Part #2
In Section VI of [the last essay], I adopted
---
1 Compare Professor MacLennan's admirable _Auseinandersetzung_ with Mr. Bradley, in _The_Journal_of_Philosophy,_Psychology_and_ _Scientific_Methods_, vol. I, [1904], pp. 403 ff., especially pp. 405-407.
101
in a general way the common-sense belief that
one and the same world is cognized by our
different minds; but I left undiscussed the
dialectical arguments which maintain that
this is logically absurd. The usual reason
given for its being absurd is that it assumes
one object (to wit, the world) to stand in two
relations at once; to my mind, namely, and
again to yours; whereas a term taken in a
second relation can not logically be the same
term which it was at first.
I have heard this reason urged so often in
discussing with absolutists, and it would destroy
my radical empiricism so utterly, if it
were valid, that I am bound to give it an attentive
ear, and seriously to search its strength.
For instance, let the matter in dispute be
term M, asserted to be on the one hand related
to L, and on the other to N; and let the two
cases of relation be symbolized by L-M and
M-N respectively. When, now, I assume
that the experience may immediately come
and be given in the shape L-M-N, with
no trace of doubling or internal fission in the
102
M, I am told that this is all a popular delusion;
that L-M-N logically means two different
experiences, L-M and M-N, namely;
and that although the Absolute may, and indeed
must, from its superior point of view,
read its own kind of unity into M's two editions,
yet as elements in finite experience the
two M's lie irretrievably asunder, and the
world between them is broken and unbridged.
In arguing this dialectic thesis, one must
avoid slipping from the logical into the physical
point of view. It would be easy, in taking
a concrete example to fix one's ideas by, to
choose one in which the letter M should stand
for a collective noun of some sort, which noun,
being related to L by one of its parts and to
N by another, would inwardly be two things
when it stood outwardly in both relations.
Thus, one might say: 'David Hume, who
weighed so many stone by his body, influences
posterity by his doctrine.' The body and the
doctrine are two things, between which our
finite minds can discover no real sameness,
though the same never covers both of them.
103
And then, one might continue: 'Only an Absolute
is capable of uniting such a non-identity.'
We must, I say, avoid this sort of example, for
the dialectic insight, if true at all, must apply
to terms and relations universally. It must be
true of abstract units as well as of nouns collective;
and if we prove it by concrete examples
we must take the simplest, so as to avoid
irrelevant material suggestions.
Taken thus in all its generality, the absolutist
contention seems to use as its major
premise Hume's notion 'that all our distinct
perceptions are distinct existences, and that
the mind never perceives any real connexion
among distinct existences.'(1) Undoubtedly,
since we use two phrases in talking first about
'M's relation to L' and then about 'M's relation
to N,' we must be having, or must have
had, two distinct perceptions; -- and the rest
would then seem to follow duly. But the starting-
point of the reasoning here seems to be the
fact of the two _phrases_; and this suggests that
---
1 [Hume: _Treatise_of_Human_Nature_, Appendix, Selby-Bigge's edition, p. 636.]
104
the argument may be merely verbal. Can it be
that the whole dialectic consists in attributing
to the experience talked-about a constitution
similar to that of the language in which we describe
it? Must we assert the objective doubleness
of the M merely because we have to name
it twice over when we name its two relations?
Candidly, I can think of no other reason
than this for the dialectic conclusion;(1) for, if
we think, not of our words, but of any simple
concrete matter which they may be held to
signify, the experience itself belies the paradox
asserted. We use indeed two separate concepts
in analyzing our object, but we know them all
the while to be but substitutional, and that the
M in L-M and the M in M-N _mean_ (i.e.,
are capable of leading to and terminating in)
one self-same piece, M, of sensible experience.
This persistent identity of certain units (or
emphases, or points, or objects, or members --
call them what you will) of the experience-
continuum, is just one of those conjunctive
---
1 Technically, it seems classable as a 'fallacy of composition.' A duality, predicable of the two wholes, L-M and M-N, is
forthwith predicated of one of their parts, M.
105
features of it, on which I am obliged to insist
so emphatically.(1) For samenesses are parts of
experience's indefeasible structure. When I
hear a bell-stroke and, as life flows on, its after
image dies away, I still hark back to it as 'that
same bell-stroke.' When I see a thing M, with
L to the left of it and N to the right of it, I see
it _as_ one M; and if you tell me I have had
to 'take' it twice, I reply that if I 'took' it a
thousand times I should still _see_it as a unity.(2)
Its unity is aboriginal, just as the multiplicity
of my successive takings is aboriginal. It
comes unbroken as _that_ M, as a singular which
I encounter; they come broken, as _those_ takings,
as my plurality of operations. The unity
and the separateness are strictly co-ordinate. I
do not easily fathom why my opponents should
find the separateness so much more easily understandable
that they must needs infect the
whole of finite experience with it, and relegate
---
1 See above, pp. 42 ff.
2 I may perhaps refer here to my _Principles_of_Psychology, vol. I, pp. 459 ff. It really seems 'weird' to have to argue (as I am forced now to do) for the notion that it is one sheet of paper (with its two surfaces and all that lies between) which is both under my pen and on the table while I write -- the 'claim' that it is two sheets seems so brazen. Yet I sometimes suspect the absolutists of sincerity!
106
the unity (now taken as a bare postulate and
no longer as a thing positively perceivable) to
the region of the Absolute's mysteries. I do
not easily fathom this, I say, for the said opponents
are above mere verbal quibbling; yet all
that I can catch in their talk is the substitution
of what is true of certain words for what is
true of what they signify. They stay with the
words, -- not returning to the stream of life
whence all the meaning of them came, and
which is always ready to reabsorb them.
IV
For aught this argument proves, then, we
may continue to believe that one thing can be
known by many knowers. But the denial of
one thing in many relations is but one application
of a still profounder dialectic difficulty.
Man can't be good, said the sophist, for man is
_man_ and _good_ is good; and Hegel(1) and Herbart
in their day, more recently A. Spir,(2) and most
---
1 [For the author's criticism of Hegel's view of relations, cf. _Will_to_Believe_, pp. 278-279, ED.]
2 [Cf. A. Spir: _Denken_und_Wirklichkeit_, part I, bk. III, ch. IV (containing also account of Herbart). ED.]
107
recently and elaborately of all, Mr. Bradley,
informs us that a term can logically only be
a punctiform unit, and that not one of the
conjunctive relations between things, which
experience seems to yield, is rationally possible.
Of course, if true, this cuts off radical empiricism
without even a shilling. Radical empiricism
takes conjunctive relations at their face
value, holding them to be as real as the terms
united by them.(1) The world it represents as a
collection, some parts of which are conjunctively
and others disjunctively related. Two
parts, themselves disjoined, may nevertheless
hang together by intermediaries with which
they are severally connected, and the whole
world eventually may hang together similarly,
inasmuch as _some_ path of conjunctive transition
by which to pass from one of its parts
to another may always be discernible. Such
determinately various hanging-together may
be called _concatenated_ union, to distinguish it
from the 'through-and-through' type of union,
---
1 [See above, pp. 42, 49.]
108
'each in all and all in each' (union of _total_
_conflux_, as one might call it), which monistic
systems hold to obtain when things are taken
in their absolute reality. In a concatenated
world a partial conflux often is experienced.
Our concepts and our sensations are confluent;
successive states of the same ego, and feelings
of the same body are confluent. Where the
experience is not of conflux, it may be of
conterminousness (things with but one thing
between); or of contiguousness (nothing between);
or of likeness; or of nearness; or of
simultaneousness; or of in-ness; or of on-ness;
or of for-ness; or of simple with-ness; or even of
mere and-ness, which last relation would make
of however disjointed a world otherwise, at any
rate for that occasion a universe 'of discourse.'
Now Mr. Bradley tells us that none of these
relations, as we actually experience them, can
possibly be real.(1) My next duty, accordingly,
---
1 Here again the reader must beware of slipping from logical into phenomenal considerations. It may well be that we _attribute_ a certain relation falsely, because the circumstances of the case, being complex, have deceived us. At a railway station we may take our own train, and not the one that fills our window, to be moving. We here put motion in the wrong place in the world, but in its original place the motion is a part of reality. What Mr. Bradley means is nothing like this, but rather that such things as motion are nowhere real, and that, even in their aboriginal and empirically incorrigible seats, relations are impossible of comprehension.
109
must be to rescue radical empiricism from Mr.
Bradley. Fortunately, as it seems to me, his
general contention, that the very notion of relation
is unthinkable clearly, has been successfully
met by many critics.(1)
It is a burden to the flesh, and an injustice
both to readers and to the previous writers, to
repeat good arguments already printed. So, in
noticing Mr. Bradley, I will confine myself to
the interests of radical empiricism solely.
V
The first duty of radical empiricism, taking
given conjunctions at their face-value, is to
class some of them as more intimate and some
as more external. When two terms are _similar_,
their very natures enter into the relation.
---
1 Particularly so by Andrew Seth Pringle-Pattison, in his _Man_and_ _the_Cosmos_; by L.T. Hobhouse, in chapter XII ("The Validity of Judgement") of his _Theory_of_Knowledge_; and by F.C.S. Schiller, in his _Humanism_, essay XI. Other fatal reviews (in my opinion) are Hodder's, in the _Psychological_Review_, vol. I [1894], p. 307; Stout's in the _Proceedings_of_the_Aristotelian_Society, 1901-2, p.1; and MacLennan's in [_The_Journal_of_Philosophy,_Psychology_and_Scientific_Methods_, vol. I, 1904, p. 403].
110
Being _what_ they are, no matter where or when,
the likeness never can be denied, if asserted.
It continues predictable as long as the terms
continue. Other relations, the _where_ and the
_when_, for example, seems adventitious. The
sheet of paper may be 'off' or 'on' the table,
for example; and in either case the relation
involves only the outside of its terms. Having
an outside, both of them, they contribute by it
to the relation. It is external: the term's inner
nature is irrelevant to it. Any book, any table,
may fall into the relation, which is created _pro_
_hac_vice_, not by their existence, but by their
causal situation. It is just because so many of
the conjunctions of experience seem so external
that a philosophy of pure experience must tend
to pluralism in its ontology. So far as things
have space-relations, for example, we are free
to imagine them with different origins even. If
they could get to _be_, and get into space at all,
then they may have done so separately. Once
there, however, they are _additives_ to one another,
and, with no prejudice to their natures,
all sorts of space-relations may supervene between
111
them. The question of how things could
come to be anyhow, is wholly different from
the question what their relations, once the
being accomplished, may consist in.
Mr. Bradley now affirms that such external
relations as the space-relations which we here
talk of must hold of entirely different subjects
from those of which the absence of such relations
might a moment previously have been
plausibly asserted. Not only is the _situation_
different when the book is on the table, but
the _book_itself_ is different as a book, from what
it was when it was off the table.(1) He admits
that "such external relations seem possible
and even existing. . . . That you do not alter
what you compare or rearrange in space seems
to common sense quite obvious, and that on
---
1 Once more, don't slip from logical into physical situations. Of course, if the table be wet, it will moisten the book, or if it be slight enough and the book be heavy enough, the book will break it down. But such collateral phenomena are not the point at issue. The point is whether the successive relations 'on' and 'not-on' can rationally (not physically) hold of the same constant terms, abstractly taken. Professor A.E. Taylor drops from logical into material considerations when he instances color-contrast as a proof that A, 'as contra-distinguished from B, is not the same thing as mere A not in any way affected' (_Elements_of_Metaphysics_, p. 145). Note the substitution, for 'related' of the word 'affected,' which begs the whole question.
112
the other side there are as obvious difficulties
does not occur to common sense at all. And I
will begin by pointing out these difficulties. . . .
There is a relation in the result, and this relation,
we hear, is to make no difference in its
terms. But, if so, to what does it make a difference?
[_Does_n't_it_make_a_difference_to_us_on-_
_lookers,_at_least?_] and what is the meaning and
sense of qualifying the terms by it? [_Surely_the_
_meaning_is_to_tell_the_truth_about_their_relative_
_position_.1] If, in short, it is external to the terms,
how can it possibly be true _of_ them? [_Is_it_the_
_'intimacy'_suggested_by_the_little_word_'of,'_here,_
_which_I_have_understood,_that_is_the_root_of_Mr._
_Bradley's_trouble?] . . . If the terms from their
inner nature do not enter into the relation,
then, so far as they are concerned, they seem
related for no reason at all. . . . Things are spatially
related, first in one way, and then become
related in another way, and yet in no
way themselves are altered; for the relations,
it is said, are but external. But I reply that, if
----
1 But "is there any sense," asks Mr. Bradley, peevishly, on p. 579, "and if so, what sense in truth that is only outside and 'about' things?" Surely such a question may be left unanswered.
