240 THE POSTULATE OF EMPIRICISM 



/be generally understood to apply to anything except knowl 

 edge, even though the body of the essay is a protest 

 against such limitation. But I venture to repeat that the 

 essay is not a denial of the necessity of &quot; mediation,&quot; or re 

 flection, in knowledge, but is an assertion that the inferential 

 factor must exist, or must occur, and that all existence is 

 direct and vital, so that philosophy can pass upon its nature 



! as upon the nature of all of the rest of its subject-matter 



. only by first ascertaining what it exists or occurs of. 



I venture to repeat also another statement of the text: 

 I do not mean by &quot;immediate experience&quot; any aboriginal 

 stuff out of which things are evolved, but I use the term 

 to indicate the necessity of employing in philosophy the 

 direct descriptive method that has now made its way in 

 all the natural sciences, with such modifications, of course, 

 as the subject itself entails. 



f There is nothing in the text to imply that things exist in 

 I experience atomically or in isolation. When it is said that a 

 thing as cognized is different from an earlier non-cognition- 

 ally experienced thing, the saying no more implies lack of 



continuity between the things, than the obvious remark 

 that a seed is different from a flower or a leaf denies their 



(continuity. The amount and kind of continuity or dis 

 creteness that exists is to be discovered by recurring to 

 what actually occurs in experience. 



Finally, there is nothing in the text that denies the 

 existence of things temporally prior to human experiencing 

 of them. Indeed, I should think it fairly obvious that we 

 experience most things as temporally prior to our ex 

 periencing of them. The import of the article is to the 

 effect that we are not entitled to draw philosophic (as dis 

 tinct from scientific) conclusions as to the meaning of prior 

 temporal existence till we have ascertained what it is to 

 experience a thing as past. These four disclaimers cover, 

 I think, all the misapprehensions disclosed in the four or 

 five controversial articles (noted below) that the original 

 essay evoked. One of these articles (that of Professor 



