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? Because I see your body acting in a certain way. Its
gestures, facial movements, words and conduct generally, are
'expressive,' so I deem it actuated as my own is, by an inner life like
mine. This argument from analogy is my _reason_, whether an instinctive
belief runs before it or not. 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
universes even now may coexist, irrelevant to one another; my concern is
solely with the universe with which my own life is connected.
In that perceptual part of _my_ universe which I call _your_ body, your
mind and my mind meet and may be called conterminous. Your mind actuates
that body and mine sees it; my thoughts pass into it as into their
harmonious cognitive fulfilment; your emotions and volitions 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. For instance, your hand lays hold of one end of a
rope and my hand lays hold of the other end. 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 I ask you
_where_ some object of yours is, our old Memorial Hall, for example, you
point to _my_ Memorial Hall with _your_ hand which _I_ see. 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.[38]
Practically, then, our minds meet in a world of objects which they share
in common, which would still be there, if one or several of the minds
were destroyed. I can see no formal objection to this supposition's
being literally true. 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. If one and
the same experience can figure twice, once in a mental and once in a
physical context (as I have tried, in my article on 'Consciousness,' to
show that it can), one does not see why it might not figure thrice, or
four times, or any number of times, by running into as many different
mental contexts, just as the same point, lying at their intersection,
can be continued into many different lines. Abolishing any number of
contexts would not destroy the experience itself or its other contexts,
any more than abolishing some of the point's linear continuations would
destroy the others, or destroy the point itself.
I well know the subtle dialectic which insists that a term taken in
another relation must needs be an intrinsically different term. 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.[39] But
if my reader will only allow that the same '_now_' both ends his past
and begins his future; or that, when he buys an acre of land from his
neighbor, it is the same acre that successively figures in the two
estates; or that when I pay him a dollar, the same dollar goes into his
pocket that came out of mine; he will also in consistency have to allow
that the same object may conceivably play a part in, as being related to
the rest of, any number of otherwise entirely different minds. This is
enough for my present point: the common-sense notion of minds sharing
the same object offers no special logical or epistemological
difficulties of its own; it stands or falls with the general possibility
of things being in conjunctive relation with other things at all.
In principle, then, let natural realism pass for possible. Your mind and
mine _may_ terminate in the same percept, not merely against it, as if
it were a third external thing, but by inserting 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. The next thing beyond my percept is not your
mind, but more percepts of my own into which my first percept develops,
the interior of the Hall, for instance, or the inner structure of its
bricks and mortar. If our minds were in a literal sense _con_terminous,
neither could get beyond the percept which they had in common, 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 terminate in percepts, our knowledge is only
speciously completed, being, in theoretic strictness, only a virtual
knowledge of those remoter objects which conception carries out.
Is natural realism, permissible in logic, refuted then by empirical
fact? Do our minds have no object in common after all?
Yes, they certainly have _Space_ in common. On pragmatic principles we
are obliged to predicate sameness wherever we can predicate no
assignable point of difference. If two named things have every quality
and function indiscernible, and are at the same time in the same place,
they must be written down as numerically 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 occupied by your percept of Memorial Hall
differs from the place occupied by mine. The percepts 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. 'There' for me means where I place my finger. 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_: it is _there_ that you resist its push, or
shrink back, or sweep the finger aside with your hand. Whatever farther
knowledge either of us may acquire of the real constitution 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. The receptacle of certain of
our experiences being thus common, the experiences themselves might some
day become common also. If that day ever did come, our thoughts would
terminate in a complete empirical 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.
VII. CONCLUSION
With this we have the outlines of a philosophy of pure experience before
us. At the outset of my essay, I called it a mosaic philosophy. In
actual mosaics the pieces are held together by their bedding, for which
bedding the Substances, 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. Of course
such a metaphor is misleading, for in actual experience the more
substantive and the more transitive parts run into each other
continuously, there is in general no separateness needing to be
overcome by an external cement; and whatever separateness is actually
experienced is not overcome, it stays and counts as separateness to the
end. But the metaphor serves to symbolize the fact that Experience
itself, taken at large, can grow by its edges. That one moment of it
proliferates 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 advancing 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 expressly as
the past's continuation; it is 'of' the future in so far as the future,
when it comes, will have continued _it_.
