n
radical and taken everything that comes without disfavor, conjunction as
well as separation, each at its face value, the results would have
called for no such artificial correction. _Radical empiricism_, as I
understand it, _does full justice to conjunctive relations_, without,
however, treating them as rationalism always tends to treat them, as
being true in some supernal way, as if the unity of things and their
variety belonged to different orders of truth and vitality altogether.

II. CONJUNCTIVE RELATIONS

Relations are of different degrees of intimacy. Merely to be 'with' one
another in a universe of discourse is the most external relation that
terms can have, and seems to involve nothing whatever as to farther
consequences. Simultaneity and time-interval come next, and then
space-adjacency and distance. After them, similarity and difference,
carrying the possibility of many inferences. Then relations of activity,
tying terms into series involving change, tendency, resistance, and the
causal order generally. Finally, the relation experienced between terms
that form states of mind, and are immediately conscious of continuing
each other. The organization of the Self as a system of memories,
purposes, strivings, fulfilments or disappointments, is incidental to
this most intimate of all relations, the terms of which seem in many
cases actually to compenetrate and suffuse each other's being.[27]

Philosophy has always turned on grammatical particles. With, near, next,
like, from, towards, against, because, for, through, my--these words
designate types of conjunctive relation arranged in a roughly ascending
order of intimacy and inclusiveness. _A priori_, we can imagine a
universe of withness but no nextness; or one of nextness but no
likeness, or of likeness with no activity, or of activity with no
purpose, or of purpose with no ego. These would be universes, each with
its own grade of unity. The universe of human experience is, by one or
another of its parts, of each and all these grades. Whether or not it
possibly enjoys some still more absolute grade of union does not appear
upon the surface.

Taken as it does appear, our universe is to a large extent chaotic. No
one single type of connection runs through all the experiences that
compose it. If we take space-relations, they fail to connect minds into
any regular system. Causes and purposes obtain only among special series
of facts. The self-relation seems ext