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 Radical
Empiricism, transcribed by Phillip McReynolds. [ Not included is the last
chapter, "La Notion de Conscience," since the chapter is completely in
French and I could not be bothered to type it in at present.  I will
probably 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 in
Radical Empiricism and A Pluralistic Universe in one volume, published
in 1943.  Underscores bewteen words indicate italics in the original.
To the best of my knowledge this work is now in the public domain as it
was copyrighted 1912 by Henry James, who died in 1916.

There are probably mistakes here.  If you let me know about them, I'll
attempt to correct them.  In any case, no warranty is issued
as to the correctness or completeness of this work nor
concerning its suitability to any purpose whatsoever.  If you accept
these conditions you may freely use and distribute this transcription as
you like, provided that you don't try to sell it or otherwise make a
profit off of my work.


Phillip McReynolds
MCREYNPA@CTRVAX.VANDERBILT.EDU

---

[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                      190
VIII. LA NOTION DE CONSCIENCE                      206

1
                                   I

                       DOES 'CONSCIOUSNESS' EXIST?

'THOUGHTS' and 'things' are names for two
sorts of object, which common sense will always
find contrasted and will always practically
oppose to each other.  Philosophy, reflecting
on the contrast, has varied in the
past in her explanations of it, and may be
expected to vary in the future.  At first,
'spirit and matter,' 'soul and body,' stood for
a pair of equipollent substances quite on a par
in weight and interest.  But one day Kant undermined
the soul and brought in the transcendental
ego, and ever since then the bipolar
relation has been very much off its balance.
The transcendental ego seems nowadays in
rationalist quarters to stand for everything, in
empiricist quarters for almost nothing.  In the
hands of such writers as Schuppe, Rehmke,
Natorp, Munsterberg -- at any rate in his

2
earlier writings, Schubert-Soldern and others,
the spiritual principle attenuates itself to a
thoroughly ghostly condition, being only a
name for the fact that the 'content' of experience
_is_known_.  It loses personal form and activity
-- these passing over to the content --
and becomes a bare _Bewusstheit_ or _Bewusstsein_
_uberhaupt_ of which in its own right absolutely
nothing can be said.
     I believe that 'consciousness,' when once it
has evaporated to this estate of pure diaphaneity,
is on the point of disappearing altogether.
It is the name of a nonentity, and has no right
to a place among first principles.  Those who
still cling to it are clinging to a mere echo, the
faint rumor left behind by the disappearing
'soul' upon the air of philosophy.  During the
past year, I have read a number of articles
whose authors seemed just on the point of abandoning
the notion of consciousness,(1) and substituting
for it that of an absolute experience
not due to two factors.  But they were not

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

3
quite radical enough, not quite daring enough
in their negations.  For twenty years past I
have mistrusted 'consciousness' as an entity;
for seven or eight years past I have suggested
its non-existence to my students, and tried to
give them its pragmatic equivalent in realities
of experience.  It seems to me that the hour
is ripe for it to be openly and universally discarded.
     To deny plumply that 'consciousness' exists
seems so absurd on the face of it -- for undeniably
'thoughts' do exist -- that I fear some
readers will follow me no farther.  Let me then
immediately explain that I mean only to deny
that the word stands for an entity, but to insist
most emphatically that it does stand for a
function.  There is, I mean, no aboriginal stuff
or quality of being, contrasted with that of
which material objects are made, out of which
our thoughts of them are made; but there is a
function in experience which thoughts perform,
and for the performance of which this

4
quality of being is invoked.  That function is
_knowing_.  'Consciousness' is supposed necessary
to explain the fact that things not only
are, but get reported, are known.  Whoever
blots out the notion of consciousness from his
list of first principles must still provide in some
way for that function's being carried on.

                              I

     My thesis is that if we start with the supposition
that there is only one primal stuff or
material in the world, a stuff of which everything
is composed, and if we call that stuff
'pure experience,' the knowing can easily be
explained as a particular sort of relation
towards one another into which portions of
pure experience may enter.  The relation itself
is a part of pure experience; one if its 'terms'
becomes the subject or bearer of the knowledge,
the knower,(1) the other becomes the object
known.  This will need much explanation
before it can be understood.  The best way to

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

5
get it understood is to contrast it with the alternative
view; and for that we may take the
recentest alternative, that in which the evaporation
of the definite soul-substance has proceeded
as far as it can go without being yet
complete.  If neo-Kantism has expelled earlier
forms of dualism, we shall have expelled all
forms if we are able to expel neo-kantism in its
turn.
     For the thinkers I call neo-Kantian, the word
consciousness to-day does no more than signalize
the fact that experience is indefeasibly dualistic
in structure.  It means that not subject,
not object, but object-plus-subject is the minimum
that can actually be.  The subject-object
distinction meanwhile is entirely different from
that between mind and matter, from that between
body and soul.  Souls were detachable,
had separate destinies; things could happen to
them.  To consciousness as such nothing can
happen, for, timeless itself, it is only a witness
of happenings in time, in which it plays no
part.  It is, in a word, but the logical correlative
of 'content' in an Experience of which the

6
peculiarity is that _fact_comes_to_light_ in it, that
_awareness_of_content_ takes place.  Consciousness
as such is entirely impersonal -- 'self' and its
activities belong to the content.  To say that I
am self-conscious, or conscious of putting forth
volition, means only that certain contents, for
which 'self' and 'effort of will' are the names,
are not without witness as they occur.
     Thus, for these belated drinkers at the Kantian
spring, we should have to admit consciousness
as an 'epistemological' necessity, even if
we had no direct evidence of its being there.
     But in addition to this, we are supposed by
almost every one to have an immediate consciousness
of consciousness itself.  When the
world of outer fact ceases to be materially present,
and we merely recall it in memory, or
fancy it, the consciousness is believed to stand
out and to be felt as a kind of impalpable inner
flowing, which, once known in this sort of experience,
may equally be detected in presentations
of the outer world.  "The moment we try
to fix out attention upon consciousness and to
see _what_, distinctly, it is," says a recent writer,

7
"it seems to vanish.  It seems as if we had before
us a mere emptiness.  When we try to introspect
the sensation of blue, all we can see is
the blue; the other element is as if it were diaphanous.
Yet it _can_ be distinguished, if we
look attentively enough, and know that there
is something to look for."(1)  "Consciousness"
(Bewusstheit), says another philosopher, "is
inexplicable and hardly describable, yet all conscious
experiences have this in common that
what we call their content has a peculiar reference
to a centre for which 'self' is the name,
in virtue of which reference alone the content
is subjectively given, or appears....  While
in this way consciousness, or reference to a
self, is the only thing which distinguishes a conscious
content from any sort of being that
might be there with no one conscious of it, yet
this only ground of the distinction defies all
closer explanations.  The existence of consciousness,
although it is the fundamental fact of
psychology, can indeed be laid down as certain,
can be brought out by analysis, but can

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

8
neither be defined nor deduced from anything
but itself."(1)
     'Can be brought out by analysis,' this
author says.  This supposes that the consciousness
is one element, moment, factor -- call it
what you like -- of an experience of essentially
dualistic inner constitution, from which, if you
abstract the content, the consciousness will remain
revealed to its own eye.  Experience, at
this rate, would be much like a paint of which
the world pictures were made.  Paint has a dual
constitution, involving, as it does, a menstruum (2)
(oil, size or what not) and a mass of
content in the form of pigment suspended
therein.  We can get the pure menstruum by
letting the pigment settle, and the pure pigment
by pouring off the size or oil.  We operate
here by physical subtraction; and the usual
view is, that by mental subtraction we can
separate the two factors of experience in an

---
   1 Paul Natorp: _Einleitung_in_die_Psychologie_, 1888, pp. 14, 112.
   2 "Figuratively speaking, consciousness may be said to be the one
universal solvent, or menstruum, in which the different concrete kinds
of psychic acts and facts are contained, whether in concealed or in
obvious form."  G.T.Ladd:  _Psychology,_Descriptive_and_Explanatory_,
1894, p.30.
---

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

                              II

     Now my contention is exactly the reverse of
this.  _Experience,_I_believe,_has_no_such_inner_duplicity;_
_and_the_separation_of_it_into_consciousness_
_and_content_comes,_not_by_way_of_subtraction,_
_but_by_way_of_addition_ -- the addition, to a
given concrete piece of it, other sets of experiences,
in connection with which severally its
use or function may be of two different kinds.
The paint will also serve here as an illustration.
In a pot in a paint-shop, along with other
paints, it serves in its entirety as so much saleable
matter.  Spread on a canvas, with other
paints around it, it represents, on the contrary,
a feature in a picture and performs a spiritual
function.  Just so, I maintain, does a given undivided
portion of experience, taken in one
context of associates, play the part of a knower,
of a state of mind, of 'consciousness'; while in
a different context the same undivided bit of
experience plays the part of a thing known, of

10
an objective 'content.'  In a word, in one group
it figures as a thought, in another group as a
thing.  And, since it can figure in both groups
simultaneously we have every right to speak of
it as subjective and objective, both at once.
The dualism connoted by such double-barrelled
terms as 'experience,' 'phenomenon,'
'datum,' '_Vorfindung_' -- terms which, in philosophy
at any rate, tend more and more to replace
the single-barrelled terms of 'thought'
and 'thing' -- that dualism, I say, is still preserved
in this account, but reinterpreted, so
that, instead of being mysterious and elusive,
it becomes verifiable and concrete.  It is an affair
of relations, it falls outside, not inside, the
single experience considered, and can always
be particularized and defined.
     The entering wedge for this more concrete
way of understanding the dualism was fashioned
by Locke when he made the word 'idea'
stand indifferently for thing and thought, and
by Berkeley when he said that what common
sense means by realities is exactly what the
philosopher means by ideas.  Neither Locke

11
nor Berkeley thought his truth out into perfect
clearness, but it seems to me that the conception
I am defending does little more than consistently
carry out the 'pragmatic' method
which they were the first to use.
     If the reader will take his own experiences,
he will see what I mean.  Let him begin with a
perceptual experience, the 'presentation,' so
called, of a physical object, his actual field of
vision, the room he sits in, with the book he is
reading as its centre; and let him for the present
treat this complex object in the common-
sense way as being 'really' what it seems to be,
namely, a collection of physical things cut out
from an environing world of other physical
things with which these physical things have
actual or potential relations.  Now at the same
time it is just _those_self-same_things_ which his
mind, as we say, perceives; and the whole philosophy
of perception from Democritus's time
downwards has just been one long wrangle over
the paradox that what is evidently one reality
should be in two places at once, both in outer
space and in a person's mind.  'Representative'

12
theories of perception avoid the logical
paradox, but on the other hand the violate the
reader's sense of life, which knows no intervening
mental image but seems to see the room
and the book immediately just as they physically
exist.
     The puzzle of how the one identical room can
be in two places is at bottom just the puzzle of
how one identical point can be on two lines.  It
can, if it be situated at their intersection; and
similarly, if the 'pure experience' of the room
were a place of intersection of two processes,
which connected it with different groups of associates
respectively, it could be counted twice
over, as belonging to either group, and spoken
of loosely as existing in two places, although it
would remain all the time a numerically single
thing.
     Well, the experience is a member of diverse
processes that can be followed away from it
along entirely different lines.  The one self-
identical thing has so many relations to the
rest of experience that you can take it in disparate
systems of association, and treat it as

13
belonging with opposite contexts.  In one of
these contexts it is your 'field of consciousness';
in another it is 'the room in which you
sit,' and it enters both contexts in its wholeness,
giving no pretext for being said to attach
itself to consciousness by one of its parts or
aspects, and to out reality by another.  What
are the two processes, now, into which the
room-experience simultaneously enters in this
way?
     One of them is the reader's personal biography,
the other is the history of the house of
which the room is part.  The presentation, the
experience, the _that_ in short (for until we have
decided _what_ it is it must be a mere _that_) is the
last term in a train of sensations, emotions,
decisions, movements, classifications, expectations,
etc., ending in the present, and the first
term in a series of 'inner' operations
extending into the future, on the reader's
part.  On the other hand, the very same _that_
is the _terminus_ad_quem_ of a lot of previous

14
physical operations, carpentering, papering,
furnishing, warming, etc., and the _terminus_a_
_quo_ of a lot of future ones, in which it will be
concerned when undergoing the destiny of a
physical room.  The physical and the mental
operations form curiously incompatible groups.
As a room, the experience has occupied that
spot and had that environment for thirty
years.  As your field of consciousness it may
never have existed until now.  As a room, attention
will go on to discover endless new details
in it.  As your mental state merely, few
new ones will emerge under attention's eye.
AS a room, it will taken an earthquake, or a
gang of men, and in any case a certain amount
of time, to destroy it.  As your subjective
state, the closing of your eyes, or any instantaneous
play of your fancy will suffice.  IN the
real world, fire will consume it.  IN your mind,
you can let fire play over it without effect.  As
an outer object, you must pay so much a
month to inhabit it.  As an inner content, you
may occupy it for any length of time rent-free.
If, in short, you follow it in the mental direction,

15
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.

