of reading this page, or in yours of listening; yet within those bits of experience as they come to pass we get a fulness of content that no conceptual description can equal.  Sensational experiences are their ’own others,’ then, both internally and externally.  Inwardly they are one with their parts, and outwardly they pass continuously into their next neighbors, so that events separated by years of time in a man’s life hang together unbrokenly by the intermediary events.  Their names, to be sure, cut them into separate conceptual entities, but no cuts existed in the continuum in which they originally came.

If, with all this in our mind, we turn to our own particular predicament, we see that our old objection to the self-compounding of states of consciousness, our accusation that it was impossible for purely logical reasons, is unfounded in principle.  Every smallest state of consciousness, concretely taken, overflows its own definition.  Only concepts are self-identical; only ‘reason’ deals with closed equations; nature is but a name for excess; every point in her opens out and runs into the more; and the only question, with reference to any point we may be considering, is how far into the rest of nature we may have to go in order to get entirely beyond its overflow.  In the pulse of inner life immediately present now in each of us is a little past, a little future, a little awareness of our own body, of each other’s persons, of these sublimities we are trying to talk about, of the earth’s geography and the direction of history, of truth and error, of good and bad, and of who knows how much more?  Feeling, however dimly and subconsciously, all these things, your pulse of inner life is continuous with them, belongs to them and they to it.  You can’t identify it with either one of them rather than with the others, for if you let it develop into no matter which of those directions, what it develops into will look back on it and say, ’That was the original germ of me.’

In principle, then, the real units of our immediately-felt life are unlike the units that intellectualist logic holds to and makes its calculations with.  They are not separate from their own others, and you have to take them at widely separated dates to find any two of them that seem unblent.  Then indeed they do appear separate even as their concepts are separate; a chasm yawns between them; but the chasm itself is but an intellectualist fiction, got by abstracting from the continuous sheet of experiences with which the intermediary time was filled.  It is like the log carried first by William and Henry, then by William, Henry, and John, then by Henry and John, then by John and Peter, and so on.  All real units of experience overlap.  Let a row of equidistant dots on a sheet of paper symbolize the concepts by which we intellectualize the world.  Let a ruler long enough to cover at least three dots stand for our sensible experience.  Then the conceived changes of the sensible experience can be symbolized by sliding the ruler along the line of dots.  One concept after another will apply to it, one after another drop away, but it will always cover at least two of them, and no dots less than three will ever adequately cover it.  You falsify it if you treat it conceptually, or by the law of dots.