Bradley, not professing to know his absolute aliunde, never theless derealizes Experience by alleging it to be everywhere infected with self-contradiction.
- „It Ain’t Easy to Forget - Trauma and Memory in Shirley Ann Grau’s Homecoming.
- Oh, Dem Golden Slippers - Score!
- William James: Essays in Radical Empiricism: Table of Contents?
- Leveraging Your Communication Style.
- Secret for a Satyr;
- Download This eBook.
His arguments seem almost purely verbal, but this is no place for arguing that point out. Bradley; Appearance and Reality, passim; and below, pp. Whatever terminates that chain was, because it now proves itself to be, what the concept "had in mind. The towering importance for human life of this kind of knowing lies in the fact that an experience that knows another can figure as its representative, not in any quasi-miraculous epistemological sense, but in the definite practical sense of being its substitute in various operations, sometimes physical and sometimes mental, which lead us to its associates and re sults.
By experimenting on our ideas of reality, we may save ourselves the trouble of experi menting on the real experiences which they severally mean. The ideas form related sys tems, corresponding point for point to the sys tems which the realities form; and by letting an ideal term call up its associates systematically, we may be led to a terminus which the corre sponding real term would have led to in case we had operated on the real world. And this brings us to the general question of substitution. What, exactly, in a system of experiences, does the substitution of one of them for another mean?
According to my view, experience as a whole is a process in time, whereby innumerable particular terms lapse and are superseded by others that follow upon them by transitions which, whether disjunctive or conjunctive in content, are themselves experiences, and must in general be accounted at least as real as the terms which they relate.
What the nature of the event called superseding signifies, de pends altogether on the kind of transition that obtains. Some experiences simply abolish their predecessors without continuing them in any way. Others are felt to increase or to enlarge their meaning, to carry out their pur pose, or to bring us nearer to their goal. But fulfil a function in a world of pure experience can be conceived and defined in only one pos sible way. In such a world transitions and arrivals or terminations are the only events that happen, though they happen by so many sorts of path. When one experience leads to 6T can lead to the same end as another, they agree in function.
But the whole system of experiences as they are immediately given presents itself as a quasi-chaos through which one can pass out of an initial term in many directions and yet end in the same terminus, moving from next to next by a great many possible paths. I Either one of these paths might be a func tional substitute for another, and to follow one rather than another might on occasion be an advantageous thing to do.
Not only do they yield inconceivably rapid transitions; but, ow ing to the universal character l which they frequently possess, and to their capacity for association with one another in great systems, they outstrip the tardy consecutions of the things themselves, and sweep us on towards our ultimate termini in a far more labor-saving way than the following of trains of sensible perception ever could.
Wonderful are the new cuts and the short-circuits which the thought- paths make. Most thought-paths, it is true, are substitutes for nothing actual; they end outside the real world altogether, in way ward fancies, Utopias, fictions or mistakes. But where they do re-enter reality and terminate therein, we substitute them always; and with 1 Of which all that need be said in this essay is that it also can be conceived as functional, and defined in terms of transitions, or of the possibliity of such.
Table of Contents
Principles of Psychology, vol. This is why I called our experiences, taken all together, a quasi-chaos. There is vastly more discontinuity in the sum total of experi ences than we commonly suppose. The objec tive nucleus of every man s experience, his own body, is, it is true, a continuous percept; and equally continuous as a percept though we may be inattentive to it is the material en vironment of that body, changing by gradual transition when the body moves. But the distant parts of the physical world are at all times absent from us, and form conceptual objects merely, into the perceptual reality of which our life inserts itself at points discrete and relatively rare.
These exist with one another, in deed, and with the objective nuclei, but out of them it is probable that to all eternity no interrelated system of any kind will ever be made. This notion of the purely substitutional or conceptual physical world brings us to the most critical of all the steps in the development of a philosophy of pure experience. The paradox of self -transcendency in knowledge comes back upon us here, but I think that our notions of pure experience and of substitution, and our radically empirical view of conjunctive transi tions, are DenJcmittel that will carry us safely through the pass.
Whosoever feels his experience to be some thing substitutional even while he has it, may be said to have an experience that reaches beyond itself. For the transcendentalist, who holds knowing to consist in a salto mortale across an epistemological chasm, such an idea presents no difficulty; but it seems at first sight as if it might be inconsistent with an empiricism like our own. Have we not explained that con ceptual knowledge is made such wholly by the existence of things that fall outside of the knowing experience itself by intermediary experiences and by a terminus that fulfils?
Can the knowledge be there before these ele ments that constitute its being have come? And, if knowledge be not there, how can ob jective reference occur? To recur to the Memorial Hall example lately used, it is only when our idea of the Hall has actually terminated in the percept that we know for certain that from the beginning it was truly cognitive of that.
Until established by the end of the process, its quality of knowing that, or indeed of knowing anything, could still be doubted; and yet the knowing really was there, as the result now shows. Just so we are mortal all the time, by reason of the virtuality of the inevitable event which will make us so when it shall have come. Now the immensely greater part of all our knowing never gets beyond this virtual stage.
