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 developed secondarily such
imperious spiritual needs that, if you ask why another generation ought
to be born at all, the answer is: 'Chiefly that love may go on.' Just
so with our intellect: it originated as a practical means of serving
life; but it has developed incidentally the function of understanding
absolute truth; and life itself now seems to be given chiefly as a means
by which that function may be prosecuted. 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 example will
make them more concrete. Mr. Bradley, for instance, is an
ultra-rationalist. He admits that our intellect is primarily practical,
but says that, for philosophers, the practical need is simply Truth.
Truth, moreover, must be assumed 'consistent.' Immediate experience 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
than ever. Taken raw, it is all un-distinguished. Intellectualized, it
is all distinction without oneness. 'Such an arrangement 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 _understanding_. '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. 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 satisfied, my intellect must understand,
and it can not understand by taking a congeries in the lump.'[44] So Mr.
Bradley, in the sole interests of 'understanding' (as he conceives that
function), turns his back on finite experience forever. Truth must lie
in the opposite direction, the direction of the Absolute; and this kind
of rationalism and naturalism, or (as I will now call it) pragmatism,
walk thenceforward upon opposite paths. 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 wavelet. Such confluence not only proves the
intellectual 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 sensible
experience again, are our abstracts and universals true or false at
all.[45]
III
In Section VI of [the last essay], I adopted in a general way the
common-sense belief that one and the same world is cognized by our
different minds; but I left undiscussed the dialectical arguments which
maintain that this is logically absurd. 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 destroy my radical empiricism so utterly, if it were valid,
that I am bound to give it an attentive ear, and seriously to search its
strength.
For instance, let the matter in dispute be term _M_, asserted to be on
the one hand related to _L_, and on the other to _N_; and let the two
cases of relation be symbolized by _L--M_ and _M--N_ respectively. When,
now, I assume that the experience may immediately come and be given in
the shape _L--M--N_, with no trace of doubling or internal fission in
the _M_, I am told that this is all a popular delusion; that _L--M--N_
logically means two different experiences, _L--M_ and _M--N_, namely;
and that although the Absolute may, and indeed must, from its superior
point of view, read its own kind of unity into _M_'s two editions, yet
as elements in finite experience the two _M_'s lie irretrievably
asunder, and the world between them is broken and unbridged.
In arguing this dialectic thesis, one must avoid slipping from the
logical into the physical 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. And then, one might continue:
'Only an Absolute 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 collective; 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 absolutist 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.'[46] Undoubtedly, since we use two
phrases in talking first about '_M_'s relation to _L_' and then about
'_M_'s relation to _N_,' we must be having, or must have had, two
distinct perceptions;--and the rest would then seem to follow duly. But
the starting-point of the reasoning here seems to be the fact of the two
_phrases_; and this suggests that the argument may be merely verbal. 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
describe 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;[47] 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.e._, are capable of leading to and terminating in) one self-same
piece, _M_, of sensible experience. 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
features of it, on which I am obliged to insist so emphatically.[48] For
samenesses are parts of experience's indefeasible structure. 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.[49] Its
unity is aboriginal, just as the multiplicity of my successive takings
is aboriginal. It comes unbroken as _that M_, as a singular which I
encounter; they come broken, as _those_ takings, 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 understandable that they must needs infect the whole of
finite experience with it, and relegate the unity (now taken as a bare
postulate and no longer as a thing positively perceivable) to the region
of the Absolute's mysteries. I do not easily fathom this, I say, for the
said opponents are above mere verbal quibbling; yet all that I can catch
in their talk is the substitution 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 application of a still profounder dialectic
difficulty. Man can't be good, said the sophists, for man is _man_ and
_good_ is good; and Hegel[50] and Herbart in their day, more recently A.
Spir,[51] and most recently and elaborately of all, Mr. 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 possible.
