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 cannot 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 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 an article entitled 'A world of
pure experience,[2] I tried my own hand sketchily at
[Footnote 1: Reprinted from the Journal of Philosophy,
Psychology, and Scientific Methods, vol. ii, New York, 1905, with
slight verbal revision.]
[Footnote 2: Journal of Philosophy, Psychology, and Scientific
Methods, vol. i, No. 20, p. 566.]
the problem, resisting certain first steps of dialectics by
insisting in a general way that the immediately experienced conjunctive
relations are as real as anything else. If my sketch is not to appear
too naeif, 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 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 the 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 envelop everything, betwixt them, and flow together
without interfering. The things that they envelop come as separate in
some ways and as continuous in others. Some sensations coalesce with
some ideas, and others are irreconcilable. Qualities compenetrate one
space, or exclude each other from it. They cling together persistently
in groups that move as units, or else they separate. Their changes are
abrupt or discontinuous; and their kinds resemble or differ; and, as
they do so, they fall into either even or irregular series.
In all this the continuities and the discontinuities are absolutely
co-ordinate matters of immediate feeling. The conjunctions are as
primordial elements of 'fact' as are the distinctions and disjunctions.
In the same act by which I feel that this passing minute is a new pulse
of my life, I feel that the old life continues into it, and the feeling
of continuance in no wise jars upon the simultaneous feeling of a
novelty. They, too, compenetrate harmoniously. Prepositions, copulas,
and conjunctions, 'is,' 'isn't,' 'then,' 'before,' 'in,' 'on,'
'beside,' 'between,' 'next,' 'like,' 'unlike,' 'as,' 'but,' flower out
of the stream of pure experience, the stream of concretes or the
sensational stream, as naturally as nouns and adjectives do, and they
melt into it again as fluidly when we apply them to a new portion of
the stream.
II
If now we ask why we must 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 not be argued with, for by the fact of
arguing he gives away his case.
The naturalist answer is that the environment kills as well as
sustains us, and that the tendency of raw experience to extinguish the
experient himself is lessened just in the degree in which the elements
in it that have a practical bearing upon life are analyzed out of the
continuum and verbally fixed and coupled together, so that we may know
what is in the wind for us and get ready to react in time. Had pure
experience, the naturalist says, been always perfectly healthy, there
would never have arisen the necessity of isolating or verbalizing any
of its terms. We should just have experienced inarticulately and
unintellectually enjoyed. This leaning on 'reaction' in the naturalist
account implies that, whenever we intellectualize a relatively pure
experience, we ought to do so for the sake of redescending to the purer
or more concrete level again; and that if an intellect stays aloft
among its abstract terms and generalized relations, and does not
reinsert itself with its conclusions into some particular point of the
immediate stream of life, it fails to finish out its function and
leaves its normal race unrun.
Most rationalists nowadays will agree that naturalism gives a true
enough account of the way in which our intellect arose at first, but
they will deny these latter implications. The case, they will say,
resembles that of sexual love. Originating in the animal need of
getting another generation born, this passion has developed secondarily
such imperious spiritual needs that, if you ask why another generation
ought to be born at all, the answer is: 'Chiefly that love may go on.'
Just so with our intellect: it originated as a practical means of
serving life; but it has developed incidentally the function of
understanding absolute truth; and life itself now seems to be given
chiefly as a means by which that function may be prosecuted. But truth
and the understanding of it lie among the abstracts and universals, so
the intellect now carries on its higher business wholly in this region,
without any need of redescending into pure experience again.
If the contrasted tendencies which I thus designate as naturalistic
and rationalistic are not recognized by the reader, perhaps an example
will make them more concrete. Mr. Bradley, for instance, is an
ultra-rationalist. He admits that our intellect is primarily practical,
but says that, for philosophers, the practical need is simply Truth.[1]
Truth, moreover, must be assumed 'consistent.' Immediate experience has
to be broken into subjects and qualities, terms and relations, to be
understood as truth at all. Yet when so broken it is less consistent
than ever. Taken raw, it is all undistinguished. Intellectualized, it
is all distinction without oneness. 'Such an arrangement may work, but the theoretic problem is not solved' (p. 23). The question is, '
How the diversity can exist in harmony with the oneness' (p. 118).
To go back to pure experience is unavailing. 'Mere feeling gives no
answer to our riddle' (p. 104). Even if your intuition is a fact, it is
not an understanding. 'It is a mere experience, and furnishes no
consistent view' (pp. 108-109). The experiences 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 cannot repeat as its own....
