Classic Audiobook Collection - Essays in Radical Empiricism by William James ~ Full Audiobook [philosophy]

Episode Date: October 24, 2022

Essays in Radical Empiricism by William James audiobook. Genre: philosophy William James (1842 – 1910) was a pioneering American psychologist and philosopher. He wrote influential books on the young science of psychology, educational psychology, psychology of religious experience and mysticism, and the philosophies of pragmatism and Radical Empiricism. Essays in Radical Empiricism is a collection edited and published posthumously by his colleague and biographer Ralph Barton Perry in 1912. It was assembled from a collection of reprinted journal articles published from 1904–1905 which James had deposited in August, 1906, at the Harvard University for supplemental use by his students. For ad-free listening try our premium subscription Chapters (Approximate) (00:00:00) Chapter 00 (00:12:56) Chapter 01 (01:03:26) Chapter 02 (02:09:17) Chapter 03 (02:47:07) Chapter 04 (03:03:32) Chapter 05 (03:27:13) Chapter 06 (04:07:10) Chapter 07 (04:24:22) Chapter 08 (04:54:24) Chapter 09 (05:04:59) Chapter 10 (05:08:41) Chapter 11 (05:35:15) Chapter 12 (05:53:32) Chapter 13 (06:18:12) Chapter 14 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Essays in Radical Empiricism by William James. Chapter 1 Does consciousness exist? Thoughts and things are names for two sorts of object, which common sense will always find contrasted, and will always practically opposed to each other. Philosophy, reflecting on the contrast, has varied in the past and her explanations of it,

and may be expected to vary in the future. At first, spirit and matter soul and body, stood for a pair of equipollant substances quite on a par in weight and interest, but one day Kant undermined the soul and brought in the transcendental ego, and ever since then, the bipolar relation has been very much off its balance. The transcendental ego seems nowadays, in rationalist quarters, to stand for everything, in empiricist quarters for almost nothing. in the hands of writers such as Schupper, Remke, Natorp, Munsterberg, at any rate, in his earlier writings, Schubert Soldern and others,

the spiritual principle attenuades itself to a thoroughly ghostly condition, being only a name for the fact that the content of experience is known. It loses personal form and activity, these passing over to the content, becomes a bare bewustheit or bevootson-upt, of which, in its own right, absolutely nothing can be said. I believe that consciousness, when once it has evaporated to this estate of pure diaphaniety, is on the point of disappearing altogether. It is the name of a non-entity, and has no right to a place among first principles.

Those who still cling to it are clinging to a mere echo. The faint room are left behind by the disappearing soul upon the air of philosophy. During the past year, I've read a number of articles whose authors seemed just on the point of abandoning the notion of consciousness, and substituting for it that of an absolute experience not due to two factors. But they were not quite radical enough, not quite daring enough in their negations. For 20 years past, I have mistrusted consciousness as an entity. For seven or eight years past, I've suggested its non-existence to my students.

and tried to give them its pragmatic equivalent in realities of experience. It seems to me that the hour is ripe for it to be openly and universally discarded. To deny plumply that consciousness exists seems so absurd on the face of it, for undeniably thoughts do exist, that I fear some readers will follow me no farther. Let me then immediately explain, that I mean only to deny that the word stands for an entity, but to insist most emphatically that it does stand for a function.

There is, I mean, no Aboriginal stuff or quality of being, contrasted with that of which material objects are made, out of which our thoughts of them are made. But there is a function and experience which thoughts perform, and for the performance of which this quality of being is invoked. That function is knowing. consciousness is supposed necessary to explain the fact that things not only are but get reported are known whoever blots out the notion of consciousness from his list of first principles must still provide in some way for that functions being carried on section one My thesis is that if we start with a supposition that there is only one primal stuff or material in the world,

a stuff of which everything is composed, and if we call that stuff pure experience, then knowing can easily be explained as a particular sort of relation towards one another, into which portions of pure experience may enter. The relation itself is a part of pure experience, one of its terms, becomes the subject, or bearer of the knowledge, the knower, the other becomes the object known. This will need much explanation before it can be understood. The best way to get it understood is to contrast it with the alternate view. And for that, we may take the recentest alternative,

that in which the evaporation of the definite soul substance has proceeded as far as it can go without being yet complete. If Neocontianism has expelled earlier forms of dualism, we shall have expelled all forms if we are able to expel neocontianism in its turn. For the thinkers I call neocontian, the word consciousness today does no more than signalize the fact that experiences indefesibly dualistic in structure.

It means that, not subject, not object, but object plus subject is the minimum that can actually be. The subject-object distinction, meanwhile, is entirely different from that between mind and matter, from that between body and soul. Souls were detachable, had separate destinies, things could happen to them.

To consciousness as such, nothing can happen, for, timeless itself, it is only a witness of happenings in time, in which it plays no part. It is, in a word, but the logical correlative of content in an experience, of which the peculiarity is that fact comes to light in it, that awareness of content takes place. Consciousness as such is entirely impersonal. Self and its activities belong to the content. To say that I am self-conscious, or conscious of putting forth volition, means only that certain contents,

for which self and effort of will are the names, are not without witness as they occur. Thus, for these belated drinkers at the Kantian Spring, we should have to admit consciousness as an epistemological necessity, even if we had no direct evidence of its being there. But, in addition to this, we are supposed by almost everyone to have an immediate consciousness of consciousness itself. When the world of outer fact ceases to be materially present, and we merely recall it in memory or fancy it, the consciousness is believed to stand out and to be felt as a kind of impalpable inner-flowing,

which, once known in this sort of experience, may equally be detected in presentations of the outer world. Quote, the moment we try to fix our attention upon consciousness, and to see what distinctly it is, says a recent writer, it seems to vanish. It seems as if we had before us a mere emptiness. When we try to introspect the sensation of blue, all we can see is the blue. The other element is as if it were diaphanous.

Yet it can be distinguished if we look attentively enough and know that there is something to look for. unquote. Footnote. G. E. Moore, Mind, Volume 12, N.S. 1903. Page 450. End, footnote. Consciousness, but Vostright, says another philosopher, is inexplicable and hardly describable.

Yet all conscious experiences have this in common, that what we call their content has this peculiar reference to a center for which self is the name. In virtue of which reference alone, the content is subjectively given or appears. While in this way consciousness or reference to a self is the only thing which distinguishes a conscious content from any sort of being that might be there with no one conscious of it, Yet this only ground of the distinction defies all closer explanations. The existence of consciousness, although it is the fundamental fact of psychology,

can indeed be laid down a certain, can be brought out by analysis, but can neither be defined nor deduced, from anything but itself. Footnote Paul Naitorp Ein Leitung in Disciology 1888 Pages 14, 112 End footnote

Can be brought out by analysis This author says This supposes that the consciousness is one element, moment, factor, call it what you like, of an experience of essentially dualistic inner constitution from which, if you abstract the content,

the consciousness will remain revealed to its own eye. Experience, at this rate, would be much like a paint of which the world pictures were made. Paint has a dual constitution, involving, as it does, a menstruum, oil, size, or whatnot, and a mass of content

in the form of pigment suspended therein. We can get the pure menstruum by letting the pigment settle, and the pure pigment by pouring off the size or oil. We operate here by physical subtraction, and the usual view is that by mental subtraction we can separate the two factors of experience in an analogous way, not isolating them entirely, but distinguishing them enough to know that they are two. Now, my contention is exactly the reverse of this. Experience, I believe, has no such inner duplicity, and the separation of it into consciousness and content comes not by way of subtraction, but by way of addition,

the addition to a given concrete piece of it of other sets of experiences in connection with which, severally, its use or function may be of two different kinds. The paint will also serve here an illustration. In a pot, in a paint shop, along with other paints, it serves in its entirety as so much saleable matter. Spread on canvas, with other paints around it, it represents, on the contrary, a feature in a picture, and performs a spiritual function. Just so, I maintained, does a given undivided portion of experience, taken in one context of associates play the part of a knower of a state of mind of consciousness,

while in a different context, the same undivided bit of experience plays the part of a thing known of an objective content. In a word, in one group it figures as a thought, in another group as a thing, and since it can figure in both groups simultaneously, we have every right to speak of it as subject and objective, both at once. The dualism connoted by such double-barreled terms as experience, phenomenon, datum, forfinding, terms, which, in philosophy at any rate, tend more and more to replace the single-barreled terms of thought and thing. That dualism, I say, is still preserved in this account, but reinterpreted,

so that instead of being mysterious and elusive, it becomes verifiable, and concrete. It is an affair of relations. It falls outside, not inside, the single experience considered, and can always be particularized and defined. The entering wedge, for this more concrete way of understanding of the dualism, was fashioned by Locke, when he made the word idea stand indifferently for thing and thought, and by Barclay, when he said that what common sense means by realities is exactly what the philosopher

means by ideas. Neither Locke nor Barclay thought this truth out into perfect clearness, but it seems to me that the conception I am defending does little more than consistently carry out the pragmatic method, which they were the first to use. If the reader will take his own experiences, he will see what I mean. Let him begin with a perceptual experience, the presentation, so-called, of a physical object, his actual field of vision, the room he sits in with the book he is reading, as its center, and let him for the present treat this complex object in the common-sense way

as being really what it seems to be, namely a collection of physical things cut out from an environmenting world of other physical things, with which these physical things have actual or potential relations. Now, at the same time, it is just those self-same things, which his mind, as we say, perceives. And the whole philosophy of perception, from Democritus' time downwards, has been just one long wrangle over the paradox that what is evidently one reality should be in two places at once, both in outer space and in a person's mind.

Representative theories of perception avoid the logical paradox, but on the other hand they violate the reader's sense of life, which knows no intervening mental image, but seems to see the room on the book immediately, just as they physically exist, the puzzle of how the one identical room can be in two places, is at bottom just the puzzle of how one identical point can be on two lines.

It can, if it be situated at their intersection, and similarly, if the pure experience of the room were a place of intersection of two processes, which connected it, with different groups of associates respectively, it could be counted twice over as belonging to either group and spoken of loosely as existing in two places,

although it would remain all the time a numerically single thing. Well, the experience is a member of diverse processes that can be followed away from it along entirely different lines. The one self-identical thing has so many relations to the rest of experience that you can take it in disparate systems of association and treat it as belonging with opposite contexts.

In one of these contexts, it is your field of consciousness, in another it is the room in which you sit, and it enters both contexts in its wholeness, giving no pretext for being said to attach itself to consciousness by one of its parts or aspects and to outer reality by another. What are the two processes now?

into which the room experience simultaneously enters in this way. One of them is the reader's personal biography, the other is the history of the house of which the room is part. The presentation, the experience, the that, in short, for until we have decided what it is, it must be a mere that, is the last term of a train of sensations, emotions, decisions, movements, classifications, expectations, etc., ending in the present, and the first term of a series of similar inner operations extending into the future on the reader's part.

On the other hand, the very same that is the terminus ad quayum of a lot of previous physical operations, carpentering, papering, furnishing, warming, etc. And the terminus aqua of a lot of future ones in which it will be concerned when undergoing the destiny of a physical room. The physical and the mental operations form curiously incompatible groups. As a room, the experiences occupied that spot

and had that environment for 30 years. As your field of consciousness, it may never have existed until now. As a room, attention will go on to discover endless new details in it. As your mental state merely, few new ones will emerge under attention's eye. As a room, it will take an earthquake or a gang of men, and in any case a certain amount of time, to destroy it. As your subjective state, the closing of your eyes or any instantaneous play of your fancy will suffice. In the real world, fire will consume it. In your mind, you can let fire play over it without effect.

As an outer object, you must pay so much a month to inhabit it. As an inner content, you may occupy it for any length of time rent-free. If, in short, you follow it in the mental direction, taking it along with events of personal biography solely, all sorts of things are true of it, which are false, and false of it, which are true, if you treat it as a real thing experienced, follow it in the physical direction, and relate it to associates in the outer world. Section 3 So far, all seems plain sailing, but my thesis will probably grow less plausible to the

reader when I pass from percepts to concepts, or from the case of things presented to that of things remote. I believe, nevertheless, that here also the same law holds good. If we take conceptual manifolds, or memories, or fancies, they also are in their first intention mere bits of pure experience, and as such are single thats, which act in one context as objects, and in another context figure as mental states. By taking them in their first intention, I mean ignoring their relation to possible perceptual experiences with which they may be connected, which they may lead to, and terminate in, and which then they may be supposed to represent. Taking them in this first way, we can find the problem to a world merely thought of and not directly felt or seen.

This world, just like the world of Percepts, comes to us at first as a chaos of experiences, but lines of order soon get traced. We find that any bit of it, which we may cut out as an example, is connected with distinct groups of associates, just as our perceptual experiences are, that these associates link themselves with it by different relations, and that one forms the inner history of a person, while the other acts as an impersonal, objective world, either spatial and temporal, or else merely logical, or mathematical,

or otherwise ideal. The first obstacle, on the part of the reader, to seeing that these non-perceptual experiences have objectivity as well as subjectivity, will probably be due to the intrusion into his mind of precepts, that third group of associates with which the non-perceptual experiences have relations, and which, as a whole, they represent, standing to them as thoughts to things. This important function of the non-perceptual experiences complicates the question and confuses it,

for so used are we to treat percepts as the sole genuine realities that, unless we keep them out of the discussion, we tend altogether to overlook the objectivity that lies in non-perceptual experiences by themselves. We treat them, knowing percepts as they do, as through and through subjective, and say they are wholly constituted of the stuff called consciousness, using this term now for a kind of entity

after the fashion which I am seeking to refute. Abstracting then from precepts altogether, what I maintain is that any single non-perceptual experience tends to get counted twice over, just as a perceptual experience does, figuring in one context as an object or field of objects, in another as a state of mind, and all this without the least internal internal,

self-diremption on its own part into consciousness and content. It is all consciousness in one taking, and in the other, all content. I find this objectivity of non-perceptual experiences, this complete parallelism in point of reality between the presently felt and the remotely thought, so well put forth in a page of Munsterberg's Grundzuge, that I will quote it as it stands. I may only think of my objects, says Professor Wonstaberg. Yet, in my living thought they stand before me exactly as perceived objects would do, no matter how different the two ways of apprehending them may be in their genesis.

The book here, lying on the table before me, and the book in the next room, of which I think and which I mean to get, are both in the same sense given realities for me, realities which I acknowledge, and of which I take account. If you agree that the perceptual object is not an idea within me, but that percept and thing, as indistinguishably one, are really experienced there outside, you ought not to believe that the merely thought-of object

is hid away inside of the thinking subject. The object of which I think, and of whose existence I take cognizance without letting it now work upon my senses occupies its definite place in the outer world as much as does the object which I directly see. What is true of the here and the there is also true of the now and the then. I know of the thing which is present and perceived, but I also know of the thing which yesterday was but is no more,

and which I only remember. Both can determine my present conduct. Both are parts of the reality of which I keep account. It is true that of much of the past I am uncertain, just as I am uncertain of much of what is present, if it be but dimly perceived. But the interval of time does not in principle alter my relation to the object, does not transform it from an object known

into a mental state. The things in the room here which I survey, and those in my distant home, of which I think, the things of this minute, and those of my long-vanished boyhood, influence and decide me alike, with a reality which my experience of them directly feels. They both make up my real world.

They make it directly. They do not have first to be introduced to me and mediated by ideas which now and here arise within me, this not-me character of my recollections and expectations does not imply that the external objects of which I am aware in those experiences should necessarily be there also for others. The objects of dreamers and hallucinated persons are wholly without general validity.

But even were they centaurs and golden mountains, they would still be off there in fairyland and not inside of ourselves. Footnote. Munsterberg, Brunsuga dot psychology, volume 1, page 48. And footnote. This certainly is the immediate primary knife or practical way of taking our thought-of-world. Were there no perceptual world to serve as it, reductive in tain sense, by being stronger and more genuinely outer, so that the whole

merely thought of world seems weak and inner by comparison. Our world of thought would be the only world and would enjoy complete reality in our belief. This actually happens in our dreams, and in our daydreams so long as percepts do not interrupt them, and yet, just as the seen-room, to go back to our late example, is also a field of consciousness, so the conceived or recollected room is also a state of mind, and the doubling up of the experience has in both cases similar grounds. The room thought of, namely, has many thought of couplings with many thought of things. Some of these couplings are inconsistent, others are stable. In the reader's personal history, the room occupies a single date. He saw it only once, perhaps, a year ago. Of the

house's history, on the other hand, it forms a permanent ingredient. Some couplings have the curious stubbornness, to borrow Royce's term, a fact. Others show the fluidity of fancy. We let them come and go as be pleased. Grouped with the rest of its house, with the name of its town, of its owner, builder, value, decorative plan, the room maintains a definite foothold to which, if we try to loosen it, it tends to return and to reassert itself with force. With these associates, in a word, it coheres, while to other houses, other towns, other owners, etc., it shows no tendency to cohere at all. The two collections, first of its cohesive and second of its loose associates inevitably come to be contrasted.

We call the first collection the system of external realities, in the midst of which the room, as real, exists. The other we call the stream of our internal thinking, in which as a mental image it for a moment floats. Footnote. For simplicity's sake, I confine my exposition to external reality, but there is also the system of ideal reality in which the room plays its part. Relations of comparison, classification, serial order, value are also stubborn,

assign a definite place to the room, unlike the incoherence of its places, and the mere rhapsody of our successive thoughts. And for above, page 16. End footnote. The room, thus again, gets counted twice over. It plays two different roles, being Gedanka and Gedachistis, the thought of an object, and the object thought of, both in one.

And all this, without paradox or mystery, just as the same material thing may be both low and high, or small and great or bad and good, because of its relations to opposite parts of an environing world. As subjective, we say that the experience represents. As objective, it is represented. What represents and what is represented is here numerically the same. But we must remember that no dualism of being represented and representing resides in the experience per se.

In its pure state, or when isolated, there is no self-splitting of it into consciousness and what the consciousness is of. Its subjectivity and objectivity are functional attributes solely, realized only when the experience is taken, i.e. talked of, twice, considered along with its two differing contexts respectively, by a new retrospective experience, of which that whole past complication now forms the fresh content. The instant field of the present is at all times what I call the pure experience. It is only virtually or potentially either object or subject as yet. For the time being, it is plain unqualified actuality or existence, a simple that. In this knife immediacy, it is of course valid. It is there we act upon it. and the doubling of it in retrospection into a state of mind and a reality intended thereby is just one of the acts. The state of mind, first treated explicitly as such in retrospection, will stand corrected or confirmed,

and the retrospective experience in its turn will get a similar treatment. But the immediate experience in its passing is always truth. Footnote. Note the ambiguity of this term, which is sometimes taken objectively and sometimes subjectively. And footnote. Practical truth, something to act on at its own movement. If the world were then and there to go out like a candle, it would remain truth absolute and objective, for it would be the last word, would have no critic, and no one would ever oppose the thought in it to the reality intended. Footnote. In the psychological review for July, 1904,

Dr. R. B. Perry has published a view of consciousness which comes nearer to mine than any other with which I am acquainted. At present, Dr. Perry thinks every field of experience is so much fact. It becomes opinion or thought only in retrospection, when a fresh experience, thinking the same object, alters and corrects it. But the corrective experience becomes itself, in turn, corrected. Said thus, experience is a whole as much. process in which what is objective originally forever turns subjective, turns into our apprehension of the object.

I strongly recommend Dr. Perry's admirable article to my readers. End footnote. I think I may now claim to have made my thesis clear. Consciousness connotes a kind of external relation and does not denote a special stuff or way of being. The peculiarity of our experiences that they not only are, but are known, which their conscious qualities invoked to explain, is better explained by their relations, these relations themselves being experiences to one another. Section 4. Where I now to go on to treat of the knowing of perceptual by conceptual experiences, it would again prove to be an affair

of external relations. One experience would be the knower, the other the reality known, and I could perfectly well define, without the notion of consciousness, what the knowing actually and practically amounts to, leading towards, namely, and terminating in, per sets, through a series of transitional experiences which the world supplies. But I will not treat of this, space being insufficient. I will rather consider a few objections that are sure to be urged against the entire theory as it stands. Section 5. First of all, this will be asked.

If experience has not conscious existence, if it be not partly made of consciousness, of what then is it made? Matter we know, and thought we know, and conscious content we know, but neutral and simple pure experience is something we know not at all. what it consists of, for it must consist of something, or be willing to give it up.

To this challenge, the reply is easy. Although for fluency's sake I myself spoke early in this article of a stuff of pure experience, I have now to say there is no general stuff of which experience at large is made. There are as many stuffs as there are natures and the things experienced. If you ask what any one bit of pure experience is made of, the answer is always the same. It is made of that, of just what appears, of space, of intensity, of flatness, brownness, heaviness, or whatnot. Shadworth Hodgson's analysis here leaves nothing to be desired. Experience is only a collective name for all these sensible natures, and save for time and space,

and if you like for being, there appears. here's no universal element of which all things are made. Section 6. The next objection is more formidable. In fact, it sounds quite crushing when one one hears it first. If it be the self-same piece of pure experience, taken twice over, that serves now as thought and now as thing, so the objection runs, how comes it that its attributes should differ so fundamentally in the two takings. As thing, the experience is extended. As thought, it occupies

no space or place. As thing, it is red, hard, heavy. But whoever heard of a red, hard, or heavy thought? Yet even now, you said that an experience is made of just what appears, and what appears is just such adjectives. How can the one experience in its thing function be made, of them, consist of them, carry them as its own attributes, while in its thought function it disowns them and attributes them elsewhere. There's a self-contradiction here from which the radical dualism of thought and thing is the only truth that can save us. Only if the thought is one kind of being can the adjectives exist in it intentionally, to use the scholastic term. Only if the thing is another kind can they exist in it

constitutionally and energetically. No simple subject can take the same adjectives and at one time be qualified by it and, at another time, be merely of it, as of something only meant or known. The solution insisted on by this objector, like many other common-sense solutions, grows the less satisfactory

the more one turns it in one's mind. To begin with, are thought and thing as heterogeneous, as is commonly said? No one denies that they have some categories in common. Their relations to time are identical. Both, moreover, may have parts, for psychologists in general treat thoughts as having them, and both may be complex or simple. Both are of kinds, can be compared, added, and subtracted, and arranged in serial orders. All sorts of adjectives

qualify our thoughts which appear incompatible with consciousness, being as such a bare diaphenity. For instance, they are natural and easy or laborious. They are beautiful, happy, intense, interesting, wise, idiotic, focal, marginal, insipid, confused, vague, precise, rational, casual, particular, and many things besides. Moreover, the chapters on perception in the psychology books are full effects that make for the essential homogeneity of thought with thing. How, if subject and object were separated by the

whole diameter of being and had no attributes in common, could it be so hard to tell, in a presented and recognized material object, what part comes in through the sense organs, and what part comes out of one's own head. Sensations and appreceptive ideas fuse here so intimately that you can no more tell where one begins and the other ends than you can tell in those cunning circular panoramas that have lately been exhibited, where the real foreground and the painted canvas joined together.

Descartes, for the first time, defined thought as the absolutely unextended, and later philosophers have accepted the description as correct. But what possible meaning has it to say that, when we think of a foot-rule or a square yard, extension is not attributable to our thought. Of every extended object, the adequate mental picture must have all the extension of the object itself. The difference between objective and subjective extension is one of a relation to a context solely. In the mind, the various this extents maintain no necessarily stubborn order relatively to one another, while in the physical world they bound each other stably, and, added together, make the great enveloping unit, which we

believe in and call real space. As outer, they carry themselves adversely, so to speak, to one another, exclude one another, and maintain their distances, while as inner, their order is loose, and they form a dorcheinandr in which unity is lost. Footnote. I speak here of the complete inner life in which the mind plays freely with its materials. Of course, the mind's free play is restricted when it seeks to copy real things in real space.

