wo different roles, being _Gedanke_ and
_Gedachtes_, the thought-of-an-object, and the object-thought-of, both
in one; and all this without paradox or mystery, just as the same
material thing may be both low and high, or small and great, or bad
and good, because of its relations to opposite parts of an environing
world.

As 'subjective' we say that the experience represents; as 'objective'
it is represented. What represents and what is represented is here
numerically the same; but we must remember that no dualism of being
represented and representing resides in the experience _per se_. In its
pure state, or when isolated, there is no self-splitting of it into
consciousness and what the consciousness is 'of.' Its subjectivity and
objectivity are functional attributes solely, realized only when the
experience is 'taken,' _i.e._, talked-of, twice, considered along with
its two differing contexts respectively, by a new retrospective
experience, of which that whole past complication now forms the fresh
content.

The instant field of the present is at all times what I call the 'pure'
experience. It is only virtually or potentially either object or subject
as yet. For the time being, it is plain, unqualified actuality, or
existence, a simple _that_. In this _naif_ immediacy it is of course
_valid_; it is _there_, we _act_ upon it; and the doubling of it in
retrospection into a state of mind and a reality intended thereby, is
just one of the acts. The 'state of mind,' first treated explicitly as
such in retrospection, will stand corrected or confirmed, and the
retrospective experience in its turn will get a similar treatment; but
the immediate experience in its passing is always 'truth,'[16] practical
truth, _something to act on_, at its own movement. If the world were
then and there to go out like a candle, it would remain truth absolute
and objective, for it would be 'the last word,' would have no critic,
and no one would ever oppose the thought in it to the reality
intended.[17]

I think I may now claim to have made my thesis clear. Consciousness
connotes a kind of external relation, and does not denote a special
stuff or way of being. _The peculiarity of our experiences, that they
not only are, but are known, which their 'conscious' quality is invoked
to explain, is better explained by their relations--these relations
themselves being experiences--to one another._

IV

Were I now to go on to treat of the knowing of