Part #1

Essays in Radical Empiricism

by William James

(1842-1910) American Philosopher & Psychologist,

Founder of Pragmatism

One

DOES 'CONSCIOUSNESS' EXIST?

'THOUGHTS' and 'things' are names for two

sorts of object, which common sense will always

find contrasted and will always practically

oppose to each other. Philosophy, reflecting

on the contrast, has varied in the

past in her explanations of it, and may be

expected to vary in the future. At first,

'spirit and matter,' 'soul and body,' stood for

a pair of equipollent substances quite on a par

in weight and interest. But one day Kant undermined

the soul and brought in the transcendental

ego, and ever since then the bipolar

relation has been very much off its balance.

The transcendental ego seems nowadays in

rationalist quarters to stand for everything, in

empiricist quarters for almost nothing. In the

hands of such writers as Schuppe, Rehmke,

Natorp, Munsterberg -- at any rate in his

earlier writings, Schubert-Soldern and others,

the spiritual principle attenuates itself to a

thoroughly ghostly condition, being only a

name for the fact that the 'content' of experience

_is_known_. It loses personal form and activity

-- these passing over to the content --

and becomes a bare _Bewusstheit_ or _Bewusstsein_

_uberhaupt_ of which in its own right absolutely

nothing can be said.

I believe that 'consciousness,' when once it

has evaporated to this estate of pure diaphaneity,

is on the point of disappearing altogether.

It is the name of a nonentity, and has no right

to a place among first principles. Those who

still cling to it are clinging to a mere echo, the

faint rumor left behind by the disappearing

'soul' upon the air of philosophy. During the

past year, I have read a number of articles

whose authors seemed just on the point of abandoning

the notion of consciousness,(1) and substituting

for it that of an absolute experience

not due to two factors. But they were not

---

1 Articles by Bawden, King, Alexander, and others. Dr. Perry is frankly over the border

---

quite radical enough, not quite daring enough

in their negations. For twenty years past I

have mistrusted 'consciousness' as an entity;

for seven or eight years past I have suggested

its non-existence to my students, and tried to

give them its pragmatic equivalent in realities

of experience. It seems to me that the hour

is ripe for it to be openly and universally discarded.

To deny plumply that 'consciousness' exists

seems so absurd on the face of it -- for undeniably

'thoughts' do exist -- that I fear some

readers will follow me no farther. Let me then

immediately explain that I mean only to deny

that the word stands for an entity, but to insist

most emphatically that it does stand for a

function. There is, I mean, no aboriginal stuff

or quality of being, contrasted with that of

which material objects are made, out of which

our thoughts of them are made; but there is a

function in experience which thoughts perform,

and for the performance of which this

quality of being is invoked. That function is

_knowing_. 'Consciousness' is supposed necessary

to explain the fact that things not only

are, but get reported, are known. Whoever

blots out the notion of consciousness from his

list of first principles must still provide in some

way for that function's being carried on.

My thesis is that if we start with the supposition

that there is only one primal stuff or

material in the world, a stuff of which everything

is composed, and if we call that stuff

'pure experience,' the knowing can easily be

explained as a particular sort of relation

towards one another into which portions of

pure experience may enter. The relation itself

is a part of pure experience; one if its 'terms'

becomes the subject or bearer of the knowledge,

the knower,(1) the other becomes the object

known. This will need much explanation

before it can be understood. The best way to

---

1 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.]

---

get it understood is to contrast it with the alternative

view; and for that we may take the

recentest alternative, that in which the evaporation

of the definite soul-substance has proceeded

as far as it can go without being yet

complete. If neo-Kantism has expelled earlier

forms of dualism, we shall have expelled all

forms if we are able to expel neo-kantism in its

turn.

For the thinkers I call neo-Kantian, the word

consciousness to-day does no more than signalize

the fact that experience is indefeasibly dualistic

in structure. It means that not subject,

not object, but object-plus-subject is the minimum

that can actually be. The subject-object

distinction meanwhile is entirely different from

that between mind and matter, from that between

body and soul. Souls were detachable,

had separate destinies; things could happen to

them. To consciousness as such nothing can

happen, for, timeless itself, it is only a witness

of happenings in time, in which it plays no

part. It is, in a word, but the logical correlative

of 'content' in an Experience of which the

peculiarity is that _fact_comes_to_light_ in it, that

_awareness_of_content_ takes place. Consciousness

as such is entirely impersonal -- 'self' and its

activities belong to the content. To say that I

am self-conscious, or conscious of putting forth

volition, means only that certain contents, for

which 'self' and 'effort of will' are the names,

are not without witness as they occur.

Thus, for these belated drinkers at the Kantian

spring, we should have to admit consciousness

as an 'epistemological' necessity, even if

we had no direct evidence of its being there.

But in addition to this, we are supposed by

almost every one to have an immediate consciousness

of consciousness itself. When the

world of outer fact ceases to be materially present,

and we merely recall it in memory, or

fancy it, the consciousness is believed to stand

out and to be felt as a kind of impalpable inner

flowing, which, once known in this sort of experience,

may equally be detected in presentations

of the outer world. "The moment we try

to fix out attention upon consciousness and to

see _what_, distinctly, it is," says a recent writer,

"it seems to vanish. It seems as if we had before

us a mere emptiness. When we try to introspect

the sensation of blue, all we can see is

the blue; the other element is as if it were diaphanous.

Yet it _can_ be distinguished, if we

look attentively enough, and know that there

is something to look for."(1) "Consciousness"

(Bewusstheit), says another philosopher, "is

inexplicable and hardly describable, yet all conscious

experiences have this in common that

what we call their content has a peculiar reference

to a centre for which 'self' is the name,

in virtue of which reference alone the content

is subjectively given, or appears.... While

in this way consciousness, or reference to a

self, is the only thing which distinguishes a conscious

content from any sort of being that

might be there with no one conscious of it, yet

this only ground of the distinction defies all

closer explanations. The existence of consciousness,

although it is the fundamental fact of

psychology, can indeed be laid down as certain,

can be brought out by analysis, but can

neither be defined nor deduced from anything

but itself."(1)

'Can be brought out by analysis,' this

author says. This supposes that the consciousness

is one element, moment, factor -- call it

what you like -- of an experience of essentially

dualistic inner constitution, from which, if you

abstract the content, the consciousness will remain

revealed to its own eye. Experience, at

this rate, would be much like a paint of which

the world pictures were made. Paint has a dual

constitution, involving, as it does, a menstruum (2)

(oil, size or what not) and a mass of

content in the form of pigment suspended

therein. We can get the pure menstruum by

letting the pigment settle, and the pure pigment

by pouring off the size or oil. We operate

here by physical subtraction; and the usual

view is, that by mental subtraction we can

separate the two factors of experience in an

---

1 Paul Natorp: _Einleitung_in_die_Psychologie_, 1888, pp. 14, 112. 2 "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.

