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III
THE THING AND ITS RELATIONS(1)
EXPERIENCE in its immediacy seems perfectly
fluent. The active sense of living which
we all enjoy, before reflection shatters our instinctive
world for us, is self-luminous and suggests
no paradoxes. Its difficulties are disappointments
and uncertainties. They are not
intellectual contradictions.
When the reflective intellect gets at work,
however, it discovers incomprehensibilities in
the flowing process. Distinguishing its elements
and parts, it gives them separate names,
and what it thus disjoins it can not easily put
together. Pyrrhonism accepts the irrationality
and revels in its dialectic elaboration.
Other philosophies try, some by ignoring,
some by resisting, and some by turning the
dialectic procedure against itself, negating its
first negations, to restore the fluent sense of
---
1 [Reprinted from _The_Journal_of_Philosophy,_Psychology_and_
_Scientific_Methods_, vol II, No. 2, January 19, 1905. Reprinted also
as Appendix A in _A_Pluralistic_Universe, pp. 347-369. The authors
corrections have been adopted in the present text. ED.]
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life again, and let redemption take the place of
innocence.
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