Abolishing any number of contexts
would not destroy the experience itself
or its other contexts, any more than abolishing
some of the point's linear continuations
would destroy the others, or destroy the point
itself.
I well know the subtle dialectic which insists
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that a term taken in another relation must
needs be an intrinsically different term. The
crux is always the old Greek one, that the same
man can't be tall in relation to one neighbor,
and short in relation to another, for that would
make him tall and short at once. In this essay
I can not stop to refute this dialectic, so I pass
on, leaving my flank for the time exposed.
But if my reader will only allow that the same
'_now_' both ends his past and begins his future;
or that, when he buys an acre of land from his
neighbor, it is the same acre that successively
figures in the two estates; or that when I pay
him a dollar, the same dollar goes into his
pocket that came out of mine; he will also in
consistency have to allow that the same object
may conceivably play a part in, as being related
to the rest of, any number of otherwise
entirely different minds. This is enough for
my present point: the common-sense notion of
minds sharing the same object offers no special
logical or epistemological difficulties of its
own; it stands or falls with the general possibility
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of things being in conjunctive relation with
other things at all.
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