---

analogous way -- not isolating them entirely,

but distinguishing them enough to know that

they are two.

Now my contention is exactly the reverse of

this. _Experience,_I_believe,_has_no_such_inner_duplicity;_ _and_the_separation_of_it_into_consciousness_

_and_content_comes,_not_by_way_of_subtraction,_

_but_by_way_of_addition_ -- the addition, to a

given concrete piece of it, other sets of experiences,

in connection with which severally its

use or function may be of two different kinds.

The paint will also serve here as an illustration.

In a pot in a paint-shop, along with other

paints, it serves in its entirety as so much saleable

matter. Spread on a canvas, with other

paints around it, it represents, on the contrary,

a feature in a picture and performs a spiritual

function. Just so, I maintain, does a given undivided

portion of experience, taken in one

context of associates, play the part of a knower,

of a state of mind, of 'consciousness'; while in

a different context the same undivided bit of

experience plays the part of a thing known, of

an objective 'content.' In a word, in one group

it figures as a thought, in another group as a

thing. And, since it can figure in both groups

simultaneously we have every right to speak of

it as subjective and objective, both at once.

The dualism connoted by such double-barrelled

terms as 'experience,' 'phenomenon,'

'datum,' '_Vorfindung_' -- terms which, in philosophy

at any rate, tend more and more to replace

the single-barrelled terms of 'thought'

and 'thing' -- that dualism, I say, is still preserved

in this account, but reinterpreted, so

that, instead of being mysterious and elusive,

it becomes verifiable and concrete. It is an affair

of relations, it falls outside, not inside, the

single experience considered, and can always

be particularized and defined.

The entering wedge for this more concrete

way of understanding the dualism was fashioned

by Locke when he made the word 'idea'

stand indifferently for thing and thought, and

by Berkeley when he said that what common

sense means by realities is exactly what the

philosopher means by ideas. Neither Locke

nor Berkeley thought his truth out into perfect

clearness, but it seems to me that the conception

I am defending does little more than consistently

carry out the 'pragmatic' method

which they were the first to use.

If the reader will take his own experiences,

he will see what I mean. Let him begin with a

perceptual experience, the 'presentation,' so

called, of a physical object, his actual field of

vision, the room he sits in, with the book he is

reading as its centre; and let him for the present

treat this complex object in the common-

sense way as being 'really' what it seems to be,

namely, a collection of physical things cut out

from an environing world of other physical

things with which these physical things have

actual or potential relations. Now at the same

time it is just _those_self-same_things_ which his

mind, as we say, perceives; and the whole philosophy

of perception from Democritus's time

downwards has just been one long wrangle over

the paradox that what is evidently one reality

should be in two places at once, both in outer

space and in a person's mind. 'Representative'

theories of perception avoid the logical

paradox, but on the other hand the violate the

reader's sense of life, which knows no intervening

mental image but seems to see the room

and the book immediately just as they physically

exist.

The puzzle of how the one identical room can

be in two places is at bottom just the puzzle of

how one identical point can be on two lines. It

can, if it be situated at their intersection; and

similarly, if the 'pure experience' of the room

were a place of intersection of two processes,

which connected it with different groups of associates

respectively, it could be counted twice

over, as belonging to either group, and spoken

of loosely as existing in two places, although it

would remain all the time a numerically single

thing.

Well, the experience is a member of diverse

processes that can be followed away from it

along entirely different lines. The one self-

identical thing has so many relations to the

rest of experience that you can take it in disparate

systems of association, and treat it as

belonging with opposite contexts. In one of

these contexts it is your 'field of consciousness';

in another it is 'the room in which you

sit,' and it enters both contexts in its wholeness,

giving no pretext for being said to attach

itself to consciousness by one of its parts or

aspects, and to out reality by another. What

are the two processes, now, into which the

room-experience simultaneously enters in this

way?

One of them is the reader's personal biography,

the other is the history of the house of

which the room is part. The presentation, the

experience, the _that_ in short (for until we have

decided _what_ it is it must be a mere _that_) is the

last term in a train of sensations, emotions,

decisions, movements, classifications, expectations,

etc., ending in the present, and the first

term in a series of 'inner' operations

extending into the future, on the reader's

part. On the other hand, the very same _that_

is the _terminus_ad_quem_ of a lot of previous

physical operations, carpentering, papering,

furnishing, warming, etc., and the _terminus_a_

_quo_ of a lot of future ones, in which it will be

concerned when undergoing the destiny of a

physical room. The physical and the mental

operations form curiously incompatible groups.

As a room, the experience has occupied that

spot and had that environment for thirty

years. As your field of consciousness it may

never have existed until now. As a room, attention

will go on to discover endless new details

in it. As your mental state merely, few

new ones will emerge under attention's eye.

AS a room, it will taken an earthquake, or a

gang of men, and in any case a certain amount

of time, to destroy it. As your subjective

state, the closing of your eyes, or any instantaneous

play of your fancy will suffice. IN the

real world, fire will consume it. IN your mind,

you can let fire play over it without effect. As

an outer object, you must pay so much a

month to inhabit it. As an inner content, you

may occupy it for any length of time rent-free.

If, in short, you follow it in the mental direction,

taking it along with events of personal

biography solely, all sorts of things are true

of it which are false, and false of it which are

true if you treat it as a real thing experienced,

follow it in the physical direction, and relate it

to associates in the outer world.

So far, all seems plain sailing, but my thesis

will probably grow less plausible to the reader

when I pass form percepts to concepts, or from

the case of things presented to that of things

remote. I believe, nevertheless, that here also

the same law holds good. If we take conceptual

manifolds, or memories, or fancies, they

also are in their first intention mere bits

of pure experience, and, as such, are single _thats_

which act in one context as objects, and in another

context figure as mental states. By taking

them in their first intention, I mean ignoring

their relation to possible perceptual experiences

with which they may be connected,

which they may lead to and terminate in, and

which then they may be supposed to 'represent.'

