All Hume’s problems, therefore, are unreal, and those of his apriorist critics are doubly removed from reality.  The whole conception of philosophy as aiming at uniting disjointed data in a higher synthesis runs counter to the real movement, which aims at the analysis of a given whole.  The real question about causation is not how events can be connected causally, but why are certain antecedents preferred and dissected out and entitled ‘causes.’  So the ‘self’ is not one (undiscoverable) item imagined to keep in order a host of other such items.  Any given moment of a consciousness is just the mass of its ‘sensations,’ but these are consciously the heirs of its history and connected with a past which is remembered.  No Transcendental Ego could do more to support the process of experience than is achieved by ’a stream of consciousness which carries its own past along.’  Here, then, is the straight way James desiderated, a critical philosophy which goes, not ‘through’ the complexities of Kantism, but leaves them on one side as superfluous ‘curios.’

But there remains an even more important deduction from the new psychology.  Hume had been convicted of error in selecting those elements of the flux which served his purpose and neglecting the rest.  But this mistake might reveal the important fact that all analysis was a choice, and inspired by volitions.  A mind that analyses cannot but be active in handling its experience.  It manipulates it to serve its ends.  It emphasizes only those portions of the flux which seem to it important.  In a better and fairer analysis than Hume’s these features will persist.  It, too, would be a product of selection, of a selection depending on its maker’s preferences.  As James showed, the distinction between ‘dreams’ and ‘realities,’ between ‘things’ and ‘illusions,’ results only from the differential values we attach to the parts of the flux according as they seem important or interesting to us or not.  The volitional contribution is all-pervasive in our thinking.  And once this volitional interference with ‘pure perception’ is shown to be indispensable, it must be allowed to be legitimate.  Nor can this approval of our interference be restricted to selections.  It must be extended to additions.  Just as we can select factors from ‘the given’ to construct ‘reality,’ we can add hypotheses to it to make it ‘intelligible.’  We can claim the right of causal analysis, and assume that our dissections have laid bare the inner springs of the connection of events.  Moreover, to the ’real world which our choice has built out of the chaos of ‘appearances’ we may hypothetically add ‘infernal’ and ‘heavenly’ regions.[B] Both are transformations of ‘the given’ by the will, but, like the postulate of causal series, experience may confirm them.  Kant’s a priori activity of the mind may thus in a sense supply an answer to Hume—­but only in a voluntaristic philosophy which would probably have seemed too bold both to him and to Hume.