experiences; perceptions of loveliness, of ugliness, tend to pass muster
as lovely or as ugly perceptions; intuitions of the morally lofty are
lofty intuitions. Sometimes the adjective wanders as if uncertain where
to fix itself. Shall we speak of seductive visions or of visions of
seductive things? Of wicked desires or of desires for wickedness? Of
healthy thoughts or of thoughts of healthy objects? Of good impulses, or
of impulses towards the good? Of feelings of anger, or of angry
feelings? Both in the mind and in the thing, these natures modify their
context, exclude certain associates and determine others, have their
mates and incompatibles. Yet not as stubbornly as in the case of
physical qualities, for beauty and ugliness, love and hatred, pleasant
and painful can, in certain complex experiences, coexist.
If one were to make an evolutionary construction of how a lot of
originally chaotic pure experiences became gradually differentiated into
an orderly inner and outer world, the whole theory would turn upon one's
success in explaining how or why the quality of an experience, once
active, could become less so, and, from being an energetic attribute in
some cases, elsewhere lapse into the status of an inert or merely
internal 'nature.' This would be the 'evolution' of the psychical from
the bosom of the physical, in which the esthetic, moral and otherwise
emotional experiences would represent a halfway stage.
VIII
But a last cry of _non possumus_ will probably go up from many readers.
"All very pretty as a piece of ingenuity," they will say, "but our
consciousness itself intuitively contradicts you. We, for our part,
_know_ that we are conscious. We _feel_ our thought, flowing as a life
within us, in absolute contrast with the objects which it so
unremittingly escorts. We can not be faithless to this immediate
intuition. The dualism is a fundamental _datum_: Let no man join what
God has put asunder."
My reply to this is my last word, and I greatly grieve that to many it
will sound materialistic. I can not help that, however, for I, too, have
my intuitions and I must obey them. Let the case be what it may in
others, I am as confident as I am of anything that, in myself, the
stream of thinking (which I recognize emphatically as a phenomenon) is
only a careless name for what, when scrutinized, reveals itself to
consist chiefly of the stream of my breathing. The 'I think' which Kant
said must be able to accompany all my objects, is the 'I breathe' which
actually does accompany them. There are other internal facts besides
breathing (intracephalic muscular adjustments, etc., of which I have
said a word in my larger Psychology), and these increase the assets of
'consciousness,' so far as the latter is subject to immediate
perception;[24] but breath, which was ever the original of 'spirit,'
breath moving outwards, between the glottis and the nostrils, is, I am
persuaded, the essence out of which philosophers have constructed the
entity known to them as consciousness. _That entity is fictitious, while
thoughts in the concrete are fully real. But thoughts in the concrete
are made of the same stuff as things are._
I wish I might believe myself to have made that plausible in this
article. In another article I shall try to make the general notion of a
world composed of pure experiences still more clear.
FOOTNOTES:
[2] [Reprinted from the _Journal of Philosophy, Psychology and
Scientific Methods_, vol. I, No. 18, September 1, 1904. For the relation
between this essay and those which follow, cf. below, pp. 53-54. ED.]
[3] Articles by Baldwin, Ward, Bawden, King, Alexander and others. Dr.
Perry is frankly over the border.
[4] [Similarly, there is no "activity of 'consciousness' as such." See
below, pp. 170 ff., note. ED.]
[5] In my _Psychology_ I have tried to show that we need no knower other
than the 'passing thought.' [_Principles of Psychology_, vol. I, pp. 338
ff.]
[6] G. E. Moore: _Mind_, vol. XII, N. S., [1903], p. 450.
[7] Paul Natorp: _Einleitung in die Psychologie_, 1888, pp. 14, 112.
[8] "Figuratively speaking, consciousness may be said to be the one
universal solvent, or menstruum, in which the different concrete kinds
of psychic acts and facts are contained, whether in concealed or in
obvious form." G. T. Ladd: _Psychology, Descriptive and Explanatory_,
1894, p. 30.
[9] [For a parallel statement of this view, cf. the author's _Meaning of
Truth_, p. 49, note. Cf. also below, pp. 196-197. ED.]
