THE PRACTICAL CHARACTER OF REALITY 241 



reality , the assumption, indeed, seems to be that the experience 

 of the different particular real things is no other than the expe 

 rience of reality itself. But it is scarcely conceivable that in 

 reply to the question, &quot;What is the nature of the universal 

 horse ?&quot; the pragmatist would point to the various experiences 

 of particular horses and say: &quot;That is what horse is expe 

 rienced as.&quot; To such a reply the retort is obvious, &quot;How is 

 the experience of these numerous and varying objects as horses 

 to be described?&quot; No, the only seemingly possible position for 

 the pragmatist to take is the one which we find him actually 

 taking; namely, that the universal is experienced as a tool in 

 the processes of reflective thought, and that, although these are 

 processes of meditation, yet as modes of experiencing they are 

 themselves immediate. Thus we find Professor Dewey saying: 

 &quot;Lest I be charged with intimating that concepts are unreal and 

 unempirical, I say forthwith that I believe meanings may be and 

 are immediately experienced as conceptual.&quot; 1 Suppose we ask, 

 however, just what in such a process of mediation is immediately 

 experienced. Here it is important to recall that the thing ex 

 perienced and the experience are the same. The thing imme 

 diately experienced in the process of mediation, accordingly, is 

 the process of mediation itself. The terms in which the process 

 is carried on, the tools by which the reconstitution is effected, 

 are not themselves immediately experienced. In pragmatist 

 references to universals they usually are described as Denkmittel, 

 instruments of analysis, means by which we are enabled to deal 

 successfully with facts and lead our thinking to successful issue. 

 They are, in short, described in functional terms. Yet one 

 could scarcely state the essence of the immediatist theory of 

 reality better than to characterize it as the belief that the real 

 nature of things is to be found in structure and not in function. 

 Perhaps the difficulty may be better presented in this way. The 

 first principle of immediatism is that things are what they are 

 experienced as. But universals are not described by the prag- 



1 Journal of Philos , p. 599, note. 

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