But there exist no processes which we cannot also consider abstractly, eviscerating them down to their essential skeletons or outlines; and when we have treated the processes of knowing thus, we are easily led to regard them as something altogether unparalleled in nature.  For we first empty idea, object and intermediaries of all their particularities, in order to retain only a general scheme, and then we consider the latter only in its function of giving a result, and not in its character of being a process.  In this treatment the intermediaries shrivel into the form of a mere space of separation, while the idea and object retain only the logical distinctness of being the end-terms that are separated.  In other words, the intermediaries which in their concrete particularity form a bridge, evaporate ideally into an empty interval to cross, and then, the relation of the end-terms having become saltatory, the whole hocus-pocus of Erkenntnistheorie begins, and goes on unrestrained by further concrete considerations.  The idea, in ‘meaning’ an object separated by an ‘epistemological chasm’ from itself, now executes what Professor Ladd calls a ‘salto mortale’; in knowing the object’s nature, it now ‘transcends’ its own.  The object in turn becomes ‘present’ where it is really absent, etc.; until a scheme remains upon our hands, the sublime paradoxes of which some of us think that nothing short of an ‘absolute’ can explain.

The relation between idea and object, thus made abstract and saltatory, is thenceforward opposed, as being more essential and previous, to its own ambulatory self, and the more concrete description is branded as either false or insufficient.  The bridge of intermediaries, actual or possible, which in every real case is what carries and defines the knowing, gets treated as an episodic complication which need not even potentially be there.  I believe that this vulgar fallacy of opposing abstractions to the concretes from which they are abstracted, is the main reason why my account of knowing is deemed so unsatisfactory, and I will therefore say a word more on that general point.

Any vehicle of conjunction, if all its particularities are abstracted from it, will leave us with nothing on our hands but the original disjunction which it bridged over.  But to escape treating the resultant self-contradiction as an achievement of dialectical profundity, all we need is to restore some part, no matter how small, of what we have taken away.  In the case of the epistemological chasm the first reasonable step is to remember that the chasm was filled with some empirical material, whether ideational or sensational, which performed some bridging function and saved us from the mortal leap.  Restoring thus the indispensable modicum of reality to the matter of our discussion, we find our abstract treatment genuinely useful.  We escape entanglement with special cases without at the same time falling into gratuitous paradoxes.  We can now describe the general features of cognition, tell what on the whole it does for us, in a universal way.