[10] [For the author's recognition of "concepts as a co-ordinate realm"
of reality, cf. his _Meaning of Truth_, pp. 42, 195, note; _A
Pluralistic Universe_, pp. 339-340; _Some Problems of Philosophy_, pp.
50-57, 67-70; and below, p. 16, note. Giving this view the name 'logical
realism,' he remarks elsewhere that his philosophy "may be regarded as
somewhat eccentric in its attempt to combine logical realism with an
otherwise empiricist mode of thought" (_Some Problems of Philosophy_, p.
106). ED.]
[11] Here as elsewhere the relations are of course _experienced_
relations, members of the same originally chaotic manifold of
non-perceptual experience of which the related terms themselves are
parts. [Cf. below, p. 42.]
[12] Of the representative function of non-perceptual experience as a
whole, I will say a word in a subsequent article: it leads too far into
the general theory of knowledge for much to be said about it in a short
paper like this. [Cf. below, pp. 52 ff.]
[13] Muensterberg: _Grundzuege der Psychologie_, vol. I, p. 48.
[14] Cf. A. L. Hodder: _The Adversaries of the Sceptic_, pp. 94-99.
[15] For simplicity's sake I confine my exposition to 'external'
reality. But there is also the system of ideal reality in which the room
plays its part. Relations of comparison, of classification, serial
order, value, also are stubborn, assign a definite place to the room,
unlike the incoherence of its places in the mere rhapsody of our
successive thoughts. [Cf. above, p. 16.]
[16] Note the ambiguity of this term, which is taken sometimes
objectively and sometimes subjectively.
[17] In the _Psychological Review_ for July [1904], Dr. R. B. Perry has
published a view of Consciousness which comes nearer to mine than any
other with which I am acquainted. At present, Dr. Perry thinks, every
field of experience is so much 'fact.' It becomes 'opinion' or 'thought'
only in retrospection, when a fresh experience, thinking the same
object, alters and corrects it. But the corrective experience becomes
itself in turn corrected, and thus experience as a whole is a process in
which what is objective originally forever turns subjective, turns into
our apprehension of the object. I strongly recommend Dr. Perry's
admirable article to my readers.
[18] I have given a partial account of the matter in _Mind_, vol. X, p.
27, 1885 [reprinted in _The Meaning of Truth_, pp. 1-42], and in the
_Psychological Review_, vol. II, p. 105, 1895 [partly reprinted in _The
Meaning of Truth_, pp. 43-50]. See also C. A. Strong's article in the
_Journal of Philosophy, Psychology and Scientific Methods_, vol. I, p.
253, May 12, 1904. I hope myself very soon to recur to the matter. [See
below, pp. 52 ff.]
[19] [Cf. Shadworth Hodgson: _The Metaphysic of Experience_, vol. I.
_passim;_ _The Philosophy of Reflection_, bk. II, ch. IV, Sec. 3. ED.]
[20] Spencer's proof of his 'Transfigured Realism' (his doctrine that
there is an absolutely non-mental reality) comes to mind as a splendid
instance of the impossibility of establishing radical heterogeneity
between thought and thing. All his painfully accumulated points of
difference run gradually into their opposites, and are full of
exceptions. [Cf. Spencer: _Principles of Psychology_, part VII, ch.
XIX.]
[21] I speak here of the complete inner life in which the mind plays
freely with its materials. Of course the mind's free play is restricted
when it seeks to copy real things in real space.
[22] [But there are also "mental activity trains," in which thoughts do
"work on each other." Cf. below, p. 184, note. ED.]
[23] [This topic is resumed below, pp. 137 ff. ED.]
[24] [_Principles of Psychology_, vol. I, pp. 299-305. Cf. below, pp.
169-171 (note).]
