James, William - Essays in Radical Empiricism

7/29/2019 James, William - Essays in Radical Empiricism

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Essays in Radical Empiricism

by

William James

(1842-1910) American Philosopher & Psychologist,

Founder of Pragmatism

Here follows the (almost) complete work of William James' Essays in RadicalEmpiricism, transcribed by Phillip McReynolds. [ Not included is the lastchapter, "La Notion de Conscience," since the chapter is completely inFrench and I could not be bothered to type it in at present. I willprobably scan it in sooner or later and am working on a translation.Expect updates accordingly.]

Page numbers are from the Longmans, Green and Co. edition of Essays inRadical Empiricism and A Pluralistic Universe in one volume, publishedin 1943. Underscores bewteen words indicate italics in the original.To the best of my knowledge this work is now in the public domain as itwas copyrighted 1912 by Henry James, who died in 1916.

There are probably mistakes here. If you let me know about them, I'llattempt to correct them. In any case, no warranty is issuedas to the correctness or completeness of this work norconcerning its suitability to any purpose whatsoever. If you acceptthese conditions you may freely use and distribute this transcription asyou like, provided that you don't try to sell it or otherwise make aprofit off of my work.

Phillip [email protected]

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[Table of Contents]vii

VOLUME I. ESSAYS IN RADICAL EMPIRICISM

I. DOES 'CONSCIOUSNESS' EXIST? 1

II. A WORLD OF PURE EXPERIENCE 39

III. THE THING AND ITS RELATIONS 92

IV. HOW TWO MINDS CAN KNOW ONE THING 123

V. THE PLACE OF AFFECTIONAL FACTS IN A WORLD

OF PURE EXPERIENCE 137

VI. THE EXPERIENCE OF ACTIVITY 155

VII. THE ESSENCE OF HUMANISM 190VIII. LA NOTION DE CONSCIENCE 206


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1

I

DOES 'CONSCIOUSNESS' EXIST?

'THOUGHTS' and 'things' are names for twosorts of object, which common sense will alwaysfind contrasted and will always practicallyoppose to each other. Philosophy, reflectingon the contrast, has varied in thepast in her explanations of it, and may beexpected to vary in the future. At first,'spirit and matter,' 'soul and body,' stood fora pair of equipollent substances quite on a parin weight and interest. But one day Kant underminedthe soul and brought in the transcendentalego, and ever since then the bipolarrelation has been very much off its balance.The transcendental ego seems nowadays inrationalist quarters to stand for everything, inempiricist quarters for almost nothing. In thehands of such writers as Schuppe, Rehmke,Natorp, Munsterberg -- at any rate in his

2earlier writings, Schubert-Soldern and others,the spiritual principle attenuates itself to athoroughly ghostly condition, being only aname for the fact that the 'content' of experience

_is_known_. It loses personal form and activity-- these passing over to the content --and becomes a bare _Bewusstheit_ or _Bewusstsein_

_uberhaupt_ of which in its own right absolutelynothing can be said.

I believe that 'consciousness,' when once it

has evaporated to this estate of pure diaphaneity,is on the point of disappearing altogether.It is the name of a nonentity, and has no rightto a place among first principles. Those whostill cling to it are clinging to a mere echo, thefaint rumor left behind by the disappearing'soul' upon the air of philosophy. During thepast year, I have read a number of articleswhose authors seemed just on the point of abandoningthe notion of consciousness,(1) and substitutingfor it that of an absolute experiencenot due to two factors. But they were not

---

1 Articles by Bawden, King, Alexander, and others. Dr. Perry isfrankly over the border---

3quite radical enough, not quite daring enoughin their negations. For twenty years past Ihave mistrusted 'consciousness' as an entity;


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for seven or eight years past I have suggestedits non-existence to my students, and tried togive them its pragmatic equivalent in realitiesof experience. It seems to me that the houris ripe for it to be openly and universally discarded.

To deny plumply that 'consciousness' existsseems so absurd on the face of it -- for undeniably'thoughts' do exist -- that I fear somereaders will follow me no farther. Let me thenimmediately explain that I mean only to denythat the word stands for an entity, but to insistmost emphatically that it does stand for afunction. There is, I mean, no aboriginal stuffor quality of being, contrasted with that ofwhich material objects are made, out of whichour thoughts of them are made; but there is afunction in experience which thoughts perform,and for the performance of which this

4quality of being is invoked. That function is

_knowing_. 'Consciousness' is supposed necessaryto explain the fact that things not only

are, but get reported, are known. Whoeverblots out the notion of consciousness from hislist of first principles must still provide in someway for that function's being carried on.

I

My thesis is that if we start with the suppositionthat there is only one primal stuff ormaterial in the world, a stuff of which everythingis composed, and if we call that stuff'pure experience,' the knowing can easily beexplained as a particular sort of relation

towards one another into which portions ofpure experience may enter. The relation itselfis a part of pure experience; one if its 'terms'becomes the subject or bearer of the knowledge,the knower,(1) the other becomes the objectknown. This will need much explanationbefore it can be understood. The best way to

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1 In my _Psychology_ I have tried to show that we need no knowerother than the 'passing thought.' [_Principles of Psychology, vol. I,pp. 338 ff.]

---

5get it understood is to contrast it with the alternativeview; and for that we may take therecentest alternative, that in which the evaporationof the definite soul-substance has proceededas far as it can go without being yetcomplete. If neo-Kantism has expelled earlierforms of dualism, we shall have expelled all


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forms if we are able to expel neo-kantism in itsturn.

For the thinkers I call neo-Kantian, the wordconsciousness to-day does no more than signalizethe fact that experience is indefeasibly dualisticin structure. It means that not subject,not object, but object-plus-subject is the minimumthat can actually be. The subject-objectdistinction meanwhile is entirely different fromthat between mind and matter, from that betweenbody and soul. Souls were detachable,had separate destinies; things could happen tothem. To consciousness as such nothing canhappen, for, timeless itself, it is only a witnessof happenings in time, in which it plays nopart. It is, in a word, but the logical correlativeof 'content' in an Experience of which the

6peculiarity is that _fact_comes_to_light_ in it, that

_awareness_of_content_ takes place. Consciousnessas such is entirely impersonal -- 'self' and itsactivities belong to the content. To say that I

am self-conscious, or conscious of putting forthvolition, means only that certain contents, forwhich 'self' and 'effort of will' are the names,are not without witness as they occur.

Thus, for these belated drinkers at the Kantianspring, we should have to admit consciousnessas an 'epistemological' necessity, even ifwe had no direct evidence of its being there.

But in addition to this, we are supposed byalmost every one to have an immediate consciousnessof consciousness itself. When the

world of outer fact ceases to be materially present,and we merely recall it in memory, orfancy it, the consciousness is believed to standout and to be felt as a kind of impalpable innerflowing, which, once known in this sort of experience,may equally be detected in presentationsof the outer world. "The moment we tryto fix out attention upon consciousness and tosee _what_, distinctly, it is," says a recent writer,

7"it seems to vanish. It seems as if we had beforeus a mere emptiness. When we try to introspect

the sensation of blue, all we can see isthe blue; the other element is as if it were diaphanous.Yet it _can_ be distinguished, if welook attentively enough, and know that thereis something to look for."(1) "Consciousness"(Bewusstheit), says another philosopher, "isinexplicable and hardly describable, yet all consciousexperiences have this in common thatwhat we call their content has a peculiar referenceto a centre for which 'self' is the name,


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in virtue of which reference alone the contentis subjectively given, or appears.... Whilein this way consciousness, or reference to aself, is the only thing which distinguishes a consciouscontent from any sort of being thatmight be there with no one conscious of it, yetthis only ground of the distinction defies allcloser explanations. The existence of consciousness,although it is the fundamental fact ofpsychology, can indeed be laid down as certain,can be brought out by analysis, but can

---

1 G.E. Moore: _Mind_, vol. XII, N.S., [1903], p.450.---

8neither be defined nor deduced from anythingbut itself."(1)

'Can be brought out by analysis,' thisauthor says. This supposes that the consciousnessis one element, moment, factor -- call it

what you like -- of an experience of essentiallydualistic inner constitution, from which, if youabstract the content, the consciousness will remainrevealed to its own eye. Experience, atthis rate, would be much like a paint of whichthe world pictures were made. Paint has a dualconstitution, involving, as it does, a menstruum (2)(oil, size or what not) and a mass ofcontent in the form of pigment suspendedtherein. We can get the pure menstruum byletting the pigment settle, and the pure pigmentby pouring off the size or oil. We operatehere by physical subtraction; and the usual

view is, that by mental subtraction we canseparate the two factors of experience in an

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

2 "Figuratively speaking, consciousness may be said to be the oneuniversal solvent, or menstruum, in which the different concrete kindsof psychic acts and facts are contained, whether in concealed or inobvious form." G.T.Ladd: _Psychology,_Descriptive_and_Explanatory_,1894, p.30.---

9analogous way -- not isolating them entirely,but distinguishing them enough to know thatthey are two.