For to be satisfied, my intellect must understand, and it cannot
understand by taking a congeries in the lump' (p. 570). So Mr. Bradley,
in the sole interests of 'understanding' (as he conceives that
function), turns his back on finite
[Footnote 1: Appearance and Reality, pp. 152-133.]
experience forever. Truth must lie in the opposite direction, the
direction of the absolute; and this kind of rationalism and naturalism,
or (as I will now call it) pragmatism, walk thenceforward upon opposite
paths. For the one, those intellectual products are most true which,
turning their face towards the absolute, come nearest to symbolizing
its ways of uniting the many and the one. For the other, those are most
true which most successfully dip back into the finite stream of feeling
and grow most easily confluent with some particular wave or wavelet.
Such confluence not only proves the intellectual operation to have been
true (as an addition may 'prove' that a subtraction is already rightly
performed), but it constitutes, according to pragmatism, all that we
mean by calling it true. Only in so far as they lead us, successfully
or unsuccessfully, into sensible experience again, are our abstracts
and universals true or false at all.
III
In Section the 6th of my article, 'A world of pure experience,' I
adopted in a general way the common-sense belief that one and the same
world is cognized by our different minds; but I left undiscussed the
dialectical arguments which maintain that this is logically absurd. The
usual reason given for 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
cannot 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 a 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 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 name covers both of them. 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.' Undoubtedly, since we
use two phrases in talking first about 'M's relation to L
' and then again about 'M's relation to N,' we must be
having, or must have had, two distinct perceptions;—and the rest would
then seem to follow duly. But the starting-point of the reasoning here
seems to be the fact of the two phrases; and this suggests that
the argument may be merely verbal. Can it be that the whole dialectic
achievement 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 features of it,
on which I am obliged to insist so emphatically. 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
[Footnote 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.]
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 unit.[1]
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 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.
[Footnote 1: 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!]
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 sophists, for man is
man and good is good; and Hegel and Herbart in their day,
more recently H. Spir, and most recently and elaborately of all, Mr.
Bradley, inform 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. 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, '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,
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
[Footnote 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.]
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. Being what they are, no matter where or
when, the likeness never can be denied, if asserted. It continues
predicable as long as the terms continue. Other relations, the where
and the when, for example, seem adventitious. The sheet of paper
may be 'off' or 'on' the table, for example; and in either case the
relation involves only the outside of its terms. Having an outside,
both of them, they contribute by it to the relation. It is external:
the term's inner nature is irrelevant to it. Any
[Footnote 1: Particularly so by Andrew Seth Pringle-Pattison, in his
Man and the Cosmos; by L.T. Hobhouse, in chapter xii (the Validity
of Judgment) 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, 307; Stout's,
in the Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, 1901-02, p. 1;
and MacLennan's, in the Journal of Philosophy, etc., vol. i,
403.]
book, any table, may fall into the relation, which is created pro
hac vice, not by their existence, but by their casual situation. It
is just because so many of the conjunctions of experience seem so
external that a philosophy of pure experience must tend to pluralism in
its ontology. So far as things have space-relations, for example, we
are free to imagine them with different origins even. If they could get
to be, and get into space at all, then they may have done so
separately. Once there, however, they are additives to one
another, and, with no prejudice to their natures, all sorts of
space-relations may supervene between them. The question of how things
could come to be, anyhow, is wholly different from the question 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. He admits that 'such external relations
[Footnote 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 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, 1903, p. 145). Note the substitution, for 'related,'
of the word 'affected,' which begs the whole question.]
seem possible and even existing.... That you do not alter what you
compare or rearrange in space seems to common sense quite obvious, and
that on the other side there are as obvious difficulties does not occur
to common sense at all. And I will begin by pointing out these
difficulties.... There is a relation in the result, and this relation,
we hear, is to make no difference in its terms. But, if so, to what
does it make a difference? [doesn't it make a difference to us
onlookers, at least?] and what is the meaning and sense of
qualifying the terms by it? [Surely the meaning is to tell the truth
about their relative position.[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
underscored, 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
[Footnote 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.]
are altered; for the relations, it is said, are but external. But I
reply that, if so, I cannot 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 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;
[Footnote 1: Appearance and Reality, 2d edition, pp.
575-576.]
and he then concludes that 'Irrationality and externality cannot be
the last truth about things. Somewhere there must be a reason why this
and that appear together. And this reason and reality must reside in
the whole from which terms and relations are abstractions, a whole in
which their internal connexion must lie, and out of which from the
background appear those fresh results which never could have come from
the premises' (p. 577). 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 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' (p. 579).
