rationalistic act of substitution--he takes them not as they
are given in their first intention, as parts constitutive of
experience's living flow, but only as they appear in retrospect, each
fixed as a determinate object of conception, static, therefore, and
contained within itself.

Against this rationalistic tendency to treat experience as chopped up
into discontinuous static objects, radical empiricism protests. It
insists on taking conjunctions at their 'face-value,' just as they come.
Consider, for example, such conjunctions as 'and,' 'with,' 'near,'
'_plus_,' 'towards.' While we live in such conjunctions our state is one
of _transition_ in the most literal sense. We are expectant of a 'more'
to come, and before the more _has_ come, the transition, nevertheless,
is directed _towards_ it. I fail otherwise to see how, if one kind of
more comes, there should be satisfaction and feeling of fulfilment; but
disappointment if the more comes in another shape. One more will
continue, another more will arrest or deflect the direction, in which
our experience is moving even now. We can not, it is true, _name_ our
different living 'ands' or 'withs' except by naming the different terms
towards which they are moving us, but we _live_ their specifications and
differences before those terms explicitly arrive. Thus, though the
various 'ands' are all bilateral relations, each requiring a term _ad
quem_ to define it when viewed in retrospect and articulately conceived,
yet in its living moment any one of them may be treated as if it 'stuck
out' from its term _a quo_ and pointed in a special direction, much as a
compass-needle (to use Mr. Bode's excellent simile) points at the pole,
even though it stirs not from its box.

In Professor Hoeffding's massive little article in _The Journal of
Philosophy, Psychology and Scientific Methods_,[121] he quotes a saying
of Kierkegaard's to the effect that we live forwards, but we understand
backwards. Understanding backwards is, it must be confessed, a very
frequent weakness of philosophers, both of the rationalistic and of the
ordinary empiricist type. Radical empiricism alone insists on
understanding forwards also, and refuses to substitute static concepts
of the understanding for transitions in our moving life. A logic similar
to that which my critic seems to employ here should, it seems to me,
forbid him to say that our present is, while present, directed towards
our future, or that any ph