II

Now my contention is exactly the reverse ofthis. _Experience,_I_believe,_has_no_such_inner_duplicity;_


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_and_the_separation_of_it_into_consciousness__and_content_comes,_not_by_way_of_subtraction,__but_by_way_of_addition_ -- the addition, to agiven concrete piece of it, other sets of experiences,in connection with which severally itsuse or function may be of two different kinds.The paint will also serve here as an illustration.In a pot in a paint-shop, along with otherpaints, it serves in its entirety as so much saleablematter. Spread on a canvas, with otherpaints around it, it represents, on the contrary,a feature in a picture and performs a spiritualfunction. Just so, I maintain, does a given undividedportion of experience, taken in onecontext of associates, play the part of a knower,of a state of mind, of 'consciousness'; while ina different context the same undivided bit ofexperience plays the part of a thing known, of

10an objective 'content.' In a word, in one groupit figures as a thought, in another group as athing. And, since it can figure in both groupssimultaneously we have every right to speak of

it as subjective and objective, both at once.The dualism connoted by such double-barrelledterms as 'experience,' 'phenomenon,''datum,' '_Vorfindung_' -- terms which, in philosophyat any rate, tend more and more to replacethe single-barrelled terms of 'thought'and 'thing' -- that dualism, I say, is still preservedin this account, but reinterpreted, sothat, instead of being mysterious and elusive,it becomes verifiable and concrete. It is an affairof relations, it falls outside, not inside, thesingle experience considered, and can alwaysbe particularized and defined.

The entering wedge for this more concreteway of understanding the dualism was fashionedby Locke when he made the word 'idea'stand indifferently for thing and thought, andby Berkeley when he said that what commonsense means by realities is exactly what thephilosopher means by ideas. Neither Locke

11nor Berkeley thought his truth out into perfectclearness, but it seems to me that the conceptionI am defending does little more than consistently

carry out the 'pragmatic' methodwhich they were the first to use.

If the reader will take his own experiences,he will see what I mean. Let him begin with aperceptual experience, the 'presentation,' socalled, of a physical object, his actual field ofvision, the room he sits in, with the book he isreading as its centre; and let him for the presenttreat this complex object in the common-


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sense way as being 'really' what it seems to be,namely, a collection of physical things cut outfrom an environing world of other physicalthings with which these physical things haveactual or potential relations. Now at the sametime it is just _those_self-same_things_ which hismind, as we say, perceives; and the whole philosophyof perception from Democritus's timedownwards has just been one long wrangle overthe paradox that what is evidently one realityshould be in two places at once, both in outerspace and in a person's mind. 'Representative'

12theories of perception avoid the logicalparadox, but on the other hand the violate thereader's sense of life, which knows no interveningmental image but seems to see the roomand the book immediately just as they physicallyexist.

The puzzle of how the one identical room canbe in two places is at bottom just the puzzle ofhow one identical point can be on two lines. It

can, if it be situated at their intersection; andsimilarly, if the 'pure experience' of the roomwere a place of intersection of two processes,which connected it with different groups of associatesrespectively, it could be counted twiceover, as belonging to either group, and spokenof loosely as existing in two places, although itwould remain all the time a numerically singlething.

Well, the experience is a member of diverseprocesses that can be followed away from italong entirely different lines. The one self-

identical thing has so many relations to therest of experience that you can take it in disparatesystems of association, and treat it as

13belonging with opposite contexts. In one ofthese contexts it is your 'field of consciousness';in another it is 'the room in which yousit,' and it enters both contexts in its wholeness,giving no pretext for being said to attachitself to consciousness by one of its parts oraspects, and to out reality by another. Whatare the two processes, now, into which the

room-experience simultaneously enters in thisway?

One of them is the reader's personal biography,the other is the history of the house ofwhich the room is part. The presentation, theexperience, the _that_ in short (for until we havedecided _what_ it is it must be a mere _that_) is thelast term in a train of sensations, emotions,decisions, movements, classifications, expectations,


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etc., ending in the present, and the firstterm in a series of 'inner' operationsextending into the future, on the reader'spart. On the other hand, the very same _that_is the _terminus_ad_quem_ of a lot of previous

14physical operations, carpentering, papering,furnishing, warming, etc., and the _terminus_a_

_quo_ of a lot of future ones, in which it will beconcerned when undergoing the destiny of aphysical room. The physical and the mentaloperations form curiously incompatible groups.As a room, the experience has occupied thatspot and had that environment for thirtyyears. As your field of consciousness it maynever have existed until now. As a room, attentionwill go on to discover endless new detailsin it. As your mental state merely, fewnew ones will emerge under attention's eye.AS a room, it will taken an earthquake, or agang of men, and in any case a certain amountof time, to destroy it. As your subjectivestate, the closing of your eyes, or any instantaneous

play of your fancy will suffice. IN thereal world, fire will consume it. IN your mind,you can let fire play over it without effect. Asan outer object, you must pay so much amonth to inhabit it. As an inner content, youmay occupy it for any length of time rent-free.If, in short, you follow it in the mental direction,

15taking it along with events of personalbiography solely, all sorts of things are trueof it which are false, and false of it which aretrue if you treat it as a real thing experienced,

follow it in the physical direction, and relate itto associates in the outer world.

III

So far, all seems plain sailing, but my thesiswill probably grow less plausible to the readerwhen I pass form percepts to concepts, or fromthe case of things presented to that of thingsremote. I believe, nevertheless, that here alsothe same law holds good. If we take conceptualmanifolds, or memories, or fancies, theyalso 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 anothercontext figure as mental states. By takingthem in their first intention, I mean ignoringtheir relation to possible perceptual experienceswith which they may be connected,which they may lead to and terminate in, andwhich then they may be supposed to 'represent.'

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Taking them in this way first, we confinethe problem to a world merely 'thought-of' and not directly felt or seen. This world,just like the world of percepts, comes to us atfirst as a chaos of experiences, but lines of ordersoon get traced. We find that any bit of itwhich we may cut out as an example is connectedwith distinct groups of associates, justas our perceptual experiences are, that theseassociates link themselves with it by differentrelations,(2) and that one forms the inner historyof 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 toseeing that these non-perceptual experiences

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2 Here as elsewhere the relations are of course _experienced_relations, members of the same originally chaotic manifold of non-perceptual experience of which the related terms themselves are

parts.---

17have objectivity as well as subjectivity willprobably be due to the intrusion into his mindof _percepts_, that third group of associates withwhich the non-perceptual experiences have relations,and which, as a whole, they 'represent,'standing to them as thoughts to things. Thisimportant function of non-perceptual experiencescomplicates the question and confusesit; for, so used are we to treat percepts as

the sole genuine realities that, unless we keepthem out of the discussion, we tend altogetherto overlook the objectivity that lies in non-perceptual experiences by themselves. Wetreat them, 'knowing' percepts as they do, asthrough and through subjective, and say thatthey are wholly constituted of the stuff calledconsciousness, using this term now for a kindof entity, after the fashion which I am seekingto refute.(1)

Abstracting, then, from percepts altogether,what I maintain is, that any single non-perceptual

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1 Of the representative functions of non-perceptual experience as awhole, I will say a word in a subsequent article; it leads too far intothe general theory of knowledge for much to be said about it in a shortpaper like this.---

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experience tends to get counted twiceover, just as a perceptual experience does, figuringin one context as an object or field of objects,in another as a state of mind: and all thiswithout the least internal self-diremption on itsown part into consciousness and content. It isall consciousness in one taking; and, in theother, all content.

I find this objectivity of non-perceptual experiences,this complete parallelism in point ofreality between the presently felt and the remotelythought, so well set forth in a page ofMunsterberg's _Grundzuge_, that I will quote itas it stands.

"I may only think of my objects," says ProfessorMunsterberg; "yet, in my living thoughtthey stand before me exactly as perceived objectswould do, no matter how different the twoways of apprehending them may be in theirgenesis. The book here lying on the table beforeme, and the book in the next room of which Ithink and which I mean to get, are both in the

same sense given realities for me, realitieswhich I acknowledge and of which I take account.

