ject of experience is at
least an animal, continuous with other organic forms in a process of
more complex organization. An animal in turn is at least continuous with
chemico-physical processes which, in living things, are so organized as
really to constitute the activities of life with all their defining
traits. And experience is not identical with brain action; it is the
entire organic agent-patient in all its interaction with the
environment, natural and social. The brain is primarily an organ of a
certain kind of behavior, not of knowing the world. And to repeat what
has already been said, experiencing is just certain modes of
interaction, of correlation, of natural objects among which the organism
happens, so to say, to be one. It follows with equal force that
experience means primarily not knowledge, but ways of doing and
suffering. Knowing must be described by discovering what particular
mode--qualitatively unique--of doing and suffering it is. As it is, we
find experience assimilated to a non-empirical concept of knowledge,
derived from an antecedent notion of a spectator outside of the
world.[7]

In short, the epistemological fashion of conceiving dreams, errors,
"relativities," etc., depends upon the isolation of mind from intimate
participation with other changes in the same continuous nexus. Thus it
is like contending that when a bottle bursts, the bottle is, in some
self-contained miraculous way, exclusively responsible. Since it is the
nature of a bottle to be whole so as to retain fluids, bursting is an
abnormal event--comparable to an hallucination. Hence it cannot belong
to the "real" bottle; the "subjectivity" of glass is the cause. It is
obvious that since the breaking of glass is a case of specific
correlation of natural energies, its accidental and abnormal character
has to do with _consequences_, not with causation. Accident is
interference with the consequences for which the bottle is intended. The
bursting considered apart from its bearing on these consequences is on a
plane with any other occurrence in the wide world. But from the
standpoint of a desired future, bursting is an anomaly, an interruption
of the course of events.

The analogy with the occurrence of dreams, hallucinations, etc., seems
to me exact. Dreams are not something outside of the regular course of
events; they are in and of it. They are not cognitive distortions of
real things; they are _more_ real things. There is nothing a