known.  That is all that knowing (in the simple case considered) can be known-as, that is the whole of its nature, put into experiential terms.  Whenever such is the sequence of our experiences we may freely say that we had the terminal object ‘in mind’ from the outset, even altho at the outset nothing was there in us but a flat piece of substantive experience like any other, with no self-transcendency about it, and no mystery save the mystery of coming into existence and of being gradually followed by other pieces of substantive experience, with conjunctively transitional experiences between.  That is what we mean here by the object’s being ‘in mind.’  Of any deeper more real way of its being in mind we have no positive conception, and we have no right to discredit our actual experience by talking of such a way at all.

I know that many a reader will rebel at this.  ‘Mere intermediaries,’ he will say, ’even tho they be feelings of continuously growing fulfilment, only separate the knower from the known, whereas what we have in knowledge is a kind of immediate touch of the one by the other, an “apprehension” in the etymological sense of the word, a leaping of the chasm as by lightning, an act by which two terms are smitten into one over the head of their distinctness.  All these dead intermediaries of yours are out of each other, and outside of their termini still.’

But do not such dialectic difficulties remind us of the dog dropping his bone and snapping at its image in the water?  If we knew any more real kind of union aliunde, we might be entitled to brand all our empirical unions as a sham.  But unions by continuous transition are the only ones we know of, whether in this matter of a knowledge-about that terminates in an acquaintance, whether in personal identity, in logical prediction through the copula ‘is,’ or elsewhere.  If anywhere there were more absolute unions, they could only reveal themselves to us by just such conjunctive results.  These are what the unions are worth, these are all that we can ever practically mean by union, by continuity.  Is it not time to repeat what Lotze said of substances, that to act like one is to be one?  Should we not say here that to be experienced as continuous is to be really continuous, in a world where experience and reality come to the same thing?  In a picture gallery a painted hook will serve to hang a painted chain by, a painted cable will hold a painted ship.  In a world where both the terms and their distinctions are affairs of experience, conjunctions that are experienced must be at least as real as anything else.  They will be ‘absolutely’ real conjunctions, if we have no transphenomenal absolute ready, to derealize the whole experienced world by, at a stroke.