THE PRACTICAL CHARACTER OF REALITY 243 



perience lies in the uncertainty and doubtfulness existing within 

 the immediate experience itself. 



In reply to this argument, I would submit, in the first place, 

 that immediate experience can contain no uncertainty and doubt- 

 fulness such as to demand mediation ; but that as immediate it is 

 utterly incapable of giving rise to any inquiry whatsoever. Let 

 the point be perfectly clear. An immediate experience may, in- 

 deed, be one of vagueness, doubt, uncertainty; but this very un- 

 certainty becomes then the thing experienced, and is not itself 

 uncertain. There can be no possible doubt as to what is experi- 

 enced, since any doubtfulness felt is itself precisely what is ex- 

 perienced. It is only an experience which contains a doubt as 

 to the nature of the thing experienced, that stands in need of, or 

 can possibly evoke, reconstitution. As Professor Dewey himself 

 says in the Studies: "It is the uncertainty as to the what of 

 the experience, together with the certainty that there is such 

 an experience, that evokes the thought-function" (p. 40). But, 

 if the thing experienced is just the experience itself, there is no 

 possible distinction between the what and the that. The what is 

 the that. It is this very confusion of the that and the what which 

 is, I believe, the source of the dogma of the certainty of immedi- 

 ate experience. "If any experience," Professor Dewey writes, 

 "then a determinate experience." 1 So also might it be said: 

 "If any existence, then a determinate existence." We see a tree 

 in the yard, and we assume (as indeed we must, if only as a 

 working hypothesis) that as an objective thing the tree is per- 

 fectly determinate in every particular. But this is not to assert 

 that any possible description of the tree can adequately express 

 its determinations. On the contrary, we would say that every 

 possible statement about the tree is fundamentally hypothetical, 

 and subject to correction. Just so, we must say that any given 

 experience, is as an objective thing, perfectly determinate; but 

 our statements about the nature of this experience are just as 

 truly hypothetical as are our statements about the nature of the 



^Journal of Philos., Vol. II, p. 398. 



