Yet, to quote Fechner’s phrase again, ’nichts wirkliches kann unmoeglich sein,’ the actual cannot be impossible, and what is actual at every moment of our lives is the sort of thing which I now proceed to remind you of.  You can hear the vibration of an electric contact-maker, smell the ozone, see the sparks, and feel the thrill, co-consciously as it were or in one field of experience.  But you can also isolate any one of these sensations by shutting out the rest.  If you close your eyes, hold your nose, and remove your hand, you can get the sensation of sound alone, but it seems still the same sensation that it was; and if you restore the action of the other organs, the sound coalesces with the feeling, the sight, and the smell sensations again.  Now the natural way of talking of all this[3] is to say that certain sensations are experienced, now singly, and now together with other sensations, in a common conscious field.  Fluctuations of attention give analogous results.  We let a sensation in or keep it out by changing our attention; and similarly we let an item of memory in or drop it out. [Please don’t raise the question here of how these changes come to pass.  The immediate condition is probably cerebral in every instance, but it would be irrelevant now to consider it, for now we are thinking only of results, and I repeat that the natural way of thinking of them is that which intellectualist criticism finds so absurd.]

The absurdity charged is that the self-same should function so differently, now with and now without something else.  But this it sensibly seems to do.  This very desk which I strike with my hand strikes in turn your eyes.  It functions at once as a physical object in the outer world and as a mental object in our sundry mental worlds.  The very body of mine that my thought actuates is the body whose gestures are your visual object and to which you give my name.  The very log which John helped to carry is the log now borne by James.  The very girl you love is simultaneously entangled elsewhere.  The very place behind me is in front of you.  Look where you will, you gather only examples of the same amid the different, and of different relations existing as it were in solution in the same thing. Qua this an experience is not the same as it is qua that, truly enough; but the quas are conceptual shots of ours at its post-mortem remains, and in its sensational immediacy everything is all at once whatever different things it is at once at all.  It is before C and after A, far from you and near to me, without this associate and with that one, active and passive, physical and mental, a whole of parts and part of a higher whole, all simultaneously and without interference or need of doubling-up its being, so long as we keep to what I call the ‘immediate’ point of view, the point of view in which we follow our sensational life’s continuity, and to which all living language conforms.  It is only when you try—­to continue using the hegelian vocabulary—­to ‘mediate’ the immediate, or to substitute concepts for sensational life, that intellectualism celebrates its triumph and the immanent-self-contradictoriness of all this smooth-running finite experience gets proved.