f immediate touch of the one by the other,
an 'apprehension' in the etymological sense of the word, a leaping of
the chasm as by lightning, an act by which two terms are smitten into
one, over the head of their distinctness. All these dead intermediaries
of yours are out of each other, and outside of their termini still."

But do not such dialectic difficulties remind us of the dog dropping his
bone and snapping at its image in the water? If we knew any more real
kind of union _aliunde_, we might be entitled to brand all our
empirical unions as a sham. But unions by continuous transition are the
only ones we know of, whether in this matter of a knowledge-about that
terminates in an acquaintance, whether in personal identity, in logical
predication through the copula 'is,' or elsewhere. If anywhere there
were more absolute unions realized, they could only reveal themselves to
us by just such conjunctive results. These are what the unions are
_worth_, these are all that _we can ever practically mean_ by union, by
continuity. Is it not time to repeat what Lotze said of substances, that
to _act like_ one is to _be_ one?[33] Should we not say here that to be
experienced as continuous is to be really continuous, in a world where
experience and reality come to the same thing? In a picture gallery a
painted hook will serve to hang a painted chain by, a painted cable will
hold a painted ship. In a world where both the terms and their
distinctions are affairs of experience, conjunctions that are
experienced must be at least as real as anything else. They will be'
absolutely' real conjunctions, if we have no transphenomenal Absolute
ready, to derealize the whole experienced world by, at a stroke. If, on
the other hand, we had such an Absolute, not one of our opponents'
theories of knowledge could remain standing any better than ours could;
for the distinctions as well as the conjunctions of experience would
impartially fall its prey. The whole question of how 'one' thing can
know 'another' would cease to be a real one at all in a world where
otherness itself was an illusion.[34]

So much for the essentials of the cognitive relation, where the
knowledge is conceptual in type, or forms knowledge 'about' an object.
It consists in intermediary experiences (possible, if not actual) of
continuously developing progress, and, finally, of fulfilment, when the
sensible percept, which is the object, is reached. The percept here not
only _ve