Of course, if true, this cuts off radical empiricism without even a
shilling. Radical empiricism takes conjunctive relations at their face
value, holding them to be as real as the terms united by them.[52] The
world it represents as a collection, some parts of which are
conjunctively and others disjunctively related. 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 transition 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, 'each in all and all in each' (union of _total conflux_,
as one might call it), which monistic systems hold to obtain when things
are taken in their absolute reality. 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 between); 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.' Now Mr. Bradley tells us that none
of these relations, as we actually experience them, can possibly be
real.[53] My next duty, accordingly, must be to rescue radical
empiricism from Mr. Bradley. Fortunately, as it seems to me, his general
contention, that the very notion of relation is unthinkable clearly, has
been successfully met by many critics.[54]
It is a burden to the flesh, and an injustice both to readers and to
the previous writers, to repeat good arguments already printed. So, in
noticing Mr. Bradley, I will confine myself to the interests of radical
empiricism solely.
V
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 _similar_, their very natures enter into
the relation. Being _what_ they are, no matter where or when, the
likeness never can be denied, if asserted. It continues predicable as
long as the terms continue. Other relations, the _where_ and the _when_,
for example, seem adventitious. The sheet of paper may be 'off' or 'on'
the table, for example; and in either case the relation involves only
the outside of its terms. Having an outside, both of them, they
contribute by it to the relation. It is external: the term's inner
nature is irrelevant to it. 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. Once there, however, they are
_additives_ to one another, and, with no prejudice to their natures, all
sorts of space-relations may supervene between them. 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.
Mr. 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 relations 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.[55] He admits that "such external relations seem possible and
even existing.... That you do not alter what you compare or rearrange in
space seems to common sense quite obvious, and that on the other side
there are as obvious difficulties does not occur to common sense at all.
And I will begin by pointing out these difficulties.... There is a
relation in the result, and this relation, we hear, is to make no
difference in its terms. But, if so, to what does it make a difference?
[_Doesn't it make a difference to us onlookers, at least?_] and what is
the meaning and sense of qualifying the terms by it? [_Surely the
meaning is to tell the truth about their relative position._[56]] If, in
short, it is external to the terms, how can it possibly be true of them?
[_Is it the 'intimacy' suggested by the little word 'of,' here, which I
have underscored, that is the root of Mr. Bradley's trouble?_] ... If
the terms from their inner nature do not enter into the relation, then,
so far as they are concerned, they seem related for no reason at all....
Things are spatially related, first in one way, and then become 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 so, I can
not _understand_ the leaving by the terms of one set of relations and
their adoption of another fresh set. The process and its result to the
terms, if they contribute nothing to it [_Surely they contribute to it
all there is 'of' it!_] seem irrational throughout. [_If 'irrational'
here means simply 'non-rational,' or nondeductible from the essence of
either term singly, it is no reproach; if it means 'contradicting' such
essence, Mr. Bradley should show wherein and how._] But, if they
contribute anything, they must surely be affected internally. [_Why so,
if they contribute only their surface? In such relations as 'on' 'a foot
away,' 'between,' 'next,' etc., only surfaces are in question._] ... If
the terms contribute anything whatever, then the terms are affected
[_inwardly altered?_] by the arrangement.... 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. That
question is ... whether in the end and in principle a mere external
relation [_i.e., a relation which can change without forcing its terms
to change their nature simultaneously_] is possible and forced on us by
the facts."[57]
Mr. 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 concludes that "Irrationality and
externality can not be the last truth about things. Somewhere there must
be a reason why this and that appear 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." And he adds that "Where the whole is
different, the terms that qualify and contribute to it must so far be
different.... They are altered so far only [_How far? farther than
externally, yet not through and through?_] but still they are
altered.... I must insist that in each case the terms are qualified by
their whole [_Qualified how?--Do their external relations, situations,
dates, etc., changed as these are in the new whole, fail to qualify them
'far' enough?_], and that in the second case there is a whole which
differs both logically and psychologically from the first whole; and I
urge that in contributing to the change the terms so far are altered."
Not merely the relations, then, but the terms are altered: _und zwar_ 'so
far.' But just _how_ far is the whole problem; and 'through-and-through'
would seem (in spite of Mr. Bradley's somewhat undecided utterances[58])
to be the full Bradleyan answer. The 'whole' which he here treats as
primary and determinative of each part's manner of 'contributing,' simply
_must_, when it alters, alter in its entirety. 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 'understanding,' for he candidly confesses that
how the parts _do_ differ as they contribute to different wholes, is
unknown to him.[59]
Although I have every wish to comprehend the authority by which Mr.
