elung_ of the All of things ought not, then, even
to be asked. No more ought the question of its _truth_ to be asked, for
truth is a relation inside of the sum total, obtaining between thoughts
and something else, and thoughts, as we have seen, can only be
contextual things. In these respects the pure experiences of our
philosophy are, in themselves considered, so many little absolutes, the
philosophy of pure experience being only a more comminuted
_Identitaetsphilosophie_.[73]

Meanwhile, a pure experience can be postulated with any amount whatever
of span or field. If it exert the retrospective and appropriative
function on any other piece of experience, the latter thereby enters
into its own conscious stream. And in this operation time intervals make
no essential difference. After sleeping, my retrospection is as perfect
as it is between two successive waking moments of my time. Accordingly
if, millions of years later, a similarly retrospective experience should
anyhow come to birth, my present thought would form a genuine portion of
its long-span conscious life. 'Form a portion,' I say, but not in the
sense that the two things could be entitatively or substantively
one--they cannot, for they are numerically discrete facts--but only in
the sense that the _functions_ of my present thought, its knowledge, its
purpose, its content and 'consciousness,' in short, being inherited,
would be continued practically unchanged. Speculations like Fechner's,
of an Earth-soul, of wider spans of consciousness enveloping narrower
ones throughout the cosmos, are, therefore, philosophically quite in
order, provided they distinguish the functional from the entitative
point of view, and do not treat the minor consciousness under discussion
as a kind of standing material of which the wider ones _consist_.[74]

FOOTNOTES:

[68] [Reprinted from _The Journal of Philosophy, Psychology and
Scientific Methods_, vol. II, No. 7, March 30, 1905.]

[69] "A World of Pure Experience," above, pp. 39-91.

[70] [For an explanation of this expression, see above, p. 32.]

[71] I call them 'passing thoughts' in the book--the passage in point
goes from pages 330 to 342 of vol. I.

[72] Shadworth Hodgson has laid great stress on the fact that the
minimum of consciousness demands two subfeelings, of which the second
retrospects the first. (Cf. the section 'Analysis of Minima' in his
_Philosophy of Reflection_, vol. I, p. 248; also the chapter entitled