End footnote. But to argue from this, that inner experience is absolutely inextensive seems to me a little short of absurd. The two worlds differ, not by the presence or absence of extension, but by the relations of the extensions which in both worlds exist. Does not this case of extension now put us on the track of truth in the case of other qualities? It does, and I am surprised that the fact should not have been noticed long ago. Why, for example, do we call a fire hot and water wet, and yet refuse to say that our mental state,

when it is of these objects, is either wet or hot. Intentionally, at any rate, and when the mental state is a vivid image, hotness and wetness are in it just as much as they are in the physical experience. The reason is this, that as the general chaos of all our experience gets sifted, we find that there are some fires that will always burn sticks and always warm our bodies, and that there are some waters that will always put out fires, while there are other fires and waters that will not act at all. The general group of experiences that act

that do not only possess their natures intrinsically but wear them adjectively and energetically, turning them against one another, comes inevitably to be contrasted with a group whose members having identically the same natures, fail to manifest them in the energetic way. footnote but there are also mental activity trains in which thoughts do work on each other confer below page one eighty four note i make for myself now an experience of blazing fire i place it near my body but it does not warm me in the least i lay a stick upon it and the stick either burns or remains green as i please

I call up water and pour it on the fire, and absolutely no difference ensues. I account for all such facts by calling this whole train of experiences unreal, a mental train. Mental fire is what won't burn real sticks. Mental water is what won't necessarily, though of course it may, put out even a mental fire. Mental knives may be sharp, but they won't cut real wood. Mental triangles are pointed, but their points won't wound. With real objects, on the contrary, consequences always accrue, and thus the real experiences get sifted from the mental ones,

the things from our thoughts of them, fanciful or true, and precipitated together as the stable part of the whole experience, chaos under the name of the physical world. Of this, our perceptual experiences are the nucleus, they being the originally strong experiences. We add a lot of conceptual experiences to them, making these strong also in imagination, and building out the remoter parts of the physical world by their means, and around this core of reality the world of laxly connected fancies and mere rhapsodical objects, floats like a bank of clouds. In the clouds, all sorts of rules are violated, which, in the

core, are kept. Extensions there can be indefinitely located. Motion there obeys no Newton's laws. Section 7. There is a peculiar class of experiences to which, whether we take them as subjective or as objective, we assign their several names. as attributes, because in both contexts they affect their associates actively, though in neither quite as strongly or as sharply as things affect one another by their physical energies. I refer here to appreciations, which form an ambiguous sphere of being, belonging with emotion on the one hand and having objective value on the other. yet seeming not quite inner nor quite outer, as if a diremption had begun but had not made itself complete.

Experiences of painful objects, for example, are usually also painful experiences. Perceptions of loveliness, of ugliness tend to pass muster as lovely or as ugly perceptions. intuitions of the morally lofty are lofty intuitions. Sometimes the adjective wanders as if uncertain were to fix itself. Shall we speak of seductive visions or of visions of seductive things? Of wicked desires or of desires for wickedness? Of healthy thoughts? Or of thoughts of healthy objects?

of good impulses or of impulses towards the good, of feelings of anger, or of angry feelings. Both in the mind and in the thing, these natures modify their context, exclude certain associates, and determine others, have their mates, and incompatibles. Yet, not as stubbornly as in the case of physical qualities, for beauty and ugliness, love and hatred, pleasant and painful, can, in certain complex experiences, coexist. If one were to make an evolutionary construction of how a lot of originally chaotic pure experiences became gradually differentiated into an orderly inner and outer world, the whole theory could turn upon one's success in explaining how or why the quality of an experience, once active, could become less so,

and from being an energetic attribute in some cases, elsewhere lapse into the status of an inert or merely internal nature. This would be the evolution of the psychical from the bosom of the physical, in which the aesthetic, moral, and otherwise emotional experiences would represent a halfway stage. Section 8 But a last cry of non-possumous will probably go up from many readers.

All very pretty is a piece of ingenuity, they will say, but our consciousness itself intuitively contradicts you. We, for our part, know that we are conscious. We feel our thought flowing as a life within us, in absolute contrast with the objects which it so unremittingly escorts. We cannot be faithless to this immediate intuition. The dualism is a fundamental datum.

Let no man join what God has put asunder. My reply to this is my last word, and I greatly grieve that to many it will sound materialistic. I cannot help that, however, for I too have my intuitions, and I must obey them. Let the case be what it may in others. I am as confident as I am of anything, that, in myself, the stream of my own. of thinking, which I recognize emphatically as a phenomenon, is only a careless name for what one scrutinized, reveals itself to consist chiefly of the stream of my breathing. The I-think, which Kant said must be able to accompany all my objects, is the I-breathe, which actually

does accompany them. There are other internal facts besides breathing. intracephalic muscular adjustments, etc., of which I have said a word in my larger psychology. And these increase the assets of consciousness, so far as the latter is subject to immediate perception. But breath, which was ever the original of spirit, breath moving outwards between the glottis and the nostrils, is, I am persuaded, the essence out of which philosophers have constructed the entity known to them as consciousness. That entity is fictitious, while thoughts in the concrete are fully real. But thoughts in the concrete are made of the same stuff as things are.

I wish I might believe myself to have made that plausible in this article. In another article, I shall try to make the general notion of a world composed of pure experiences still more clear. End Chapter 1 Does consciousness exist? From Essays in Radical Empiricism by William James. This recording is in the public domain. This is a Libravox recording.

All Libravox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, visit Libravox.org. This reading by Carl Manchester 2007. Essays in Radical Empiricism by William James. Chapter 2 a world of pure experience. It is difficult not to notice a curious unrest in the philosophic atmosphere of the time, a loosening of old landmarks, a softening of oppositions,

a mutual borrowing from one another on the part of systems anciently closed, and an interest in new suggestions, however vague, as if the one thing sure were the inadequacy of the extant school solutions. The dissatisfaction with these seems due for the most part, to a feeling that they are too abstract and academic. Life is confused and superabundant, and what the younger generation appears to crave is more of the temperament of life in philosophy,

even though it were at some cost of logical rigour and of formal purity. Transcendental idealism is inclining to let the world wag incomprehensibly, in spite of its absolute subject and his unity of purpose. Berkeleyan idealism is abandoning the principle of parsimony and dabbling in pan-psychic speculations. Empiricism flirts with teleology, and strangest of all, natural realism, so long decently buried, raises its head above the turf, and finds glad hands

outstretched from the most unlikely quarters to help it to its feet again. We are all biased by our personal feelings, I know, and I am personally discontented with extant solutions, so I seem to read the signs of a great unsettlement, as if the upheaval of more real conceptions and more fruitful methods were imminent, as if a true landscape might result, less clipped, straight-edged, and artificial. If philosophy be really on the eve of any considerable rearrangement, the time should be propitious for anyone who has suggestions of his own to bring forward. For many years past, my mind has been growing into a certain type of Velton-shawung. Rightly or wrongly, I have got to the point where I can hardly see things in any other pattern.

I propose, therefore, to describe the pattern as clearly as I can consistently with great brevity, and to throw my description into the bubbling vat of publicity, where, jostled by rivals and torn by critics, it will eventually either disappear from notice, or else, if better look before it, quietly subside into the profundities, and serve as a possible ferment of new growths or a nucleus of new crystallisation. I give the name of radical empiricism to my Velton-Schaueng. Empiricism is known as the opposite of rationalism. Rationalism tends to emphasize universals and make holes prior to parts in the order of logic, as well as in that of being.

Empiricism, on the contrary, lays the explanatory stress upon the part, the element, the individual, and treats the whole as a collection and the universal. as an abstraction. My description of things, accordingly, starts with the parts and makes the whole being of the second order. It is essentially a mosaic philosophy, a philosophy of plural facts, like that of Hume and his descendants, who refer these facts neither to substances in which they inherit, nor to an absolute mind that creates them as its objects.

But it differs from the Humean type of empiricism, in one particular, which makes me add the epithet radical. To be radical, and empiricism must neither admit into its constructions any element that is not directly experienced, nor exclude from them any element that is directly experienced. For such a philosophy, the relations that connect experiences must themselves be experienced relations, and any kind of relation experienced, must be accounted as real as anything else in the system. Elements may indeed be redistributed, the original placing of things getting corrected,

but a real place must be found for every kind of thing experienced, whether term or relation, in the final philosophic arrangement. Now, ordinary empiricism, in spite of the fact that conjunctive and disjunctive relations present themselves as being fully coordinate parts of experience, has always shown a tendency to do away with the connections of things,

and to insist most on the disjunctions. Berkeley's nominalism, Hume's statement that whatever things we distinguish are as loose and separate as if they had no manner of connection. James Mills' denial that similers have anything really in common, the resolution of the causal tie into habitual sequence. John Mills' account of both physical things and cells as composed of discontinuous possibilities, and the general pulverization of all experience by association and the mind dust theory are examples of what I mean. The natural result of such a world picture has been

the efforts of rationalism to correct its incoherencies by the addition of trans-experiential agents of unification, substances, intellectual categories and powers, or selves, whereas if empiricism had only been radical and taken everything that comes without disfavor, conjunction as well as separation, each at its face value, the results would have called for no such artificial correction. Radical empiricism, as I understand it, does full justice to conjunctive relations. Without, however, treating them as rationalism always tends to treat them,

as being true in some supernal way, as if the unity of things and their variety belonged to different orders of truth and vitality altogether. Conjunctive relations. Relations are of different degrees of intimacy. Merely to be with one another in a universe of discourse is the most external relation that terms can have and seems to involve nothing whatsoever as to farther consequences.

Simultaneity and time interval come next, and then space adjacency and distance. After them, similarity and difference, carrying the possibility of many inferences, then relations of activity, tying terms into series involving change, tendency, resistance, and the causal order generally. Finally, the relation experienced between terms

that form states of mind, and are immediately conscious of continuing each other. The organisation of the self, as a system of memories, purposes, strivings, fulfilments or disappointments, is incidental to this most intimate of all relations, the terms of which seem in many cases actually to compenetrate and suffuse each other's being. Footnote. See the experience of activity.

End footnote. Philosophy has always turned on grammatical particles, with, near, next, like, from, towards against because four through my these words designate types of conjunctive relation arranged in a roughly ascending order of intimacy and inclusiveness a priori we can imagine a universe of withness but no nextness or one of nextness but no likeness or of likeness with no activity or of activity with no purpose or of purpose with no ego these would be universe

each with its own grade of unity. The universe of human experience is, by one or another of its parts, of each and all these grades. Whether or not it possibly enjoys some still more absolute grade of union does not appear upon the surface. Taken as it does appear,

our universe is to a large extent chaotic. No single type of connection runs through all the experiences that compose it. If we take space relations, they fail to connect minds into any regular system. Causes and purposes obtain only among special series of facts. The self-relation seems extremely limited and does not link two different selves together.

Prima Fasi, if you should liken the universe of absolute idealism to an aquarium, a crystal globe in which goldfish are swimming, you would have to compare the empiricist universe to something more like one of those dried human heads with which the diacs of Borneo deck their lodges. The skull forms a solid nucleus, but innumerable feathers, leaves, strings, beads, and loose appendices of every description,

float and dangle from it, and, save that they terminate in it, seem to have nothing to do with one another. Even so, my experiences and yours float and dangle, terminating it is true, in a nucleus of common perception, but for the most part out of sight and irrelevant, and unimaginable to one another. This imperfect intimacy,

this bare relation of withness between some parts of the sum total of experience and other parts, is the fact that ordinary empiricism over-emphasises against rationalism, the latter always tending to ignore it unduly. Radical empiricism, on the contrary, is fair to both the unity and the disconnection.

It finds no reason for treating either as illusory. It allots to each its definite sphere of description and agrees that there appear to be actual forces at work which tend as time goes on to make the unity greater. The conjunctive relation that has given most trouble to philosophy is the co-conscious transition, so to call it, by which one experience passes into another when both belong to the same self. About the facts there is no question. my experiences and your experiences are with each other in various external ways but mine pass into mine and yours pass into yours in a way in which yours and mine never pass into one another within each of our personal histories subject objects interest and purpose a continuous or may be continuous footnote the psychology books of late have described the facts here with a proximity

adequacy, I may refer to the chapters on the stream of thought and on the self in my own principles of psychology, as well as to S.H. Hodgson's Metaphysics of Experience. End footnote. Personal histories are processes of change in time, and the change in itself is one of the things immediately experienced. Change, in this case, means continuous as opposed to discontinuous transition. But continuous transition is one sort of a conjunctive relation.

And to be a radical empiricist means to hold fast to this conjunctive relation of all others. For this is the strategic point, the position through which if a whole be made all the corruptions of dialectics

and all the metaphysical fictions pour into our philosophy. The holding fast to this relation means taking it at its face value, neither less nor more, And to take it at its face value means, first of all, to take it just as we feel it, and not to confuse ourselves with abstract talk about it, involving words that drive us to invent secondary conceptions

in order to neutralise their suggestions, and to make our actual experience again seem rationally possible. What I do feel simply, when a later moment of my experience succeeds an earlier one, is that though they are two moments, the transition from the one to the other is continuous. Continuity here is a definite sort of experience just as definite as the discontinuity experience, which I find it impossible to avoid

when I seek to make the transition from an experience of my own to one of yours. In this latter case, I have to get on and off again, to pass from a thing lived to another thing only conceived, and the break is positively experienced and noted. Though the functions exerted by my experience and by yours may be the same, e.g. the same objects known and the same purposes followed, yet the sameness has in this case to be ascertained expressly,

and often with difficulty and uncertainty, after the break has been felt, where in passing from one of my own moments to another, the sameness of object and interest is unbroken, and both the earlier and the later experience are of things directly lived. There is no other nature, no other whatness, than this absence of break and this sense of continuity in that most intimate of all conjunctive relations, the passing of one experience into another when they belong to the same self. And this whatness is real empirical content, just as the whatness of separation and discontinuity is real content in the contrasted case. practically to experience one's personal continuum in this living way is to know the originals of the ideas of continuity and of sameness,

to know what the words stand for concretely, to own all that they can ever mean. But all experiences have their conditions, and over subtle intellects, thinking about the facts here, and asking how they are possible, have ended by substituting a lot of static objects of conception for the direct perceptual experiences.

Sameness, they have said, must be a stark numerical identity. It can't run on from next to next. Continuity can't mean mere absence of gap. For, if you say two things are in immediate contact, at the contact, how can they be two? If, on the other hand, you put a relation of transition between them, that itself is a third thing. and needs to be related or hitched to its terms.

An infinite series is involved, and so on. The result is that from difficulty to difficulty, the plain conjunctive experience has been discredited by both schools, the empiricists leaving things permanently disjointed, and the rationalist remedying the looseness by their absolutes or substances, or whatever other fictitious agencies of union they may have employed. footnote see the thing and its relations end footnote from all which artificiality we can be saved by a couple of simple reflections first that conjunctions and separations are at all events coordinate phenomena which if we take experiences at their face value,

must be accounted equally real, and second, that if we insist on treating things as really separate, when they are given as continuously joined, invoking when union is required, transcendental principles to overcome the separateness we have assumed, then we ought to stand ready to perform the Converse Act. We ought to invoke higher principles of disunion also, to make our merely experienced disjunction,

more truly real. Failing this, we ought to let the originally given continuities stand on their own bottom. We have no right to be lopsided or to blow capriciously hot and cold. The first great pitfall from which such a radical standing-by experience will save us is an artificial conception of the relations between Noah and known. Throughout the history of philosophy, the subject and its object have been treated, as absolutely discontinuous entities,

and thereupon the presence of the latter to the former, or the apprehension by the former of the latter, has assumed a paradoxical character which all sorts of theories had to be invented to overcome. Representative theories put a mental representation image or content into the gap as a sort of intermediary. Common sense theories left the gap untouched, declaring our mind able to create our mind able to

clear it by a self-transcending leap. Transcendentalist theories left it impossible to traverse by finite knowers and brought an absolute in to perform the salutary act. All the while, in the very bosom of the finite experience, every conjunction required to make the relation intelligible is given in full. Either the Noah and the known are, one, the self-same piece, and, of experience taken twice over in different contexts, or there are two, two pieces of actual experience belonging to the same subject with definite tracts of conjunctive transitional experience between them, or, three, the known is a possible experience either of that subject or another, to which the said conjunctive transitions would lead, if sufficiently prolonged.

To discuss all the ways in which one experience may function as the knower of another would be incompatible with the limits of this essay. Footnote For brevity's sake I altogether omit mention of the type constituted by knowledge of the truth of general propositions. This type has been thoroughly and so far as I can see satisfactorily elucidated in Dewey's studies in logical theory. Such propositions are reducible to the S is p. form, and the terminus that verifies and fulfills is the SP in combination.

Of course, Perseps may be involved in the mediating experiences, or in the satisfactoryness of the P in its new position. End footnote. I have just treated of type 1, the kind of knowledge called perception. This is the type of case in which the mind enjoys direct acquaintance with the present object. In the other types, the mind has knowledge about an object not immediately there. Of type 2, the simplest sort of conceptual knowledge, I have given some account in two earlier articles. Footnote.

On the function of cognition, Mind, Volume 10, 1885, and The Knowing of Things Together, Psychological Review, Volume 2, 1895. These articles are reprinted, the former in full, the latter in part, in the meaning of truth. End footnote. Type 3 can always formally and hypothetically be reduced to type 2, so that a brief description of that type will put the present reader sufficiently at my point of view and make him see what the actual meanings of the mysterious cognitive relation may be. Suppose me to be sitting here in my library at Kemparkin. Cambridge at ten minutes walk from Memorial Hall, and to be thinking truly of the latter object.

My mind may have before it only the name, or it may have a clear image, or it may have a very dim image of the hall. But such intrinsic differences in the image make no difference in its cognitive function. Certain extrinsic phenomena, special experiences of conjunction, are what in part to the image be what it may, its knowing office. For instance, if you ask me what hall I mean by my image, and I tell you nothing, or if I fail to point or lead you towards the Harvard Delta, or if being led by you, I am uncertain whether the hall I see be what I had in mind or not, you would rightly deny that I had meant that particular hall at all, even though my mental image might to some degree have resembled it.

The resemblance would count in that case as coincidental merely, for all sorts of things of a kind, resemble one another in this world, without being held for that reason to take cognizance of one another. On the other hand, if I can lead you to the hall, and tell you of its history and present uses, if in its presence I feel my idea, however imperfect it may have been, to have led hither and to be now terminated,

if the associates of the image and of the felt hall run parallel, so that each term of the one context corresponds serially as I walk with an answering term of the others, why then my soul was prophetic, and my idea must be, and by common consent would be, called cognizant of reality, that percept was what I meant, for into it my idea has passed

by conjunctive experiences of sameness, and fulfilled in reality. intention. Nowhere is their jar, but every latter moment continues and corroborates an earlier one. In this continuing and corroborating, taken in no transcendental sense, but denoting definitely felt transitions, lies all that the knowing of a percept by an idea can possibly contain or signify. Wherever such transitions are felt, the first experience knows the last one. where they do not or where even as possible they cannot intervene there can be no pretense of knowing in this latter case the extremes will be connected if connected at all by inferior relations

bare likeness or succession or by withness alone knowledge of sensible realities thus comes to life inside the tissue of experience it is made and made by relations that unroll themselves in time. Whenever certain intermediaries are given, such that, as they develop towards their terminus, there is experience from point to point of one direction followed, and finally of one process fulfilled, the result is that their starting point thereby becomes a knower,

and their terminus an object meant or known. That is all that knowing, in the simplest case considered, can be known as, that is the whole of its nature put into experiential terms. Whenever such is the sequence of our experiences, we may freely say that we had the terminal object in mind from the outset. Even although at the outset nothing was there in us but a flat piece of substantive experience like any other

with no self-transcendency about it and no mystery save the mystery of coming into existence and being gradually followed by other pieces of substantive experience with conjunctively transitional experiences between them. That is what we mean here by the objects being in mind. Of any deeper, more real way of being in mind, we have no positive conception, and we have no right to discredit our actual experience

by talking of such a way at all. I know that many a reader will rebel at this. Mere intermediaries, he will say, Even though they be feelings of continuously growing fulfilment, only separate the knower from the known, whereas what we have in knowledge is a kind of immediate touch of the one by the other, an apprehension in the etymological sense of the word, a leaping of the chasm by lightning,

an act by which two terms are smitten into one over the head of their distinctness. All these dead intermediaries of yours are out of each other, and outside their term and I still. But do not such dialectic difficulties, remind us of the dog dropping his bone and snapping at its image in the water. If we knew any more real kind of union, Aliundi, from another source, we might be entitled to brand all our empirical unions as a sham.

But unions by continuous transition are the only ones we know of, whether in this matter of a knowledge about, that terminates in an acquaintance. whether in personal identity, in logical predication through the copular, is, or elsewhere. If anywhere there were more absolute unions realised, they could only reveal themselves to us by just such conjunctive results. These are what the unions are worth. These are all that we can ever practically mean, by union, by continuity.

Is it not time to repeat what Lotzy said of substances, that to act like one is to be, one. Should we not say here that to be experienced as continuous is to be really continuous? In a world where experience and reality come to the same thing. In a picture gallery, a painted hook will serve to hang a painted chain by. A painted cable will hold a painted ship. In a world where both the terms and their distinctions are affairs of experience, conjunctions that are experienced must be at least as real. as anything else.

There will be absolutely real conjunctions if we have no trans-phenomenal absolute ready to de-realise the whole experienced world by at a stroke. If, on the other hand, we had such an absolute, not one of our opponent's theories of knowledge could remain standing any better than ours could, for the distinctions as well as the conjunctions of experience would impartially fall its prey.

The whole question of how one thing can know another, would cease to be a real one at all in a world where otherness itself was an illusion. Footnote. Mr Bradley, not professing to know his absolute Alliundi, nevertheless de-realises experience by alleging it to be everywhere infected with self-contradiction. His arguments seem almost purely verbal, but this is no place for arguing that point out. End footnote. So much for the essentials of the cognitive relation.

Whether knowledge is conceptual in type or forms knowledge about an object, it consists in intermediary experiences, possible, if not actual, of continuously developing progress, and finally of fulfillment, when the sensible percept, which is the object, is reached. The percept here not only verifies the concept, proves its function of knowing that percept to be true, but the percept's existence as the terminus of the chain of intermediaries creates the function.

