nd hatred, pleasant
and painful can, in certain complex experiences, coexist.

If one were to make an evolutionary construction of how a lot of
originally chaotic pure experiences became gradually differentiated into
an orderly inner and outer world, the whole theory would turn upon one's
success in explaining how or why the quality of an experience, once
active, could become less so, and, from being an energetic attribute in
some cases, elsewhere lapse into the status of an inert or merely
internal 'nature.' This would be the 'evolution' of the psychical from
the bosom of the physical, in which the esthetic, moral and otherwise
emotional experiences would represent a halfway stage.

VIII

But a last cry of _non possumus_ will probably go up from many readers.
"All very pretty as a piece of ingenuity," they will say, "but our
consciousness itself intuitively contradicts you. We, for our part,
_know_ that we are conscious. We _feel_ our thought, flowing as a life
within us, in absolute contrast with the objects which it so
unremittingly escorts. We can not be faithless to this immediate
intuition. The dualism is a fundamental _datum_: Let no man join what
God has put asunder."

My reply to this is my last word, and I greatly grieve that to many it
will sound materialistic. I can not help that, however, for I, too, have
my intuitions and I must obey them. Let the case be what it may in
others, I am as confident as I am of anything that, in myself, the
stream of thinking (which I recognize emphatically as a phenomenon) is
only a careless name for what, when scrutinized, reveals itself to
consist chiefly of the stream of my breathing. The 'I think' which Kant
said must be able to accompany all my objects, is the 'I breathe' which
actually does accompany them. There are other internal facts besides
breathing (intracephalic muscular adjustments, etc., of which I have
said a word in my larger Psychology), and these increase the assets of
'consciousness,' so far as the latter is subject to immediate
perception;[24] but breath, which was ever the original of 'spirit,'
breath moving outwards, between the glottis and the nostrils, is, I am
persuaded, the essence out of which philosophers have constructed the
entity known to them as consciousness. _That entity is fictitious, while
thoughts in the concrete are fully real. But thoughts in the concrete
are made of the same stuff as things are._

I wish I might believe myself t