113
so, I can not _understand_ the leaving by the
terms of one set of relations and their adoption
of another fresh set. The process and its
result to the terms, if they contribute nothing
to it [_Surely_they_contribute_to_it_all_there_is_
_'of'_it!_] seem irrational throughout. [_If_'irrational'_ _here_means_simply_'non-rational,'_or_non-_
_deducible_from_the_essence_of_either_term_singly,_it_
_is_no_reproach;_if_it_means_'contradicting'_such_
_essence,_Mr._Bradley_should_show_wherein_and_
_how._] But, if they contribute anything, they
_must surely be affected internally. [_Why_so,_
_if_they_contribute_only_their_surface?__In_such_
_relations_as_'on,'_'a_foot_away,'_'between,'_'next,'_
_etc.,_only_surfaces_are_in_question._] . . . If the
terms contribute anything whatever, then the
terms are affected [_inwardly_altered?_] by the
arrangement. . . . That for working purposes
we treat, and do well to treat, some relations
as external merely I do not deny, and that of
course is not the question at issue here. That
question is . . . whether in the end and in
principle a mere external relation -_i.e.,_a_relation_
_which_can_change_without_forcing_its_terms_
114
_to_change_their_nature_simultaneously_] is possible
and forced on us by the facts."(1)
Mr. Bradley next reverts to the antinomies
of space, which, according to him, prove it to
be unreal, although it appears as so prolific a
medium of external relations; and he then concludes
that "Irrationality and externality can
not be the last truth about things. Somewhere
there must be a reason why this and that appear
together. And this reason and reality
must reside in the whole from which terms and
relations are abstractions, a whole in which
their internal connection must lie, and out of
which from the background appear those fresh
results which never could have come from
the premises." And he adds that "Where the
whole is different, the terms that qualify and
contribute to it must so far be different. . . .
They are altered so far only [_How_far?_ farther_
_than_externally,_yet_not_through_and_through?_]
but still they are altered. . . . I must insist
that in each case the terms are qualified by
their whole [_Qualified_how?--Do_their_external_
115
_relations,_situations,_dates,_etc.,_changed_as_these_
_are_in_the_new_whole,_fail_to_qualify_them_'far'_
enough?_], and that in the second case there is a
whole which differs both logically and psychologically
from the first whole; and I urge that
in contributing to the change the terms so far
are altered."
Not merely the relations, then, but the terms
are altered: _Und_zwar_ 'so far.' But just _how_
far is the whole problem; and 'through-and-
through' would seem (in spite of Mr. Bradley's
somewhat undecided utterances(1)) to be the
---
1 I say 'undecided,' because, apart from the 'so far,' what sounds terribly half-hearted, there are passages in these very pages in which Mr. Bradley admits the pluralistic thesis. Read, for example, what he says, on p. 578, of a billiard ball keeping its 'character' unchanged, though, in its change of place, its 'existence' gets altered; or what he says, on p. 579, of the possibility that an abstract quality A, B, or C, in a thing, 'may throughout remain unchanged' although the thing be altered; or his admission that red-hairedness, both as analyzed out of a man and when given with the rest of him, there may be 'no change' p. 580). Why does he immediately add that for the pluralist to plead the non-mutation of such abstractions would be an _ignoratio_ _elenchi?_ It is impossible to admit it to be such. The entire _elenchus_ and inquest is just as to whether parts which you can abstract from their inner nature. If they can thus mould various wholes into new _gestalqualitaten_, then it follows that the same elements are logically able to exist in different wholes [whether physically able would depend on additional hypotheses]; that partial changes are thinkable, and through-and-through change not a dialectic necessity; that monism is only an hypothesis; and that an additively constituted universe is a rationally respectable hypothesis also. All theses of radical empiricism, in short, follow.
116
full Bradleyan answer. The 'whole' which he
here treats as primary and determinative of
each part's manner of 'contributing,' simply
_must_, when it alters, alter in its entirety. There
_must_ be total conflux of its parts, each into
and through each other. The 'must' appears
here as a _Machtspruch_, as an _ipse_dixit_ of Mr.
Bradley's absolutistically tempered 'understanding,'
for he candidly confesses that how
the parts _do_differ as they contribute to different
wholes, is unknown to him.(1)
Although I have every wish to comprehend
the authority by which Mr. Bradley's understanding
speaks, his words leave me wholly
unconverted. 'External relations' stand with
their withers all unwrung, and remain, for
aught he proves to the contrary, not only
practically workable, but also perfectly intelligible
factors of reality.
---
1 Op. cit., pp. 577-579.
117
VI
Mr. Bradley's understanding shows the
most extraordinary power of perceiving separations
and the most extraordinary impotence
in comprehending conjunctions. One would
naturally say 'neither or both,' but not so Mr.
Bradley. When a common man analyzes certain
_whats_ from out the stream of experience, he
understands their distinctness _as_thus_isolated_.
But this does not prevent him from equally
well understanding their combination with
each other _as_originally_experienced_in_the_concrete_,
or their confluence with new sensible experiences
in which they recur as 'the same.'
Returning into the stream of sensible presentation,
nouns and adjectives, and _thats_ and abstract
_whats_, grow confluent again, and the
word 'is' names all these experiences of conjunction.
Mr. Bradley understands the isolation
of the abstracts, but to understand the
combination is to him impossible.(1) "To understand
---
1 So far as I catch his state of mind, it is somewhat like this: 'Book,' 'table,' 'on' -- how does the existence of these three abstract elements result in _this_ book being livingly on _this_table. Why is n't the table on the book? Or why does n't the 'on' connect itself with another book, or something that is not a table? Must n't something _in_ each of the three elements already determine the two others to _it_, so that they do not settle elsewhere or float vaguely? Must n't the _whole_fact_be_prefigured_in_each_part_, and exist _de_jure_ before it can exist _de_fact?_ But, if so, in what can the jural existence consist, if not in a spiritual miniature of the whole fact's constitution actuating every partial factor as its purpose? But is this anything but the old metaphysical fallacy of looking behind a fact _in_esse_ for the ground of the fact, and finding it in the shape of the very same fact _in_posse?_ Somewhere we must leave off with a _constitution_ behind which there is nothing.
118
a complex AB," he says, "I must begin
with A or B. And beginning, say with A, if I
then merely find B, I have either lost A, or
I have got beside A, [_the_word_'beside'_seems_
_here_vital,_as_meaning_a_conjunction_'external'_
_and_therefore_unintelligible_] something else, and
in neither case have I understood.(1) For my
intellect can not simply unite a diversity, nor
has it in itself any form or way of togetherness,
and you gain nothing if, beside A and B,
you offer me their conjunction in fact. For to
my intellect that is no more than another external
element. And 'facts,' once for all, are
for my intellect not true unless they satisfy
it. . . . The intellect has in its nature no
principle of mere togetherness." (2)
---
1 Apply this to the case of 'book-on-table'! W.J.
2 Op. cit., pp. 570, 572.
119
Of course Mr. Bradley has a right to define
'intellect' as the power by which we perceive
separations but not unions -- provided he
give due notice to the reader. But why then
claim that such a maimed and amputated
power must reign supreme in philosophy, and
accuse on its behoof the whole empirical
world of irrationality? It is true that he elsewhere
attributes to the intellect a _proprius_
_motus_ of transition, but says that when he
looks for _these_ transitions in the detail of living
experience, he 'is unable to verify such a
solution.'(1)
Yet he never explains what the intellectual
transitions would be like in case we had them.
He only defines them negatively -- they are
not spatial, temporal, predicative, or causal;
or qualitatively or otherwise serial; or in any
way relational as we naively trace relations,
for relations _separate_ terms, and need themselves
to be hooked on _ad_infinitum_. The nearest
approach he makes to describing a truly
intellectual transition is where he speaks of
---
1 Op. cit., pp. 568, 569.
120
A and B as being 'united, each from its own
nature, in a whole which is the nature of both
alike.'(1) But this (which, _pace_ Mr. Bradley,
seems exquisitely analogous to 'taking' a congeries
in a 'lump,' if not to 'swamping') suggests
nothing but that _conflux_ which pure
experience so abundantly offers, as when
'space,' 'white' and 'sweet' are confluent in
a 'lump of sugar,' or kinesthetic, dermal, and
optical sensations confluent in 'my hand.'(2)
All that I can verify in the transitions which
Mr. Bradley's intellect desiderates as its _proprius_
_motus_ is a reminiscence of these and
other sensible conjunctions (especially space-
conjunctions), but a reminiscence so vague
that its originals are not recognized. Bradley
in short repeats the fable of the dog, the bone,
and its image in the water. With a world of
particulars, given in loveliest union, in conjunction
definitely various, and variously definite,
---
1 Op. cit., p. 570.
2 How meaningless is the contention that in such wholes (or in 'book-on-table,' 'watch-in-pocket,' etc) the relation is an additional entity _between_ the terms, needing itself to be related again to each! Both Bradley (op. cit., pp. 32-33) and Royce (_The_World_and_the_ _Individual_, vol. I, p. 128) lovingly repeat this piece of profundity.
121
the 'how' of which you 'understand' as
soon as you see the fact of them,(1) for there is
no 'how' except the constitution of the fact
as given; with all this given him, I say, in pure
experience, he asks for some ineffable union in
the abstract instead, which, if he gained it,
would only be a duplicate of what he has already
in his full possession. Surely he abuses
the privilege which society grants to all us
philosophers, of being puzzle-headed.
Polemic writing like this is odious; but with
absolutism in possession in so many quarters,
omission to defend my radical empiricism
against its best known champion would count
as either superficiality or inability. I have to
conclude that its dialectic has not invalidated
in the least degree the usual conjunctions by
which the world, as experienced, hangs so variously
together. In particular it leaves an empirical
theory of knowledge(2) intact, and lets
us continue to believe with common sense that
122
one object _may_ be known, if we have any
ground for thinking that it _is_ known, to many
knowers.
In [the next essay] I shall return to this last
supposition, which seems to me to offer other
difficulties much harder for a philosophy of
pure experience to deal with than any of
absolutism's dialectic objections.
123
IV
HOW TWO MINDS CAN KNOW
ONE THING(1)
IN [the essay] entitled 'Does Consciousness
Exist?' I have tried to show that when we call
an experience 'conscious,' that does not mean
that it is suffused throughout with a peculiar
modality of being ('psychic' being) as stained
glass may be suffused with light, but rather
that it stands in certain determinate relations
to other portions of experience extraneous to
itself. These form one peculiar 'context' for
it; while, taken in another context of experiences,
we class it as a fact in the physical
world. This 'pen,' for example, is, in the first
instance, a bald _that_, a datum, fact, phenomenon,
content, or whatever other neutral or
ambiguous name you may prefer to apply. I
called it in that article a 'pure experience.' To
get classed either as a physical pen or as some
one's percept of a pen, it must assume a _function_,
---
1 [Reprinted from _The_Journal_of_Philosophy,_Psychology_and_ _Scientific_Methods_, vol II, No. 7, March 30, 1905.]
124
and that can only happen in a more complicated
world. So far as in that world it is
a stable feature, holds ink, marks paper and
obeys the guidance of a hand, it is a physical
pen. That is what we mean by being 'physical,'
in a pen. So far as it is instable, on the
contrary, coming and going with the movements
of my eyes, altering with what I call my
fancy, continuous with subsequent experiences
of its 'having been' (in the past tense), it is the
percept of a pen in my mind. Those peculiarities
are what we mean by being 'conscious,'
in a pen.
In Section VI of another [essay](1) I tried to
show that the same _that_, the same numerically
identical pen of pure experience, can enter
simultaneously into many conscious contexts,
or, in other words, be an object for many different
minds. I admitted that I had not space
to treat of certain possible objections in that
article; but in [the last essay] I took some of
the objections up. At the end of that [essay]
I said that a still more formidable-sounding
---
1 "A World of Pure Experience," above, pp. 39-91.
125
objections remained; so, to leave my pure-
experience theory in as strong a state as possible,
I propose to consider those objections now.
I
The objections I previously tried to dispose
of were purely logical or dialectical. no one
identical term, whether physical or psychical,
it had been said, could be the subject of two
relations at once. This thesis I sought to prove
unfounded. The objections that now confront
us arise from the nature supposed to inhere in
psychic facts specifically. Whatever may be
the case with physical objects, a fact of consciousness,
it is alleged (and indeed very plausibly),
can not, without self-contradiction, be
treated as a portion of two different minds,
and for the following reasons.
In the physical world we make with impunity
the assumption that one and the same
material object can figure in an indefinitely
large number of different processes at once.
When, for instance, a sheet of rubber is pulled
at its four corners, a unit of rubber in the middle
of the sheet is affected by all four of the
126
pulls. It _transmits_ them each, as if it pulled in
four different ways at once itself. So, an air-
particle or an ether-particle 'compounds' the
different directions of movement imprinted on
it without obliterating their several individualities.