These relations of continuous transition experienced are what make our
experiences cognitive. 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 prospects 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 continue 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.
Prince's and Professor Strong's sense of the term--that is, it must be
an experience _for_ itself whose relation to other things we translate
into the action of molecules, ether-waves, or whatever else the
physical symbols may be.[40] This opens the chapter of the relations of
radical empiricism to panpsychism, into which I can not enter now.[41]
The beyond can in any case exist simultaneously--for it can be
experienced _to have existed_ simultaneously--with the experience that
practically postulates it by looking in its direction, or by turning or
changing in the direction of which it is the goal. Pending that
actuality of union, in the virtuality of which the 'truth,' even now, of
the postulation consists, the beyond and its knower are entities split
off from each other. The world is in so far forth a pluralism of which
the unity is not fully experienced as yet. But, as fast as verifications
come, trains of experience, once separate, run into one another; and
that is why I said, earlier in my article, that the unity of the world
is on the whole undergoing increase. The universe continually grows in
quantity by new experiences 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 radical pluralism,
with novelty and indeterminism, moralism and theism, and with the
'humanism' lately sprung upon us by the Oxford and the Chicago
schools.[42] I can not, however, be sure that all these doctrines are
its necessary and indispensable allies. It presents so many points of
difference, both from the common sense and from the idealism that have
made our philosophic language, that it is almost as difficult to state
it as it is to think it out clearly, and if it is ever to grow into a
respectable system, it will have to be built up by the contributions of
many co-operating minds. It seems to me, as I said at the outset of this
essay, that many minds are, in point of fact, now turning in a direction
that points towards radical 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.
FOOTNOTES:
[25] [Reprinted from the _Journal of Philosophy, Psychology and
Scientific Methods_, vol. I, 1904, No. 20, September 29, and No. 21,
October 13. Pp. 52-76 have also been reprinted, with some omissions,
alterations and additions, in _The Meaning of Truth_, pp. 102-120. The
alterations have been adopted in the present text. This essay is
referred to in _A Pluralistic Universe_, p. 280, note 5. ED.]
[26] [Cf. Berkeley: _Principles of Human Knowledge_, Introduction; Hume:
_An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding_, sect. VII, part II
(Selby-Bigge's edition, p. 74); James Mill: _Analysis of the Phenomena
of the Human Mind_, ch. VIII; J. S. Mill: _An Examination of Sir William
Hamilton's Philosophy_, ch. XI, XII; W. K. Clifford: _Lectures and
Essays_, pp. 274 ff.]
[27] [See "The Experience of Activity," below, pp. 155-189.]
[28] The psychology books have of late described the facts here with
approximate adequacy. I may refer to the chapters on 'The Stream of
Thought' and on the Self in my own _Principles of Psychology_, as well
as to S. H. Hodgson's _Metaphysic of Experience_, vol. I, ch. VII and
VIII.
[29] [See "The Thing and its Relations," below, pp. 92-122.]
[30] For brevity's sake I altogether omit mention of the type
constituted by knowledge of the truth of general propositions. This type
has been thoroughly and, so far as I can see, satisfactorily, elucidated
in Dewey's _Studies in Logical Theory_. Such propositions are reducible
to the _S_-is-_P_ form; and the 'terminus' that verifies and fulfils is
the _SP_ in combination. Of course percepts may be involved in the
mediating experiences, or in the 'satisfactoriness' of the _P_ in its
new position.
[31] [See above, pp. 9-15.]
[32] ["On the Function of Cognition," _Mind_, vol. X, 1885, and "The
Knowing of Things Together," _Psychological Review_, vol. II, 1895.
These articles are reprinted, the former in full, the latter in part, in
_The Meaning of Truth_, pp. 1-50. ED.] These articles and their
doctrine, unnoticed apparently by any one else, have lately gained
favorable comment from Professor Strong. ["A Naturalistic Theory of the
Reference of Thought to Reality," _Journal of Philosophy, Psychology and
Scientific Methods_, vol. I, 1904.] Dr. Dickinson S. Miller has
independently thought out the same results ["The Meaning of Truth and
Error," _Philosophical Review_, vol. II, 1893; "The Confusion of
Function and Content in Mental Analysis," _Psychological Review_, vol.
II, 1895], which Strong accordingly dubs the James-Miller theory of
cognition.