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])
[Footnote 1: I say 'undecided,' because, apart from the 'so far,'
which 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 in
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 existing wholes can also
contribute to other wholes without changing their inner nature. If they
can thus mould various wholes into new gestalt-qualitaeten, 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 the theses of radical
empiricism, in short, follow.]
to be the 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 (p. 578).
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.
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 a complex AB,' he
[Footnote 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 isn't the table on the book? Or why doesn't the 'on' connect
itself with another book, or something that is not a table? Mustn't
something in each of the three elements already determine the
two others to it, so that they do not settle elsewhere or float
vaguely? Mustn't the whole fact be prefigured in each part, and
exist de jure before it can exist de facto? But, if so,
in what can the jural existence consist, if not in a spiritual
miniature of the whole fact's constitution actuating; every partial
factor as its purpose? But is this anything but the old metaphysical
fallacy of looking behind a fact in esse for the ground of the
fact, and finding it in the shape of the very same fact in posse
? Somewhere we must leave off with a constitution behind which
there is nothing.]
says, 'I must begin with A or B. And beginning, say
with A, if I then merely find B, I have either lost A, or I have got beside A, [the word 'beside' seems here vital,
as meaning a conjunction 'external' and therefore unintelligible]
something else, and in neither case have I understood.[1] For my
intellect cannot simply unite a diversity, nor has it in itself any
form or way of togetherness, and you gain nothing if, beside A
and B, you offer me their conjunction in fact. For to my
intellect that is no more than another external element. And “facts,”
once for all, are for my intellect not true unless they satisfy it....
The intellect has in its nature no principle of mere togetherness' (pp.
570, 572).
Of course Mr. Bradley has a right to define 'intellect' as the power
by which we perceive separations but not unions—provided he give due
notice to the reader. But why then claim that such a maimed and
amputated power must reign supreme in philosophy, and accuse on its
behoof the whole empirical world of irrationality? It is true that he
elsewhere (p. 568) attributes to the intellect a proprius motus
of transition, but says that
[Footnote 1: Apply this to the case of 'book-on-table'! W.J.]
when he looks for these transitions in the detail of living
experience, he 'is unable to verify such a solution' (p. 569).
Yet he never explains what the intellectual transitions would be
like in case we had them. He only defines them negatively—they are not
spatial, temporal, predicative, or causal; or qualitatively or
otherwise serial; or in any way relational as we naively trace
relations, for relations separate terms, and need themselves to
be hooked on ad infinitum. The nearest approach he makes to
describing a truly intellectual transition is where he speaks of A
and B as being 'united, each from its own nature, in a whole
which is the nature of both alike' (p. 570). But this (which, pace
Mr. Bradley, seems exquisitely analogous to 'taking a congeries in a
lump,' if not to 'swamping') suggests nothing but that conflux
which pure experience so abundantly offers, as when 'space,' 'white,'
and 'sweet' are confluent in a 'lump of sugar,' or kinesthetic, dermal,
and optical sensations confluent in 'my hand.'[1] All that I can verify
in the transitions which Mr. Bradley's intellect desiderates as its
proprius motus is a reminiscence of these and other sensible
conjunctions (especially space-conjunctions),
[Footnote 1: How meaningless is the contention that in such wholes
(or in 'book-on-table,' 'watch-in-pocket,' etc.) the relation is an
additional entity between the terms, needing itself to be
related again to each! Both Bradley (Appearance and Reality, pp.
32-33) and Royce (The World and the Individual, i, 128) lovingly
repeat this piece of profundity.]
but a reminiscence so vague that its originals are not recognized.
Bradley, in short, repeats the fable of the dog, the bone, and its
image in the water. With a world of particulars, given in loveliest
union, in conjunction definitely various, and variously definite, the
'how' of which you 'understand' as soon as you see the fact of them,[1]
for there is no how except the constitution of the fact as given; with
all this given him, I say, in pure experience, he asks for some
ineffable union in the abstract instead, which, if he gained it, would
only be a duplicate of what he has already in his full possession.
Surely he abuses the privilege which society grants to all of us
philosophers, of being puzzle-headed.
Polemic writing like this is odious; but with absolutism in
possession in so many quarters, omission to defend my radical
empiricism against its best known champion would count as either
superficiality or inability. I have to conclude that its dialectic has
not invalidated in the least degree the usual conjunctions by which the
world, as experienced, hangs so variously together. In particular it
leaves an empirical theory of knowledge intact, and lets us continue to
believe with common sense that one object may be known, if we
have any ground for thinking that it is known, to many knowers.
[Footnote 1: The 'why' and the 'whence' are entirely other
questions, not under discussion, as I understand Mr. Bradley. Not how
experience gets itself born, but how it can be what it is after it is
born, is the puzzle.]