1. Consciousness, as it is commonly understood, does not exist, any more than does Matter, to which Berkeley gave the coup de grâce;
2. That which exists and forms the portion of truth masked by the word “consciousness,” is the capacity which the parts of experience have of being reported or known;
3. This capacity is explained by the fact that certain experiences can lead one to the other by clearly characterized intermediary experiences, of such a kind that some play the role of things known, others that of knowing subjects;
4. One can define these two roles perfectly without leaving the web of experience itself, and without invoking anything transcendent;
5. The terms subject and object, representing and represented, thought and thing, therefore signify a practical distinction which is of the highest importance, but which is only of a functional order, and not at all ontological as classical dualism conceives it;
6. All told, thoughts and things are not in the least essentially heterogeneous, but they are made from the same stuff, that stuff which cannot itself be defined, but only experienced, and which one may call, if one wishes, the stuff of experience in general.
* Title assigned by the author of this book; from the conclusions of “La notion de conscience,”Archives de Psychologie, V (1905), 11-12; reprinted in Essays in Radical Empiricism (New York & Lon־ don: Longmans, Green, 1912), pp. 232-33. This translation from the French by Rima Dreil Reck, associate professor of French and comparative literature, Louisiana State University, in New Orleans.