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III

In Section VI of [the last essay], I adopted in a general way the common-sense belief that one and the same world is cognized by our different minds; but I left undiscussed the dialectical arguments which maintain that this is logically absurd. The usual reason given for its being absurd is that it assumes one object (to wit, the world) to stand in two relations at once; to my mind, namely, and again to yours; whereas a term taken in a second relation can not logically be the same term which it was at first.

I have heard this reason urged so often in discussing with absolutists, and it would destroy my radical empiricism so utterly, if it were valid, that I am bound to give it an attentive ear, and seriously to search its strength.

For instance, let the matter in dispute be term M, asserted to be on the one hand related to L, and on the other to N; and let the two cases of relation be symbolized by L–M and M–N respectively. When, now, I assume that the experience may immediately come and be given in the shape L–M–N, with no trace of doubling or internal fission in the M, I am told that this is all a popular delusion; that L–M–N logically means two different experiences, L–M and M–N, namely; and that although the Absolute may, and indeed must, from its superior point of view, read its own kind of unity into M‘s two editions, yet as elements in finite experience the two M‘s lie irretrievably asunder, and the world between them is broken and unbridged.

In arguing this dialectic thesis, one must avoid slipping from the logical into the physical point of view. It would be easy, in taking a concrete example to fix one’s ideas by, to choose one in which the letter M should stand for a collective noun of some sort, which noun, being related to L by one of its parts and to N by another, would inwardly be two things when it stood outwardly in both relations. Thus, one might say: ‘David Hume, who weighed so many stone by his body, influences posterity by his doctrine.’ The body and the doctrine are two things, between which our finite minds can discover no real sameness, though the same name covers both of them. And then, one might continue: ‘Only an Absolute is capable of uniting such a non-identity.’ We must, I say, avoid this sort of example, for the dialectic insight, if true at all, must apply to terms and relations universally. It must be true of abstract units as well as of nouns collective; and if we prove it by concrete examples we must take the simplest, so as to avoid irrelevant material suggestions.

Taken thus in all its generality, the absolutist contention seems to use as its major premise Hume’s notion ‘that all our distinct perceptions are distinct existences, and that the mind never perceives any real connexion among distinct existences.'[46] Undoubtedly, since we use two phrases in talking first about ‘ M‘s relation to L‘ and then about ‘ M‘s relation to N,’ we must be having, or must have had, two distinct perceptions;–and the rest would then seem to follow duly. But the starting-point of the reasoning here seems to be the fact of the two phrases; and this suggests that the argument may be merely verbal. Can it be that the whole dialectic consists in attributing to the experience talked-about a constitution similar to that of the language in which we describe it? Must we assert the objective double-ness of the M merely because we have to name it twice over when we name its two relations?