It never is completed or nailed down. To continue think ing unchallenged is, ninety-nine times out of a hundred, our practical substitute for knowing in the completed sense. As each experience runs by cognitive transition into the next one, and we nowhere feel a collision with what we elsewhere count as truth or fact, we commit ourselves to the current as if the port were sure.
We live, as it were, upon the front edge of an advanc ing wave-crest, and our sense of a determinate direction in falling forward is all we cover of the future of our path. It is as if a differential quotient should be conscious and treat itself as an adequate substitute for a traced-out curve. Our experience, inter alia, is of variations of rate and of direction, and lives in these transi tions more than in the journey s end.
The ex periences of tendency are sufficient to act upon what more could we have done at those moments even if the later verification comes complete? A positively conjunctive transition involves neither chasm nor leap. Being the very original of what we mean by continuity, it makes a continuum wherever it appears. I know full well that such brief words as these will leave the hardened transcendentalist unshaken.
Conjunctive expe riences separate their terms, he will still say: To feel our motion forward is impossible. Motion implies terminus; and how can termi nus be felt before we have arrived? The barest start and sally forwards, the barest tendency to leave the instant, involves the chasm and the leap. Conjunctive transitions are the most superficial of appearances, illusions of our sensi bility which philosophical reflection pulverizes at a touch. Conception is our only trust worthy instrument, conception and the Abso lute working hand in hand. Such transcendentalists I must leave, pro visionally at least, in full possession of their creed.
Objective reference, I say then, is an inci dent of the fact that so much of our experi ence comes as an insufficient and consists of process and transition. Our fields of experience have no more definite boundaries than have our fields of view. Both are fringed forever by a more that continuously develops, and that continuously supersedes them as life proceeds. The relations, generally speaking, are as real here as the terms are, and the only complaint of the transcendentalisms with which I could at all sympathize would be his charge that, by first making knowledge to consist in external relations as I have done, and by then confess- 1 [Cf.
Only the admis sion, such a critic might say, that our ideas are self -transcendent and true already, in ad vance of the experiences that are to terminate them, can bring solidity back to knowledge in a world like this, in which transitions and terminations are only by exception fulfilled. This seems to me an excellent place for applying the pragmatic method. When a dispute arises, that method consists in augur ing what practical consequences would be different if one side rather than the other were true.
If no difference can be thought of, the dispute is a quarrel over words. What then would the self -transcendency affirmed to exist in advance of all experiential mediation or termination, be known-as? What would it practically result in for us, were it true? Where direct acquaintance is lacking, know ledge about is the next best thing, and an acquaintance with what actually lies about the object, and is most closely related to it, puts such knowledge within our grasp. Ether-waves and your anger, for example, are things in which my thoughts will never perceptually ter minate, but my concepts of them lead me to their very brink, to the chromatic fringes and to the hurtful words and deeds which are their really next effects.
Even if our ideas did in themselves carry the postulated self-transcendency, it would still remain true that their putting us into pos session of such effects would be the sole cash- value of the self-transcendency for us. And this cash-value, it is needless to say, is verbatim et literatim what our empiricist account pays in. Call our concepts of ejective things self- transcendent or the reverse, it makes no dif ference, so long as we don t differ about the nature of that exalted virtue s fruits fruits for us, of course, humanistic fruits.
If an Absolute were proved to exist for other rea sons, it might well appear that his knowledge is terminated in innumerable cases where ours is still incomplete. That, however, would be a fact indifferent to our knowledge. The latter would grow neither worse nor better, whether we acknowledged such an Absolute or left him out.
So the notion of a knowledge still in transitu and on its way joins hands here with that notion of a pure experience which I tried to explain in my [essay] entitled Does Con sciousness Exist? The instant field of the present is always experience in its pure state, plain unqualified actuality, a simple that, as yet undifferentiated into thing and thought, and only virtually classifiable as objective fact or as some one s opinion about fact. Memorial Hall is there in my idea as much as when I stand before it. I proceed to act on its account in either case.
Only in the later experience that supersedes the present one is this naif immediacy retrospectively split into two parts, a consciousness and its con tent, and the content corrected or confirmed. While still pure, or present, any experience mine, for example, of what I write about in these very lines passes for truth.
The morrow may reduce it to opinion. The trans- cendentalist in all his particular knowledges is as liable to this reduction as I am: Why, then, need he quarrel with an account of knowing that merely leaves it liable to this inevitable condition? Why in sist that knowing is a static relation out of time when it practically seems so much a func tion of our active life?
For a thing to be valid, says Lotze, is the same as to make itself valid. When the whole universe seems only to be making itself valid and to be still incom plete else why its ceaseless changing? Why should it not be making itself valid like every thing else?
- How To Help Your Child Succeed On The SAT/ACT: The Ultimate Guide for Parents to SAT/ACT Success.
- Navigation menu?
- Hurst Reviews Medical-Surgical Nursing Review!
- Easter Rabbit.
- Essays in Radical Empiricism by William James.
- A William James source page;
- Item Preview!
- Bokveld binnekort (Afrikaans Edition);
- Essays in Radical Empiricism - Wikipedia!
