can not
explain how the notion of a physical order, as distinguished from a
subjectively biographical order, of experiences, ever arose.

It pretends to explain the notion of a physical order, but does so by
playing fast and loose with the concept of objective reference. On the
one hand, it denies that such reference implies self-transcendency on
the part of any one experience; on the other hand, it claims that
experiences _point_. But, critically considered, there can be no
pointing unless self-transcendency be also allowed. The conjunctive
function of pointing, as I have assumed it, is, according to my critic,
vitiated by the fallacy of attaching a bilateral relation to a term _a
quo_, as if it could stick out substantively and maintain itself in
existence in advance of the term _ad quem_ which is equally required for
it to be a concretely experienced fact. If the relation be made
concrete, the term _ad quem_ is involved, which would mean (if I succeed
in apprehending Mr. Bode rightly) that this latter term, although not
empirically there, is yet _noetically_ there, in advance--in other words
it would mean that any experience that 'points' must already have
transcended itself, in the ordinary 'epistemological' sense of the word
transcend.

Something like this, if I understand Mr. Bode's text, is the upshot of
his state of mind. It is a reasonable sounding state of mind, but it is
exactly the state of mind which radical empiricism, by its doctrine of
the reality of conjunctive relations, seeks to dispel. I very much
fear--so difficult does mutual understanding seem in these exalted
regions--that my able critic has failed to understand that doctrine as
it is meant to be understood. I suspect that he performs on all these
conjunctive relations (of which the aforesaid 'pointing' is only one)
the usual