It delivers them distinct, on the contrary,
at as many several 'receivers' (ear, eye or what
not) as may be 'tuned' to that effect. The apparent
paradox of a distinctness like this surviving
in the midst of compounding is a thing
which, I fancy, the analyses made by physicists
have by this time sufficiently cleared up.
But if, on the strength of these analogies, one
should ask: "Why, if two or more lines can run
through one and the same geometrical point,
or if two or more distinct processes of activity
can run through one and the same physical
thing so that it simultaneously plays a role
in each and every process, might not two or
more streams of personal consciousness include
one and the same unit of experience so that it
would simultaneously be a part of the experience
of all the different minds?" one would be
checked by thinking of a certain peculiarity by
127
which phenomena of consciousness differ from
physical things.
While physical things, namely, are supposed
to be permanent and to have their 'states,' a
fact of consciousness exists but once and _is_ a
state. Its _esse_ is _sentiri_; it is only so far as it is felt; and it is unambiguously and unequivocally
exactly _what_ is felt The hypothesis under
consideration would, however, oblige it to be
felt equivocally, felt now as part of my mind
and again at the same time _not_ as a part of my
mind, but of yours (for my mind is _not) yours),
and this would seem impossible without doubling
it into two distinct things, or, in other
words, without reverting to the ordinary dualistic
philosophy of insulated minds each knowing
its object representatively as a third thing,
-- and that would be to give up the pure-
experience scheme altogether.
Can we see, then, any way in which a unit of
pure experience might enter into and figure in
two diverse streams of consciousness without
turning itself into the two units which, on our
hypothesis, it must not be?
128
II
There is a way; and the first step towards it
is to see more precisely how the unit enters into
either one of the streams of consciousness
alone. Just what, from being 'pure,' does its
becoming 'conscious' _once_ mean?
It means, first, that new experiences have
supervened; and, second, that they have
borne a certain assignable relation to the unit
supposed. Continue, if you please, to speak of
the pure unit as 'the pen.' So far as the pen's
successors do but repeat the pen or, being
different from it, are 'energetically'(1) related
to it, and they will form a group of stably
existing physical things. So far, however, as
its successors differ from it in another well-
determined way, the pen will figure in their
context, not as a physical, but as a mental fact.
It will become a passing 'percept,' _my_ percept
of that pen. What now is that decisive well-
determined way?
In the chapter on 'The Self,' in my _Principles_
---
1 [For an explanation of this expression, see above, p. 32.]
129
_of_Psychology_, I explained the continuous identity
of each personal consciousness as a name
for the practical fact that new experiences(1)
come which look back on the old ones, find
them 'warm,' and greet and appropriate them
as 'mine.' These operations mean, when analyzed
empirically, several tolerably definite
things, viz.:
1. That the new experience has past time for
its 'content,' and in that time a pen that 'was';
2. That 'warmth' was also about the pen,
in the sense of a group of feelings ('interest'
aroused, 'attention' turned, 'eyes' employed,
etc.) that were closely connected with it and
that now recur and evermore recur with unbroken
vividness, though from the pen of now,
which may be only an image, all such vividness
may have gone;
3. That these feelings are the nucleus of 'me';
4. That whatever once was associated with
them was, at least for that one moment,
'mine' -- my implement if associated with
---
1 I call them 'passing thoughts' in the book -- the passage in point goes from pages 330 to 342 of vol. I.
130
hand-feelings, my 'percept' only, if only eye-
feelings and attention-feelings were involved.
The pen, realized in this retrospective way
as my percept, thus figures as a fact of 'conscious'
life. But it does so only so far as 'appropriation'
has occurred; and appropriation
is _part_of_the_content_of_a_later_experience_ wholly
additional to the originally 'pure' pen. _That_
pen, virtually both objective and subjective, is
at its own moment actually and intrinsically
neither. It has to be looked back upon and
_used_, in order to be classed in either distinctive
way. But its use, so called, is in the hands of
the other experience, while _it_ stands, throughout
the operation, passive and unchanged.
If this pass muster as an intelligible account
of how an experience originally pure can enter
into one consciousness, the next question is as
to how it might conceivably enter into two.
III
Obviously no new kind of condition would
have to be supplied. All that we should have
to postulate would be a second subsequent
131
experience, collateral and contemporary with
the first subsequent one, in which a similar act
of appropriation should occur. The two acts
would interfere neither with one another nor
with the originally pure pen. It would sleep
undisturbed in its own past, no matter how
many such successors went through their several
appropriative acts. Each would know it
as 'my' percept, each would class it as a 'conscious'
fact.
Nor need their so classing it interfere in the
least with their classing it at the same time as
a physical pen. Since the classing in both cases
depends upon the taking of it in one group or
another of associates, if the superseding experience
were of wide enough 'span' it could think
the pen in both groups simultaneously, and yet
distinguish the two groups. It would then see
the whole situation conformably to what, we
call 'the representative theory of cognition,'
and that is what we all spontaneously do. As a
man philosophizing 'popularly,' I believe that
what I see myself writing with is double -- I
think it in its relations to physical nature, and
132
also in its relations to my personal life; I see
that it is in my mind, but that it also is a
physical pen.
The paradox of the same experience figuring
in two consciousnesses seems thus no paradox
at all. To be 'conscious' means not simply to
be, but to be reported, known, to have awareness
of one's being added to that being; and
this is just what happens when the appropriative
experience supervenes. The pen-experience
in its original immediacy is not aware of
itself, it simply _is_, and the second experience is
required for what we call awareness of it to
occur.(1) The difficulty of understanding what
happens here is, therefore, not a logical difficulty:
there is no contradiction involved. It is
an ontological difficulty rather. Experiences
come on an enormous scale, and if we take
---
1 Shadworth Hodgson has laid great stress on the fact that the minimum of consciousness demands two subfeelings of which the second retrospects the first. (Cf. the section 'Analysis of Minima' in his _Philosophy_of_Reflection_, vol. I, p. 248; also the chapter entitled 'The Moment of Experience' in his _Metaphysic_of_Experience_, vol. I, p. 34.) 'We live forward, but we understand backward' is a phrase of Kierkegaard's which Hoffding quotes. [H. Hoffding: "A Philosophical Confession,"
_Journal_of_Philosophy,_Psychology_and_Scientific_Methods_, vol. II, 1905, p. 86.
133
them all together, they come in a chaos of
incommensurable relations that we can not
straighten out. We have to abstract different
groups of them, and handle these separately
if we are to talk of them at all. But how the
experiences ever _get_themselves_made_, or _why_
their characters and relations are just such
as appear, we can not begin to understand..
Granting, however, that, by hook or crook,
they _can_ get themselves made, and can appear
in the successions that I have so schematically
described, then we have to confess that even
although (as I began by quoting from the adversary)
'a feeling only is as it is felt,' there is
still nothing absurd in the notion of its being
felt in two different ways at once, as yours,
namely, and as mine. It is, indeed, 'mine' only
as it is felt as mine, and 'yours' only as it is
felt as yours. But it is felt as neither _by_itself_,
but only when 'owned' by our two several remembering
experiences, just as one undivided
estate is owned by several heirs.
134
IV
One word, now, before I close, about the
corollaries of the view set forth. Since the
acquisition of conscious quality on the part of
an experience depends upon a context coming
to it, it follows that the sum total of all experiences,
having no context, can not strictly be
called conscious at all. It is a _that_, an Absolute,
a 'pure' experience on an enormous
scale, undifferentiated and undifferentiable
into thought and thing. This the post-Kantian
idealists have always practically acknowledged
by calling their doctrine an _Identitats-_
_philosophie_. The question of the _Beseelung_ of
the All of things ought not, then, even to be
asked. No more ought the question of its _truth_
to be asked, for truth is a relation inside of the
sum total, obtaining between thoughts and
something else, and thoughts, as we have seen,
can only be contextual things. In these respects
the pure experiences of our philosophy
are, in themselves considered, so many little
absolutes, the philosophy of pure experience
135
being only a more comminuted _Identitatsphilosphie_.(1)
Meanwhile, a pure experience can be postulated
with any amount whatever of span or
field. If it exert the retrospective and appropriative
function on any other piece of experience,
the latter thereby enters into its own
conscious stream. And in this operation time
intervals make no essential difference. After
sleeping, my retrospection is as perfect as it is
between two successive waking moments of my
time. Accordingly if, millions of years later, a
similarly retrospective experience should anyhow
come to birth, my present thought would
form a genuine portion of its long-span conscious
life. 'Form a portion,' I say, but not in
the sense that the two things could be entitatively
or substantively one -- they cannot,
for they are numerically discrete facts -- but
only in the sense that the _functions_ of my present
thought, its knowledge, its purpose, its
content and 'consciousness,' in short, being
inherited, would be continued practically
---
1 [Cf. below, pp. 197, 202.]
136
unchanged. Speculations like Fechner's, of an
Earth-soul, of wider spans of consciousness
enveloping narrower ones throughout the cosmos,
are, therefore, philosophically quite in
order, provided they distinguish the functional
from the entitative point of view, and do not
treat the minor consciousness under discussion
as a kind of standing material of which the
wider ones _consist_.(1)
---
1 [Cf. _A_Pluralistic_Universe_, Lect. IV, 'Concerning Fechner,' and Lect. V, 'The Compounding of Consciousness.']
137
V
THE PLACE OF AFFECTIONAL
FACTS IN A WORLD OF PURE
EXPERIENCE(1)
COMMON sense and popular philosophy are as
dualistic as it is possible to be. Thoughts, we
all naturally think, are made of one kind of
substance, and things of another. Consciousness,
flowing inside us in the forms of conception
or judgement, or concentrating itself in
the shape of passion or emotion, can be directly
felt as the spiritual activity which it is, and
known in contrast with the space-filling, objective
'content' which it envelops and accompanies.
In opposition to this dualistic
philosophy, I tried, in [the first essay] to show
that thoughts and things are absolutely homogeneous
as to their material, and that their
opposition is only one of relation and of function.
There is no thought-stuff different from
thing-stuff, I said; but the same identical piece
---
1 [Reprinted from _The_Journal_of_Philosophy,_Psychology_and_ _Scientific_Methods_, vol II,, No. 11, May 25, 1905.]
138
of 'pure experience' (which was the name I
gave to the _materia_prima_ of everything) can
stand alternately for a 'fact of consciousness'
or for a physical reality, according as it is taken
in one context or in another. For the right
understanding of what follows, I shall have to
presuppose that the reader will have read that
-essay].(1)
The commonest objection which the doctrine
there laid down runs up against is drawn
from the existence of our 'affections.' In our
pleasures and pains, our loves and fears and
angers, in the beauty, comicality, importance
or preciousness of certain objects and situations,
we have, I am told by many critics, a
great realm of experience intuitively recognized
as spiritual, made, and felt to be made,
of consciousness exclusively, and different in
nature from the space-filling kind of being
which is enjoyed by physical objects. In
Section VII, of [the first essay], I treated of
this class of experiences inadequately,
---
1 It will be still better if he shall have also read the [essay] entitled 'A World of Pure Experience,' which follows [the first] and develops its ideas still farther.
139
because I had to be brief. I now return to
the subject, because I believe that, so far from
invalidating my general thesis, these phenomena,
when properly analyzed, afford it powerful
support.
The central point of the pure-experience theory
is that 'outer' and 'inner' are names for
two groups into which we sort experiences
according to the way in which they act upon
their neighbors. Any one 'content,' such as
_hard_, let us say, can be assigned to either
group. In the outer group it is 'strong,' it acts
'energetically' and aggressively. Here whatever
is hard interferes with the space its neighbors
occupy. It dents them; is impenetrable
by them; and we call the hardness then a physical
hardness. In the mind, on the contrary,
the hard thing is nowhere in particular, it
dents nothing, it suffuses through its mental
neighbors, as it were, and interpenetrates
them. Taken in this group we call both it and
them 'ideas' or 'sensations'; and the basis of
the two groups respectively is the different
type of interrelation, the mutual impenetrability,
140
on the one hand, and the lack of physical
interference and interaction, on the other.
That what in itself is one and the same
entity should be able to function thus differently
in different contexts is a natural consequence
of the extremely complex reticulations
in which our experiences come. To her offspring
a tigress is tender, but cruel to every
other living thing -- both cruel and tender,
therefore, at once. A mass in movement resists
every force that operates contrariwise to its
own direction, but to forces that pursue the
same direction, or come in at right angles, it is
absolutely inert. It is thus both energetic and
inert; and the same is true (if you vary the
associates properly) of every other piece of
experience. It is only towards certain specific
groups of associates that the physical energies
as we call them, of a content are put forth. In
another group it may be quite inert.