- Essays in Radical Empiricism by William James - Free Ebook.
- Essays in radical empiricism;
- Essays in Radical Empiricism, by William James.
That some parts of it may be al ready valid or verified beyond dispute, the empirical philosopher, of course, like any one else, may always hope. Radical empiricism has, in fact, more affini ties with natural realism than with the views of Berkeley or of Mill, and this can be easily shown. For the Berkeleyan school, ideas the verbal equivalent of what I term experiences are dis continuous. The content of each is wholly im manent, and there are no transitions with which they are consubstantial and through which their beings may unite.
Your Memorial Hall and mine, even when both are percepts, are wholly out of connection with each other. No dynamic currents run between my objects and your objects. Never can our minds meet in the same. The incredibility of such a philosophy is flagrant. It is cold, strained, and unnatural in a supreme degree; and it may be doubted whether even Berkeley himself, who took it so religiously, really believed, when walking through the streets of London, that his spirit and the spirits of his fellow wayfarers had absolutely different towns in view.
To me the decisive reason in favor of our minds meeting in some common objects at least is that, unless I make that supposition, I have no motive for assuming that your mind exists at all. Why do I postulate your mind? Be cause I see your body acting in a certain way. But what is your body here but a percept in my field?
It is only as animating that object, my object, that I have any occasion to think of you at all. If the body that you actuate be not the very body that I see there, but some duplicate body of your own with which that has nothing to do, we belong to different universes, you and I, and for me to speak of you is folly.
Myriads of such uni verses even now may coexist, irrelevant to one another; my concern is solely with the universe with which my own life is connected. Your mind actuates that body and mine sees it ; my thoughts pass into it as into their harmonious cognitive fulfilment ; your emotions and voli tions pass into it as causes into their effects. But that percept hangs together with all our other physical percepts. They are of one stuff with it; and if it be our common possession, they must be so likewise. We pull against each other. Can our two hands be mutual objects in this experience, and the rope not be mutual also?
What is true of the rope is true of any other percept. Your objects are over and over again the same as mine. If you alter an object in your world, put out a candle, for example, when I am present, my candle ipso facto goes out. It is only as altering my objects that I guess you to exist. If your objects do not coalesce with my objects, if they be not identically where mine are, they must be proved to be positively somewhere else.
But no other location can be assigned for them, so their place must be what it seems to be, the same. On the principles which I am defending, a mind or personal consciousness is the name for a series of experiences run together by certain definite transitions, and an objective reality is a series of similar experiences knit by different transitions.
Abolishing any number of con texts would not destroy the experience itself or its other contexts, any more than abolish ing some of the point s linear continuations would destroy the others, or destroy the point itself. The crux is always the old Greek one, that the same man can t be tall in relation to one neighbor, and short in relation to another, for that would make him tall and short at once.
In this essay I can not stop to refute this dialectic, so I pass on, leaving my flank for the time exposed. This is enough for my present point: In principle, then, let natural realism pass for possible. Your mind and mine may termi nate in the same percept, not merely against it, as if it were a third external thing, but by in serting themselves into it and coalescing with it, for such is the sort of conjunctive union that appears to be experienced when a perceptual terminus fulfils.
Even so, two hawsers may embrace the same pile, and yet neither one of them touch any other part except that pile, of what the other hawser is attached to. It is therefore not a formal question, but a question of empirical fact solely, whether, when you and I are said to know the same Memorial Hall, our minds do terminate at or in a numerically identical percept. Obviously, as a plain matter of fact, they do not. Apart from color-blindness and such possibilities, we see the Hall in different perspectives. You may be on one side of it and I on another.
The percept of each of us, as he sees the surface of the Hall, is moreover only his provisional terminus. If our minds were in a literal sense conterminous, neither could get beyond the percept which they had in com mon, it would be an ultimate barrier between them unless indeed they flowed over it and became co-conscious over a still larger part of their content, which thought-transference apart is not supposed to be the case.
In point of fact the ultimate common barrier can always be pushed, by both minds, farther than any actual percept of either, until at last it resolves itself into the mere notion of imperceptibles like atoms or ether, so that, where we do ter minate in percepts, our knowledge is only spe ciously completed, being, in theoretic strict ness, only a virtual knowledge of those remoter objects which conception carries out.
Is natural realism, permissible in logic, re futed then by empirical fact? Do our minds have no object in common after all? On pragmatic principles we are obliged to predi cate sameness wherever we can predicate no assignable point of difference. If two named things have every quality and function indis cernible, and are at the same time in the same place, they must be written down as numeri cally one thing under two different names. But there is no test discoverable, so far as I know, by which it can be shown that the place occu pied by your percept of Memorial Hall differs from the place occupied by mine.
The per cepts themselves may be shown to differ; but if each of us be asked to point out where his percept is, we point to an identical spot. All the relations, whether geometrical or causal, of the Hall originate or terminate in that spot wherein our hands meet, and where each of us begins to work if he wishes to, make the Hall change before the other s eyes. Just so it is with our bodies. That body of yours which you actuate and feel from within must be in the same spot as the body of yours which I see or touch from without. If you do not feel my finger s contact to be there in my sense, when I place it on your body, where then do you feel it?
