What we think of may be enormous--the cosmic
times and spaces, for example-- whereas the inner state may be
the most fugitive and paltry activity of mind. Yet the cosmic
objects, so far as the experience yields them, are but ideal
pictures of something whose existence we do not inwardly possess
but only point at outwardly, while the inner state is our very
experience itself; its reality and that of our experience are
one. A conscious field PLUS its object as felt or thought of
PLUS an attitude towards the object PLUS the sense of a self to
whom the attitude belongs--such a concrete bit of personal
experience may be a small bit, but it is a solid bit as long as
it lasts; not hollow, not a mere abstract element of experience,
such as the "object" is when taken all alone. It is a FULL fact,
even though it be an insignificant fact; it is of the KIND to
which all realities whatsoever must belong; the motor currents of
the world run through the like of it; it is on the line
connecting real events with real events. That unsharable feeling
which each one of us has of the pinch of his individual destiny
as he privately feels it rolling out on fortune's wheel may be
disparaged for its egotism, may be sneered at as unscientific,
but it is the one thing that fills up the measure of our concrete
actuality, and any would-be existent that should lack such a
feeling, or its analogue, would be a piece of reality only half
made up.
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