The atoms again, though
we may never attain to human means of perceiving
them, are still defined perceptually.
The mind-stuff itself is conceived as a kind
of experience; and it is possible to frame the
hypothesis (such hypotheses can by no logic
be excluded from philosophy) of two knowers
of a piece of mind-stuff and the mind-stuff
itself becoming 'confluent' at the moment at
which our imperfect knowing might pass into
knowing of a completed type. Even so do you
and I habitually represent our two perceptions
and the real dog as confluent, though only provisionally,
and for the common-sense stage
of thought. If my pen be inwardly made of
mind-stuff, there is no confluence _now_ between
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that mind-stuff and my visual perception of
the pen. But conceivably there might come to
be such confluence; for, in the case of my hand,
the visual sensations and the inward feelings
of the hand, its mind-stuff, so to speak, are even
now as confluent as any two things can be.
There is, thus, no breach in humanistic
epistemology. Whether knowledge be taken
as ideally perfected, or only as true enough to
pass muster for practice, it is hung on one continuous
scheme. Reality, howsoever remote, is
always defined as a terminus within the general
possibilities of experience; and what knows it is
defined as an experience _that_'represents'_it,_in_
_the_sense_of_being_substitutable_for_it_in_our_thinking_
because it leads to the same associates, _or_
_in_the_sense_of_'point_to_it'_ through a chain
of other experiences that either intervene or
may intervene.
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