19If you agree that the perceptual objectis not an idea within me, but that percept andthing, as indistinguishably one, are really experienced

_there_, _outside_, you ought not to believethat the merely thought-of object is hid awayinside of the thinking subject. The object ofwhich I think, and of whose existence I takecognizance without letting it now work uponmy senses, occupies its definite place in the

outer world as much as does the object which Idirectly see."

"What is true of the here and the there, isalso true of the now and the then. I know ofthe thing which is present and perceived, but Iknow also of the thing which yesterday wasbut is no more, and which I only remember.Both can determine my present conduct, bothare 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 whatis present if it be but dimly perceived. But the

interval of time does not in principle alter myrelation to the object, does not transform itfrom an object known into a mental state....

20The 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 mealike, with a reality which my experience of


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them directly feels. They both make up myreal world, they make it directly, they do nothave first to be introduced to me and mediatedby ideas which now and here arisewithin me.... This not-me characterof my recollections and expectations does notimply that the external objects of which I amaware in those experiences should necessarilybe there also for others. The objects of dreamersand hallucinated persons are wholly withoutgeneral validity. But even were they centaursand golden mountains, they still wouldbe 'off there,' in fairy land, and not 'inside' ofourselves."(1)

This certainly is the immediate, primary,naif, or practical way of taking our thought-ofworld. Were there no perceptual world toserve as its 'reductive,' in Taine's sense, by

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

21being 'stronger' and more genuinely 'outer'(so that the whole merely thought-of worldseems weak and inner in comparison), ourworld of thought would be the only world, andwould enjoy complete reality in our belief.This actually happens in our dreams, and inour day-dreams so long as percepts do notinterrupt them.

And yet, just as the seen room (to go back toour 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 theexperience has in both cases similar grounds.

The room thought-of, namely, has manythought-of couplings with many thought-ofthings. Some of these couplings are inconstant,others are stable. In the reader's personal historythe room occupies a single date -- he sawit only once perhaps, a year ago. Of the house'shistory, on the other hand, it forms a permanentingredient. Some couplings have the curiousstubbornness, to borrow Royce's term, of

fact; others show the fluidity of fancy -- we letthem come and go as we please. Grouped with

22the rest of its house, with the name of its town,of its owner, builder, value, decorative plan,the room maintains a definite foothold, towhich, if we try to loosen it, it tends to returnand to reassert itself with force.(1) With theseassociates, in a word, it coheres, while to other


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houses, other towns, other owners, etc., it showsno tendency to cohere at all. The two collections,first of its cohesive, and, second, of itsloose associates, inevitably come to be contrasted.We call the first collection the systemof external realities, in the midst of which theroom, as 'real,' exists; the other we call thestream of internal thinking, in which, as a'mental image,' it for a moment floats.(2) Theroom thus again gets counted twice over. Itplays two different roles, being _Gedanke_ and

_Gedachtes_, the thought-of-an-object, and theobject-thought-of, both in one; and all thiswithout paradox or mystery, just as the same

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

2 For simplicity's sake I confine my exposition to 'external'reality. But there is also the system of ideal reality in which theroom plays its part. Relations of comparison, of classification,serial order, value, also are stubborn, assign a definite place to theroom, unlike the incoherence of its places in the mere rhapsody of our

successive thoughts.---

23material thing may be both low and high, orsmall and great, or bad and good, because of itsrelations to opposite parts of an environingworld.

As 'subjective' we say that the experiencerepresents; as 'objective' it is represented.What represents and what is represented is herenumerically the same; but we must remember

that no dualism of being represented and representingresides in the experience _per_se_. Inits pure state, or when isolated, there is no self-splitting of it into consciousness and what theconsciousness is 'of.' Its subjectivity and objectivityare functional attributes solely, , realizedonly when the experience is 'take,' i.e.,talked-of, twice, considered along with its twodiffering contexts respectively, by a new retrospectiveexperience, of which that whole pastcomplication now forms the fresh content.

The instant field of the present is at all times

what I call the 'pure' experience. It is onlyvirtually or potentially either object or subjectas yet. For the time being, it is plain, unqualifiedactuality, or existence, a simple _that_. In this

24_naif_ immediacy it is of course _valid_; it is _there_,we _act_ upon it; and the doubling of it in retrospectioninto a state of mind and a reality intendedthereby, is just one of the acts. The


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'state of mind,' first treated explicitly as suchin retrospection, will stand corrected or confirmed,and the retrospective experience in itsturn will get a similar treatment; but the immediateexperience in its passing is always'truth,'(1) practical truth, _something_to_act_on_, atits own movement. If the world were then andthere to go out like a candle, it would remaintruth absolute and objective, for it would be'the last word,' would have no critic, and noone would ever oppose the thought in it to thereality intended.(2)

I think I may now claim to have made my

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

2 In the _Psychological_Review_ for July [1904], Dr. R.B.Perry haspublished a view of Consciousness which comes nearer to mine than anyother with which I am acquainted. At present, Dr. Perry thinks, everyfield of experience is so much 'fact.' It becomes 'opinion' or

'thought' only in retrospection, when a fresh experience, thinking thesame object, alters and corrects it. But the corrective experiencebecomes itself in turn corrected, and thus the experience as a whole isa process in which what is objective originally forever turnssubjective, turns into our apprehension of the object. I stronglyrecommend Dr. Perry's admirable article to my readers.---

25thesis clear. Consciousness connotes a kind ofexternal relation, and does not denote a specialstuff or way of being. _The_peculiarity_of_our_experiences,_

_that_they_not_only_are,_but_are_known,_

_which_their_'conscious'_quality_is_invoked_to__explain,_is_better_explained_by_their_relations_--_these_relations_themselves_being_experiences_--_to__one_another_.

IV

Were I now to go on to treat of the knowingof perceptual by conceptual experiences, itwould again prove to be an affair of externalrelations. One experience would be the knower,the other the reality known; and I couldperfectly well define, without the notion of

'consciousness,' what the knowing actuallyand practically amounts to -- leading-towards,namely, and terminating-in percepts, througha series of transitional experiences which theworld supplies. But I will not treat of this,space being insufficient.(1) I will rather consider

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1 I have given a partial account of the matter in _Mind_, vol. X, p.


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27, 1885, and in the _Psychological_Review_, vol. II, p. 105, 1895. Seealso C.A. Strong's article in the

_Journal_of_Philosophy,_Psychology_and_Scientific_Methods_, vol I, p.253, May 12, 1904. I hope myself very soon to recur to the matter.---

26a few objections that are sure to be urgedagainst the entire theory as it stands.

V

First of all, this will be asked: "If experiencehas not 'conscious' existence, if it be notpartly made of 'consciousness,' of what thenis it made? Matter we know, and thought weknow, and conscious content we know, butneutral and simple 'pure experience' is somethingwe know not at all. Say _what_ it consistsof -- for it must consist of something -- or bewilling to give it up!"

To this challenge the reply is easy. Althoughfor fluency's sake I myself spoke early in this

article of a stuff of pure experience, I have nowto say that there is no _general_ stuff of which experienceat large is made. There are as manystuffs as there are 'natures' in the things experienced.If you ask what any one bit of pureexperience is made of, the answer is always the

27same: "It is made of _that_, of just what appears,of space, of intensity, of flatness, brownness,heaviness, or what not." Shadworth Hodgson'sanalysis here leaves nothing to be desired.(1)Experience is only a collective name

for all these sensible natures, and save for timeand space (and, if you like, for 'being') thereappears no universal element of which allthings are made.

VI

The next objection is more formidable, infact it sounds quite crushing when one hearsit 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 attributesshould differ so fundamentally in the two takings.As thing, the experience is extended; asthought, it occupies no space or place. Asthing, it is red, hard, heavy; but who ever heard

28of a red, hard or heavy thought? Yet evennow you said that an experience is made ofjust what appears, and what appears is just


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such adjectives. How can the one experiencein its thing-function be made of them, consistof them, carry them as its own attributes, whilein its thought-function it disowns them andattributes them elsewhere. There is a self-contradictionhere from which the radical dualismof thought and thing is the only truth that cansave us. Only if the thought is one kind ofbeing can the adjectives exist in it 'intentionally'(to use the scholastic term); only if thething is another kind, can they exist in it constituitivelyand energetically. No simple subjectcan take the same adjectives and at onetime be qualified by it, and at another time bemerely 'of' it, as of something only meant orknown."

The solution insisted on by this objector, likemany other common-sense solutions, growsthe less satisfactory the more one turns it inone's mind. To begin with, _are_ thought andthing as heterogeneous as is commonly said?

