[Footnote 1:  Reprinted from the Journal of Philosophy, Psychology, and Scientific Methods, vol. ii, New York, 1905, with slight verbal revision.]

[Footnote 2:  Journal of Philosophy, Psychology, and Scientific Methods, vol. i, No. 20, p. 566.]

the problem, resisting certain first steps of dialectics by insisting in a general way that the immediately experienced conjunctive relations are as real as anything else.  If my sketch is not to appear too naeif, I must come closer to details, and in the present essay I propose to do so.

I

‘Pure experience’ is the name which I gave to the immediate flux of life which furnishes the material to our later reflection with its conceptual categories.  Only new-born babes, or men in semi-coma from sleep, drugs, illnesses, or blows, may be assumed to have an experience pure in the literal sense of a that which is not yet any definite what, tho ready to be all sorts of whats; full both of oneness and of manyness, but in respects that don’t appear; changing throughout, yet so confusedly that its phases interpenetrate and no points, either of distinction or of identity, can be caught.  Pure experience in this state is but another name for feeling or sensation.  But the flux of it no sooner comes than it tends to fill itself with emphases, and these salient parts become identified and fixed and abstracted; so that experience now flows as if shot through with adjectives and nouns and prepositions and conjunctions.  Its purity is only a relative term, meaning the proportional amount of unverbalized sensation which it still embodies.

Far back as we go, the flux, both as a whole and in its parts, is that of things conjunct and separated.  The great continua of time, space, and the self envelop everything, betwixt them, and flow together without interfering.  The things that they envelop come as separate in some ways and as continuous in others.  Some sensations coalesce with some ideas, and others are irreconcilable.  Qualities compenetrate one space, or exclude each other from it.  They cling together persistently in groups that move as units, or else they separate.  Their changes are abrupt or discontinuous; and their kinds resemble or differ; and, as they do so, they fall into either even or irregular series.

In all this the continuities and the discontinuities are absolutely co-ordinate matters of immediate feeling.  The conjunctions are as primordial elements of ‘fact’ as are the distinctions and disjunctions.  In the same act by which I feel that this passing minute is a new pulse of my life, I feel that the old life continues into it, and the feeling of continuance in no wise jars upon the simultaneous feeling of a novelty.  They, too, compenetrate harmoniously.  Prepositions, copulas, and conjunctions, ‘is,’ ‘isn’t,’ ‘then,’ ‘before,’ ‘in,’ ‘on,’ ‘beside,’ ‘between,’ ‘next,’ ‘like,’ ‘unlike,’ ‘as,’ ‘but,’ flower out of the stream of pure experience, the stream of concretes or the sensational stream, as naturally as nouns and adjectives do, and they melt into it again as fluidly when we apply them to a new portion of the stream.