398
DOC.
395
OCTOBER
1917
You write verbatim:
“In
any case, once you
have broken down
the
world of
facts
of
consciousness into
a
vast
quantity of such states deficient in
content,
surely you
must
paste
them
together
again
with
some
sort
of
suitable
glue, so
that
this
world
is
formed
again
out of them.”
(With glue you apparently
do not
mean
much
more
than
temporal
order,
since it
is
scarcely likely
that
you
mean
the
stronger
glue
of
the substantial
identity
of successive states in
the
sense
of
the
old
theory of
mental
substance.)
I
saw
with
dismay
from
your
statement
that
you
had
not
grasped
the
gist
of
my
entire
argument
after
all.
For
I
demonstrate
that it
is
impossible
for
a
glue
between
the
states,
an
order between
them,
to be
able to
belong
within
pure
consciousness.
I
was
all
the
more
astonished
that
you
did not
see
this,
since
it
follows
easily
from
a
fact
you yourself
had
acknowledged
earlier, namely,
that
all
things lying
beyond
the
current state
are
as
if
they
were
not
present
for
it,
and
that
it would not notice
if
they
did
not
exist. This does not
exclude
that
beyond
this
state,
1,
2...n,
infinitely many
other
states
analogous
to
it
and
each
likewise
with
a
world of its
own
also
existed,
which
we
all
firmly
believe,
of
course,
but
it
is
impossible
that
anything
between
them-a
glue or an
order-can
belong
to
the total
consciousness
existing
in
the
world,
to
that
quality
so
well-known to
us
all.
With this it
is naturally
not
proven
that
such
a
glue
or
such
an
order does
not
exist
as something
unconscious and
metaphysical;
Hume
cannot
prove
with
his criticism
either that
some metaphysical
causal
relation
re-
ally
does
exist
apart
from
the
facts of consciousness
demonstrated
by him;
but
that this relation
does
not
belong
within
pure
consciousness
can
be
shown,
and
whoever believes
that
nothing
exists
other than what
is
more or
less
analogous
to the consciousness
familiar
to
us,
will not
believe in
an
unconscious
metaphys-
ical causal
relation
and in
a
metaphysical
order in
time.[15]
As
paradoxical
as
the
notion
of
temporally
unordered states of consciousness
is,
it
is
nonetheless
evident that
we
must
arrive
at
this
concept
if
we
eliminate
everything
that
is
not
an
immediate fact of consciousness to
any
one
of
them.
It
is probably
clear
from
my
description
at
the
beginning
that
I
do
not construe
immediate facts of
consciousness
as
merely
what
we can
know
very
certainly to
exist. For
the
only
thing
we
can
know
certainly
is
the
existence
of
our
momentary state;
but with
an
immediate
fact of consciousness
I
mean
something
that
has
a
very
distinctive
quality
(of
being intrinsically
and
directly given,
of
the
type of
perception
and
sensation)
if it
exists,
whether
we
know
about
it
or
not.
That
is
why
the
totality
of all immediate
facts of consciousness
can
very
well
be
a
multiplicity
of elements
of
consciousness,
but
each
is
immediate
on
its
own.
For
whom,
though, is
an
order of elements of consciousness
an
immediate fact
of consciousness?
The
firm
conviction
that
such
an
order exists
(this
is
projection along
the
vertical
line),
which
admittedly
is
an
immediate fact
of
consciousness,
in most
human
states,
nonetheless is
far from
making
this order
itself
(the
horizontal line in
the
dia–