Page:Mind-a quarterly review of psychology and philosophy, vol33, no129 (1924).djvu/23

 the existence can be predicated between all parts of this aggregate without exception.

26.1. The conception of the Form of an Experience is without meaning unless we determine the kind of events into which we divide this Experience, as a given Experience can be divided into events in an infinite number of ways; among these ways, however, there exists only one division which is uniquely determined for every Experience, and that is the division into elements of experience. We may therefore define the Form of an Experience as the sum of formative relations existing between the elements of this Experience.

26.2. In this connexion we must recur to the result we reached in our consideration of an ordering relation towards the end of the preceding section (17.1), and inquire whether the relation, which we have called formative, is a purely ordinal, or at the same time also an extensional characteristic. At this juncture I see no clear logical ground for my view—which may turn out to be the denial of mutual independence between order and extension—but it seems to me that the answer to our question must admit the latter alternative; although the element of experience, as defined in this chapter, is an abstraction and an intersection of colours, sounds, touches, and all other possible primitive sensations, I do not see how it could be attainable unless there were present in all these parts of Experience a characteristic of a special kind proper to these phenomena and enabling us to speak of the intersection of a given colour with a given sound. I think, therefore, we may safely define the Form of Experience as that attribute, in virtue of which we can divide Experience into elements (or distinguish them in Experience), and by reference to which we can also uniquely order all these elements.