The Interpretation of Experience 59 



One must, however, be on one's guard against supposing that 

 there is any hard and fast dividing line between self-unconscious- 

 ness and self-consciousness, or between the latter and the last 

 stage. They are all phases of the experience of one individual 

 who is a living being, and therefore the stages cannot be separated 

 one from another and marked off in sequence like the vertebrae 

 in a skeleton. 



They are no more distinctly marked off from one another in 

 the whole process of the development of experience than are feel- 

 ing and thought and volition distinctly and vividly marked off 

 from one another in any particular experience that we may choose 

 to analyse. 



Further, it must be borne in mind that, far from being clearly 

 defined, these stages mix and mingle with one another, overlap, 

 land leave ragged edges ; so that it frequently happens that one 

 aspect of a man's experience will leap far ahead of others and 

 reach perhaps the third stage, while some other unconsidered 

 aspect of his experience remains far behind, atrophied at the first 

 stage. Thus it happens that there is often such a wide discrep- 

 ancy between an individual's thought and action in commercial 

 affairs, in social relationships, and in religious belief. What is 

 true of the individual can also be seen writ large in the life of 

 society, where institutions attain different levels of development, 

 are actuated by different ideals and standards, and are character- 

 ised by greater or less unity in themselves and cooperation with 

 others. 



It is difficult for one who has been trained in the average col- 

 lege classroom philosophy to look upon what he has come to 

 regard as the outside world except through coloured spectacles 

 of some special theory of knowledge. These spectacles continue 

 to be worn either because the wearer constitutionally prefers the 

 world to appear golden or blue, or because some master of his 

 thought wears them and the imitation has become habitual. It 

 is also difficult for the average person, who never bothers his 

 head about questions as to how we get to know anything or as to 

 how the self differs from those things that are not itself, to think 

 seriously of what after all his everyday experience is made up. 

 Both of these types of people, one finds, when they talk about 

 experience imply by their words some sort of dualism — implicit 