Taking them in this way first, we confine

the problem to a world merely 'thought-

of' and not directly felt or seen. This world,

just like the world of percepts, comes to us at

first as a chaos of experiences, but lines of order

soon get traced. We find that any bit of it

which we may cut out as an example is connected

with distinct groups of associates, just

as our perceptual experiences are, that these

associates link themselves with it by different

relations,(2) and that one forms the inner history

of a person, while the other acts as an impersonal

'objective' world, either spatial and temporal,

or else merely logical or mathematical,

or otherwise 'ideal.'

The first obstacle on the part of the reader to

seeing that these non-perceptual experiences

---

2 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.

---

have objectivity as well as subjectivity will

probably be due to the intrusion into his mind

of _percepts_, that third group of associates with

which the non-perceptual experiences have relations,

and which, as a whole, they 'represent,'

standing to them as thoughts to things. This

important function of non-perceptual experiences

complicates the question and confuses

it; for, so used are we to treat percepts as

the sole genuine realities that, unless we keep

them out of the discussion, we tend altogether

to overlook the objectivity that lies in non-

perceptual experiences by themselves. We

treat them, 'knowing' percepts as they do, as

through and through subjective, and say that

they are wholly constituted of the stuff called

consciousness, using this term now for a kind

of entity, after the fashion which I am seeking

to refute.(1)

Abstracting, then, from percepts altogether,

what I maintain is, that any single non-perceptual

---

1 Of the representative functions 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.

---

experience tends to get counted twice

over, just as a perceptual experience does, figuring

in one context as an object or field of objects,

in another as a state of mind: and all this

without the least internal self-diremption on its

own part into consciousness and content. It is

all consciousness in one taking; and, in the

other, all content.

I find this objectivity of non-perceptual experiences, this complete parallelism in point of

reality between the presently felt and the remotely

thought, so well set forth in a page of

Munsterberg's _Grundzuge_, that I will quote it

as it stands.

"I may only think of my objects," says Professor

Munsterberg; "yet, in my living thought

they stand before me exactly as perceived objects

would do, no matter how different the two

ways of apprehending them may be in their

genesis. The book here lying on the table before

me, and the book in the next room of which I

think and which I mean to get, are both in the

same sense given realities for me, realities

which I acknowledge and of which I take account.

If you agree that the perceptual object

is not an idea within me, but that percept and

thing, as indistinguishably one, are really experienced

_there_, _outside_, you ought not to believe

that the merely thought-of object is hid away

inside of the thinking subject. The object of

which I think, and of whose existence I take

cognizance without letting it now work upon

my senses, occupies its definite place in the

outer world as much as does the object which I

directly see."

"What is true of the here and the there, is

also true of the now and the then. I know of

the thing which is present and perceived, but I

know also of the thing which yesterday was

but is no more, and which I only remember.

Both can determine my present conduct, both

are parts of the reality of which I keep account.

It is true that of much of the past I am uncertain,

just as I am uncertain of much of what

is present if it be but dimly perceived. But the

interval of time does not in principle alter my

relation to the object, does not transform it

from an object known into a mental state....

The things in the room here which I survey,

and those in my distant home of which I think,

the things of this minute and those of my long-

vanished boyhood, influence and decide me

alike, with a reality which my experience of

them directly feels. They both make up my

real world, they make it directly, they do not

have first to be introduced to me and mediated

by ideas which now and here arise

within me.... This not-me character

of my recollections and expectations does not

imply that the external objects of which I am

aware in those experiences should necessarily

be there also for others. The objects of dreamers

and hallucinated persons are wholly without

general validity. But even were they centaurs

and golden mountains, they still would

be 'off there,' in fairy land, and not 'inside' of

ourselves."(1)

This certainly is the immediate, primary,

naif, or practical way of taking our thought-of

world. Were there no perceptual world to

serve as its 'reductive,' in Taine's sense, by

---

1 Munsterberg: _Grundzuge_der_Psychologie_, vol. I, p. 48. ---

being 'stronger' and more genuinely 'outer'

(so that the whole merely thought-of world

seems weak and inner in comparison), our

world of thought would be the only world, and

would enjoy complete reality in our belief.

This actually happens in our dreams, and in

our day-dreams so long as percepts do not

interrupt them.

And yet, just as the seen room (to go back to

our late example) is _also_ a field of consciousness,

so the conceived or recollected room is

_also_ a state of mind; and the doubling-up of the

experience has in both cases similar grounds.

The room thought-of, namely, has many

thought-of couplings with many thought-of

things. Some of these couplings are inconstant,

others are stable. In the reader's personal history

the room occupies a single date -- he saw

it only once perhaps, a year ago. Of the house's

history, on the other hand, it forms a permanent

ingredient. Some couplings have the curious

stubbornness, to borrow Royce's term, of

fact; others show the fluidity of fancy -- we let

them come and go as we please. Grouped with

the rest of its house, with the name of its town,

of its owner, builder, value, decorative plan,

the room maintains a definite foothold, to

which, if we try to loosen it, it tends to return

and to reassert itself with force.(1) With these

associates, in a word, it coheres, while to other

houses, other towns, other owners, etc., it shows

no tendency to cohere at all. The two collections,

first of its cohesive, and, second, of its

loose associates, inevitably come to be contrasted.

We call the first collection the system

of external realities, in the midst of which the

room, as 'real,' exists; the other we call the

stream of internal thinking, in which, as a

'mental image,' it for a moment floats.(2) The

room thus again gets counted twice over. It

plays two different roles, being _Gedanke_ and

_Gedachtes_, the thought-of-an-object, and the

object-thought-of, both in one; and all this

without paradox or mystery, just as the same

---

1 Cf. A.L. Hodder: _The_Adversaries_of_the_Sceptic_, pp.94-99. 2 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.

---

material thing may be both low and high, or

small and great, or bad and good, because of its

relations to opposite parts of an environing

world.

As 'subjective' we say that the experience

represents; as 'objective' it is represented.

