Candidly, I can think of no other reason than this for the dialectic conclusion![1] for, if we think, not of our words, but of any simple concrete matter which they may be held to signify, the experience itself belies the paradox asserted.  We use indeed two separate concepts in analyzing our object, but we know them all the while to be but substitutional, and that the M in L—­M and the M in M—­N mean (i.e., are capable of leading to and terminating in) one self-same piece, M, of sensible experience.  This persistent identity of certain units, or emphases, or points, or objects, or members—­call them what you will—­of the experience-continuum, is just one of those conjunctive features of it, on which I am obliged to insist so emphatically.  For samenesses are parts of experience’s indefeasible structure.  When I hear a bell-stroke and, as life flows on, its after-image dies away, I still hark back to it as ’that same

[Footnote 1:  Technically, it seems classable as a ’fallacy of composition.’  A duality, predicable of the two wholes, L—­M and M—­N, is forthwith predicated of one of their parts, M.]

bell-stroke.’  When I see a thing M, with L to the left of it and N to the right of it, I see it as one M; and if you tell me I have had to ‘take’ it twice, I reply that if I ‘took’ it a thousand times, I should still see it as a unit.[1] Its unity is aboriginal, just as the multiplicity of my successive takings is aboriginal.  It comes unbroken as that M, as a singular which I encounter; they come broken, as those takings, as my plurality of operations.  The unity and the separateness are strictly co-ordinate.  I do not easily fathom why my opponents should find the separateness so much more easily understandable that they must needs infect the whole of finite experience with it, and relegate the unity (now taken as a bare postulate and no longer as a thing positively perceivable) to the region of the absolute’s mysteries.  I do not easily fathom this, I say, for the said opponents are above mere verbal quibbling; yet all that I can catch in their talk is the substitution of what is true of certain words for what is true of what they signify.  They stay with the words,—­not returning to the stream of life whence all the meaning of them came, and which is always ready to reabsorb them.

[Footnote 1:  I may perhaps refer here to my Principles of Psychology, vol. i, pp. 459 ff.  It really seems ‘weird’ to have to argue (as I am forced now to do) for the notion that it is one sheet of paper (with its two surfaces and all that lies between) which is both under my pen and on the table while I write—­the ‘claim’ that it is two sheets seems so brazen.  Yet I sometimes suspect the absolutists of sincerity!]

IV