'The Moment of Experience' in his _Metaphysic of Experience_, vol. I, p.
34.) 'We live forward, but we understand backward' is a phrase of
Kierkegaard's which Hoeffding quotes. [H. Hoeffding: "A Philosophical
Confession," _Journal of Philosophy, Psychology and Scientific Methods_,
vol. II, 1905, p. 86.]

[73] [Cf. below, pp. 197, 202.]

[74] [Cf. _A Pluralistic Universe_, Lect. IV, 'Concerning Fechner,' and
Lect. V, 'The Compounding of Consciousness.']

V

THE PLACE OF AFFECTIONAL FACTS IN A WORLD OF PURE EXPERIENCE[75]

Common sense and popular philosophy are as dualistic as it is possible
to be. Thoughts, we all naturally think, are made of one kind of
substance, and things of another. Consciousness, flowing inside of us in
the forms of conception or judgment, or concentrating itself in the
shape of passion or emotion, can be directly felt as the spiritual
activity which it is, and known in contrast with the space-filling
objective 'content' which it envelopes and accompanies. In opposition to
this dualistic philosophy, I tried, in [the first essay] to show that
thoughts and things are absolutely homogeneous as to their material, and
that their opposition is only one of relation and of function. There is
no thought-stuff different from thing-stuff, I said; but the same
identical piece of 'pure experience' (which was the name I gave to the
_materia prima_ of everything) can stand alternately for a 'fact of
consciousness' or for a physical reality, according as it is taken in
one context or in another. For the right understanding of what follows,
I shall have to presuppose that the reader will have read that
[essay].[76]

The commonest objection which the doctrine there laid down runs up
against is drawn from the existence of our 'affections.' In our
pleasures and pains, our loves and fears and angers, in the beauty,
comicality, importance or preciousness of certain objects and
situations, we have, I am told by many critics, a great realm of
experience intuitively recognized as spiritual, made, and felt to be
made, of consciousness exclusively, and different in nature from the
space-filling kind of being which is enjoyed by physical objects. In
Section VII. of [the first essay], I treated of this class of
experiences very inadequately, because I had to be so brief. I now
return to the subject, because I believe that, so far from invalidating
my general thesis, these phenomena, when properly analyzed, aff