                             III

     So far, all seems plain sailing, but my thesis
will probably grow less plausible to the reader
when I pass form percepts to concepts, or from
the case of things presented to that of things
remote.  I believe, nevertheless, that here also
the same law holds good.  If we take conceptual
manifolds, or memories, or fancies, they
also are in their first intention mere bits
of pure experience, and, as such, are single _thats_
which act in one context as objects, and in another
context figure as mental states.  By taking
them in their first intention, I mean ignoring
their relation to possible perceptual experiences
with which they may be connected,
which they may lead to and terminate in, and
which then they may be supposed to 'represent.'

16
Taking them in this way first, we confine
the problem to a world merely 'thought-
of' and not directly felt or seen.  This world,
just like the world of percepts, comes to us at
first as a chaos of experiences, but lines of order
soon get traced.  We find that any bit of it
which we may cut out as an example is connected
with distinct groups of associates, just
as our perceptual experiences are, that these
associates link themselves with it by different
relations,(2) and that one forms the inner history
of a person, while the other acts as an impersonal
'objective' world, either spatial and temporal,
or else merely logical or mathematical,
or otherwise 'ideal.'
     The first obstacle on the part of the reader to
seeing that these non-perceptual experiences

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

17
have objectivity as well as subjectivity will
probably be due to the intrusion into his mind
of _percepts_, that third group of associates with
which the non-perceptual experiences have relations,
and which, as a whole, they 'represent,'
standing to them as thoughts to things.  This
important function of non-perceptual experiences
complicates the question and confuses
it; for, so used are we to treat percepts as
the sole genuine realities that, unless we keep
them out of the discussion, we tend altogether
to overlook the objectivity that lies in non-
perceptual experiences by themselves.  We
treat them, 'knowing' percepts as they do, as
through and through subjective, and say that
they are wholly constituted of the stuff called
consciousness, using this term now for a kind
of entity, after the fashion which I am seeking
to refute.(1)
     Abstracting, then, from percepts altogether,
what I maintain is, that any single non-perceptual

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

18
experience tends to get counted twice
over, just as a perceptual experience does, figuring
in one context as an object or field of objects,
in another as a state of mind:  and all this
without the least internal self-diremption on its
own part into consciousness and content.  It is
all consciousness in one taking; and, in the
other, all content.
     I find this objectivity of non-perceptual experiences,
this complete parallelism in point of
reality between the presently felt and the remotely
thought, so well set forth in a page of
Munsterberg's _Grundzuge_, that I will quote it
as it stands.
     "I may only think of my objects," says Professor
Munsterberg; "yet, in my living thought
they stand before me exactly as perceived objects
would do, no matter how different the two
ways of apprehending them may be in their
genesis.  The book here lying on the table before
me, and the book in the next room of which I
think and which I mean to get, are both in the
same sense given realities for me, realities
which I acknowledge and of which I take account.

19
If you agree that the perceptual object
is not an idea within me, but that percept and
thing, as indistinguishably one, are really experienced
_there_, _outside_, you ought not to believe
that the merely thought-of object is hid away
inside of the thinking subject.  The object of
which I think, and of whose existence I take
cognizance without letting it now work upon
my senses, occupies its definite place in the
outer world as much as does the object which I
directly see."
     "What is true of the here and the there, is
also true of the now and the then.  I know of
the thing which is present and perceived, but I
know also of the thing which yesterday was
but is no more, and which I only remember.
Both can determine my present conduct, both
are parts of the reality of which I keep account.
It is true that of much of the past I am uncertain,
just as I am uncertain of much of what
is present if it be but dimly perceived.  But the
interval of time does not in principle alter my
relation to the object, does not transform it
from an object known into a mental state....

20
The things in the room here which I survey,
and those in my distant home of which I think,
the things of this minute and those of my long-
vanished boyhood, influence and decide me
alike, with a reality which my experience of
them directly feels.  They both make up my
real world, they make it directly, they do not
have first to be introduced to me and mediated
by ideas which now and here arise
within me....  This not-me character
of my recollections and expectations does not
imply that the external objects of which I am
aware in those experiences should necessarily
be there also for others.  The objects of dreamers
and hallucinated persons are wholly without
general validity.  But even were they centaurs
and golden mountains, they still would
be 'off there,' in fairy land, and not 'inside' of
ourselves."(1)
     This certainly is the immediate, primary,
naif, or practical way of taking our thought-of
world.  Were there no perceptual world to
serve as its 'reductive,' in Taine's sense, by

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

21
being 'stronger' and more genuinely 'outer'
(so that the whole merely thought-of world
seems weak and inner in comparison), our
world of thought would be the only world, and
would enjoy complete reality in our belief.
This actually happens in our dreams, and in
our day-dreams so long as percepts do not
interrupt them.
     And yet, just as the seen room (to go back to
our late example) is _also_ a field of consciousness,
so the conceived or recollected room is
_also_ a state of mind; and the doubling-up of the
experience has in both cases similar grounds.
     The room thought-of, namely, has many
thought-of couplings with many thought-of
things.  Some of these couplings are inconstant,
others are stable.  In the reader's personal history
the room occupies a single date -- he saw
it only once perhaps, a year ago.  Of the house's
history, on the other hand, it forms a permanent
ingredient.  Some couplings have the curious
stubbornness, to borrow Royce's term, of
fact; others show the fluidity of fancy -- we let
them come and go as we please.  Grouped with

22
the rest of its house, with the name of its town,
of its owner, builder, value, decorative plan,
the room maintains a definite foothold, to
which, if we try to loosen it, it tends to return
and to reassert itself with force.(1)  With these
associates, in a word, it coheres, while to other
houses, other towns, other owners, etc., it shows
no tendency to cohere at all.  The two collections,
first of its cohesive, and, second, of its
loose associates, inevitably come to be contrasted.
We call the first collection the system
of external realities, in the midst of which the
room, as 'real,' exists; the other we call the
stream of internal thinking, in which, as a
'mental image,' it for a moment floats.(2)  The
room thus again gets counted twice over.  It
plays two different roles, being _Gedanke_ and
_Gedachtes_, the thought-of-an-object, and the
object-thought-of, both in one; and all this
without paradox or mystery, just as the same

---
   1 Cf. A.L. Hodder:  _The_Adversaries_of_the_Sceptic_, pp.94-99.
   2 For simplicity's sake I confine my exposition to 'external'
reality.  But there is also the system of ideal reality in which the
room plays its part.  Relations of comparison, of classification,
serial order, value, also are stubborn, assign a definite place to the
room, unlike the incoherence of its places in the mere rhapsody of our
successive thoughts.
---

23
material thing may be both low and high, or
small and great, or bad and good, because of its
relations to opposite parts of an environing
world.
     As 'subjective' we say that the experience
represents; as 'objective' it is represented.
What represents and what is represented is here
numerically the same; but we must remember
that no dualism of being represented and representing
resides in the experience _per_se_.  In
its pure state, or when isolated, there is no self-
splitting of it into consciousness and what the
consciousness is 'of.'  Its subjectivity and objectivity
are functional attributes solely, , realized
only when the experience is 'take,' i.e.,
talked-of, twice, considered along with its two
differing contexts respectively, by a new retrospective
experience, of which that whole past
complication now forms the fresh content.
     The instant field of the present is at all times
what I call the 'pure' experience.  It is only
virtually or potentially either object or subject
as yet.  For the time being, it is plain, unqualified
actuality, or existence, a simple _that_.  In this

24
_naif_ immediacy it is of course _valid_; it is _there_,
we _act_ upon it; and the doubling of it in retrospection
into a state of mind and a reality intended
thereby, is just one of the acts.  The
'state of mind,' first treated explicitly as such
in retrospection, will stand corrected or confirmed,
and the retrospective experience in its
turn will get a similar treatment; but the immediate
experience in its passing is always
'truth,'(1) practical truth, _something_to_act_on_, at
its own movement.  If the world were then and
there to go out like a candle, it would remain
truth absolute and objective, for it would be
'the last word,' would have no critic, and no
one would ever oppose the thought in it to the
reality intended.(2)
     I think I may now claim to have made my

---
   1 Note the ambiguity of this term, which is taken sometimes
objectively and sometimes subjectively.
   2 In the _Psychological_Review_ for July [1904], Dr. R.B.Perry has
published a view of Consciousness which comes nearer to mine than any
other with which I am acquainted.  At present, Dr. Perry thinks, every
field of experience is so much 'fact.'  It becomes 'opinion' or
'thought' only in retrospection, when a fresh experience, thinking the
same object, alters and corrects it.  But the corrective experience
becomes itself in turn corrected, and thus the experience as a whole is
a process in which what is objective originally forever turns
subjective, turns into our apprehension of the object.  I strongly
recommend Dr. Perry's admirable article to my readers.
---

25
thesis clear.  Consciousness connotes a kind of
external relation, and does not denote a special
stuff or way of being.  _The_peculiarity_of_our_experiences,_
_that_they_not_only_are,_but_are_known,_
_which_their_'conscious'_quality_is_invoked_to_
_explain,_is_better_explained_by_their_relations_--
_these_relations_themselves_being_experiences_--_to_
_one_another_.

                              IV

     Were I now to go on to treat of the knowing
of perceptual by conceptual experiences, it
would again prove to be an affair of external
relations.  One experience would be the knower,
the other the reality known; and I could
perfectly well define, without the notion of
'consciousness,' what the knowing actually
and practically amounts to -- leading-towards,
namely, and terminating-in percepts, through
a series of transitional experiences which the
world supplies.  But I will not treat of this,
space being insufficient.(1)  I will rather consider

---
   1 I have given a partial account of the matter in _Mind_, vol. X, p.
27, 1885, and in the _Psychological_Review_, vol. II, p. 105, 1895.  See
also C.A. Strong's article in the
_Journal_of_Philosophy,_Psychology_and_Scientific_Methods_, vol I, p.
253, May 12, 1904.  I hope myself very soon to recur to the matter.
---

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

                              V

     First of all, this will be asked:  "If experience
has not 'conscious' existence, if it be not
partly made of 'consciousness,' of what then
is it made?  Matter we know, and thought we
know, and conscious content we know, but
neutral and simple 'pure experience' is something
we know not at all.  Say _what_ it consists
of -- for it must consist of something -- or be
willing to give it up!"
     To this challenge the reply is easy.  Although
for fluency's sake I myself spoke early in this
article of a stuff of pure experience, I have now
to say that there is no _general_ stuff of which experience
at large is made.  There are as many
stuffs as there are 'natures' in the things experienced.
If you ask what any one bit of pure
experience is made of, the answer is always the

27
same:  "It is made of _that_, of just what appears,
of space, of intensity, of flatness, brownness,
heaviness, or what not."  Shadworth Hodgson's
analysis here leaves nothing to be desired.(1)
Experience is only a collective name
for all these sensible natures, and save for time
and space (and, if you like, for 'being') there
appears no universal element of which all
things are made.

                              VI

     The next objection is more formidable, in
fact it sounds quite crushing when one hears
it first.
     "If it be the self-same piece of pure experience,
taken twice over, that serves now as thought and now as thing" -- so the
objection runs -- "how comes it that its attributes
should differ so fundamentally in the two takings.
As thing, the experience is extended; as
thought, it occupies no space or place.  As
thing, it is red, hard, heavy; but who ever heard

28
of a red, hard or heavy thought?  Yet even
now you said that an experience is made of
just what appears, and what appears is just
such adjectives.  How can the one experience
in its thing-function be made of them, consist
of them, carry them as its own attributes, while
in its thought-function it disowns them and
attributes them elsewhere.  There is a self-contradiction
here from which the radical dualism
of thought and thing is the only truth that can
save us.  Only if the thought is one kind of
being can the adjectives exist in it 'intentionally'
(to use the scholastic term); only if the
thing is another kind, can they exist in it constituitively
and energetically.  No simple subject
can take the same adjectives and at one
time be qualified by it, and at another time be
merely 'of' it, as of something only meant or
known."
     The solution insisted on by this objector, like
many other common-sense solutions, grows
the less satisfactory the more one turns it in
one's mind.  To begin with, _are_ thought and
thing as heterogeneous as is commonly said?

