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.[1] 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
undistinguished. Intellectualized, it is all distinction without
oneness. 'Such an arrangement may _work_, but the theoretic problem is
not solved' (p. 23). The question is, '_How_ the diversity can exist
in harmony with the oneness' (p. 118). To go back to pure experience
is unavailing. 'Mere feeling gives no answer to our riddle' (p. 104).
Even if your intuition is a fact, it is not an _understanding_. 'It is
a mere experience, and furnishes no consistent view' (pp. 108-109).
The experiences 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 cannot repeat as its own.... For to be satisfied, my intellect must
understand, and it cannot understand by taking a congeries in
the lump' (p. 570). So Mr. Bradley, in the sole interests of
'understanding' (as he conceives that function), turns his back on
finite
[Footnote 1: _Appearance and Reality_, pp. 152-133.]
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, into sensible
experience again, are our abstracts and universals true or false at
all.
III
In Section the 6th of my article, 'A world of pure experience,' 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 cannot 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 a 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.' Undoubtedly, since we
use two phrases in talking first about '_M_'s relation to _L_' and
then again 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 achievement
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 doubleness 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![1] 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. 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
[Footnote 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_.]
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.[1] 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.
[Footnote 1: 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!]
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 and Herbart in their day, more recently H.
Spir, and most recently and elaborately of all, Mr. Bradley, inform 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.
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.[1] 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
[Footnote 1: Here again the reader must beware of slipping from
logical into phenomenal considerations. 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. We here put motion in the wrong place in the world, but in its
original place the motion is a part of reality. What Mr. 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, relations are impossible of comprehension.]
unthinkable clearly, has been successfully met by many critics.[1]
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
[Footnote 1: Particularly so by Andrew Seth Pringle-Pattison, in his
_Man and the Cosmos_; by L.T. Hobhouse, in chapter xii (the Validity
of Judgment) of his _Theory of Knowledge_; and by F.C.S. Schiller,
in his _Humanism_, Essay XI. Other fatal reviews (in my opinion) are
Hodder's, in the _Psychological Review_, vol. i, 307; Stout's, in
the _Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society_, 1901-02, p. 1; and
MacLennan's, in the _Journal of Philosophy_, etc., vol. i, 403.]
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. He admits that 'such external relations
[Footnote 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. The point is whether the successive relations 'on' and 'not-on'
can rationally (not physically) hold of the same constant terms,
abstractly taken. Professor A.E. 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_, 1903, p.
145). Note the substitution, for 'related,' of the word 'affected,'
which begs the whole question.]
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_.[1]] 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
[Footnote 1: But 'is there any sense,' asks Mr. Bradley, peevishly,
on p. 579, 'and if so, what sense, in truth that is only outside and
"about" things?' Surely such a question may be left unanswered.]
are altered; for the relations, it is said, are but external. But I
reply that, if so, I cannot _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 non-deducible 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.'[1]
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;
[Footnote 1: _Appearance and Reality_, 2d edition, pp. 575-576.]
and he then concludes that 'Irrationality and externality cannot 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 connexion must lie, and out of which from the
background appear those fresh results which never could have come
from the premises' (p. 577). 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' (p. 579).
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[1])
[Footnote 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. Bradley admits the pluralistic thesis. Read, for
example, what he says, on p. 578, of a billiard ball keeping its
'character' unchanged, though, in its change of place, its 'existence'
gets altered; or what he says, on p. 579, of the possibility that
an abstract quality A, B, or C, in a thing, 'may throughout remain
unchanged' although the thing be altered; or his admission that in
red-hairedness, both as analyzed out of a man and when given with
the rest of him, there may be 'no change' (p. 580). 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. If
they can thus mould various wholes into new _gestalt-qualitäten_,
then it follows that the same elements are logically able to exist in
different wholes [whether physically able would depend on
additional hypotheses]; that partial changes are thinkable, and
through-and-through change not a dialectic necessity; that monism is
only an hypothesis; and that an additively constituted universe is
a rationally respectable hypothesis also. All the theses of radical
empiricism, in short, follow.]
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 (p. 578).
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.[1] 'To understand a complex _AB_,' he