ord it
powerful support.

The central point of the pure-experience theory is that 'outer' and
'inner' are names for two groups into which we sort experiences
according to the way in which they act upon their neighbors. Any one
'content,' such as _hard_, let us say, can be assigned to either group.
In the outer group it is 'strong,' it acts 'energetically' and
aggressively. Here whatever is hard interferes with the space its
neighbors occupy. It dents them; is impenetrable by them; and we call
the hardness then a physical hardness. In the mind, on the contrary, the
hard thing is nowhere in particular, it dents nothing, it suffuses
through its mental neighbors, as it were, and interpenetrates them.
Taken in this group we call both it and them 'ideas' or 'sensations';
and the basis of the two groups respectively is the different type of
interrelation, the mutual impenetrability, on the one hand, and the
lack of physical interference and interaction, on the other.

That what in itself is one and the same entity should be able to
function thus differently in different contexts is a natural consequence
of the extremely complex reticulations in which our experiences come. To
her offspring a tigress is tender, but cruel to every other living
thing--both cruel and tender, therefore, at once. A mass in movement
resists every force that operates contrariwise to its own direction, but
to forces that pursue the same direction, or come in at right angles, it
is absolutely inert. It is thus both energetic and inert; and the same
is true (if you vary the associates properly) of every other piece of
experience. It is only towards certain specific groups of associates
that the physical energies, as we call them, of a content are put forth.
In another group it may be quite inert.

It is possible to imagine a universe of experiences in which the only
alternative between neighbors would be either physical interaction or
complete inertness. In such a world the mental or the physical _status_
of any piece of experience would be unequivocal. When active, it would
figure in the physical, and when inactive, in the mental group.

But the universe we live in is more chaotic than this, and there is room
in it for the hybrid or ambiguous group of our affectional experiences,
of our emotions and appreciative perceptions. In the paragraphs that
follow I shall try to show:

(1) That the popular notion that these experiences are intuitively given