of its terms. Having an outside, both of them, they
contribute by it to the relation. It is external: the term's inner
nature is irrelevant to it. Any book, any table, may fall into the
relation, which is created _pro hac vice_, not by their existence, but
by their casual situation. It is just because so many of the
conjunctions of experience seem so external that a philosophy of pure
experience must tend to pluralism in its ontology. So far as things have
space-relations, for example, we are free to imagine them with different
origins even. If they could get to _be_, and get into space at all, then
they may have done so separately. Once there, however, they are
_additives_ to one another, and, with no prejudice to their natures, all
sorts of space-relations may supervene between them. The question of
how things could come to be anyhow, is wholly different from the
question what their relations, once the being accomplished, may consist
in.

Mr. Bradley now affirms that such external relations as the
space-relations which we here talk of must hold of entirely different
subjects from those of which the absence of such relations might a
moment previously have been plausibly asserted. Not only is the
_situation_ different when the book is on the table, but the _book
itself_ is different as a book, from what it was when it was off the
table.[55] He admits that "such external relations seem possible and
even existing.... That you do not alter what you compare or rearrange in
space seems to common sense quite obvious, and that on the other side
there are as obvious difficulties does not occur to common sense at all.
And I will begin by pointing out these difficulties.... There is a
relation in the result, and this relation, we hear, is to make no
difference in its terms. But, if so, to what does it make a difference?
[_Doesn't it make a difference to us onlookers, at least?_] and what is
the meaning and sense of qualifying the terms by it? [_Surely the
meaning is to tell the truth about their relative position._[56]] If, in
short, it is external to the terms, how can it possibly be true of them?
[_Is it the 'intimacy' suggested by the little word 'of,' here, which I
have underscored, that is the root of Mr. Bradley's trouble?_] ... If
the terms from their inner nature do not enter into the relation, then,
so far as they are concerned, they seem related for no reason at all....
Things are spatially related, first in one way, a