Bradley's understanding 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 intelligible factors of reality.
VI
Mr. Bradley's understanding shows the most extraordinary power of
perceiving separations and the most extraordinary impotence in
comprehending conjunctions. One would naturally say 'neither or both,'
but not so Mr. Bradley. When a common man analyzes certain _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
concrete_, or their confluence with new sensible experiences in which
they recur as 'the same.' Returning into the stream of sensible
presentation, nouns and adjectives, and _thats_ and abstract _whats_,
grow confluent again, and the word 'is' names all these experiences of
conjunction. Mr. Bradley understands the isolation of the abstracts, but
to understand the combination is to him impossible.[60] "To understand
a complex _AB_," he says, "I must begin with _A_ or _B_. And beginning,
say with _A_, if I then merely find _B_, I have either lost _A_, or I
have got beside _A_, [_the word 'beside' seems here vital, as meaning a
conjunction 'external' and therefore unintelligible_] something else,
and in neither case have I understood.[61] For my intellect can not
simply unite a diversity, nor has it in itself any form or way of
togetherness, and you gain nothing if, beside _A_ and _B_, you offer me
their conjunction in fact. For to my intellect that is no more than
another external element. And 'facts,' once for all, are for my
intellect not true unless they satisfy it.... The intellect has in its
nature no principle of mere togetherness."[62]
Of course Mr. Bradley has a right to define 'intellect' as the power by
which we perceive separations but not unions--provided he give due
notice to the reader. 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
elsewhere attributes to the intellect a _proprius motus_ of transition,
but says that when he looks for _these_ transitions in the detail of
living experience, he 'is unable to verify such a solution.'[63]
Yet he never explains what the intellectual transitions would be like in
case we had them. 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 themselves to be hooked on _ad infinitum_.
The nearest approach he makes to describing a truly intellectual
transition is where he speaks of _A_ and _B_ as being 'united, each
from its own nature, in a whole which is the nature of both alike.'[64]
But this (which, _pace_ Mr. Bradley, seems exquisitely analogous to
'taking' a congeries in a 'lump,' if not to 'swamping') suggests nothing
but that _conflux_ which pure experience so abundantly offers, as when
'space,' 'white' and 'sweet' are confluent in a 'lump of sugar,' or
kinesthetic, dermal, and optical sensations confluent in 'my hand.'[65]
All that I can verify in the transitions which Mr. Bradley's intellect
desiderates as its _proprius 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
conjunction definitely various, and variously definite, the 'how' of
which you 'understand' as soon as you see the fact of them,[66] for
there is no 'how' except the constitution of the fact as given; with all
this given him, I say, in pure experience, he asks for some ineffable
union in the abstract instead, which, if he gained it, would only be a
duplicate of what he has already in his full possession. 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 variously together. In particular it leaves an
empirical theory of knowledge[67] intact, and lets us continue to
believe with common sense that one object _may_ be known, if we have any
ground for thinking that it _is_ known, to many knowers.
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.
FOOTNOTES:
[43] [Reprinted from _The Journal of Philosophy, Psychology and
Scientific Methods_, vol. II, No. 2, January 19, 1905. Reprinted also as
Appendix A in _A Pluralistic Universe_, pp. 347-369. The author's
corrections have been adopted in the present text. ED.]
[44] [F. H. Bradley: _Appearance and Reality_, second edition, pp.
152-153, 23, 118, 104, 108-109, 570.]
[45] Compare Professor MacLennan's admirable _Auseinandersetzung_ with
Mr. Bradley, in _The Journal of Philosophy, Psychology and Scientific
Methods_, vol. I, [1904], pp. 403 ff., especially pp. 405-407.
[46] [Hume: _Treatise of Human Nature_, Appendix, Selby-Bigge's edition,
p. 636.]
[47] 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_.
[48] See above, pp. 42 ff.
[49] I may perhaps refer here to my _Principles of Psychology_, vol. I,
pp. 459 ff. 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!