Your inner actuations of your body meet my finger there: Whatever farther knowledge either of us may acquire of the real constitu tion of the body which we thus feel, you from within and I from without, it is in that same place that the newly conceived or perceived constituents have to be located, and it is through that space that your and my mental intercourse with each other has always to be carried on, by the mediation of impressions which I convey thither, and of the reactions thence which those impressions may provoke from you.
In general terms, then, whatever differing contents our minds may eventually fill a place with, the place itself is a numerically identical content of the two minds, a piece of common property in which, through which, and over which they join. If that day ever did come, our thoughts would terminate in a complete empir ical identity, there would be an end, so far as those experiences went, to our discussions about truth. No points of difference appearing, they would have to count as the same. At the out set of my essay, I called it a mosaic philosophy.
In actual mosaics the pieces are held together by their bedding, for which bedding the Sub stances, transcendental Egos, or Absolutes of other philosophies may be taken to stand. In radical empiricism there is no bedding; it is as if the pieces clung together by their edges, the transitions experienced between them forming their cement.
But the metaphor serves to symbolize the fact that Experience itself, taken at large, can grow by its edges. That one moment of it pro liferates into the next by transitions which, whether conjunctive or disjunctive, continue the experiential tissue, can not, I contend, be denied. Life is in the transitions as much as in the terms connected; often, indeed, it seems to be there more emphatically, as if our spurts and sallies forward were the real firing-line of the battle, were like the thin line of flame ad vancing across the dry autumnal field which the farmer proceeds to burn.
In this line we live prospectively as well as retrospectively. It is of the past, inasmuch as it comes ex pressly as the past s continuation; it is of the future in so far as the future, when it comes, will have continued it. In the simplest and completest cases the experiences are cognitive of one another. When one of them terminates a previous series of them with a sense of fulfilment, it, we say, is what those other experiences had in view.
The knowledge, in such a case, is verified; the truth is "salted down. Mainly, however, we live on speculative investments, or on our pro spects only. But living on things in posse is as good as living in the actual, so long as our credit remains good. It is evident that for the most part it is good, and that the universe seldom protests our drafts. In this sense we at every moment can con tinue to believe in an existing beyond. It is only in special cases that our confident rush forward gets rebuked. The beyond must, of course, always in our philosophy be itself of an experiential nature.
If not a future experience of our own or a present one of our neighbor, it must be a thing in itself in Dr. Pending that actuality of union, in the virtuality of which the truth, even now, of the postulation con sists, the beyond and its knower are entities split off from each other. But, as fast as verifications come, trains of experience, once separate, run into one another; and that is why I said, earlier 1 Our minds and these ejective realities would still have space or pseudo-space, as I believe Professor Strong calls the medium of inter action between things-in-themselves in common.
These would exist where, and begin to act where, we locate the molecules, etc. Why the Mind Has a Body. The universe continually grows in quantity by new experi ences that graft themselves upon the older mass; but these very new experiences often help the mass to a more consolidated form. These are the main features of a philosophy of pure experience. It has innumerable other aspects and arouses innumerable questions, but the points I have touched on seem enough to make an entering wedge.
In my own mind such a philosophy harmonizes best with a radi cal pluralism, with novelty and indeterminism, moralism and theism, and with the human ism lately sprung upon us by the Oxford and the Chicago schools. It seems to me, as I said at the outset of this es say, that many minds are, in point of fact, now turning in a direction that points towards radi cal empiricism. If they are carried farther by my words, and if then they add their stronger voices to my feebler one, the publication of this essay will have been worth while.
The active sense of living which we all enjoy, before reflection shatters our in stinctive world for us, is self-luminous and sug gests no paradoxes. Its difficulties are disap pointments and uncertainties. They are not intellectual contradictions. When the reflective intellect gets at work, however, it discovers incomprehensibilities in the flowing process. Distinguishing its ele ments and parts, it gives them separate names, and what it thus disjoins it can not easily put together.
Pyrrhonism accepts the irration ality and revels in its dialectic elaboration. Other philosophies try, some by ignoring, some by resisting, and some by turning the dialectic procedure against itself, negating its first negations, to restore the fluent sense of 1 [Reprinted from The Journal of Philosophy, Psychology and Scientific Methods, vol. The author s corrections have been adopted in the present text. The perfection with which any philosophy may do this is the measure of its human success and of its importance in philo sophic history.
In [the last essay], A World of Pure Experience, 5 I tried my own hand sketchily at the problem, resisting certain first steps of dialectics by insisting in a general way that the immediately experienced con junctive relations are as real as anything else. If my sketch is not to appear too naif, I must come closer to details, and in the present essay I propose to do so. Pure experience is the name which I gave to the immediate flux of life which furnishes the material to "our later reflection with its conceptual categories.
Pure experience in this state is but another name for feeling or sensation. But the flux of it no sooner comes than it tends to fill itself with emphases, and these salient parts become identified and fixed and abstracted; so that experience now flows as if shot through with adjectives and nouns and prepositions and conjunctions. Its purity is only a relative term, meaning the propor tional amount of unverbalized sensation which it still embodies. Far back as we go, the flux, both as a whole and in its parts, is that of things conjunct and separated. The great continua of time, space, and the self envelope everything, betwixt them, and flow together without interfering.
