ABSTRACT
So far we have dealt with what appeared to be the most solid phenomena of the human cave, the bodies that stood before us in the infinite medium of space, that displayed themselves to us and affected our sensibility in countless ways, that endured in time, and that were in the main opposed to us in their simple integrity and persistence and imperviousness to environmental variation, including the variations in our own concern with them, and our accessibility to their influence. That they are in the main such integral, persistent, self-contained, self-sufficient realities is not primarily brought home to us by their palpable appearances: it is what we feel or know to be true of them, what we recognize in them when they silently confront us. Though lacking gross visibility or what in German is called Anschaulichkeit, all this is as much given, as much ‘there’, as much part of the phenomena, as are the grossly palpable features which traditional empiricism alone feels justified in recognizing. This great solid mass of bodies seems to provide a point of attachment, of constancy, to all the looser elements that drift about it, the erratic living bodies that make strange uses of themselves and of their inert neighbours, the floating thoughts, dreams, personal feelings and longings that circulate among bodies and colour them, the stable ideal meanings and values that enable us to classify them or to grade them. All these are like the multiform marine shapes that float among the coral and sand of the sea-bottom, and that would seem phantasmagoric without the latter.