It is possible to imagine a universe of experiences
in which the only alternative between
neighbors would be either physical interaction
or complete inertness. In such a world the
141
mental or the physical _status) of any piece of
experience would be unequivocal. When active,
it would figure in the physical, and when
inactive, in the mental group.
But the universe we live in is more chaotic
than this, and there is room in it for the hybrid
or ambiguous group of our affectional experiences,
of our emotions and appreciative perceptions.
In the paragraphs that follow I shall
try to show:
(1) That the popular notion that these experiences
are intuitively given as purely inner
facts is hasty and erroneous; and
(2) That their ambiguity illustrates beautifully
my central thesis that subjectivity and
objectivity are affairs not of what an experience
is aboriginally made of, but of its classification.
Classifications depend on our temporary
purposes. For certain purposes it is
convenient to take things in one set of relations,
for other purposes in another set. In the
two cases their contexts are apt to be different.
In the case of our affectional experiences we
have no permanent and steadfast purpose that
142
obliges us to be consistent, so we find it easy to
let them float ambiguously, sometimes classing
them with our feelings, sometimes with
more physical realities, according to caprice
or to the convenience of the moment. Thus
would these experiences, so far from being
an obstacle to the pure experience philosophy,
serve as an excellent corroboration of its
truth.
First of all, then, it is a mistake to say, with
the objectors whom I began by citing, that
anger, love and fear are affections purely of the
mind. That, to a great extent at any rate, they
are simultaneously affections of the body is
proved by the whole literature of the James-
Lange theory of emotion.(1) All our pains,
moreover, are local, and we are always free to
speak of them in objective as well as in subjective
terms. We can say that we are aware of
a painful place, filling a certain bigness in our
organism, or we can say that we are inwardly
in a 'state' of pain. All our adjectives of
---
1 [Cf. _The_Principles_of_Psychology_, vol. II, ch. XXV; and "The Physical Basis of Emotion," _The_Psychological_Review_, vol. I, 1894, p. 516.]
worth are similarly ambiguous -- I instanced
some of the ambiguities [in the first essay].(1)
Is the preciousness of a diamond a quality of
the gem? or is it a feeling in our mind? Practically
we treat it as both or as either, according
to the temporary direction of our thought.
'Beauty,' says Professor Santayana, 'is pleasure
objectified'; and in Sections 10 and 11 of
his work, _The_Sense_of_Beauty_, he treats in a
masterly way of this equivocal realm. The
various pleasures we receive from an object
may count as 'feelings' when we take them
singly, but when they combine in a total richness,
we call the result the 'beauty' of the
object, and treat it as an outer attribute which
our mind perceives. We discover beauty just as
we discover the physical properties of things.
Training is needed to make us expert in either
line. Single sensations also may be ambiguous.
Shall we say an 'agreeable degree of heat,' or
an 'agreeable feeling' occasioned by the degree
of heat? Either will do; and language would
lose most of its esthetic and rhetorical value
---
1 [See above, pp. 34, 35.]
144
were we forbidden to project words primarily
connoting our affections upon the objects by
which the affections are aroused. The man
is really hateful; the action really mean; the
situation really tragic -- all in themselves and
quite apart from our opinion. We even go so
far as to talk of a weary road, a giddy height, a
jocund morning or a sullen sky; and the term
'indefinite' while usually applied only to our
apprehensions, functions as a fundamental
physical qualification of things in Spencer's
'law of evolution,' and doubtless passes with
most readers for all right.
Psychologists, studying our perceptions of
movement, have unearthed experiences in
which movement is felt in general but not
ascribed correctly to the body that really
moves. Thus in optical vertigo, caused by
unconscious movements of our eyes, both we
and the external universe appear to be in a
whirl. When clouds float by the moon, it is as
if both clouds and moon and we ourselves
shared in the motion. In the extraordinary
case of amnesia of the Rev. Mr. Hanna, published
145
by Sidis and Goodhart in their important
work on _Multiple_Personality_, we read that
when the patient first recovered consciousness
and "noticed an attendant walk across the
room, he identified the movement with that of
his own. He did not yet discriminate between
his own movements and those outside himself."(1)
Such experiences point to a primitive
stage of perception in which discriminations
afterwards needful have not yet been made.
A piece of experience of a determinate sort
is there, but there at first as a 'pure' fact.
Motion originally simply _is_; only later is it
confined to this thing or to that. Something
like this is true of every experience, however
complex, at the moment of its actual presence.
Let the reader arrest himself in the act of reading
this article now. _Now_ this is a pure experience,
a phenomenon, or datum, a mere _that_ or
content of fact. _'Reading'_simply_is,_is_there_;
and whether there for some one's consciousness,
or there for physical nature, is a question
not yet put. At the moment, it is there for
---
1 Page 102.
146
neither; later we shall probably judge it to
have been there for both.
With the affectional experiences which we
are considering, the relatively 'pure' condition
lasts. In practical life no urgent need has
yet arisen for deciding whether to treat them
as rigorously mental or as rigorously physical
facts. So they remain equivocal; and, as the
world goes, their equivocality is one of their
great conveniences.
The shifting place of 'secondary qualities' in
the history of philosophy(1) is another excellent
proof of the fact that 'inner' and 'outer' are
not coefficients with which experiences come to
us aboriginally stamped, but are rather results
of a later classification performed by us for
particular needs. The common-sense stage of
thought is a perfectly definite practical halting-
place, the place where we ourselves can
proceed to act unhesitatingly. On this stage
of thought things act on each other as well
as on us by means of their secondary qualities.
---
1 [Cf. Janet and Seailles: _History_of_the_Problems_of_Philosophy_, trans. by Monahan, part I, ch. III.]
Sound, as such, goes through the air
and can be intercepted. The heat of the fire
passes over, as such, into the water which it
sets a-boiling. It is the very light of the arc-
lamp which displaces the darkness of the midnight
street, etc. By engendering and translocating
just these qualities, actively efficacious
as they seem to be, we ourselves succeed in
altering nature so as to suit us; and until more
purely intellectual, as distinguished from practical,
needs had arisen, no one ever thought
of calling these qualities subjective. When,
however, Galileo, Descartes, and others found
it best for philosophic purposes to class sound,
heat, and light along with pain and pleasure
as purely mental phenomena, they could do so
with impunity.(1)
Even the primary qualities are undergoing
the same fate. Hardness and softness are effects
on us of atomic interactions, and the
atoms themselves are neither hard nor soft,
nor solid nor liquid. Size and shape are deemed
---
1 [Cf. Descartes: _Meditation_ II; _Principles_of_Philosophy_, part I, XLVIII.]
148
subjective by Kantians; time itself is subjective
according to many philosophers;(1) and
even the activity and causal efficacy which
lingered in physics long after secondary qualities
were banished are now treated as illusory
projections outwards of phenomena of our
own consciousness. There are no activities or
effects in nature, for the most intellectual
contemporary school of physical speculation.
Nature exhibits only _changes_, which habitually
coincide with one another so that their habits
are describable in simple 'laws.'(2)
There is no original spirituality or materiality
of being, intuitively discerned, then; but
only a translocation of experiences from one
world to another; a grouping of them with
one set or another of associates for definitely
practical or intellectual ends.
I will say nothing here of the persistent
ambiguity of _relations_. They are undeniable
parts of pure experience; yet, while common
sense and what I call radical empiricism stand
---
1 [Cf. A.E. Taylor: _Elements_of_Metaphysics_, bk. III, ch. IV.] 2 [Cf. K. Pearson: _Grammar_of_Science_, ch. III.]
149
for their being objective, both rationalism and
the usual empiricism claim that they are exclusively
the 'work of the mind' -- the finite
mind or the absolute mind, as the case may be.
Turn now to those affective phenomena
which more directly concern us.
We soon learn to separate the ways in which
things appeal to our interests and emotions
from the ways in which they act upon one
another. It does not _work_ to assume that physical
objects are going to act outwardly by
their sympathetic or antipathetic qualities.
The beauty of a thing or its value is no force
that can be plotted in a polygon of compositions,
nor does its 'use' or 'significance' affect in
the minutest degree its vicissitudes or destiny
at the hands of physical nature. Chemical
'affinities' are a purely verbal metaphor; and,
as I just said, even such things as forces, tensions,
and activities can at a pinch be regarded
as anthropomorphic projections. So far, then,
as the physical world means the collection of
contents that determine in each other certain
150
regular changes, the whole collection of our
appreciative attributes has to be treated as
falling outside of it. If we mean by physical
nature whatever lies beyond the surface of our
bodies, these attributes are inert throughout
the whole extent of physical nature.
Why then do men leave them as ambiguous
as they do, and not class them decisively as
purely spiritual?
The reason would seem to be that, although
they are inert as regards the rest of physical
nature, they are not inert as regards that part
of physical nature which our own skin covers.
It is those very appreciative attributes of
things, their dangerousness, beauty, rarity,
utility, etc., that primarily appeal to our
attention. In our commerce with nature these
attributes are what give _emphasis_ to objects;
and for an object to be emphatic, whatever
spiritual fact it may mean, means also that it
produces immediate bodily effects upon us,
alterations of tone and tension, of heart-beat
and breathing, of vascular and visceral action.
The 'interesting' aspects of thins are thus
151
not wholly inert physically, though they be
active only in these small corners of physical
nature which our bodies occupy. That,
however, is enough to save them from being
classed as absolutely non-objective.
The attempt, if any one should make it, to
sort experience into two absolutely discrete
groups, with nothing but inertness in one of
them and nothing but activities in the other,
would thus receive one check. It would receive
another as soon as we examined the more
distinctively mental group; for though in that
group it be true that things do not act on one
another by their physical properties do not
dent each other or set fire to each other, they
yet act on each other in the most energetic
way by those very characters which are so
inert extracorporeally. It is by the interest
and importance that experiences have for us,
by the emotions they excite, and the purposes
they subserve, by their affective values, in
short, that their consecution in our several
conscious streams, as 'thoughts' of ours, is
mainly ruled. Desire introduces them; interest
152
holds them; fitness fixes their order and connection.
I need only refer for this aspect of
our mental life, to Wundt's article 'Ueber
psychische Causalitat,' which begins Volume
X. of his _Philosophische_Studien_.(1)
It thus appears that the ambiguous or amphibious
_status_ which we find our epithets of
value occupying is the most natural thing in
the world. It would, however, be an unnatural
status if the popular opinion which I cited
at the outset were correct. If 'physical' and
'mental' meant two different kinds of intrinsic
nature, immediately, intuitively, and
infallibly discernible, and each fixed forever
in whatever bit of experience it qualified,
one does not see how there could ever have
arisen any room for doubt or ambiguity.
But if, on the contrary, these words are
words of sorting, ambiguity is natural. For
then, as soon as the relations of a thing are
sufficiently various it can be sorted variously.
---
1 It is enough for my present purpose if the appreciative characters but _seem_ to act thus. Believers in an activity _an_sich_, other than our mental experiences of activity, will find some farther reflections on the subject in my address on 'The Experience of Activity.' [The next essay. Cf. especially, p. 169. ED.]
153
Take a mass of carrion, for example, and the
'disgustingness' which for us is a part of the
experience. The sun caresses it, and the
zephyr wooes it as if it were a bed of roses.
So the disgustingness fails to _operate_ within
the realm of suns and breezes, -- it does not
function as a physical quality. But the carrion
'turns our stomach' by what seems a direct
operation -- it _does_ function physically, therefore,
in that limited part of physics. We can
treat it as physical or as non-physical according
as we take it in the narrower or in the wider
context, and conversely, of course, we must
treat it as non-mental or as mental.
Our body itself is the palmary instance of
the ambiguous. Sometimes I treat my body
purely as a part of outer nature. Sometimes,
again, I think of it as 'mine,' I sort it with
the 'me,' and then certain local changes and
determinations in it pass for spiritual happenings.
Its breathing is my 'thinking,' its sensorial
adjustments are my 'attention,' its
kinesthetic alterations are my 'efforts,' its
visceral perturbations are my 'emotions.'
154
The obstinate controversies that have arisen
over such statements as these (which sound so
paradoxical, and which can yet be made so
seriously) prove how hard it is to decide by
bare introspection what it is in experiences
that shall make them either spiritual or
material. It surely can be nothing intrinsic in
the individual experience. It is their way of
behaving towards each other, their system of
relations, their functions; and all these things
vary with the context in which we find it
opportune to consider them.
I think I may conclude, then (and I hope
that my readers are now ready to conclude
with me), that the pretended spirituality of
our emotions and of our attributes of value,
so far from proving an objection to the philosophy
of pure experience, does, when rightly
discussed and accounted for, serve as one of
its best corroborations.