The things that they envelope come as separate in some ways and as continuous in others. Some sensations coalesce with some ideas, and others are irreconcilable. They cling together persistently in groups that move as units, or else they separate. Their changes are abrupt or discontinuous; and their kinds resemble or differ; and, as they do so, they fall into either even or irregular series. In all this the continuities and the discon tinuities are absolutely co-ordinate matters of immediate feeling.
The conjunctions are as primordial elements of fact as are the dis tinctions and disjunctions. In the same act by which I feel that this passing minute is a new pulse of my life, I feel that the old life con tinues into it, and the feeling of continuance in no wise jars upon the simultaneous feeling of a novelty.
They, too, compenetrate harmoni ously. The rationalistic answer is that the theoretic life is absolute and its interests imperative; that to understand is simply the duty of man; and that who questions this need not be argued with, for by the fact of arguing he gives away his case. The naturalist answer is that the environ ment kills as well as sustains us, and that the tendency of raw experience to extinguish the experient himself is lessened just in the degree in which the elements in it that have a practi cal bearing upon life are analyzed out of the continuum and verbally fixed and coupled to gether, so that we may know what is in the wind for us and get ready to react in time.
We should just have experienced inarticulately and unintellectually enjoyed. This leaning on reaction in the naturalist account implies that, whenever we intellectualize a relatively pure experience, we ought to do so for the sake of redescending to the purer or more concrete level again; and that if an intellect stays aloft among its abstract terms and generalized relations, and does not reinsert itself with its conclusions into some particular point of the immediate stream of life, it fails to finish out its function and leaves its normal race unrun.
Most rationalists nowadays will agree that naturalism gives a true enough account of the way in which our intellect arose at first, but they will deny these latter implications. The case, they will say, resembles that of sexual love. Originating in the animal need of getting another generation born, this passion has de veloped secondarily such imperious spiritual needs that, if you ask why another generation ought to be born at all, the answer is: Just so with our intel lect: But truth and the understanding of it lie among the abstracts and universals, so the intellect now carries on its higher business wholly in this region, without any need of redescending into pure experience again.
If the contrasted tendencies which I thus designate as naturalistic and rationalistic are not recognized by the reader, perhaps an ex ample will make them more concrete. Bradley, for instance, is an ultra-rationalist. He admits that our intellect is primarily prac tical, but says that, for philosophers, the prac tical need is simply Truth.
Truth, moreover, must be assumed consistent. Immediate ex perience has to be broken into subjects and qualities, terms and relations, to be understood as truth at all. Yet when so broken it is less consistent then ever. Intellectualized, it is all dis tinction without oneness. Such an arrange ment may work, but the theoretic problem is not solved.
The question is how the diversity can exist in harmony with the oneness. To go back to pure experience is unavailing. Mere feeling gives no answer to our riddle. Even if your intuition is a fact, it is not an understand ing. It is a mere experience, and furnishes no consistent view. The experience offered as facts or truths I find that my intellect rejects because they contradict themselves.
Essays in Radical Empiricism
They offer a complex of diversities conjoined in a way which it feels is not its way and which it can not repeat as its own. For to be satis fied, my intellect must understand, and it can not understand by taking a congeries in the lump. Bradley, in the sole interests of understanding as he conceives that func tion , turns his back on finite experience for ever. Truth must lie in the opposite direction, the direction of the Absolute; and this kind of 1 [F.
Appearance and Reality, second edition, pp. For the one, those intellectual products are most true which, turning their face towards the Absolute, come nearest to symbolizing its ways of uniting the many and the one. For the other, those are most true which most successfully dip back into the finite stream of feeling and grow most easily confluent with some particular wave or wave let. Such confluence not only proves the in tellectual operation to have been true as an addition may prove that a subtraction is already rightly performed , but it constitutes, according to pragmatism, all that we mean by calling it true.
Only in so far as they lead us, successfully or unsuccessfully, back into sen sible experience again, are our abstracts and universals true or false at all. The usual reason given for its being absurd is that it assumes one object to wit, the world to stand in two relations at once; to my mind, namely, and again to yours; whereas a term taken in a second relation can not logically be the same term which it was at first. I have heard this reason urged so often in discussing with absolutists, and it would de stroy my radical empiricism so utterly, if it were valid, that I am bound to give it an atten tive ear, and seriously to search its strength.
For instance, let the matter in dispute be term If, asserted to be on the one hand related to L 9 and on the other to N; and let the two cases of relation be symbolized by L M and M N respectively. In arguing this dialectic thesis, one must avoid slipping from the logical into the physi cal point of view. It would be easy, in taking a concrete example to fix one s ideas by, to choose one in which the letter M should stand for a collective noun of some sort, which noun, being related to L by one of its parts and to N by another, would inwardly be two things when it stood outwardly in both relations.
