at its face value, neither less nor more; and
to take it at its face value means first of all to take it just as we
feel it, and not to confuse ourselves with abstract talk _about_ it,
involving words that drive us to invent secondary conceptions in order
to neutralize their suggestions and to make our actual experience again
seem rationally possible.

What I do feel simply when a later moment of my experience succeeds an
earlier one is that though they are two moments, the transition from the
one to the other is _continuous_. Continuity here is a definite sort of
experience; just as definite as is the _discontinuity-experience_ which
I find it impossible to avoid when I seek to make the transition from an
experience of my own to one of yours. In this latter case I have to get
on and off again, to pass from a thing lived to another thing only
conceived, and the break is positively experienced and noted. Though the
functions exerted by my experience and by yours may be the same (_e.g._,
the same objects known and the same purposes followed), yet the sameness
has in this case to be ascertained expressly (and often with difficulty
and uncertainty) after the break has been felt; whereas in passing from
one of my own moments to another the sameness of object and interest is
unbroken, and both the earlier and the later experience are of things
directly lived.

There is no other _nature_, no other whatness than this absence of break
and this sense of continuity in that most intimate of all conjunctive
relations, the passing of one experience into another when they belong
to the same self. And this whatness is real empirical 'content,' just as
the whatness of separation and discontinuity is real content in the
contrasted case. Practically to experience one's personal continuum in
this living way is to know the originals of the ideas of continuity and
of sameness, to know what the words stand for concretely, to own all
that they can ever mean. But all experiences have their conditions; and
over-subtle intellects, thinking about the facts here, and asking how
they are possible, have ended by substituting a lot of static objects of
conception for the direct perceptual experiences. "Sameness," they have
said, "must be a stark numerical identity; it can't run on from next to
next. Continuity can't mean mere absence of gap; for if you say two
things are in immediate contact, _at_ the contact how can they be two?
If, on the other ha