o act on its account
in either case. Only in the later experience that supersedes the present
one is this _naif_ immediacy retrospectively split into two parts, a
'consciousness' and its 'content,' and the content corrected or
confirmed. While still pure, or present, any experience--mine, for
example, of what I write about in these very lines--passes for 'truth.'
The morrow may reduce it to 'opinion.' The transcendentalist in all his
particular knowledges is as liable to this reduction as I am: his
Absolute does not save him. Why, then, need he quarrel with an account
of knowing that merely leaves it liable to this inevitable condition?
Why insist that knowing is a static relation out of time when it
practically seems so much a function of our active life? For a thing to
be valid, says Lotze, is the same as to make itself valid. When the
whole universe seems only to be making itself valid and to be still
incomplete (else why its ceaseless changing?) why, of all things,
should knowing be exempt? Why should it not be making itself valid like
everything else? That some parts of it may be already valid or verified
beyond dispute, the empirical philosopher, of course, like any one else,
may always hope.

VI. THE CONTERMINOUSNESS OF DIFFERENT MINDS[37]

With transition and prospect thus enthroned in pure experience, it is
impossible to subscribe to the idealism of the English school. Radical
empiricism has, in fact, more affinities with natural realism than with
the views of Berkeley or of Mill, and this can be easily shown.

For the Berkeleyan school, ideas (the verbal equivalent of what I term
experiences) are discontinuous. The content of each is wholly immanent,
and there are no transitions with which they are consubstantial and
through which their beings may unite. Your Memorial Hall and mine, even
when both are percepts, are wholly out of connection with each other.
Our lives are a congeries of solipsisms, out of which in strict logic
only a God could compose a universe even of discourse. No dynamic
currents run between my objects and your objects. Never can our minds
meet in the _same_.

The incredibility of such a philosophy is flagrant. It is 'cold,
strained, and unnatural' in a supreme degree; and it may be doubted
whether even Berkeley himself, who took it so religiously, really
believed, when walking through the streets of London, that his spirit
and the spirits of his fellow wayfarers had absolutely differe