29
     No one denies that they have some categories
in common.  Their relations to time are identical.
Both, moreover, may have parts (for
psychologists n general treat thoughts as having
them); and both may be complex or simple.
Both are of kinds, can be compared, added and
subtracted and arranged in serial orders.  All
sorts of adjectives qualify our thoughts which
appear incompatible with consciousness, being
as such a bare diaphaneity.  For instance, they
are natural and easy, or laborious.  They are
beautiful, happy, intense, interesting, wise,
idiotic, focal, marginal, insipid, confused,
vague, precise, rational, causal, general, particular,
and many things besides.  Moreover,
the chapters on 'Perception' in the psychology-
books are full of facts that make for the
essential homogeneity of thought with thing.
How, if 'subject' and 'object' were separated
'by the whole diameter of being,' and had no
attributes and common, could it be so hard to
tell, in a presented and recognized material
object, what part comes in thought the sense-
organs and what part comes 'out of one's own

30
head'?  Sensations and apperceptive ideas fuse
here so intimately that you can no more tell
where one begins and the other ends, than you
can tell, in those cunning circular panoramas
that have lately been exhibited, where the real
foreground and the painted canvas join together.(1)
     Descartes for the first time defined thought
as the absolutely unextended, and later philosophers
have accepted the description as correct.
But what possible meaning has it to say
that, when we think of a foot-rule or a square
yard, extension is not attributable to our
thought?  Of every extended object the _adequate_
mental picture must have all the extension
of the object itself.  The difference between
objective and subjective extension is
one of relation to a context solely.  In the mind
the various extents maintain no necessarily
stubborn order relatively to each other, while

---
   1 Spencer's proof of his 'Transfigured Realism' (his  doctrine that
there is an absolutely non-mental reality) comes to mind as a splendid
instance of the impossibility of establishing radical heterogeneity
between thought and thing.  All his painfully accumulated points of
difference run gradually into their opposites, and are full of
exceptions.
---

31
in the physical world they bound each other
stably, and, added together, make the great
enveloping Unit which we believe in and call
real Space.  As 'outer,' they carry themselves
adversely, so to speak, to one another, exclude
one another and maintain their distances;
while, as 'inner,' their order is loose, and they
form a _durcheinander_ in which unity is lost.(1)
But to argue from this that inner experience is
absolutely inextensive seems to me little short
of absurd.  The two worlds differ, not by the
presence or absence of extension, but by the
relations of the extensions which in both
worlds exist.
     Does not this case of extension now put us
on the track of truth in the case of other qualities?
It does; and I am surprised that the facts
should not have been noticed long ago.  Why,
for example, do we call a fire hot, and water
wet, and yet refuse to say that our mental
state, when it is 'of' these objects, is either wet
or hot?  'Intentionally,' at any rate, and when

32
the mental state is a vivid image, hotness and
wetness are in it just as much as they are in the
physical experience.  The reason is this, that,
as the general chaos of all our experiences gets
sifted, we find that there are some fires that
will always burn sticks and always warm our
bodies, and that there are some waters that
will always put out fires; while there are other
fires and waters that will not act at all.  The
general group of experiences that _act_, that do
not only possess their natures intrinsically, but
wear them adjectively and energetically, turning
them against one another, comes inevitably
to be contrasted with the group whose members,
having identically the same natures, fail
to manifest them in the 'energetic' way.(1)  I
make for myself now an experience of blazing
fire; I place it near my body; but it does not
warm me in the least.  I lay a stick upon it, and
the stick either burns or remains green, as I
please.  I call up water, and pour it on the fire,
and absolutely no difference ensues.  I account

33
for all such facts by calling this whole train
of experiences unreal, a mental train.  Mental
fire is what won't burn real sticks; mental water
is what won't necessarily (though of course
it may) put out even a mental fire.  Mental
knives may be sharp, but they won't cut real
wood.  Mental triangles are pointed, but their
points won't wound.  With 'real' objects, on
the contrary, consequences always accrue; and
thus the real experiences get sifted from the
mental ones, the things from out thoughts of
them, fanciful or true, and precipitated together
as the stable part of the whole experience-
chaos, under the name of the physical
world.  Of this our perceptual experiences are
the nucleus, they being the originally _strong_
experiences.  We add a lot of conceptual experiences
to them, making these strong also in
imagination, and building out the remoter
parts of the physical world by their means;
and around this core of reality the world
of laxly connected fancies and mere rhapsodical
objects floats like a bank of clouds.
In the clouds, all sorts of rules are violated

34
which in the core are kept.  Extensions there
can be indefinitely located; motion there obeys
no Newton's laws.

                             VII

     There is a peculiar class of experience to
which, whether we take them as subjective or
as objective, we _assign their several natures as
attributes, because in both contexts they affect
their associates actively, though in neither
quite as 'strongly' or as sharply as things affect
one another by their physical energies.  I
refer here to _appreciations_, which form an ambiguous
sphere of being, belonging with emotion
on the one hand, and having objective 'value'
on the other, yet seeming not quite inner nor
quite outer, as if a diremption had begun but
had not made itself complete.
     Experiences of painful objects, for example,
are usually also painful experiences; perceptions
of loveliness, of ugliness, tend to pass
muster as lovely or as ugly perceptions; intuitions
of the morally lofty are lofty intuitions.

35
Sometimes the adjective wanders as if uncertain
where to fix itself.  Shall we speak of
seductive visions or of visions of seductive
things?  Of healthy thoughts or of thoughts
of healthy objects?  Of good impulses, or of
impulses towards the good?  Of feelings of
anger, or of angry feelings?  Both in the mind
and in the thing, these natures modify their
context, exclude certain associates and determine
others, have their mates and incompatibles.
Yet not as stubbornly as in the case of
physical qualities, for beauty and ugliness,
love and hatred, pleasant and painful can, in
certain complex experiences, coexist.
     If one were to make an evolutionary construction
of how a lot of originally chaotic pure
experience became gradually differentiated
into an orderly inner and outer world, the
whole theory would turn upon one's success in
explaining how or why the quality of an experience,
once active, could become less so, and,
from being an energetic attribute in some
cases, elsewhere lapse into the status of an

36
inert or merely internal 'nature.'  This would
be the 'evolution' of the psychical from the
bosom of the physical, in which the esthetic,
moral and otherwise emotional experiences
would represent a halfway stage.

                            VIII

     But a last cry of _non_possumus_ will probably
go up from many readers.  "All very pretty as
a piece of ingenuity," they will say, "but our
consciousness itself intuitively contradicts you.
We, for our part, _know_ that we are conscious.
We _feel_ our thought, flowing as a life within us,
in absolute contrast with the objects which it
so unremittingly escorts.  We can not be faithless
to this immediate intuition.  The dualism
is a fundamental _datum_:  Let no man join what
God has put asunder."
     My reply to this is my last word, and I
greatly grieve that to many it will sound materialistic.
I can not help that, however, for
I, too, have my intuitions and I must obey
them.  Let the case be what it may in others, I
am as confident as I am of anything that, in

37
myself, the stream of thinking (which I recognize
emphatically as a phenomenon) is only a
careless name for what, when scrutinized, reveals
itself to consist chiefly of the stream of
my breathing.  The 'I think' which Kant said
must be able to accompany all my objects, is
the 'I breath' which actually does accompany
them.  There are other internal facts
besides breathing (intracephalic muscular adjustments,
etc., of which I have said a word in
my larger Psychology), and these increase the
assets of 'consciousness,' so far as the latter is
subject to immediate perception; but breath,
which was ever the original of 'spirit,' breath
moving outwards, between the glottis and the
nostrils, is, I am persuaded, the essence out of
which philosophers have constructed the entity
known to them as consciousness.  _That_
_entity_is_fictitious,_while_thoughts_in_the_concrete_
_are_fully_real.__But_thoughts_in_the_concrete_are_
_made_of_the_same_stuff_as_things_are.
     I wish I might believe myself to have made

38
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.

39
                                   II

                       A WORLD OF PURE EXPERIENCE

IT is difficult not to notice a curious unrest in
the philosophic atmosphere of the time, always
loosening of old landmarks, a softening of oppositions,
a mutual borrowing from one another reflecting
on the part of systems anciently closed,
and an interest in new suggestions, however
vague, as if the one thing sure were the inadequacy
of the extant school-solutions.  The dissatisfaction
with these seems due for the most
part to a feeling that they are too abstract and
academic.  Life is confused and superabundant,
and what the younger generation appears to
crave is more of the temperament of life in its
philosophy, even thought it were at some cost
of logical rigor and of formal purity.  Transcendental

40
idealism is inclining to let the world
wag incomprehensibly, in spite of its Absolute
Subject and his unity of purpose.  Berkeleyan
idealism is abandoning the principle of parsimony
and dabbling in panpsychic speculations.
Empiricism flirts with teleology; and,
strangest of all, natural realism, so long decently
buried, raises its head above the turf,
and finds glad hands outstretched from the
most unlikely quarters to help it to its feet
again.  We are all biased by our personal feelings,
I know, and I am personally discontented
with extant solutions; so I seem to read the
signs of a great unsettlement, as if the upheaval
of more real conceptions and more fruitful
methods were imminent, as if a true landscape
might result, less clipped, straight-edged
and artificial.
     If philosophy be really on the eve of any considerable
rearrangement, the time should be
propitious for any one who has suggestions of
his own to bring forward.  For many years past
my mind has bee growing into a certain type
of _Weltanschauung_.  Rightly or wrongly, I have
41
got to the point where I can hardly see things
in any other pattern.  I propose, therefore, to
describe the pattern as clearly as I can consistently
with great brevity, and to throw my
description into the bubbling vat of publicity
where, jostled by rivals and torn by critics, it
will eventually either disappear from notice,
or else, if better luck befall it, quietly subside
to the profundities, and serve as a possible
ferment of new growths or a nucleus of new
crystallization.

                    I. RADICAL EMPIRICISM

     I give the name of 'radical empiricism' to
my _Weltanschauung_.  Empiricism is known as
the opposite of rationalism.  Rationalism tends
to emphasize universals and to make wholes
prior to parts in the order of logic as well as in
that of being.  Empiricism, on the contrary,
lays the explanatory stress upon the part, the
element, the individual, and treats the whole
as a collection and the universal as an abstraction.
My description of things, accordingly,
starts with the parts and makes of the whole

42
a being of the second order.  It is essentially
a mosaic philosophy, a philosophy of plural
facts, like that of Hume and his descendants,
who refer these facts neither to Substances in
which they inhere nor to an Absolute Mind
that creates them as its objects.  But it differs
from the Humian type of empiricism in one
particular which makes me add the epithet
radical.
     To be radical, an empiricism must neither
admit into its constructions any element that
is not directly experienced, nor exclude from
them any element that is directly experienced.
For such a philosophy, _the_relations_that_connect_
_experiences_must_themselves_be_experienced_relations,_
_and_any_kind_of_relation_experienced_must_
_be_accounted_as_'real'_as_anything_else_in_the_
_system.  Elements may indeed be redistributed,
the original placing of things getting corrected,
but a real place must be found for every kind
of thing experienced, whether term or relation,
in the final philosophic arrangement.
     Now, ordinary empiricism, in spite of the
fact that conjunctive and disjunctive relations

43
present themselves as being fully co-ordinate
parts of experience, has always shown a tendency
to do away with the connections of
things, and to insist most on the disjunctions.
Berkeley's nominalism, Hume's statement that
whatever things we distinguish are as 'loose
and separate' as if they had 'no manner of connection.'
James Mill's denial that similars have
anything 'really' in common, the resolution
of the causal tie into habitual sequence, John
Mill's account of both physical things and
selves as composed of discontinuous possibilities,
and the general pulverization of all Experience
by association and the mind-dust
theory, are examples of what I mean.
     The natural result of such a world-picture
has been the efforts of rationalism to correct
its incoherencies by the addition of trans-
experiential agents of unification, substances,
intellectual categories and powers, or Selves;

44
whereas, if empiricism had only been radical
and taken everything that comes without disfavor,
conjunction as well as separation, each
at its face value, the results would have called
for no such artificial correction.  _Radical_empiricism,_
as I understand it, _does_full_justice_to_
_conjunctive_relations_, without, however, treating
them as rationalism always tends to treat
them, as being true in some supernal way, as if
the unity of things and their variety belonged
to different orders of truth and vitality altogether.

                    II. CONJUNCTIVE RELATIONS

     Relations are of different degrees of intimacy.
Merely to be 'with' one another in a
universe of discourse is the most external relation
that terms can have, and seems to involve
nothing whatever as to farther consequences.
Simultaneity and time-interval come next, and
then space-adjacency and distance.  After
them, similarity and difference, carrying the
possibility of many inferences.  Then relations
of activity, tying terms into series involving

45
change, tendency, resistance, and the causal
order generally.  Finally, the relation experienced
between terms that form states of mind,
and are immediately conscious of continuing
each other.  The organization of the Self as a
system of memories, purposes, strivings, fulfilments
or disappointments, is incidental to
this most intimate of all relations, the terms
of which seem in many cases actually to compenetrate
and suffuse each other's being.
     Philosophy has always turned on grammatical
particles.  With, near, next, like, from,
towards, against, because, for, through, my --
these words designate types of conjunctive
relation arranged in a roughly ascending order
of intimacy and inclusiveness.  _A_priori, we can
imagine a universe of withness but no nextness;
or one of nextness but no likeness, or of likeness
with no activity, or of activity with no purpose,
or of purpose with no ego.  These would
be universes, each with its own grade of unity.
The universe of human experience is, by one or
another of its parts, of each and all these grades.

