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While physical things, namely, are supposed to be permanent and to have their ‘states,’ a fact of consciousness exists but once and is a state. Its esse is sentiri; it is only so far as it is felt; and it is unambiguously and unequivocally exactly what is felt. The hypothesis under consideration would, however, oblige it to be felt equivocally, felt now as part of my mind and again at the same time not as a part of my mind, but of yours (for my mind is not yours), and this would seem impossible without doubling it into two distinct things, or, in other words, without reverting to the ordinary dualistic philosophy of insulated minds each knowing its object representatively as a third thing,–and that would be to give up the pure-experience scheme altogether.

Can we see, then, any way in which a unit of pure experience might enter into and figure in two diverse streams of consciousness without turning itself into the two units which, on our hypothesis, it must not be?

II

There is a way; and the first step towards it is to see more precisely how the unit enters into either one of the streams of consciousness alone. Just what, from being ‘pure,’ does its becoming ‘conscious’ once mean?

It means, first, that new experiences have supervened; and, second, that they have borne a certain assignable relation to the unit supposed. Continue, if you please, to speak of the pure unit as ‘the pen.’ So far as the pen’s successors do but repeat the pen or, being different from it, are ‘energetically'[70] related to it, it and they will form a group of stably existing physical things. So far, however, as its successors differ from it in another well-determined way, the pen will figure in their context, not as a physical, but as a mental fact. It will become a passing ‘percept,’ my percept of that pen. What now is that decisive well-determined way?

In the chapter on ‘The Self,’ in my Principles of Psychology, I explained the continuous identity of each personal consciousness as a name for the practical fact that new experiences[71] come which look back on the old ones, find them ‘warm,’ and greet and appropriate them as ‘mine.’ These operations mean, when analyzed empirically, several tolerably definite things, viz.:

1. That the new experience has past time for its ‘content,’ and in that time a pen that ‘was’;

2. That ‘warmth’ was also about the pen, in the sense of a group of feelings (‘interest’ aroused, ‘attention’ turned, ‘eyes’ employed, etc.) that were closely connected with it and that now recur and evermore recur with unbroken vividness, though from the pen of now, which may be only an image, all such vividness may have gone;

3. That these feelings are the nucleus of ‘me’;

4. That whatever once was associated with them was, at least for that one moment, ‘mine’–my implement if associated with hand-feelings, my ‘percept’ only, if only eye-feelings and attention-feelings were involved.

The pen, realized in this retrospective way as my percept, thus figures as a fact of ‘conscious’ life. But it does so only so far as ‘appropriation’ has occurred; and appropriation is part of the content of a later experience wholly additional to the originally ‘pure’ pen. That pen, virtually both objective and subjective, is at its own moment actually and intrinsically neither. It has to be looked back upon and used, in order to be classed in either distinctive way. But its use, so called, is in the hands of the other experience, while it stands, throughout the operation, passive and unchanged.

If this pass muster as an intelligible account of how an experience originally pure can enter into one consciousness, the next question is as to how it might conceivably enter into two.