I may refer to the chapters on 'The Stream of
Thought' and on the Self in my own _Principles_of_Psychology_, as well
as to S.H.Hodgson's _Metaphysics_of_Experience_, vol I., ch. VII and
VIII.
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49
suggestions and to make our actual experience
again seem rationally possible.
what I do feel simply when a later moment
of my experience succeeds an earlier one is that
though they are two moments, the transition
from the one to the other is _continuous_. Continuity
here is a definite sort of experience; just
as definite as is the _discontinuity-experience_
which I find it impossible to avoid when I seek
to make the transition from an experience of
my own to one of yours. In this latter case I
have to get on and off again, to pass from a
thing lived to another thing only conceived,
and the break is positively experienced and
noted. Though the functions exerted by my
experience and by yours may be the same (.e.g.,
the same objects known and the same purposes
followed), yet the sameness has in this case to
be ascertained expressly (and often with difficulty
and uncertainly) after the break has been
felt; whereas in passing from one of my own
moments to another the sameness of object and
interest is unbroken, and both the earlier and
the later experience are of things directly lived.
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