Whatever terminates that chain was, because it now proves itself to be, what the concept had in mind. The towering importance for human life of this kind of knowing lies in the fact that an experience that knows another can figure as its representative, not in any quasi-miraculous epistemological sense, but in the definite practical sense of being its substitute in various operations, sometimes physical and sometimes mental, which lead us to its associates and results. By experimenting on our ideas of reality, we may save ourselves the trouble of experimenting on the real experiences which they severally mean. The ideas form related systems

corresponding point four point to the systems which the realities form, and by letting an ideal term call up its associates systematically, we may be led to a terminus, which the corresponding real term would have led to in case we had operated on the real world. And this brings us to the general question of substitution. Substitution. In Tane's brilliant book on intelligence, substitution was for the first time named as a cardinalogical function, though of course the facts had always been familiar enough. What exactly, in a sense, in a central logical function. What exactly, system of experiences, does the substitution of one of them for another mean? According to my view, experience as a whole is a process in time, whereby innumerable

particular terms lapse and are superseded by others that follow upon them, by transitions which, whether disjunctive or conjunctive in content, are themselves experiences, and must in general be accounted at least as real as the terms which they relate. What the nature of the event called superseding signifies depends altogether on the kind of transition that obtains. Some experiences simply abolish their predecessors without continuing them in any way. Others are felt to increase or to enlarge their meaning, to carry out their purpose or to bring us nearer to their goal. They represent them, and may fulfil their function better than they fulfilled it themselves. But to fulfil a function in a world of pure experience,

can be conceived and defined in only one possible way. In such a world, transitions and arrivals, or terminations, are the only events that happen, though they happen by so many sorts of path. The only function that one experience can perform is to lead into another experience, and the only fulfilment we can speak of is the reaching of a certain experienced end. When one experience leads to, or can lead to, the same end as another, they agree in function. But the whole system of experiences, as they are immediately given, presents itself a quasi-chaos,

through which one can pass out of an initial term in many directions, and yet end in the same terminus, moving from next to next by a great many possible paths. Either one of these paths might be a functional substitute for another, and to follow one, rather than another, might, on occasion, be an advantageous thing to do. As a matter of fact, and in a general way, the paths that run through conceptual experiences, that is through thoughts or ideas, that know, the things in which they terminate, are highly advantageous paths to follow. Not only do they yield in conceivably rapid transitions, but owing to the universal character, footnote, of which all that need be said in this essay is that it also can be conceived as functional and defined in terms of transitions, or of the possibility. of such, end footnote, which they frequently possess, and to their capacity for association with one another in great systems, they outstrip the tardy consecutions of the things themselves, and sweep us on

towards our ultimate termini in a far more labour-saving way than the following of trains of sensible perception ever could. Wonderful are the new cuts and the short circuits which the thought-paths make. Most thought-paths, it is true, substitutes for nothing actual. They end outside the real world altogether, in wayward fancies, utopias, fictions or mistakes. But where they do re-enter reality and terminate therein, we substitute them always,

and with these substitutes we pass the greater number of our hours. This is why I called our experiences, taken altogether, a quasi-chaos. There is vastly more discontinuity in the sum total of experiences than we commonly suppose. The objective nucleus of every man's experience, his own body, is, it is true, a continuous percept. An equally continuous as a percept,

though we may be inattentive to it, is the material environment of that body, changing by gradual transition when the body moves. But the distant parts of the physical world are at all times absent from us and form conceptual objects merely into the perceptual reality of which our life inserts itself at points, discreet, and relatively rare. Round their several objective nuclei, partly shared in common and partly discrete, of the real physical world,

innumerable thinkers pursuing their several lines of physically true cogitation, trace paths that intersect one another only at discontinuous perceptual points, and the rest of the time are quite incongruent. and around all the nuclei of shared reality, as around the diac's head of my late metaphor, floats the vast cloud of experiences that are wholly subjective, that are non-substitutional, that find not even an eventual ending for themselves in the perceptual world, the mere daydreams and joys and sufferings and wishes of the individual minds. These exist with one another indeed, and with the objective nuclei,

but out of them it is probable that to all eternity no interrelated system of any kind will ever be made. This notion of the purely substitutional or conceptual physical world brings us to the most critical of all the steps in the development of a philosophy of pure experience. The paradox of self-transcendency in knowledge comes back upon us here, but I think that our notions of pure experience and of substitution and our radically empirical view of conjunctive transitions

are denk-mittle, ways of thinking, that will carry us safely through the pass. What objective reference is? Whosoever feels his experience to be something substitutional even while he has it may be said to have an experience that reaches beyond itself. From inside of its own entity, it says, more, and postulates reality existing elsewhere.

for the transcendentalist who holds knowing to consist in a salto mortale across an epistemological chasm such an idea presents no difficulty but it seems at first sight as if it might be inconsistent with an empiricism like our own have we not explained that conceptual knowledge is made such wholly by the existence of things that fall outside the knowing experience itself by intermediary experiences and by a third terminus that fulfills. Can the knowledge be there before these elements that constitute its being have come? And, if knowledge be not there, how can objective reference occur? The key to this difficulty lies in the distinction between knowing as verified and completed, and the same knowing as in transit and on its way. To recur to the memorial hall example lately used, it is only when our idea of the hall has actually terminated in the percept, that we know, for certain, that from the beginning it was truly cognitive of that. Until established by the end of the process, its quality

of knowing that, or indeed knowing anything, could still be doubted, and yet the knowing really was there, as the result now shows. We were virtual knowers of the hall, long before we were certified to have been its actual knowers by the Percept's retroactive validating power. Just so, we are mortal all the time, by reason of the virtuality of the inevitable event, which will make us so when it shall have come. Now, the immensely greater part of all our knowing never gets beyond this virtual stage. It never is completed or nailed down. I speak not merely of our ideas of imperceptibles like ether waves or daze.

dissociated irons, or of ejects like the contents of our neighbours' minds. I speak also of ideas which we might verify, if we would take the trouble, but which we hold for true, although unterminated perceptually, because nothing says no to us, and there is no contradicting truth in sight. To continue thinking unchallenged is 99 times out of 100, our practical substitute for knowing in the completed sense. As each experience runs by cognitive transition into the next one, and we nowhere feel a collision with what we elsewhere count as truth or fact, we commit ourselves to the current as if the port was sure. We live, as it were, upon the front edge of an advancing wave crest, and our sense of a determinate

direction in falling forward is all we cover of the future of our path. It is as if a differential quotient should be conscious and treat itself as an adequate substitute for a truble. traced out curve. Our experience in Terralia is of variations of rate and of direction, and lives in these transitions more than in the journey's end. The experiences of tendency are sufficient to act upon. What more could we have done at those moments, even if the later verification comes complete? This is what, as a radical empiricist, I say to the charge that the objective reference which is so flagrant a character of our existence. experiences involves a chasm and a mortal leap.

A positively conjunctive transition involves neither chasm nor leap. Being the very original of what we mean by continuity, it makes a continuum wherever it appears. I know full well that such brief words as these will leave the hardened transcendentalist unshaken. Conjunctive experiences separate their terms, he will still say. They are third things interposed that have themselves. to be conjoined by new links and to invoke them makes our trouble infinitely worse to feel our motion forward is impossible motion implies terminus and how can terminus be felt before we have arrived the barest start and sally forwards the barest tendency to leave the instant involves the chasm and the leap conjunctive transitions are the most superficial of appearances allusions of our sensibility which philosophical reflexes pulverizes at a touch conception is our only trustworthy instrument conception and the

absolute working hand in hand conception disintegrates experience utterly but its disjunctions are easily overcome again when the absolute takes up the task such transcendentalists I must leave provisionally at least in full possession of their creed I have no space for polemics in this article so I shall simply formulate the empiricist doctrine as my hypothesis, leaving it to work or not to work as it may. Objective reference, I say then, is an incident of the fact that so much of our experience comes as an insufficient and consists of process and transition. Our fields of experience have no more definite boundaries than have our fields of view. Both are fringed forever by a

more that continuously develops and that continuously supersedes them as like. proceeds the relations generally speaking are as real here as the terms are and the only complaint of the transcendentalists with which I could at all sympathize would be his charge that by first making knowledge to consist in external relations as I have done and by then confessing that nine-tenths of the time these are not actually but only virtually there I have knocked the solid bottom out of the whole business and palmed off a substitute of knowledge for the genuine thing Only the admission, such a critic might say, that our ideas are self-transcendent and true already, in advance of the experiences that are to terminate them, can bring solidity back to knowledge in a world like this, in which transitions and terminations are only by exception fulfilled.

This seems to me an excellent place for applying the pragmatic method. When a dispute arises, that method consists in auguring what practical consequences would be did. different if one side rather than the other were true. If no difference can be thought of, the dispute is a quarrel over words. What then would the self-transcendency affirm to exist in advance of all experiential mediation or termination be known as? What would it practically result in for us? Were it true? It could only result in our orientation, in the turning of our expectations and practical tendencies into the right path, and the right path here,

so long as we and the object are not yet face to face, or can never get face to face, as in the case of ejects, would be the path that leads us into the object's nearest neighbourhood. Where direct acquaintance is lacking, knowledge about is the next best thing, and an acquaintance with what actually lies about the object

and is most closely related to it, puts such knowledge within our grasp. Etherwaves and your anger, for example, are things in which my thoughts will never perceptually terminate, but my concepts of them lead me to their very brink, to the chromatic fringes and to the hurtful words and deeds, which are their really next effects. Even if our ideas did in themselves carry the postulated self-transcendency,

it would still remain true that they're putting us into possession of such effects, would be the sole cash value of the self-transcendency for us. And this cash value, it is needless to say, is verbatim et literatim what our empiricist account pays in. On pragmatist principles, therefore, a dispute over self-transcendancy is a pure logo-machi. Call our concepts of ejective things self-transcendant, or the reverse, it makes no difference,

so long as we don't differ about the nature of, that exalted virtue's fruits fruits for us of course humanistic fruits if an absolute were proved to exist for other reasons it might well appear that his knowledge is terminated in innumerable cases where ours is still incomplete that however would be a fact indifferent to our knowledge the latter would grow neither worse nor better whether we acknowledged such an absolute or left him out so the notion of a knowledge still in transitue and on its way joins hands here with the notion of a pure experience which i tried to explain in my essay entitled does consciousness exist the instant field of the present is always experience in its pure state plain unqualified actuality a simple that as yet undifferentiated into thing and thought and only virtually classifiable as objective fact or as someone's opinion about fact. This is as true when the field is conceptual as when it is perceptual. Memorial Hall is there, in my idea, as much as when I stand before it. I proceed to act on its account in either case.

Only in the later experience that supersedes the present one is this naive immediacy retrospectively split into two parts, a consciousness and its content, and the content corrected or confirmed. While still pure or present, any experience, mine, for example, of what I write about in these very lines, passes for truth.

The morrow may reduce it to opinion. The transcendentalist in all his particular knowledges is as liable to this reduction as I am. His absolute does not save him. Why then need he quarrel with an account of knowing that merely leaves it liable to this inevitable condition. Why insist that knowing is a static relation out of time

when it practically seems so much a function of our active life? For a thing to be valid, says Lotzy, is the same as to make itself valid. When the whole universe seems only to be making itself valid and to be still incomplete, else why it's ceaseless changing, why, of all things, should knowing be exempt? why should it not be making itself valid like everything else that some parts of it may be already valid or verified beyond dispute the empirical philosopher of course like any one else may always hope

the conteminousness of different minds with transition and prospect thus enthroned in pure experience it is impossible to subscribe to the idealism of the english school radical empiricism has in fact more affinity with natural realism than with the views of Berkeley or of Mill, and this can be easily shown. For the Berkeleyan School, ideas, the verbal equivalent of what I term experiences, are discontinuous. The content of each is wholly imminent, and there are no transitions with which they are consubstantial, and through which their beings may unite. Your memorial hall and mine, even when both are percepts, a wholly out of connection with each, other. Our lives are a congeries of solipsisms, out of which in strict logic only a God could compose a universe, even of discourse. No dynamic currents run between my objects and your objects,

never can our minds meet in the same. The incredibility of such a philosophy is flagrant. It is cold, strained, and unnatural in a supreme degree, and it may be doubted whether even Berklee himself, who took it so religiously, really believed when walking through the streets of London that his spirit and the spirits of his fellow wayfarers had absolutely different towns in view. To me, the decisive reason in favour of our minds meeting in some common objects at least is that, unless I make that supposition, I have no motive for assuming that your mind exists at all. Why do I postulate your mind? Because I see your body acting in a way. Its gestures, facial movements, words and conduct generally are expressive, so I deem it

actuated as my own is, by an inner life like mine. This argument from analogy is my reason, whether an instinctive belief runs before it or not. But what is your body here, but a percept in my field? It is only as animating that object, my object, that I have any account to think of you at all. If the body that you actuate be not the very body that I see there, but some duplicate body of your own, with which that has nothing to do, we belong to different universes you and I, and for me to speak of you is folly. Myriads of such universes even now may coexist, irrelevant to one another. My concern is solely with the universe with which my own life is connected. In that perceptual part of my universe which I called your body, your mind and

my mind meet and may be called conterminous. Your mind actuates that body and mind sees it. My thoughts pass into it as into their harmonious cognitive fulfillment. Your emotions and volitions pass into it as causes into their effects. But that percept hangs together with all our other physical percepts. They have one's stuff with it, and if it be our common possession, they must be so likewise. For instance, your hand lays hold of one end of a rope, and mine lays hold of the other end. We pull against each other. Can our two hands be mutual objects in this experience, and the rope not be mutual also? What is true of the rope is true of any other percept. Your objects are over and over again, the same as mine. If I ask you where

some object of yours is, our old memorial hall, for example, you point to my memorial hall with your hand, which I see. If you alter an object in your world, put out a candle, for example, when I am present, my candle ipso facto goes out. It is only as altering my objects, that I guess you to exist. If your objects do not coalesce with my objects, if they be not identically where mine are, they must be proved to be positively somewhere else. But no other location can be assigned for them,

so their place must be, what it seems to be, the same. Footnote. The notion that our objects are inside of our respective heads is not seriously defensible, so I pass it by. End footnote. practically then our minds meet in a world of objects which they share in common which would still be there if one or several of the minds were destroyed i can see no formal objection to this suppositions being literally true on the principles which i am defending a mind or personal consciousness is the name for a series of experiences run together by certain definite transitions and an objective reality is a series of similar experiences knit by different transitions. And if one in the same experience can figure twice,

once in a mental and once in a physical context, as I have tried in my article on consciousness to show that it can, one does not see why it might not figure thrice or four times or any number of times by running into as many different mental contexts, just as the same point, lying at their intersection, can be continued into many different lines. abolishing any number of contexts would not destroy the experience itself or its other contexts any more than abolishing some of the points linear continuations would destroy the others or destroy the point itself i well know the subtle dialectic which insists so that a term taken in another relation must needs be an intrinsically different term the crux is always the old greek one that the same man can't be tall in relation to one neighbour and short in relation to another, for that would make him tall and short at once. In this essay I cannot stop to refute this dialectic, so I pass on, leaving my flank for the time exposed.

But if my reader will only allow that the same now both ends his past and begins his future, or that when he buys an acre of land from his neighbour, it is the same acre that successively figures in the two estates, or that when I pay him a dollar, the same dollar goes into his pocket. that came out of mine. He will also, in consistency, have to allow that the same object may conceivably play a part in as being related to the rest of any number of otherwise entirely different minds. This is enough for my present point. The common sense notion of minds sharing the same object offers no special logical or epistemological difficulties of its own. It stands or falls with the general possibility of things being in conjunctive relation with,

other things at all. In principle, then, let natural realism pass for possible. Your mind and mine may terminate in the same percept, not merely against it, as if it were a third external thing, but by inserting themselves into it and coalescing with it, for such is the sort of conjunctive union that appears to be experienced when a perceptual terminus fulfills. Even so, two horses may embrace the same pile, and yet neither one of them touch any other part except that pile, of which the other hawser is attached to. It is therefore not a formal question, but a question of empirical fact solely, whether, when you and I are said to know the same memorial hall,

our minds do terminate at or in a numerically identical percept. Obviously, as a plain matter of fact, they do not. apart from colour-blindness and such possibilities we see the hall in different perspectives you may be on one side of it and i on another the percept of each of us as he sees the surface of the hall is moreover only his provisional terminus the next thing beyond my percept is not your mind but more percepts of my own into which my first percept develops the interior of the hall for instance or the inner structure of its bricks and mortar If our minds were in a literal sense, conterminous, neither could get beyond the percept which they had in common, it would be an ultimate barrier between them, unless indeed they flowed over it and became co-conscious over a still larger part of their content, which, thought transference apart, is not supposed to be the case. In point of fact, the ultimate common barrier can always be pushed by both minds, farther than any actual perceptive. of either, until at last it resolves itself into the mere notion of imperceptibles, like atoms or ether, so that when we do terminate in percepts, our knowledge is only speciously completed, being,

in theoretic strictness, only a virtual knowledge of those remoter objects which conception carries out. Is natural realism permissible in logic, refuted then by empirical fact? Do our minds have no object in common after all? Yes, they certainly have space in common. On pragmatic principles, we are obliged to predicate sameness wherever we can predicate no assignable point of difference. If two named things have every quality and function indiscernible, and are at the same time in the same place,

they must be written down as numerically one thing under two. different names. But there is no test discoverable, so far as I know, by which it can be shown that the place occupied by your percept of Memorial Hall differs from the place occupied by mine. The percepts themselves may be shown to differ, but if each of us be asked to point out where his percept is, we point to an identical spot. All the relations, whether geometrical or causal, of the hall originate or terminate in that spot where in our hands meet and where each of us begins to work if he wishes to make the hall change before the other's eyes. Just so it is with our bodies. That body of yours which you actuate and feel from within must be in the same spot as the body of yours which I see or touch from without. There, for me, means where I place my finger. If you do not feel my fingers' contact to the body.

to be there in my sense when I place it on your body, where then do you feel it? Your inner actuation of your body meets my finger there. It is there that you resist its push or shrink back or sweep the finger aside with your hand. Whatever far the knowledge either of us may acquire of the real constitution of the body which we thus feel, you from within and I from without, it is in that place that the newly conceived or perceived constituents have to be loved. located, and it is through that space that your and my mental intercourse with each other has always to be carried on, by the mediation of impressions which I convey thither, and of the

reactions thence which those impressions may provoke from you. In general terms, then, whatever differing contents our minds may eventually fill a place with, the place itself is a numerically identical content of the two minds, a piece of common property in which, through which and over which they join. The receptacle of certain of our experiences being thus common, the experiences themselves might someday become common also. If that day ever did come, our thoughts would terminate in a complete empirical identity. There would be an end so far as those experiences went to our discussions about truth.

No points of difference appearing, they would have to count as the same. With this, we have the outlines of a philosophy of pure experience before us. At the outset of my essay, I called it a mosaic philosophy. In actual mosaics, the pieces are held together by their bedding, for which bedding, the substances, transcendental egos, or absolutes of other philosophies may be taken to stand. In radical empiricism, there is no bedding. It is as if the pieces clung to beckxed.

together by their edges, the transitions experienced between them forming their cement. Of course, such a metaphor is misleading. For an actual experience, the more substantive and the more transitive parts run into each other continuously, there is in general no separateness needing to be overcome by an external cement, and whatever separateness is actually experienced is not overcome. It stays and counts as separateness to the end. But the metaphor serves to symbolise the fact that experience itself, taken at large, can grow by its edges, that one moment of it proliferates into the next by transitions which, whether conjunctive or disjunctive, continue the experiential tissue, cannot, I contend, be denied.

Life is in the transitions as much as in the terms connected. Often, indeed, it seems to be there more emphatically, as if our spurts and sallies forward, with a real firing line of the battle. We're like the thin line of flame advancing across the dry autumnal field which the farmer proceeds to burn. In this line, we live prospectively as well as retrospectively. It is of the past, inasmuch as it comes expressly at the past's continuation. It is of the future, insofar as the future, when it comes, will have continued it.

These relations of continuous transition experienced are what make our experiences cognitive. In the simplest and completest cases, the experiences are cognitive of one another. When one of them terminates a previous series of them with a sense of fulfillment, it, we say, is what those other experiences had in view. The knowledge, in such a case, is verified. The truth is salted down. mainly, however, we live on speculative investments or on our prospects only, but living on things in posse is as good as living on the actual, so long as our credit remains good.

It is evident that for the most part it is good, and that the universe seldom protests our drafts. In this sense, we at every moment can continue to believe in an existing beyond. It is only in special cases that our confident rogasties. forward gets rebuked the beyond must of course always in our philosophy be itself of an experiential nature if not a future experience of our own or a present one of our neighbour it must be a thing in itself in dr princes and professor strong's sense of the term that is it must be an experience for itself whose relation to other things we translate into the action of molecules ether waves or whatever else the physical symbols may be our minds and these objective realities would still have space or pseudospace as i believe professor strong calls the medium of interaction between things in themselves in common these would exist where and begin to act where we locate the molecules etc and where we perceive the sensible phenomena explained thereby end footnote this opens the chapter of the relations of radical empiricism to panpsychism into which i cannot enter now footnote see a pluralistic universe end footnote the beyond can in any case exist simultaneously for it can be experienced to have existed simultaneously with the experience that practically postulates it

by looking in its direction or by turning or changing in the direction of which it is the goal pending that actuality of union in the virtuality of which the truth even now of the postulation consists the beyond and its knower are entities split off from each other the world is in so far forth a pluralism of which the unity is not fully experienced as yet but as fast as verifications come trains of experience once separate run into one another and that is why i said earlier in my article that the unity of the world is on the whole undergoing increase The universe continually grows in quantity by new experiences that graft themselves upon the older mass, but these very new experiences often help the mass to a more consolidated form. These are the main features of a philosophy of pure experience. It has innumerable other aspects and arouses innumerable questions, but the points I have touched on seem enough to make an entering wedge.

In my own mind such a philosophy harmonizes best. best with a radical pluralism, with novelty and indeterminism, moralism and theism, and with the humanism lately sprung upon us by the Oxford and the Chicago schools. Footnote. I have said something of this latter alliance in an article entitled Humanism and Truth, in Mind October 1904. End footnote. I cannot, however, be sure that all these doctrines are its necessary and indispensable.

allies. It presents so many points of difference, both from the common sense and from the idealism that have made our philosophical language, that it is almost as difficult to state it as it is to think it out clearly. And if it is ever to grow into a respectable system, it will have to be built up by the contributions of many cooperating minds. It seems to me, as I said at the outset of this essay, that many minds are, in point of fact, now turning in a direction that points towards radical empiricism, if they are carried farther by my words, and if they add their stronger voices to my feebler one, the publication of this essay will have been worthwhile. End of chapter two. This is a Libravox recording. All Liberbox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer,

please visit Libravox.org. Read by M.L. Cohen, www. mojomov411.com. Ohio, October 2007. Essays in Radical Empiricism by William James, Chapter 3, The Thing and and its Relations. Experience in its immediacy seems perfectly fluent. The active sense of living, which we all enjoy, before reflection shadows our instinctive world for us, is self-luminous, and suggests no paradoxes. Its difficulties are disappointments and, uncertainties. They are not intellectual contradictions. When the reflective intellect gets at work, however, it discovers incomprehensibilities in the flowing process. Distinguishing its elements and parts, it gives them separate names, and what it thus disjoins it cannot easily

put together. Puranism accepts the irrationality and revels in its dialectic elaboration. Other philosophies try, some by ignoring, some by resisting, and some by turning the dialectical procedure against itself, negating its first negations to restore the fluent sense of life again, and let redemption take the place of innocence. The perfection with which any philosophy may do this is the measure of its human success and of its importance in philosophical history. In the last essay, a world of pure experience,

I tried my own hands sketchily at the problem, resisting certain first steps of dialectics by insisting in a general way that the immediately experienced conjunctive relations are as real as anything else. If my sketch is not to appear too nafe, I must come closer to the details, and in the present essay I propose to do so. Pure experience is the name which I give to the immediate flux of life which furnishes the material to our later reflection with its conceptual categories. Only newborn babes, or men in semi-coma from sleep, drugs, illnesses, or blows,

may be assumed to have an experience pure in the literal sense of a that, which is not yet any definite what, though ready to be all sorts of whats, full both of oneness and of manyness, but in respects that don't appear, changing throughout, yet so confusedly, that its phases interpenetrate, and no points, either of distinction or of identity, can be caught. pure experience in this state is but another name for feeling or sensation. But the flux of it no sooner comes, then it tends to fill itself with emphases, and these salient parts become identified and fixed and abstracted,

so that experience now flows as if shot through with adjectives and nouns and prepositions and conjunctions. Its purity is only a relative term, meaning the proportional amount of unverbalized sensation which it embodies. far back as we go, the flux, both as a whole and in its parts, is that of things conjunct and separated. The great continuum of time, space, and the self envelop everything betwixt them, and flow together without interfering. The things that they envelop come as separate in some ways and as continuous in others. Some sensations coalesce with some ideas, and others are irreconcilable. qualities come penetrate one space or exclude each other from it.

They cling together persistently in groups that move as units or else they separate. Their changes are abrupt or discontinuous, and their kinds resemble or differ, and, as they do so, they fall into either even or irregular series. In all this, the continuities and the discontinuities are absolutely coordinate matters of immediate feeling. The conjunctions are as primordial elements of fact, as are the distinctions and disjunctions. In the same act by which I feel that this passing minute is a new pulse of my life, I feel that the old life continues into it, and the feeling of continuance in no ways jars upon the simultaneous feeling of a novelty.