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No one denies that they have some categoriesin common. Their relations to time are identical.Both, moreover, may have parts (forpsychologists n general treat thoughts as havingthem); and both may be complex or simple.Both are of kinds, can be compared, added andsubtracted and arranged in serial orders. Allsorts of adjectives qualify our thoughts whichappear incompatible with consciousness, beingas such a bare diaphaneity. For instance, theyare natural and easy, or laborious. They arebeautiful, happy, intense, interesting, wise,

idiotic, focal, marginal, insipid, confused,vague, precise, rational, causal, general, particular,and many things besides. Moreover,the chapters on 'Perception' in the psychology-books are full of facts that make for theessential homogeneity of thought with thing.How, if 'subject' and 'object' were separated'by the whole diameter of being,' and had noattributes and common, could it be so hard totell, in a presented and recognized materialobject, what part comes in thought the sense-organs and what part comes 'out of one's own

30head'? Sensations and apperceptive ideas fusehere so intimately that you can no more tellwhere one begins and the other ends, than youcan tell, in those cunning circular panoramasthat have lately been exhibited, where the realforeground and the painted canvas join together.(1)

Descartes for the first time defined thoughtas the absolutely unextended, and later philosophers


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have accepted the description as correct.But what possible meaning has it to saythat, when we think of a foot-rule or a squareyard, extension is not attributable to ourthought? Of every extended object the _adequate_mental picture must have all the extensionof the object itself. The difference betweenobjective and subjective extension isone of relation to a context solely. In the mindthe various extents maintain no necessarilystubborn order relatively to each other, while

---

1 Spencer's proof of his 'Transfigured Realism' (his doctrine thatthere is an absolutely non-mental reality) comes to mind as a splendidinstance of the impossibility of establishing radical heterogeneitybetween thought and thing. All his painfully accumulated points ofdifference run gradually into their opposites, and are full ofexceptions.---

31in the physical world they bound each other

stably, and, added together, make the greatenveloping Unit which we believe in and callreal Space. As 'outer,' they carry themselvesadversely, so to speak, to one another, excludeone another and maintain their distances;while, as 'inner,' their order is loose, and theyform a _durcheinander_ in which unity is lost.(1)But to argue from this that inner experience isabsolutely inextensive seems to me little shortof absurd. The two worlds differ, not by thepresence or absence of extension, but by therelations of the extensions which in bothworlds exist.

Does not this case of extension now put uson the track of truth in the case of other qualities?It does; and I am surprised that the factsshould not have been noticed long ago. Why,for example, do we call a fire hot, and waterwet, and yet refuse to say that our mentalstate, when it is 'of' these objects, is either wetor hot? 'Intentionally,' at any rate, and when

32the mental state is a vivid image, hotness andwetness are in it just as much as they are in the

physical experience. The reason is this, that,as the general chaos of all our experiences getssifted, we find that there are some fires thatwill always burn sticks and always warm ourbodies, and that there are some waters thatwill always put out fires; while there are otherfires and waters that will not act at all. Thegeneral group of experiences that _act_, that donot only possess their natures intrinsically, butwear them adjectively and energetically, turning


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them against one another, comes inevitablyto be contrasted with the group whose members,having identically the same natures, failto manifest them in the 'energetic' way.(1) Imake for myself now an experience of blazingfire; I place it near my body; but it does notwarm me in the least. I lay a stick upon it, andthe stick either burns or remains green, as Iplease. I call up water, and pour it on the fire,and absolutely no difference ensues. I account

33for all such facts by calling this whole trainof experiences unreal, a mental train. Mentalfire is what won't burn real sticks; mental wateris what won't necessarily (though of courseit may) put out even a mental fire. Mentalknives may be sharp, but they won't cut realwood. Mental triangles are pointed, but theirpoints won't wound. With 'real' objects, onthe contrary, consequences always accrue; andthus the real experiences get sifted from themental ones, the things from out thoughts ofthem, fanciful or true, and precipitated together

as the stable part of the whole experience-chaos, under the name of the physicalworld. Of this our perceptual experiences arethe nucleus, they being the originally _strong_experiences. We add a lot of conceptual experiencesto them, making these strong also inimagination, and building out the remoterparts of the physical world by their means;and around this core of reality the worldof laxly connected fancies and mere rhapsodicalobjects floats like a bank of clouds.In the clouds, all sorts of rules are violated

34which in the core are kept. Extensions therecan be indefinitely located; motion there obeysno Newton's laws.

VII

There is a peculiar class of experience towhich, whether we take them as subjective oras objective, we _assign their several natures asattributes, because in both contexts they affecttheir associates actively, though in neitherquite as 'strongly' or as sharply as things affect

one another by their physical energies. Irefer here to _appreciations_, which form an ambiguoussphere of being, belonging with emotionon the one hand, and having objective 'value'on the other, yet seeming not quite inner norquite outer, as if a diremption had begun buthad not made itself complete.

Experiences of painful objects, for example,are usually also painful experiences; perceptions


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of loveliness, of ugliness, tend to passmuster as lovely or as ugly perceptions; intuitionsof the morally lofty are lofty intuitions.

35Sometimes the adjective wanders as if uncertainwhere to fix itself. Shall we speak ofseductive visions or of visions of seductivethings? Of healthy thoughts or of thoughtsof healthy objects? Of good impulses, or ofimpulses towards the good? Of feelings ofanger, or of angry feelings? Both in the mindand in the thing, these natures modify theircontext, exclude certain associates and determineothers, have their mates and incompatibles.Yet not as stubbornly as in the case ofphysical qualities, for beauty and ugliness,love and hatred, pleasant and painful can, incertain complex experiences, coexist.

If one were to make an evolutionary constructionof how a lot of originally chaotic pureexperience became gradually differentiatedinto an orderly inner and outer world, the

whole theory would turn upon one's success inexplaining how or why the quality of an experience,once active, could become less so, and,from being an energetic attribute in somecases, elsewhere lapse into the status of an

36inert or merely internal 'nature.' This wouldbe the 'evolution' of the psychical from thebosom of the physical, in which the esthetic,moral and otherwise emotional experienceswould represent a halfway stage.

VIII

But a last cry of _non_possumus_ will probablygo up from many readers. "All very pretty asa piece of ingenuity," they will say, "but ourconsciousness 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 itso unremittingly escorts. We can not be faithlessto this immediate intuition. The dualismis a fundamental _datum_: Let no man join whatGod has put asunder."

My reply to this is my last word, and Igreatly grieve that to many it will sound materialistic.I can not help that, however, forI, too, have my intuitions and I must obeythem. Let the case be what it may in others, Iam as confident as I am of anything that, in

37myself, the stream of thinking (which I recognize


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emphatically as a phenomenon) is only acareless name for what, when scrutinized, revealsitself to consist chiefly of the stream ofmy breathing. The 'I think' which Kant saidmust be able to accompany all my objects, isthe 'I breath' which actually does accompanythem. There are other internal factsbesides breathing (intracephalic muscular adjustments,etc., of which I have said a word inmy larger Psychology), and these increase theassets of 'consciousness,' so far as the latter issubject to immediate perception; but breath,which was ever the original of 'spirit,' breathmoving outwards, between the glottis and thenostrils, is, I am persuaded, the essence out ofwhich philosophers have constructed the entityknown 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

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that plausible in this article. IN another articleI shall try to make the general notion of aworld composed of pure experiences still moreclear.

39

II

A WORLD OF PURE EXPERIENCE

IT is difficult not to notice a curious unrest inthe philosophic atmosphere of the time, always

loosening of old landmarks, a softening of oppositions,a mutual borrowing from one another reflectingon the part of systems anciently closed,and an interest in new suggestions, howevervague, as if the one thing sure were the inadequacyof the extant school-solutions. The dissatisfactionwith these seems due for the mostpart to a feeling that they are too abstract andacademic. Life is confused and superabundant,and what the younger generation appears tocrave is more of the temperament of life in itsphilosophy, even thought it were at some costof logical rigor and of formal purity. Transcendental

40idealism is inclining to let the worldwag incomprehensibly, in spite of its AbsoluteSubject and his unity of purpose. Berkeleyanidealism is abandoning the principle of parsimonyand dabbling in panpsychic speculations.Empiricism flirts with teleology; and,strangest of all, natural realism, so long decentlyburied, raises its head above the turf,


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and finds glad hands outstretched from themost unlikely quarters to help it to its feetagain. We are all biased by our personal feelings,I know, and I am personally discontentedwith extant solutions; so I seem to read thesigns of a great unsettlement, as if the upheavalof more real conceptions and more fruitfulmethods were imminent, as if a true landscapemight result, less clipped, straight-edgedand artificial.