Thus, one might say: David Hume, who weighed so many stone by his body, influences posterity by his doctrine. The body and the doctrine are two things, between which our finite minds can discover no real sameness, though the same name covers both of them. Only an Abso lute is capable of uniting such a non-identity. We must, I say, avoid this sort of example, for the dialectic insight, if true at all, must apply to terms and relations universally.
It must be true of abstract units as well as of nouns col lective; and if we prove it by concrete examples we must take the simplest, so as to avoid irrelevant material suggestions. Taken thus in all its generality, the abso lutist contention seems to use as its major premise Hume s notion that all our distinct perceptions are distinct existences, and that the mind never perceives any real connexion among distinct existences. But the start ing-point of the reasoning here seems to be the fact of the two phrases; and this suggests that 1 [Hume: Can it be that the whole dialectic consists in attributing to the experience talked-about a constitution similar to that of the language in which we de scribe it?
Must we assert the objective double- ness of the M merely because we have to name it twice over when we name its two relations? Candidly, I can think of no other reason than this for the dialectic conclusion; l for, if we think, not of our words, but of any simple concrete matter which they may be held to signify, the experience itself belies the paradox asserted.
We use indeed two separate concepts in analyzing our object, but we know them all the while to be but substitutional, and that the M in L M and the M in M N mean i. This persistent identity of certain units or emphases, or points, or objects, or members call them what you will of the experience- continuum, is just one of those conjunctive 1 Technically, it seems classable as a fallacy of composition. A duality, predicable of the two wholes, L M and M N, is forthwith predicated of one of their parts, M.
When I hear a bell-stroke and, as life flows on, its after image dies away, I still hark back to it as that same bell-stroke. When I see a thing M , with L to the left of it and N to the right of it, I see it as one M; and if you tell me I have had to take it twice, I reply that if I took it a thousand times I should still see it as a unit. It comes unbroken as that M, as a singular which I encounter; they come broken, as those tak ings, as my plurality of operations.
The unity and the separateness are strictly co-ordinate. I do not easily fathom why my opponents should find the separateness so much more easily un derstandable that they must needs infect the whole of finite experience with it, and relegate 1 See above, pp. It really seems weird to have to argue as I am forced now to do for the notion that it is one sheet of paper with its two surfaces and all that lies between which is both under my pen and on the table while I write the claim that it is two sheets seems so brazen. Yet I sometimes suspect the absolutists of sincerity! I do not easily fathom this, I say, for the said oppo nents are above mere verbal quibbling; yet all that I can catch in their talk is the substitu tion of what is true of certain words for what is true of what they signify.
They stay with the words, not returning to the stream of life whence all the meaning of them came, and which is always ready to reabsorb them. IV For aught this argument proves, then, we may continue to believe that one thing can be known by many knowers. But the denial of one thing in many relations is but one applica tion of a still profounder dialectic difficulty. Man can t be good, said the sophists, for man is man and good is good; and Hegel 1 and Herbart in their day, more recently A. Spir, 2 and most 1 [For the author s criticism of Hegel s view of relations, cf.
Will to Believe, pp. Denken und Wirklichkeit, part I, bk. IV containing also account of Herbart. Bradley, informs us that a term can logically only be , a punctiform unit, and that not one of the conjunctive relations between things, which experience seems to yield, is rationally pos sible. Of course, if true, this cuts off radical empiri cism without even a shilling. Radical empiri cism takes conjunctive relations at their face value, holding them to be as real as the terms united by them. Two parts, themselves disjoined, may nevertheless hang together by intermediaries with which they are severally connected, and the whole world eventually may hang together similarly, inasmuch as some path of conjunctive transi tion by which to pass from one of its parts to another may always be discernible.
Such determinately various hanging-together may be called concatenated union, to distinguish it from the through-and-through type of union, 1 [See above, pp. In a concatenated world a partial conflux often is experienced. Our concepts and our sensations are confluent; successive states of the same ego, and feelings of the same body are confluent. Where the experience is not of conflux, it may be of conterminousness things with but one thing between ; or of contiguousness nothing be tween ; or of likeness; or of nearness; or of simultaneousness; or of in-ness; or of on-ness; or of for-ness; or of simple with-ness; or even of mere and-ness, which last relation would make of however disjointed a world otherwise, at any rate for that occasion a universe of discourse.
Bradley tells us that none of these relations, as we actually experience them, can possibly be real. It may well be that we attribute a certain relation falsely, because the circumstances of the case, being complex, have deceived us. At a railway station we may take our own train, and not the one that fills our window, to be moving.
Fortunately, as it seems to me, his general contention, that the very notion of re lation is unthinkable clearly, has been success fully met by many critics. So, in noticing Mr. Bradley, I will confine myself to the interests of radical empiricism solely. The first duty of radical empiricism, taking given conjunctions at their face-value, is to class some of them as more intimate and some as more external. When two terms are simi lar, their very natures enter into the relation. Bradley means is nothing like this, but rather that such things as motion are nowhere real, and that, even in their aboriginal and empirically incorrigible seats, rela tions are impossible of comprehension.