46
Whether or not it possibly enjoys some still
more absolute grade of union does not appear
upon the surface.
     Taken as it does appear, our universe is to a
large extent chaotic.  No one single type of connection
runs through all the experiences that
compose it.  If we take space-relations, they
fail to connect minds into any regular system.
Causes and purposes obtain only among special
series of facts.  The self-relation seems
extremely limited and does not link two different
selves together.  _Prima_facie, if you should
liken the universe of absolute idealism to an
aquarium, a crystal globe in which goldfish
are swimming, you would have to compare the
empiricist universe to something more like one
of those dried human heads with which the
Dyaks of Borneo deck their lodges.  The skull
forms a solid nucleus; but innumerable feathers,
leaves, strings, beads, and loose appendices
of every description float and dangle
from it, and, save that they terminate in it, seem
to have nothing to do with one another.  Even
so my experiences and yours float and dangle,

47
terminating, it is true, in a nucleus of common
perception, but for the most part out of sight
and irrelevant and unimaginable to one another.
This imperfect intimacy, this bare relation
of _withness) between some parts of the
sum total of experience and other parts, is the
fact that ordinary empiricism over-emphasizes
against rationalism, the latter always tending
to ignore it unduly.  Radical empiricism, on
the contrary, is fair to both the unity and the
disconnection.  It finds no reason for treating
either as illusory.  It allots to each its definite
sphere of description, and agrees that there
appear to be actual forces at work which tend,
as time goes on, to make the unity greater.
     The conjunctive relation that has given
most trouble to philosophy is _the_co-conscious_
_transition_, so to call it, by which one experience
passes into another when both belong to the
same self.  My experiences and your experiences are
'with' each other in various external ways, but
mine pass into mine, and yours pass into yours
in a way in which yours and mine never pass

48
into one another.  Within each of our personal
histories, subject, object, interest and purpose
_are_continuous_or_may_be_continuous_.(1)  Personal
histories are processes of change in time, and
_the_change_itself_is_one_of_the_things_immediately_
_experienced._  'Change' in this case means continuous
as opposed to discontinuous transition.
But continuous transition is one sort of a
conjunctive relation; and to be a radical empiricist
means to hold fast to this conjunctive
relation of all others, for this is the strategic
point, the position through which, if a hole be
made, all the corruptions of dialectics and all
the metaphysical fictions pour into our philosophy.
The holding fast to this relation means
taking it at its face value, neither less nor more;
and to take it at its face value means first of all
to take it just as we feel it, and not to confuse
ourselves with abstract talk _about_ it, involving
words that drive us to invent secondary
conceptions in order to neutralize their

---
   1 The psychology books have of late described the facts here with
approximate adequacy.  I may refer to the chapters on 'The Stream of
Thought' and on the Self in my own _Principles_of_Psychology_, as well
as to S.H.Hodgson's _Metaphysics_of_Experience_, vol I., ch. VII and
VIII.
---

49
suggestions and to make our actual experience
again seem rationally possible.
what I do feel simply when a later moment
of my experience succeeds an earlier one is that
though they are two moments, the transition
from the one to the other is _continuous_.  Continuity
here is a definite sort of experience; just
as definite as is the _discontinuity-experience_
which I find it impossible to avoid when I seek
to make the transition from an experience of
my own to one of yours.  In this latter case I
have to get on and off again, to pass from a
thing lived to another thing only conceived,
and the break is positively experienced and
noted.  Though the functions exerted by my
experience and by yours may be the same (.e.g.,
the same objects known and the same purposes
followed), yet the sameness has in this case to
be ascertained expressly (and often with difficulty
and uncertainly) after the break has been
felt; whereas in passing from one of my own
moments to another the sameness of object and
interest is unbroken, and both the earlier and
the later experience are of things directly lived.

50
     There is no other _nature_, no other whatness
than this absence of break and this sense of
continuity in that most intimate of all conjunctive
relations, the passing of one experience
into another when the belong to the same self.
And this whatness is real empirical 'content,'
just as the whatness of separation and discontinuity
is real content in the contrasted case.
Practically to experience one's personal continuum
in this living way is to know the originals
of the ideas of continuity and sameness, to
know what the words stand for concretely, to
own all that they can ever mean.  But all experiences
have their conditions; and over-subtle
intellects, thinking about the facts here, and
asking how they are possible, have ended by
substituting a lot of static objects of conception
for the direct perceptual experiences.
"Sameness," they have said, "must be a stark
numerical identity; it can't run on from next to
next.  Continuity can't mean mere absence of
gap; for if you say two things are in immediate
contact, _at_ the contact how can they be two?
If, on the other hand, you put a relation of

51
transition between them, that itself is a third
thing, and needs to be related or hitched to its
terms. An infinite series is involved," and so
on.  The result is that from difficulty to difficulty,
the plain conjunctive experience has
been discredited by both schools, the empiricists
leaving things permanently disjoined, and
the rationalist remedying the looseness by their
Absolutes or Substances, or whatever other fictitious
agencies of union may have employed.
From all which artificiality we can
be saved by a couple of simple-reflections:  first,
that conjunctions and separations are, at all
events, co-ordinate phenomena which, if we
take experiences at their face value, must be
accounted equally real; and second, that if we
insist on treating things as really separate
when they are given as continuously joined,
invoking, when union is required, transcendental
principles to overcome the separateness
we have assumed, then we ought to stand
ready to perform the converse act.  We ought
to invoke higher principles of _dis_union, also, to

52
make our merely experienced _dis_junctions more
truly real.  Failing thus, we ought to let the
originally given continuities stand on their own
bottom.  We have no right to be lopsided or to
blow capriciously hot and cold.

                III. THE COGNITIVE RELATION

     The first great pitfall from which such a radical
standing by experience will save us is an
artificial conception of the _relations_between_
_knower_and_known_.  Throughout the history of
philosophy the subject and its object have been
treated as absolutely discontinuous entities;
and thereupon the presence of the latter to the
former, or the 'apprehension' by the former of
the latter, has assumed a paradoxical character
which all sorts of theories had to be invented
to overcome.  Representative theories
put a mental 'representation,' 'image,' or
'content' into the gap, as a sort of intermediary.
Common-sense theories left the gap
untouched, declaring our mind able to clear
it by a self-transcending leap.  Transcendentalist
theories left it impossible to traverse by

53
finite knowers, and brought an Absolute in to
perform the saltatory act.  All the while, in
the very bosom of the finite experience, every
conjunction required to make the relation intelligible
is given in full.  Either the knower
and the known are:
     (1) The self-same piece of experience taken
twice over in different contexts; or they are
     (2) two pieces of _actual_ experience belonging
to the same subject, with definite tracts of
conjunctive transitional experience between
them; or
     (3) the known is a _possible_ experience either
of that subject or another, to which the said
conjunctive transitions _would_lead, if sufficiently
prolonged.
     To discuss all the ways in which one experience
may function as the knower of another,
would be incompatible with the limits
of this essay.91)  I have just treated of type 1, the

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

54
kind of knowledge called perception.  This is
the type of case in which the mind enjoys direct
'acquaintance' with a present object.  In
the other types the mind has 'knowledge-
about' an object not immediately there.  Of
type 2, the simplest sort of conceptual knowledge,
I have given some account in two
articles.(1)  Type 3 can always formally
and hypothetically be reduced to type 2, so
that a brief description of that type will put
the present reader sufficiently at my point
of view, and make him see what the actual
meanings of the mysterious cognitive relation
may be.
     Suppose me to be sitting here in my library

---
   1  These articles and their doctrine, unnoticed apparently by any one
else, have lately gained favorable comment from Professor Strong.  Dr.
Dickinson S. Miller has independently thought out the same results,
which Strong accordingly dubs the James-Miller theory of cognition.
---
55
at Cambridge, at ten minutes' walk from
'Memorial Hall,' and to be thinking truly of
the latter object.  My mind may have before
it only the name, or it may have a clear image,
or it may have a very dim image of the hall, but
such intrinsic differences in the image make no
difference in its cognitive function.  Certain
_extrinsic_ phenomena, special experiences of
conjunction, are what impart to the image, be
it what it may, its knowing office.
     For instance, if you ask me what hall I mean
by my image, and I call tell you nothing; or if I
fail to point or lead you towards the Harvard
Delta; or if, being led by you, I am uncertain
whether the Hall I see be what I had in mind
or not; you would rightly deny that I had
'meant' that particular hall at all, even though
my mental image might to some degree have
resembled it.  The resemblance would count in
that case as coincidental merely, for all sorts
of things of a kind resemble one another in this
world without being held for that reason to
take cognizance of one another.
     On the other hand, if I can lead you to the

56
hall, and tell you of its history and present
uses; if in its presence I feel my idea, however
imperfect it may have been, to have led hither
and to be now _terminated_; if the associates of
the image and of the felt hall run parallel, so
that each term of the one context corresponds
serially, as I walk, with an answering term of
the others; why then my soul was prophetic,
and my idea must be, and by common consent
would be, called cognizant of reality.  That percept
was what I _meant_, for into it my idea has
passed by conjunctive experiences of sameness
and fulfilled intention.  Nowhere is there jar,
but every later moment continues and corroborates
an earlier one.
     In this continuing and corroborating, taken
in no transcendental sense, but denoting definitely
felt transitions, _lies_all_that_the_knowing_
_of_a_percept_by_an_idea_can_possibly_contain_or_
_signify_.  Wherever such transitions are felt, the
first experience _knows_ that last one.  Where they
do not, or where even as possibles they can not,
intervene, there can be no pretence of knowing.
In this latter case the extremes will be connected,

57
if connected at all, by inferior relations
-- bare likeness or succession, or by 'withness'
alone.  Knowledge of sensible realities thus
comes to life inside the tissue of experience.  It
is _made_; and made by relations that unroll
themselves in time.  Whenever certain intermediaries
are given, such that, as they develop
towards their terminus, there is experience
from point to point of one direction followed,
and finally of one process fulfilled, the result
is that _their_starting-point_thereby_becomes_a_
_knower_and_their_terminus_an_object_meant_or_
_known_.  That is all that knowing (in the simple
case considered) can be known-as, that is
the whole of its nature, put into experiential
terms.  Whenever such is the sequence of our
experiences we may freely say that we had the
terminal object 'in mind' from the outset, even
although _at_ the outset nothing was there in us
but a flat piece of substantive experience like
any other, with no self-transcendency about it,
and ny mystery save the mystery of coming
into existence and of being gradually followed
by other pieces of substantive experience, with

58
conjunctively transitional experiences between.
That is what we _mean_ here by the object's
being 'in mind.'  Of any deeper more real way
of being in mind we have no positive conception,
and we have no right to discredit our
actual experience by talking of such a way
at all.
     I know that many a reader will rebel at this.
"Mere intermediaries," he will say, "even
though they be feelings of continuously growing
fulfilment, only _separate_ the knower from
the known, whereas what we have in knowledge
is a kind of immediate touch of the one by the
other, an 'apprehension' in the etymological
sense of the word, a leaping of the chasm as by
lightning, an act by which two terms are smitten
into one, over the head of their distinctness.
All these dead intermediaries of yours
are out of each other, and outside of their
termini still."
     But do not such dialectic difficulties remind
us of the dog dropping his bone and snapping
at its image in the water?  If we knew any more
real kind of union _aliunde_, we might be entitled

59
to brand all our empirical unions as a sham.
But unions by continuous transition are the
only ones we know of, whether in this matter
of a knowledge-about that terminates in an
acquaintance, whether in personal identity, in
logical predication through the copula 'is,' or
elsewhere.  If anywhere there were more absolute
unions realized, they could only reveal
themselves to us by just such conjunctive
results.  These are what the unions are _worth_,
these are all that _we_can_ever_practically_mean_
by union, by continuity.  Is it not time to
repeat what Lotze said of substances, that to
_act_like_ one is to _be_ one?  Should we not say
here that to be experienced as continuous is to
be really continuous, in a world where experience
and reality come to the same thing?  In
a picture gallery a painted hook will serve to
hang a painted chain by, a painted cable will
hold a painted ship.  In a world where both the
terms and their distinctions are affairs of experience,
conjunctions that are experienced
must be at least as real as anything else.  They

60
will be 'absolutely' real conjunctions, if we have
no transphenomenal Absolute ready, to derealize
the whole experienced world by, at a stroke.
If, on the other hand, we had such an Absolute,
not one of our opponents' theories of knowledge
could remain standing any better than
ours could; for the distinctions as well as the
conjunctions of experience would impartially
fall its prey.  The whole question of how 'one'
thing can know 'another' would cease to be a
real one at all in a world where otherness itself
was an illusion.(1)
     So much for the essentials of the cognitive
relation, where the knowledge is conceptual in
type, or forms knowledge 'about' an object.  It
consists in intermediary experiences (possible,
if not actual) of continuously developing progress,
and, finally, of fulfilment, when the sensible
percept, which is the object, is reached.
The percept here not only _verifies_ the concept,
proves its function of knowing that percept to

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

61
be true, but the percept's existence as the
terminus of the chain of intermediaries _creates_
the function.  Whatever terminates that chain
was, because it now proves itself to be, what
the concept 'had in mind.'
     The towering importance for human life of
this kind of knowing lies in the fact that an
experience that knows another can figure as
its _representative_, not in any quasi-miraculous
'epistemological' sense, but in the definite
practical sense of being its _substitute_ in various
operations, sometimes physical and sometimes
mental, which lead us to its associates and results.
By experimenting on our ideas of reality,
we may save ourselves the trouble of experimenting
on the real experiences which they
severally mean.  The ideas form related systems,
corresponding point for point to the systems
which the realities form; and by letting an
ideal term call up its associates systematically,
we may be led to a terminus which the corresponding
real term would have led to in case
we had operated on the real world.  And this
brings us to the general question of substitution.
62
            IV. SUBSTITUTION

