e real physical world, innumerable
thinkers, pursuing their several lines of physically true cogitation,
trace paths that intersect one another only at discontinuous perceptual
points, and the rest of the time are quite incongruent; and around all
the nuclei of shared 'reality,' as around the Dyak's head of my late
metaphor, floats the vast cloud of experiences that are wholly
subjective, that are non-substitutional, that find not even an eventual
ending for themselves in the perceptual world--the mere day-dreams and
joys and sufferings and wishes of the individual minds. These exist
_with_ one another, indeed, and with the objective nuclei, but out of
them it is probable that to all eternity no interrelated system of any
kind will ever be made.

This notion of the purely substitutional or conceptual physical world
brings us to the most critical of all the steps in the development of a
philosophy of pure experience. The paradox of self-transcendency in
knowledge comes back upon us here, but I think that our notions of pure
experience and of substitution, and our radically empirical view of
conjunctive transitions, are _Denkmittel_ that will carry us safely
through the pass.

V. WHAT OBJECTIVE REFERENCE IS.

Whosoever feels his experience to be something substitutional even while
he has it, may be said to have an experience that reaches beyond itself.
From inside of its own entity it says 'more,' and postulates reality
existing elsewhere. For the transcendentalist, who holds knowing to
consist in a _salto mortale_ across an 'epistemological chasm,' such an
idea presents no difficulty; but it seems at first sight as if it might
be inconsistent with an empiricism like our own. Have we not explained
that conceptual knowledge is made such wholly by the existence of things
that fall outside of the knowing experience itself--by intermediary
experiences and by a terminus that fulfils? Can the knowledge be there
before these elements that constitute its being have come? And, if
knowledge be not there, how can objective reference occur?

The key to this difficulty lies in the distinction between knowing as
verified and completed, and the same knowing as in transit and on its
way. To recur to the Memorial Hall example lately used, it is only when
our idea of the Hall has actually terminated in the percept that we know
'for certain' that from the beginning it was truly cognitive of _that_.
Until established by the end of the