What represents and what is represented is here

numerically the same; but we must remember

that no dualism of being represented and representing

resides in the experience _per_se_. In

its pure state, or when isolated, there is no self-

splitting of it into consciousness and what the

consciousness is 'of.' Its subjectivity and objectivity

are functional attributes solely, , realized

only when the experience is 'take,' i.e.,

talked-of, twice, considered along with its two

differing contexts respectively, by a new retrospective

experience, of which that whole past

complication now forms the fresh content.

The instant field of the present is at all times

what I call the 'pure' experience. It is only

virtually or potentially either object or subject

as yet. For the time being, it is plain, unqualified

actuality, or existence, a simple _that_. In this

_naif_ immediacy it is of course _valid_; it is _there_,

we _act_ upon it; and the doubling of it in retrospection

into a state of mind and a reality intended

thereby, is just one of the acts. The

'state of mind,' first treated explicitly as such

in retrospection, will stand corrected or confirmed,

and the retrospective experience in its

turn will get a similar treatment; but the immediate

experience in its passing is always

'truth,'(1) practical truth, _something_to_act_on_, at

its own movement. If the world were then and

there to go out like a candle, it would remain

truth absolute and objective, for it would be

'the last word,' would have no critic, and no

one would ever oppose the thought in it to the

reality intended.(2)

I think I may now claim to have made my

---

1 Note the ambiguity of this term, which is taken sometimes objectively and sometimes subjectively.

2 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 the 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.

---

thesis clear. Consciousness connotes a kind of

external relation, and does not denote a special

stuff or way of being. _The_peculiarity_of_our_experiences,_ _that_they_not_only_are,_but_are_known,_

_which_their_'conscious'_quality_is_invoked_to_

_explain,_is_better_explained_by_their_relations_--

_these_relations_themselves_being_experiences_--_to_

_one_another_.

Were I now to go on to treat of the knowing

of perceptual by conceptual experiences, it

would again prove to be an affair of external

relations. One experience would be the knower,

the other the reality known; and I could

perfectly well define, without the notion of

'consciousness,' what the knowing actually

and practically amounts to -- leading-towards,

namely, and terminating-in percepts, through

a series of transitional experiences which the

world supplies. But I will not treat of this,

space being insufficient.(1) I will rather consider

---

1 I have given a partial account of the matter in _Mind_, vol. X, p. 27, 1885, and in the _Psychological_Review_, vol. II, p. 105, 1895. 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. ---

a few objections that are sure to be urged

against the entire theory as it stands.

First of all, this will be asked: "If experience

has not 'conscious' existence, if it be not

partly made of 'consciousness,' of what then

is it made? Matter we know, and thought we

know, and conscious content we know, but

neutral and simple 'pure experience' is something

we know not at all. Say _what_ it consists

of -- for it must consist of something -- or be

willing to give it up!"

To this challenge the reply is easy. Although

for fluency's sake I myself spoke early in this

article of a stuff of pure experience, I have now

to say that there is no _general_ stuff of which experience at large is made. There are as many

stuffs as there are 'natures' in the things experienced.

If you ask what any one bit of pure

experience is made of, the answer is always the

same: "It is made of _that_, of just what appears,

of space, of intensity, of flatness, brownness,

heaviness, or what not." Shadworth Hodgson's

analysis here leaves nothing to be desired.(1)

Experience is only a collective name

for all these sensible natures, and save for time

and space (and, if you like, for 'being') there

appears no universal element of which all

things are made.

The next objection is more formidable, in

fact it sounds quite crushing when one hears

it first.

"If it be the self-same piece of pure experience,

taken twice over, that serves now as thought and now as thing" -- so the objection runs -- "how comes it that its attributes

should differ so fundamentally in the two takings.

As thing, the experience is extended; as

thought, it occupies no space or place. As

thing, it is red, hard, heavy; but who ever heard

of a red, hard or heavy thought? Yet even

now you said that an experience is made of

just what appears, and what appears is just

such adjectives. How can the one experience

in its thing-function be made of them, consist

of them, carry them as its own attributes, while

in its thought-function it disowns them and

attributes them elsewhere. There is a self-contradiction

here from which the radical dualism

of thought and thing is the only truth that can

save us. Only if the thought is one kind of

being can the adjectives exist in it 'intentionally'

(to use the scholastic term); only if the

thing is another kind, can they exist in it constituitively and energetically. No simple subject

can take the same adjectives and at one

time be qualified by it, and at another time be

merely 'of' it, as of something only meant or

known."

The solution insisted on by this objector, like

many other common-sense solutions, grows

the less satisfactory the more one turns it in

one's mind. To begin with, _are_ thought and

thing as heterogeneous as is commonly said?

No one denies that they have some categories

in common. Their relations to time are identical.

Both, moreover, may have parts (for

psychologists n general treat thoughts as having

them); and both may be complex or simple.

Both are of kinds, can be compared, added and

subtracted and arranged in serial orders. All

sorts of adjectives qualify our thoughts which

appear incompatible with consciousness, being

as such a bare diaphaneity. For instance, they

are natural and easy, or laborious. They are

beautiful, happy, intense, interesting, wise,

idiotic, focal, marginal, insipid, confused,

vague, precise, rational, causal, general, particular,

and many things besides. Moreover,

the chapters on 'Perception' in the psychology-

books are full of facts that make for the

essential homogeneity of thought with thing.

How, if 'subject' and 'object' were separated

'by the whole diameter of being,' and had no

attributes and common, could it be so hard to

tell, in a presented and recognized material

object, what part comes in thought the sense-

organs and what part comes 'out of one's own

head'? Sensations and apperceptive ideas fuse

here so intimately that you can no more tell

where one begins and the other ends, than you

can tell, in those cunning circular panoramas

that have lately been exhibited, where the real

foreground and the painted canvas join together.(1)

Descartes for the first time defined thought

as the absolutely unextended, and later philosophers

have accepted the description as correct.

But what possible meaning has it to say

that, when we think of a foot-rule or a square

yard, extension is not attributable to our

thought? Of every extended object the _adequate_

mental picture must have all the extension

of the object itself. The difference between

objective and subjective extension is

one of relation to a context solely. In the mind

the various extents maintain no necessarily

stubborn order relatively to each other, while

---

1 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.