If philosophy be really on the eve of any considerablerearrangement, the time should bepropitious for any one who has suggestions ofhis own to bring forward. For many years pastmy mind has bee growing into a certain typeof _Weltanschauung_. Rightly or wrongly, I have41got to the point where I can hardly see thingsin any other pattern. I propose, therefore, todescribe the pattern as clearly as I can consistentlywith great brevity, and to throw mydescription into the bubbling vat of publicitywhere, jostled by rivals and torn by critics, it

will eventually either disappear from notice,or else, if better luck befall it, quietly subsideto the profundities, and serve as a possibleferment of new growths or a nucleus of newcrystallization.

I. RADICAL EMPIRICISM

I give the name of 'radical empiricism' tomy _Weltanschauung_. Empiricism is known asthe opposite of rationalism. Rationalism tendsto emphasize universals and to make wholesprior 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, theelement, the individual, and treats the wholeas a collection and the universal as an abstraction.My description of things, accordingly,starts with the parts and makes of the whole

42a being of the second order. It is essentiallya mosaic philosophy, a philosophy of pluralfacts, like that of Hume and his descendants,who refer these facts neither to Substances inwhich they inhere nor to an Absolute Mind

that creates them as its objects. But it differsfrom the Humian type of empiricism in oneparticular which makes me add the epithetradical.

To be radical, an empiricism must neitheradmit into its constructions any element thatis not directly experienced, nor exclude fromthem any element that is directly experienced.For such a philosophy, _the_relations_that_connect_


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_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 kindof thing experienced, whether term or relation,in the final philosophic arrangement.

Now, ordinary empiricism, in spite of thefact that conjunctive and disjunctive relations

43present themselves as being fully co-ordinateparts of experience, has always shown a tendencyto do away with the connections ofthings, and to insist most on the disjunctions.Berkeley's nominalism, Hume's statement thatwhatever things we distinguish are as 'looseand separate' as if they had 'no manner of connection.'James Mill's denial that similars haveanything 'really' in common, the resolutionof the causal tie into habitual sequence, JohnMill's account of both physical things and

selves as composed of discontinuous possibilities,and the general pulverization of all Experienceby association and the mind-dusttheory, are examples of what I mean.

The natural result of such a world-picturehas been the efforts of rationalism to correctits incoherencies by the addition of trans-experiential agents of unification, substances,intellectual categories and powers, or Selves;

44whereas, if empiricism had only been radical

and taken everything that comes without disfavor,conjunction as well as separation, eachat its face value, the results would have calledfor no such artificial correction. _Radical_empiricism,_as I understand it, _does_full_justice_to_

_conjunctive_relations_, without, however, treatingthem as rationalism always tends to treatthem, as being true in some supernal way, as ifthe unity of things and their variety belongedto different orders of truth and vitality altogether.

II. CONJUNCTIVE RELATIONS

Relations are of different degrees of intimacy.Merely to be 'with' one another in auniverse of discourse is the most external relationthat terms can have, and seems to involvenothing whatever as to farther consequences.Simultaneity and time-interval come next, andthen space-adjacency and distance. Afterthem, similarity and difference, carrying thepossibility of many inferences. Then relationsof activity, tying terms into series involving


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45change, tendency, resistance, and the causalorder generally. Finally, the relation experiencedbetween terms that form states of mind,and are immediately conscious of continuingeach other. The organization of the Self as asystem of memories, purposes, strivings, fulfilmentsor disappointments, is incidental tothis most intimate of all relations, the termsof which seem in many cases actually to compenetrateand suffuse each other's being.

Philosophy has always turned on grammaticalparticles. With, near, next, like, from,towards, against, because, for, through, my --these words designate types of conjunctiverelation arranged in a roughly ascending orderof intimacy and inclusiveness. _A_priori, we canimagine a universe of withness but no nextness;or one of nextness but no likeness, or of likenesswith no activity, or of activity with no purpose,or of purpose with no ego. These wouldbe universes, each with its own grade of unity.

The universe of human experience is, by one oranother of its parts, of each and all these grades.

46Whether or not it possibly enjoys some stillmore absolute grade of union does not appearupon the surface.

Taken as it does appear, our universe is to alarge extent chaotic. No one single type of connectionruns through all the experiences thatcompose it. If we take space-relations, theyfail to connect minds into any regular system.

Causes and purposes obtain only among specialseries of facts. The self-relation seemsextremely limited and does not link two differentselves together. _Prima_facie, if you shouldliken the universe of absolute idealism to anaquarium, a crystal globe in which goldfishare swimming, you would have to compare theempiricist universe to something more like oneof those dried human heads with which theDyaks of Borneo deck their lodges. The skullforms a solid nucleus; but innumerable feathers,leaves, strings, beads, and loose appendicesof every description float and dangle

from it, and, save that they terminate in it, seemto have nothing to do with one another. Evenso my experiences and yours float and dangle,

47terminating, it is true, in a nucleus of commonperception, but for the most part out of sightand irrelevant and unimaginable to one another.This imperfect intimacy, this bare relationof _withness) between some parts of the


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sum total of experience and other parts, is thefact that ordinary empiricism over-emphasizesagainst rationalism, the latter always tendingto ignore it unduly. Radical empiricism, onthe contrary, is fair to both the unity and thedisconnection. It finds no reason for treatingeither as illusory. It allots to each its definitesphere of description, and agrees that thereappear to be actual forces at work which tend,as time goes on, to make the unity greater.

The conjunctive relation that has givenmost trouble to philosophy is _the_co-conscious_

_transition_, so to call it, by which one experiencepasses into another when both belong to thesame self. My experiences and your experiences are'with' each other in various external ways, butmine pass into mine, and yours pass into yoursin a way in which yours and mine never pass

48into one another. Within each of our personalhistories, subject, object, interest and purpose

_are_continuous_or_may_be_continuous_.(1) Personal

histories are processes of change in time, and_the_change_itself_is_one_of_the_things_immediately__experienced._ 'Change' in this case means continuousas opposed to discontinuous transition.But continuous transition is one sort of aconjunctive relation; and to be a radical empiricistmeans to hold fast to this conjunctiverelation of all others, for this is the strategicpoint, the position through which, if a hole bemade, all the corruptions of dialectics and allthe metaphysical fictions pour into our philosophy.The holding fast to this relation meanstaking it at its face value, neither less nor more;

and to take it at its face value means first of allto take it just as we feel it, and not to confuseourselves with abstract talk _about_ it, involvingwords that drive us to invent secondaryconceptions in order to neutralize their

---

1 The psychology books have of late described the facts here withapproximate adequacy. I may refer to the chapters on 'The Stream ofThought' and on the Self in my own _Principles_of_Psychology_, as wellas to S.H.Hodgson's _Metaphysics_of_Experience_, vol I., ch. VII andVIII.

---

49suggestions and to make our actual experienceagain seem rationally possible.what I do feel simply when a later momentof my experience succeeds an earlier one is thatthough they are two moments, the transitionfrom the one to the other is _continuous_. Continuityhere is a definite sort of experience; just


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as definite as is the _discontinuity-experience_which I find it impossible to avoid when I seekto make the transition from an experience ofmy own to one of yours. In this latter case Ihave to get on and off again, to pass from athing lived to another thing only conceived,and the break is positively experienced andnoted. Though the functions exerted by myexperience and by yours may be the same (.e.g.,the same objects known and the same purposesfollowed), yet the sameness has in this case tobe ascertained expressly (and often with difficultyand uncertainly) after the break has beenfelt; whereas in passing from one of my ownmoments to another the sameness of object andinterest is unbroken, and both the earlier andthe later experience are of things directly lived.

