Essays in Radical Empiricism Part 3

This is what, as a radical empiricist, I say to the charge that the objective reference which is so flagrant a character of our experiences involves a chasm and a mortal leap. A positively conjunctive transition involves neither chasm nor leap. Being the very original of what we mean by continuity, it makes a continuum wherever it appears. I know full well that such brief words as these will leave the hardened transcendentalist unshaken. Conjunctive experiences _separate_ their terms, he will still say: they are third things interposed, that have themselves to be conjoined by new links, and to invoke them makes our trouble infinitely worse. To 'feel' our motion forward is impossible.

Motion implies terminus; and how can terminus be felt before we have arrived? The barest start and sally forwards, the barest tendency to leave the instant, involves the chasm and the leap. Conjunctive transitions are the most superficial of appearances, 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 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.[36] I have no s.p.a.ce 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 to consist in external relations as I have done, and by then confessing that nine-tenths of the time these are not actually but only virtually there, I have knocked the solid bottom out of the whole business, and palmed off a subst.i.tute 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 termination, be _known-as_?

What would it practically result in for _us_, were it true?

It could only result in our orientation, in the turning of our expectations and practical tendencies into the right path; and the right path here, so long as we and the object are not yet face to face (or can never get face to face, as in the case of ejects), would be the path that 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 grasp. 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 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] ent.i.tled 'Does Consciousness Exist?' The instant field of the present is always experience in its 'pure' state, plain unqualified actuality, a simple _that_, as yet undifferentiated into thing and thought, and only virtually cla.s.sifiable as objective fact or as some one's opinion about fact. This is as true when the field is conceptual as when it is perceptual. 'Memorial Hall' is 'there' in my idea as much as when I stand before it. I proceed to act on its account in either case. Only in the later experience that supersedes the present one is this _naf_ 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--pa.s.ses 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 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[37]

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.

Our lives are a congeries of solipsisms, out of which in strict logic only a G.o.d 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 a.s.suming 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 a.n.a.logy is my _reason_, whether an instinctive belief runs before it or not. But what is 'your body' here but a percept in _my_ field? It is only as animating _that_ object, _my_ object, that I have any 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 pa.s.s into it as into their harmonious cognitive fulfilment; your emotions and volitions pa.s.s 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 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 a.s.signed for them, so their place must be what it seems to be, the same.[38]

Practically, then, our minds meet in a world of objects which they share in common, which would still be there, if one or several of the minds were destroyed. I can see no formal objection to this 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 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 pa.s.s on, leaving my flank for the time exposed.[39] 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 of things being in conjunctive relation with other things at all.

In principle, then, let natural realism pa.s.s 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 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 ether, 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?

Yes, they certainly have _s.p.a.ce_ in common. On pragmatic principles we are obliged to predicate sameness wherever we can predicate no a.s.signable 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 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 const.i.tution 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 const.i.tuents have to be located, and it is _through_ that s.p.a.ce that your and my mental intercourse with each other has always to be carried on, by the mediation of impressions which I convey thither, and of the reactions thence which those impressions may provoke from you.

In general terms, then, whatever differing contents our minds may eventually fill a place with, the place itself is a numerically identical content of the two minds, a piece of common property in which, through which, and over which they join. The receptacle of certain of our experiences being thus common, the experiences themselves might some day become common also. If that day ever did come, our thoughts would terminate in a complete empirical ident.i.ty, 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 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 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 not, 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. 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 of molecules, ether-waves, or whatever else the physical symbols may be.[40] This opens the chapter of the relations of radical empiricism to panpsychism, into which I can not enter now.[41]

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 ent.i.ties split off from each other. The world is in so far forth a pluralism of which the unity is not fully experienced as yet. But, as fast as verifications come, trains of experience, once separate, run into one another; and that is why I said, earlier in my article, that the unity of the world is on the whole undergoing increase. The universe continually grows in quant.i.ty by new experiences that graft themselves upon the older ma.s.s; but these very new experiences often help the ma.s.s 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.[42] 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 as difficult to state it as it is to think it out clearly, and if it is ever to grow into a respectable system, it will have to be built up by the contributions of many 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.

FOOTNOTES:

[25] [Reprinted from the _Journal of Philosophy, Psychology and Scientific Methods_, vol. I, 1904, No. 20, September 29, and No. 21, October 13. Pp. 52-76 have also been reprinted, with some omissions, alterations and additions, in _The Meaning of Truth_, pp. 102-120. The alterations have been adopted in the present text. This essay is referred to in _A Pluralistic Universe_, p. 280, note 5. ED.]

[26] [Cf. Berkeley: _Principles of Human Knowledge_, Introduction; Hume: _An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding_, sect. VII, part II (Selby-Bigge's edition, p. 74); James Mill: _a.n.a.lysis of the Phenomena of the Human Mind_, ch. VIII; J. S. Mill: _An Examination of Sir William Hamilton's Philosophy_, ch. XI, XII; W. K. Clifford: _Lectures and Essays_, pp. 274 ff.]

[27] [See "The Experience of Activity," below, pp. 155-189.]

[28] 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 _Metaphysic of Experience_, vol. I, ch. VII and VIII.

[29] [See "The Thing and its Relations," below, pp. 92-122.]

[30] For brevity's sake I altogether omit mention of the type const.i.tuted 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.

[31] [See above, pp. 9-15.]

[32] ["On the Function of Cognition," _Mind_, vol. X, 1885, and "The Knowing of Things Together," _Psychological Review_, vol. II, 1895.

These articles are reprinted, the former in full, the latter in part, in _The Meaning of Truth_, pp. 1-50. ED.] These articles and their doctrine, unnoticed apparently by any one else, have lately gained favorable comment from Professor Strong. ["A Naturalistic Theory of the Reference of Thought to Reality," _Journal of Philosophy, Psychology and Scientific Methods_, vol. I, 1904.] Dr. d.i.c.kinson S. Miller has independently thought out the same results ["The Meaning of Truth and Error," _Philosophical Review_, vol. II, 1893; "The Confusion of Function and Content in Mental a.n.a.lysis," _Psychological Review_, vol.

II, 1895], which Strong accordingly dubs the James-Miller theory of cognition.

[33] [Cf. H. Lotze: _Metaphysik_, ---- 37-39, 97, 98, 243.]

[34] 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. [Cf. F. H.

Bradley; _Appearance and Reality, pa.s.sim;_ and below, pp. 106-122.]

[35] 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. [Cf. _Principles of Psychology_, vol. I, pp.

473-480, vol. II, pp. 337-340; _Pragmatism_, p. 265; _Some Problems of Philosophy_, pp. 63-74; _Meaning of Truth_, pp. 246-247, etc. ED.]

[36] [Cf. below, pp. 93 ff.]