where they touch.  There is no datum so small as not to show this mystery, if mystery it be.  The tiniest feeling that we can possibly have comes with an earlier and a later part and with a sense of their continuous procession.  Mr. Shadworth Hodgson showed long ago that there is literally no such object as the present moment except as an unreal postulate of abstract thought.[6] The ‘passing’ moment is, as I already have reminded you, the minimal fact, with the ’apparition of difference’ inside of it as well as outside.  If we do not feel both past and present in one field of feeling, we feel them not at all.  We have the same many-in-one in the matter that fills the passing time.  The rush of our thought forward through its fringes is the everlasting peculiarity of its life.  We realize this life as something always off its balance, something in transition, something that shoots out of a darkness through a dawn into a brightness that we feel to be the dawn fulfilled.  In the very midst of the continuity our experience comes as an alteration.  ‘Yes,’ we say at the full brightness, ’this is what I just meant.’  ‘No,’ we feel at the dawning, ’this is not yet the full meaning, there is more to come.’  In every crescendo of sensation, in every effort to recall, in every progress towards the satisfaction of desire, this succession of an emptiness and fulness that have reference to each other and are one flesh is the essence of the phenomenon.  In every hindrance of desire the sense of an ideal presence which is absent in fact, of an absent, in a word, which the only function of the present is to mean, is even more notoriously there.  And in the movement of pure thought we have the same phenomenon.  When I say Socrates is mortal, the moment Socrates is incomplete; it falls forward through the is which is pure movement, into the mortal which is indeed bare mortal on the tongue, but for the mind is that mortal, the mortal Socrates, at last satisfactorily disposed of and told off.[7]

Here, then, inside of the minimal pulses of experience, is realized that very inner complexity which the transcendentalists say only the absolute can genuinely possess.  The gist of the matter is always the same—­something ever goes indissolubly with something else.  You cannot separate the same from its other, except by abandoning the real altogether and taking to the conceptual system.  What is immediately given in the single and particular instance is always something pooled and mutual, something with no dark spot, no point of ignorance.  No one elementary bit of reality is eclipsed from the next bit’s point of view, if only we take reality sensibly and in small enough pulses—­and by us it has to be taken pulse-wise, for our span of consciousness is too short to grasp the larger collectivity of things except nominally and abstractly.  No more of reality collected together at once is extant anywhere, perhaps, than in my experience