50

There is no other _nature_, no other whatnessthan this absence of break and this sense ofcontinuity in that most intimate of all conjunctiverelations, the passing of one experience

into another when the belong to the same self.And this whatness is real empirical 'content,'just as the whatness of separation and discontinuityis real content in the contrasted case.Practically to experience one's personal continuumin this living way is to know the originalsof the ideas of continuity and sameness, toknow what the words stand for concretely, toown all that they can ever mean. But all experienceshave their conditions; and over-subtleintellects, thinking about the facts here, andasking how they are possible, have ended bysubstituting a lot of static objects of conception

for the direct perceptual experiences."Sameness," they have said, "must be a starknumerical identity; it can't run on from next tonext. Continuity can't mean mere absence ofgap; for if you say two things are in immediatecontact, _at_ the contact how can they be two?If, on the other hand, you put a relation of

51transition between them, that itself is a thirdthing, and needs to be related or hitched to itsterms. An infinite series is involved," and soon. The result is that from difficulty to difficulty,

the plain conjunctive experience hasbeen discredited by both schools, the empiricistsleaving things permanently disjoined, andthe rationalist remedying the looseness by theirAbsolutes or Substances, or whatever other fictitiousagencies of union may have employed.From all which artificiality we canbe saved by a couple of simple-reflections: first,that conjunctions and separations are, at allevents, co-ordinate phenomena which, if we


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take experiences at their face value, must beaccounted equally real; and second, that if weinsist on treating things as really separatewhen they are given as continuously joined,invoking, when union is required, transcendentalprinciples to overcome the separatenesswe have assumed, then we ought to standready to perform the converse act. We oughtto invoke higher principles of _dis_union, also, to

52make our merely experienced _dis_junctions moretruly real. Failing thus, we ought to let theoriginally given continuities stand on their ownbottom. We have no right to be lopsided or toblow capriciously hot and cold.

III. THE COGNITIVE RELATION

The first great pitfall from which such a radicalstanding by experience will save us is anartificial conception of the _relations_between_

_knower_and_known_. Throughout the history ofphilosophy the subject and its object have been

treated as absolutely discontinuous entities;and thereupon the presence of the latter to theformer, or the 'apprehension' by the former ofthe latter, has assumed a paradoxical characterwhich all sorts of theories had to be inventedto overcome. Representative theoriesput a mental 'representation,' 'image,' or'content' into the gap, as a sort of intermediary.Common-sense theories left the gapuntouched, declaring our mind able to clearit by a self-transcending leap. Transcendentalisttheories left it impossible to traverse by

53finite knowers, and brought an Absolute in toperform the saltatory act. All the while, inthe very bosom of the finite experience, everyconjunction required to make the relation intelligibleis given in full. Either the knowerand the known are:

(1) The self-same piece of experience takentwice over in different contexts; or they are

(2) two pieces of _actual_ experience belongingto the same subject, with definite tracts of

conjunctive transitional experience betweenthem; or

(3) the known is a _possible_ experience eitherof that subject or another, to which the saidconjunctive transitions _would_lead, if sufficientlyprolonged.

To discuss all the ways in which one experiencemay function as the knower of another,


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would be incompatible with the limitsof this essay.91) I have just treated of type 1, the

---

1 For brevity's sake I altogether omit mention of the typeconstituted by knowledge of the truth of general propositions. Thistype has been thoroughly and, so far as I can see, satisfactorily,elucidated in Dewey's _Studies_in_Logical_Theory_. Such propositionsare reducible to the S-is-P form; and the 'terminus' that verifies andfulfils is the SP in combination. Of course percepts may be involved inthe mediating experiences, or in the 'satisfactoriness' of the P in itsnew position.---

54kind of knowledge called perception. This isthe type of case in which the mind enjoys direct'acquaintance' with a present object. Inthe other types the mind has 'knowledge-about' an object not immediately there. Oftype 2, the simplest sort of conceptual knowledge,I have given some account in twoarticles.(1) Type 3 can always formally

and hypothetically be reduced to type 2, sothat a brief description of that type will putthe present reader sufficiently at my pointof view, and make him see what the actualmeanings of the mysterious cognitive relationmay be.

Suppose me to be sitting here in my library

---

1 These articles and their doctrine, unnoticed apparently by any oneelse, have lately gained favorable comment from Professor Strong. Dr.

Dickinson S. Miller has independently thought out the same results,which Strong accordingly dubs the James-Miller theory of cognition.---55at Cambridge, at ten minutes' walk from'Memorial Hall,' and to be thinking truly ofthe latter object. My mind may have beforeit only the name, or it may have a clear image,or it may have a very dim image of the hall, butsuch intrinsic differences in the image make nodifference in its cognitive function. Certain

_extrinsic_ phenomena, special experiences ofconjunction, are what impart to the image, be

it what it may, its knowing office.

For instance, if you ask me what hall I meanby my image, and I call tell you nothing; or if Ifail to point or lead you towards the HarvardDelta; or if, being led by you, I am uncertainwhether the Hall I see be what I had in mindor not; you would rightly deny that I had'meant' that particular hall at all, even thoughmy mental image might to some degree have


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resembled it. The resemblance would count inthat case as coincidental merely, for all sortsof things of a kind resemble one another in thisworld without being held for that reason totake cognizance of one another.

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

56hall, and tell you of its history and presentuses; if in its presence I feel my idea, howeverimperfect it may have been, to have led hitherand to be now _terminated_; if the associates ofthe image and of the felt hall run parallel, sothat each term of the one context correspondsserially, as I walk, with an answering term ofthe others; why then my soul was prophetic,and my idea must be, and by common consentwould be, called cognizant of reality. That perceptwas what I _meant_, for into it my idea haspassed by conjunctive experiences of samenessand fulfilled intention. Nowhere is there jar,but every later moment continues and corroboratesan earlier one.

In this continuing and corroborating, takenin no transcendental sense, but denoting definitelyfelt transitions, _lies_all_that_the_knowing_

_of_a_percept_by_an_idea_can_possibly_contain_or__signify_. Wherever such transitions are felt, thefirst experience _knows_ that last one. Where theydo not, or where even as possibles they can not,intervene, there can be no pretence of knowing.In this latter case the extremes will be connected,

57if connected at all, by inferior relations

-- bare likeness or succession, or by 'withness'alone. Knowledge of sensible realities thuscomes to life inside the tissue of experience. Itis _made_; and made by relations that unrollthemselves in time. Whenever certain intermediariesare given, such that, as they developtowards their terminus, there is experiencefrom point to point of one direction followed,and finally of one process fulfilled, the resultis that _their_starting-point_thereby_becomes_a_

_knower_and_their_terminus_an_object_meant_or__known_. That is all that knowing (in the simplecase considered) can be known-as, that is

the whole of its nature, put into experientialterms. Whenever such is the sequence of ourexperiences we may freely say that we had theterminal object 'in mind' from the outset, evenalthough _at_ the outset nothing was there in usbut a flat piece of substantive experience likeany other, with no self-transcendency about it,and ny mystery save the mystery of cominginto existence and of being gradually followedby other pieces of substantive experience, with


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58conjunctively transitional experiences between.That is what we _mean_ here by the object'sbeing 'in mind.' Of any deeper more real wayof being in mind we have no positive conception,and we have no right to discredit ouractual experience by talking of such a wayat all.

I know that many a reader will rebel at this."Mere intermediaries," he will say, "eventhough they be feelings of continuously growingfulfilment, only _separate_ the knower fromthe known, whereas what we have in knowledgeis a kind of immediate touch of the one by theother, an 'apprehension' in the etymologicalsense of the word, a leaping of the chasm as bylightning, an act by which two terms are smitteninto one, over the head of their distinctness.All these dead intermediaries of yoursare out of each other, and outside of theirtermini still."

But do not such dialectic difficulties remindus of the dog dropping his bone and snappingat its image in the water? If we knew any morereal kind of union _aliunde_, we might be entitled

59to brand all our empirical unions as a sham.But unions by continuous transition are theonly ones we know of, whether in this matterof a knowledge-about that terminates in anacquaintance, whether in personal identity, inlogical predication through the copula 'is,' orelsewhere. If anywhere there were more absolute

unions realized, they could only revealthemselves to us by just such conjunctiveresults. These are what the unions are _worth_,these are all that _we_can_ever_practically_mean_by union, by continuity. Is it not time torepeat what Lotze said of substances, that to

_act_like_ one is to _be_ one? Should we not sayhere that to be experienced as continuous is tobe really continuous, in a world where experienceand reality come to the same thing? Ina picture gallery a painted hook will serve tohang a painted chain by, a painted cable willhold a painted ship. In a world where both the

terms and their distinctions are affairs of experience,conjunctions that are experiencedmust be at least as real as anything else. They

60will be 'absolutely' real conjunctions, if we haveno transphenomenal Absolute ready, to derealizethe whole experienced world by, at a stroke.If, on the other hand, we had such an Absolute,not one of our opponents' theories of knowledge


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could remain standing any better thanours could; for the distinctions as well as theconjunctions of experience would impartiallyfall its prey. The whole question of how 'one'thing can know 'another' would cease to be areal one at all in a world where otherness itselfwas an illusion.(1)

So much for the essentials of the cognitiverelation, where the knowledge is conceptual intype, or forms knowledge 'about' an object. Itconsists in intermediary experiences (possible,if not actual) of continuously developing progress,and, finally, of fulfilment, when the sensiblepercept, which is the object, is reached.The percept here not only _verifies_ the concept,proves its function of knowing that percept to

---

1 Mr. Bradley, not professing to know his absolute _aliunde_,nevertheless derealizes Experience by alleging it to be everywhereinfected with self-contradiction. His arguments seem almost purelyverbal, but this is no place for arguing that point out.