     In Taine's brilliant book on 'Intelligence,'
substitution was for the first time named as
a cardinal logical function, though of course
the facts had always been familiar enough.
What, exactly, in a system of experiences, does
the 'substitution' of one of them for another
mean?
     According to my view, experience as a whole
is a process in time, whereby innumerable
particular terms lapse and are superseded by
others that follow upon them by transitions
which, whether disjunctive or conjunctive in
content, are themselves experiences, and must
in general be accounted at least as real as
the terms which they relate.  What the nature
of the event called 'superseding' signifies, depends
altogether on the kind of transition
that obtains.  Some experiences simply abolish
their predecessors without continuing them
in any way.  Others are felt to increase or to
enlarge their meaning, to carry out their purpose,
or to bring us nearer to their goal.  They

63
'represent' them, and may fulfil their function
better than they fulfilled it themselves.  But to
'fulfil a function' in a world of pure experience
can be conceived and defined in only one possible
way.  IN such a world transitions and
arrivals (or terminations) are the only events
that happen, though they happen by so many
sorts of path.  The only experience that one experience
can perform is to lead into another
experience; and the only fulfilment we can
speak of is the reaching of a certain experienced
end.  When one experience leads to (or
can lead to) the same end as another, they
agree in function.  But the whole system of
experiences as they are immediately given
presents itself as a quasi-chaos through which
one can pass out of an initial term in many
directions and yet end in the same terminus,
moving from next to next by a great many
possible paths.
     Either one of these paths might be a functional
substitute for another, and to follow one
rather than another might on occasion be
an advantageous thing to do.  As a matter of

64
fact, and in a general way, the paths that
run through conceptual experiences, that is,
through 'thoughts' or 'ideas' that 'know' the
things in which they terminate, are highly advantageous
paths to follow.  Not only do they
yield inconceivably rapid transitions; but, owing
to the 'universal' character(1) which they
frequently possess, and to their capacity for
association with one another in great systems,
they outstrip the tardy consecutions of the
things themselves, and sweep us on towards
our ultimate termini in a far more labor-saving
way than the following of trains of sensible
perception ever could.  Wonderful are the new
cuts and the short-circuits which the thought-
paths make.  Most thought-paths, it is true,
are substitutes for nothing actual; they end
outside the real world altogether, in wayward
fancies, utopias, fictions or mistakes.  But
where they do re-enter reality and terminate
therein, we substitute them always; and with

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

65
these substitutes we pass the greater number
of our hours.
     This is why I called our experiences, taken
together, a quasi-chaos.  There is vastly
more discontinuity in the sum total of experiences
than we commonly suppose.  The objective
nucleus of every man's experience, his own
body, is, it is true, a continuous percept; and
equally continuous as a percept (thought we
may be inattentive to it) is the material environment
of that body, changing by gradual
transition when the body moves.  But the
distant parts of the physical world are at all
times absent from us, and form conceptual
objects merely, into the perceptual reality of
which our life inserts itself at points discrete
and relatively rare.  Round their several objective
nuclei, partly shared and common and
partly discrete, of the real physical world, innumerable
thinkers, pursuing their several lines
of physically true cogitation, trace paths that
intersect one another only at discontinuous
perceptual points, and the rest of the time are
quite incongruent; and around all the nuclei

66
of shared 'reality,' as around the Dyak's head
of my late metaphor, floats the vast cloud of
experiences that are wholly subjective, that
are non-substitutional, that find not even an
eventual ending for themselves in the perceptual
world -- there mere day-dreams and
joys and sufferings and wishes of the individual
minds.  These exist _with_ one another, indeed,
and with the objective nuclei, but out
of them it is probable that to all eternity no
interrelated system of any kind will every be
made.
     This notion of the purely substitutional or
conceptual physical world brings us to the most
critical of all steps in the development of
a philosophy of pure experience.  The paradox
of self-transcendency in knowledge comes back
upon us here, but I think that our notions of
pure experience and of substitution, and our
radically empirical view of conjunctive transitions,
are _Denkmittel_ that will carry us safely
through the pass.

67
          V.  WHAT OBJECTIVE REFERENCE IS.

     Whosoever feels his experience to be something
substitutional even while he has it, may
be said to have an experience that reaches
beyond itself.  From inside of its own entity it
says 'more,' and postulates reality existing elsewhere.
For the transcendentalist, who holds
knowing to consist in a _salto_mortale_ across an
'epistemological chasm,' such an idea presents
no difficulty; but it seems at first sight as if it
might be inconsistent with an empiricism like
our own.  Have we not explained that conceptual
knowledge is made such wholly by the
existence of things that fall outside of the
knowing experience itself -- by intermediary
experience and by a terminus that fulfils?
Can the knowledge be there before these elements
that constitute its being have come?
And, if knowledge be not there, how can objective
reference occur?
     The key to this difficulty lies in the distinction
between knowing as verified and completed,
and the same knowing as in transit

68
and on its way.  To recur to the Memorial
Hall example lately used, it is only when our
idea of the Hall has actually terminated in the
percept that we know 'for certain' that from
the beginning it was truly cognitive of _that_.
Until established by the end of the process, its
quality of knowing that, or indeed of knowing
anything, could still be doubted; and yet the
knowing really was there, as the result now
shows.  We were _virtual_ knowers of the Hall
long before we were certified to have been its
actual knowers, by the percept's retroactive
validating power.  Just so we are 'mortal' all
the time, by reason of the virtuality of the
inevitable event which will make us so when
it shall have come.
     Now the immensely greater part of all our
knowing never gets beyond this virtual stage.
It never is completed or nailed down.  I speak
not merely of our ideas of imperceptibles like
ether-waves or dissociated 'ions,' or of 'ejects'
like the contents of our neighbors' minds; I
speak also of ideas which we might verify if we
would take the trouble, but which we hold for

69
true although unterminated perceptually, because
nothing says 'no' to us, and there is no
contradicting truth in sight.  _To_continue_thinking_
_unchallenged_is,_ninety-nine_times_out_of_a_
_hundred,_our_practical_substitute_for_knowing_in_
_the_completed_sense_.  As each experience runs by
cognitive transition into the next one, and we
nowhere feel a collision with what we elsewhere
count as truth or fact, we commit ourselves to
the current as if the port were sure.  We live,
as it were, upon the front edge of an advancing
wave-crest, and our sense of a determinate
direction in falling forward is all we cover of
the future of our path.  It is as if a differential
quotient should be conscious and treat itself as
an adequate substitute for a traced-out curve.
Our experience, _inter_alia_, is of variations of
rate and of direction, and lives in these transitions
more than in the journey's end.  The experiences
of tendency are sufficient to act upon
-- what more could we have _done_ at those
moments even if the later verification comes
complete?
     This is what, as a radical empiricist, I say to

70
the charge that the objective reference which
is so flagrant a character of our experience involves
a chasm and a mortal leap.  A positively
conjunctive transition involves neither chasm
nor leap.  Being the very original of what we
mean by continuity, it makes a continuum
wherever it appears.  I know full well that such
brief words as these will leave the hardened
transcendentalist unshaken.  Conjunctive experiences
_separate_ their terms, he will still say:  they
are third things interposed, that have themselves
to be conjoined by new links, and to invoke
them makes our trouble infinitely worse.
To 'feel' our motion forward is impossible.
Motion implies terminus; and how can terminus
be felt before we have arrived?  The barest
start and sally forwards, the barest tendency
to leave the instant, involves the chasm and
the leap.  Conjunctive transitions are the most
superficial of appearances, illusions of our sensibility
which philosophical reflection pulverizes
at a touch.  Conception is our only trustworthy
instrument, conception and the Absolute
working hand in hand.  Conception disintegrates

71
experience utterly, but its disjunctions
are easily overcome again when the Absolute
takes up the task.
     Such transcendentalists I must leave, provisionally
at least, in full possession of their
creed.  I have no space for polemics in this
article, so I shall simply formulate the empiricist
doctrine as my hypothesis, leaving it to
work or not work as it may.
     Objective reference, I say then, is an incident
of the fact that so much of our experience
comes as an insufficient and consists of
process and transition.  Our fields of experience
have no more definite boundaries than have
our fields of view.  Both are fringed forever by
a _more_ that continuously develops, and that
continuously supersedes them as life proceeds.
The relations, generally speaking, are as real
here as the terms are, and the only complaint
of the transcendentalist's with which I could
at all sympathize would be his charge that, by
first making knowledge consist in external
relations as I have done, and by then confessing

72
that nine-tenths of the time these are
not actually but only virtually there, I have
knocked the solid bottom out of the whole
business, and palmed off a substitute of knowledge
for the genuine thing.  Only the admission,
such a critic might say, that our ideas are
self-transcendent and 'true' already, in advance
of the experiences that are to terminate
them, can bring solidity back to knowledge
in a world like this, in which transitions and
terminations are only by exception fulfilled.
     This seems to me an excellent place for
applying the pragmatic method.  When a
dispute arises, that method consists in auguring
what practical consequences would be
different if one side rather than the other were
true.  If no difference can be thought of, the
dispute is a quarrel over words.  What then
would the self-transcendency affirmed to exist
in advance of all experiential mediation or
terminations, be _known-as?_  What would it
practically result in for _us_, were it true?
     It could only result in our orientation, in the
turning of our expectations and practical tendencies

73
into the right path; and the right path
here, so long as we and the object are not yet
face to face (or can never get face to face, as in
the case of ejects), would be the path that led
us into the object's nearest neighborhood.
Where direct acquaintance is lacking, 'knowledge
about' is the next best thing, and an
acquaintance with what actually lies about the
object, and is most closely related to it, puts
such knowledge within our gasp.  Ether-waves
and your anger, for example, are things in
which my thoughts will never _perceptually_ terminate,
but my concepts of them lead me to
their very brink, to the chromatic fringes and
to the hurtful words and deeds which are their
really next effects.
     Even if our ideas did in themselves carry the
postulated self-transcendency, it would still
remain true that their putting us into possession
of such effects _would_be_the_sole_cash-_
_value_of_the_self-transcendency_for_us_.  And this
cash-value, it is needless to say, is _verbatim_et_
_literatim_ what our empiricist account pays in.
On pragmatist principles, therefore, a dispute

74
over self-transcendency is a pure logomachy.
Call our concepts of ejective things self-
transcendent or the reverse, it makes no difference,
so long as we don't differ about the
nature of that exalted virtue's fruits -- fruits
for us, of course, humanistic fruits.  If an
Absolute were proved to exist for other reasons,
it might well appear that _his_ knowledge is
terminated in innumerable cases where ours is
still incomplete.  That, however, would be a
fact indifferent to our knowledge.  The latter
would grow neither worse nor better, whether
we acknowledged such an Absolute or left him
out.
     So the notion of a knowledge still _in_transitu_
and on its way joins hands here with that
notion of a 'pure experience' which I tried to
explain in my [essay] entitled 'Does Consciousness
Exist?'  The instant field of the
present is always experienced in its 'pure' state.
plain unqualified actuality, a simple _that_, as yet
undifferentiated into thing and thought, and
only virtually classifiable as objective fact or as
some one's opinion about fact.  This is as true

75
when the field is conceptual as when it is perceptual.
'Memorial Hall' is 'there' in my idea
as much as when I stand before it.  I proceed to
act on its account in either case.  Only in the
later experience that supersedes the present
one is this _naif_ immediacy retrospectively split
into two parts, a 'consciousness' and its 'content,'
and the content corrected or confirmed.
While still pure, or present, any experience --
mine, for example, of what I write about in
these very lines -- passes for 'truth.'  The
morrow may reduce it to 'opinion.'  The transcendentalist
in all his particular knowledges is
as liable to this reduction as I am:  his Absolute
does not save him.  Why, then, need he quarrel
with an account of knowing that merely leaves
it liable to this inevitable condition?  Why insist
that knowing is a static relation out of
time when it practically seems so much a function
of our active life?  For a thing to be valid,
says Lotze, is the same as to make itself
valid.  When the whole universe seems only
to be making itself valid and to be still incomplete
(else why its ceaseless changing?) why, of

76
all things, should knowing be exempt?  Why
should it not be making itself valid like everything
else?  That some parts of it may be already
valid or verified beyond dispute, the
empirical philosopher, of course, like any one
else, may always hope.

VI.  THE CONTERMINOUSNESS OF DIFFERENT MINDS

     With transition and prospect thus enthroned
in pure experience, it is impossible to subscribe
to the idealism of the English school.
Radical empiricism has, in fact, more affinities
with natural realism than with the views
of Berkeley or of Mill, and this can be easily
shown.
     For the Berkeleyan school, ideas (the verbal
equivalent of what I term experiences) are discontinuous.
The content of each is wholly immanent,
and there are no transitions with
which they are consubstantial and through
which their beings may unite.  Your Memorial
Hall and mine, even when both are percepts,
are wholly out of connection with each other.

