voke them makes our
trouble infinitely worse. To 'feel' our motion forward is impossible.
Motion implies terminus; and how can terminus be felt before we have
arrived? The barest start and sally forwards, the barest tendency to
leave the instant, involves the chasm and the leap. Conjunctive
transitions are the most superficial of appearances, illusions of our
sensibility which philosophical reflection pulverizes at a touch.
Conception is our only trustworthy instrument, conception and the
Absolute working hand in hand. Conception disintegrates experience
utterly, but its disjunctions are easily overcome again when the
Absolute takes up the task.

Such transcendentalists I must leave, provisionally at least, in full
possession of their creed.[36] I have no space for polemics in this
article, so I shall simply formulate the empiricist doctrine as my
hypothesis, leaving it to work or not work as it may.

Objective reference, I say then, is an incident of the fact that so much
of our experience comes as an insufficient and consists of process and
transition. Our fields of experience have no more definite boundaries
than have our fields of view. Both are fringed forever by a _more_ that
continuously develops, and that continuously supersedes them as life
proceeds. The relations, generally speaking, are as real here as the
terms are, and the only complaint of the transcendentalist's with which
I could at all sympathize would be his charge that, by first making
knowledge to consist in external relations as I have done, and by then
confessing that nine-tenths of the time these are not actually but only
virtually there, I have knocked the solid bottom out of the whole
business, and palmed off a substitute of knowledge for the genuine
thing. Only the admission, such a critic might say, that our ideas are
self-transcendent and 'true' already, in advance of the experiences that
are to terminate them, can bring solidity back to knowledge in a world
like this, in which transitions and terminations are only by exception
fulfilled.

This seems to me an excellent place for applying the pragmatic method.
When a dispute arises, that method consists in auguring what practical
consequences would be different if one side rather than the other were
true. If no difference can be thought of, the dispute is a quarrel over
words. What then would the self-transcendency affirmed to exist in
advance of all experiential mediation or termination, b