remely limited and does not link
two different selves together. _Prima facie_, if you should liken the
universe of absolute idealism to an aquarium, a crystal globe in which
goldfish are swimming, you would have to compare the empiricist universe
to something more like one of those dried human heads with which the
Dyaks of Borneo deck their lodges. The skull forms a solid nucleus; but
innumerable feathers, leaves, strings, beads, and loose appendices of
every description float and dangle from it, and, save that they
terminate in it, seem to have nothing to do with one another. Even so my
experiences and yours float and dangle, terminating, it is true, in a
nucleus of common perception, but for the most part out of sight and
irrelevant and unimaginable to one another. This imperfect intimacy,
this bare relation of _withness_ between some parts of the sum total of
experience and other parts, is the fact that ordinary empiricism
over-emphasizes against rationalism, the latter always tending to ignore
it unduly. Radical empiricism, on the contrary, is fair to both the
unity and the disconnection. It finds no reason for treating either as
illusory. It allots to each its definite sphere of description, and
agrees that there appear to be actual forces at work which tend, as time
goes on, to make the unity greater.

The conjunctive relation that has given most trouble to philosophy is
the _co-conscious transition_, so to call it, by which one experience
passes into another when both belong to the same self. About the facts
there is no question. My experiences and your experiences are 'with'
each other in various external ways, but mine pass into mine, and yours
pass into yours in a way in which yours and mine never pass into one
another. Within each of our personal histories, subject, object,
interest and purpose _are continuous or may be continuous_.[28] Personal
histories are processes of change in time, and _the change itself is one
of the things immediately experienced_. 'Change' in this case means
continuous as opposed to discontinuous transition. But continuous
transition is one sort of a conjunctive relation; and to be a radical
empiricist means to hold fast to this conjunctive relation of all
others, for this is the strategic point, the position through which, if
a hole be made, all the corruptions of dialectics and all the
metaphysical fictions pour into our philosophy. The holding fast to this
relation means taking it