natural environment of the body, which is the true “object,” he may think he finds an illimitable reality; and, to make things simpler, he may proceed to declare that these two are one; but all this is myth.
The fact of experience, then, is single and, from its own point of view, absolutely unconditioned and groundless, impossible to explain and impossible to exorcise. Yet just as it comes unbidden, so it may fade and lapse of its own accord. It constantly seems to do so; and my hold on existence is not so firm that non-existence does not seem always at hand and, as it were, always something deeper, vaster, and more natural than existence. Yet this apprehension of an imminent non-existence — an apprehension which is itself an existing fact — cannot be trusted to penetrate to a real nothingness yawning about me unless I assert something not at all involved in the present being, and something most remarkable, namely, that I know and can survey the movement of my existence, and that it can actually have lapsed from one state into another, as I conceive it to have lapsed.
Thus the sense of a complex strain of existence, the conviction that I am and that I am thinking, involve a sense of at least possible change. I should not speak of complexity nor of strain, if various opposed developments into the not-given were not, to my feeling, striving to take place. Doors are about to open, cords to snap, blows to fall, pulsations to repeat themselves. The flux and perspectives of being seem to be open within me to my own intuition.
Caution is requisite here. All this may be simply a present obsession, destitute of all prophetic or retrospective truth, and carrying me no further, if I wish to be honest, than a bare confession of how I feel. Anything given in intuition is, by definition, an appearance and nothing but an appearance. Of course, if I am a thorough sceptic, I may discredit the existence
