nd, you put a relation of transition between them,
that itself is a third thing, and needs to be related or hitched to its
terms. An infinite series is involved," and so on. The result is that
from difficulty to difficulty, the plain conjunctive experience has been
discredited by both schools, the empiricists leaving things permanently
disjoined, and the rationalist remedying the looseness by their
Absolutes or Substances, or whatever other fictitious agencies of union
they may have employed.[29] From all which artificiality we can be saved
by a couple of simple reflections: first, that conjunctions and
separations are, at all events, co-ordinate phenomena which, if we take
experiences at their face value, must be accounted equally real; and
second, that if we insist on treating things as really separate when
they are given as continuously joined, invoking, when union is required,
transcendental principles to overcome the separateness we have assumed,
then we ought to stand ready to perform the converse act. We ought to
invoke higher principles of _dis_union, also, to make our merely
experienced disjunctions more truly real. Failing thus, we ought to let
the originally given continuities stand on their own bottom. We have no
right to be lopsided or to blow capriciously hot and cold.

III. THE COGNITIVE RELATION

The first great pitfall from which such a radical standing by experience
will save us is an artificial conception of the _relations between
knower and known_. Throughout the history of philosophy the subject and
its object have been treated as absolutely discontinuous entities; and
thereupon the presence of the latter to the former, or the
'apprehension' by the former of the latter, has assumed a paradoxical
character which all sorts of theories had to be invented to overcome.
Representative theories put a mental 'representation,' 'image,' or
'content' into the gap, as a sort of intermediary. Common-sense theories
left the gap untouched, declaring our mind able to clear it by a
self-transcending leap. Transcendentalist theories left it impossible to
traverse by finite knowers, and brought an Absolute in to perform the
saltatory act. All the while, in the very bosom of the finite
experience, every conjunction required to make the relation intelligible
is given in full. Either the knower and the known are:

(1) the self-same piece of experience taken twice over in different
contexts; or they are

(2) two pie