Is it not time to
repeat what Lotze said of substances, that to
_act_like_ one is to _be_ one? Should we not say
here that to be experienced as continuous is to
be really continuous, in a world where experience
and reality come to the same thing? In
a picture gallery a painted hook will serve to
hang a painted chain by, a painted cable will
hold a painted ship. In a world where both the
terms and their distinctions are affairs of experience,
conjunctions that are experienced
must be at least as real as anything else. They
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will be 'absolutely' real conjunctions, if we have
no transphenomenal Absolute ready, to derealize
the whole experienced world by, at a stroke.
If, on the other hand, we had such an Absolute,
not one of our opponents' theories of knowledge
could remain standing any better than
ours could; for the distinctions as well as the
conjunctions of experience would impartially
fall its prey. The whole question of how 'one'
thing can know 'another' would cease to be a
real one at all in a world where otherness itself
was an illusion.(1)
So much for the essentials of the cognitive
relation, where the knowledge is conceptual in
type, or forms knowledge 'about' an object.
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