They too conpenetrate harmoniously. prepositions copulas and conjunctions is isn't then before in on beside between next like unlike as but flower out of the stream of pure experience the stream of concretes or the sensational stream as naturally as nouns and adjectives do and they melt into it again as fluidly when we apply them to a new portion of the stream two if now we ask why we must thus translate experience from a more concrete or pure into a more intellectualized form, filling it with ever more abounding conceptual distinctions, rationalism, and naturalism, give different replies. The rationalistic answer is that the theoretic life is absolute,

and its interest imperative, that to understand is simply the duty of man, and that who questions this need not be argued with, for by the fact of arguing he gives away his case. The naturalist answer is that the environment kills, as well as sustains us, and that the tendency of raw experience to extinguish the experience himself is lessened just in a degree in which the elements that have a practical bearing upon life are analyzed out of the continuum and verbally fixed and coupled together, so that we may

know what is in the wind for us and get ready to react in time. Had pure experience, the naturalist says, been always perfectly healthy, there would never have arisen the necessity of isolating or verbalizing any of its terms. We should just have experience inarticulately and unintellectually enjoyed. This leaning on reaction, in the naturalist account, implies that, whenever we intellectualized a relatively pure experience, we ought to do so for the sake of re-descending to the pure or more concrete level again, and that if an intellect stays aloft among its abstract terms and general relations

and does not re-insert itself with its conclusions into some particular point of the immediate stream of life. It fails to finish out its function and leaves its normal race unrun. Most rationalists nowadays will agree that naturalism gives a true enough account of the way in which our intellect arose at first, but they will deny these latter implications. The case they will say resembles that of sexual love. Originating in the animal need of getting another generation born, this passion has developed secondarily such impure as spiritual needs, that if you ask why another generation ought to be born at all, the answer is, chiefly, that love may go on. Just so with our

intellect. It originated as a practical means of serving life, but it has developed incidentally the function of understanding absolute truth, and life itself now seems to be given chiefly as a means by which that function may be prosecuted. But truth and the understanding of it lie among the abstracts and universals. So the intellect now carries on its higher business wholly in this region, without any need of redescending into pure experience again. If the contrasted tendencies which I thus designate as naturalistic and rationalistic are not recognized by the reader,

perhaps an example will make them more concrete. Mr. Bradley, for instance, is an ultra-rationalisman. He admits that our intellect is primarily practical, but says that for philosophers the practical need is simply truth. Truth, moreover, must be assumed consistent. Immediate experience has to be broken into subjects and qualities, terms, and relations, to be understood as truth at all. Yet, when so broken, it is less consistent than ever. Taken raw, it is all undistinguished. intellectualized, it is all distinction without oneness. Quote, such an arrangement may work, but the theoretic problem is not solved, end quote.

The question is, quote, how the diversity can exist in harmony with the oneness, end quote. To go back to pure experience is unavailing. Quote, mere feeling gives no answer to our riddle, end quote. Even if your intuition is a fact, it is not an understanding. Quote, it is a mere experience and furnishes no consistent view, end quote.

The experience offered as facts or truths, I find that my intellect rejects because they contradict themselves. They offer a complex of diversities conjoined in a way which it feels as not its way in which it cannot repeat as its own. For to be satisfied, my intellect must understand and it cannot understand by taking a congeries in the lump.

end quote. Footnote. F.H. Bradley, appearance in reality second edition. End footnote. So, Mr. Bradley, in the sole interest of, quote, understanding, as he conceived that function, turns his back on finite experience forever. Truth must lie in the opposite direction, the direction of the absolute. And this kind of rationalism and naturalism, or, as I will now call it, pragmatism,

walk thence forward upon opposite paths. For the one, those intellectual products are most true which, turning their face towards the absolute, come nearest to symbolizing its ways of uniting the many and the one. For the other, those are most true, which most successfully dip back into the finite stream of feeling and grow most easily confluent, with some particular wave or wavelet.

such confluence not only proves the intellectual operation to have been true, as an addition may prove that a subtraction is already rightly performed, but it constitutes, according to pragmatism, all that we mean by calling it true. Only insofar as they lead us, successfully or unsuccessfully, back into sensible experience again, are our abstracts and universals true or false at all. 3. In Section 6 of the last essay, I adopted in a general way the common-sense belief that one and the same world is cognized by our different minds, but I left undiscussed the dialectical arguments which maintain that this is logically absurd. The usual reason given for it being absurd is that it assumes one object, to it the world, to stand in two relations at once, to my mind, namely, and again to your own. doors. Whereas a term taken in a second relation cannot logically be the same term which it was at first. I have heard this reason urged so often in discussing with absolutist, and it would destroy my

radical empiricum so utterly, if it were valid, that I am bound to give it an attentive ear and seriously to search its strengths. 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 the shape L-M-N with no trace of doubling or internal fission in the M. I am told that this is all a popular delusion, that L-M-M-Dash-N logically mean two different experiences. L-Dash-M, and M-Dash-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 additions, yet its 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 end by another, would inwardly be two things when it stood

outwardly in both relations. Thus, one might say, quote, David Hume, who weighed so many stone by his body, influences posterity by his doctrine, end quote. The body and the doctrine are two things. Between, which our finite minds can discover no real sameness, though the same name covers both of them. And then one might continue, quote, only an absolute is capable of uniting such a non-identity, end quote. 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, quote, that all our distinct perceptions are distinct existences, and that the mind never perceives any real connection among distinct existences. Footnote. Hume, Treatise of Human Nature. appendix. End footnote. Undoubtedly, since we use two phrases in talking about M's relation to L and about M's relation to N, we must be having or must have had two distinct perceptions, and the rest would then seem to follow duly. But the starting point of the reasoning here seems to be the fact of the two phrases, and this suggests that the argument may be merely

verbal. Can it be that the whole dialectic consist 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 dialect conclusion. 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-Dash-M, and the M in M-Dash-N mean, that is, are capable of leading to and terminating in, one self-same piece, M, of sensible experience. The persistent identity of certain units, or emphases or points or objects or members, call them what you will, of the experience continuum is just one of those conjunctive features of it, on which I am obliged to insist so emphatically. For sameness are parts of experience's indefeasible structure. When I hear a bellstroke and, as life flows on after its image dies away, I still hark back to it as that same bellstroke. when I see a thing M with L to the left of it and then to the right of it, I see it as one M. And if you tell me I've had to take it twice, I replied that if I took it a thousand times, I should still see it as a unit.

Footnote. I may perhaps refer here to my principles of psychology volume one. It really seems weird to have to argue, as I am forced now to do, for the notion that, quote, it is one sheet of paper with it and two surfaces and all the ties between. which is both under my pen and on the table while I write. The claim that its two sheets seem so brazen, yet I sometimes suspect the absolutist of sincerity. End footnote.

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 coordinate. I do not easily fathom why my opponents should find the separatist so much more easily understandable

that they must needs infect the whole of finite experience with it and relegate to unity, now taken as a bare postulate no longer as a thing positively perceivable, to the region of the absolutes mysteries. I do not easily fathom this, I'd 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 meaning of them came, and which is always ready to reabsorb them. For all this argument proves then, we may continue to believe that one thing can be known by many knowers,

but the denial of one thing in many relations is but one application of a still profounder dialectic difficulty. man can't be good, said the sophists, for man is man, and good is good. And Hegel and Herbart in their day, more recently A. Speer, and most recently and elaborately evolved Mr. Bradley, informs us that a term can logically only be a punctiform unit, and that not one of the conjunctive relation between things which experience seems to yield is rationally possible. Of course, if true, this cuts off radical impregulated. empiricism without even a shilling. Radical empiricism takes conjunctive relations at their face value, holding them to be as real as the terms united by them.

The world it represents as a collection, some parts of which are conjunctively and others disjunctively related. Two parts, themselves as joined, 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 conjunctively. of 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, quote, 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

is experienced. Our concepts and our sensations are confluent. Successive stages of the same ego and feelings of the same body are confluent. Where the experience is not of conflux, it may be of conteminousness, things with but one thing between, or of contiguousness, nothing between, or likeness, or of nearness, or of simultaneousness, or of inness, or of onness, or of onness, or of foreignness or of simple withness, or even of mere anness, which last relation would make it, 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. Footnote. Here again, the reader must beware of slipping from logical

into phenomenal considerations. It may well be that we attribute 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 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. End footnote. My next duty, accordingly, must be to rescue radical empiricism from Mr. Bradley. Fortunately, as it seems to me, his general contention that the very notion of relation is unthinkable clearly has been successfully met by many critics. It is a burden to the flesh and an injustice both to readers and to previous writers to repeat good arguments already printed.

So, in noticing Mr. Bradley, I will confine myself to the interest. of radical empiricism solely. Five. The first duty of radical empiricism, taking given conjunctions at their face value, is to class some of them as more intimate and some as more external. When two terms are similar,

their very natures enter into the relation. Being what they are, no matter where or when, the likeness never can be denied if asserted. It continues predicable as long as the terms continue. Other relations, the where and the when, for example, seem adventitious. The sheet of paper may be off or on the table, for example,

and in either case the relation involves only the outside of its terms. Having an outside, both of them, they contribute by it to the relation. It is external. The term's inner nature is irrelevant to it. Any book, any table, may fall into the relation, which has created Prohavisi. not by their existence, but by their casual situation. It is just because so many of the conjunctions of experience seem so external that a philosophy of pure experience must tend to pluralism in its ontology.

So far as things have space relations, for example, we are free to imagine them with different origins even. If they could get to be, and get into space at all, then they may have done so separately. Once there, however, they are additives to one another, and with no prejudice to their natures, all sorts of space relations may supervene between them. The question of how things could come to be anyhow is wholly different from the question of what the relations, once they're being accomplished, may consist in.

Mr. Bradley now affirms that such external relations as the space relations which we hear 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 a different book, from what it was when it was off the table. Footnote. Once more, don't slip from logical and physical situations.

Of course, if the table be wet, it will moisten the book, or if it be slight enough and the book heavy enough, the book will break it down. But such collateral phenomena are not the point it is. issue. The point is whether the successive relations on and not on can rationally, not physically, hold of the same constant turns abstractly taken. Professor A.E. Taylor drops from logical into material considerations when he instances color contrasts as a proof that A, as contradistinguished from B, is not the same thing as

mere A, not B, any way affected. Elements of Mesophysics, page 145. Note the substitution for related, and the world affected, which begs the whole question. End footnote. He admits that such external relations seem possible and even existing. That you do not alter what you compare or rearrange in space seems to common sense quite obvious, and that on the other side there are as obvious difficulties does not occur to common sense at all. And I will begin by pointing out these difficulties. There is a relation in the result, and this relation we hear is to make no difference in its

terms. But if so, to what does it make a difference? Doesn't it make a difference to us onlookers, at least? And what is the meaning and sense of qualifying the terms by it? Surely the meaning is to tell the truth about their relative position. If, in short, it is external to the terms, how can it possibly be true of them? Is it the, quote, intimacy suggested by the little word of here, which I have underscored that it 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 that it said are but external. But I reply that, if so, I cannot understand the leaving by the terms of one set of relation and their adoption of a 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-dedducible from the essence of either term singly, it is no reproach. If it means contradicting successance, 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 more external relation, that is a relation which can change without forcing its terms to change their nature simultaneously,

is possible and forced on us by the facts. Footnote. Appearance and reality. Second edition. Mr. Bradley next revert to the Antenamese of Space, which, according to him, prove it to be unreal, although it appears as so prolific immediate, of external relations. And he then concludes that, quote,

a rationality and externality cannot be the last truth about things. Somewhere, there must be a reason why this and that appear together. And this reason and reality must reside in the whole from which terms and relations are abstractions, a whole in which their internal connection must lie, and out of which from the background appear those fresh results which never could have come from the premises, end quote. And he adds that, quote, where the whole is different, the terms that qualify and contribute it must so far be different. They are altered so far only. How far? Far than externally, yet not through and through. But still they are altered. I must insist that in each case the terms are qualified

by their whole. Qualified how? Do their external relations, situations, dates, etc., change as these are in a new whole fair to qualify them is far enough, and that in a second case there is a hole which differs both logically and psychologically from the first hole, and I urge that in contributing to the change, the terms so far are altered, end quote. Not merely the relations then, but the terms are altered. Unzwar, 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, to be the full Bradley and answer. The whole, which he here treats as primary and determinative each part's manner of contributing,

simply must, when it alters, alter in its entirety. There must be a total conflict of its parts, each into and through each other. The must appears here as smachspart, as ipsidixic of Mr. Bradley's absolutically tempered understanding, for he candidly confesses that how the parts do differ as they contribute to different holes is unknown to him. 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 all he proved to the contrary, not only practically workable, but also perfectly intelligible factors of reality.

Six. 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 watts from out of 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 experience

in which they recur as the same. Returning into the stream of sensible presentation, nouns and adjectives and that's and abstract whats, grow confluent again, and the word is names all these experience of conjunction. Mr. Bradley understands the isolation of the abstracts, but understand the combination is to him impossible. So far as I can catch a state of mind,

there's something like this. book, table, on. How does the existence of these three abstract elements result in this book being livingly on this table? Why isn't the table on the book? Or why doesn't the on connect itself with another book or something that is not a table? Mustn't something in each of these three elements already determine the two others to it? So that they do not settle elsewhere or float vaguely? Mustn't the whole fact be prefigured in each part and exist to jurisdiction?

before it can exist de facto? But if so, and what can the juror existence consist, if not in a spiritual miniature of the whole facts constitution, actuating every partial factor as its purpose? But is this anything but the old metaphysical fallacy of looking behind a fact in ESA for the ground of the fact and finding in it the shape of the very same fact in posse? Somewhere we must leave off with a constitution behind which there is nothing. footnote. Quote, to understand the complex A, B, 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 here seems vital, as meaning a conjunction external and therefore unintelligible.

Something else, and in neither case, have I understood. For my intellect cannot 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 it 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 principles of mere togetherness, end quote. Of course, Mr. Bradley has a right to define intellect of the power by which we perceive separation, 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 appropriate modus of transition, but says that when he looks for these transitions in the detail of living experience, he is, quote, unable to verify such a solution, end quote. Yet, he never explains what the intellectual transitions would be like in case we had them. He only defines them negatively. They are not spatial, temporal, predicative, or causal, or qualitatively, or otherwise serial,

or in any way relational as we naively trace relations, for relations separate terms and need themselves to be hooked on ad infinitum. The nearest approach he makes to describing a truly intellectual transition is where he speaks of A and B is being, quote, united, each from its own nature and in a whole, which is the nature of both alike, end quote. But this, which pays Mr. Bradley, seems exquisitely analogous to taking a congeries in the lump, if not the 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.

All that I can verify in the transitions with Mr. Bradley's intellect deciderates as its propious motives is a reminiscent 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 the world of particulars given in loveliest union, in conjunction definitely various and variously definite, the how of which you understand as soon as you see the fact of them, for there is no how except the constitution of the fact is given.

With all this given him, I say, in pure experience, he asked 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 and 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 experience, hang so variously together. In particular, it leaves an empirical theory of knowledge intact, and lets us continue to believe with common sense that one object may be known if we have any ground for thinking that it is known to many knowers. In the next essay, I shall return to this last supposition, which seems to me to offer other difficulties much harder for a philosophy of pure experience. to deal with than any of absolutism's dialectic objections.

End of Chapter 3. This is a Liberbox recording. All Liberbox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visitliborbox.org. Read by ML Cohen, www. mojo-moove411.com Cleveland, Ohio, October 2007. Essays in Radical Empiricism by William James, Chapter 4. how two minds can know one thing.

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 suffused throughout with a particular 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 taking 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, phenomena, content, or whatever other neutral or ambiguous names you may prefer to apply. I call it in that article a, quote, pure experience. To get classed either as a physical pen or as someone's percept of a pen, it must assume a function. And that can only happen in a more complicated world. So far as in that world, it is a stable feature, holds ink, marked 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 experience of its having been, in the past tense, it is the percept of a phoenix. it is the percept of a pen in my mind. Those peculiarities are what we mean by being conscious in a pen. In section six of another essay, 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 still more formidable sounding objections remained. So, to leave my pure experience theory in as strong a state as possible, I proposed to consider those objections now.

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 inherit in psychic facts specifically. Whatever may be the case with physical objects, a fact of consciousness it is alleged, and indeed very plausibly, cannot, 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 poles. It transmits each of them, as if 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, eye, ear, or whatnot, 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 analysis made by physicists have by this time sufficiently cleared up. But if, on the strength of these analogies, one should ask, quote, why, if two or more lines can run through one in 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 in the same unit of experience, so that would simultaneously be a part of the

experience of all the different minds? End quote, one would be checked by thinking of a certain peculiarity by 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 consciences exists but once and is a state. It's essay in sincerity. 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 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 representively, 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 two? 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 it becoming conscious once mean? It means first that new experiences have supervened, and, second, that they have borne a certain assignable relation to the units opposed. Continue, if you please, to speak of the pure unit as the pen. So far as the pen successors do but repeat the pen or being different from it are energetically related to it, 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? term in Dway? In the chapter on the self and my principles of psychology, I explain the continuous identity of each personal consciousness as a name for the practical fact that new experiences come, which look back on the old ones, find them warm, and greet them appropriate as mine. These operations mean, when analyzed empirically, several tolerably definite things, that is. One. That the new experience. has passed time for its content, and in that time, a pen that was.

Two, that warmth was also about the pen, in the sense of a group of feelings. Interest aroused, attention turned, eyes employed, etc. They were closely connected with it, and that now recur and ever more 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 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. An appropriation is part of the content of a latter experience wholly additional to the original 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 wed 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 past muster, as an intelligible account of how an experience originally pure can enter into one consciousness, the next question is as how it might conceivably enter into two. Three, obviously, no new kind of condition would have to be supplied.

All that we should have to postulate would be a second subsequent experience, collateral and contemporary with the first subsequent one, in which a similar act of appropriations 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 neither so classing it to 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 a 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, quote, the representative theory of cognition, end quote, 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 relation to physical nature and also in its relation to my personal life. I see that it is in my mind, but that it is also 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 reported, known, to have awareness of one's consciousness. being added to that being, and this is just what happens when the appropriate experience supervenes. The Penn experience, in its original mediacy, is not aware of itself, it simply is, and the second experience is required for what we call awareness of it to occur. Footnote. Shadworth Hodgson has laid great stress on the fact that the minimum of consciousness demands two sub-feelings, of which the second retrospects the first.

We live forward, but we understand backward, is a phrase of Kierkegaars, which Hofdigg quotes. End footnote. 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 them all together, they come in a chaos of incommensurable relations that we cannot 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 cannot begin to understand. Granting, however, that by hook or crook, they can get themselves made and can appear in a succession that I've so schematically described, then we have to confess that even although, as I began by quoting from the adversary, quote, a feeling only is as it is felt, end quote. There is still nothing absurd in the notion of 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 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. Four. One word now before I close, about the corollaries of the views 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, cannot strictly be called conscious at all. It is that an absolute, a pure experience on an enormous scale, undifferentiated and undifferentiable, into thought and thing. This, the post-conscious idealist, have always practically acknowledged by calling their doctrine an identitat philosophy. The question of the beasling of all things, all. ought not then even to be asked. No more ought the question of its truth to be asked, for truth is relation inside of the sum total. Obtaining between thoughts and something else,

and thoughts if 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 being only a more common-neuded identitas philosophy. Meanwhile, a pure experience can be postulated with any amount whatever of span or field. If it exert the retrospective and appropriate 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 similar retrospective experience should anyhow come to birth, my present thought would form a genuine portion of its long-spaned 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 unchanged.

Speculations like Fetchner's of an earth's soul, of wider spans of consciousness enveloping narrow ones throughout the cosmos, are therefore philosophically quite in order, provided they distinguish the functional from the quantitative point of view, and do not treat the minor consciousness

under discussion as a kind of standing material of which the wider ones consist. End of chapter 4. This is a Libravox recording. All Libervox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit Libravox.org. Recording by Frank Farage. Essays in Radical Empiricism by William James.

The Place of Affectional Facts in a World of Pure Experience 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 of us in the forms of conception or judgment 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 envelopes 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 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. 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 7 of the first essay, I treated of this class of experiences very inadequately, because I had to be so brief.

I now returned to the subject because I believe that, so far from invalidating my general thesis, these phenomena, when properly analyzed, afforded 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 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 and movement resists every force that operates contrary-wise 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 toward 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 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 two, 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 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, any rate, they are simultaneously affections of the body, is proved by the whole literature of the James Langer theory of emotion. 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 worth are similarly ambiguous. I instanced some of the ambiguities in the first essay. 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 ten and eleven 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 aesthetic and rhetorical value 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 jacund 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 Reverend Mr. Hanna, published by Cidus and Goodhart in their important work on multiple personality, we read that when the patient first recovered consciousness and, quote, 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, end quote. 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 someone's consciousness or therefore physical nature is a question not yet put, at the moment it is there for 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 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-scent 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. sound as such goes through the air and can be intercepted. The heat of 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. 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 subjective by Kantians.

Time itself is subjective, according to many philosophers. 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.

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 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 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 heartbeat and breathing, of vascular and visceral action. The interesting aspects of things are thus 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 experiences into two absolutely discreet 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 a certain as to receive another as a certain thing as to be a certain as a certain one of them-and-one activity in the other would receive another as soon as we examine 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 extracorporally. It is by the interest and importance that experiences have for us, by the emotions they excite and the purposes they subserve, by their affronts.

effective values, in short, that their consecution in our several conscious streams as thoughts of ours is mainly ruled. Desire introduces them. Interest holds them. Fitness fixes their order and connection. I need only refer for this aspect of our mental life to Vunt's article Uber Psychishk Casualitat, which begins volume 10 of his philosophishk studian. 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 relationship of a thing are sufficiently various, it can be sorted variously. Take a mass of carrion, for example,

and the disgustingness, for which it is part of the experience. The sun caresses it, and the zephyr wooze 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 pulmonary 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 works. Its visceral perturbations are my emotions. 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 function, and all these things vary with the context in which we find. 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. End of Chapter 5. Essays in Radical Empiricism by William James This is a Libravox recording. All Libravox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit Libravox.org. Recording by Kirsten Ferreri. Essays in Radical Empiricism by William James.

Chapter 6. The Experience of Activity 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 reach definitive conclusions, I can yet show show, in a rather definite manner, how the method works. The way of handling things I speak of is, as you will already have suspected, that known sometimes as the pragmatic method, sometimes as humanism, sometimes as deweism, and in France, by the disciples of Bergson, as the Philosophie Nouvelle. Professor Woodbridge's Journal of Philosophy 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 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 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 meeting, I will commit myself to this. Either the or 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, end quote. 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 of her Bartian psychology by one who has tried to improve upon it without being at the pains to master it, end quote. Musterberg excludes a view opposed to his own by saying that with anyone who holds it a verstandigung with him is Grunzatzlossin, and Royce, in a review of Stout,

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 discussions, distinct questions are habitually jumbled, and different points of view are talked of Durkananda. 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 reframe of it? What is it like? And what does it do if it does anything? And finally there is a logical question.

Three, 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 anyone's experience it would make if his adversaries 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 doesn't make a difference of fact somewhere,

and it seeks to determine the meaning of all differences of opinion, by making the discussion hinge as soon as possible upon some practical or particular issue. The principle of pure experience is also a methodical postulate. Nothing shall be admitted as fact, it says, except what can be experienced at some definite time by some experience. 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 experientable somewhere, and every kind of thing experienced must somewhere be 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 judgments we may eventually come to make regarding activity, that sort of thing will be what the judgments are about. The first step to take then is to ask where in the stream of experience we seem to find what 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. This seems to be what certain writers have in mind when they insist that, for an experience, to be at all, is to be active. It seems to justify, or at any rate, to explain Mr. Warren's expression, that we are only as we are active, for we are only as experience, and it rules out Mr. Bradley's contention that, quote, there is no original experience of anything like activity, end quote. What we ought to say about activities, thus elementary, whose they are, what they affect, or indeed whether they affect anything at all, these are later questions, to be answered only when the field of experience is enlarged. Bare activity would thus

be predictable, though there were no definite direction, no actor, and no aim, mere restless zigzag movement, or a wild eidin-fluked or rhapsody der Varna mungen, as Kant would say, would constitute an 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 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. In their descriptions, exquisitely subtle some of them, the activity appears as the Gestalt Qualitat, or the Fundertinthalte, or 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?