77
Our lives are a congeries of solipsisms, out of
which in strict logic only a God could compose
a universe even of discourse.  No dynamic
currents run between my objects and your
objects.  Never can our minds meet in the
_same_.
     The incredibility of such a philosophy is
flagrant.  It is 'cold, strained, and unnatural'
in a supreme degree; and it may be doubted
whether even Berkeley himself, who took it
so religiously, really believed, when walking
through the streets of London, that his spirit
and the spirits of his fellow wayfarers had
absolutely different towns in view.
     To me the decisive reason in favor of our
minds meeting in _some_ common objects at least
is that, unless I make that supposition, I have
no motive for assuming that your mind exists
at all.  Why do I postulate your mind?  Because
I see your body acting in a certain way.
Its gestures, facial movements, words and conduct
generally, are 'expressive,' so I deem it
actuated as my own is, by an inner life like
mine.  This argument from analogy is my _reason_,

78
whether an instinctive belief runs before it
or not.  But what is 'your body' here but a
percept in _my_ field?  It is only as animating
_that_ object, _my_ object, that I have any occasion
to think of you at all.  If the body that you
actuate be not the very body that I see there,
but some duplicate body of your own with
which that has nothing to do, we belong to
different universes, you and I, and for me to
speak of you is folly.  Myriads of such universes
even now may coexist, irrelevant to one
another; my concern is solely with the universe
with which my own life is connected.
     In that perceptual part of _my_ universe which
I call _your_ body, your mind and my mind meet
and may be called conterminous.  Your mind
actuates that body and mine sees it; my
thoughts pass into it as into their harmonious
cognitive fulfilment; your emotions and volitions
pass into it as causes into their effects.
     But that percept hangs together with all our
other physical percepts.  They are of one stuff
with it; and if it be our common possession,
they must be so likewise.  For instance, your

79
hand lays hold of one end of a rope and my
hand lays hold of the other end.  We pull
against each other.  Can our two hands be
mutual objects in this experience, and the rope
not be mutual also?  What is true of the rope is
true of any other percept.  Your objects are
over and over again the same as mine.  If I
ask you _where_ some object of yours is, our old
Memorial Hall, for example, you point to _my_
Memorial Hall with _your_ hand which _I_see_.  If
you alter an object in your world, put out a
candle, for example, when I am present, _my_
candle _ipso_facto_ goes out.  It is only as altering
my objects that I guess you to exist.  If your
objects do not coalesce with my objects, if they
be not identically where mine are, they must
be proved to be positively somewhere else.
But no other location can be assigned for them,
so their place must be what it seems to be, the
same.(1)
     Practically, then, our minds meet in a world
of objects which they share in common, which

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

80
would still be there, if one or several of the
minds were destroyed.  I can see no formal
objection to this supposition's being literally
true.  On the principles which I am defending,
a 'mind' or 'personal consciousness' is the
name for a series of experiences run together by
certain definite transitions, and an objective
reality is a series of similar experiences knit by
different transitions.  If one and the same experience
can figure twice, once in a mental and
once in a physical context (as I have tried, in
my article on 'Consciousness,' to show that it
can), one does not see why it might not figure
thrice, or four times, or any number of times,
by running into as many different mental contexts,
just as the same point, lying at their
intersection, can be continued into many different
lines.  Abolishing any number of contexts
would not destroy the experience itself
or its other contexts, any more than abolishing
some of the point's linear continuations
would destroy the others, or destroy the point
itself.
     I well know the subtle dialectic which insists

81
that a term taken in another relation must
needs be an intrinsically different term.  The
crux is always the old Greek one, that the same
man can't be tall in relation to one neighbor,
and short in relation to another, for that would
make him tall and short at once.  In this essay
I can not stop to refute this dialectic, so I pass
on, leaving my flank for the time exposed.
But if my reader will only allow that the same
'_now_' both ends his past and begins his future;
or that, when he buys an acre of land from his
neighbor, it is the same acre that successively
figures in the two estates; or that when I pay
him a dollar, the same dollar goes into his
pocket that came out of mine; he will also in
consistency have to allow that the same object
may conceivably play a part in, as being related
to the rest of, any number of otherwise
entirely different minds.  This is enough for
my present point:  the common-sense notion of
minds sharing the same object offers no special
logical or epistemological difficulties of its
own; it stands or falls with the general possibility

82
of things being in conjunctive relation with
other things at all.
     In principle, then, let natural realism pass
for possible.  Your mind and mine _may_ terminate
in the same percept, not merely against it,
as if it were a third external thing, but by inserting
themselves into it and coalescing with
it, for such is the sort of conjunctive union that
appears to be experienced when a perceptual
terminus 'fulfils.'  Even so, two hawsers may
embrace the same pile, and yet neither one of
them touch any other part except that pile, of
what the other hawser is attached to.
     It is therefore not a formal question, but
a question of empirical fact solely, whether
when you and I are said to know the 'same'
Memorial Hall, our minds do terminate at or in
a numerically identical percept.  Obviously, as
a plain matter of fact, they do _not_.  Apart from
color-blindness and such possibilities, we see
the Hall in different perspectives.  You may be
on one side of it and I on another.  The percept
of each of us, as he sees the surface of the Hall,
is moreover only his provisional terminus.  The

83
next thing beyond my percept is not your
mind, but more percepts of my own into which
my first percept develops, the interior of the
Hall, for instance, or the inner structure of its
bricks and mortar.  If our minds were in a
literal sense _con_terminous, neither could get
beyond the percept which they had in common,
it would be an ultimate barrier between
them -- unless indeed they flowed over it and
became 'co-conscious' over a still larger part
of their content, which (thought-transference
apart) is not supposed to be the case.  In point
of fact the ultimate common barrier can always
be pushed, by both minds, farther than any
actual percept of either, until at last it resolves
itself into the mere notion of imperceptibles
like atoms or either, so that, where we do terminate
in percepts, our knowledge is only speciously
completed, being, in theoretic strictness,
only a virtual knowledge of those remoter
objects which conception carries out.
     Is natural realism, permissible in logic, refuted
then by empirical fact?  Do our minds
have no object in common after all?

84
     Yet, they certainly have _Space_ in common.
On pragmatic principles we are obliged to predicate
sameness wherever we can predicate no
assignable point of difference.  If two named
things have every quality and function indiscernible,
and are at the same time in the same
place, they must be written down as numerically
one thing under two different names.  But
there is no test discoverable, so far as I know,
by which it can be shown that the place occupied
by your percept of Memorial Hall differs
from the place occupied by mine.  The percepts
themselves may be shown to differ; but
if each of us be asked to point out where his
percept is, we point to an identical spot.  All
the relations, whether geometrical or causal, of
the Hall originate or terminate in that spot
wherein our hands meet, and where each of us
begins to work if he wishes to make the Hall
change before the other's eyes.  Just so it is
with our bodies.  That body of yours which
you actuate and feel from within must be in
the same spot as the body of yours which I see
or touch from without.  'There' for me means
85
where I place my finger.  If you do not feel my
finger's contact to be 'there' in _my_ sense, when
I place it on your body, where then do you feel
it?  Your inner actuations of your body meet
my finger _there:_  it is _there_ that you resist its
push, or shrink back, or sweep the finger aside
with your hand.  Whatever farther knowledge
either of us may acquire of the real constitution
of the body which we thus feel, you from
within and I from without, it is in that same
place that the newly conceived or perceived
constituents have to be located, and it is
_through_ that space that your and my mental
intercourse with each other has always to be
carried on, by the mediation of impressions
which I convey thither, and of the reactions
thence which those impressions may provoke
from you.
     In general terms, then, whatever differing
contents our minds may eventually fill a place
with, the place itself is a numerically identical
content of the two minds, a piece of common
property in which, through which, and over
which they join.  The receptacle of certain of

86
our experiences being thus common, the experiences
themselves might some day become
common also.  If that day ever did come, our
thoughts would terminate in a complete empirical
identity, there would be an end, so far as
_those_ experiences went, to our discussions about
truth.  No points of difference appearing, they
would have to count as the same.

                    VII. CONCLUSION

     With this we have the outlines of a philosophy
of pure experience before us.  At the outset
of my essay, I called it a mosaic philosophy.
In actual mosaics the pieces are held together
by their bedding, for which bedding of the Substances,
transcendental Egos, or Absolutes of
other philosophies may be taken to stand.  In
radical empiricism there is no bedding; it is as
if the pieces clung together by their edges, the
transitions experienced between them forming
their cement.  Of course such a metaphor is
misleading, for in actual experience the more
substantive and the more transitive parts run
into each other continuously, there is in general

87
no separateness needing to be overcome by an
external cement; and whatever separateness
is actually experienced is not overcome, it
stays and counts as separateness to the end.
But the metaphor serves to symbolize the fact
that Experience itself, taken at large, can grow
by its edges.  That one moment of it proliferates
into the next by transitions which,
whether conjunctive or disjunctive, continue
the experiential tissue, can no, I contend, be
denied.  Life is in the transitions as much as in
the terms connected; often, indeed, it seems to
be there more emphatically, as if our spurts
and sallies forward were the real firing-line of
the battle, were like the thin line of flame advancing
across the dry autumnal field which
the farmer proceeds to burn.  In this line we
live prospectively as well as retrospectively.
It is 'of' the past, inasmuch as it comes expressly
as the past's continuation; it is 'of' the
future in so far as the future, when it comes,
will have continued _it_.
     These relations of continuous transition experienced
are what make our experiences cognitive.

88
In the simplest and completest cases
the experiences are cognitive of one another.
When one of them terminates a previous series
of them with a sense of fulfilment, it, we say,
is what those other experiences 'had in view.'
The knowledge, in such a case, is verified; the
truth is 'salted down.' Mainly, however, we
live on speculative investments, or on our prospects
only.  But living on things _in_posse_ is
as good as living in the actual, so long as our
credit remains good.  It is evident that for the
most part it is good, and that the universe
seldom protests our drafts.
     In this sense we at every moment can continue
to believe in an existing _beyond_.  It is
only in special cases that our confident rush
forward gets rebuked.  The beyond must, of
course, always in our philosophy be itself of an
experiential nature.  If not a future experience
of our own or a present one of our neighbor, it
must be a thing in itself in Dr. Prince's and
Professor Strong's sense of the term -- that is,
it must be an experience _for_ itself whose relation
to other things we translate into the action

89
of molecules, ether-waves, or whatever else the
physical symbols may be.(1)  This opens the
chapter of the relations of radical empiricism
to panspychism, into which I cannot enter
now.
     The beyond can in any case exist simultaneously
-- for it can be experienced _to_have_existed_
simultaneously -- with the experience
that practically postulates it by looking in its
direction, or by turning or changing in the
direction of which it is the goal.  Pending that
actuality of union, in the virtuality of which
the 'truth,' even now, of the postulation consists,
the beyond and its knower are entities
split off from each other.  The world is in so far
forth a pluralism of which the unity is not fully
experienced as yet.  But, as fast as verifications
come, trains of experience, once separate, run
into one another; and that is why I said, earlier

---
   1 Our minds and these ejective realities would still have space (or
pseudo-space, as I believe Professor Strong calls the medium of
interaction between 'things-in-themselves') in common.  These would
exist _where_, and begin to act _where_, we locate the molecules, etc.,
and _where_ we perceive the sensible phenomena explained thereby.
---

90
in my article, that the unity of the world is on
the whole undergoing increase.  The universe
continually grows in quantity by new experiences
that graft themselves upon the older
mass; but these very new experiences often
help the mass to a more consolidated form.
     These are the main features of a philosophy
of pure experience.  It has innumerable other
aspects and arouses innumerable questions,
but the points I have touched on seem enough
to make an entering wedge.  In my own mind
such a philosophy harmonizes best with a radical
pluralism, with novelty and indeterminism,
moralism and theism, and with the 'humanism'
lately sprung upon us by the Oxford and
the Chicago schools.(1)  I can not, however, be
sure that all these doctrines are its necessary
and indispensable allies.  It presents so many
points of difference, both from the common
sense and from the idealism that have made
our philosophic language, that it is almost
---
   1 I have said something of this latter alliance in an article entitled
'Humanism and Truth,' in Mind, October, 1904. [Reprinted in
_The_Meaning_of_Truth_, pp. 51-101.  Cf. also "humanism and Truth Once
More," below, pp. 244-265.]
---

difficult to state it as it is to think it out
clearly, and if it is ever to grow into a respectable
system, it will have to be built up by the
contributions of many co-operating minds.  It
seems to me, as I said at the outset of this essay,
that many minds are, in point of fact, now
turning in a direction that points towards radical
empiricism.  If they are carried farther by
my words, and if then they add their stronger
voices to my feebler one, the publication of
this essay will have been worth while.

92
                              III

                  THE THING AND ITS RELATIONS(1)

EXPERIENCE in its immediacy seems perfectly
fluent.  The active sense of living which
we all enjoy, before reflection shatters our instinctive
world for us, is self-luminous and suggests
no paradoxes.  Its difficulties are disappointments
and uncertainties.  They are not
intellectual contradictions.
     When the reflective intellect gets at work,
however, it discovers incomprehensibilities in
the flowing process.  Distinguishing its elements
and parts, it gives them separate names,
and what it thus disjoins it can not easily put
together.  Pyrrhonism accepts the irrationality
and revels in its dialectic elaboration.
Other philosophies try, some by ignoring,
some by resisting, and some by turning the
dialectic procedure against itself, negating its
first negations, to restore the fluent sense of
---
   1 [Reprinted from _The_Journal_of_Philosophy,_Psychology_and_
_Scientific_Methods_, vol II, No. 2, January 19, 1905.  Reprinted also
as Appendix A in _A_Pluralistic_Universe, pp. 347-369.  The authors
corrections have been adopted in the present text.  ED.]