155
VI
THE EXPERIENCE OF ACTIVITY(1)
BRETHREN OF THE PSYCHOLOGICAL ASSOCIATION:
IN casting about me for a subject for your
President this year to talk about it has seemed
to me that our experiences of activity would
form a good one; not only because the topic
is so naturally interesting, and because it has
lately led to a good deal of rather inconclusive
discussion, but because I myself am growing
more and more interested in a certain systematic
way of handling questions, and want to get
others interested also, and this question strikes
me as one in which, although I am painfully
aware of my inability to communicate new
discoveries or to reach definitive conclusions,
I yet can show, in a rather definite manner,
how the method works.
---
1 President's Address before the American Psychological Association, Philadelphia Meeting, December, 1904. [Reprinted from _The_ _Psychological_Review_, vol. XII, No. 1, Jan., 1905. Also reprinted with some omissions, as Appendix B, _A_Pluralistic_Universe, pp. 370-394. Pp. 166-167 have also been reprinted in
_Some_Problems_of_Philosophy_, p. 212. The present essay is referred to in _Ibid._, p. 219, note. The author's corrections have been adopted for the present text. ED.]
156
The way of handling things I speak of, is, as
you already will have suspected, that known
sometimes as the pragmatic method, sometimes
as humanism, sometimes as Deweyism,
and in France, by some of the disciples of
Bergson, as the Philosophie nouvelle. Professor
Woodbridge's _Journal_of_Philosophy_(1) seems
unintentionally to have become a sort of meeting
place for those who follow these tendencies
in America. There is only a dim identity
among them; and the most that can be said at
present is that some sort of gestation seems to
be in the atmosphere, and that almost any day
a man with a genius for finding the right word
for things may hit upon some unifying and
conciliating formula that will make so much
vaguely similar aspiration crystallize into
more definite form.
I myself have given the name of 'radical
empiricism' to that version of the tendency in
question which I prefer; and I propose, if you
will now let me, to illustrate what I mean by
radical empiricism, by applying it to activity
---
1 [_The_Journal_of_Philosophy,_Psychology_and_Scientific_Methods_.]
157
as an example, hoping at the same time incidentally
to leave the general problem of activity
in a slightly -- I fear very slightly -- more
manageable shape than before.
Mr. Bradley calls the question of activity a
scandal to philosophy, and if one turns to the
current literature of the subject -- his own
writings included -- one easily gathers what
he means. The opponents cannot even understand
one another. Mr. Bradley says to Mr.
Ward: "I do not care what your oracle is,
and your preposterous psychology may here be
gospel if you please; . . . but if the revelation
does contain a meaning, I will commit
myself to this: either the oracle is so confused
that its signification is not discoverable, or,
upon the other hand, if it can be pinned down
to any definite statement, then that statement
will be false."(1) Mr. Ward in turn says
of Mr. Bradley: "I cannot even imagine the
state of mind to which his description applies.
. . . [It] reads like an unintentional travesty
---
1 _Appearance_and_Reality_, second edition. pp. 116-117. -- Obviously written _at_ Ward, though Ward's name is not mentioned
158
of Herbartian psychology by one who has
tried to improve upon it without being at the
pains to master it."(1) Munsterberg excludes a
view opposed to his own by saying that with
any one who holds it a _Verstandigung_ with
him is "_grundsatzlich_ausgeschlosen_"; and
Royce, in a review of _Stoud_,(2) hauls him over
the coals at great length for defending 'efficacy'
in a way which I, for one, never gathered
from reading him, and which I have
heard Stout himself say was quite foreign to
the intention of his text.
In these discussion distinct questions are
habitually jumbled and different points of
view are talked of _durcheinander_.
(1) There is a psychological question: "Have
we perceptions of activity? and if so, what are
they like, and when and where do we have
them?"
(2) There is a metaphysical question: "Is
there a _fact_ of activity? and if so, what idea
must we frame of it? What is it like? and what
---
1 [_Mind_, vol. XII, 1887, pp. 573-574.]
2 _Mind_, N.S., vol. VI, [1897], p. 379.
159
does it do, if it does anything?" And finally
there is a logical question:
(3) "Whence do we _know_ activity? By our
own feelings of it solely? or by some other
source of information?" Throughout page
after page of the literature one knows not
which of these questions is before one; and
mere description of the surface-show of experience
is proffered as if it implicitly answered
every one of them. No one of the disputants,
moreover, tries to show what pragmatic consequences
his own view would carry, or what
assignable particular differences in any one's
experience it would make if his adversary's
were triumphant.
It seems to me that if radical empiricism be
good for anything, it ought, with its pragmatic
method and its principle of pure experience,
to be able to avoid such tangles, or at least
to simplify them somewhat. The pragmatic
method starts from the postulate that there is
no difference of truth that does n't make a
difference of fact somewhere; and it seeks to
determine the meaning of all differences of
160
opinion by making the discussion hinge as soon
as possible upon some practical or particular
issue. The principle of pure experience is also
a methodological postulate. Nothing shall be admitted
as fact, it says, except what can be
experienced at some definite time by some experient;
and for every feature of fact ever so
experienced, a definite place must be found
somewhere in the final system of reality. In
other words: Everything real must be experiencable
somewhere, and every kind of thing
experienced must be somewhere real.
Armed with these rules of method let us see
what face the problems of activity present to us.
By the principle of pure experience, either
the word 'activity' must have no meaning at
all, or else the original type and model of what
it means must lie in some concrete kind of
experience that can be definitely pointed out.
Whatever ulterior judgements we may eventually
come to make regarding activity, _that_sort_
of thing will be what the judgements are about.
The first step to take, then, is to ask where in
the stream of experience we seem to find what
161
we speak of as activity. What we are to think
of the activity thus found will be a later
question.
Now it is obvious that we are tempted to
affirm activity wherever we find anything
_going_on_. Taken in the broadest sense, any
apprehension of something _doing_, is an experience
of activity. Were our world describable
only by the words 'nothing happening,'
'nothing changing,' 'nothing doing,' we should
unquestionably call it an 'inactive' world.
Bare activity then, as we may call it, means
the bare fact of event or change. 'Change taking
place' is a unique content of experience,
one of those 'conjunctive' objects which radical
empiricism seeks so earnestly to rehabilitate
and preserve. The sense of activity is thus
in the broadest and vaguest way synonymous
with the sense of 'life.' We should feel our
own subjective life at least, even in noticing
and proclaiming an otherwise inactive world.
Our own reaction on its monotony would be
the one thing experienced there in the form of
something coming to pass.
162
This seems to be what certain writers have
in mind when they insist that for an experient
to be at all is to be active. It seems to justify,
or at any rate to explain, Mr. Ward's expression
that we _are_ only as we are active,(1) for
we _are_ only as experients; and it rules out Mr.
Bradley's contention that "there is no original
experience of anything like activity."(2) What
we ought to say about activities thus elementary,
whose they are, what they effect, or
whether indeed they effect anything at all --
these are later questions, to be answered only
when the field of experience is enlarged.
Bare activity would thus be predicable,
though there were no definite direction, no
actor, and no aim. Mere restless zigzag movement,
or a wild _Ideenflucht_, or _Rhapsodie_der_
_Wharnehmungen_, as Kant would say,(2) would
---
1 _Naturalism_and_Agnosticism_, vol. II, p.245. One thinks naturally of the peripatetic _actus_primus_ and _actus_secundus_ here. ["Actus autem est _duplex_: _primus_ et _secundus_. Actus quidem primus est forma, et integritas sei. Actus autem secundus est operatio." Thomas Aquinas: _Summa_Theologica_, edition of Leo XIII, (1894), vol. I, p. 391. Cf. also Blanc: _Dictionaire_de_Philosophie_, under 'acte.' ED.]
2 [_Appearance_and_Reality_, second edition, p. 116.]
3 [_Kritik_der_reinen_Vernunft,_Werke_, (1905), vol. IV, p. 110 (trans. by Max Muller, second edition, p. 128).]
constitute and active as distinguished from an
inactive world.
But in this actual world of ours, as it is
given, a part at least of the activity comes
with definite direction; it comes with desire
and a sense of goal; it comes complicated with
resistances which it overcomes or succumbs to,
and with the efforts which the feeling of resistance
so often provokes; and it is in complex
experiences like these that the notions of
distinct agents, and of passivity as opposed
to activity arise. Here also the notion of
causal efficacy comes to birth. Perhaps the
most elaborate work ever done in descriptive
psychology has been the analysis by various
recent writers of the more complex activity-
situations.(1) In their descriptions, exquisitely
---
1 I refer to such descriptive work as Ladd's (_Psychology,_ _Descriptive_and_Explanatory_, part I, chap. V, part II, chap. XI, part III, chaps. XXV and XXVI); as Sully's (_The_Human_Mind_, part V); as Stout's (_Analytic_Psychology_, book I, chap. vi, and book II, chaps. I, II, and III); as Bradley's (in his long series of articles on Psychology in _Mind)_; as Titchener's (_Outline_of_Psychology_, part I, chap. vi); as Shand's (_Mind_, N.S., III, 449; IV, 450; VI, 289); as Ward's (_Mind_, XII, 67; 564); as Loveday's (_Mind_, N.S., X, 455); as Lipp's (Vom Fuhlen, Wollen Und Denken, 1902, chaps II, IV, VI); and as Bergson's (_Revue_Philosophique_, LIII, 1) -- to mention only a few writings which I immediately recall.
subtle some of them,91) the activity appears as
the _gestaltqualitat_ or the _fundirte_inhalt_ (or as
whatever else you may please to call the conjunctive
form) which the content falls into
when we experience it in the ways which the
describers set forth. Those factors in those
relations are what we mean by activity-situations;
and to the possible enumeration and
accumulation of their circumstances and ingredients
there would seem to be no natural
bound. Every hour of human life could contribute
to the picture gallery; and this is the
only fault that one can find with such descriptive
industry -- where is it going to stop?
Ought we to listen forever to verbal pictures
of what we have already in concrete form in
our own breasts?(2) They never take us off the
superficial plane. We knew the facts already --
less spread out and separated, to be sure -- but
---
1 Their existence forms a curious commentary on Prof. Munsterberg's dogma that will-attitudes are not describable. He himself has contributed in a superior way to their description, both in his _Willenshandlung_, and in his _Grundzuge_ [_der_Psychologie_], part II, chap. IX, section 7.
2 I ought myself to cry _peccavi_, having been a voluminous sinner in my own chapter on the will. [_Principles_of_Psychology_, vol. II, chap. XXVI.]
165
we knew them still. We always felt our own
activity, for example, as 'the expansion of an
idea with which our Self is identified, against
an obstacle';(1) and the following out of such a
definition through a multitude of cases elaborates
the obvious so as to be little more than an
exercise in synonymic speech.
All the descriptions have to trace familiar
outlines, and to use familiar terms. The activity
is, for example, attributed either to a
physical or to a mental agent, and is either
aimless or directed. If directed it shows tendency.
The tendency may or may not be resisted.
If not, we call the activity immanent, as
when a body moves in empty space by its momentum,
or our thoughts wander at their own
sweet will. If resistance is met, _its_ agent complicates
the situation. If now, in spite of resistance,
the original tendency continues, effort
makes its appearance, and along with effort,
strain or squeeze. Will, in the narrower sense
of the word, then comes upon the scene, whenever,
---
1 [Cf. F.H. Bradley, _Appearance_and_Reality_, second edition, pp. 96-97.]
166
along with the tendency, the strain and
squeeze are sustained. But the resistance may
be great enough to check the tendency, or even
to reverse its path. In that case, we (if 'we' were
the original agents or subjects of the tendency)
are overpowered. The phenomenon turns into
one of tension simply, or of necessity succumbed-
to, according as the opposing power is
only equal, or is superior to ourselves.
Whosoever describes an experience in such
terms as these describes an experience _of_ activity.
If the word have any meaning, it must
denote what there is found. _There_ is complete
activity in its original and first intention.
What is 'known-as' is what there appears.
The experiencer of such a situation possesses all
that the idea contains. He feels the tendency,
the obstacle, the will, the strain, the triumph, or
the passive giving up, just as he feels the time,
the space, the swiftness or intensity, the movement,
the weight and color, the pain and pleasure,
the complexity, or whatever remaining
characters the situation may involve. He goes
through all that ever can be imagined where
167
activity is supposed. If we suppose activities
to go on outside of our experience, it is in forms
like these that we must suppose them, or else
give them some other name; for the word
'activity' has no imaginable content whatever
save these experiences of process, obstruction,
striving, strain, or release, ultimate _qualia_ as
they are of the life given us to be known.