They never take us off the superficial plane. We know the facts already, less spread out and separated, to be sure, but we know them still. We always felt our own activity, for example, as, quote, the expansion of an idea with which ourself is identified against an obstacle, 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 imminent, as when a body moves an 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, 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 succumb to, according as the opposing power is only equal or is superior to ourselves. Whoever 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 can ever be imagined where 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 prepared. Lott says somewhere that, to be an entity, all that is necessary is to gelton as an entity, to operate, or be felt, experienced, recognized, or in any way realized as such. In our activity experiences, the activity assuredly fulfills lots of demand.

It makes itself guelten. It is witnessed at its work. No matter what activities there may really be in this extraordinary universe of ours, it is impossible 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 means something only to beings with ears, eyes, and tongues.

The Persepean these originals of experience is the essay. 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 a stuff. 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 effects at all. Footnote. Verborum Grazie

The feeling of activity is not able, qua feeling, to tell us anything about activity. Love Day, Mind Ness, Volume X, 119011, page 463. A sensation or feeling 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 not in itself an experience of our activity at all. It, as it comes first, is only so for extraneous reasons, and only so for an outside observer. Bradley, appearance in reality, second edition, page 605.

In them tatig-skaitzke-feuil leaked on stigntzegstébebe, for Hansenstein, aner psychic-skin tutteichite. Munsterberg grunzag der Psychology. 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 authors' discussions, not at Moonstrobergs, 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 Stout, in the excellent chapter on mental activity in volume one 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,

in Principles of Psychology, Volume 1, pages 299 to 305. I found it in certain intracephalic movements which we habitually oppose as subjective to the activities of the transcorporial 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 eye 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 further specification of this something into two whats, an activity felt is 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, 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 bodies 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 there are 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 as its center, center of vision, center of action, center 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, their activity terminates in the activity of the body, and only through first arousing its activities can they begin to be active. to change those of the rest of the world. The body is the storm center, the origin of coordinates, the constant place of stress in all that experience train. Everything circles around 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 I this position must have prerogative emphasis, and if activities have feelings must be felt in a peculiar 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 prospective interest in which they are died. End footnote. 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 still to tell about them that has led such able writers to conceive of a Simon pure activity, of an activity, an Sikh, that does, and doesn't merely appear to us to do so, 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 that 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 have experienced 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, you cannot say so, for you have just declared activity to be only a kind of synthetic object, or conjunctive relation experience between bits of experience already made. But what made them at all? What propels experience Uber-Hopped 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 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, being the first source of action, he regards as the most real agent in the field. The others, but transmit that 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 of 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 catabolic 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 cessate defectors. Does this not look as if the short-span brain activities were the more real activities, and the lecturing activities on my part only their effects? Moreover, as Hume so clearly pointed out, in my mental activity situation, the words physically to be 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. The third type believes that nerve cells are the agents, and that the resultant motor discharges are the acts achieved. Now, if you're a 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. us take them in succession in seeking a reply. If we assume a wider thinker, it is evident that his purposes envelop 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 end prolongs my own. So long as I take him 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 we now 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 provision 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 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 agent. and neither wished nor willed nor foreseen. Their being agents now congruous with my will gives me no guarantee that like results will 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, to the question what will be 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 very 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 as the old dispute come back. Materialism and teleology. Elementary short-span actions summing themselves blindly, or facts foreseen ideal 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 pictureable, 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 the 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 meningial 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 the 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. I said a while back 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 it in flagrante delicto, the very power that makes facts come and be. I am now eagerly striving, for example, to get this truth, which I seem have 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 of the state of merely possible being in which they were. How is this feat performed? How does the fact of the striving? 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 is, how do 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 activities 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 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 in the Arctic 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 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 in 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 anywhere, can be discussed. Here is creation in its first intention. Here is causality at work. Footnote. 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 appugnancy 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. End footnote. 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. Footnote. 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 meant to express. I owe all my doctrines on this subject to Renovier, and Renovier, as I understand him, is, or at any rate then was, an out-and-out phenomenist, a denier of forces in the most strenuous sense. Single clauses in my writing, or sentences read out of their

connection may possibly have been compatible with a trans-phenominal 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 ever thought of defending is the character of novelty in fresh activity situations. If an activity process is the form of the 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 died 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 saw, nor do I now see, what the principle could do, except rehearse the phenomenon beforehand, or why it should ever be invoked. I conclude, then, that real effectual causation as an ultimate nature, as a category, if you like, of reality, is just what we feel it to be,

just that kind of conjunction which our own activity series reveal. We have the whole but and being of it in our hands, and the healthy thing for philosophy is to leave off grubbing underground for what effects effectuation, or what makes action act, and try to solve the concrete questions of where effectuation in this world is located, of which things are true causal agents there, and of what the more remote effects consist. End footnote. 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 transcendently is in itself,

the only use of the knowledge would be to help us 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 things or be they in 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 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 when 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, unmeaning of the world of life. Life, says our colleague, is full of significance, of meaning, of success and defeat, of hoping and striving, of longing and desire and inner value. It is a total presence that embodies worth. To live our own lives better in this

presence is the true reason why we wish to note 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 coexist with the wider activities than 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 steal 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 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. The results of these authors seem in many respects dissimilar, and I understand them as yet 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.

End of Chapter 6. This is the Libervox recording. All Libravox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit Libravox.org. Recording by Leon Meyer. Essays in Radical Empiricism by William James. Chapter 7. The Essence of Humanism. Humanism is a ferment that has come to stay. It is not a single hypothesis or 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 center of interest or point of sight. Some

writers are strongly conscious of the shifting, others half unconscious, even though the 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 wish to count upon the other side. 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. 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 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 skepticism, for example, that no good humanists finds it necessary to entertain. By their still greater reticences, the anti-humanists have, in turn, perplex 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 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 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 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 section one the essential service of humanism as i concede 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. 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 reason 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 at 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 roysian type Similarly, sterile, by its pragmatic treatment of the problem of knowledge, a treatment of which I have already given aversion in two very inadequate articles. As the views of knowledge, reality, and truth imputed to humanism have been those so far most fiercely attacked, it is in regard to those ideas that a sharpening of focus seems most urgently required. I proceed, therefore, to bring the views which I impute to humanism in these respects into focus as briefly as I can. section two 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 one another part of experience in other words parts must as professor woodbridge says represent one another instead of representing realities outside of consciousness this case is that of conceptual knowledge or else two they must simply exist as so many ultimate that's or facts of being in the first instance and then as a secondary complication and without doubling up its intative singleness, any one in the same that must figure alternately as a thing known and is a knowledge of the thing, by reason of two divergent kinds of context into which, in the general course of experience, it gets woven. Footnote. This statement is probably excessively obscure to anyone who has not read my two articles, does consciousness exist, and a world of pure experience.

end footnote the 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 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 commenuted identity's philosophie in case one 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 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 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 representational is 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. is 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 since termini of the two men instead of coalescing with each other and with the real dog object as at first supposed are thus held 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 these only carry the procession of experiences the philosopher thinks 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 become 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 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 practice, it is hung on one continuous scheme. Reality, however 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 pointing 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 the only terminus at which the practical man habitually stops, while the philosopher projects that 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 else. 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 Idintutat's philosophy in pluralistic form. 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 be an intra-experential affair

a conception is reckoned true by common sense when it can be made to lead to its 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 some remoter experience the philosopher finds reason to believe meanwhile what actually does confer true to any individual trower whether he be philosopher or common man is always a result of his appreceptions if a novel experience conceptual or sensible contradict too emphatically our pre-existent system of belief In 99 cases out of 100 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 and truth result. Having written in 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. In no case, however, need truth consists in a relation between our experience. between our experiences and something archetypal or trans-experential.

Should we ever reach absolutely terminal experiences, experiences in which we all agreed, which are superseded by no revised continuations, these would not be true, they would be real, it would simply be, and be indeed the angles, corners, and lynch-pins of all reality, on which the truth of everything else would be stayed. Only such other things had led to these by satisfactory con,

conjunctions would be true. Satisfactory connection of some sort with such termini is all that the word truth means. On a common sense stage of thought, since perceptions 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 mind to trace the more essential features of that way of viewing things. I feel almost certain that Messrs Dewey and 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 is Heather to Ben. End of Chapter 7 of Essays and Radical Empiricism by William James. This is a Librevox recording. All Librevox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, visit Librevox.org. reading by Carl Manchester 2006. Essays in Radical Empiricism by William James

Chapter 8 The notion of consciousness translated by Carl Manchester A communication made in French at the 5th International Congress of Psychology in Rome, April 30th, 1905 I'd like to tell you about a few doubts that I've had on the subject of the notion of consciousness

that currently rules our psychology papers. We normally define psychology as the science of the events of the conscious mind, or of the phenomena, or even the states of the conscious mind. Whether we suppose that it is related to personal egos, or whether we believe it to be impersonal in the manner of the transcendental ego of Kant, of the Bevustheit, consciousness, or the Bevustain Uberhauped, general consciousness, of our German contemporaries,

consciousness is always considered to have its own essence, absolutely distinct from the essences of material things. It has the mysterious gift of representing a knowing. Material facts, considered in their materiality, are not felt. They are not objects of experience. They do not refer to anything. In order for them to take the shape of the environment in which we have the experience of living, they must appear.

And this fact of appearing, over and above their mere existence, is the consciousness that we have of them. Or, perhaps, according to the panpsychist hypothesis, the consciousness they have of themselves. This is the deep-seated dualism that it seems impossible to banish from our view of the world. The world may well exist in its own right, but we know nothing of it because, for us, it is purely the object of experience. And it is an indispensable condition of this effect that it is witnessed, that it is known by a spiritual subject or subjects. Object and subject. These are the two legs without which it seems that philosophy cannot take a single step.

Every school of thought agrees on this. Scholastic, Cartesian, Kantian, Neocantian, all posit a fundamental dualism. Contemporary positivism, or agnosticism, which likes to think that it furthers natural science, admittedly adopts quite contentedly the name of monism. But this is only monism in name. It posits an unknown reality, but tells us that this reality presents itself always under two aspects, consciousness on one side and matter on the other.

And these two sides remain as irreducible as the two fundamental attributes of Spinoza's God, extension and thought. At heart, contemporary monism is pure Spinozism. So how should we think of this consciousness? which we are so inclined to suppose exists. We tell ourselves it is impossible to define, but we each have a direct intuition of it.

Straight off, consciousness is conscious of itself. Ask the first person you come across, man or woman, psychologist or layperson, and they will tell you that they feel themselves thinking, enjoying, suffering, wanting, just as they feel themselves breathing. They perceive their spiritual existence directly as an internal current.

It is active, light, fluid, delicate, diaphanous, if you will, and the absolute opposite of anything material. In short, subjective existence appears to be not only a logical necessity in order for there to be an objective world that appears, but also to be part of our own direct experience

as much as is our own body. How then can we avoid recognising the dualism between ideas and things? How can we doubt the complete heterogeneity between feelings and objects. Supposedly scientific psychology accepts this heterogeneity in the same way that the old spiritualist psychology did. How can it not be accepted?

Each science arbitrarily marks out a field in the framework of facts, where it settles, and whose contents it describes and studies. Understandably, psychology chooses for its domain the field of facts about consciousness. It postulates them without assessing them. It opposes them to facts about matter and, without assessing those either, it links them to consciousness with the mysterious thread of knowledge or perception, which is seen as a third type of fundamental and ultimate fact. In following this path, contemporary psychology has celebrated great triumphs.

It has been able to sketch the evolution of conscious existence, conceiving of it as adapting further and further to its physical surroundings. It has been able to establish a dualistic parallel between mental and cerebral events. It has explained illusions, hallucinations, and, to an extent, mental illness. These are great steps, but there remain many problems. General philosophy above all, whose task is to scrutinize postulates, finds paradoxes and obstacles where science carries on regardless. It is only the devotees of popular science who remain credulous. The deeper we look into things, the more we look into things,

the more we find enigmas. And I'll say for my part that, since I've taken up psychology seriously, the old dualism of thought and matter, the allegedly absolute heterogeneity of these two essences, has always given me difficulties. I'd like now to tell you about a few of those difficulties. Firstly, there is one which, I'm sure, will have occurred to all of you. Take our perception of the external,

the direct sensation which tells us, for example, of the walls of this room, Can we say in this case that the psychological and the physical are absolutely heterogeneous? On the contrary, they are so little heterogeneous that if we take a common sense point of view and rid ourselves of explanatory stories about molecules and waves in the ether, for example, which are essentially metaphysical concepts, if, in a word, we take reality naively as it appears to us from the start, this palpable reality on which our vital interest depend and on which our actions are carried, well, this reality and the sensation we have of it are, at the moment the sensation appears absolutely identical. Reality is perception itself. The words walls of this room only signify this fresh, echoing whiteness that surrounds us, interrupted by these windows and bounded by these lines and angles.

Physics, in this case, has no different content than psychology. Subject and object merge. Berkeley was the first to bring credit to this truth. Essie est percipi, to be is to be perceived. Our sensations are not little internal copies of things. They are the things themselves, so long as the things are present to us. And whatever we might want to think about the life of things which are absent, hidden or, so to speak, private, and whatever the hypothetical constructs we make of them,

it remains the case that the public life of things, the actuality of which they present to us, from which we get our theoretic constructs, and to which they must return and reattach themselves or else float in the air and in unreality. This actuality, I say, is homogeneous, and not only homogeneous, but numerically one with a certain part of our internal life. Here's how it is for our perception of the external.

When we consider imagination, memory, or the faculties of abstract representation, Although the facts here are much more complicated, I believe that the same basic homogeneity emerges. To simplify the problems, let's start by excluding tangible reality. Let's take pure thought, as it appears in a dream or daydream, or in a memory of the past. Here again, doesn't the stuff of experience play two roles? Don't the physical and the psychological merge? If I dream of a golden mountain, it certainly does not exist,

outside the dream, but inside the dream it is in essence or in nature perfectly physical. It appears to me as physical. If at that moment I allow myself to remember my house in America and the details of my recent voyage to Italy, what is it that happens? What is the pure phenomenon? It is, let's say, my thought and its content. But still, what is this content? It takes the form of a part of the real world.

world. To be sure, this part is 6,000 miles and six weeks away, but it is linked to the room where we are now by masses of things, objects and events. Homogeneous on the one hand with the room and on the other with the object of my remembering. This content doesn't start as a tiny internal fact which I then project. It presents itself immediately as the distant event itself. And what is the consciousness that I have of the act of thinking this distant content. Is there any other way of naming the content other than retrospectively, once we've separated it from the physical intermediaries, and reattached it to a new group of associations which bring it back into my mental life, the emotions which it awakens in me, for example, the attention I pay to it, the ideas I've just

gone through, which the memory aroused. It is only in relation to these later associations that the phenomenon is classed as a thought. If it were related only to its earlier associations, it would remain an objective phenomenon. It is true that we are accustomed to compare our internal images to objects, and we consider them as little inferior carbon copies or duplicates. An object presents vivacity and clarity which are superior to those of an image of it. The object thus contrasts with the image, and, to borrow Thain's excellent term,

it acts as its reducer. When the two are present together, the object comes to the fore and the image retreats, becoming something absent. But what is the object itself which is present? What is it made of?

The same stuff as the image. It is made of sensations. It is a perceived thing. Its essay is percipi, and it and its image are homogeneous, generically so. If I think of my hat that I left just now in the cloakroom, where is the dualism, the disjoint, between the imagined hat and the real hat?

It is a real, absent hat, with which my mind is occupied. I think of it for practical purposes, as if it were a reality. If it were present on this table, the hat would provoke a movement of my hand. I would pick it up. In this same way, this conceived or imagined hat will soon. determine the direction of my steps, I will go out to get it. The idea I have of it will continue up until the point where the hat is tangibly present, when it will harmoniously dissolve. I conclude, therefore, that whilst there is dualism for practical purposes, because images are different from objects, take their place and bring us to them, there is no reason to say that they are essentially different in nature. Thought and actuality are made of the same thing.

the stuff of experience in general. The psychology of external perception leads us to the same conclusion. When I see an object in front of me, such as a table of such and such a shape, and at such and such a distance, it is explained to me that this experience is down to two things.

To a material sensation which comes through my eyes and brings the element of exterior reality and to ideas which awaken me, meet this reality, class it and interpret it. But who can tell? within the table concretely perceived what is sensation and what is idea external and internal extended and unexended fused together and become inseparable this recalls the circular panoramas

where real objects rocks grass broken wagons and so on which occupy the foreground are ingeniously linked to the canvas that makes up the background representing a battle or a landscape so that it is hard to tell the object from the painting. The seams and joints are imperceptible. Could it happen like that if the object and the idea were completely different in nature? I am convinced that similar considerations to these will have also already provoked doubts in you about the alleged dualism of the world, and there are other reasons to doubt which arise.

There's a whole realm of adjectives and attributes, which are not either wholly objective or subjective, but which we use sometimes in one sense and sometimes in another, as if enthralled in their ambiguity. I'm talking about the qualities that we appreciate in things, to put it one way. The ethical or moral aspects of things, their value to us. Where, for example, is beauty to be found? Is it contained in a statue, in a sonata, or in our souls?

My colleague at Harvard, George Santayana, has written a book on aesthetics, the sense of beauty, where he calls beauty objectified pleasure. It's true that in this context we could talk about projection to the exterior. We think of a pleasant warmth and of a sensation of pleasant warmth in the same way. The rarity and preciousness of a diamond seemed to as essential as qualities. We might speak of a terrible storm or a detestable man or a shameful act and we think ourselves to be speaking objectively,

even though these expressions are about nothing more than our own emotional sensibilities. We even talk about a wretched journey, a glum sky, a kind breeze, or a cruel midday heat. This animist way of looking at things, which seems to have been the style of primitive man, is very easily explained. And Mr. Santayana, in another recent book, The Life of Reason, has made this explanation. By the tendency to attribute to an object the things we experience in its presence. The division of subjective and objective comes from a sophisticated act of reflection, which we are wont to defer on many occasions. When practical necessity doesn't pull us towards it,

it seems as if we prefer to delude ourselves with vagueness. Secondary qualities such as heat, sound and light themselves no longer have vague explanations. For practical purposes, and as far as common sense is concerned, they are absolutely physical and objective. For the physicist, they are subjective. For him they are the form, mass and movement, which give rise to an external reality. For the philosophical idealist, on the other hand, form and movement are just as subjective as light and heat, and only the unknown thing itself, the numon, enjoys a complete non-mental existence. Our private sensations retain some of this ambiguity.

There are illusions of movement which prove that our primary sensations of movement are generalized. It is the whole world, including us, that moves. We currently distinguish our own movement by reference to the movement of the objects around us, and among those objects we can discern some that remain still. But it is from a vitiginous height that we today fall back to a primary lack of differentiation. You are all no doubt aware of the theory that wants to make emotions the sum of bodily and muscular sensations. It has caused a lot of controversy, and we're yet to see universal agreement around one opinion on the matter. You will also be aware of the controversies over the nature of mental activity.

Some hold that it is a purely spiritual force and that we have an immediate perception of it as such. Others claim that what we call mental activity, effort or attention, for example, is only the conscious aspect of certain operations to which our body plays host. Muscular tensions in the head and throat, the stop and go of breathing, the flow of blood and so on. However these controversies are resolved, their existence clearly proves one thing. It is very hard, maybe even impossible,

to know simply by private inspection of certain phenomena, whether they are physical in nature, occupying extended space and so on, or whether they are purely mental and internal. We must always find reasons for putting forward an opinion. We need to find the most probable way of classifying the phenomenon, But at the end of the day, it may be that all our usual classifications are motivated more by practical necessity than by some faculty we may have for perceiving two ultimate distinct essences, which together make up the framework of existence. Each of our bodies gives us an almost violent sense of contrast with the outside world.

Everything coming from inside the body is more private and important to us than that which comes from elsewhere. It is identified and classified with our ego. Who really knows how to distinguish soul, life and breath? Even our private images and memories, which only act on the physical world by the intermediary of our body, seem to be part of that body. We treat them as internal. We class them with our emotions.

It has to be said, basically, that the question of the dualism of mind and matter is a long way from being finally resolved. And that's the end of the first part of my mind. my lecture. Ladies and gentlemen, I wanted to instill in you my doubts and the reality, as well as the importance of the problem. Myself, after long years of hesitation, I have come to understand my position clearly. I believe that consciousness, as it is commonly represented, whether as an entity or as pure activity, but in any case as fluid, unextended, diaphanous,

empty of proper content, but knowing itself directly, in a word spiritual, is, I say, a pure chimera. The totality of concrete realities that the word consciousness ought to cover deserves a completely different description. A description of the kind that a philosophy that pays attention to facts and that knows how to make an analysis will from now on be able to provide, or rather, to begin to provide. And this brings me to the second part of the my lecture. It will be much shorter than the first, because if I develop it to the same extent, it will be far too long. For this reason, I will restrict myself only to some indispensable remarks. Let us say that consciousness, or Bevustheit, conceived as an essence, an entity,

an activity, an irreducible part of each experience, should be suppressed, that the fundamental and so to speak ontological dualism should be abolished, and that we should suppose to exist what we have up until now called the content, the inhalt of consciousness. How can philosophy extricate itself from the vague sort of monism that results? I'm going to attempt to give some positive suggestions, although I'm afraid that, without the necessary development, my ideas will not shed much light,

but perhaps it will be enough to indicate the starting point of the journey. Why do we cling so tenaciously to the idea of consciousness existing over and above the content of things? Why do we complain so forcefully that anyone who denies this must be conveying a poor joke rather than an idea? Is it not to rescue the undeniable fact that the content of experience not only exists immediately and intrinsically, but that each part of that content has a hold, so to speak, on its neighbours? It takes account of itself and of the others, comes out of itself in a way in order to make itself known, and in this way all the field of experience becomes transparent from one part to another,

or constituted like a space filled with mirrors. This binary nature of the parts of experience, knowing on the one hand that they have their own properties, and on the other that they relate to other parts and are known themselves, is noted and explained by the dominant, idea of a fundamental dualism in the makeup of each individual piece of experience. In this sheet of paper, it is said, there are not only contents, whiteness and so on, but also the secondary fact of consciousness of the whiteness and thinness.

This function of being related, of being part of a whole, more comprehensive framework of experience, we make into an ontological fact, and we make a home for this fact inside the paper. itself, coupling it with its whiteness and thinness. It is not an extrinsic relationship as we suppose. It is part of the phenomenon itself. I think basically that we represent reality to ourselves as being made in the same way as the colours in a painting. First of all, there are coloured things that correspond to the content and there is a medium,

oil or paste, that holds them in place and corresponds to consciousness. This is a complete dualism in which, through certain procedures, we can separate each element away by subtraction. In this way we can be sure that by making a great effort of introspection, we can catch our consciousness in action as a pure spiritual activity, almost completely neglecting the things it is focusing on at any given moment. Could we not, I ask, just as easily reverse this way of viewing things? Let us suppose that the principal reality is neutral. and let us call it by a name that is still ambiguous, such as phenomenon, datum, or Vorfingdung, finding. Personally, I like to use the plural, and I call it pure experiences.

This is, if you like, a monism, but it is an altogether rudimentary monism, absolutely opposed to the binary so-called monism of Spinozist scientific positivism. These pure experiences exist and success. one another, entering into relationships with one another, which vary infinitely. These relationships are themselves an essential part of the framework of experiences. There is consciousness in these relationships, just as there is consciousness in their destinations. The result is that groups of experiences notice and distinguish one another, and that the same single experience, given the grand variety of these relationships,

can play a role in several groups at once. In this way, it can be classed as a physical phenomenon in a certain context of its neighbours, whereas in another grouping it figures as an event of consciousness, in the same way that the same particle of ink can appear simultaneously in two lines, one vertical and one horizontal, provided it is situated at their intersection. To help fix our ideas, let's take the experience we are now having of the place we are in, of these walls, this table, these chairs, this space. In this full, concrete and undivided experience, just as it is, the objective physical world and the personal interior world of each of us meet each other and merge, just as lines merge at their intersection.

