ABSTRACT
It is tolerably evident, even à priori , that, simple as it seems, the relation of coexistence is in reality compound. Though, in the adult mind, apparently undecomposable, yet it is a corollary from very obvious truths, that this relation is originally synthetic. For as coexistence implies two things; as, further, the two things which coexist, cannot occupy consciousness at the same instant; and as they cannot pass through consciousness in simple succession—seeing that they would then be known as sequent and not coexistent—it follows that coexistence can be disclosed only by some duplex act of thought. The repeatedly described consolidation of serial states of consciousness into quasi single states, is not the whole of the process by which the ideas of coexistence and extension are evolved. The equal facility with which the terms of a relation of coexistence can be thought of in either order, is evidently knowable by us simply through an internal feeling.
