Daily Inspiration Quote by Samuel Alexander

Alexander is doing something philosophers do when they’re trying to keep an insight from dissolving back into everyday mush: he’s naming a split inside experience itself, then warning you that the split is partly an artifact of naming. “It is convenient” is the tell. This isn’t thunderous metaphysics delivered from a mountaintop; it’s a pragmatic move in the workshop. The sentence performs a quiet double act: it introduces a distinction and simultaneously downshifts its authority. We are not discovering two sealed compartments in the mind so much as adopting a tool that helps us talk without tripping over grammar.

The hyphenated neologisms, “experienc-ing” and “experienc-ed,” matter more than they look. They force an awkwardness that ordinary language smooths away. “Experience” usually comes packaged as a noun, like an object you can hold. Alexander insists on the verb-like structure underneath: a process (the experiencing) and what the process is of (the experienced). He’s carving subject and object out of a single continuous event, not treating them as two pre-existing substances.

Contextually, this sits in early 20th-century British “new realism” and Alexander’s larger project in Space, Time, and Deity: reality is dynamic, layered, and knowable without reducing it to either mental theater or inert matter. The subtext is a meta-philosophical flex: if you want to argue about consciousness, perception, or knowledge, you need disciplined vocabulary, but you must also remember that “technical words” are conveniences - scaffolding, not cathedrals.