process, its quality of knowing
that, or indeed of knowing anything, could still be doubted; and yet the
knowing really was there, as the result now shows. We were _virtual_
knowers of the Hall long before we were certified to have been its
actual knowers, by the percept's retroactive validating power. Just so
we are 'mortal' all the time, by reason of the virtuality of the
inevitable event which will make us so when it shall have come.

Now the immensely greater part of all our knowing never gets beyond this
virtual stage. It never is completed or nailed down. I speak not merely
of our ideas of imperceptibles like ether-waves or dissociated 'ions,'
or of 'ejects' like the contents of our neighbors' minds; I speak also
of ideas which we might verify if we would take the trouble, but which
we hold for true although unterminated perceptually, because nothing
says 'no' to us, and there is no contradicting truth in sight. _To
continue thinking unchallenged is, ninety-nine times out of a hundred,
our practical substitute for knowing in the completed sense._ As each
experience runs by cognitive transition into the next one, and we
nowhere feel a collision with what we elsewhere count as truth or fact,
we commit ourselves to the current as if the port were sure. We live, as
it were, upon the front edge of an advancing wave-crest, and our sense
of a determinate direction in falling forward is all we cover of the
future of our path. It is as if a differential quotient should be
conscious and treat itself as an adequate substitute for a traced-out
curve. Our experience, _inter alia_, is of variations of rate and of
direction, and lives in these transitions more than in the journey's
end. The experiences of tendency are sufficient to act upon--what more
could we have _done_ at those moments even if the later verification
comes complete?

This is what, as a radical empiricist, I say to the charge that the
objective reference which is so flagrant a character of our experiences
involves a chasm and a mortal leap. A positively conjunctive transition
involves neither chasm nor leap. Being the very original of what we mean
by continuity, it makes a continuum wherever it appears. I know full
well that such brief words as these will leave the hardened
transcendentalist unshaken. Conjunctive experiences _separate_ their
terms, he will still say: they are third things interposed, that have
themselves to be conjoined by new links, and to in