)
is the difference which the natural event of knowing makes to the
natural event of direct organic stimulation. It is no change of a
reality into an unreality, of an object into something subjective; it is
no secret, illicit, or epistemological transformation; it is a genuine
acquisition of new and distinctive features through entering into
relations with things with which it was not formerly connected--namely,
possible and future things.

But, replies some one so obsessed with the epistemological point of view
that he assumes that the prior account is a rival epistemology in
disguise, all this involves no change in Reality, no difference made to
Reality. Water was all the time all the things it is ever found out to
be. Its real nature has not been altered by knowing it; any such
alteration means a mis-knowing.

In reply let it be said,--once more and finally,--there is no assertion
or implication about _the_ real object or _the_ real world or _the_
reality. Such an assumption goes with that epistemological universe of
discourse which has to be abandoned in an empirical universe of
discourse. The change is of _a_ real object. An incident of the world
operating as a physiologically direct stimulus is assuredly a reality.
Responded to, it produces specific consequences in virtue of the
response. Water is not drunk unless somebody drinks it; it does not
quench thirst unless a thirsty person drinks it--and so on. Consequences
occur whether one is aware of them or not; they are integral facts in
experience. But let one of these consequences be anticipated and let it,
as anticipated, become an indispensable element in the stimulus, and
then there is a known object. It is not that knowing _produces_ a
change, but that it _is_ a change of the specific kind described. A
serial process, the successive portions of which are as such incapable
of simultaneous occurrence, is telescoped and condensed into an object,
a unified inter-reference of contemporaneous properties, most of which
express potentialities rather than completed data.

Because of this change, an _object_ possesses truth or error (which the
physical occurrence as such never has); it is classifiable as fact or
fantasy; it is of a sort or kind, expresses an essence or nature,
possesses implications, etc., etc. That is to say, it is marked by
specifiable _logical_ traits not found in physical occurrences as such.
Because objective idealisms have seized upon these tra