93
life again, and let redemption take the place of
innocence.  The perfection with which any
philosophy may do this is the measure of its
human success and of its importance in philosophic
history.  In [the last essay], 'A World
of Pure Experience,' I tried my own hand
sketchily at the problem, resisting certain
first steps of dialectics by insisting in a general
way that the immediately experienced conjunctive
relations are as real as anything else.
If my sketch is not to appear to _naif_, I must
come closer to details, and in the present essay
I propose to do so.

                         I

     'Pure experience' is the name which I gave
to the immediate flux of life which furnishes
the material to our later reflection with its
conceptual categories.  Only new-born babes,
or men in semi-coma from sleep, drugs, illnesses,
or blows, may be assumed to have an
experience pure in the literal sense of a _that_
which is not yet any definite _what_, tho' ready
to be all sorts of whats; full both of oneness

94
and of manyness, but in respects that don't
appear; changing throughout, yet so confusedly
that its phases interpenetrate and no
points, either of distinction or of identity,
can be caught.  Pure experience in this state
is but another name for feeling or sensation.
But the flux of it no sooner comes than it
tends to fill itself with emphases, and these
salient parts become identified and fixed and
abstracted; so that experience now flows as if
shot through with adjectives and nouns and
prepositions and conjunctions.  Its purity is
only a relative term, meaning to proportional
amount of unverbalized sensation which
it still embodies.
     Far back as we go, the flux, both as a whole
and in its parts, is that of things conjunct and
separated.  The great continua of time, space,
and the self envelope everything, betwixt
them, and flow together without interfering.
The things that they envelop come as separate
in some ways and as continuous in others.
Some sensations coalesce with some ideas, and
others are irreconcilable.  Qualities compenetrate

95
one space, or exclude each other from it.
They cling together persistently in groups that
move as units, or else they separate.  Their
changes are abrupt or discontinuous; and their
kinds resemble or differ; and, as they do so,
they fall into either even or irregular series.
     In all this the continuities and the discontinuities
are absolutely co-ordinate matters of
immediate feeling.  The conjunctions are as
primordial elements of 'fact' as are the distinctions
and disjunctions.  In the same act by
which I feel that this passing minute is a new
pulse of my life, I feel that the old life continues
into it, and the feeling of continuance in
no wise jars upon the simultaneous feeling of a
novelty.  They, too, compenetrate harmoniously.
Prepositions, copulas, and conjunctions,
'is,' is n't,' 'then,' 'before,' 'in,' 'on,' 'beside,'
'between,' 'next,' 'like,' 'unlike,' 'as,' 'but,'
flower out of the stream of pure experience, the
stream of concretes or the sensational stream,
as naturally as nouns and adjectives do, and
they melt into it again as fluidly when we
apply them to a new portion of the stream

96
                         II

     If now we ask why we must thus translate
experience from a more concrete or pure into a
more intellectualized form, filling it with ever
more abounding conceptual distinctions, rationalism
and naturalism give different replies.
     The rationalistic answer is that the theoretic
life is absolute and its interests imperative;
that to understand is simply the duty of man;
and that who questions this need must not be argued
with, for by the fact of arguing he gives away
his case.
     The naturalist answer is that the environment
kills as well as sustains us, and that the
tendency of raw experience to extinguish the
experient himself is lessened just in the degree
in which the elements in it that have a practical
bearing upon life are analyzed out of the
continuum and verbally fixed and coupled together,
so that we may know what is in the
wind for us and get ready to react in time.
Had pure experience, the naturalist says, been
always perfectly healthy, there would never

97
have arisen the necessity of isolating or verbalizing
any of its terms.  We should just have
experienced inarticulately and unintellectually
enjoyed.  This leaning on 'reaction' in the
naturalist account implies that, whenever we
intellectualize a relatively pure experience, we
ought to do so for the sake of redescending
to the purer or more concrete level again;
and that if an intellect stays aloft among its
abstract terms and generalized relations, and
does not reinsert itself with its conclusions into
some particular point of the immediate stream
of life, it fails to finish out its function and
leaves its normal race unrun.
     Most rationalists nowadays will agree that
naturalism gives a true enough account of the
way in which our intellect arose at first, but
they will deny these latter implications.  The
case, they will say, resembles that of sexual
love.  Originating in the animal need of getting
another generation born, this passion has developed
secondarily such imperious spiritual
needs that, if you ask why another generation
ought to be born at all, the answer is:  'Chiefly

98
that love may go on.'  Just so with our intellect:
it originated as a practical means of serving
life; but it has developed incidentally the
function of understanding absolute truth; and
life itself now seems to be given chiefly as a
means by which that function may be prosecuted.
But truth and the understanding of it
lie among the abstracts and universals, so the
intellect now carries on its higher business
wholly in this region, without any need of
redescending into pure experience again.
     If the contrasted tendencies which I thus
designate as naturalistic and rationalistic are
not recognized by the reader, perhaps an example
will make them more concrete.  Mr.
Bradley, for instance, is an ultra-rationalist.
He admits that our intellect is primarily practical,
but says that, for philosophers,the practical
need is simply Truth.  Truth, moreover,
must be assumed 'consistent.'  Immediate experience
has to be broken into subjects and
qualities, terms and relations, to be understood
as truth at all.  Yet when so broken it is less
consistent than ever.  Taken raw, it is all undistinguished.

99
Intellectualized, it is all distinction
without oneness.  'Such an arrangement
may _work_, but the theoretic problem is
not solved.'  The question is '_how_ the diversity
can exist in harmony with the oneness.' To go
back to pure experience is unavailing.  'Mere
feeling gives no answer to our riddle.'  Even if
your intuition is a fact, it is not an _understanding_.
'It is a mere experience, and furnishes
no consistent view.'  The experience offered as
facts or truths 'I find that my intellect rejects
because they contradict themselves.  They
offer a complex of diversities conjoined in a
way which it feels is not its way and which it
can not repeat as its own. . . .  For to be satisfied,
my intellect must understand, and it can
not understand by taking a congeries in the
lump'(1)  So Mr. Bradley, in the sole interests
of 'understanding' (as he conceives that function),
turns his back on finite experience forever.
Truth must lie in the opposite direction,
the direction of the Absolute; and this kind of
---
   1 [F.H. Bradley:  _Appearance_and_Reality_, second edition, pp.
152-153, 23, 118, 104, 108-109, 570.]

100
rationalism and naturalism, or (as I will now
call it) pragmatism, walk thenceforward upon
opposite paths.  For the one, those intellectual
products are most truth which, turning their
face towards the Absolute, come nearest to
symbolizing its ways of uniting the many and
the one.  For the other, those are most true
which most successfully dip back into the
finite stream of feeling and grow most easily
confluent with some particular wave or wavelet.
Such confluence not only proves the intellectual
operation to have been true (as an
addition may 'prove' that a subtraction is
already rightly performed), but it constitutes,
according to pragmatism, all that we mean by
calling it true.  Only in so far as they lead us,
successfully or unsuccessfully, back into sensible
experience again, are our abstracts and
universals true or false at all.(1)

                         III

     In Section VI of [the last essay], I adopted
---
   1 Compare Professor MacLennan's admirable _Auseinandersetzung_
with Mr. Bradley, in _The_Journal_of_Philosophy,_Psychology_and_
_Scientific_Methods_, vol. I, [1904], pp. 403 ff., especially pp.
405-407.

101
in a general way the common-sense belief that
one and the same world is cognized by our
different minds; but I left undiscussed the
dialectical arguments which maintain that
this is logically absurd.  The usual reason
given for its being absurd is that it assumes
one object (to wit, the world) to stand in two
relations at once; to my mind, namely, and
again to yours; whereas a term taken in a
second relation can not logically be the same
term which it was at first.
     I have heard this reason urged so often in
discussing with absolutists, and it would destroy
my radical empiricism so utterly, if it
were valid, that I am bound to give it an attentive
ear, and seriously to search its strength.
     For instance, let the matter in dispute be
term M, asserted to be on the one hand related
to L, and on the other to N; and let the two
cases of relation be symbolized by L-M and
M-N respectively.  When, now, I assume
that the experience may immediately come
and be given in the shape L-M-N, with
no trace of doubling or internal fission in the

102
M, I am told that this is all a popular delusion;
that L-M-N logically means two different
experiences, L-M and M-N, namely;
and that although the Absolute may, and indeed
must, from its superior point of view,
read its own kind of unity into M's two editions,
yet as elements in finite experience the
two M's lie irretrievably asunder, and the
world between them is broken and unbridged.
     In arguing this dialectic thesis, one must
avoid slipping from the logical into the physical
point of view.  It would be easy, in taking
a concrete example to fix one's ideas by, to
choose one in which the letter M should stand
for a collective noun of some sort, which noun,
being related to L by one of its parts and to
N by another, would inwardly be two things
when it stood outwardly in both relations.
Thus, one might say:  'David Hume, who
weighed so many stone by his body, influences
posterity by his doctrine.'  The body and the
doctrine are two things, between which our
finite minds can discover no real sameness,
though the same never covers both of them.

103
And then, one might continue:  'Only an Absolute
is capable of uniting such a non-identity.'
We must, I say, avoid this sort of example, for
the dialectic insight, if true at all, must apply
to terms and relations universally.  It must be
true of abstract units as well as of nouns collective;
and if we prove it by concrete examples
we must take the simplest, so as to avoid
irrelevant material suggestions.
     Taken thus in all its generality, the absolutist
contention seems to use as its major
premise Hume's notion 'that all our distinct
perceptions are distinct existences, and that
the mind never perceives any real connexion
among distinct existences.'(1)  Undoubtedly,
since we use two phrases in talking first about
'M's relation to L' and then about 'M's relation
to N,' we must be having, or must have
had, two distinct perceptions; -- and the rest
would then seem to follow duly.  But the starting-
point of the reasoning here seems to be the
fact of the two _phrases_; and this suggests that
---
   1 [Hume:  _Treatise_of_Human_Nature_, Appendix, Selby-Bigge's
edition, p. 636.]

104
the argument may be merely verbal.  Can it be
that the whole dialectic consists in attributing
to the experience talked-about a constitution
similar to that of the language in which we describe
it?  Must we assert the objective doubleness
of the M merely because we have to name
it twice over when we name its two relations?
     Candidly, I can think of no other reason
than this for the dialectic conclusion;(1) for, if
we think, not of our words, but of any simple
concrete matter which they may be held to
signify, the experience itself belies the paradox
asserted.  We use indeed two separate concepts
in analyzing our object, but we know them all
the while to be but substitutional, and that the
M in L-M and the M in M-N _mean_ (i.e.,
are capable of leading to and terminating in)
one self-same piece, M, of sensible experience.
This persistent identity of certain units (or
emphases, or points, or objects, or members --
call them what you will) of the experience-
continuum, is just one of those conjunctive
---
   1 Technically, it seems classable as a 'fallacy of composition.'  A
duality, predicable of the two wholes, L-M and M-N, is
forthwith predicated of one of their parts, M.

105
features of it, on which I am obliged to insist
so emphatically.(1)  For samenesses are parts of
experience's indefeasible structure.  When I
hear a bell-stroke and, as life flows on, its after
image dies away, I still hark back to it as 'that
same bell-stroke.'  When I see a thing M, with
L to the left of it and N to the right of it, I see
it _as_ one M; and if you tell me I have had
to 'take' it twice, I reply that if I 'took' it a
thousand times I should still _see_it as a unity.(2)
Its unity is aboriginal, just as the multiplicity
of my successive takings is aboriginal.  It
comes unbroken as _that_ M, as a singular which
I encounter; they come broken, as _those_ takings,
as my plurality of operations.  The unity
and the separateness are strictly co-ordinate.  I
do not easily fathom why my opponents should
find the separateness so much more easily understandable
that they must needs infect the
whole of finite experience with it, and relegate
---
   1 See above, pp. 42 ff.
   2 I may perhaps refer here to my _Principles_of_Psychology, vol. I,
pp. 459 ff.  It really seems 'weird' to have to argue (as I am forced
now to do) for the notion that it is one sheet of paper (with its two
surfaces and all that lies between) which is both under my pen and on
the table while I write -- the 'claim' that it is two sheets seems so
brazen.  Yet I sometimes suspect the absolutists of sincerity!

106
the unity (now taken as a bare postulate and
no longer as a thing positively perceivable) to
the region of the Absolute's mysteries.  I do
not easily fathom this, I say, for the said opponents
are above mere verbal quibbling; yet all
that I can catch in their talk is the substitution
of what is true of certain words for what is
true of what they signify.  They stay with the
words, -- not returning to the stream of life
whence all the meaning of them came, and
which is always ready to reabsorb them.