II
A WORLD OF PURE EXPERIENCE[25]
It is difficult not to notice a curious unrest in the philosophic
atmosphere of the time, a loosening of old landmarks, a softening of
oppositions, a mutual borrowing from one another on the part of systems
anciently closed, and an interest in new suggestions, however vague, as
if the one thing sure were the inadequacy of the extant
school-solutions. The dissatisfaction with these seems due for the most
part to a feeling that they are too abstract and academic. Life is
confused and superabundant, and what the younger generation appears to
crave is more of the temperament of life in its philosophy, even though
it were at some cost of logical rigor and of formal purity.
Transcendental idealism is inclining to let the world wag
incomprehensibly, in spite of its Absolute Subject and his unity of
purpose. Berkeleyan idealism is abandoning the principle of parsimony
and dabbling in panpsychic speculations. Empiricism flirts with
teleology; and, strangest of all, natural realism, so long decently
buried, raises its head above the turf, and finds glad hands
outstretched from the most unlikely quarters to help it to its feet
again. We are all biased by our personal feelings, I know, and I am
personally discontented with extant solutions; so I seem to read the
signs of a great unsettlement, as if the upheaval of more real
conceptions and more fruitful methods were imminent, as if a true
landscape might result, less clipped, straight-edged and artificial.
If philosophy be really on the eve of any considerable rearrangement,
the time should be propitious for any one who has suggestions of his own
to bring forward. For many years past my mind has been growing into a
certain type of _Weltanschauung_. Rightly or wrongly, I have got to the
point where I can hardly see things in any other pattern. I propose,
therefore, to describe the pattern as clearly as I can consistently with
great brevity, and to throw my description into the bubbling vat of
publicity where, jostled by rivals and torn by critics, it will
eventually either disappear from notice, or else, if better luck befall
it, quietly subside to the profundities, and serve as a possible ferment
of new growths or a nucleus of new crystallization.
I. RADICAL EMPIRICISM
I give the name of 'radical empiricism' to my _Weltanschauung_.
Empiricism is known as the opposite of rationalism. Rationalism tends to
emphasize universals and to make wholes prior to parts in the order of
logic as well as in that of being. Empiricism, on the contrary, lays the
explanatory stress upon the part, the element, the individual, and
treats the whole as a collection and the universal as an abstraction. My
description of things, accordingly, starts with the parts and makes of
the whole a being of the second order. It is essentially a mosaic
philosophy, a philosophy of plural facts, like that of Hume and his
descendants, who refer these facts neither to Substances in which they
inhere nor to an Absolute Mind that creates them as its objects. But it
differs from the Humian type of empiricism in one particular which makes
me add the epithet radical.
To be radical, an empiricism must neither admit into its constructions
any element that is not directly experienced, nor exclude from them any
element that is directly experienced. For such a philosophy, _the
relations that connect experiences must themselves be experienced
relations, and any kind of relation experienced must be accounted as
'real' as anything else in the system_. Elements may indeed be
redistributed, the original placing of things getting corrected, but a
real place must be found for every kind of thing experienced, whether
term or relation, in the final philosophic arrangement.
Now, ordinary empiricism, in spite of the fact that conjunctive and
disjunctive relations present themselves as being fully co-ordinate
parts of experience, has always shown a tendency to do away with the
connections of things, and to insist most on the disjunctions.
Berkeley's nominalism, Hume's statement that whatever things we
distinguish are as 'loose and separate' as if they had 'no manner of
connection,' James Mill's denial that similars have anything 'really' in
common, the resolution of the causal tie into habitual sequence, John
Mill's account of both physical things and selves as composed of
discontinuous possibilities, and the general pulverization of all
Experience by association and the mind-dust theory, are examples of what
I mean.[26]
The natural result of such a world-picture has been the efforts of
rationalism to correct its incoherencies by the addition of
trans-experiential agents of unification, substances, intellectual
categories and powers, or Selves; whereas, if empiricism had only been
radical and taken everything that comes without disfavor, conjunction as
well as separation, each at its face value, the results would have
called for no such artificial correction. _Radical empiricism_, as I
understand it, _does full justice to conjunctive relations_, without,
however, treating them as rationalism always tends to treat them, as
being true in some supernal way, as if the unity of things and their
variety belonged to different orders of truth and vitality altogether.
