Not only do they
yield inconceivably rapid transitions; but, owing
to the 'universal' character(1) which they
frequently possess, and to their capacity for
association with one another in great systems,
they outstrip the tardy consecutions of the
things themselves, and sweep us on towards
our ultimate termini in a far more labor-saving
way than the following of trains of sensible
perception ever could. Wonderful are the new
cuts and the short-circuits which the thought-
paths make. Most thought-paths, it is true,
are substitutes for nothing actual; they end
outside the real world altogether, in wayward
fancies, utopias, fictions or mistakes. But
where they do re-enter reality and terminate
therein, we substitute them always; and with
---
1 Of which all that need be said in this essay is that it also can be
conceived as functional, and defined in terms of transitions, or of the
possibility of such.
---
65
these substitutes we pass the greater number
of our hours.
This is why I called our experiences, taken
together, a quasi-chaos. There is vastly
more discontinuity in the sum total of experiences
than we commonly suppose. The objective
nucleus of every man's experience, his own
body, is, it is true, a continuous percept; and
equally continuous as a percept (thought we
may be inattentive to it) is the material environment
of that body, changing by gradual
transition when the body moves.
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