Schiller, in his Humanism, essay xi. Other fatal reviews in my opinion are Hod- der s, in the Psychological Review, vol. It continues predicable as long as the terms continue. Other relations, the where and the when, for example, seem adventitious. Having an outside, both of them, they contribute by it to the relation.
Any book, any table, may fall into the relation, which is created pro hac vice, not by their existence, but by their casual situation. It is just because so many of the conjunctions of experience seem so external that a philosophy of pure experience must tend to pluralism in its ontology. So far as things have space-relations, for example, we are free to imagine them with different origins even. If they could get to be, and get into space at all, then they may have done so separately.
The question of how things could come to be anyhow, is wholly different from the question what their relations, once the being accomplished, may consist in. Bradley now affirms that such external relations as the space-relations which we here talk of must hold of entirely different subjects from those of which the absence of such rela tions might a moment previously have been plausibly asserted. Not only is the situation different when the book is on the table, but the book itself is different as a book, from what it was when it was off the table.
That you do not alter what you compare or rearrange in space seems to common sense quite obvious, and that on 1 Once more, don t slip from logical into physical situations. Of course, if the table be wet, it will moisten the book, or if it be slight enough and the book heavy enough, the book will break it down. But such collateral phenomena are not the point at issue.
Taylor drops from logical into material considerations when he instances color-contrast as a proof that A, as contra distinguished from B, is not the same thing as mere A not in any way affected Elements of Metaphysics, p. Note the substitution, for related of the word affected, which begs the whole question.
And I will begin by pointing out these difficulties. There is a relation in the result, and this rela tion, we hear, is to make no difference in its terms. But, if so, to what does it make a dif ference? If the terms from their inner nature do not enter into the relation, v then, so far as they are concerned, they seem related for no reason at all. Things are spa tially related, first in one way, and then be come related in another way, and yet in no way themselves are altered; for the relations, it is said, are but external.
But I reply that, if 1 But "is there any sense," asks Mr. Bradley, peevishly, on p. The process and its result to the terms, if they contribute nothing to it [Surely they contribute to it all there is of it! Bradley should show wherein and how. In such relations as on, afoot away, 9 between, next 9 etc.
If the terms contribute anything whatever, then the terms are affected [inwardly altered? That for working purposes we treat, and do well to treat, some relations as external merely I do not deny, and that of course is not the question at issue here. Bradley next reverts to the antinomies of space, which, according to him, prove it to be unreal, although it appears as so prolific a medium of external relations; and he then con cludes that "Irrationality and externality can not be the last truth about things.
Somewhere there must be a reason why this and that ap- pear together. And this reason and reality must reside in the whole from which terms and relations are abstractions, a whole in which their internal connection must lie, and out of which from the background appear those fresh results which never could have come from the premises. They are altered so far only [How far? I must insist that in each case the terms are qualified by their whole [Qualified how?
But just how far is the whole problem; and through-and- through would seem in spite of Mr. Bradley s somewhat undecided utterances 1 to be the 1 I say undecided, because, apart from the so far, which sounds terribly half-hearted, there are passages in these very pages in which Mr.
Similar Books
Bradley admits the pluralistic thesis. Read, for example, what he says, on p. Why does he immediately add that for the pluralist to plead the non-mutation of such abstractions would be an ignoratio elenchi? It is impossible to admit it to be such. The entire elenchus and inquest is just as to whether parts which you can abstract from existing wholes can also contribute to other wholes without changing their inner nature.
There must be total conflux of its parts, each into and through each other. The must appears here as a Machtspruch, as an ipse dixit of Mr. Bradley s absolutistically tempered under standing, for he candidly confesses that how the parts do differ as they contribute to differ ent wholes, is unknown to him. Bradley s under standing speaks, his words leave me wholly unconverted. External relations stand with their withers all unwrung, and remain, for aught he proves to the contrary, not only practically workable, but also perfectly intelli gible factors of reality.
All the theses of radical empiricism, in short, follow. Bradley s understanding shows the most extraordinary power of perceiving sepa rations and the most extraordinary impotence in comprehending conjunctions. One would naturally say "neither or both, but not so Mr. When a common man analyzes cer tain whats from out the stream of experience, he understands their distinctness as thus isolated.
But this does not prevent him from equally well understanding their combination with each other as originally experienced in the con crete, or their confluence with new sensible ex periences in which they recur as the same. Returning into the stream of sensible present ation, nouns and adjectives, and thats and ab stract whats, grow confluent again, and the word is names all these experiences of con junction.
Bradley understands the isola tion of the abstracts, but to understand the combination is to him impossible. For to my intellect that is no more than another ex ternal element. The intellect has in its nature no principle of mere togetherness. Must n t something in each of the three elements already determine the two others to it, so that they do not settle elsewhere or float vaguely? Must n t the whole fact be pre figured in each part, and exist dejure before it can exist de facto?
But, if so, in what can the jural existence consist, if not in a spiritual miniature of the whole fact s constitution actuating every partial factor as its purpose? But is this anything but the old metaphysical fallacy of looking behind a fact in ease for the ground of the fact, and finding it in the shape of the very same fact in posse? Somewhere we must leave off with a constitution behind which there is nothing. But why then claim that such a maimed and amputated power must reign supreme in philosophy, and accuse on its behoof the whole empirical world of irrationality?