                         IV

     For aught this argument proves, then, we
may continue to believe that one thing can be
known by many knowers.  But the denial of
one thing in many relations is but one application
of a still profounder dialectic difficulty.
Man can't be good, said the sophist, for man is
_man_ and _good_ is good; and Hegel(1) and Herbart
in their day, more recently A. Spir,(2) and most
---
   1 [For the author's criticism of Hegel's view of relations, cf.
_Will_to_Believe_, pp. 278-279, ED.]
   2 [Cf. A. Spir:  _Denken_und_Wirklichkeit_, part I, bk. III, ch. IV
(containing also account of Herbart).  ED.]

107
recently and elaborately of all, Mr. Bradley,
informs us that a term can logically only be
a punctiform unit, and that not one of the
conjunctive relations between things, which
experience seems to yield, is rationally possible.
     Of course, if true, this cuts off radical empiricism
without even a shilling.  Radical empiricism
takes conjunctive relations at their face
value, holding them to be as real as the terms
united by them.(1)  The world it represents as a
collection, some parts of which are conjunctively
and others disjunctively related.  Two
parts, themselves disjoined, may nevertheless
hang together by intermediaries with which
they are severally connected, and the whole
world eventually may hang together similarly,
inasmuch as _some_ path of conjunctive transition
by which to pass from one of its parts
to another may always be discernible.  Such
determinately various hanging-together may
be called _concatenated_ union, to distinguish it
from the 'through-and-through' type of union,
---
   1 [See above, pp. 42, 49.]

108
'each in all and all in each' (union of _total_
_conflux_, as one might call it), which monistic
systems hold to obtain when things are taken
in their absolute reality.  In a concatenated
world a partial conflux often is experienced.
Our concepts and our sensations are confluent;
successive states of the same ego, and feelings
of the same body are confluent.  Where the
experience is not of conflux, it may be of
conterminousness (things with but one thing
between); or of contiguousness (nothing between);
or of likeness; or of nearness; or of
simultaneousness; or of in-ness; or of on-ness;
or of for-ness; or of simple with-ness; or even of
mere and-ness, which last relation would make
of however disjointed a world otherwise, at any
rate for that occasion a universe 'of discourse.'
Now Mr. Bradley tells us that none of these
relations, as we actually experience them, can
possibly be real.(1)  My next duty, accordingly,
---
   1 Here again the reader must beware of slipping from logical into
phenomenal considerations.  It may well be that we _attribute_ a certain
relation falsely, because the circumstances of the case, being complex,
have deceived us.  At a railway station we may take our own train,
and not the one that fills our window, to be moving.  We here put
motion in the wrong place in the world, but in its original place the
motion is a part of reality.  What Mr. Bradley means is nothing like
this, but rather that such things as motion are nowhere real, and
that, even in their aboriginal and empirically incorrigible seats,
relations are impossible of comprehension.

109
must be to rescue radical empiricism from Mr.
Bradley.  Fortunately, as it seems to me, his
general contention, that the very notion of relation
is unthinkable clearly, has been successfully
met by many critics.(1)
     It is a burden to the flesh, and an injustice
both to readers and to the previous writers, to
repeat good arguments already printed.  So, in
noticing Mr. Bradley, I will confine myself to
the interests of radical empiricism solely.

                         V

     The first duty of radical empiricism, taking
given conjunctions at their face-value, is to
class some of them as more intimate and some
as more external.  When two terms are _similar_,
their very natures enter into the relation.
---
   1 Particularly so by Andrew Seth Pringle-Pattison, in his _Man_and_
_the_Cosmos_; by L.T. Hobhouse, in chapter XII ("The Validity of
Judgement") of his _Theory_of_Knowledge_; and by F.C.S. Schiller, in his
_Humanism_, essay XI.  Other fatal reviews (in my opinion) are Hodder's,
in the _Psychological_Review_, vol. I [1894], p. 307; Stout's in the
_Proceedings_of_the_Aristotelian_Society, 1901-2, p.1; and MacLennan's
in [_The_Journal_of_Philosophy,_Psychology_and_Scientific_Methods_,
vol. I, 1904, p. 403].

110
Being _what_ they are, no matter where or when,
the likeness never can be denied, if asserted.
It continues predictable as long as the terms
continue.  Other relations, the _where_ and the
_when_, for example, seems adventitious.  The
sheet of paper may be 'off' or 'on' the table,
for example; and in either case the relation
involves only the outside of its terms.  Having
an outside, both of them, they contribute by it
to the relation.  It is external:  the term's inner
nature is irrelevant to it.  Any book, any table,
may fall into the relation, which is created _pro_
_hac_vice_, not by their existence, but by their
causal situation.  It is just because so many of
the conjunctions of experience seem so external
that a philosophy of pure experience must tend
to pluralism in its ontology.  So far as things
have space-relations, for example, we are free
to imagine them with different origins even. If
they could get to _be_, and get into space at all,
then they may have done so separately.  Once
there, however, they are _additives_ to one another,
and, with no prejudice to their natures,
all sorts of space-relations may supervene between

111
them.  The question of how things could
come to be anyhow, is wholly different from
the question what their relations, once the
being accomplished, may consist in.
     Mr. Bradley now affirms that such external
relations as the space-relations which we here
talk of must hold of entirely different subjects
from those of which the absence of such relations
might a moment previously have been
plausibly asserted.  Not only is the _situation_
different when the book is on the table, but
the _book_itself_ is different as a book, from what
it was when it was off the table.(1)  He admits
that "such external relations seem possible
and even existing. . . . That you do not alter
what you compare or rearrange in space seems
to common sense quite obvious, and that on
---
   1 Once more, don't slip from logical into physical situations.  Of
course, if the table be wet, it will moisten the book, or if it be
slight enough and the book be heavy enough, the book will break it down.
But such collateral phenomena are not the point at issue.  The point is
whether the successive relations 'on' and 'not-on' can rationally (not
physically) hold of the same constant terms, abstractly taken.
Professor A.E. Taylor drops from logical into material considerations
when he instances color-contrast as a proof that A, 'as contra-
distinguished from B, is not the same thing as mere A not in any way
affected' (_Elements_of_Metaphysics_, p. 145).  Note the substitution,
for 'related' of the word 'affected,' which begs the whole question.

112
the other side there are as obvious difficulties
does not occur to common sense at all.  And I
will begin by pointing out these difficulties. . . .
There is a relation in the result, and this relation,
we hear, is to make no difference in its
terms.  But, if so, to what does it make a difference?
[_Does_n't_it_make_a_difference_to_us_on-_
_lookers,_at_least?_]  and what is the meaning and
sense of qualifying the terms by it?  [_Surely_the_
_meaning_is_to_tell_the_truth_about_their_relative_
_position_.1]  If, in short, it is external to the terms,
how can it possibly be true _of_ them?  [_Is_it_the_
_'intimacy'_suggested_by_the_little_word_'of,'_here,_
_which_I_have_understood,_that_is_the_root_of_Mr._
_Bradley's_trouble?] . . . If the terms from their
inner nature do not enter into the relation,
then, so far as they are concerned, they seem
related for no reason at all. . . . Things are spatially
related, first in one way, and then become
related in another way, and yet in no
way themselves are altered; for the relations,
it is said, are but external. But I reply that, if
----
   1 But "is there any sense," asks Mr. Bradley, peevishly, on p. 579,
"and if so, what sense in truth that is only outside and 'about'
things?"  Surely such a question may be left unanswered.

113
so, I can not _understand_ the leaving by the
terms of one set of relations and their adoption
of another fresh set.  The process and its
result to the terms, if they contribute nothing
to it [_Surely_they_contribute_to_it_all_there_is_
_'of'_it!_] seem irrational throughout.  [_If_'irrational'_
_here_means_simply_'non-rational,'_or_non-_
_deducible_from_the_essence_of_either_term_singly,_it_
_is_no_reproach;_if_it_means_'contradicting'_such_
_essence,_Mr._Bradley_should_show_wherein_and_
_how._]  But, if they contribute anything, they
_must surely be affected internally.  [_Why_so,_
_if_they_contribute_only_their_surface?__In_such_
_relations_as_'on,'_'a_foot_away,'_'between,'_'next,'_
_etc.,_only_surfaces_are_in_question._] . . . If the
terms contribute anything whatever, then the
terms are affected [_inwardly_altered?_] by the
arrangement. . . . That for working purposes
we treat, and do well to treat, some relations
as external merely I do not deny, and that of
course is not the question at issue here.  That
question is . . . whether in the end and in
principle a mere external relation -_i.e.,_a_relation_
_which_can_change_without_forcing_its_terms_

114
_to_change_their_nature_simultaneously_] is possible
and forced on us by the facts."(1)
     Mr. Bradley next reverts to the antinomies
of space, which, according to him, prove it to
be unreal, although it appears as so prolific a
medium of external relations; and he then concludes
that "Irrationality and externality can
not be the last truth about things.  Somewhere
there must be a reason why this and that appear
together.  And this reason and reality
must reside in the whole from which terms and
relations are abstractions, a whole in which
their internal connection must lie, and out of
which from the background appear those fresh
results which never could have come from
the premises."  And he adds that "Where the
whole is different, the terms that qualify and
contribute to it must so far be different. . . .
They are altered so far only [_How_far?_ farther_
_than_externally,_yet_not_through_and_through?_]
but still they are altered. . . . I must insist
that in each case the terms are qualified by
their whole [_Qualified_how?--Do_their_external_

115
_relations,_situations,_dates,_etc.,_changed_as_these_
_are_in_the_new_whole,_fail_to_qualify_them_'far'_
enough?_], and that in the second case there is a
whole which differs both logically and psychologically
from the first whole; and I urge that
in contributing to the change the terms so far
are altered."
     Not merely the relations, then, but the terms
are altered:  _Und_zwar_ 'so far.'  But just _how_
far is the whole problem; and 'through-and-
through' would seem (in spite of Mr. Bradley's
somewhat undecided utterances(1)) to be the
---
   1 I say 'undecided,' because, apart from the 'so far,' what sounds
terribly half-hearted, there are passages in these very pages in which
Mr. Bradley admits the pluralistic thesis.  Read, for example, what he
says, on p. 578, of a billiard ball keeping its 'character' unchanged,
though, in its change of place, its 'existence' gets altered; or what he
says, on p. 579, of the possibility that an abstract quality A, B, or C,
in a thing, 'may throughout remain unchanged' although the thing be
altered; or his admission that red-hairedness, both as analyzed out
of a man and when given with the rest of him, there may be 'no
change' p. 580).  Why does he immediately add that for the pluralist
to plead the non-mutation of such abstractions would be an _ignoratio_
_elenchi?_  It is impossible to admit it to be such.  The entire
_elenchus_ and inquest is just as to whether parts which you can
abstract from their inner nature.  If they can thus mould various wholes
into new _gestalqualitaten_, then it follows that the same elements are
logically able to exist in different wholes [whether physically able
would depend on additional hypotheses]; that partial changes are
thinkable, and through-and-through change not a dialectic necessity;
that monism is only an hypothesis; and that an additively constituted
universe is a rationally respectable hypothesis also.  All theses of
radical empiricism, in short, follow.

116
full Bradleyan answer.  The 'whole' which he
here treats as primary and determinative of
each part's manner of 'contributing,' simply
_must_, when it alters, alter in its entirety.  There
_must_ be total conflux of its parts, each into
and through each other.  The 'must' appears
here as a _Machtspruch_, as an _ipse_dixit_ of Mr.
Bradley's absolutistically tempered 'understanding,'
for he candidly confesses that how
the parts _do_differ as they contribute to different
wholes, is unknown to him.(1)
     Although I have every wish to comprehend
the authority by which Mr. Bradley's understanding
speaks, his words leave me wholly
unconverted.   'External relations' stand with
their withers all unwrung, and remain, for
aught he proves to the contrary, not only
practically workable, but also perfectly intelligible
factors of reality.
---
   1 Op. cit., pp. 577-579.

117
                         VI

     Mr. Bradley's understanding shows the
most extraordinary power of perceiving separations
and the most extraordinary impotence
in comprehending conjunctions.  One would
naturally say 'neither or both,' but not so Mr.
Bradley.  When a common man analyzes certain
_whats_ from out the stream of experience, he
understands their distinctness _as_thus_isolated_.
But this does not prevent him from equally
well understanding their combination with
each other _as_originally_experienced_in_the_concrete_,
or their confluence with new sensible experiences
in which they recur as 'the same.'
Returning into the stream of sensible presentation,
nouns and adjectives, and _thats_ and abstract
_whats_, grow confluent again, and the
word 'is' names all these experiences of conjunction.
Mr. Bradley understands the isolation
of the abstracts, but to understand the
combination is to him impossible.(1)  "To understand
---
   1 So far as I catch his state of mind, it is somewhat like this:
'Book,' 'table,' 'on' -- how does the existence of these three abstract
elements result in _this_ book being livingly on _this_table.  Why is
n't the table on the book?  Or why does n't the 'on' connect itself with
another book, or something that is not a table?  Must n't something _in_
each of the three elements already determine the two others to _it_, so
that they do not settle elsewhere or float vaguely?  Must n't the
_whole_fact_be_prefigured_in_each_part_, and exist _de_jure_ before it
can exist _de_fact?_  But, if so, in what can the jural existence
consist, if not in a spiritual miniature of the whole fact's
constituti