---

in the physical world they bound each other

stably, and, added together, make the great

enveloping Unit which we believe in and call

real Space. As 'outer,' they carry themselves

adversely, so to speak, to one another, exclude

one another and maintain their distances;

while, as 'inner,' their order is loose, and they

form a _durcheinander_ in which unity is lost.(1)

But to argue from this that inner experience is

absolutely inextensive seems to me little short

of absurd. The two worlds differ, not by the

presence or absence of extension, but by the

relations of the extensions which in both

worlds exist.

Does not this case of extension now put us

on the track of truth in the case of other qualities?

It does; and I am surprised that the facts

should not have been noticed long ago. Why,

for example, do we call a fire hot, and water

wet, and yet refuse to say that our mental

state, when it is 'of' these objects, is either wet

or hot? 'Intentionally,' at any rate, and when

the mental state is a vivid image, hotness and

wetness are in it just as much as they are in the

physical experience. The reason is this, that,

as the general chaos of all our experiences gets

sifted, we find that there are some fires that

will always burn sticks and always warm our

bodies, and that there are some waters that

will always put out fires; while there are other

fires and waters that will not act at all. The

general group of experiences that _act_, that do

not only possess their natures intrinsically, but

wear them adjectively and energetically, turning

them against one another, comes inevitably

to be contrasted with the group whose members,

having identically the same natures, fail

to manifest them in the 'energetic' way.(1) I

make for myself now an experience of blazing

fire; I place it near my body; but it does not

warm me in the least. I lay a stick upon it, and

the stick either burns or remains green, as I

please. I call up water, and pour it on the fire,

and absolutely no difference ensues. I account

for all such facts by calling this whole train

of experiences unreal, a mental train. Mental

fire is what won't burn real sticks; mental water

is what won't necessarily (though of course

it may) put out even a mental fire. Mental

knives may be sharp, but they won't cut real

wood. Mental triangles are pointed, but their

points won't wound. With 'real' objects, on

the contrary, consequences always accrue; and

thus the real experiences get sifted from the

mental ones, the things from out thoughts of

them, fanciful or true, and precipitated together

as the stable part of the whole experience-

chaos, under the name of the physical

world. Of this our perceptual experiences are

the nucleus, they being the originally _strong_

experiences. We add a lot of conceptual experiences

to them, making these strong also in

imagination, and building out the remoter

parts of the physical world by their means;

and around this core of reality the world

of laxly connected fancies and mere rhapsodical

objects floats like a bank of clouds.

In the clouds, all sorts of rules are violated

which in the core are kept. Extensions there

can be indefinitely located; motion there obeys

no Newton's laws.

VII

There is a peculiar class of experience to

which, whether we take them as subjective or

as objective, we _assign their several natures as

attributes, because in both contexts they affect

their associates actively, though in neither

quite as 'strongly' or as sharply as things affect

one another by their physical energies. I

refer here to _appreciations_, which form an ambiguous

sphere of being, belonging with emotion

on the one hand, and having objective 'value'

on the other, yet seeming not quite inner nor

quite outer, as if a diremption had begun but

had not made itself complete.

Experiences of painful objects, for example,

are usually also painful 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 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

experience 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 breath' 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; 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.

A WORLD OF PURE EXPERIENCE

IT is difficult not to notice a curious unrest in

the philosophic atmosphere of the time, always

loosening of old landmarks, a softening of oppositions,

a mutual borrowing from one another reflecting

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 thought 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 bee 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.

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.

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. 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_.(1) 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

---

1 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 _Metaphysics_of_Experience_, vol I., ch. VII and VIII.

---

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 uncertainly) 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 the 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 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 may have employed.

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 _dis_junctions 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.91) I have just treated of type 1, the

---

1 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.

---

kind of knowledge called perception. 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

articles.(1) 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.

Suppose me to be sitting here in my library

---

1 These articles and their doctrine, unnoticed apparently by any one else, have lately gained favorable comment from Professor Strong. Dr. Dickinson S. Miller has independently thought out the same results, which Strong accordingly dubs the James-Miller theory of cognition. ---

at Cambridge, at ten minutes' walk from

'Memorial Hall,' and to be thinking truly of

the latter object. My mind may have before

it only the name, or it may have a clear image,

or it may have a very dim image of the hall, but

such intrinsic differences in the image make no

difference in its cognitive function. Certain

_extrinsic_ phenomena, special experiences of

conjunction, are what impart to the image, be

it what it may, its knowing office.

For instance, if you ask me what hall I mean

by my image, and I call tell you nothing; or if I

fail to point or lead you towards the Harvard

Delta; or if, being led by you, I am uncertain

whether the Hall I see be what I had in mind

or not; you would rightly deny that I had

'meant' that particular hall at all, even though

my mental image might to some degree have

resembled it. The resemblance would count in

that case as coincidental merely, for all sorts

of things of a kind resemble one another in this

world without being held for that reason to

take cognizance of one another.

On the other hand, if I can lead you to the

hall, and tell you of its history and present

uses; if in its presence I feel my idea, however

imperfect it may have been, to have led hither

and to be now _terminated_; if the associates of

the image and of the felt hall run parallel, so

that each term of the one context corresponds

serially, as I walk, with an answering term of

the others; why then my soul was prophetic,

and my idea must be, and by common consent

would be, called cognizant of reality. That percept

was what I _meant_, for into it my idea has

passed by conjunctive experiences of sameness

and fulfilled intention. Nowhere is there jar,

but every later moment continues and corroborates

an earlier one.

In this continuing and corroborating, taken

in no transcendental sense, but denoting definitely

felt transitions, _lies_all_that_the_knowing_

_of_a_percept_by_an_idea_can_possibly_contain_or_

_signify_. Wherever such transitions are felt, the

first experience _knows_ that last one. Where they

do not, or where even as possibles they can not,

intervene, there can be no pretence of knowing.

In this latter case the extremes will be connected,

if connected at all, by inferior relations

-- bare likeness or succession, or by 'withness'

alone. Knowledge of sensible realities thus

comes to life inside the tissue of experience. It

is _made_; and made by relations that unroll

themselves in time. Whenever certain intermediaries

are given, such that, as they develop

towards their terminus, there is experience

from point to point of one direction followed,

and finally of one process fulfilled, the result

is that _their_starting-point_thereby_becomes_a_

_knower_and_their_terminus_an_object_meant_or_

_known_. That is all that knowing (in the simple

case considered) can be known-as, that is

the whole of its nature, put into experiential

terms. Whenever such is the sequence of our

experiences we may freely say that we had the

terminal object 'in mind' from the outset, even

although _at_ the outset nothing was there in us

but a flat piece of substantive experience like

any other, with no self-transcendency about it,

and ny mystery save the mystery of coming

into existence and of being gradually followed

by other pieces of substantive experience, with

conjunctively transitional experiences between.

