[Footnote 1:  How meaningless is the contention that in such wholes (or in ‘book-on-table,’ ‘watch-in-pocket,’ etc.) the relation is an additional entity between the terms, needing itself to be related again to each!  Both Bradley (Appearance and Reality, pp. 32-33) and Royce (The World and the Individual, i, 128) lovingly repeat this piece of profundity.]

but a reminiscence so vague that its originals are not recognized.  Bradley, in short, repeats the fable of the dog, the bone, and its image in the water.  With a world of particulars, given in loveliest union, in conjunction definitely various, and variously definite, the ‘how’ of which you ‘understand’ as soon as you see the fact of them,[1] for there is no how except the constitution of the fact as given; with all this given him, I say, in pure experience, he asks for some ineffable union in the abstract instead, which, if he gained it, would only be a duplicate of what he has already in his full possession.  Surely he abuses the privilege which society grants to all of us philosophers, of being puzzle-headed.

Polemic writing like this is odious; but with absolutism in possession in so many quarters, omission to defend my radical empiricism against its best known champion would count as either superficiality or inability.  I have to conclude that its dialectic has not invalidated in the least degree the usual conjunctions by which the world, as experienced, hangs so variously together.  In particular it leaves an empirical theory of knowledge intact, and lets us continue to believe with common sense that one object may be known, if we have any ground for thinking that it is known, to many knowers.

[Footnote 1:  The ‘why’ and the ‘whence’ are entirely other questions, not under discussion, as I understand Mr. Bradley.  Not how experience gets itself born, but how it can be what it is after it is born, is the puzzle.]

APPENDIX B

THE EXPERIENCE OF ACTIVITY[1]

...  Mr. Bradley calls the question of activity a scandal to philosophy, and if one turns to the current literature of the subject—­his own writings included—­one easily gathers what he means.  The opponents cannot even understand one another.  Mr. Bradley says to Mr. Ward:  ’I do not care what your oracle is, and your preposterous psychology may here be gospel if you please; ... but if the revelation does contain a meaning, I will commit myself to this:  either the oracle is so confused that its signification is not discoverable, or, upon the other hand, if it can be pinned down to any definite statement, then that statement will be false.’[2] Mr. Ward in turn says of Mr. Bradley:  ’I cannot even imagine the state of mind to which his description applies....  It reads like an unintentional travesty of Herbartian Psychology by one who has tried to improve upon it without being at the pains to master it.’  Muensterberg excludes a view opposed to his own by saying that with any one who holds it a verstaendigung with him is ‘grundsaetzlich ausgeschlossen’; and Royce,