in the isolation in which our verbalized logic keeps it?  They exist only durcheinander.  Reality always is, in M. Bergson’s phrase, an endosmosis or conflux of the same with the different:  they compenetrate and telescope.  For conceptual logic, the same is nothing but the same, and all sames with a third thing are the same with each other.  Not so in concrete experience.  Two spots on our skin, each of which feels the same as a third spot when touched along with it, are felt as different from each other.  Two tones, neither distinguishable from a third tone, are perfectly distinct from each other.  The whole process of life is due to life’s violation of our logical axioms.  Take its continuity as an example.  Terms like A and C appear to be connected by intermediaries, by B for example.  Intellectualism calls this absurd, for ‘B-connected-with-A’ is, ‘as such,’ a different term from ‘B-connected-with-C.’  But real life laughs at logic’s veto.  Imagine a heavy log which takes two men to carry it.  First A and B take it.  Then C takes hold and A drops off; then D takes hold and B drops off, so that C and D now bear it; and so on.  The log meanwhile never drops, and keeps its sameness throughout the journey.  Even so it is with all our experiences.  Their changes are not complete annihilations followed by complete creations of something absolutely novel.  There is partial decay and partial growth, and all the while a nucleus of relative constancy from which what decays drops off, and which takes into itself whatever is grafted on, until at length something wholly different has taken its place.  In such a process we are as sure, in spite of intellectualist logic with its ‘as suches,’ that it is the same nucleus which is able now to make connexion with what goes and again with what comes, as we are sure that the same point can lie on diverse lines that intersect there.  Without being one throughout, such a universe is continuous.  Its members interdigitate with their next neighbors in manifold directions, and there are no clean cuts between them anywhere.

The great clash of intellectualist logic with sensible experience is where the experience is that of influence exerted.  Intellectualism denies (as we saw in lecture ii) that finite things can act on one another, for all things, once translated into concepts, remain shut up to themselves.  To act on anything means to get into it somehow; but that would mean to get out of one’s self and be one’s other, which is self-contradictory, etc.  Meanwhile each of us actually is his own other to that extent, livingly knowing how to perform the trick which logic tells us can’t be done.  My thoughts animate and actuate this very body which you see and hear, and thereby influence your thoughts.  The dynamic current somehow does get from me to you, however numerous the intermediary conductors may have to be.  Distinctions may be insulators in logic as much as they like, but in life distinct things can and do commune together every moment.