is possible to frame the hypothesis (such hypotheses can by no logic be excluded from philosophy) of two knowers of a piece of mind-stuff and the mind-stuff itself becoming ‘confluent’ at the moment at which our imperfect knowing might pass into knowing of a completed type.  Even so do you and I habitually conceive our two perceptions and the real dog as confluent, tho only provisionally, and for the common-sense stage of thought.  If my pen be inwardly made of mind-stuff, there is no confluence now between that mind-stuff and my visual perception of the pen.  But conceivably there might come to be such. confluence; for, in the case of my hand, the visual sensations and the inward feelings of the hand, its mind-stuff, so to speak, are even now as confluent as any two things can be.

There is, thus, no breach in humanistic epistemology.  Whether knowledge be taken as ideally perfected, or only as true enough to pass muster for practice, it is hung on one continuous scheme.  Reality, howsoever remote, is always defined as a terminus within the general possibilities of experience; and what knows it is defined as an experience that ‘represents’ it, in the sense of being substitutable for it in our thinking because it leads to the same associates, or in the sense of ’pointing to it through A chain of other experiences that either intervene or may intervene.

Absolute reality here bears the same relation to sensation as sensation bears to conception or imagination.  Both are provisional or final termini, sensation being only the terminus at which the practical man habitually stops, while the philosopher projects a ‘beyond,’ in the shape of more absolute reality.  These termini, for the practical and the philosophical stages of thought respectively, are self-supporting.  They are not ‘true’ of anything else, they simply are, are real.  They ‘lean on nothing,’ as my italicized formula said.  Rather does the whole fabric of experience lean on them, just as the whole fabric of the solar system, including many relative positions, leans, for its absolute position in space, on any one of its constituent stars.  Here, again, one gets a new Identitatsphilosophie in pluralistic form.

 IV

If I have succeeded in making this at all clear (tho I fear that brevity and abstractness between them may have made me fail), the reader will see that the ‘truth’ of our mental operations must always be an intra-experiential affair.  A conception is reckoned true by common sense when it can be made to lead to a sensation.  The sensation, which for common sense is not so much ‘true’ as ‘real,’ is held to be provisionally true by the philosopher just in so far as it covers (abuts at, or occupies the place of) a still more absolutely real experience, in the possibility of which, to some remoter experient, the philosopher finds reason to believe.