plain unqualified actuality, a simple _that_, as yet
undifferentiated into thing and thought, and
only virtually classifiable as objective fact or as
some one's opinion about fact. This is as true
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when the field is conceptual as when it is perceptual.
'Memorial Hall' is 'there' in my idea
as much as when I stand before it. I proceed to
act on its account in either case. Only in the
later experience that supersedes the present
one is this _naif_ immediacy retrospectively split
into two parts, a 'consciousness' and its 'content,'
and the content corrected or confirmed.
While still pure, or present, any experience --
mine, for example, of what I write about in
these very lines -- passes for 'truth.' The
morrow may reduce it to 'opinion.' The transcendentalist
in all his particular knowledges is
as liable to this reduction as I am: his Absolute
does not save him. Why, then, need he quarrel
with an account of knowing that merely leaves
it liable to this inevitable condition? Why insist
that knowing is a static relation out of
time when it practically seems so much a function
of our active life? For a thing to be valid,
says Lotze, is the same as to make itself
valid.
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