Psychology, then, had worked itself to a breakdown by accepting the ‘sensationalistic’ analysis offered by Hume, and dragged philosophy with it.  Yet the escape was as easy as the egg of Columbus to the insight of genius.  William James had merely to invert the problem.  Instead of assuming with Hume that because some experiences seemed to attest the presence of distinct objects, all connections were illusory and all experience must ultimately consist of psychical atoms, James had merely to maintain that this separation was secondary and artificial, and that experience was initially a continuum.  Once this is pointed out, the fact is obvious.  The stream of experience no doubt contains what it is afterwards possible to single out as ‘sensations,’ but it presents them also as connected by ‘relations.’  Moreover, the ‘sensations’ or ‘qualities’ and their ‘relations’ exhibit the immediate indiscerptible unity of a fluid rather than a succession of flashes.  Temporal and spatial relations with all the connections they sustain are perceived just as directly as what we come to distinguish as the ‘things’ in them.  ‘Consciousness,’ James insists, ’does not appear to itself chopped up in bits,’ and ’we ought to say a feeling of and, a feeling of if, a feeling of but, and a feeling of by, quite as readily as we say a feeling of blue or a feeling of cold.  All things in experience naturally ‘compenetrate,’ to use a phrase of Bergson’s; they are distinct and they are united at the same time.

The great crux in Hume is thus seen to be illusory.  Immediate experience does not require ‘synthesis’:  it calls for ‘analysis.’  It is not a jigsaw puzzle, to be pieced together without glue:  it is a confused whole which has to be divided and set in order for clear thinking.  Hume’s mistake was to have started from experience as partly analysed by common sense, and not from the flux as given.  His ‘sensations’ were the qualities already analysed out of the flux; he took these selections for the whole and neglected the other less obvious features in it—­viz., the relations which floated them.

Thus the puzzle ‘How do “relations” relate?’ received its solution in this new account of experience.  Philosophers are puzzled by this question because they confuse percepts with concepts.  Percepts are given in relation; but concepts, being ideal dissections of the perceptual flux, are discontinuous terms which have to be related by an act of thought, because they were made for this very purpose of distinction.  Thus the eye sees cats sitting upon walls, as parts of a rural landscape, and without the sharp distinctions which exist between the concepts ‘cat,’ ‘upon,’ ‘wall.’  These ideas were meant to disconnect ‘the cat’ in thought from the site it sat upon.  Thought, then, has made the ‘atomism’ it professed to find.  It has only to unmake it, and to allow the distinctions it held apart to merge again into the stream of change.