ss to
passion.

II

This description of experience would be but a rhapsodic celebration of
the commonplace were it not in marked contrast to orthodox philosophical
accounts. The contrast indicates that traditional accounts have not been
empirical, but have been deductions, from unnamed premises, of what
experience _must_ be. Historic empiricism has been empirical in a
technical and controversial sense. It has said, Lord, Lord, Experience,
Experience; but in practice it has served ideas _forced into_
experience, not _gathered from_ it.

The confusion and artificiality thereby introduced into philosophical
thought is nowhere more evident than in the empirical treatment of
relations or dynamic continuities. The experience of a living being
struggling to hold its own and make its way in an environment, physical
and social, partly facilitating and partly obstructing its actions, is
of necessity a matter of ties and connexions, of bearings and uses. The
very point of experience, so to say, is that it doesn't occur in a
vacuum; its agent-patient instead of being insulated and disconnected is
bound up with the movement of things by most intimate and pervasive
bonds. Only because the organism is in and of the world, and its
activities correlated with those of other things in multiple ways, is it
susceptible to undergoing things and capable of trying to reduce objects
to means of securing its good fortune. That these connexions are of
diverse kinds is irresistibly proved by the fluctuations which occur in
its career. Help and hindrance, stimulation and inhibition, success and
failure mean specifically different modes of correlation. Although the
actions of things in the world are taking place in one continuous
stretch of existence, there are all kinds of specific affinities,
repulsions, and relative indifferencies.

Dynamic connexions are qualitatively diverse, just as are the centers of
action. _In this sense_, pluralism, not monism, is an established
empirical fact. The attempt to establish monism from consideration of
the very nature of a relation is a mere piece of dialectics. Equally
dialectical is the effort to establish by a consideration of the nature
of relations an ontological Pluralism of Ultimates: _simple and
independent beings._ To attempt to get results from a consideration of
the "external" nature of relations is of a piece with the attempt to
deduce results from their "internal" character. Some things are