That is what we _mean_ here by the object's

being 'in mind.' Of any deeper more real way

of being in mind we have no positive conception,

and we have no right to discredit our

actual experience by talking of such a way

at all.

I know that many a reader will rebel at this.

"Mere intermediaries," he will say, "even

though they be feelings of continuously growing

fulfilment, only _separate_ the knower from

the known, whereas what we have in knowledge

is a kind of immediate touch of the one by the

other, an 'apprehension' in the etymological

sense of the word, a leaping of the chasm as by

lightning, an act by which two terms are smitten

into one, over the head of their distinctness.

All these dead intermediaries of yours

are out of each other, and outside of their

termini still."

But do not such dialectic difficulties remind

us of the dog dropping his bone and snapping

at its image in the water? If we knew any more

real kind of union _aliunde_, we might be entitled

to brand all our empirical unions as a sham.

But unions by continuous transition are the

only ones we know of, whether in this matter

of a knowledge-about that terminates in an

acquaintance, whether in personal identity, in

logical predication through the copula 'is,' or

elsewhere. If anywhere there were more absolute

unions realized, they could only reveal

themselves to us by just such conjunctive

results. These are what the unions are _worth_,

these are all that _we_can_ever_practically_mean_

by union, by continuity. Is it not time to

repeat what Lotze said of substances, that to

_act_like_ one is to _be_ one? Should we not say

here that to be experienced as continuous is to

be really continuous, in a world where experience

and reality come to the same thing? In

a picture gallery a painted hook will serve to

hang a painted chain by, a painted cable will

hold a painted ship. In a world where both the

terms and their distinctions are affairs of experience,

conjunctions that are experienced

must be at least as real as anything else. They

will be 'absolutely' real conjunctions, if we have

no transphenomenal Absolute ready, to derealize

the whole experienced world by, at a stroke.

If, on the other hand, we had such an Absolute,

not one of our opponents' theories of knowledge

could remain standing any better than

ours could; for the distinctions as well as the

conjunctions of experience would impartially

fall its prey. The whole question of how 'one'

thing can know 'another' would cease to be a

real one at all in a world where otherness itself

was an illusion.(1)

So much for the essentials of the cognitive

relation, where the knowledge is conceptual in

type, or forms knowledge 'about' an object. It

consists in intermediary experiences (possible,

if not actual) of continuously developing progress,

and, finally, of fulfilment, when the sensible

percept, which is the object, is reached.

The percept here not only _verifies_ the concept,

proves its function of knowing that percept to

---

1 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.

---

be true, but the percept's existence as the

terminus of the chain of intermediaries _creates_

the function. Whatever terminates that chain

was, because it now proves itself to be, what

the concept 'had in mind.'

The towering importance for human life of

this kind of knowing lies in the fact that an

experience that knows another can figure as

its _representative_, not in any quasi-miraculous

'epistemological' sense, but in the definite

practical sense of being its _substitute_ in various

operations, sometimes physical and sometimes

mental, which lead us to its associates and results.

By experimenting on our ideas of reality,

we may save ourselves the trouble of experimenting

on the real experiences which they

severally mean. The ideas form related systems,

corresponding point for point to the systems

which the realities form; and by letting an

ideal term call up its associates systematically,

we may be led to a terminus which the corresponding

real term would have led to in case

we had operated on the real world. And this

brings us to the general question of substitution.

IV. SUBSTITUTION

In Taine's brilliant book on 'Intelligence,'

substitution was for the first time named as

a cardinal logical function, though of course

the facts had always been familiar enough.

What, exactly, in a system of experiences, does

the 'substitution' of one of them for another

mean?

According to my view, experience as a whole

is a process in time, whereby innumerable

particular terms lapse and are superseded by

others that follow upon them by transitions

which, whether disjunctive or conjunctive in

content, are themselves experiences, and must

in general be accounted at least as real as

the terms which they relate. What the nature

of the event called 'superseding' signifies, depends

altogether on the kind of transition

that obtains. Some experiences simply abolish

their predecessors without continuing them

in any way. Others are felt to increase or to

enlarge their meaning, to carry out their purpose,

or to bring us nearer to their goal. They

'represent' them, and may fulfil their function

better than they fulfilled it themselves. But to

'fulfil a function' in a world of pure experience

can be conceived and defined in only one possible

way. IN such a world transitions and

arrivals (or terminations) are the only events

that happen, though they happen by so many

sorts of path. The only experience that one experience

can perform is to lead into another

experience; and the only fulfilment we can

speak of is the reaching of a certain experienced

end. When one experience leads to (or

can lead to) the same end as another, they

agree in function. But the whole system of

experiences as they are immediately given

presents itself as a quasi-chaos through which

one can pass out of an initial term in many

directions and yet end in the same terminus,

moving from next to next by a great many

possible paths.

Either one of these paths might be a functional

substitute for another, and to follow one

rather than another might on occasion be

an advantageous thing to do. As a matter of

fact, and in a general way, the paths that

run through conceptual experiences, that is,

through 'thoughts' or 'ideas' that 'know' the

things in which they terminate, are highly advantageous

paths to follow. Not only do they

yield inconceivably rapid transitions; but, owing

to the 'universal' character(1) which they

frequently possess, and to their capacity for

association with one another in great systems,

they outstrip the tardy consecutions of the

things themselves, and sweep us on towards

our ultimate termini in a far more labor-saving

way than the following of trains of sensible

perception ever could. Wonderful are the new

cuts and the short-circuits which the thought-

paths make. Most thought-paths, it is true,

are substitutes for nothing actual; they end

outside the real world altogether, in wayward

fancies, utopias, fictions or mistakes. But

where they do re-enter reality and terminate

therein, we substitute them always; and with

---

1 Of which all that need be said in this essay is that it also can be conceived as functional, and defined in terms of transitions, or of the possibility of such. ---

these substitutes we pass the greater number

of our hours.

