102 THE EXPERIMENTAL THEORY 



ing against them, and regulating, so far as 

 possible, the conditions under which objects are 

 bearers of meanings beyond themselves. But im 

 patient of such slow and tentative methods (which 

 insure not infallibility but increased probability of 

 valid conclusions), by reason of disappointment 

 a person may turn epistemologist. He may then 

 take the discrepancy, the failure of the smell to 

 execute its own intended meaning, as a wholesale, 

 rather than as a specific fact: as evidence of a 

 contrast in general between things meaning and 

 things meant, instead of as evidence of the need 

 of a more cautious and thorough inspection of 

 odors and execution of operations indicated by 

 them. One may then say: Woe is me; smells are 

 only my smells, subjective states existing in an 

 order of being made out of consciousness, while 

 roses exist in another order made out of a radically 

 different sort of stuff; or, odors are made out of 

 &quot; finite &quot; consciousness as their stuff, while the real 

 things, the objects which fulfil them, are made out 

 of an &quot; infinite &quot; consciousness as their material. 

 Hence some purely metaphysical tie has to be called 

 in to bring them into connection with each other. 

 And yet this tie does not concern knowledge; it 

 does not make the meaning of one odor any more 

 correct than that of another, nor enable us to 

 discriminate relative degrees of correctness. As 

 a principle of control, this transcendental connec- 



