Say _what_ it consists
of -- for it must consist of something -- or be
willing to give it up!"
To this challenge the reply is easy. Although
for fluency's sake I myself spoke early in this
article of a stuff of pure experience, I have now
to say that there is no _general_ stuff of which experience
at large is made. There are as many
stuffs as there are 'natures' in the things experienced.
If you ask what any one bit of pure
experience is made of, the answer is always the
27
same: "It is made of _that_, of just what appears,
of space, of intensity, of flatness, brownness,
heaviness, or what not." Shadworth Hodgson's
analysis here leaves nothing to be desired.(1)
Experience is only a collective name
for all these sensible natures, and save for time
and space (and, if you like, for 'being') there
appears no universal element of which all
things are made.
VI
The next objection is more formidable, in
fact it sounds quite crushing when one hears
it first.
"If it be the self-same piece of pure experience,
taken twice over, that serves now as thought and now as thing" -- so the
objection runs -- "how comes it that its attributes
should differ so fundamentally in the two takings.
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