visual sensations and the inward feelings of
the hand, its mind-stuff, so to speak, are even now as confluent as any
two things can be.

There is, thus, no breach in humanistic epistemology. Whether knowledge
be taken as ideally perfected, or only as true enough to pass muster for
practice, it is hung on one continuous scheme. Reality, howsoever
remote, is always defined as a terminus within the general possibilities
of experience; and what knows it is defined as an experience _that
'represents' it, in the sense of being substitutable for it in our
thinking_ because it leads to the same associates, _or in the sense of
'pointing to it'_ through a chain of other experiences that either
intervene or may intervene.

Absolute reality here bears the same relation to sensation as sensation
bears to conception or imagination. Both are provisional or final
termini, sensation being only the terminus at which the practical man
habitually stops, while the philosopher projects a 'beyond' in the
shape of more absolute reality. These termini, for the practical and the
philosophical stages of thought respectively, are self-supporting. They
are not 'true' of anything else, they simply _are_, are _real_. They
'lean on nothing,' as my italicized formula said. Rather does the whole
fabric of experience lean on them, just as the whole fabric of the solar
system, including many relative positions, leans, for its absolute
position in space, on any one of its constituent stars. Here, again, one
gets a new _Identitaetsphilosophie_ in pluralistic form.[114]

IV

If I have succeeded in making this at all clear (though I fear that
brevity and abstractness between them may have made me fail), the reader
will see that the 'truth' of our mental operations must always be an
intra-experiential affair. A conception is reckoned true by common sense
when it can be made to lead to a sensation. The sensation, which for
common sense is not so much 'true' as 'real,' is held to be
_provisionally_ true by the philosopher just in so far as it _covers_
(abuts at, or occupies the place of) a still more absolutely real
experience, in the possibility of which to some remoter experient the
philosopher finds reason to believe.

Meanwhile what actually _does_ count for true to any individual trower,
whether he be philosopher or common man, is always a result of his
_apperceptions_. If a novel experience, conceptual or sensible,
contradict too emphatically our