Page:Immediate Experience and Mediation.djvu/12

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IMMEDIATE EXPERIENCE

tion has ended in the grounding of the Immediate. But in the process the Immediate itself has been transformed. The original feeling of distrust is not the same as that which issues from, is justified by, the mediation; and we may continue to feel instinctive distrust of A, even if we know that B, not A, was the culprit. In short, our feeling that A is the thief is no more the logical consequent, than it was the logical ground, of the knowledge of his guilt.

So, again, the immediate experiences of the lover of beauty, of the whole-hearted seeker after truth or worshipper of the divine, are not premisses from which there logically follow the conclusions of the critic, the philosopher, or the theologian. They are data for analysis and criticism, materials to be sifted and tested, and in part, perhaps, converted into the substance of a reasoned knowledge. But the latter—the mediate experience—is 'built' (if we must employ so inadequate a metaphor) not upon, but out of the Immediate. The Immediate, if indeed it is the 'foundation', is a foundation which is fashioned and transformed in the process of mediation. And, notwithstanding this development, the original Immediate may, and often does, also survive. We still 'see' the sun as about 200 paces from the earth, even when we know its 'real' distance.[1] We still 'feel' the room hot, though we have established that the temperature is 'really' moderate, and that it is

  1. Cf. Spinoza, Ethica, ii. 35S.