 Subsequent criticisms honed in on a supposed tension between two foci of Dewey’s: “qualities” vs. “relations”. Qualities are immediate, while relations are mediate; how could both coexist in the same item of experience? There seemed to be a contradiction within Dewey’s  view.[20]  Richard Bernstein (1961) seized on this issue, and claimed that Dewey harbored two irreconcilable strains, a “metaphysical strain” and a “phenomenological strain”, but failed to sufficiently account for them with his “principle of continuity”. One response to this argued that such critiques are vitiated by their unwitting reproduction of the very spectatorial standpoint Dewey’s experiential starting point was designed to  prevent.[21]