---

61be true, but the percept's existence as theterminus of the chain of intermediaries _creates_the function. Whatever terminates that chainwas, because it now proves itself to be, whatthe concept 'had in mind.'

The towering importance for human life ofthis kind of knowing lies in the fact that anexperience that knows another can figure asits _representative_, not in any quasi-miraculous

'epistemological' sense, but in the definitepractical sense of being its _substitute_ in variousoperations, sometimes physical and sometimesmental, which lead us to its associates and results.By experimenting on our ideas of reality,we may save ourselves the trouble of experimentingon the real experiences which theyseverally mean. The ideas form related systems,corresponding point for point to the systemswhich the realities form; and by letting anideal term call up its associates systematically,we may be led to a terminus which the correspondingreal term would have led to in case

we had operated on the real world. And thisbrings us to the general question of substitution.62

IV. SUBSTITUTION

In Taine's brilliant book on 'Intelligence,'substitution was for the first time named asa cardinal logical function, though of coursethe facts had always been familiar enough.


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What, exactly, in a system of experiences, doesthe 'substitution' of one of them for anothermean?

According to my view, experience as a wholeis a process in time, whereby innumerableparticular terms lapse and are superseded byothers that follow upon them by transitionswhich, whether disjunctive or conjunctive incontent, are themselves experiences, and mustin general be accounted at least as real asthe terms which they relate. What the natureof the event called 'superseding' signifies, dependsaltogether on the kind of transitionthat obtains. Some experiences simply abolishtheir predecessors without continuing themin any way. Others are felt to increase or toenlarge their meaning, to carry out their purpose,or to bring us nearer to their goal. They

63'represent' them, and may fulfil their functionbetter than they fulfilled it themselves. But to'fulfil a function' in a world of pure experience

can be conceived and defined in only one possibleway. IN such a world transitions andarrivals (or terminations) are the only eventsthat happen, though they happen by so manysorts of path. The only experience that one experiencecan perform is to lead into anotherexperience; and the only fulfilment we canspeak of is the reaching of a certain experiencedend. When one experience leads to (orcan lead to) the same end as another, theyagree in function. But the whole system ofexperiences as they are immediately givenpresents itself as a quasi-chaos through which

one can pass out of an initial term in manydirections and yet end in the same terminus,moving from next to next by a great manypossible paths.

Either one of these paths might be a functionalsubstitute for another, and to follow onerather than another might on occasion bean advantageous thing to do. As a matter of

64fact, and in a general way, the paths thatrun through conceptual experiences, that is,

through 'thoughts' or 'ideas' that 'know' thethings in which they terminate, are highly advantageouspaths to follow. Not only do theyyield inconceivably rapid transitions; but, owingto the 'universal' character(1) which theyfrequently possess, and to their capacity forassociation with one another in great systems,they outstrip the tardy consecutions of thethings themselves, and sweep us on towardsour ultimate termini in a far more labor-saving


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way than the following of trains of sensibleperception ever could. Wonderful are the newcuts and the short-circuits which the thought-paths make. Most thought-paths, it is true,are substitutes for nothing actual; they endoutside the real world altogether, in waywardfancies, utopias, fictions or mistakes. Butwhere they do re-enter reality and terminatetherein, we substitute them always; and with

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

65these substitutes we pass the greater numberof our hours.

This is why I called our experiences, takentogether, a quasi-chaos. There is vastlymore discontinuity in the sum total of experiences

than we commonly suppose. The objectivenucleus of every man's experience, his ownbody, is, it is true, a continuous percept; andequally continuous as a percept (thought wemay be inattentive to it) is the material environmentof that body, changing by gradualtransition when the body moves. But thedistant parts of the physical world are at alltimes absent from us, and form conceptualobjects merely, into the perceptual reality ofwhich our life inserts itself at points discreteand relatively rare. Round their several objectivenuclei, partly shared and common and

partly discrete, of the real physical world, innumerablethinkers, pursuing their several linesof physically true cogitation, trace paths thatintersect one another only at discontinuousperceptual points, and the rest of the time arequite incongruent; and around all the nuclei

66of shared 'reality,' as around the Dyak's headof my late metaphor, floats the vast cloud ofexperiences that are wholly subjective, thatare non-substitutional, that find not even aneventual ending for themselves in the perceptual

world -- there mere day-dreams andjoys and sufferings and wishes of the individualminds. These exist _with_ one another, indeed,and with the objective nuclei, but outof them it is probable that to all eternity nointerrelated system of any kind will every bemade.

This notion of the purely substitutional orconceptual physical world brings us to the most


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critical of all steps in the development ofa philosophy of pure experience. The paradoxof self-transcendency in knowledge comes backupon us here, but I think that our notions ofpure experience and of substitution, and ourradically empirical view of conjunctive transitions,are _Denkmittel_ that will carry us safelythrough the pass.

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V. WHAT OBJECTIVE REFERENCE IS.

Whosoever feels his experience to be somethingsubstitutional even while he has it, maybe said to have an experience that reachesbeyond itself. From inside of its own entity itsays 'more,' and postulates reality existing elsewhere.For the transcendentalist, who holdsknowing to consist in a _salto_mortale_ across an'epistemological chasm,' such an idea presentsno difficulty; but it seems at first sight as if itmight be inconsistent with an empiricism likeour own. Have we not explained that conceptual

knowledge is made such wholly by theexistence of things that fall outside of theknowing experience itself -- by intermediaryexperience and by a terminus that fulfils?Can the knowledge be there before these elementsthat constitute its being have come?And, if knowledge be not there, how can objectivereference occur?

The key to this difficulty lies in the distinctionbetween knowing as verified and completed,and the same knowing as in transit

68and on its way. To recur to the MemorialHall example lately used, it is only when ouridea of the Hall has actually terminated in thepercept that we know 'for certain' that fromthe beginning it was truly cognitive of _that_.Until established by the end of the process, itsquality of knowing that, or indeed of knowinganything, could still be doubted; and yet theknowing really was there, as the result nowshows. We were _virtual_ knowers of the Halllong before we were certified to have been itsactual knowers, by the percept's retroactive

validating power. Just so we are 'mortal' allthe time, by reason of the virtuality of theinevitable event which will make us so whenit shall have come.

Now the immensely greater part of all ourknowing never gets beyond this virtual stage.It never is completed or nailed down. I speaknot merely of our ideas of imperceptibles likeether-waves or dissociated 'ions,' or of 'ejects'


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like the contents of our neighbors' minds; Ispeak also of ideas which we might verify if wewould take the trouble, but which we hold for

69true although unterminated perceptually, becausenothing says 'no' to us, and there is nocontradicting truth in sight. _To_continue_thinking_

_unchallenged_is,_ninety-nine_times_out_of_a__hundred,_our_practical_substitute_for_knowing_in__the_completed_sense_. As each experience runs bycognitive transition into the next one, and wenowhere feel a collision with what we elsewherecount as truth or fact, we commit ourselves tothe current as if the port were sure. We live,as it were, upon the front edge of an advancingwave-crest, and our sense of a determinatedirection in falling forward is all we cover ofthe future of our path. It is as if a differentialquotient should be conscious and treat itself asan adequate substitute for a traced-out curve.Our experience, _inter_alia_, is of variations ofrate and of direction, and lives in these transitionsmore than in the journey's end. The experiences

of tendency are sufficient to act upon-- what more could we have _done_ at thosemoments even if the later verification comescomplete?

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

70the charge that the objective reference whichis so flagrant a character of our experience involvesa chasm and a mortal leap. A positivelyconjunctive transition involves neither chasmnor leap. Being the very original of what we

mean by continuity, it makes a continuumwherever it appears. I know full well that suchbrief words as these will leave the hardenedtranscendentalist unshaken. Conjunctive experiences

_separate_ their terms, he will still say: theyare third things interposed, that have themselvesto be conjoined by new links, and to invokethem makes our trouble infinitely worse.To 'feel' our motion forward is impossible.Motion implies terminus; and how can terminusbe felt before we have arrived? The bareststart and sally forwards, the barest tendencyto leave the instant, involves the chasm and

the leap. Conjunctive transitions are the mostsuperficial of appearances, illusions of our sensibilitywhich philosophical reflection pulverizesat a touch. Conception is our only trustworthyinstrument, conception and the Absoluteworking hand in hand. Conception disintegrates

71experience utterly, but its disjunctionsare easily overcome again when the Absolute


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takes up the task.