[33] [Cf. H. Lotze: _Metaphysik_, Secs. 37-39, 97, 98, 243.]
[34] Mr. Bradley, not professing to know his absolute _aliunde_,
nevertheless derealizes Experience by alleging it to be everywhere
infected with self-contradiction. His arguments seem almost purely
verbal, but this is no place for arguing that point out. [Cf. F. H.
Bradley; _Appearance and Reality, passim;_ and below, pp. 106-122.]
[35] 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
possibility of such. [Cf. _Principles of Psychology_, vol. I, pp.
473-480, vol. II, pp. 337-340; _Pragmatism_, p. 265; _Some Problems of
Philosophy_, pp. 63-74; _Meaning of Truth_, pp. 246-247, etc. ED.]
[36] [Cf. below, pp. 93 ff.]
[37] [Cf. "How Two Minds Can Know One Thing," below, pp. 123-136.]
[38] The notion that our objects are inside of our respective heads is
not seriously defensible, so I pass it by.
[39] [The argument is resumed below, pp. 101 sq. ED.]
[40] Our minds and these ejective realities would still have space (or
pseudo-space, as I believe Professor Strong calls the medium of
interaction between 'things-in-themselves') in common. These would exist
_where_, and begin to act _where_, we locate the molecules, etc., and
_where_ we perceive the sensible phenomena explained thereby. [Cf.
Morton Prince: _The Nature of Mind, and Human Automatism_, part I, ch.
III, IV; C. A. Strong: _Why the Mind Has a Body_, ch. XII.]
[41] [Cf. below, p. 188; _A Pluralistic Universe_, Lect. IV-VII.]
[42] I have said something of this latter alliance in an article
entitled 'Humanism and Truth,' in _Mind_, October, 1904. [Reprinted in
_The Meaning of Truth_, pp. 51-101. Cf. also "Humanism and Truth Once
More," below, pp. 244-265.]
III
THE THING AND ITS RELATIONS[43]
Experience in its immediacy seems perfectly fluent. The active sense of
living which we all enjoy, before reflection shatters our instinctive
world for us, is self-luminous and suggests no paradoxes. Its
difficulties are disappointments and uncertainties. They are not
intellectual contradictions.
When the reflective intellect gets at work, however, it discovers
incomprehensibilities in the flowing process. Distinguishing its
elements and parts, it gives them separate names, and what it thus
disjoins it can not easily put together. Pyrrhonism accepts the
irrationality 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 life again, and let redemption
take the place of innocence. The perfection with which any philosophy
may do this is the measure of its human success and of its importance in
philosophic history. In [the last essay], 'A World of Pure Experience,'
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 conjunctive 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.
I
'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. Only new-born babes, or men in semi-coma from sleep, drugs,
illnesses, or blows, may be assumed to have an experience pure in the
literal sense of a _that_ which is not yet any definite _what_, tho'
ready to be all sorts of whats; full both of oneness and of manyness,
but in respects that don't appear; changing throughout, yet so
confusedly that its phases interpenetrate and no points, either of
distinction or of identity, can be caught. 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 proportional 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. Qualities compenetrate one space, or
exclude each other from it. 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 discontinuities are absolutely
co-ordinate matters of immediate feeling. The conjunctions are as
primordial elements of 'fact' as are the distinctions 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 continues into it, and the feeling
of continuance in no wise jars upon the simultaneous feeling of a
novelty. They, too, compenetrate harmoniously. Prepositions, copulas,
and conjunctions, 'is,' 'isn't,' 'then,' 'before,' 'in,' 'on,' 'beside,'
'between,' 'next,' 'like,' 'unlike,' 'as,' 'but,' flower out of the
stream of pure experience, the stream of concretes or the sensational
stream, as naturally as nouns and adjectives do, and they melt into it
again as fluidly when we apply them to a new portion of the stream.
II
If now we ask why we must thus translate experience from a more concrete
or pure into a more intellectualized form, filling it with ever more
abounding conceptual distinctions, rationalism and naturalism give
different replies.
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 environment 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 practical bearing upon life are analyzed out of the continuum and
verbally fixed and coupled together, so that we may know what is in the
wind for us and get ready to react in time. Had pure experience, the
naturalist says, been always perfectly healthy, there would never have
arisen the necessity of isolating or verbalizing any of its terms. 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.