As a physical thing, this room relates to the rest of the building, a building of which we know and understand nothing. It owes its existence to a whole story of financiers, architects and workers. It weighs on the earth. It will last an uncertain amount of time. If a fire breaks out, the chairs and tables inside will quickly be reduced to ashes. As a personal experience, on the other hand, something reported, something known, something we are aware of, this room can be seen in different ways. Its antecedents are not workers, they are the respective thoughts we have had just now.

Soon it will be a fleeting fact in our biographies, associated with pleasant memories. As a mental experience, it doesn't weigh anything and its structure isn't combustible. It exercises no physical force except on our individual brains, and many of us will deny even this influence, whereas the physical room has a relationship of physical influence to everything else in the world. And yet, it is absolutely the self-same room in both cases. Although we are not engaged in speculative physics, and although we're looking at things from the point of view of common sense, the room we see and feel is very much the physical room. Of what are we speaking then, if not of that,

which, made of the same part of material nature as our souls at this same moment are embracing, enters, just as it is, into the present and personal experience of each of us, and which our memories will regard forever as an integral part of our histories. It is absolutely the same stuff, which, at the same time,

depending on the context we consider is the material and physical fact or the fact of personal consciousness. I think therefore that we should shy away from treating consciousness and matter as being different in essence. We can't derive either one by subtraction, neglecting the other part of an experience made of two parts. Experiences are, on the contrary, simpler in nature in the first place. They become conscious in their entirety and they become physical. in their entirety. It is by way of addition that this comes about. As long as experiences last,

entering into relationships of physical influence, stopping each other, warming each other, lighting each other, and so on, we take from them a distinct group which we refer to as the physical world. As long as, on the other hand, they are fleeting and physically inert, and they arrange themselves in no fixed order, but seem rather to be following emotional caprices,

we take them to form another group which we refer to as the psychological world it is by entering right now into a great number of these psychological groups that this room becomes something of which we are conscious something reported something known because it will in future become part of our biographies it will not be followed by the silly monotonous repetition of itself over time which characterizes its physical existence it will be followed instead by other experiences which will be discontinuous with it, or which will have the strange sort of continuity that we call remembering. Tomorrow it will have taken its place in each of our past lives. But the various presence, to which all those pasts will be linked, will be very different from the present which this room will enjoy tomorrow as a physical entity. But this line of reasoning will take us too far. I can't go into all the hidden recesses of the theory of consciousness,

or of what you Italians call noosology. I'll have to content myself with short remarks or simple suggestions, which are, I fear, all to obscure for lacking the necessary development. Allow me then to sum up, too briefly and in a dogmatic fashion, with the following six theses. 1. Consciousness in its ordinary meaning does not exist any more than does matter, to which Berkeley dealt the final blow. 2. What does exist, and forms the truth that the word consciousness retains, is the tendency of the parts of experience to be reported or known.

3. This tendency is explained by the fact that certain experiences can lead one to another via intermediary experiences, which are clearly characterized in a way so that some play the role of things that are known and others play that of subjects that are understood. 4. You can perfectly well define these two roles without stepping outside the framework of experience itself and without invoking anything transcendental. 5. The designation's subject and object, represented and representative, thing and thought, signify therefore, a practical distinction which is of little importance, but which is of a functional order only. and not ontological as classic dualism would have it. 6. All said and done, things and thoughts, are not at all fundamentally heterogeneous, but are made of the same stuff, a stuff that cannot be defined as such, but only felt, and which can be called, if we wish to name it, the stuff of experience in general.

End of Chapter 8 of Essays in Radical Empiricism. William James. This is the Libravox recording. All Libravox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit Libravox.org. Essays in Radical Empiricism by William James. Chapter 9 Is radical empiricism solipsistic? If all the criticisms which the humanistic Velton-Shaung is receiving, were as sachgames as Mr. Bode is, the truth of the matter would more rapidly clear up. Footnote.

B.H. Bode. P. H. Bode.E. P.E. Experience and the External World. Journal of Philosophy, Psychology, and Scientific Methods. Volume 2. 1905, page 128. End footnote. Not only is it excellently well written, but it brings its own point of view out clearly and admits of a perfectly straight reply. The argument, unless I fail to catch it, can be expressed as follows. If a series of experiences be supposed, no one of which is in doubt

immediately with the self-transcendant function of reference to a reality beyond itself, no motive will occur within the series for supposing anything beyond it to exist. It will remain subjective, and contentedly subjective, both as a whole and in its several parts. Radical empiricism, trying as it does to account for objective knowledge by means of such a series, egregiously fails. It cannot explain how the notion of a physical order as distinguished from a subjectively biographical order of experiences ever arose. It pretends to explain the notion of a physical order, but does so by playing fast and loose with the concept of object of reference. On the one hand, it denies that such reference implies self-transcendency on the part of any one experience.

On the other hand, it claims that experiences point. But, critically considered, there can be no pointing. unless self-transcendency be also allowed. The conjunctive function of pointing, as I have assumed it, is, according to my critic, fissuated by the fallacy of attaching a bilateral relation to a term,

a quo, as if it could stick out substantively and maintain itself in existence in advance of the term ad quem, which is equally required for, it to be a concretely experienced fact. If the relation be made concrete, the term ad quem is involved, which would mean, if I succeed in apprehending Mr. Boda rightly, that this latter term, though not empirically there,

is yet no-ethically there in advance. In other words, it would mean that any experience that points must already have transcended itself in the ordinary epistemological sense of the word transcend. Something like this, if I understand Mr. Bodas' text, is the upshot of his state of mind. It is a reasonable sounding state of mind, but it is exactly the state of mind which radical empiricalicism, by its doctrine of the reality of conjunctive relations, seeks to dispel. I very much fear, so difficult does mutual understanding seem in these exalted regions, that my able critic has failed to understand that doctrine as it is meant to be understood.

I suspect that he performs on all these conjunctive relations, of which the aforesaid pointing is only one, the usual rationalistic act of substitution. He takes them not as they're given in their first intention, as parts constitutive of experiences living flow, but only as they appear in retrospect, each fixed as a determinate object of conception, static, therefore, and contained within itself, against this rationalistic tendency. to treat experience as chopped up into discontinuous static objects, radical empiricism protests. It insists on taking conjunctions at their face value, just as they come.

Consider, for example, such conjunctions as and, with, near, plus, towards. While we live in such conjunctions, our state is one of transition in the most literal sense. We are expectant of a more to come, and before the more has come, the transition nevertheless is directed towards it. I fail otherwise to see how, if one kind of more comes, there should be satisfaction and feeling of fulfillment, but disappointment if the more comes in another shape. one more will continue another more will arrest or deflect the direction in which our experience is moving even now

we cannot it is true name our different living ands or widths except by naming the different terms towards which they are moving us but we live their specifications and differences before those terms explicitly arrive. Thus, though the various ands are all bilateral relations, each requiring a term ad quem to define it, when viewed in retrospect and articulately conceived, yet in its living moment any one of them may be treated as if it stuck out from, its term, aquo, and pointed in a special direction, much as a compass needle, to use Mr. Bode's excellent simile, points at the pole, even though it stirs not from its box. In Professor Hifting's massive little article in the Journal of Philosophy, Psychology, and Scientific Methods, Volume 2, 1905, pages 85 through 92, end footnote.

He quotes a saying of Kirkagoras to the effect that we live forwards, but we understand backwards. Understanding backwards is, it must be confessed, a very frequent weakness of philosophers, both of the rationalistic and of the ordinary empiricist type. Radical empiricism alone insists on understanding forwards also and refuses to substitute static concepts of the understanding for transitions in our moving life. A logic similar to that, which my critic seems to employ here, should, it seems to me, forbid him to say that our present is, while present, directed towards our future,

or that any physical movement can have direction until its goal is actually reached. At this point, does it not seem as if the quarrel about self-transcendency and knowledge might drop? Is it not a purely verbal dispute? Call it self-transcendency or call it pointing, whichever you like. It makes no difference. As long as real transitions towards real goals are admitted, as things given in experience, and among experiences most indefeasible parts. Radical empiricism, unable to close its eyes to the transitions caught inactu,

accounts for the self-transcendency, or the pointing, whichever you may call it, as a process that occurs within experience, as an empirically mediated thing, of which a perfectly definite description can be given. Epistemology, on the other hand, denies this, and pretends that the self-transcendency is unmediated, or if mediated, then mediated in a super-empirical world. To justify this pretension, epistemology has first to transform all our conjunctions into static objects,

and this, I submit, is an absolutely arbitrary act. But in spite of Mr. Boda's maltreatment of conjunctions, as I understand them, and as I understand him, I believe that at bottom we are fighting for nothing different, but are both defending the same continuities of experience in different forms of words. There are other criticisms in the article in question but, as this seems the most vital one,

I will, for the present, at any rate, leave them untouched. End, Chapter 9. This recording is in the public domain. Essays in Radical Empiricism by William James, Chapter 10. Mr. Pitkin's refutation of radical empiricism. This is a Libervox recording. All Librevox recordings are in the public domain, for more information or to volunteer visit librivox.org, Mr. Pitkin's refutation of radical empiricism. Although Mr. Pitkin does not name me in his acute article on radical empiricism,

I fear that some readers knowing me to have applied that name to my own doctrine may possibly consider themselves to have been in at my death. In point of fact, my withers are entirely unwrung. I have indeed said that to be radical and empiricism must not admit into its constructions any element that is not directly experienced. But in my own radical empiricism, this is only a methodological postulate, not a conclusion supposed to flow from the intrinsic absurdity of trans-empirical object. I've never felt the slightest respect for the idealistic arguments which Mr. Pitkin attacks, and of which Farrier made such striking use, and I am perfectly willing to admit any number of numinal beings or events into philosophy, if only their pragmatic value, can be shown.

Radical empiricism and pragmatism have so many misunderstandings to suffer from that it seems my duty not to let this one go any farther uncorrected. Mr. Pitkin's reply to me perplexes me by the obscurity of style which I find in almost all our younger philosophers. He asks me, however, two direct questions which I understand, so I take the liberty of answering. First, he asks, do not experience and science show that countless things are experienced as that which they are not, or are only partially. note Mr. Pitkin inserts the clause by reason of the very nature of experience itself. Not understanding just what reason is meant, I do not include this clause in my answer. I reply, yes, assuredly as, for example, things distorted by refractive media, molecules,

or whatever else is taken to be more ultimately real than the immediate content of the perceptive moment. Secondly, if experience is self-supporting in any intelligible sense, does this fact preclude the possibility of, A, something not experienced, and B, action of experience upon Newmanen? My reply is, assuredly not the possibility of either. How could it? Yet in my opinion, we should be wise not to consider anything or action of that nature and to restrict our universe of philosophic discourse to what is experienced or, at least,

experientable. Note, elsewhere in speaking of reality as conceptual or perceptual experiences, the author says, this is meant merely to exclude reality of an unknowable sort of which no account in either perceptual or conceptual terms can be given. It includes, of course, any amount of course. of empirical reality independent of the knower of chapter 10 this is a Librevox recording all Librevox recordings are in the public domain for more informational to volunteer visit libravox.org this reading by Carl Manchester 2007 essays in radical empiricism by

William James chapter 11 humanism and truth once more mr. Joseph's criticism of my article Humanism and Truth is a useful contribution to the general clearing up. Footnote. Humanism and truth first appeared in mind October 1904. It is reprinted in the meaning of truth. Mr. H. W.B. Joseph's criticism entitled Professor James on Humanism and Truth appeared in mind January 1905. End footnote. He has seriously tried to comprehend what the pragmatic movement may intelligibly mean, and if he has failed, it is the fault neither of his patience, nor of his sincerity, but rather of stubborn tricks of thought which he could not easily get rid of. Minute polemics, in which the parties try to rebut every detail of each other's charges,

are a useful exercise only to the disputants. They can but breed confusion in a reader. I will therefore ignore as much as possible the text of both our articles, Mine was inadequate enough, and treat once more the general objective situation. As I apprehend the movement towards humanism, it is based on no particular discovery or principle that can be driven into one precise formula which thereupon can be impaled upon a logical skewer. It is much more like one of those secular changes that come upon public opinion overnight, as it were, born upon tides too full for sound or foam, that survive all the crude

and extravagances of their advocates, that you can pin to no one absolutely essential statement nor kill by any one decisive stab. Such have been the changes from aristocracy to democracy, from classic to romantic taste, from theistic to pantheistic feeling, from static to evolutionary ways of understanding life, changes of which we have all been spectators. Scholasticism still opposes to such changes the methods. of confutation by single decisive reasons, showing that the new view involves self-contradiction, or traverses some fundamental principle. This is like stopping a river by planting a stick in the middle of its bed.

Round your obstacle flows the water, and gets there all the same. In reading Mr. Joseph, I am not a little reminded of those Catholic writers who refute Darwinism by telling us that higher species cannot come from lower because minus nequit gignere pluse or that the notion of transformation is absurd for it implies that species tend to their own destruction

and that would violate the principle that every reality tends to persevere in its own shape the point of view is too myopic too tight and close to take in the inductive argument you cannot settle questions of fact by formal logic I feel as if Mr. Joseph almost pounced on my words singly, without giving the sentences time to get out of my mouth. The one condition of understanding humanism is to become inductive-minded oneself, to drop rigorous definitions and follow lines of least resistance on the whole.

In other words, Mr. Joseph may probably say, resolve your intellect into a kind of slush. Even so I make reply. if you will consent to use no politer word. For humanism, conceiving the more true as the more satisfactory, Dewey's term, has to renounce sincerely rectilinear arguments and ancient ideals of rigor and finality. It is in just this temper of renunciation, so different from that of Pyrrhenistic skepticism,

that the spirit of humanism essentially consists. Satisfactriness has to be measured by a multitude of standards, of which some, for aught we know, may fail in any given case, and what is more satisfactory than any alternative in sight may to the end be a sum of pluses and minuses, concerning which we can only trust that by ulterior corrections and improvements a maximum of the one and a minimum of the other may someday be approached. It means a real change of heart, a break with absolutistic hopes,

when one takes up this view of the conditions of belief. that humanism's critics have never imagined this attitude inwardly is shown by their invariable tactics. They do not get into it far enough to see objectively and from without what their own opposite notion of truth is. Mr Joseph is possessed by some such notion. He thinks his readers to be full of it. He obeys it, works from it, but never even essays to tell us what it is. The nearest he comes to doing so is where he says it is the way. we ought to think, whether we be psychologically compelled to or not. Of course, humanism agrees to

this. It is only a manner of calling truth an ideal. But humanism explocates the summarizing word ought into a mass of pragmatic motives, from the midst of which our critics think that truth itself takes flight. Truth is a name of double meaning. It stands now for an abstract something defined only as that to which our thought ought to conform, and again it stands for the concrete propositions within which we believe that conformity already reigns, they being so many truths. Humanism sees that the only conformity

we ever have to deal with concretely is that between our subjects and our predicates, using these words in a very broad sense. It sees, moreover, that this conformity is validated, to use Mr. Schiller's term, by an indefinite number of pragmatic tests that vary as the predicates and subjects vary. If an S gets superseded by an SP, that gives our mind a completer sum of satisfactions. We always say humanism points out that we have advanced to a better position in regard to truth.

Now many of our judgments thus attained are retrospective. The S is, so the judgment runs, were SPs already. ere the fact was humanly recorded. Common sense, struck by this state of things, now rearranges the whole field, and traditional philosophy follows her example. The general requirement that predicates must conform to their subject, they translate into an ontological theory. A most previous subject of all is substituted for the lesser subjects, and conceived of as an archetypal reality. And the conformity required of predicates in detail is reinterpreted as a relation which our whole mind, with all its subjects and predicates together, must get into with respect to this reality. It, meanwhile, is conceived as eternal, static, and unaffected by our thinking.

Conformity to a non-human archetype like this is probably the notion of truth which my opponent shares with common sense and philosophic rationalism. Now when humanism, fully admitting both the naturalness and the grandeur of this hypothesis, nevertheless points to its sterility, and declines to chime in with its substitution, keeping to the concrete and still lodging truth between the subjects and the predicates in detail, it provokes the outcry which we hear and which my critic echoes. One of the commonest parts of the outcry is that humanism is subjectivistic altogether. It is supposed to labour under a necessity of denying transperceptual reality. It is not hard to see how this misconception of humanism may have arisen,

and humanistic writers, partly from not having sufficiently guarded their expressions, and partly from not having yet got round in the poverty of their literature, to a full discussion of the subject, a doubtless in some degree to blame. But I fail to understand how anyone with a working grasp of their principles, can charge them wholesale with subjectivism. I myself have never thought of humanism as being subjectivistic, farther than to this extent that, in so much as it treats the thinker as being himself one portion of reality, it must also allow that some of the realities that he declares for

true are created by his being there. Such realities, of course, are either acts of his, or relations between other things and him, or relations between things which, but for him, would never have been. been traced. Humanists are subjectivistic also in this, that unlike rationalists, who think they carry a warrant for the absolute truth of what they now believe in their present pocket, they hold all present beliefs as subject to revision in the light of future experience. The future experience, however, may be of things outside the thinker, and that this is so the humanist may believe as freely as any other kind of empiricist philosopher.

The critics of humanism, though here I follow them but darkly, appear to object to any infusion whatever of subjectivism into truth. All must be archetypal. Every truth must pre-exist to its perception. Humanism sees that an enormous quantity of truth must be written down as having pre-existed to its perception by us humans. In countless instances we find it most satisfactory to believe that, though we were always ignorant of, the fact, it always was a fact that S was SP. But humanism separates this class of cases from those in which it is more satisfactory to believe the opposite, e.g. that S is ephemeral, or P a passing event, or S.P. created by the perceiving act. Our critics seem, on the other hand, to wish to universalise the retrospective type of instance.

Reality must pre-exist to every assertion for which truth is claimed. and not content with this overuse of one particular type of judgment our critics claim its monopoly they appear to wish to cut off humanism from its rights to any retrospection at all humanism says that satisfactoriness is what distinguishes the true from the false but satisfactoriness is both a subjective quality and a present one ergo the critics appear to reason an object Must always for humanism be both present and subjective, and a humanist belief can never be in anything that lives outside the belief itself or antedates it. Why so preposterous a charge should be so current, I find it hard to say. Nothing is more obvious than the fact that both the objective and the past existence of the object may be the very things about it that most seem satisfactory, and that most invite us to believe them. The past tense can figure in the humanist's world as well of belief as of representation, quite as harmoniously as in the world of anyone else. Mr Joseph gives a special turn on this accusation.

He charges me with being self-contradictory when I say that the main categories of thought were evolved in the course of experience itself, for I use these very categories to define the course of experiences by. experience as I talk about it is a product of their use, and yet I take it as true anteriorly to them. This seems to Mr Joseph to be an absurdity. I hope it does not seem such to his readers, for if experiences can suggest hypotheses at all, and they notoriously do so, I can see no absurdity whatever in the notion of a retrospective hypothesis having for its object the very train of experiences by which its own being, along with that of other things, has been brought about. If the hypothesis is satisfactory, we must of course believe it to have been true anteriorly of its formulation by ourselves.

Every explanation of a present by a past seems to involve this kind of circle, which is not a vicious circle. The past is cause a existendi of the present, which in turn is causa cognoscendi of the past. If the present were treated as causer existendi of the past, the circle might indeed be vicious. Closely connected with this pseudo-difficulty is another one of wider scope and greater complication, more excusable therefore.

Footnote. This Mr. Joseph deals with, though in much too petty fogging and logic chopping away, on page 33 to 34 of his article. End footnote. Humanism, namely, asking how truth in point of fact is reached, and seeing that it is by ever substituting more satisfactory for less satisfactory opinions, is thereby led into a vague historic sketch of truth's development.

The earliest opinions, it thinks, must have been dim, unconnected feelings, and only little by little did more and more orderly views of things replace them. Our own retrospective view of this whole evolution is now, let us say, the latest candidate for truth, as yet reached in the process. To be a satisfactory candidate, it must give some definite sort of a picture of what forces keep the process going. On the subjective side, we have a fairly definite picture, sensation, association, interest, hypothesis. These account in a general way for the growth into a cosmos of the relative chaos with which the mind. began. But on the side of the object, so to call it roughly, our view is much less satisfactory. Of which of our many objects are we to believe that it truly was there and at work before the

human mind began? Time, space, kind, number, serial order, cause, consciousness are hard things not to objectify. Even transcendental idealism gives them standing as empirically real. substance, matter, force, fall down more easily before the criticism, and secondary qualities make almost no resistance at all. Nevertheless, when we survey the field of speculation, from scholasticism through cantism to Spencerism, we find an ever-recurring tendency to convert the pre-human into a merely logical object, an unknowable ding and sick, that but starts the process, or a vague material, that but receives our forms. The reasons for this are not so much logical as they are material. We can postulate an extramental that freely enough, though some idealists have denied us the privilege.

But when we have done so, the what of it is hard to determine satisfactorily, because of the oppositions and entanglements of the variously proposed watts with one another and with the history of the human mind. The literature of speculative cosmology bears witness to this difficulty. Humanism suffers from it no more than any other philosophy suffers, but it makes all our cosmogonic theories so unsatisfactory that some thinkers seek relief in the denial of any primal dualism. Absolute thought or pure experience is postulated

and endowed with attributes calculated to justify the belief that it may run itself. Both these truth-claiming hypotheses are non-dualistic in the old mind and matter sense, but the one is monistic and the other pluralistic as to the world process itself. Some humanists are non-dualists of this sort. I myself am one unsvar of the pluralistic brand. But doubtless dualistic humanists also exist, as well as non-dualistic ones of the monistic wing. Mr. Joseph pins these general philosophic difficulties on humanism alone, or possibly on me alone.

My article spoke vaguely of a most chaotic, pure experience coming first and building up the mind. But how can two structuralist things interact so as to produce a structure? My critic triumphantly asks. Of course they can't, as purely so named entities. We must make additional hypotheses. We must beg a minimum of structure for. them. The kind of minimum that might have tended to increase towards what we now find actually developed is the philosophical desideratum here. The question is that of the most materially

satisfactory hypothesis. Mr. Joseph handles it by formal logic purely, as if he had no acquaintance with the logic of hypothesis at all. Mr. Joseph again is much bewildered as to what a humanist can mean when he uses the word knowledge. He tries to to convict me of vaguely identifying it with any kind of good. Knowledge is a difficult thing to define briefly, and Mr. Joseph shows his own constructive hand here even less than in the rest of his article. I have myself put forth on several occasions a radically pragmatist account of knowledge. The existence of which account, my critic probably does not know of, so perhaps I had better not say anything about knowledge, until he reads it and attacks that. I will

say, however, that whatever the relation called knowing may itself prove to consist in, I can think of no conceivable kind of object which may not become an object of knowledge on humanistic principles as well as on the principles of any other philosophy. Footnote. For a recent attempt, effective on the whole, at squaring humanism with knowing, I may refer to Professor Woodbridge's very able address at the St. Louis Congress, the field of logic, printed in science, New York, November 1904. End footnote. I confess that I am pretty steadily hampered by the habit on the part of humanism's critics

of assuming that they have truer ideas than mine of truth and knowledge, the nature of which I must know of and cannot need to have redefined. I have consequently to reconstruct these ideas in order to carry on the discussion. I have, for example, had to do so in some parts of this article, and I thereby expose myself to charges of caricature. In one part of Mr Joseph's attack, however, I rejoice that we are free from this embarrassment. It is an important point and covers probably a genuine difficulty,

so I take it up last. When, following Schiller and Dewey, I define the true as that which gives the maximal combination of satisfactions and say that satisfaction is a many-dimensional term that can be realised in various ways. Mr Joseph replies rightly enough that the chief satisfaction of a rational creature must always be his thought that what he believes is true, whether the truth brings him the satisfaction of collateral profits or not. This would seem, however, to make of truth the prior concept and to relegate satisfaction to a secondary place. Again, if to be satisfactory is what is meant by being true, whose satisfactions and which of his satisfaction are,

actions at a count. Discriminations notoriously have to be made, and the upshot is that only rational candidates and intellectual satisfactions stand the test. We are then driven to a purely theoretic notion of truth, and get out of the pragmatic atmosphere altogether, and with this Mr Joseph leaves us, truth is truth, and there is an end of the matter. But he makes a very pretty show of convicting me of self-stultification in according to our purely theoretic satisfactions any place in the humanistic scheme. They crowd the collateral satisfactions out of house and home, he thinks, and pragmatism has to go into bankruptcy if she recognises them at all. There is no room for disagreement about the facts here, but the destructive force of the reasoning

disappears as soon as we talk concretely instead of abstractly, and ask, in our quality of good pragmatists, just what the famous theoretic needs are known as, and in what the intellectual satisfactions consist. Mr. Joseph, faithful to the habits of his party, makes no attempt at characterising them, but assumes that their nature is self-evident to all. Are they not all mere matters of consistency, and emphatically not of consistency between an absolute reality and the mind's copies of it, but have actually felt consistency amongst judgments, objects, and manners of reacting in the mind, and are not both our need of such consistency and our pleasure in it conceivable as outcomes of the natural fact that we are beings that

develop mental habits, habit itself proving adaptively beneficial in an environment where the same objects or the same kinds of objects recur and follow law. If this was so, what would have come first would have been the collateral profits of habit, and the theory. would have grown up in aid of these. In point of fact, this seems to have been the probable case. At life's origin, any present perception may have been true, if such a word could then be applicable. Later, when reactions became organized,

the reactions became true whenever the expectation was fulfilled by them. Otherwise, they were false or mistaken reactions. But the same class of objects needs the same kind of reaction. so the impulse to react consistently must gradually have been established, with a disappointment felt whenever the result's frustrated expectation. Here is a perfectly plausible germ for all our higher consistencies. Nowadays, if an object claims from us a reaction of the kind habitually accorded only to the opposite class of objects, our mental machinery refuses to run smoothly.

