_To_continue_thinking_
_unchallenged_is,_ninety-nine_times_out_of_a_
_hundred,_our_practical_substitute_for_knowing_in_
_the_completed_sense_. As each experience runs by
cognitive transition into the next one, and we
nowhere feel a collision with what we elsewhere
count as truth or fact, we commit ourselves to
the current as if the port were sure. We live,
as it were, upon the front edge of an advancing
wave-crest, and our sense of a determinate
direction in falling forward is all we cover of
the future of our path. It is as if a differential
quotient should be conscious and treat itself as
an adequate substitute for a traced-out curve.
Our experience, _inter_alia_, is of variations of
rate and of direction, and lives in these transitions
more than in the journey's end. The experiences
of tendency are sufficient to act upon
-- what more could we have _done_ at those
moments even if the later verification comes
complete?
This is what, as a radical empiricist, I say to
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the charge that the objective reference which
is so flagrant a character of our experience involves
a chasm and a mortal leap. A positively
conjunctive transition involves neither chasm
nor leap.
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