ts of path. The only function that one experience can perform is
to lead into another experience; and the only fulfilment we can speak of
is the reaching of a certain experienced end. When one experience leads
to (or can lead to) the same end as another, they agree in function. But
the whole system of experiences as they are immediately given presents
itself as a quasi-chaos through which one can pass out of an initial
term in many directions and yet end in the same terminus, moving from
next to next by a great many possible paths.

Either one of these paths might be a functional substitute for another,
and to follow one rather than another might on occasion be an
advantageous thing to do. As a matter of fact, and in a general way,
the paths that run through conceptual experiences, that is, through
'thoughts' or 'ideas' that 'know' the things in which they terminate,
are highly advantageous paths to follow. Not only do they yield
inconceivably rapid transitions; but, owing to the 'universal'
character[35] which they frequently possess, and to their capacity for
association with one another in great systems, they outstrip the tardy
consecutions of the things themselves, and sweep us on towards our
ultimate termini in a far more labor-saving way than the following of
trains of sensible perception ever could. Wonderful are the new cuts and
the short-circuits which the thought-paths make. Most thought-paths, it
is true, are substitutes for nothing actual; they end outside the real
world altogether, in wayward fancies, utopias, fictions or mistakes. But
where they do re-enter reality and terminate therein, we substitute them
always; and with these substitutes we pass the greater number of our
hours.

This is why I called our experiences, taken all together, a quasi-chaos.
There is vastly more discontinuity in the sum total of experiences than
we commonly suppose. The objective nucleus of every man's experience,
his own body, is, it is true, a continuous percept; and equally
continuous as a percept (though we may be inattentive to it) is the
material environment of that body, changing by gradual transition when
the body moves. But the distant parts of the physical world are at all
times absent from us, and form conceptual objects merely, into the
perceptual reality of which our life inserts itself at points discrete
and relatively rare. Round their several objective nuclei, partly shared
and common and partly discrete, of th