Page:Immediate Experience and Mediation.djvu/13

Rh we who have a fever. And it seems at least possible to become a critic, a theologian, or a metaphysician without losing the immediate vision of beauty, the emotional faith in God, the whole-hearted absorption in the truth.

In the sense of the distinction thus imperfectly sketched, the relation between mediate and immediate experience is not a logical dependence. We start, in a sense, from what is immediately experienced; and again, in a sense, it is our aim to understand this Immediate, to give a reasoned account of it. What is immediately experienced perplexes us and sets us thinking; but the moment we begin to think, we are transforming our Immediate. There—within the analysis and synthesis which is thinking, within the process of mediation—we have antecedents and consequents, logical terms and logical relations. Often, no doubt, the mediation is but the bringing out what the initial Immediacy really is—its deepening, development, and growth; and our reasoned understanding is thus the grounded Immediate. But neither the process itself nor its result, if for the moment we distinguish the two—neither reasoning nor the reasoned understanding to which it leads or which it is—are logical consequents or logical grounds of the initial Immediacy.

Yet, in thus rejecting the conception of a logical connexion between mediate and immediate experience, we have stumbled upon another sense of the distinction. For we assumed that within the process of mediation