ter which of those
directions, what it develops into will look back on it and say, 'That
was the original germ of me.'

In _principle_, then, the real units of our immediately-felt life are
unlike the units that intellectualist logic holds to and makes its
calculations with. They are not separate from their own others, and
you have to take them at widely separated dates to find any two of
them that seem unblent. Then indeed they do appear separate even as
their concepts are separate; a chasm yawns between them; but the chasm
itself is but an intellectualist fiction, got by abstracting from the
continuous sheet of experiences with which the intermediary time was
filled. It is like the log carried first by William and Henry, then
by William, Henry, and John, then by Henry and John, then by John and
Peter, and so on. All real units of experience _overlap_. Let a row of
equidistant dots on a sheet of paper symbolize the concepts by which
we intellectualize the world. Let a ruler long enough to cover at
least three dots stand for our sensible experience. Then the conceived
changes of the sensible experience can be symbolized by sliding the
ruler along the line of dots. One concept after another will apply to
it, one after another drop away, but it will always cover at least two
of them, and no dots less than three will ever adequately cover _it_.
You falsify it if you treat it conceptually, or by the law of dots.

What is true here of successive states must also be true of
simultaneous characters. They also overlap each other with their
being. My present field of consciousness is a centre surrounded by a
fringe that shades insensibly into a subconscious more. I use three
separate terms here to describe, this fact; but I might as well use
three hundred, for the fact is all shades and no boundaries. Which
part of it properly is in my consciousness, which out? If I name what
is out, it already has come in. The centre works in one way while the
margins work in another, and presently overpower the centre and are
central themselves. What we conceptually identify ourselves with and
say we are thinking of at any time is the centre; but our _full_ self
is the whole field, with all those indefinitely radiating subconscious
possibilities of increase that we can only feel without conceiving,
and can hardly begin to analyze. The collective and the distributive
ways of being coexist here, for each part functions distinctly, makes
connex