Note 22 — Chapter II · FORMULATION OF AN ORGANIC OR SOCIETAL BASIS OF INTERPRETATION

This mistaken tendency of inference has so far laid hold upon us as to mislead our perceptions even in respect to judgments concerning data which lie altogether within the objective mode. To cite an instance of homely type quite remote from the present argument:—when we speak of two buckets of water, drawn from a common source, in reality our concept is buckets of two waters. For the accident of their separation in space and of the demarcation of the bulk of each by the outline of its container leads the mind, habituated to the fallacy of subjective inference, to posit a difference or a twoness of essence where there is but a difference or twoness of outer circumstance or accidental condition. Hence there results a concept not of two buckets but of two waters, whereas the apparently two waters dipped from the same source are essentially one.