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James, William

"Essays In Radical Empiricism"

It has to be looked back upon and
_used_, in order to be classed in either distinctive
way. But its use, so called, is in the hands of
the other experience, while _it_ stands, throughout
the operation, passive and unchanged.
If this pass muster as an intelligible account
of how an experience originally pure can enter
into one consciousness, the next question is as
to how it might conceivably enter into two.
III
Obviously no new kind of condition would
have to be supplied. All that we should have
to postulate would be a second subsequent
131
experience, collateral and contemporary with
the first subsequent one, in which a similar act
of appropriation should occur. The two acts
would interfere neither with one another nor
with the originally pure pen. It would sleep
undisturbed in its own past, no matter how
many such successors went through their several
appropriative acts. Each would know it
as 'my' percept, each would class it as a 'conscious'
fact.
Nor need their so classing it interfere in the
least with their classing it at the same time as
a physical pen. Since the classing in both cases
depends upon the taking of it in one group or
another of associates, if the superseding experience
were of wide enough 'span' it could think
the pen in both groups simultaneously, and yet
distinguish the two groups.


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