are transcendent, until we begin, as psychologists, to study the subjective mechanism on its own account. It is doubtless simultaneities and sequences among our ideas that put us upon the track of these trans-subjective connections; but, once established, no appearance of A in consciousness without B, or of B without A, or of A and B separated by various intervening ideas – no one, in short, of the hundred casualties to which the conscious sequence is exposed – shakes in the least our belief in the continued validity of the relation in the real world. And, it may be added, unless from the beginning we transcended the immediate data of consciousness – unless from the outset they were taken not for what they are, but for what they mean – we should not fasten either upon the regularities or upon the irregularities of our experience as calling for explanation. There would be nothing to explain; we should simply take everything as it came. We should be mere historians of the course of conscious occurrences that had made up our individual existence.[1]
Such then is pure experience; this is what is actually immanent. The actual world of subjective experience only requires to be exhibited thus in its nakedness to have its essentially dependent and symbolic character recognized. It is only when related to a world of independent realities that these subjective phenomena become intelligible. Nay, it is only in this relation that knowledge, or the very conception of knowledge, could arise. Such an independent and essentially trans-subjective world is therefore necessarily assumed by every philosophy. An examination of the various theories of pure experience or pure immanence would show that, however they may disguise it from themselves, they all make this realistic assumption. But it is not necessary for us to go further than Mill's well-
- ↑ So Volkelt says that "knowledge" from the purely immanent point of view would consist simply "in einem Erzählen der von Moment zu Moment in seinem Bewusstsein vorkommenden Einzelvorstellungen." Properly speaking there would be neither thought nor knowledge "sondern lediglich ein Berichten über den absolut zusammenhangslosen Spectakel den ich unbegreiflicherweise in meinem Bewusstsein antreffe." Compare the fourth section of his Immanuel Kant's Erkenntnisslehre, to which I am indebted in the foregoing paragraph.