The situation is intellectually unsatisfactory. To gain relief, we seek either to preserve the reaction by reinterpreting the object, or leaving the object as it is, we react in a way contrary to the way claimed of us. Neither solution is easy. Such a situation might be that of Mr Joseph, with me claiming assent to humanism from him. He cannot apperceive it so as to permit him to gratify my claim, but there is enough appeal in the claim to induce him to write a whole article in justification of his refusal.

If he should assent to humanism, on the other hand, that would drag after it an unwelcome, yea, incredible, alteration of his previous mental beliefs. Whichever alternative he might adopt, however, a new equilibrium of intellectual consistency would in the end be reached. He would feel, whichever way he decided, that he was now thinking truly. But if, with his old habits unaltered,

he should simply add them to the new one of advocacy. humanism quietly or noisily, his mind would be rent into two systems, each of which would accuse the other of falsehood. The resultant situation, being profoundly unsatisfactory, would also be unstable. Theoretic truth is thus no relation between our mind and archetypal reality. It falls within the mind, being the accord of some of its processes and objects with other processes and objects. Accord consisting here in well-definable relations. So long as the satisfaction of feeling such an accord is denied us,

whatever collateral profits may seem to enure from what we believe in, are but as dust in the balance, provided always that we are highly organized intellectually, which the majority of us are not. The amount of accord which satisfies most men and women is merely the absence of violent clash between their usual thoughts and statements and the limited sphere of sense perceptions in which their lives are cast. The theoretic truth that most of us think we ought to attain to

is thus the possession of a set of predicates that do not contradict their subjects. We preserve it as often as not by leaving other predicates and subjects out. In some men theory is a passion, just as music in others. The form of inner consistency is pursued far beyond the line at which collateral profits stop. Such men systemise and classify and schematize and make synoptical tables and invent ideal objects for the pure love of unifying. Too often the results glowing with truth for the inventors seem pathetically personal and artificial to bystanders, which is as much as to say that the purely theoretical criterion of truth can leave us in the love, as easily as any other criterion.

I think that if Mr. Joseph will but consider all these things a little more concretely, he may find that the humanistic scheme and the notion of theoretic truth fall into line consistently enough to yield him also intellectual satisfaction. End of Chapter 11. This is a Libravox recording. All Libravox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit Libravox.org. Recording by Leon Meyer

Essays in Radical Empiricism by William James Chapter 12 Absolutism and Empiricism No Seeker of Truth can fail to rejoice at the Tera-Tere sort of discussion of the issues between empiricism and transcendentalism or, as the champions of the latter would probably prefer to say, between irrationalism and rationalism, that seems to have begun in mind.

It would seem as if, over concrete examples like Mr. J.S. Haldane's, both parties ought inevitably to come to a better understanding. As a reader with a strong bias towards irrationalism, I have studied his article with the liveliest admiration of its temper and its painstaking effort to be clear. But the cases discussed failed to satisfy me, and I was at first tempted to write a note and am adverting upon them in detail.

The growth of the limb, the seas contour, the vicarious functioning of the nerve center, the digitalis curing the heart, are, unfortunately, not cases where we can see any through-and-through conditioning of the parts by the whole. They are all cases of reciprocity where subjects, supposed independently to exist,

acquire certain attributes through their relations to other subjects. That they also exist through similar relations is only an ideal supposition, not verified to our understanding in these or any other concrete cases whatsoever. If, however, one were to urge this solemnly, Mr. Haldane's friends could easily reply that he only gave us such examples on account of the hardness of our hearts. He knew full well their imperfection,

but he hoped that to those who would not spontaneously ascend to the notion of the totality, these cases might prove a spur, and suggest and symbolize something better than themselves. No particular case that can be brought forward is a real concrete. They are all abstractions from the whole, and of course the through-and-through character cannot be found in them. Each of them still contains, among its elements, what we call things, grammatical subjects, forming a sort of residual kapatmortum of existence, after all the relations that figure in the examples have been told off. On this existence, thinks popular philosophy, things may live on, like the, the winter bears, on their own fat, never entering relations at all, or, if entering them,

entering an entirely different set of them, from those treated of in Mr. Haldane's examples. Thus, if the digitalis were to weaken instead of strengthening the heart, and to produce death, as sometimes happens, it would determine itself through determining the organism to the function of kill instead of that of cure. The function and relations seem adventitious, depending on what kind of a heart the digitalist gets hold of, the digitalis and the heart being facts external, and so to speak accidental to each other.

But this popular view, Mr. Haldane's friends will continue, is an illusion. What seems to us the existence of digitalis and heart outside of the relations of killing or curing is but a lot, a function in a wider system of relations, of which Prohawk Wicke, we take no account. The larger system determines the existence, just as absolutely, as the system kill, or the system cure, determine the function of the digitalis. Ascend to the absolute system, instead of biting with these relative and partial ones, and you shall see that the law of through and throughness must and does obtain. Of course, this argument is entirely reasonable, and debars us

completely from chopping logic about the concrete examples Mr. Haldane is chosen. It is not his fault if his categories are so fine an instrument that nothing but the sum total of things can be taken to show us the manner of their use. It is simply our misfortune that he is not the sum total of things to show it by. Let us fall back from all concrete attempts and see what we can do with his notion of through-and-thrueness, avowedly taken in abstracto. In abstract systems, the through-and-thru ideal is realized on every hand. In any system as such, the members are only members in the system.

Abolish the system, and you abolish its members, for you have conceived them through no other property than the abstract one of membership. Neither rightness nor leftness except through bilaterality. Neither mortgager nor mortgagee except through mortgage. The logic of these cases is this, if A, then B, but if B, then A. Wherefore, if either, both, and if not both, nothing. It costs nothing, not even a mental effort, to admit that the absolute totality of things may be organized exactly after the pattern of one of these through-and-through abstractions. In fact, it is the pleasantest and freest of mental movements. Husband makes, and is made by, wife, through marriage.

One makes other, by being itself other. Everything self-created through its opposite. go round like a squirrel and a cage. But if you stop and reflect upon what you are about, you lay bare the exact point at issue between common sense and the through-and-through school. What, in fact, is the logic of these abstract systems? It is, as we said above, if any member, then the whole system. If not the whole system, then nothing. But how can logic possibly do anything more with these two hypotheses, then combine them into the single disjunctive proposition, quote, either this whole system just as it stands, or nothing at all, unquote.

Is not that disjunction the ultimate word of logic in the matter, and can any disjunction, as such, resolve itself? It may be that Mr. Haldane sees how one horn, the concept of the whole system carries real existence with it. But if he has been as unsuccessful as I, in assimilating the Hegelian re-editings of the Anselmian proof, he will have to say that though logic may determine what the system must be, if it is, something else than logic must tell us that it is. Mr. Hall-Dane in this case would probably consciously or unconsciously make an appeal to fact. the disjunction is decided since no one can dispute that now as a matter of fact something and not nothing is we must therefore he would probably say go on to admit the whole system in the desiderated sense is not then the validity of the anselmian proof the nucleus of the whole question between logic and fact ought not the efforts of mr halldain and his friends to be principally devoted to its elucidious to its elucidiousnesses

Is it not the real door of separation between empiricism and rationalism? And if the rationalists leave that door for a moment off its hinges, can any power keep that abstract, opaque, unmediated, external, irrational, and irresponsible monster, known to the vulgar as bare fact, from getting in and contaminating the whole sanctuary with his presence? Can anything prevent Faust from changing? a mongfong-vartis vort into among-fong-vartitat. Nothing in earth or heaven.

Only the Enselmian proof can keep fact out of philosophy. The question, shall fact be recognized as an ultimate principle, is the whole issue between the rationalists and the empiricism of vulgar thought. Of course, if so recognized, fact sets a limit to the through-and-through character of the world's rationality. That rationality might then mediate between all the members of our conception of the world, but not between the conception itself and reality. Reality would have to be given, not by reason, but by fact. Fact holds out blankly, brutally, and blindly, against that universal deliquescence of everything into logical relations which the absolutist logic demands, and it is the only thing

that does hold out. Hence the ire of the absolutist logic, hence its non-recognition, its cutting of fact. The reasons it gives for the cutting are that fact is speechless, a mere word for the negation of thought, a vacuous unknowability, a dog in the manger, in truth, which, having no rights of its own, can find nothing else to do than to keep its betters out of theirs. There are two points involved here. First, the claim that certain things have rights that are absolute, ubiquitous, and all-pervasive, and in regard to which nothing else can possibly exist in its own right. And second, that anything that denies this assertion is pure negativity with no positive

context whatsoever. Take the latter point first. Is it true that what is negative in one way? way is thereby convicted of incapacity to be positive in any other way. The word fact is like the word accident, like the word absolute itself. They all have their negative connotation. In truth, their whole connotation is negative and relative. All it says is that, whatever the thing may be that is denoted by the words, other things do not control it. Where fact, where accident, where is, they must be silent. It alone can speak. But that does not prevent it speaking as loudly as you please

in its own tongue. It may have an inward life, self-transparent and active in the maximum degree. An indeterminate future volition on my part, for example, would be a strict accident as far as my present self is concerned. But that could not prevent it in the moment in which it occurred, from being possibly the most intensely living and luminous experience I ever had. Its quality of being a brute fact, Ab-Astra, says nothing whatever as to its inwardness. It simply says to outsiders, hands off. And this brings us back to the first point of the absolutest indictment of fact. Is that point really anything more than a fantastic dislike to letting anything say, hands off?

What else explains that? the contempt the absolutist authors exhibit for a freedom defined simply on its negative side, as freedom from, etc. What else prompts them to deride such freedom? But dislike for dislike, who shall decide? Why is not their dislike at having me from them, entirely on a par with mine at having them through me? I know very well that in talking of dislikes to those who never mention them, I am doing a very coarse thing, and making a sort of intellectual orson of myself. But for the life of me, I cannot help it, because I feel sure that likes and dislikes must be among the ultimate factors of their philosophy, as well as of mine.

Would they but admit it? How sweetly we then could hold converse together. There is something finite about us both, as we now stand. We do not know the absolute whole yet. Part of it is still negative to us. Among the whats of it still stalks a mob of opaque that, without which we cannot think. But just as I admit that this is all possibly provisional, that even the Anselmian proof may come out all right, and creation may be a rational system through and through, why might they not also admit that it may all be otherwise, and that the shadow, the opacity, the negativity, the from-ness, the plurality that is ultimate, may never be wholly driven from the scene. We should both then be avowedly making hypotheses, playing with ideals. Ah, why is the notion of hypothesis so appurrent to the Hegelian mind? And once down on our common level of hypothesis, we might then admit skepticism, since the whole

is not yet revealed to be the soundest logical position. But since we are in the main not skeptics, we might go on and frankly confess to each other the motives for our several faiths. I frankly confess mine. I cannot think but that at bottom they are of an aesthetic and not of a logical sort. The through and through universe seems to suffocate me

with its infallible, impeccable, all-pervasiveness, its necessity with no possibilities, its relations with no subjects. Make me feel as if I had entered into a contract with no reserved rights, or rather as if I had to live in a large seaside boarding-house, with no private bedroom in which I might take refuge from the society of the place. I am distinctly aware, moreover, that the old quarrel of sinner and Pharisee has something to do with the matter. Certainly, to my personal knowledge, all Higalians are not prigs, but I somehow feel as if all prigs ought to end,

if developed, by becoming Hagalians. There is a story of two clergymen asked by mistake to conduct the same funeral. One came first, and had got no farther than I am the resurrection in the life, when the other entered. I am the resurrection in the life, cried the latter. The through-and-through philosophy, as it actually exists, reminds many of us of that clergyman. It seems too buttoned up and white-chokered and clean-shaven a thing to speak for the vast, slow-breathing, unconscious cosmos with its dread abysses and its unknown tides. The freedom we want to see there is not the freedom with a string tied to its leg and warranted not to fly away of that philosophy.

Let it fly away, we say. From us, I what then. Again, I know I am exhibiting my mental grossness. But again, Ikehannik Donders. I show my feelings, why will not they show theirs? I know they have a personal feeling about the through and through universe, which is entirely different from mine, in which I should very likely be much the better for gaining, if they would only show me how. their persistence in telling me that feeling has nothing to do with the question that it is a pure matter of absolute reason keeps me forever out of the pale still seeing a that in things which logic does not expel the most i can do is to aspire to the expulsion at present i do not even aspire aspiration is a feeling what can kindle feeling but the example of feeling and if the hagelians will refuse to be to set an example, what can they expect the rest of us to do? To speak more seriously, the one fundamental quarrel empiricism has with absolutism

is over this repudiation by absolutism of the personal and aesthetic factor in the construction of philosophy, that we all of us have feelings, empiricism feels quite sure, that they may be as prophetic and anticipatory of truth as anything else we have, and some of them more so than others, cannot possibly be denied. But what hope is there of squaring and settling opinions, unless absolutism will hold parley on this common ground, and will admit that all philosophies are hypotheses, to which all our faculties, emotional as well as logical, help us, and the truest of which, will, at the final integration of things, be found in possession of the men whose faculties on the whole had the best divining power.

End of Chapter 12. This is a Librivox recording. All Librivox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit Librivox.org. Essays in Radical Empiricism by William James. Chapter 13. Controversy about Truth William James John E. R. Russell, the Journal of Philosophy, Psychology and Scientific Methods,

Volume 4, Issue 11, May 23, 1907, pages 289 to 296. Discussion. Controversy about Truth To the editors of the Journal of Philosophy, Psychology and Scientific Methods. The pragmatistic conception of truth is so important. that no amount of printer's ink spent upon it ought to be considered wasted. My exposition of it in number six of this year's journal was sent back to me with copious critical annotations on its margins by Professor John E. Russell. This led to an exchange of letters between us, in which one issue at least got sharpened, and as that issue is probably the most prevalent stumbling block, I ask you in the interest of

clarifying the question to print the correspondence as it was written i subjoin our letters sincerely yours william james one dear russell your notes bring out the exact point of misunderstanding and the exact difficulty with which pragmatism has to cope in making converts you say quote events in the way of verification do not make an idea true, they only prove that it is true or was true." There is the whole difference between us in a nutshell. The statement seems to mean that truth is a quality of the idea numerically distinct from the events which are its proof. But don't you then think that the said quality ought to be somehow definable as it is in and per se?

I hoped for the definition, as I read your comments, but in the end I found no new definition, only the old ones of agreement with reality and of thinking the reality as it is. Now what does agreement mean? Does it mean anything different from, or prior to, the copings and leadings by which pragmatism explocates the word? These are perfectly well-defined relations. of the idea to the reality or to the reality's associates and surroundings. And what does thinking the reality as it is

mean unless it be either copying it or leading straight up to it or thinking it in its right surroundings, which last notion means terminating at places to which it, the reality, also leads? You speak of Leverrier's idea of Neptune being true before it had led him to verify it. Doubtless.

But pray define its truth apart from those leadings and guidings. The word truth means just such leadings and guidings. Had his idea led him to point his telescope to a vacant part of the sky, it would have been untrue. Is untruth, then, also a resident and previous quality in ideas? Leading to that point, Leverrier's idea certainly was true. I can conceive no other kind of truth,

and of course quite as true when only verifiable as it was after the verification. Even so the star was Neptune, both before and afterwards baptism, for in the star universe that star is all that Neptune ever can mean. In the case of Neptune, he don't separate the name from the fact found, and make it a cause thereof. You don't say the star was found at that point because it was Neptune. But in the case of the idea, you say it led to that point because it was true. But just as Neptune means nothing but the star, which at a certain moment is at that point,

so true means nothing but the idea which, instead of leading you elsewhere, leads you thither. Otherwise, it's like raising a dispute about whether blood is red because it looks so, or looks so because it's red. You ought to insist on the latter formula, I call them equally correct. You may say either that the leading makes the idea true or that it proves it true,

for you are only talking of the same thing in different words. The leading both makes you call the idea true and proves that you have called it so justly. Take another illustration. Does bread nourish us because it is food? Or is it food because it nourishes. Or, finally, are being food and nourishing only two ways of naming the same

physiological events? And if this last view be correct here, why isn't it just as correct in the case of truth? The concrete facts denoted by the word truth are ideas that guide us towards certain termini. Other connotations of the word than these same guidings it is for you to show. If you can't, then we may say either that the ideas are true because they guide, or that they guide because they are true. To be true and to guide are precisely equivalent terms, of which you may make either you like the more primordial in significance. Otherwise, and this is the point which I emphasize, and on which I insist,

you must point out some substantive connotation in the word truth over and above such guiding processes. If you can do this, I surrender, but I don't see how you can do it. It seems to me that there is no other connotation, any more than there is in the case of Neptune. Neptune means the star that gets there, and True means the idea that gets there. Agreement correspondence, thinking the object as it is, all resolve themselves into guidings, into getting there somehow. You argue as if, in the object. You argue as if, in In spite of its getting there, an idea might still be false, unless the intrinsic epistemological virtue of being true were superadded.

I wish you'd explain how. To me, it couldn't be false under those circumstances. Revert to food. In this case, we do have some additional connotations, a certain chemical structure, say, that explain the physiological events in advance. We know nothing of such connotations. as yet, but we suppose they may someday be known. If the word food should connote primarily such chemical structure,

and only secondarily digestions, absorptions, etc., then you might contend that bread nourishes because it is food, and isn't food because it nourishes. But you would still be on purely verbal ground, and even then you would have to define positively these newfangled connotations. meanwhile please observe that the word true has absolutely no such further connotations it has no more of them than neptune has it denotes certain ideas and it connotes their getting there here i must leave the matter as a pragmatist i can defy you to find any other practical meaning to the word truth than that it guides and gets us there if failing to do that you nevertheless call our account an inadequate account of what you mean by truth. Why then, again as a pragmatist, I can wash my hands

of the whole controversy. It is trivial. It has no meaning. Yours, etc. William James. Two. Dear James, I think the issue between the intellectualist and the pragmatist narrows itself down to the question of the validity and the value of two distinctions. The first is the distinction between the ideas being true and the proof that the idea is true. The second distinction is that between a true idea and its instrumental function in leading, guiding behavior to desirable issues in experience. The intellectualist insists that these distinctions are valid and important to a right conception of knowledge. The pragmatist denies this. He contends that the term,

true, truth, leading, guiding, getting there, etc., are different names for the same thing, that the term truth applied to an idea has the same function that the name Neptune, for instance, has when applied to a particular planetary body in the heavens. The pragmatist, after having made agreeing with reality, being as it is thought, etc., mean, leading, guiding, coming into practical relation with, getting there, etc., challenges the intellectualist to point out any other significant connection which his terms, true, truth, etc., can have. The pragmatist says to the intellectualist,

I pray you to define the truth of an idea apart from its leadings and guidings. I defy you to supply other meanings to the word truth than that of guiding and getting us there. Does agreement mean anything different from that copying and leading by which pragmatism explicates this word? Now this puts the intellectualist in a hard situation. If he answers, I mean by a true idea, an idea that agrees with, that copies or corresponds to reality, the pragmatist replies, but what is it to agree with to copy, etc., reality? if it be not just to lead, to guide, to get there.

Now what can the intellectualists say in reply? Suppose he undertakes to define his meaning of truth in different terms. These terms would suffer the same fate. The pragmatist would explicate them in his terms of leading, guiding, getting there, etc., and then ask the naked intellectualist to put on different garments. I can see no other way by which the intellectualist can escape this dilemma than simply to abide by the terms by which he is defined a true idea, and insist that it is the pragmatist who is forced upon these terms

a meaning they cannot take without involving one in intellectual confusion. The intellectualists should, therefore, maintain that the terms in which he explocates the meaning of a true idea give a perfectly defined relation of the idea to reality. What more definite relation can legitimately be demanded? How can the intellectualist, in fairness, be asked to define in other terms what he means by agreement with, by copying, by thinking reality as it is? May he not, with more propriety, ask the pragmatist by what right he makes these terms mean leading, guiding, getting there, etc.? This leads me to the real issue between the intellectualist and the pragmatist, and first, to that distinction between an idea as being true and the proof that it is or was true.

Let us take the case of LeVarie in the discovery of the planet Neptune. We have the following things. 1. Certain perturbations in the motions of the planet Uranus, which could not be explained by the influence of known bodies of the solar system. 2. We have LeVarier's idea of a planetary body of a certain mass and position in the heavens. 3. We have the agreement between the calculated perturbations which this hypothetical body should produce in the motions of Uranus and the actual perturbations observed. 4. We have the discovery of this planet, afterwards named Neptune, by a German astronomer who, following the suggestion of Leverier, pointed his telescope to that exact spot in the heavens where this planet was. Now the intellectualist contends that Laverier's hypothetical conception was true the instant it existed in his mind,

and that the trueness of his idea consisted in its agreement with a fact, a piece of reality, an object, at that time existing, namely that planet occupying a particular place in the physical universe. It was the existence of Neptune then and there, which made it possible for him to have a true idea at that time, Had he thought differently about this planet, this same body would have made his thought untrue. His idea was true for no other reason, and true in no other meaning of the terms, than that it agreed with its object. Furthermore, the contention of the intellectualist is that had Leverier gone no farther in his undertaking, had no telescope ever discovered that planet, his idea would have been as true as it was after the discovery,

which completed the verification of his hypothesis. His idea did not get its quality of truth by the process of verification. This only produced the certainty in his and other minds that his idea was true. It is one thing for an idea to be true. It is quite a different thing to prove that this idea is true. It is one thing to hit a mark. To know that you have hit a mark is a different thing. may ring to let you know that you have made a bull's eye. The ringing of the bell is a sign,

the criterion of the correctness of your aim, but it hardly constitutes the trueness of your aim, or you're making the bull's eye. LeVarier's idea hit its mark. What was subsequently done made that fact known. Truth and verification are therefore different things, and to make the truth or the verity of an idea consists in its verification is to introduce mental confusion and to make unintelligible such a procedure as laveriers in the discovery of Neptune. It is true to say that a true idea is one that can be verified and that only true ideas can be verified, but then these ideas are not true because they are verified.

