An infinite series is involved," and so
on. The result is that from difficulty to difficulty,
the plain conjunctive experience has
been discredited by both schools, the empiricists
leaving things permanently disjoined, and
the rationalist remedying the looseness by their
Absolutes or Substances, or whatever other fictitious
agencies of union may have employed.
From all which artificiality we can
be saved by a couple of simple-reflections: first,
that conjunctions and separations are, at all
events, co-ordinate phenomena which, if we
take experiences at their face value, must be
accounted equally real; and second, that if we
insist on treating things as really separate
when they are given as continuously joined,
invoking, when union is required, transcendental
principles to overcome the separateness
we have assumed, then we ought to stand
ready to perform the converse act. We ought
to invoke higher principles of _dis_union, also, to
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make our merely experienced _dis_junctions more
truly real. Failing thus, we ought to let the
originally given continuities stand on their own
bottom. We have no right to be lopsided or to
blow capriciously hot and cold.
III.
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