  Philosophers have used the word “mode” to refer to an attribute that a thing can possess or the form a substance can take. For Oakeshott, this thing or substance is experience, by which he means both the activity of experiencing and what is experienced, understood as inseparable and therefore as a unity. Looked at from either side, experience involves thinking and therefore ideas. He has in mind the kind of mutually correlated subject-object relationship that Hegel examines in the Phenomenology (which Oakeshott read in his 20s), according to which what is experienced—the object—is itself thought. Where a body of ideas has achieved a substantial degree of integrity and differentiation, a mode of thought can be said to have emerged. Sometimes, a mode is understood to be an aspect of something larger or more real than itself (Descartes 1641: 27–28, 31). In Experience and Its Modes there are traces of the view, also discernible in Spinoza and Hegel, that this “larger thing” is everything that exists, the sum total of experience identified as God or the Absolute. Oakeshott does not use the word “mode” in later writings in a way that postulates a universal or ultimate reality. But neither is a mode of thought just any kind of thinking. It is an “autonomous” kind of thinking, one that is “specifiable in terms of exact conditions” and “logically incapable of denying or confirming the conclusions of any other mode” (OH 2). A mode constitutes a distinct and self-consistent “whole of interlocking meanings” (VLL 38), a world of ideas resting on its own criteria of truth, factuality, and reality. A puzzle, then, is how the modes can talk to one another, and the solution is that as modes they don't. There is a difference between the modes as ideal types and their instantiation in actual thoughts and actions, and therefore between philosophically differentiating them and investigating them historically or sociologically. 