Were this the end of the matter, one might
think that whenever we had successfully lived
through an activity-situation we should have
to be permitted, without provoking contradiction,
to say that we had been really active,
that we had met real resistance and had really
prevailed. Lotze somewhere says that to be an
entity all that is necessary is to _gelten_ as an
entity, to operate, or be felt, experienced, recognized,
or in any way realized, as such.(1) in
our activity-experiences the activity assuredly
fulfils Lotze's demand. It makes itself
_gelten_. It is witnessed at its work. no matter
what activities there may really be in this extraordinary
universe of ours, it is impossible
---
1 [Cf. above, p. 59, note.]
168
for us to conceive of any one of them being
either lived through or authentically known
otherwise than in this dramatic shape of something
sustaining a felt purpose against felt
obstacles and overcoming or being overcome.
What 'sustaining' means here is clear to anyone
who has lived through the experience, but to
no one else; just as 'loud,' 'red,' 'sweet,' mean
something only to beings with ears, eyes, and
tongues. The _percipi_ in these originals of experience
is the _esse_; the curtain is the picture.
If there is anything hiding in the background,
it ought not to be called activity, but should
get itself another name.
This seems so obviously true that one might
well experience astonishment at finding so
many of the ablest writers on the subject
flatly denying that the activity we live through
in these situations is real. Merely to feel active
is not to be active, in their sight. The agents
that appear in the experience are not real
agents, the resistances do not really resist, the
effects that appear are not really affects at all.(1)
---
1 _Verborum_gratia_: "The feeling of activity is not able, _qua_ feeling, to tell us anything about activity" (Loveday: _Mind_, N.S., vol, X, [1901], p. 463; "A sensation or feeling or sense of activity ... is not, looked at in another way, an experience _of_ activity at all. It is a mere sensation shut up within which you could by no reflection get the idea of activity. . . . Whether this experience is or is not later on a character essential to our perception and our idea of activity, it, as it comes first, is only so for extraneous reasons and only so for an outside observer" (Bradley, _Appearance_and_Reality_, second edition, p.605); "In dem Tatigkeitsgefuhle liegt an sich nicht der geringste Beweis fur das Vorhandesein einer psychischen Tatigkeit" (Munsterberg: _Grundzuge_der_Psychologie_). I could multiply similar quotations and would have introduced some of them into my text to make it more concrete, save that the mingling of different points of view in most of these author's discussions (not in Munsterberg's) make it impossible to disentangle exactly what they mean. I am sure in any case, to be accused of misrepresenting them totally, even in this note, by omission of the context, so the less I name names and the more I stick to abstract characterization of a merely possible style of opinion, the safer it will be. And apropos of misunderstandings, I may add to this note a complaint on my own account. Professor Stoud, in the excellent chapter on 'Mental Activity,' in vol. I of his
_Analytic_Psychology_, takes me to task for identifying spiritual activity with certain muscular feelings and gives quotations to bear him out. They are from certain paragraphs on 'the Self' in which my attempt was to show what the central nucleus of the activities that we call 'ours' is. [_Principles_of_Psychology_, vol. I, pp. 299-305.] I found it in certain intracephalic movements which we habitually oppose, as 'subjective,' to the activities of the transcorporeal world. I sought to show that there is no direct evidence that we feel the activity of an inner spiritual agent as such (I should now say the activity of 'consciousness' as such, see [the first essay], 'Does Consciousness Exist?'). There are, in fact, three distinguishable 'activities' in the field of discussion: the elementary activity involved in the mere _that_ of experience, in the fact that _something_ is going on, and the farther specification of this _something_ into two _whats_, an activity felt as 'ours,' and an activity ascribed to objects. Stout, as I apprehend him, identifies 'our' activity with that of the total experience-process, and when I circumscribe it as a part thereof, accuses me of treating it as a sort of external appendage to itself (Stout: op.cit., vol. I, pp. 162-163), as if I 'separated the activity from the process which is active.' But all the processes in question are active, and their activity is inseparable from their being. My book raised only the question of _which_ activity deserved the name of 'ours.' So far as we are 'persons,' and contrasted and opposed to an 'environment,' movements in our body figure as our activities; and I am unable to find any other activities that are ours in this strictly personal sense. There is a wider sense in which the whole 'choir of heaven and furniture of the earth,' and their activities, are ours, for they are our 'objects.' But 'we' are here only another name for the total process of experience, another name for all that is, in fact; and I was dealing with the personal and individualized self exclusively in the passages with which Professor Stout finds fault.
The individualized self, which I believe to be the only thing properly called self, is a part of the content of the world experienced. The world experienced (otherwise called the 'field of consciousness') comes at all times with our body at its centre, centre of vision, centre of action, centre of interest. Where the body is is 'here': when the body acts is 'now'; what the body touches is 'this'; all other things are 'there' and 'then' and 'that.' These words of emphasized position imply a systematization of things with reference to a focus of action and interest which lies in the body; and the systematization is now so instinctive (was it ever not so?) that no developed or active experience exists for us at all except in that ordered form. So far as 'thoughts' and 'feelings' can be active, there activity terminates in the activity of the body, and only through first arousing its activities can they begin to change those of the rest of the world. [Cf. also
_A_Pluralistic_Universe_, p. 344, note 8. ED.] The body is the storm centre, the origin of co-ordinates, the constant place of stress in all that experience-train. Everything circles round it, and is felt from its point of view. The word 'I,' then, is primarily a noun of position, just like 'this' and 'here.' Activities attached to 'this' position have prerogative emphasis, and, if activities have feelings, must be felt in a particular way. The word 'my designates the kind of emphasis. I see no inconsistency whatever in defending, on the one hand, 'my' activities as unique and opposed to those of outer nature, and, on the other hand, in affirming, after introspection, that they consist in movements in the head. The 'my' of them is the emphasis, the feeling of perspective-interest in which they are dyed.
169
It is evident from this that mere descriptive
analysis of any one of our activity-experiences
is not the whole story, that there is something
170
still to tell _about_ them that has led such able
writers to conceive of a _Simon-pure_ activity,
an activity _an_sich_, that does, and does n't
171
merely appear to us to do, and compared with
whose real doing all this phenomenal activity
is but a specious sham.
The metaphysical question opens here; and
I think that the state of mind of one possessed
by it is often something like this: "It is all very
well," we may imagine him saying, "to talk
about certain experience-series taking on the
form of feelings of activity, just as they might
take on musical or geometric forms. Suppose
that they do so; suppose we feel a will to stand
a strain. Does our feeling do more than _record_
the fact that the strain is sustained? The _real_
activity, meanwhile, is the _doing_ of the fact;
and what is the doing made of before the record
is made. What in the will _enables_ it to act thus?
And these trains of experience themselves, in
which activities appear, what makes them _go_
at all? Does the activity in one bit of experience
bring the next bit into being? As an empiricist
172
you cannot say so, for you have just
declared activity to be only a kind of synthetic
object, or conjunctive relation experienced between
bits of experience already made. But
what made them at all? What propels experience
_uberhaupt_ into being? _There_ is the activity
that _operates_; the activity _felt_ is only
its superficial sign."
To the metaphysical question, popped upon
us in this way, I must pay serious attention
ere I end my remarks; but, before doing so, let
me show that without leaving the immediate
reticulations of experience, or asking what
makes activity itself act, we still find the distinction
between less real and more real activities
forced upon us, and are driven to much
soul-searching on the purely phenomenal plane.
We must not forget, namely, in talking of
the ultimate character of our activity-experiences,
that each of them is but a portion of a
wider world, one link in the vast chain of processes
of experience out of which history is
made. Each partial process, to him who lives
through it, defines itself by its origin and its
173
goal; but to an observer with a wider mind-
span who should live outside of it, that goal
would appear but as a provisional halting-
place, and the subjectively felt activity would
be seen to continue into objective activities
that led far beyond. We thus acquire a habit,
in discussing activity-experiences, of defining
them by their relation to something more. If
an experience be one of narrow span, it will be
mistaken as to what activity it is and whose.
You think that _you_ are acting while you are
only obeying someone's push. You think you
are doing _this_, but you are doing something of
which you do not dream. For instance, you
think you are but drinking this glass; but you
are really creating the liver-cirrhosis that will
end your days. You think you are just driving
this bargain, but, as Stevenson says somewhere,
you are laying down a link in the policy
of mankind.
Generally speaking, the onlooker, with his
wider field of vision, regards the _ultimate_outcome_
of an activity as what it is more really
doing; and _the_most_previous_agent_ ascertainable,
174
being the first source of action, he regards
as the most real agent in the field. The others
but transmit the agent's impulse; on him
we put responsibility; we name him when one
asks us 'Who's to blame?'
But the most previous agents ascertainable,
instead of being a longer span, are often of
much shorter span than the activity in view.
Brain-cells are our best example. My brain-
cells are believed to excite each other from
next to next (by contiguous transmission of
katabolic alteration, let us say) and to have
been doing so long before this present stretch
of lecturing-activity on my part began. If any
one cell-group stops its activity, the lecturing
will cease or show disorder of form. _Cessante_
_causa,_cessat_et_effectus_ -- does not this look as
if the short-span brain activiteis were the more
real activities, and the lecturing activities
on my part only their effects? Moreover, as
Hume so clearly pointed out,(1) in my mental
activity-situation the words physically to be
---
1 [_Enquiry_Concerning_Human_Understanding_, sect VII, part I, Selby-Bigge's edition, pp. 65 ff.]
175
uttered are represented as the activity's immediate
goal. These words, however, cannot
be uttered without intermediate physical processes
in the bulb and vagi nerves, which processes
nevertheless fail to figure in the mental
activity-series at all. That series, therefore,
since it leaves out vitally real steps of action,
cannot represent the real activities. It is something
purely subjective; the _facts_ of activity
are elsewhere. They are something far more
interstitial, so to speak, than what my feelings
record.
The _real_ facts of activity that have in point
of fact been systematically pleaded for by
philosophers have, so far as my information
goes, been of three principal types.
The first type takes a consciousness of wider
time-span than ours to be the vehicle of the
more real activity. Its will is the agent, and its
purpose is the action done.
The second type assumes that 'ideas' struggling
with one another are the agents, and
that the prevalence of one set of them is the
action.
176
The third type believes that never-cells are
the agents, and that resultant motor discharges
are the acts achieved.
Now if we must de-realize our immediately
felt activity-situations for the benefit of either
of these types of substitute, we ought to know
what the substitution practically involves.
_What_practical_difference_ought_it_to_make_if_,
instead of saying naively that 'I' am active
now in delivering this address, I say that _a_
_wider_thinker_is_active_, or that _certain_ideas_are_
_active_, or that _certain_nerve-cells_are_active_, in
producing the result?
This would be the pragmatic meaning of the
three hypotheses. Let us take them in succession
in seeking a reply.
If we assume a wider thinker, it is evident
that his purposes envelope mine. I am really
lecturing _for_ him; and although I cannot surely
know to what end, yet if I take him religiously,
I can trust it to be a good end, and willingly
connive. I can be happy in thinking that my
activity transmits his impulse, and that his
ends prolong my own. Son long as I take him
177
religiously, in short, he does not de-realize my
activities. He tends rather to corroborate the
reality of them, so long as I believe both them
and him to be good.
When now we turn to ideas, the case is different,
inasmuch as ideas are supposed by the
association psychology to influence each other
only from next to next. The 'span' of an idea
or pair of ideas, is assumed to be much smaller
instead of being larger than that of my total
conscious field. The same results may get
worked out in both cases, for this address is
being given anyhow. But the ideas supposed
to 'really' work it out had no prevision of the
whole of it; and if I was lecturing for an absolute
thinker in the former case, so, by similar
reasoning, are my ideas now lecturing for me,
that is, accomplishing unwittingly a result
which I approve and adopt. But, when this
passing lecture is over, there is nothing in the
bare notion that ideas have been its agents
that would seem to guarantee that my present
purposes in lecturing will be prolonged. _I_ may
have ulterior developments in view; but there
178
is no certainty that my ideas as such will wish
to, or be able to, work them out.
The like is true if nerve-cells be the agents.
The activity of a nerve-cell must be conceived
of as a tendency of exceedingly short reach, an
'impulse' barely spanning the way to the next
cell -- for surely that amount of actual 'process'
must be 'experienced' by the cells if what
happens between them is to deserve the name
of activity at all. But here again the gross
resultant, as _I_ perceive it, is indifferent to the
agents, and neither wished or willed or foreseen.
Their being agents now congruous with
my will gives me no guarantee that like results
will recur again from their activity. In point
of fact, all sorts of other results do occur. My
mistakes, impotencies, perversions, mental obstructions,
and frustrations generally, are also
results of the activity of cells. Although these
are letting me lecture now, on other occasions
they make me do things that I would willingly
not do.
The question _Whose_is_the_real_activity?_ is
thus tantamount to the question _What_will_be_
179
_the_actual_results?_ Its interest is dramatic; how
will things work out? If the agents are of
one sort, one way; if of another sort, they may
work out differently. The pragmatic
meaning of the various alternatives, in short,
is great. It makes no merely verbal difference
which opinion we take up.