Such transcendentalists I must leave, provisionallyat least, in full possession of theircreed. I have no space for polemics in thisarticle, so I shall simply formulate the empiricistdoctrine as my hypothesis, leaving it towork or not work as it may.

Objective reference, I say then, is an incidentof the fact that so much of our experiencecomes as an insufficient and consists ofprocess and transition. Our fields of experiencehave no more definite boundaries than haveour fields of view. Both are fringed forever bya _more_ that continuously develops, and thatcontinuously supersedes them as life proceeds.The relations, generally speaking, are as realhere as the terms are, and the only complaintof the transcendentalist's with which I couldat all sympathize would be his charge that, byfirst making knowledge consist in externalrelations as I have done, and by then confessing

72that nine-tenths of the time these arenot actually but only virtually there, I haveknocked the solid bottom out of the wholebusiness, and palmed off a substitute of knowledgefor the genuine thing. Only the admission,such a critic might say, that our ideas areself-transcendent and 'true' already, in advanceof the experiences that are to terminatethem, can bring solidity back to knowledgein a world like this, in which transitions andterminations are only by exception fulfilled.

This seems to me an excellent place forapplying the pragmatic method. When adispute arises, that method consists in auguringwhat practical consequences would bedifferent if one side rather than the other weretrue. If no difference can be thought of, thedispute is a quarrel over words. What thenwould the self-transcendency affirmed to existin advance of all experiential mediation orterminations, be _known-as?_ What would itpractically result in for _us_, were it true?

It could only result in our orientation, in the

turning of our expectations and practical tendencies

73into the right path; and the right pathhere, so long as we and the object are not yetface to face (or can never get face to face, as inthe case of ejects), would be the path that ledus into the object's nearest neighborhood.Where direct acquaintance is lacking, 'knowledgeabout' is the next best thing, and an


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acquaintance with what actually lies about theobject, and is most closely related to it, putssuch knowledge within our gasp. Ether-wavesand your anger, for example, are things inwhich my thoughts will never _perceptually_ terminate,but my concepts of them lead me totheir very brink, to the chromatic fringes andto the hurtful words and deeds which are theirreally next effects.

Even if our ideas did in themselves carry thepostulated self-transcendency, it would stillremain true that their putting us into possessionof such effects _would_be_the_sole_cash-_

_value_of_the_self-transcendency_for_us_. And thiscash-value, it is needless to say, is _verbatim_et_

_literatim_ what our empiricist account pays in.On pragmatist principles, therefore, a dispute

74over self-transcendency is a pure logomachy.Call our concepts of ejective things self-transcendent or the reverse, it makes no difference,so long as we don't differ about the

nature of that exalted virtue's fruits -- fruitsfor us, of course, humanistic fruits. If anAbsolute were proved to exist for other reasons,it might well appear that _his_ knowledge isterminated in innumerable cases where ours isstill incomplete. That, however, would be afact indifferent to our knowledge. The latterwould grow neither worse nor better, whetherwe acknowledged such an Absolute or left himout.

So the notion of a knowledge still _in_transitu_and on its way joins hands here with that

notion of a 'pure experience' which I tried toexplain in my [essay] entitled 'Does ConsciousnessExist?' The instant field of thepresent is always experienced in its 'pure' state.plain unqualified actuality, a simple _that_, as yetundifferentiated into thing and thought, andonly virtually classifiable as objective fact or assome one's opinion about fact. This is as true

75when the field is conceptual as when it is perceptual.'Memorial Hall' is 'there' in my ideaas much as when I stand before it. I proceed to

act on its account in either case. Only in thelater experience that supersedes the presentone is this _naif_ immediacy retrospectively splitinto 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 inthese very lines -- passes for 'truth.' Themorrow may reduce it to 'opinion.' The transcendentalistin all his particular knowledges is


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as liable to this reduction as I am: his Absolutedoes not save him. Why, then, need he quarrelwith an account of knowing that merely leavesit liable to this inevitable condition? Why insistthat knowing is a static relation out oftime when it practically seems so much a functionof our active life? For a thing to be valid,says Lotze, is the same as to make itselfvalid. When the whole universe seems onlyto be making itself valid and to be still incomplete(else why its ceaseless changing?) why, of

76all things, should knowing be exempt? Whyshould it not be making itself valid like everythingelse? That some parts of it may be alreadyvalid or verified beyond dispute, theempirical philosopher, of course, like any oneelse, may always hope.

VI. THE CONTERMINOUSNESS OF DIFFERENT MINDS

With transition and prospect thus enthronedin pure experience, it is impossible to subscribe

to the idealism of the English school.Radical empiricism has, in fact, more affinitieswith natural realism than with the viewsof Berkeley or of Mill, and this can be easilyshown.

For the Berkeleyan school, ideas (the verbalequivalent of what I term experiences) are discontinuous.The content of each is wholly immanent,and there are no transitions withwhich they are consubstantial and throughwhich their beings may unite. Your MemorialHall and mine, even when both are percepts,

are wholly out of connection with each other.

77Our lives are a congeries of solipsisms, out ofwhich in strict logic only a God could composea universe even of discourse. No dynamiccurrents run between my objects and yourobjects. Never can our minds meet in the

_same_.

The incredibility of such a philosophy isflagrant. It is 'cold, strained, and unnatural'in a supreme degree; and it may be doubted

whether even Berkeley himself, who took itso religiously, really believed, when walkingthrough the streets of London, that his spiritand the spirits of his fellow wayfarers hadabsolutely different towns in view.

To me the decisive reason in favor of ourminds meeting in _some_ common objects at leastis that, unless I make that supposition, I haveno motive for assuming that your mind exists


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at all. Why do I postulate your mind? BecauseI see your body acting in a certain way.Its gestures, facial movements, words and conductgenerally, are 'expressive,' so I deem itactuated as my own is, by an inner life likemine. This argument from analogy is my _reason_,

78whether an instinctive belief runs before itor not. But what is 'your body' here but apercept in _my_ field? It is only as animating

_that_ object, _my_ object, that I have any occasionto think of you at all. If the body that youactuate be not the very body that I see there,but some duplicate body of your own withwhich that has nothing to do, we belong todifferent universes, you and I, and for me tospeak of you is folly. Myriads of such universeseven now may coexist, irrelevant to oneanother; my concern is solely with the universewith which my own life is connected.

In that perceptual part of _my_ universe whichI call _your_ body, your mind and my mind meet

and may be called conterminous. Your mindactuates that body and mine sees it; mythoughts pass into it as into their harmoniouscognitive fulfilment; your emotions and volitionspass into it as causes into their effects.

But that percept hangs together with all ourother physical percepts. They are of one stuffwith it; and if it be our common possession,they must be so likewise. For instance, your

79hand lays hold of one end of a rope and my

hand lays hold of the other end. We pullagainst each other. Can our two hands bemutual objects in this experience, and the ropenot be mutual also? What is true of the rope istrue of any other percept. Your objects areover and over again the same as mine. If Iask you _where_ some object of yours is, our oldMemorial Hall, for example, you point to _my_Memorial Hall with _your_ hand which _I_see_. Ifyou alter an object in your world, put out acandle, for example, when I am present, _my_candle _ipso_facto_ goes out. It is only as alteringmy objects that I guess you to exist. If your

objects do not coalesce with my objects, if theybe not identically where mine are, they mustbe 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, thesame.(1)

Practically, then, our minds meet in a worldof objects which they share in common, which


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1 The notions that our objects are inside of our respective heads isnot seriously defensible, so I pass it by.

80would still be there, if one or several of theminds were destroyed. I can see no formalobjection to this supposition's being literallytrue. On the principles which I am defending,a 'mind' or 'personal consciousness' is thename for a series of experiences run together bycertain definite transitions, and an objectivereality is a series of similar experiences knit bydifferent transitions. If one and the same experiencecan figure twice, once in a mental andonce in a physical context (as I have tried, inmy article on 'Consciousness,' to show that itcan), one does not see why it might not figurethrice, or four times, or any number of times,by running into as many different mental contexts,just as the same point, lying at theirintersection, can be continued into many differentlines. Abolishing any number of contexts

would not destroy the experience itselfor its other contexts, any more than abolishingsome of the point's linear continuationswould destroy the others, or destroy the pointitself.

I well know the subtle dialectic wh

James, William - Essays in Radical Empiricism

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