II. CONJUNCTIVE RELATIONS
Relations are of different degrees of intimacy. Merely to be 'with' one
another in a universe of discourse is the most external relation that
terms can have, and seems to involve nothing whatever as to farther
consequences. Simultaneity and time-interval come next, and then
space-adjacency and distance. After them, similarity and difference,
carrying the possibility of many inferences. Then relations of activity,
tying terms into series involving change, tendency, resistance, and the
causal order generally. Finally, the relation experienced between terms
that form states of mind, and are immediately conscious of continuing
each other. The organization of the Self as a system of memories,
purposes, strivings, fulfilments or disappointments, is incidental to
this most intimate of all relations, the terms of which seem in many
cases actually to compenetrate and suffuse each other's being.[27]
Philosophy has always turned on grammatical particles. With, near, next,
like, from, towards, against, because, for, through, my--these words
designate types of conjunctive relation arranged in a roughly ascending
order of intimacy and inclusiveness. _A priori_, we can imagine a
universe of withness but no nextness; or one of nextness but no
likeness, or of likeness with no activity, or of activity with no
purpose, or of purpose with no ego. These would be universes, each with
its own grade of unity. The universe of human experience is, by one or
another of its parts, of each and all these grades. Whether or not it
possibly enjoys some still more absolute grade of union does not appear
upon the surface.
Taken as it does appear, our universe is to a large extent chaotic. No
one single type of connection runs through all the experiences that
compose it. If we take space-relations, they fail to connect minds into
any regular system. Causes and purposes obtain only among special series
of facts. The self-relation seems extremely limited and does not link
two different selves together. _Prima facie_, if you should liken the
universe of absolute idealism to an aquarium, a crystal globe in which
goldfish are swimming, you would have to compare the empiricist universe
to something more like one of those dried human heads with which the
Dyaks of Borneo deck their lodges. The skull forms a solid nucleus; but
innumerable feathers, leaves, strings, beads, and loose appendices of
every description float and dangle from it, and, save that they
terminate in it, seem to have nothing to do with one another. Even so my
experiences and yours float and dangle, terminating, it is true, in a
nucleus of common perception, but for the most part out of sight and
irrelevant and unimaginable to one another. This imperfect intimacy,
this bare relation of _withness_ between some parts of the sum total of
experience and other parts, is the fact that ordinary empiricism
over-emphasizes against rationalism, the latter always tending to ignore
it unduly. Radical empiricism, on the contrary, is fair to both the
unity and the disconnection. It finds no reason for treating either as
illusory. It allots to each its definite sphere of description, and
agrees that there appear to be actual forces at work which tend, as time
goes on, to make the unity greater.
The conjunctive relation that has given most trouble to philosophy is
the _co-conscious transition_, so to call it, by which one experience
passes into another when both belong to the same self. About the facts
there is no question. My experiences and your experiences are 'with'
each other in various external ways, but mine pass into mine, and yours
pass into yours in a way in which yours and mine never pass into one
another. Within each of our personal histories, subject, object,
interest and purpose _are continuous or may be continuous_.[28] Personal
histories are processes of change in time, and _the change itself is one
of the things immediately experienced_. 'Change' in this case means
continuous as opposed to discontinuous transition. But continuous
transition is one sort of a conjunctive relation; and to be a radical
empiricist means to hold fast to this conjunctive relation of all
others, for this is the strategic point, the position through which, if
a hole be made, all the corruptions of dialectics and all the
metaphysical fictions pour into our philosophy. The holding fast to this
relation means taking it at its face value, neither less nor more; and
to take it at its face value means first of all to take it just as we
feel it, and not to confuse ourselves with abstract talk _about_ it,
involving words that drive us to invent secondary conceptions in order
to neutralize their suggestions and to make our actual experience again
seem rationally possible.
