o yours; whereas a term taken in a second
relation cannot 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 a 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.' Undoubtedly, since we
us