It is true that he else where attributes to the intellect a propritu motus of transition, but says that when he looks for these transitions in the detail of liv ing experience, he "is unable to verify such a solution. He only defines them negatively they are not spatial, temporal, predicative, or causal; or qualitatively or otherwise serial; or in any way relational as we naively trace relations, for relations separate terms, and need them selves to be hooked on ad infinitum.
The near est approach he makes to describing a truly intellectual transition is where he speaks of 1 Op. Bradley s intellect desiderates as its pro- prius motus is a reminiscence of these and other sensible conjunctions especially space- conjunctions , but a reminiscence so vague that its originals are not recognized. Bradley in short repeats the fable of the dog, the bone, and its image in the water. With a world of particulars, given in loveliest union, in con junction definitely various, and variously de- 1 Op. Surely he abuses the privilege which society grants to all us philosophers, of being puzzle-headed.
Polemic writing like this is odious; but with absolutism in possession in so many quarters, omission to defend my radical empiricism against its best known champion would count as either superficiality or inability. I have to conclude that its dialectic has not invalidated in the least degree the usual conjunctions by which the world, as experienced, hangs so va riously together.
Not how experience gets itself born, but how it can be what it is after it is born, is the puzzle. In [the next essay] I shall return to this last supposition, which seems to me to offer other difficulties much harder for a philosophy of pure experience to deal with than any of absolutism s dialectic objections. I have tried to show that when we call an experience conscious, that does not mean that it is suffused throughout with a peculiar modality of being psychic being as stained glass may be suffused with light, but rather that it stands in certain determinate relations to other portions of experience extraneous to itself.
These form one peculiar context for it; while, taken in another context of experi ences, we class it as a fact in the physical world. This pen, for example, is, in the first instance, a bald that, a datum, fact, phenom enon, content, or whatever other neutral or ambiguous name you may prefer to apply.
I called it in that article a pure experience. To get classed either as a physical pen or as some one s percept of a pen, it must assume a func- 1 [Reprinted from The Journal of Philosophy, Psychology and Scientific Methods, vol. So far as in that world it is a stable feature, holds ink, marks paper and obeys the guidance of a hand, it is a physical pen.
That is what we mean by being physi cal, in a pen. So far as it is instable, on the contrary, coming and going with the move ments of my eyes, altering with what I call my fancy, continuous with subsequent experiences of its having been in the past tense , it is the percept of a pen in my mind. Those peculiar ities are what we mean by being conscious, in a pen. In Section VI of another [essay] 1 1 tried to show that the same that, the same numerically identical pen of pure experience, can enter simultaneously into many conscious contexts, or, in other words, be an object for many differ ent minds.
I admitted that I had not space to treat of certain possible objections in that article; but in [the last essay] I took some of the objections up. At the end of that [essay] I said that still more formidable-sounding 1 "A World of Pure Experience," above, pp. I The objections I previously tried to dispose of were purely logical or dialectical.
Full text of "Essays in radical empiricism"
No one identical term, whether physical or psychical, it had been said, could be the subject of two relations at once. This thesis I sought to prove unfounded. The objections that now confront us arise from the nature supposed to inhere in psychic facts specifically. Whatever may be the case with physical objects, a fact of con sciousness, it is alleged and indeed very plau sibly , can not, without self-contradiction, be treated as a portion of two different minds,, and for the following reasons.
In the physical world we make with impu nity the assumption that one and the same material object can figure in an indefinitely large number of different processes at once. It transmits them each, as if it pulled in four different ways at once itself. It delivers them distinct, on the contrary, at as many several receivers ear, eye or what not as may be tuned to that effect. The ap parent paradox of a distinctness like this sur viving in the midst of compounding is a thing which, I fancy, the analyses made by physi cists have by this time sufficiently cleared up.
But if, on the strength of these analogies, one should ask: Its esse is sentiri; it is only so far as it is felt; and it is unambiguously and unequivo cally exactly what is felt. The hypothesis under consideration would, however, oblige it to be felt equivocally, felt now as part of my mind and again at the same time not as a part of my mind, but of yours for my mind is not yours , and this would seem impossible without doub ling it into two distinct things, or, in other words, without reverting to the ordinary dual- istic philosophy of insulated minds each know ing its object representatively as a third thing, and that would be to give up the pure- experience scheme altogether.
This is the original collection of articles deposited by James as bound by Harvard about , with dates of journal publication: In mid James composed a list of 15 essays for an anticipated book titled "Essays in Radical Empiricism". James' plans for a book on radical empiricism based on this list never came to fruition.
Pragmatism was published in June and was well received. In the spring of James began to assemble material for a follow-up book called The Meaning of Truth. His list fell victim to the needs of the immediate book. The two strikeout lines were made by James on his actual list. The notes to the right of the titles have been added to clarify how the essays were later used. After James' death, Ralph Perry thought it appropriate to assemble a book on radical empiricism, and mined the earlier lists to come up with this one:.
Harvard added one more article, "Controversy About Truth", from James' list to its critical edition.