11, May 25, 1905.]
138
of 'pure experience' (which was the name I
gave to the _materia_prima_ of everything) can
stand alternately for a 'fact of consciousness'
or for a physical reality, according as it is taken
in one context or in another. For the right
understanding of what follows, I shall have to
presuppose that the reader will have read that
-essay].(1)
The commonest objection which the doctrine
there laid down runs up against is drawn
from the existence of our 'affections.' In our
pleasures and pains, our loves and fears and
angers, in the beauty, comicality, importance
or preciousness of certain objects and situations,
we have, I am told by many critics, a
great realm of experience intuitively recognized
as spiritual, made, and felt to be made,
of consciousness exclusively, and different in
nature from the space-filling kind of being
which is enjoyed by physical objects. In
Section VII, of [the first essay], I treated of
this class of experiences inadequately,
---
1 It will be still better if he shall have also read the [essay]
entitled 'A World of Pure Experience,' which follows [the first] and
develops its ideas still farther.
139
because I had to be brief.
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