What I do feel simply when a later moment of my experience succeeds an
earlier one is that though they are two moments, the transition from the
one to the other is _continuous_. Continuity here is a definite sort of
experience; just as definite as is the _discontinuity-experience_ which
I find it impossible to avoid when I seek to make the transition from an
experience of my own to one of yours. In this latter case I have to get
on and off again, to pass from a thing lived to another thing only
conceived, and the break is positively experienced and noted. Though the
functions exerted by my experience and by yours may be the same (_e.g._,
the same objects known and the same purposes followed), yet the sameness
has in this case to be ascertained expressly (and often with difficulty
and uncertainty) after the break has been felt; whereas in passing from
one of my own moments to another the sameness of object and interest is
unbroken, and both the earlier and the later experience are of things
directly lived.
There is no other _nature_, no other whatness than this absence of break
and this sense of continuity in that most intimate of all conjunctive
relations, the passing of one experience into another when they belong
to the same self. And this whatness is real empirical 'content,' just as
the whatness of separation and discontinuity is real content in the
contrasted case. Practically to experience one's personal continuum in
this living way is to know the originals of the ideas of continuity and
of sameness, to know what the words stand for concretely, to own all
that they can ever mean. But all experiences have their conditions; and
over-subtle intellects, thinking about the facts here, and asking how
they are possible, have ended by substituting a lot of static objects of
conception for the direct perceptual experiences. "Sameness," they have
said, "must be a stark numerical identity; it can't run on from next to
next. Continuity can't mean mere absence of gap; for if you say two
things are in immediate contact, _at_ the contact how can they be two?
If, on the other hand, you put a relation of transition between them,
that itself is a third thing, and needs to be related or hitched to its
terms. An infinite series is involved," and so on. The result is that
from difficulty to difficulty, the plain conjunctive experience has been
discredited by both schools, the empiricists leaving things permanently
disjoined, and the rationalist remedying the looseness by their
Absolutes or Substances, or whatever other fictitious agencies of union
they may have employed.[29] From all which artificiality we can be saved
by a couple of simple reflections: first, that conjunctions and
separations are, at all events, co-ordinate phenomena which, if we take
experiences at their face value, must be accounted equally real; and
second, that if we insist on treating things as really separate when
they are given as continuously joined, invoking, when union is required,
transcendental principles to overcome the separateness we have assumed,
then we ought to stand ready to perform the converse act. We ought to
invoke higher principles of _dis_union, also, to make our merely
experienced disjunctions more truly real. Failing thus, we ought to let
the originally given continuities stand on their own bottom. We have no
right to be lopsided or to blow capriciously hot and cold.
III. THE COGNITIVE RELATION
The first great pitfall from which such a radical standing by experience
will save us is an artificial conception of the _relations between
knower and known_. Throughout the history of philosophy the subject and
its object have been treated as absolutely discontinuous entities; and
thereupon the presence of the latter to the former, or the
'apprehension' by the former of the latter, has assumed a paradoxical
character which all sorts of theories had to be invented to overcome.
Representative theories put a mental 'representation,' 'image,' or
'content' into the gap, as a sort of intermediary. Common-sense theories
left the gap untouched, declaring our mind able to clear it by a
self-transcending leap. Transcendentalist theories left it impossible to
traverse by finite knowers, and brought an Absolute in to perform the
saltatory act. All the while, in the very bosom of the finite
experience, every conjunction required to make the relation intelligible
is given in full. Either the knower and the known are:
(1) the self-same piece of experience taken twice over in different
contexts; or they are
(2) two pieces of _actual_ experience belonging to the same subject,
with definite tracts of conjunctive transitional experience between
them; or
(3) the known is a _possible_ experience either of that subject or
another, to which the said conjunctive transitions _would_ lead, if
sufficiently prolonged.
To discuss all the ways in which one experience may function as the
knower of another, would be incompatible with the limits of this
essay.[30] I have just treated of type 1, the kind of knowledge called
perception.[31] This is the type of case in which the mind enjoys direct
'acquaintance' with a present object. In the other types the mind has
'knowledge-about' an object not immediately there. Of type 2, the
simplest sort of conceptual knowledge, I have given some account in two
[earlier] articles.[32] Type 3 can always formally and hypothetically be
reduced to type 2, so that a brief description of that type will put the
present reader sufficiently at my point of view, and make him see what
the actual meanings of the mysterious cognitive relation may be.