  The best way to appreciate this theory is to consider the nature of the most primitive stage of sensory experience. Some philosophers have held that in our initial sensory states we have a subject or self confronting and receiving information from an object—which might be either a physical object or a sense-datum. The mistake here, in Bradley’s view, lies with the dualism this picture endorses, with the idea that the initial experiences are ones in which the experiencing self’s consciousness is focused on an object. In other words, these views see the initial stage of experience as cognitive (meaning there is an object before one’s conscious awareness); in other words they are intentional mental states. Bradley rejects this, arguing that there is level of a non-cognitive experience at the foundation of all cognitive experiences. At this logically prior level conscious experiences have no objects. Being in pain is often offered as an example of this sort of mental state. Bradley calls this level of experience “feeling” to remind us that we are dealing with a non-cognitive mental state below the level of thought; and it is also called “immediate experience” because it is as yet unmediated by any mental operations such as attention and abstraction. The reason Bradley advances this view of immediate experience lies with his analysis of the structure of thought. Put roughly, he claims that in judging that “The wolf is eating the lamb,” for example, we separate various aspects of what is immediately given and assert a relationship between them, which involves mental operations such as attention and abstracting. Operations of this sort must be working on experience that is a non-relational unity. (In a sense then, the argument for immediate experience is transcendental, in the Strawsonian sense that it can be shown to be a necessary condition of the mental operations we can and do perform.) Finally, at some point the subject-object or experience-experienced dichotomy has to arise.