I know that many a reader will rebel at this.
"Mere intermediaries," he will say, "even
though they be feelings of continuously growing
fulfilment, only _separate_ the knower from
the known, whereas what we have in knowledge
is a kind of immediate touch of the one by the
other, an 'apprehension' in the etymological
sense of the word, a leaping of the chasm as by
lightning, an act by which two terms are smitten
into one, over the head of their distinctness.
All these dead intermediaries of yours
are out of each other, and outside of their
termini still."
But do not such dialectic difficulties remind
us of the dog dropping his bone and snapping
at its image in the water? If we knew any more
real kind of union _aliunde_, we might be entitled
59
to brand all our empirical unions as a sham.
But unions by continuous transition are the
only ones we know of, whether in this matter
of a knowledge-about that terminates in an
acquaintance, whether in personal identity, in
logical predication through the copula 'is,' or
elsewhere. If anywhere there were more absolute
unions realized, they could only reveal
themselves to us by just such conjunctive
results. These are what the unions are _worth_,
these are all that _we_can_ever_practically_mean_
by union, by continuity.
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