You see it is the old dispute come back!
Materialism and teleology; elementary short-
span actions summing themselves 'blindly,' or
far foreseen ideals coming with effort into act.
Naively we believe, and humanly and dramatically
we like to believe, that activities
both of wider and of narrower span are at
work in life together, that both are real, and
that the long-span tendencies yoke the others
in their service, encouraging them in the right
direction, and damping them when they tend
in other ways. But how to represent clearly
the _modus_operandi_ of such steering of small
tendencies by large ones is a problem which
metaphysical thinkers will have to ruminate
upon for many years to come. Even if such
control should eventually grow clearly picturable,
180
the question how far it is successfully
exerted in this actual world can be answered
only by investigating the details of fact. No
philosophic knowledge of the general nature
and constitution of tendencies, or of the relation
of larger to smaller ones, can help us to
predict which of all the various competing
tendencies that interest us in this universe are
likeliest to prevail. We know as an empirical
fact that far-seeing tendencies often carry out
their purpose, but we know also that they are
often defeated by the failure of some contemptibly
small process on which success depends.
A little thrombus in a statesman's
meningeal artery will throw an empire out of
gear. I can therefore not even hint at any solution
of the pragmatic issue. I have only wished
to show you that that issue is what gives the
real interest to all inquiries into what kinds of
activity may be real. Are the forces that really
act in the world more foreseeing or more blind?
As between 'our' activities as 'we' experience
them, and those of our ideas, or of our brain-
cells, the issue is well-defined.
181
I said a while back(1) that I should return to
the 'metaphysical' question before ending; so,
with a few words about that, I will now close
my remarks.
In whatever form we hear this question propounded,
I think that it always arises from two
things, a belief that _causality_ must be exerted
in activity, and a wonder as to how causality is
made. If we take an activity-situation at its
face-value, it seems as if we caught _in_flagrante_
_delicto_ the very power that makes facts come
and be. I now am eagerly striving, for example,
to get this truth which I seem half to
perceive, into words which shall make it show
more clearly. If the words come, it will seem as
if the striving itself had drawn or pulled them
into actuality out from the state of merely
possible being in which they were. How is this
feat performed? How does the pulling _pull?_
How do I get my hold on words not yet existent,
and when they come by what means have
I _made_ them come? Really it is the problem of
creation; for in the end the question is: How do
---
1 Page 172.
182
I make them _be?_ Real activities are those
that really make things be, without which
the things are not, and with which they are
there. Activity, so far as we merely feel it, on
the other hand, is only an impression of ours,
it may be maintained; and an impression is,
for all this way of thinking, only a shadow of
another fact.
Arrived at this point, I can do little more
than indicate the principles on which, as it
seems to me, a radically empirical philosophy
is obliged to rely in handling such a dispute.
If there _be_ real creative activiteis in being,
radical empiricism must say, somewhere they
must be immediately lived. Somewhere the
_that_ of efficacious causing and the _what_ of it
must be experienced in one, just as the what
and the that of 'cold' are experienced in one
whenever a man has the sensation of cold here
and now. It boots not to say that our sensations
are fallible. They are indeed; but to see
the thermometer contradict us when we say 'it
is cold' does not abolish cold as a specific nature
from the universe. Cold is the arctic
183
circle if not here. Even so, to feel that our
train is moving when the train beside our window
moves, to see the moon through a telescope
come twice as near, or to see two pictures
as one solid when we look through a
stereoscope at them, leaves motion, nearness,
and solidity still in being -- if not here,
yet each in its proper seat elsewhere. And
wherever the seat of real causality _is_, as ultimately
known 'for true' (in nerve-processes,
if you will, that cause our feelings of activity
as well as the movements which these
seem to prompt), a philosophy of pure experience
can consider the real causation as no other
_nature_ of thing than that which even our
most erroneous experiences appears to be at
work. Exactly what appears there is what we
_mean_ by working, though we may later come
to learn that working was not exactly _there_.
Sustaining, persevering, striving, paying with
effort as we go, hanging on, and finally achieving
our intention -- this _is_ action, this _is_ effectuation
in the only shape in which, by a pure
experience-philosophy, the whereabouts of it
184
anywhere can be discussed. Here is creation
in its first intention, here is causality at work.(1)
To treat this offhand as the bare illusory surface
of a world whose real causality is an unimaginable
ontological principle hidden in the
cubic deeps, is, for the more empirical way of
thinking, only animism in another shape. You
explain your given fact by your 'principle,' but
the principle itself, when you look clearly at it,
turns out to be nothing but a previous little
spiritual copy of the fact. Away from that one
and only kind of fact your mind, considering
causality, can never get.(2)
---
1 Let me not be told that this contradicts [the first essay], 'Does Consciousness Exist?' (see especially page 32), in which it was said that while 'thoughts' and 'things' have the same natures, the natures work 'energetically' on each other in the things (fire burns, water wets, etc.) but not in the thoughts. Mental activity- trains are composed of thoughts, yet their members do work on each other, they check, sustain, and introduce. They do so when the activity is merely associational as well as when effort is there. But, and this is my reply, they do so by other parts of their nature than those that energize physically. One thought in every developed activity-series is a desire or thought of purpose, and all the other thoughts acquire a feeling tone from their relation of harmony or oppugnancy to this. The interplay of these secondary tones (among which 'interest,' 'difficulty,' and 'effort' figure) runs the drama in the mental series. In what we term the physical drama these qualities play absolutely no part. The subject needs careful working out; but I can see no inconsistency.
2 I have found myself more than once accused in print of being the assertor of a metaphysical principle of activity. Since literary misunderstandings retard the settlement of problems, I should like to say that such an interpretation of the pages I have published on Effort and on Will is absolutely foreign to what I mean to express. [_Principles_of_Psychology_, vol II, ch. XXVI.] I ow all my doctrines on this subject to Renouvier; and Renouvier, as I understand him, is (or at any rate then was) an out and out phenomenalist, a denier of 'forces' in the most strenuous sense. [Cf. Ch. Renouvier:
_Esquisse_d'une_Classification_Systematique_des_Doctrines_Philoso phiques_ (1885), vol. II, pp. 390-392; _Essais_de_Critique_Generale_ (1859), vol. II, sections ix, xiii. For an acknowledgement of the author's general indebtedness to Renouvier, cf. _Some_Problems_of_Philosophy_, p. 165, note. ED.] Single clauses in my writing, or sentences read out of their connection, may possibly have been compatible with a
transphenomenal principle of energy; but I defy anyone to show a single sentence which, taken with its context, should be naturally held to advocate that view. The misinterpretation probably arose at first from my defending (after Renouvier) the indeterminism of our efforts. 'Free will' was supposed by my critics to involve a supernatural agent. As a matter of plain history the only 'free will' I have ever thought of defending is the character of novelty in fresh activity-situations. If an activity-process is the form of a whole 'field of consciousness,' and if each field of consciousness is not only in its totality unique (as is now commonly admitted) but has its elements unique (since in that situation they are all dyed in the total) then novelty is perpetually entering the world and what happens there is not pure _repetition_, as the dogma of the literal uniformity of nature requires.
Activity-situations come, in short, each with an original touch. A 'principle' of free will if there were one, would doubtless manifest itself in such phenomena, but I never say, nor do I now see, what the principle could do except rehearse the phenomenon beforehand, or why it ever should be invoked.
186
for philosophy is to leave off grubbing underground
for what effects effectuation, or what
makes action act, and to try to solve the concrete
questions of where effectuation in this
world is located, of which things are the true
causal agents there, and of what the more
remote effects consist.
From this point of view the greater sublimity
traditionally attributed to the metaphysical
inquiry, the grubbing inquiry, entirely disappears.
If we could know what causation
really and transcendentally is in itself, the only
_use_ of the knowledge would be to help us to
recognize an actual cause when we had one,
and so to track the future course of operations
more intelligently out. The mere abstract
inquiry into causation's hidden nature
is not more sublime than any other inquiry
equally abstract. Causation inhabits no more
sublime level than anything else. It lives,
apparently, in the dirt of the world as well
as in the absolute, or in man's unconquerable
mind. The worth and interest of the world
consists not in its elements, be these elements
187
things, or be they the conjunctions of things;
it exists rather in the dramatic outcome in
the whole process, and in the meaning of the
succession stages which the elements work out.
My colleague and master, Josiah Royce, in
a page of his review of Stout's _Analytic_Psychology(1)
has some fine words on this point
with which I cordially agree. I cannot agree
with his separating the notion of efficacy from
that of activity altogether (this I understand
to be one contention of his) for activities are
efficacious whenever they are real activities at
all. But the inner nature both of efficacy and
of activity are superficial problems, I understand
Royce to say; and the only point for us
in solving them would be their possible use in
helping us to solve the far deeper problem of
the course and meaning of the world of life.
Life, says our colleague, is full of significance,
of meaning, of success and of defeat, of hoping
and of striving, of longing, of desire, and of
inner value. It is a total presence that embodies
worth. To live our own lives better in
---
1 _Mind_, N.S., vol. VI, 1897; cf. pp. 392-393.
188
this presence is the true reason why we wish to
know the elements of things; so even we psychologists
must end on this pragmatic note.
The urgent problems of activity are thus
more concrete. They are all problems of the
true relation of longer-span to shorter-span
activities. When, for example, a number of
'ideas' (to use the name traditional in psychology)
grow confluent in a larger field of
consciousness, do the smaller activities still
co-exist with the wider activities then experienced
by the conscious subject? And, if so,
do the wide activities accompany the narrow
ones inertly, or do they exert control? Or do
they perhaps utterly supplant and replace
them and short-circuit their effects? Again,
when a mental activity-process and a brain-
cell series of activities both terminate in the
same muscular movement, does the mental
process steer the neural processes or not? Or,
on the other hand, does it independently short-
circuit their effects? Such are the questions
that we must begin with. But so far am I from
suggesting any definitive answer to such questions,
189
that I hardly yet can put them clearly.
They lead, however, into that region of pan-
psychic and ontologic speculation of which
Professors Bergson and Strong have lately enlarged
the literature in so able and interesting
a way.(1) The result of these authors seem
in many respects dissimilar, and I understand
them as yet but imperfectly; but I cannot help
suspecting that the direction of their work is
very promising, and that they have the hunter's
instinct for the fruitful trails.
---
1 [Cf. _A_Pluralistic_Universe_, Lect. VI (on Bergson); H. Bergson: _Creative_Evolution_, trans. by A. Mitchell; C.A. Strong:
_Why_the_Mind_Has_a_Body_, ch. XII. ED.]
190
VII
THE ESSENCE OF HUMANISM(1)
HUMANISM is a ferment that has 'come to
stay.'(2) It is not a single hypothesis of theorem,
and it dwells on no new facts. It is
rather a slow shifting in the philosophic perspective,
making things appear as from a new
centre of interest or point of sight. Some
writers are strongly conscious of the shifting,
others half unconscious, even though their own
vision may have undergone much change. The
result is no small confusion in debate, the half-conscious
humanists often taking part against
the radical ones, as if they wished to count
upon the other side.(3)
---
1 [Reprinted from
_The_Journal_of_Philosophy,_Psychology_and_Scientific_Methods_, vol. II, No. 5, March 2, 1905. Also reprinted, with slight changes in _The_Meaning_of_Truth_, pp. 121-135. The author's corrections have been adopted for the present text. ED.]
2 [Written _apropos_ of the appearance of three articles in _Mind_, N.S., vol. XIV, No. 53, January, 1905: "'Absolute' and 'Relative' Truth," H.H.Joachim; "Professor James on 'Humanism and Truth,'" H.W.B.Joseph; "Applied Axioms," A. Sidgwick. Of these articles the second and third "continue the humanistic (or pragmatistic) controversy," the first "deeply connects with it." ED.]
3 Professor Baldwin, for example. His address 'On Selective Thinking' (_Psychological_Review_, [vol. V], 1898, reprinted in his volume, _Development_and_Evolution) seems to me an unusually well- written pragmatic manifesto. Nevertheless in 'The Limits of Pragmatism' (ibid., [vol. XI], 1904), he (much less clearly) joins in the attack.
191
If humanism really be the name for such
a shifting of perspective, it is obvious that
the whole scene of the philosophic stage will
change in some degree if humanism prevails.
The emphasis of things, their foreground and
background distribution, their sizes and values,
will not keep just the same.(1) If such
pervasive consequences be involved in humanism,
it is clear that no pains which philosophers
may take, first in defining it, and then in
furthering, checking, or steering its progress,
will be thrown away.