They are verifiable because they are already true. This brings the intellectual, to the second distinction upon which he insist, namely the distinction between truth and its valuation in terms of desirable experience. To say that truth should have good practical consequences, that those ideas are true which work well in practice, that every true idea leads into satisfying experiences of some sort

is to say what no intellectualists need deny. But to say that an idea is true because it has this practically good issue, or because it works well is to say quite a different thing and something which no intellectualists can accept. There are, so contends the intellectuals, conditions on which our human action or the course of experience depends, and to which our actions, our experiences, must conform if they are to have successful and satisfying issues. Only as a particular experience is in agreement with conditions of experience, Uberhopped, can it lead to beneficial or desirable experiences?

Ideas, therefore, can work well, can lead successfully, only if they first agree with reality, with the objective and determining conditions of our experience. This is just the fact that the pragmatist overlooks when he identifies the truth of an idea with its practically good leadings and consequences. He insists that truth shall be practical, but he fails to answer the question, how can an idea or a course of experience have a practically good leading or result? To take your illustration of bread as food, you ask, does bread nourish because it is food, or is it food because it nourishes,

or are being food and nourishing only two ways of meaning the same physiological events? The intellectualist answers, bread nourishes us because it contains those chemical elements which are nutritive. A particular substance is not bread because it nourishes. It nourishes because it is bread. Being food and nourishing are two ways of meaning the same physiological events, but being bred and nourishing are not two ways of meaning the same physiological events. The intellectualists need not deny that a true idea has an instrumental, in relation to our various needs, that a true idea is a tool to be used in the service

of the will or our practical nature. But he contends that the efficiency of the instrument, the serviceableness of the tool, depends upon the construction of the instrument, upon the quality of the tool. That a knife cuts well proves indeed that it is a good knife. But that which enables the knife to cut well is the quality of the steel and the fashion of the instrument. In other words, the knife cuts well because it was rightly made. Its cutting well merely proves that the knife was rightly made. The proof of the pudding is in the eating, but it will hardly do to say, therefore, the good eating is the pudding. Or is that

in the pudding which gives us that satisfying experience of eating this pudding. Yours, etc., John E. Russell. 3. Dear Russell, your letter is so ultra-clear, and brings the question down to where the wool is so short that I can't help dashing off one more word, though I know I can't convert you. First I note with extreme pleasure your explicit confession that truth, in the intellectualist sense, cannot be further defined. It means agreement, and agreement means truth. That is one point clearly gained. My second remark is simply this.

If true be not an abstract name for the property of verifiability in an idea, then an idea might conceivably be true, though absolutely unverifiable. There might be no empirical mediation between it and its object, no leading either to the object or towards it or into its associates, and yet it might still be true as, agreeing with the object. But then you are met by Royce's old argument. How do you know it means to be true of that object?

It might agree perfectly in the sense of copying, yet not be true unless it meant to copy. And so that particular original. An egg isn't true of another egg, because it is not supposed to aim at the other egg at all, or to intend it. Neither is my toothache, true of your toothache. Royce makes the absolute to the aiming and intending.

I make the chain of empirical intermediaries do it. What does it in your philosophy? Yours, etc. William James. 4. Dear James, according to the meaning of a true idea, I have been maintaining it does follow, not only that an idea is true prior to its verification, but also that an idea may remain unverified in our human experience. I would not, however, say that an idea can be true and be

absolutely unverifiable, for there may be such a being as Royce's absolute, and if so, no true idea can remain unverified. In the experience of the Roycean absolute, truth and verification do not fall apart as they do in our human experience. the roycean question with which you confront me i must confess has never given me a pause or seemed a serious one at all how do you know that your idea means to be true of its object i answer when i think i know what i am thinking about just as i know what mark i am aiming at when i am engaged in target shooting my thinking as such is selective of its object and knows its own intent namely to think that object as that object is my thought picks out this particular piece of the real world and means to agree with it just as i pick out my target and intend to hit it for instance i am now thinking of you among your books in your study at cambridge i mean to think of you and your immediate surroundings your present doings as you and they are now at this hour ten o'clock in the morning in so doing i know what object i mean to agree with in my present thinkings now the royce and absolute may exist and if it does he of course knows whether or not my present thought of you is now true but the knowing of that being is no more necessary to constitute the truth of my idea or to explain the fact that i aim at you in my idea

then is the presence of an onlooker when i am shooting at a mark essential to my aiming at and hitting or missing that mark nor does it seem to me that your claim of intermediation is in any matter essential to the meaning, the intent or the truth of my present thought of you, which is sufficient unto itself both to select its object and to determine its truth or untruth. Yours, etc. John E. Russell. 5. Dear Russell, we seem now to have laid bare our exact difference. According to me, meaning a certain object and agreeing with it are abstract notions of both of which definite concrete accounts can be given. According to you, they shine by their own inner light and no further account can be given. They may even obtain, in cases where human

verification is impossible, and make no empirical difference to us. To me, using the pragmatic method of testing concepts, this would mean that the word truth might on certain occasions have no meaning whatever. I still must hold to its having always a meaning, and continue to contend for that meaning being unfoldable and representable in experiential terms. Yours, Etc. William James End of Chapter 13. Controversy about Truth This is a Librevox recording. All Librevox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit Librivox.

Recording in French by Eswa. Essays in Radical Empiricism by William James, Section 14, Chapter 8, The Notion of Conscience. I would say you communicate some doubts who are coming to the notion of conscience that reigns in all our treate of psychology. We define, habitually, like the science of effects of conscience,

or the phenomena, or even the state of the conscience. That we admit that it's attach at these moys personal, or even that we across in personel to the Moe Transcendantal of Kant,

of the Bevichsteit or the Bevichstein-Uberaut of our contemporaries in Germany, this conscience is always regarded as a presence proper, absolutely

distinct of the essence of the essence of things material, that has the don't mysterious to representer and to know it. The effect

material, pried in their materiality, they are not proved, no are not object of experience, do you

do it's not the form of the system in which we know we we are we want to live, it is they are to appear,

and so it's a a chance to their existence brut, it's appell the conscience that we're

on have been, or perhaps the hypothesis panpsychist, that they have they're of them this dualism

inveterate that it seems impossible to chasse to our view of this world. This

world can exist in so, but we don't know we're not know, because

it is exclusively an object of experience, and the condition indispensable to that

is that it is that it is reported to to be a test, that it be known by a subject or by these subjects spiritual. Object and subject, here the two jambes and it

seems that the philosophy not would be a pass in an advance. All the schools are of course there's school

scholastic, Cartesianism, Kantism, neocantism, all admit the dualism fundamental. The positivism

or agnosticism of our years, that's pique to relever of the science natural ,

is voluntary, it is true, the non of monism. But it is an monism verbal. He poses an reality incone, but we say that this reality is present always to two aspects, a co-cote conscience and a part matter.

And these two sides are so irreductible that the attributes fundamental, extended and pensed, the god of Spinoza. At the monism contemporary is of

Spinozism pure. Or, how can represent this conscience which we are all so ported to admit the existence. Impossible to

to define, we did we don't have all we're all an intuition immediate. All first the conscience

to be the same, demandes to the first person that you'll want to woman,

psychologist or ignorant, and she will she'll be sure, she'll be doing, all right,

all right, she's just like she feel she's spiritual like a kind of

current interior, active, leger, fluid, delicate, diaphan, for so say, and absolutely opposed to what that's quite of material. Brief, the life subjective

not only is a condition logically indispensable for that there is a world objective that is an element of the experience

that we're even in the same title we're our own ideas and things, how so, how do not

recognize their dualism? Sentiments and objects. How do they're heterogeneity absolute? The psychology, so-d-scientific, admit this heterogeneity as an ancient psychology

spiritualist it hadmitted. How can not let me admit? Each science decoup arbitrarily in the tram of the fact

a chant where she's park and which they decrites and the content. The psychology is just for

his domain the chant of effect of conscience. They are they postules without they criticize,

they oppose to the matter and they and not critiqued not not the notion of these their attention, she retouch

to the conscience by the line mysterious of the knowledge, of the perception which for it is a

third-of-faint fundamental and ultimate. In following this voice, the psychology contemporary has made

a great triumph. She has put a exquise of the evolution of the life conscient,

in conceivate as the last as adaptant to more completely to the middle

in the the world the dualism, the effect psychic and the events

cerebral. She has explained the illusions, the hallucinations, and to a certain point, the malady mental. It's some good progress, but it rest still still some

the problem. The philosophy general, especially, who has for to scrutor all the postulah, troughed the paradox and the

impetements, where the science pass out. And there are only the amateurs of science popular that are never

perplex. Plus we go to the things, plus we find anigm, and I have for my

part, that this old dualism of matter and of the pensions, this heterogeneity posed as absolute of the two essence me has always

presented these difficulties. It's of some of these difficulties that I would want to you want to you want to you'll have

all overfrape to all. We'll have the perception exterior, the sensation direct that we don't by example

the mure of this cell. Can't here here that the psychic and the physics

are absolutely heterogene? Or contrary, they are so so few eterogen that if we we place on to point of view of the sense

common, if we do we're doing these inventions expletive, of the molecules and the undulations eterey,

by example, who are the ones, we're in a word, we pren't the reality naively, and tels

that it is done all the first, this reality sensible of where depends

of our interests and on our all all our actions,

And, well, this reality sensible and the sensation that we have are at the moment where the sensation is produced absolutely identical to one

to another. The reality and the perception even. The moor of this cell does mean that this

blanchee and sonor that we're cuted by these fenettes by these lines and

the angles, the physical here has not other content than the psychic

the subject and the object is confound. It's Berkley who the first has made this Verity in honor And C.S. Pryncky Our sensations

Not are not of little duplicates interior of things They are the things MAME, in time that the things are present And what we'll think Of the life absent, Cache, and for

insidire privates, And, what are the constructions hypothetique that we're in face, it rest of right that the view

public of this actuality present by which it is confront, of where derives all our constructions

and to have all their own and to return to be in the air and in the

real, this actuality is I'm not only only only only a but numerically one,

with a certain part of our life interior. That for the

perception exterior. When we're when we it's to the imagination,

to the memory or the faculties of the fact of

the fact are here much more complicated, I think that the same homogeneity essential is regage. For simplify the problem, exclude all of all reality sensible. Prone the penser pure, tell that she effectue in the rave or the rave-rere, or in the

memory of the past. Here again, the estof of the experience, do not do double-employed? The physique and the psychic, do not confound, not? If I dream, I dream, of a mountain of d'ore, it exists not in the world in the dream, but in the

dream, it is of nature or of the sense perfectly physically, it's like it's like

it's my time if it's my time, I'm in the detail of my embarkment recent for

the Italy, the phenomenon pure, the fact that's the thing that's it,

did I think, with his content, but it but it's he's, he's,

he's, he ported the form of a part of the world real, party distanced, it is

very, of six thousand kilometers of space and of six seven of time, but reliant at the cell where we are we are from a full of

things, objects and eventmen, homogene, of one part, with the cell, and, other part, with the object of my souvenirs. This content not as a lot of course that I project very much in front, and it's present d'emble, as it's like the way, and

it's a lot of this content, the conscience that I'm in, what are they? Some, so forth other things than the manner retrospective to noming the contentu, he himself, when we've

separated to all these intermediaries and reliant to the new group of associates, who are in

my life mental, the emotions, for example, that he had evoired in me, the attention

I'm in my ideas of allure that they're that you're that you're that's the last

associates, that the phenomenon arrive to to be a classed as kind of that it

can't that he never thing, it never been a phenomenon objectif. It is right we're

consider them are they considerate as of the little copy, like the calc or double affebbly of these the other. It's an object present has a vivacity and a nettee superior to the image. He he made an see contrast, and for me serve of the excellent mode of Tain, he he serves as a reductor. When the two are present as well, the object The object is the first plan and the image recule, and it becomes a thing absent. But this object present, what is it in himself?

Of what etof is he made? Of the same ettoff than the image. He is made of sensation. It is chose percied. His S.E.S. Prenkipi and the image are generically homogen. If I think in this moment to my chapeau that I left

all over vestire, where is the dualism, the discontinue, between the chapo pensed and the chapeau real? It's an real chapo absent

that my spirit is okay, I can count practically like an reality. If it

was present on this table, the chapo would determine a movement of my hand, I'll

be it this chapo conced, this chapo in idea, determiner a time,

it will be the idea, I'm know, the idea that is continued to

the presence sensible of the chapo, and it fondra harmoniously

I conclude so, I think, that, even that there is a dualism practical, because the images

the image the object and take new in the same, it is not there is a way to their of sensations that

me penetre by the voice of the eye and who don't the element of the exterior

real, and to the idea of the way, go to the class and the interprete. But who

can do the part, in the table concretely of what is sensation and of what is

the exterior and the interior, the entendue and the in tendue and the and form

a marriage indissoluble. It's rappel these panorama circular or objects real, rochet,

herbe, chario-bris, etc, who occupy the avant-plan, are so ingenuously reliant as a to-a-law and that makes a whole, and that represents a battle

or a vast pageage, that we can't distinguish what is object of what is the the pointure. The cutures and

the joints are imperceptible. It could be to be if the object and the idea was absolutely dissemblable

of nature? I am convinced that the considerations that same to the have been given to

some of you also some doubt to the subject of dualism predendue. And other reasons to doubt

surges still There are all Afturetives and attributes And attributes They are not objective Or subjective But we are not Tempto of one

Mankind Like we We need We need We need to We call the Caliote Weppercions

Incied, In these things, Their co-esthetique Morale, Their value for No? The beauty,

Where is it? Is it in the Statue, In the Sonat, In our Sper? my colleague at harvard georsanthiana has written an lyev'esthetic where he appell the beauty the pleasure objectified and in verity it's here that we could

probably be of projection on the door on different a chaleur a greata or a sensation aggrable of a chalear the rarthe the precious of diamond us empireses of the qualities essential we arel an orage affreous an unashable an action indign and we we, we believe we are objectively, even that these terms can't express that the

rapport to our sensibility and motives proper. We say even a chement a chel a child

trist, a cushion of a solace superbe. All this manner animist to regard the things

that may have been the thing of people, can be very can't be and Mr. Santayana

in a other book all recent, it has been explained in this, by the ability to

attribute to the object to the we're we're we're resent in his presence. The partage of the subjective and of the objective is the fact of a reflection very advanced that we emmon

again in a day in many of the places. When the bestons in practice not tire not necessarily, it seems that we emmons to us burst in the vague. The qualities seconds themselves, chaleur, sound,

light, are not even today an attribution vague. For the sense common, for the life practical, they are absolutely objective,

physical. For the physicist, they are subjective. For him, it is the form, the mass, the movement

that is an reality exterior. For the philosopher idealist, the contrary, form and

movement are all so subjective than the light and and there is a thing

in the human, who jowis of an reality extra mental complete. Our

sensations intimate conserved again of this ambiguity. There is illusions

of movement that prove that our first sensation of movement was generalized. It's the world

entire with us who were to move now we're we're doing our proper movement of the subject of the object and we're

we're in repose. But it is these states of vertige where we retombing we're still

in the indifferensiation premier. You know this theory who has wanted to do these emotions

some of sensations viscerals and muscular. It has done it to many of many controverses

and no opinion has even conquil unanimity of suffrage. You know also the controverses

on the nature of the activity mental. The one support that is a force purely spiritual,

that we are in a state to perceive immediately as such. The other pretend that we know

activity mental, effort, attention, by example, is that the reflex sent of certain effects

of certain effects, and the system to cranes, to gosier, arre or passage of

the respiration, a flu of the resteration, after blood, etc. Of some ways that to resolve these controverses, their existence

prove very clearly one thing, is that it is very difficult or even absolutely impossible to know by the sole inspection intimate of certain

phenomena, if they are of nature physical, occupant of the tendue, or if they are of

purement psychic and interior. It is always to find there reasons for

our opinion. It is we have the classification the most probable

of the phenomenon. And, in the end of count, it could be able to be able to their motif, more in the business than the basic, that

in some faculties that we would have to perceive two essences ultimates and diverse, which would be together the trame of things. The core of each of us offers a contrast

practice pretty to the rest of the middle ambient. All what which arrive to within of this core is more intimate and important

than what is more than what happens He's identifi with our Mois, he's classed with him, soul, who

should be them do you know they're exactly? Even our images and our souvenirs that can

act is in the world parten to our last year, we are we're playing with our sentiments affective, it's quite long to be

quite to be able to be able to beckon to beckonelue. And we're It has terminated the first part of my discourse. I've wanted you penetrate, madame and messieurs, of my doubts and of the reality, as well as to the importance of the problem. As to me, after the longs'aned of hesitation,

I've finished by taking my party carremont. I think that the conscience, tell that we're represent commonly, so as like an entity, or an activity pure, but in all the case, like fluid, inattendue, diaffan,

vied of all content proper, but, but with it's directly they're same, spiritual

I think, I think that this conscience is a pure chimera and that the sum

of reality concrete that the word the word this should a different

description description. Description of rest that a philosophy attentive

of fact, and such of a little analysis would

be in the order to formier or rather to

continue to form and the word it's more

than because if I developed on the same scale, it would be a lot too long. It is, by consequence, that I restrain to the only indications indispensable. Admeting that conscience, the Abouche-Steid, conced as essence, entity, activity, moatier-reductible of each experience,

be subrimed, that the dualism fundamental, and, for, so, is, or, so that we supposion exist is, so only what we have called, just here the content, the inhaled, the inhaled, of the conscience? How

the philosophy will tell to be in with the kind of monism vague that's a I'm sure

I'm sure some questions positive there even that's that I'm think that the fault the development

necessary, my ideas are not with a clearty very great for a that I

think I think a commence of a centier, it is a certain.

Why we're not we're so tenace to this idea of this idea of this

suradjutor to the existence of the content of these things. Why, la reclaming also fortly that would be able rather a more pleasant than a thought of a penceor?

Ness not for to save this fact indignable that the content of the experience has not only an existence proper and like immanent

and intrinsic, but that each part of this content of this content of to their own to them to other,

sort in some sort for being seen, and that this is the chan of the experience

is transparent to part in part, or constitue as an space that would be filled by-myroar? This bilaterality of the parties of the experience,

to know, d'n part, that they are with their qualities proper, d'other part that are that are p'other

that are psal, the opinion reignante, the fact, and it's the dualism fundamental of constitution,

appartening to each morceau of experience in proper. In this this feil of paper,

there not only, the content, the content, the, blancheur, minseur, etc. But there is this second fact of the

conscience, of this blancheur and of this maceor. This function of being rapporteed, to make part of the tram-ant-eer of an experience more comprehensive, we're eriege in fact ontologic,

and on loachs this fact in the interior-mem-d-pocket, on the acoupleant to its blanchee and to some it's not a rapport extrinsque that we suppose, it's a moatee the phenomenon even.

I think, in sum, we're represent the reality as constituted of the way don't are made the colors that are the

paint of the there's there's matter of colorate to the material that's a vehicle,

oil or coal, which they are the suspension and that the conscience. It's a

dualism complete, or in employing certain proceedings, we can separate

each element of the other by the voice of subtraction. It's

so that we're that in making an great effort of

abstraction introspection, we we can to seize our conscience on the vif, as an activity spiritual pure, in negligent completely the matter that at a moment

done, it is clear. Now, I'm if we're not not so much ever everse absolutely this manner to see. Suppos-on, in

effect, that the reality primary, are of nature neutral, and we're not by some non-ambiqueue like phenomena,

don't know, Vorthindung. I'm even, I'm all the voluntier to plurial, and I give the name

the experience pure. It will. But a monism, if you want, but a monism all quite rudimentaire and absolutely opposable to monism bilateral

of positivism or spinosist. These experiences pure exist and the success, enter in in the reports infinitely

varied the ones with the other reports who are they are the parties essential to the ones, you are

remarked and distinguished, and that one and same experience, view the great variety of these reports, can joyer in multiple groups at the way. It's so that in a certain context of the other, it would be classed as a phenomenon physical,

tending that in another entourage, it would figurer as a fact of conscience, a pretty, like a same particle of anchor, can appertainly to be one vertical, the other horizontal, for view that it was situated

at their intersection. Prenon, for fix our ideas, the experience that we have at this moment of the local where we are, of these murrayal, of this table, of these chaise, of this space. In this experience plain, concrete and indivise, tell that it is, the world physical objective and the world

interior and personal of each one to meet and so fusion as as lines to fusion at their intersection. As a thing physical, this cell has a rapport with all the rest of the batiment, batiment that we know we know know we not, and they know not.

She does its existence to a whole history of financier, an architect, of an ouvriere, she pays on the soil, it durr durrard indefinimely

in the time. If the feo it had, the chaise and the table that contains, would be

very much as cendre. As experience personal, on the contrary, as things

reported, conued, conscious, this cell has to other tenants and the

antecedents are not these the work. It's our pensions of all a lot of the

time it's not a fact fugitive in our biographies associated to the greatable

souvenir. As it's experience she's no point, it's amoebable not combustible.

She has it's not our sole servo, and many of us need even the

influence, tending the sal is in rapport of influence physical with

all the rest of the world. And it's the same same It's a sal absolutely that it's

in the two cases. Tant that we do not of physics speculative, as we are not we place on the sense common,

it's the salveu and senty who is the same the same we don't know if it's the same part

of the nature material that our spirits at this same moment embrace who enter as well

in the experience in the time of each of us and that our souvenir

will be always like a part intigrant of our history. It's

absolutely a same etof that figure simultaneously along the context that we consider as a material and physical or as a face of conscience intimate. I think that we should be treated conscience and

matter as an essence disparate. We obtain neither any one or other by subtraction in egreging each time the other mootier of an

experience of a couple. The experience are, on contrary, primitively, of nature pretty simple. They are

conscious in their entire, they become physical in their entire, and it's by way of addition that this result is realise.

For a time, for a time, enter in the rapport of influence physical, so brisant, so choffing, s'eclare,

et cetera, mutually, we're doing a group at par that we call the world physical. For a

contrary, that they are fugitive, inert physically, that their succession not of order determined,

but seem more to obeyed to be able to do you do anything, we're we're

we're we're we call the world psychicic. It's in entrant at present in a grand number of these groups psychic, that this cell becomes now things conscient,

things rapporte, things su. In making theseorme part of our biographies respective, she will not be seen of this sote and monotonon repetition of it in the time, which characterise its existence physical.

It will be, at other experiences that are discontinuous with her, or who will this genre all particular of continuity that we appellant souvenir. to be near.

Demain, she'll have had his place in each of our pastes, but the present of the pastes are liable are very different

the present which this cell will be in the same this is the form of experience, but the rapport of the

experiences between them differed from a group to another. It's so by addition other phenomena

that a phenomenon that a phenomenon done that becomes conscious or conue, it's not

by a a deadoubleman of the sense interior. The concessance of things their survien, she is not imminent. It's not the fact neither of a moe or an Moeuchtaid

or act of conscience that they would be given to one the other, or there are there there are a report that we know we know

the knowledge is he even in many in many in many times that a suite of experience intermediary perfectly

to be decried in terms concrete. It is nullmule the mystery transcendent or so that have been puttent of philosophers.

But this we mennered too long. I can't enter here in all the replies of the theory of the

knowledge, or of what you other Italians, you have called the Gnoseology. I do me contented to

these remarks and shorted or simple suggestions, which are, I think, I'm, I'm even

obscure, for the development necessary. Permette so I'm somerement, in style

dogmatic, in the six ttes three times. One, the conscience that we can

intends ordinarily, not, not more than the matter, to the Berkeley has done the coup of grace.

2. What is and form the part of the word of conscience recouped, is the

susceptibility that possesses the parties of the experience of the experience of or known.

3. This susceptibility is explained by the fact that certain experiences can't

men's to others by the experience intermediary netement characterised, to tell

sort that the one the one, the role of things known, the other the other,

the other, the other, the other, the other, the other, we can perfectly

define these two roles without sort of the trams of the experience

and without invoking nothing the noncendant. 5, the attributions

and object, representate and representat and representatif, so, signify, so, so,

a distinction six in fain de count the things and the pens-s are point fonsierment tetherogenes but they are fete of a m'emm'n't of a tofe thatof that we can define as well as welle'n't e'pruve and that we'll name if we're if we've the toff of section fourteen chapter eight end of essays in radical empiricism by william james