This is why I called our experiences, taken

together, a quasi-chaos. There is vastly

more discontinuity in the sum total of experiences

than we commonly suppose. The objective

nucleus of every man's experience, his own

body, is, it is true, a continuous percept; and

equally continuous as a percept (thought we

may be inattentive to it) is the material environment

of that body, changing by gradual

transition when the body moves. But the

distant parts of the physical world are at all

times absent from us, and form conceptual

objects merely, into the perceptual reality of

which our life inserts itself at points discrete

and relatively rare. Round their several objective

nuclei, partly shared and common and

partly discrete, of the real physical world, innumerable

thinkers, pursuing their several lines

of physically true cogitation, trace paths that

intersect one another only at discontinuous

perceptual points, and the rest of the time are

quite incongruent; and around all the nuclei

of shared 'reality,' as around the Dyak's head

of my late metaphor, floats the vast cloud of

experiences that are wholly subjective, that

are non-substitutional, that find not even an

eventual ending for themselves in the perceptual

world -- there mere day-dreams and

joys and sufferings and wishes of the individual

minds. These exist _with_ one another, indeed,

and with the objective nuclei, but out

of them it is probable that to all eternity no

interrelated system of any kind will every be

made.

This notion of the purely substitutional or

conceptual physical world brings us to the most

critical of all steps in the development of

a philosophy of pure experience. The paradox

of self-transcendency in knowledge comes back

upon us here, but I think that our notions of

pure experience and of substitution, and our

radically empirical view of conjunctive transitions,

are _Denkmittel_ that will carry us safely

through the pass.

V. WHAT OBJECTIVE REFERENCE IS.

Whosoever feels his experience to be something

substitutional even while he has it, may

be said to have an experience that reaches

beyond itself. From inside of its own entity it

says 'more,' and postulates reality existing elsewhere.

For the transcendentalist, who holds

knowing to consist in a _salto_mortale_ across an

'epistemological chasm,' such an idea presents

no difficulty; but it seems at first sight as if it

might be inconsistent with an empiricism like

our own. Have we not explained that conceptual

knowledge is made such wholly by the

existence of things that fall outside of the

knowing experience itself -- by intermediary

experience and by a terminus that fulfils?

Can the knowledge be there before these elements

that constitute its being have come?

And, if knowledge be not there, how can objective

reference occur?

The key to this difficulty lies in the distinction

between knowing as verified and completed,

and the same knowing as in transit

and on its way. To recur to the Memorial

Hall example lately used, it is only when our

idea of the Hall has actually terminated in the

percept that we know 'for certain' that from

the beginning it was truly cognitive of _that_.

Until established by the end of the process, its

quality of knowing that, or indeed of knowing

anything, could still be doubted; and yet the

knowing really was there, as the result now

shows. We were _virtual_ knowers of the Hall

long before we were certified to have been its

actual knowers, by the percept's retroactive

validating power. Just so we are 'mortal' all

the time, by reason of the virtuality of the

inevitable event which will make us so when

it shall have come.

Now the immensely greater part of all our

knowing never gets beyond this virtual stage.

It never is completed or nailed down. I speak

not merely of our ideas of imperceptibles like

ether-waves or dissociated 'ions,' or of 'ejects'

like the contents of our neighbors' minds; I

speak also of ideas which we might verify if we

would take the trouble, but which we hold for

true although unterminated perceptually, because

nothing says 'no' to us, and there is no

contradicting truth in sight. _To_continue_thinking_

_unchallenged_is,_ninety-nine_times_out_of_a_

_hundred,_our_practical_substitute_for_knowing_in_

_the_completed_sense_. As each experience runs by

cognitive transition into the next one, and we

nowhere feel a collision with what we elsewhere

count as truth or fact, we commit ourselves to

the current as if the port were sure. We live,

as it were, upon the front edge of an advancing

wave-crest, and our sense of a determinate

direction in falling forward is all we cover of

the future of our path. It is as if a differential

quotient should be conscious and treat itself as

an adequate substitute for a traced-out curve.

Our experience, _inter_alia_, is of variations of

rate and of direction, and lives in these transitions

more than in the journey's end. The experiences

of tendency are sufficient to act upon

-- what more could we have _done_ at those

moments even if the later verification comes

complete?

This is what, as a radical empiricist, I say to

the charge that the objective reference which

is so flagrant a character of our experience involves

a chasm and a mortal leap. A positively

conjunctive transition involves neither chasm

nor leap. Being the very original of what we

mean by continuity, it makes a continuum

wherever it appears. I know full well that such

brief words as these will leave the hardened

transcendentalist unshaken. Conjunctive experiences

_separate_ their terms, he will still say: they

are third things interposed, that have themselves

to be conjoined by new links, and to invoke

them makes our trouble infinitely worse.

To 'feel' our motion forward is impossible.

Motion implies terminus; and how can terminus

be felt before we have arrived? The barest

start and sally forwards, the barest tendency

to leave the instant, involves the chasm and

the leap. Conjunctive transitions are the most

superficial of appearances, illusions of our sensibility

which philosophical reflection pulverizes

at a touch. Conception is our only trustworthy

instrument, conception and the Absolute

working hand in hand. Conception disintegrates

experience utterly, but its disjunctions

are easily overcome again when the Absolute

takes up the task.

Such transcendentalists I must leave, provisionally

at least, in full possession of their

creed. I have no space for polemics in this

article, so I shall simply formulate the empiricist

doctrine as my hypothesis, leaving it to

work or not work as it may.

Objective reference, I say then, is an incident

of the fact that so much of our experience

comes as an insufficient and consists of

process and transition. Our fields of experience

have no more definite boundaries than have

our fields of view. Both are fringed forever by

a _more_ that continuously develops, and that

continuously supersedes them as life proceeds.

The relations, generally speaking, are as real

here as the terms are, and the only complaint

of the transcendentalist's with which I could

at all sympathize would be his charge that, by

first making knowledge consist in external

relations as I have done, and by then confessing

that nine-tenths of the time these are

not actually but only virtually there, I have

knocked the solid bottom out of the whole

business, and palmed off a substitute of knowledge

for the genuine thing. Only the admission,

such a critic might say, that our ideas are

self-transcendent and 'true' already, in advance

of the experiences that are to terminate

them, can bring solidity back to knowledge

in a world like this, in which transitions and

terminations are only by exception fulfilled.