It suffers badly at present from incomplete
definition. Its most systematic advocates,
Schiller and Dewey, have published fragmentary
---
1 The ethical changes, it seems to me, are beautifully made evident in Professor Dewey's series of articles, which will never get the attention they deserve till they are printed in a book. I mean: 'The Significance of Emotions,' _Psychological_Review_, vol. II, [1895], p. 13; 'The Reflex Arc Concept in Psychology,' ibid., vol. III [1896], p. 357; 'Psychology and Social Practice,' ibid., vol. VII, [1900], p. 105; 'Interpretation of Savage Mind,' ibid., vol. IX, [1902], p.217; 'Green's Theory of the Moral Motive,' _Philosophical_Review_, vol. I, [1892], p. 593; 'Self-realization as the Moral Ideal,' ibid., vol. II, [1893], p. 652; 'The Psychology of Effort,' ibid., vol. VI, [1897], p.43; 'The Evolutionary Method as Applied to Morality,' ibid., vol XI, [1902], pp. 107, 353; 'Evolution and Ethics,' _Monist_, vol. VIII, [1898], p.321; to mention only a few.
192
programs only; and its bearing on many
vital philosophic problems has not been traced
except by adversaries who, scenting heresies in
advance, have showered blows on doctrines --
subjectivism and scepticism, for example --
that no good humanist finds it necessary to
entertain. By their still greater reticences, the
anti-humanists have, in turn, perplexed the
humanists. Much of the controversy has involved
the word 'truth.' It is always good in
debate to know your adversary's point of view
authentically. But the critics of humanism
never define exactly what the word 'truth'
signifies when they use it themselves. The
humanists have to guess at their view; and
the result has doubtless been much at beating of
the air. Add to all this, great individual differences
in both camps, and it becomes clear that
nothing is so urgently needed, at the stage
which things have reached at present, as a
sharper definition by each side of its central
point of view.
Whoever will contribute any touch of
sharpness will help us to make sure of what's
193
what and who is who. Anyone can contribute
such a definition, and, without it, no one
knows exactly where he stands. If I offer my
own provisional definition of humanism(1) now
and here, others may improve it, some adversary
may be led to define his own creed more sharply
by the contrast, and a certain quickening
of the crystallization of general opinion
may result.
I
The essential service of humanism, as I conceive
the situation, is to have seen that _though_
_one_part_of_our_experience_may_lean_upon_another_
_part_to_make_it_what_it_is_in_any_one_of_several_
_aspects_in_which_it_may_be_considered,_experience_
_as_a_whole_is_self-containing_and_leans_
_on_nothing_.
Since this formula also expresses the main
contention of transcendental idealism, it needs
abundant explication to make it unambiguous.
---
1 [The author employs the term 'humanism' either as a synonym for 'radical empiricism' (cf. e.g, above, p. 156); or as that general philosophy of life of which 'radical empiricism' is the theoretical ground (cf. below, p. 194). For other discussions of 'humanism,' cf. below, essay XI, and _The_Meaning_of)Truth_, essay III. ED.]
194
It seems, at first sight, to confine itself to
denying theism and pantheism. But, in fact,
it need not deny either; everything would
depend on the exegesis; and if the formula
ever became canonical, it would certainly
develop both right-wing and left-wing interpreters.
I myself read humanism theistically
and pluralistically. If there be a God, he is
no absolute all-experiencer, but simply the
experiencer of widest actual conscious span.
Read thus, humanism is for me a religion
susceptible of reasoned defence, though I am
well aware how many minds there are to whom
it can appeal religiously only when it has
been monistically translated. Ethically the
pluralistic form of it takes for me a stronger
hold on reality than any other philosophy I
know of -- it being essentially a _social_ philosophy,
a philosophy of _'co,'_ in which conjunctions
do the work. But my primary reason
for advocating it is its matchless intellectual
economy. It gets rid, not only of the standing
'problems' that monism engenders ('problem
of evil,' 'problem of freedom,' and the
like), but of other metaphysical mysteries and
paradoxes as well.
It gets rid, for example, of the whole agnostic
controversy, by refusing to entertain the hypothesis
of trans-empirical reality at all. It gets rid
of any need for an absolute of the Bradleyan
type (avowedly sterile for intellectual
purposes) by insisting that the conjunctive
relations found within experience are faultlessly
real. It gets rid of the need of an absolute
of the Roycean type (similarly sterile) by
its pragmatic treatment of the problem of
knowledge [a treatment of which I have already
given a version in two very inadequate
articles].(1) As the views of knowledge, reality
and truth imputed to humanism have been
those so far most fiercely attacked, it is in
regard to these ideas that a sharpening of
focus seems most urgently required. I proceed
therefore to bring the view which _I_ impute
to humanism in these respects into focus as
briefly as I can.
---
1 [Omitted from reprint in _Meaning_of_Truth_. The articles referred to are 'Does Consciousness Exist?' and 'A World of Pure Experience,' reprinted above.]
196
II
If the central humanistic thesis, printed
above in italics, be accepted, it will follow
that, if there be any such thing at all as knowing,
the knower and the object known must
both be portions of experience. One part of
experience must, therefore, either
(1) Know another part of experience -- in
other words, parts must, as Professor Woodbridge
says,(1) represent _one_another_ instead of
representing realities outside of 'consciousness'
-- this case is that of conceptual knowledge; or else
(2) They must simply exist as so many ultimate
_thats_ or facts of being, in the first instance;
an then, as a secondary complication,
and without doubling up its entitative singleness,
any one and the same _that_ must figure
alternately as a thing known and as a knowledge
of the thing, by reason of two divergent
kinds of context into which, in the general
course of experience, it gets woven.(2)
---
1 In _Science_, November 4, 1904, p. 599.
2 This statement is probably excessively obscure to any who has not read my two articles, 'Does Consciousness Exist?' and 'A World of Pure Experience.'
197
This second case is that of sense-perception.
There is a stage of thought that goes beyond
common sense, and of it I shall say more presently;
but the common-sense stage is a perfectly
definite halting-place of thought, primarily
for the purposes of action; and, so long
as we remain on the common-sense stage of
thought, object and subject _fuse_ in the fact of
'presentation' or sense-perception -- the pen
and hand which I now _see_ writing, for example,
_are_ the physical realities which those words
designate. In this case there is no self-transcendency
implied in the knowing. Humanism,
here, is only a more comminuted _Identitasphilosophie_.(1)
In case (1), on the contrary, the representative
experience does transcend itself in knowing
the other experience that is its object. No
one can talk of the knowledge of the one by the
other without seeing them as numerically distinct
entities, of which the one lies beyond the
other and away from it, along some direction
---
1 [Cf. above, p. 134; and below, p.202.]
198
and with some interval, that can be definitely
named. But, if the talker be a humanist, he
must also see this distance-interval concretely
and pragmatically, and confess it to consist
of other intervening experiences -- of possible
ones, at all events, if not of actual. To call my
present idea of my dog, for example, cognitive
of the real dog means that, as the actual tissue
of experience is constituted, the idea is capable
of leading into a chain of other experiences
on my part that go from next to next and
terminate at last in vivid sense-perceptions
of a jumping, barking, hairy body. Those _are_
the real dog, the dog's full presence, for my
common sense. If the supposed talker is a
profound philosopher, although they may not
_be_ the real dog for him, they _mean_ the real dog,
are practical substitutes for the real dog, as
the representation was a practical substitute
for them, that real dog being a lot of atoms,
say, or of mind-stuff, that lie _where_ the sense-
perceptions lie in his experience as well as in
my own.
199
III
The philosopher here stands for the stage of
thought that goes beyond the stage of common
sense; and the difference is simply that he
'interpolates' and 'extrapolates,' where common
sense does not. For common sense, two
men see the same identical real dog. Philosophy,
noting actual differences in their perceptions,
points out the duality of these latter,
and interpolates something between them as
a more real terminus -- first, organs, viscera,
etc.; next, cells; then, ultimate atoms; lastly,
mind-stuff perhaps. The original sense-termini
of the two men, instead of coalescing with
each other and with the real dog-object, as at
first supposed, are thus help by philosophers to
be separated by invisible realities with which
at most, they are conterminous.
Abolish, now, one of the percipients, and
the interpolation changes into 'extrapolation.'
The sense-terminus of the remaining percipient
is regarded by the philosopher as not quite
reaching reality. He has only carried the procession
of experiences, the philosopher thinks,
200
to a definite, because practical, halting-place
somewhere on the way towards an absolute
truth that lies beyond.
The humanist sees all the time, however,
that there is no absolute transcendency even
about the more absolute realities thus conjectured
or believed in. The viscera and cells
are only possible percepts following upon that
of the outer body. The atoms again, though
we may never attain to human means of perceiving
them, are still defined perceptually.
The mind-stuff itself is conceived as a kind
of experience; and it is possible to frame the
hypothesis (such hypotheses can by no logic
be excluded from philosophy) of two knowers
of a piece of mind-stuff and the mind-stuff
itself becoming 'confluent' at the moment at
which our imperfect knowing might pass into
knowing of a completed type. Even so do you
and I habitually represent our two perceptions
and the real dog as confluent, though only provisionally,
and for the common-sense stage
of thought. If my pen be inwardly made of
mind-stuff, there is no confluence _now_ between
201
that mind-stuff and my visual perception of
the pen. But conceivably there might come to
be such confluence; for, in the case of my hand,
the visual sensations and the inward feelings
of the hand, its mind-stuff, so to speak, are even
now as confluent as any two things can be.
There is, thus, no breach in humanistic
epistemology. Whether knowledge be taken
as ideally perfected, or only as true enough to
pass muster for practice, it is hung on one continuous
scheme. Reality, howsoever remote, is
always defined as a terminus within the general
possibilities of experience; and what knows it is
defined as an experience _that_'represents'_it,_in_
_the_sense_of_being_substitutable_for_it_in_our_thinking_
because it leads to the same associates, _or_
_in_the_sense_of_'point_to_it'_ through a chain
of other experiences that either intervene or
may intervene.
Absolute reality here bears the same relation
to sensation as sensation bears to conception
or imagination. Both are provisional or final
termini, sensation being only the terminus
at which the practical man habitually stops,
202
while the philosopher projects a 'beyond' in
the shape of more absolute reality. These
termini, for the practical and the philosophical
stages of thought respectively, are self-
supporting. They are not 'true' of anything
lese, they simply _are_, are _real_. They 'lean
on nothing,' as my italicized formula said.
Rather does the whole fabric of experience
lean on them, just as the whole fabric of the
solar system, including many relative positions,
leans, for its absolute position in space,
on any one of its constituent stars. Here,
again, one gets a new _Identitatsphilosophie_ in
pluralistic form.(1)
IV
If I have succeeded in making this at all
clear (though I fear that brevity and abstractness
between them may have made me fail),
the reader will see that the 'truth' of our mental
operations must always ben an intra-experiential
affair. A conception is reckoned true by
common sense when it can be made to lead to a
---
1 [Cf. above, pp. 134, 197.]
203
sensation. The sensation, which for common
sense is not so much 'true' as 'real,' is held to
be _provisionally_ true by the philosopher just
in so far as it _covers_ (abuts at, or occupies the
place of) a still more absolutely real experience,
in the possibility of which to come remoter
experient the philosopher finds reason
to believe.
Meanwhile what actually _does_ count for true
to any individual trower, whether he be philosopher
or common man, is always a result of his
_apperceptions_. If a novel experience, conceptual
or sensible, contradict too emphatically our
pre-existent system of beliefs, in ninety-nine
cases out of a hundred it is treated as false.
Only when the older and the newer experiences
are congruous enough to mutually apperceive
and modify each other, does what we treat as
an advance in truth result. [Having written of
this point in an article in reply to Mr. Joseph's
criticism of my humanism, I will say no more
about truth here, but refer the reader to that
review.(1)] In no case, however, need truth
---
1 [Omitted from reprint in _Meaning_of_Truth_. The review referred to is reprinted below, pp. 244-265, under the title "Humanism and Truth Once More." ED.]
consist in a relation between our experiences
and something archetypal or trans-experiential.
Should we ever reach absolutely terminal
experiences, experiences in which we all agreed,
which were superseded by no revised continuations,
these would not be _true_, they would be
_real_, they would simply _be_, and be indeed the
angles, corners, and linchpins of all reality, on
which the truth of everything else would be
stayed. Only such _other_ thins as led to these
by satisfactory conjunctions would be 'true.'
Satisfactory connection of some sort with such
termini is all that the word 'truth' means.
On the common-sense stage of thought sense-
presentations serve as such termini. our ideas
and concepts and scientific theories pass for
true only so far as they harmoniously lead back
to the world of sense.
I hope that many humanists will endorse
this attempt of mine to trace the more essential
features of that way of viewing things. I
feel almost certain that Messrs. Dewey and
205
Schiller will do so. If the attackers will also
take some slight account of it, it may be that
discussion will be a little less wide of the mark
than it has hitherto been.