orld is built
up is not of two sorts, one matter and the other mind, but that it is
arranged in different patterns by its inter-relations, and that some
arrangements may be called mental, while others may be called physical.

"My thesis is," he says, "that if we start with the supposition that
there is only one primal stuff or material in the world, a stuff
of which everything is composed, and if we call that stuff 'pure
experience,' then knowing can easily be explained as a particular sort
of relation towards one another into which portions of pure experience
may enter. The relation itself is a part of pure experience; one of its
'terms' becomes the subject or bearer of the knowledge, the knower, the
other becomes the object known"(p. 4).

After mentioning the duality of subject and object, which is supposed
to constitute consciousness, he proceeds in italics: "EXPERIENCE, I
BELIEVE, HAS NO SUCH INNER DUPLICITY; AND THE SEPARATION OF IT INTO
CONSCIOUSNESS AND CONTENT COMES, NOT BY WAY OF SUBTRACTION, BUT BY WAY
OF ADDITION"(p. 9).

He illustrates his meaning by the analogy of paint as it appears in a
paint-shop and as it appears in a picture: in the one case it is just
"saleable matter," while in the other it "performs a spiritual function.
Just so, I maintain (he continues), does a given undivided portion
of experience, taken in one context of associates, play the part of a
knower, of a state of mind, of 'consciousness'; while in a different
context the same undivided bit of experience plays the part of a thing
known, of an objective 'content.' In a word, in one group it figures as
a thought, in another group as a thing"(pp. 9-10).

He does not believe in the supposed immediate certainty of thought. "Let
the case be what it may in others," he says, "I am as confident as I am
of anything that, in myself, the stream of thinking (which I recognize
emphatically as a phenomenon) is only a careless name for what, when
scrutinized, reveals itself to consist chiefly of the stream of my
breathing. The 'I think' which Kant said must be able to accompany all
my objects, is the 'I breathe' which actually does accompany them"(pp.
36-37).

The same view of "consciousness" is set forth in the succeeding essay,
"A World of Pure Experience" (ib., pp. 39-91). The use of the phrase
"pure experience" in both essays points to a lingering influence of
idealism. "Experience," like "consciousness," must be a product, not
part of the pr