life are filled with power and its spasms with resource.  No emotion can overwhelm the mind, for of none is the basis or issue wholly hidden; no event can disconcert it altogether, because it sees beyond.  Means can be looked for to escape from the worst predicament; and whereas each moment had been formerly filled with nothing but its own adventure and surprised emotion, each now makes room for the lesson of what went before and surmises what may be the plot of the whole."[Footnote:  The Life of Reason:  Reason in Common Sense, 1905, p. 59.]

Even to-day science and philosophy are still laboriously trying to part fancies from realities in our experience; and in primitive times they made only the most incipient distinctions in this line.  Men believed whatever they thought with any liveliness, and they mixed their dreams with their realities inextricably.  The categories of ‘thought’ and ‘things’ are indispensable here—­instead of being realities we now call certain experiences only ‘thoughts.’  There is not a category, among those enumerated, of which we may not imagine the use to have thus originated historically and only gradually spread.

That one Time which we all believe in and in which each event has its definite date, that one Space in which each thing has its position, these abstract notions unify the world incomparably; but in their finished shape as concepts how different they are from the loose unordered time-and-space experiences of natural men!  Everything that happens to us brings its own duration and extension, and both are vaguely surrounded by a marginal ‘more’ that runs into the duration and extension of the next thing that comes.  But we soon lose all our definite bearings; and not only do our children make no distinction between yesterday and the day before yesterday, the whole past being churned up together, but we adults still do so whenever the times are large.  It is the same with spaces.  On a map I can distinctly see the relation of London, Constantinople, and Pekin to the place where I am; in reality I utterly fail to feel the facts which the map symbolizes.  The directions and distances are vague, confused and mixed.  Cosmic space and cosmic time, so far from being the intuitions that Kant said they were, are constructions as patently artificial as any that science can show.  The great majority of the human race never use these notions, but live in plural times and spaces, interpenetrant and DURCHEINANDER.

Permanent ‘things’ again; the ‘same’ thing and its various ‘appearances’ and ‘alterations’; the different ‘kinds’ of thing; with the ‘kind’ used finally as a ‘predicate,’ of which the thing remains the ’subject’—­what a straightening of the tangle of our experience’s immediate flux and sensible variety does this list of terms suggest!  And it is only the smallest part of his experience’s flux that anyone actually does straighten out by applying to it these conceptual instruments.  Out of them all our lowest ancestors probably used only, and then most vaguely and inaccurately, the notion of ‘the same again.’  But even then if you had asked them whether the same were a ‘thing’ that had endured throughout the unseen interval, they would probably have been at a loss, and would have said that they had never asked that question, or considered matters in that light.