But the
distant parts of the physical world are at all
times absent from us, and form conceptual
objects merely, into the perceptual reality of
which our life inserts itself at points discrete
and relatively rare. Round their several objective
nuclei, partly shared and common and
partly discrete, of the real physical world, innumerable
thinkers, pursuing their several lines
of physically true cogitation, trace paths that
intersect one another only at discontinuous
perceptual points, and the rest of the time are
quite incongruent; and around all the nuclei
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of shared 'reality,' as around the Dyak's head
of my late metaphor, floats the vast cloud of
experiences that are wholly subjective, that
are non-substitutional, that find not even an
eventual ending for themselves in the perceptual
world -- there mere day-dreams and
joys and sufferings and wishes of the individual
minds. These exist _with_ one another, indeed,
and with the objective nuclei, but out
of them it is probable that to all eternity no
interrelated system of any kind will every be
made.
This notion of the purely substitutional or
conceptual physical world brings us to the most
critical of all steps in the development of
a philosophy of pure experience.
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