 This move also overcame another traditional positivist and phenomenological obstacle to Carnap’s project of a Leibnizian, deductive system of knowledge, formulated most drastically by Hans Vaihinger (who influenced Carnap in this regard): the “chaos” of subjective experience, as we immediately experience it, has no structure whatever. Nothing is really “given” but the undifferentiated chaos itself. No distinguishable “elements” present themselves as naturally isolable from it or as inherently available, without externally imposed fictions. Russell’s principle of abstraction—his method of substituting “logical constructions for inferred entities” (such as qualities)—solved this problem, but with the addition of a small but indispensable contribution from phenomenology. What enabled Carnap to obtain the elements he sought without isolating identifiable elements within the undifferentiated “chaos” was a single act of phenomenological discernment: a partition of the entire “chaos” into just two sectors, which he called the “living” and “dead” components of experience. This one distinction allowed Carnap to arrange experiences into a temporal sequence (“dead” experience is past; “living” experience present), making it possible to identify holistic temporal cross-sections of experience, in which the total experience of a given specious present remains intact as a momentary whole. This chronological sequence of experiential time-slices now gave Carnap the basic framework he needed for identifying qualities as cross-temporal equivalence classes of discernable persistences across series of adjacent specious presents. These holistic time-slices did not need to be analysed. Qualities and qualitative relations could, rather, be constructed as something like equivalence classes of sufficiently “similar” persistences across a series of adjacent time-slices (up to any desired degree of precision in “similarity”). The result was that what empiricists such as Hume or Mach had always hoped to achieve by “analysis of the sensations” could be achieved without analysis. Carnap called it “quasianalysis” (which is explained in more detail in the supplement  Methodology (Section 3)).  Physical objects could be constructed as connected classes of qualities, and from objects the path to a “reality” seemed clear.