This seems to me an excellent place for

applying the pragmatic method. When a

dispute arises, that method consists in auguring

what practical consequences would be

different if one side rather than the other were

true. If no difference can be thought of, the

dispute is a quarrel over words. What then

would the self-transcendency affirmed to exist

in advance of all experiential mediation or

terminations, be _known-as?_ What would it

practically result in for _us_, were it true?

It could only result in our orientation, in the

turning of our expectations and practical tendencies

into the right path; and the right path

here, so long as we and the object are not yet

face to face (or can never get face to face, as in

the case of ejects), would be the path that led

us into the object's nearest neighborhood.

Where direct acquaintance is lacking, 'knowledge

about' is the next best thing, and an

acquaintance with what actually lies about the

object, and is most closely related to it, puts

such knowledge within our gasp. Ether-waves

and your anger, for example, are things in

which my thoughts will never _perceptually_ terminate,

but my concepts of them lead me to

their very brink, to the chromatic fringes and

to the hurtful words and deeds which are their

really next effects.

Even if our ideas did in themselves carry the

postulated self-transcendency, it would still

remain true that their putting us into possession

of such effects _would_be_the_sole_cash-_

_value_of_the_self-transcendency_for_us_. And this

cash-value, it is needless to say, is _verbatim_et_

_literatim_ what our empiricist account pays in.

On pragmatist principles, therefore, a dispute

over self-transcendency is a pure logomachy.

Call our concepts of ejective things self-

transcendent or the reverse, it makes no difference,

so long as we don't differ about the

nature of that exalted virtue's fruits -- fruits

for us, of course, humanistic fruits. If an

Absolute were proved to exist for other reasons,

it might well appear that _his_ knowledge is

terminated in innumerable cases where ours is

still incomplete. That, however, would be a

fact indifferent to our knowledge. The latter

would grow neither worse nor better, whether

we acknowledged such an Absolute or left him

out.

So the notion of a knowledge still _in_transitu_

and on its way joins hands here with that

notion of a 'pure experience' which I tried to

explain in my [essay] entitled 'Does Consciousness

Exist?' The instant field of the

present is always experienced in its 'pure' state.

plain unqualified actuality, a simple _that_, as yet

undifferentiated into thing and thought, and

only virtually classifiable as objective fact or as

some one's opinion about fact. This is as true

when the field is conceptual as when it is perceptual.

'Memorial Hall' is 'there' in my idea

as much as when I stand before it. I proceed to

act on its account in either case. Only in the

later experience that supersedes the present

one is this _naif_ immediacy retrospectively split

into two parts, a 'consciousness' and its 'content,'

and the content corrected or confirmed.

While still pure, or present, any experience --

mine, for example, of what I write about in

these very lines -- passes for 'truth.' The

morrow may reduce it to 'opinion.' The transcendentalist

in all his particular knowledges is

as liable to this reduction as I am: his Absolute

does not save him. Why, then, need he quarrel

with an account of knowing that merely leaves

it liable to this inevitable condition? Why insist

that knowing is a static relation out of

time when it practically seems so much a function

of our active life? For a thing to be valid,

says Lotze, is the same as to make itself

valid. When the whole universe seems only

to be making itself valid and to be still incomplete

(else why its ceaseless changing?) why, of

all things, should knowing be exempt? Why

should it not be making itself valid like everything

else? That some parts of it may be already

valid or verified beyond dispute, the

empirical philosopher, of course, like any one

else, may always hope.

VI. THE CONTERMINOUSNESS OF DIFFERENT MINDS

With transition and prospect thus enthroned

in pure experience, it is impossible to subscribe

to the idealism of the English school.

Radical empiricism has, in fact, more affinities

with natural realism than with the views

of Berkeley or of Mill, and this can be easily

shown.

For the Berkeleyan school, ideas (the verbal

equivalent of what I term experiences) are discontinuous.

The content of each is wholly immanent,

and there are no transitions with

which they are consubstantial and through

which their beings may unite. Your Memorial

Hall and mine, even when both are percepts,

are wholly out of connection with each other.

Our lives are a congeries of solipsisms, out of

which in strict logic only a God could compose

a universe even of discourse. No dynamic

currents run between my objects and your

objects. Never can our minds meet in the

_same_.

The incredibility of such a philosophy is

flagrant. It is 'cold, strained, and unnatural'

in a supreme degree; and it may be doubted

whether even Berkeley himself, who took it

so religiously, really believed, when walking

through the streets of London, that his spirit

and the spirits of his fellow wayfarers had

absolutely different towns in view.

To me the decisive reason in favor of our

minds meeting in _some_ common objects at least

is that, unless I make that supposition, I have

no motive for assuming that your mind exists

at all. Why do I postulate your mind? 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.(1)

Practically, then, our minds meet in a world

of objects which they share in common, which

---

1 The notions that our objects are inside of our respective heads is not seriously defensible, so I pass it by.

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.

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 either, 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?

Yet, 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 of 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 no, 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.(1) This opens the

chapter of the relations of radical empiricism

to panspychism, into which I cannot enter

now.

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

---

1 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. ---

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.(1) 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

---

1 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.]

---

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.

III

THE THING AND ITS RELATIONS(1)

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

---

1 [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 authors corrections have been adopted in the present text. ED.]

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 to _naif_, I must

come closer to details, and in the present essay

I propose to do so.

'Pure experience' is the name which I gave

to the immediate flux of life which furnishes

the material to our later reflection with its

conceptual categories. 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 to 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 envelop 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,' is n'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

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 must 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.

Most rationalists nowadays will agree that

naturalism gives a true enough account of the

way in which our intellect arose at first, but

they will deny these latter implications. The

case, they will say, resembles that of sexual

love. Originating in the animal need of getting

another generation born, this passion has 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 undistinguished.

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'(1) 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

---

1 [F.H. Bradley: _Appearance_and_Reality_, second edition, pp. 152-153, 23, 118, 104, 108-109, 570.]

100

rationalism and naturalism, or (as I will now

call it) pragmatism, walk thenceforward upon

opposite paths. For the one, those intellectual

products are most truth 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.

To Be Continued With Part #2