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 entities split off from each other. The world is in so far forth a pluralism of which the unity is not fully experienced as yet. But, as fast as verifications come, trains of experience, once separate, run into one another; and that is why I said, earlier in my article, that the unity of the world is on the whole undergoing increase. The universe continually grows in quantity by new experiences that graft themselves upon the older mass; but these very new experiences often help the mass to a more consolidated form.
These are the main features of a philosophy of pure experience. It has innumerable other aspects and arouses innumerable questions, but the points I have touched on seem enough to make an entering wedge. In my own mind such a philosophy harmonizes best 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: Analysis 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 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.
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. Dickinson 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 Analysis,” 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, passim; 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.]
37 [Cf. “How Two Minds Can Know One Thing,” below, pp. 123-136.]
38 The notion that our objects are inside of our respective heads is not seriously defensible, so I pass it by.
39 [The argument is resumed below, pp. 101 sq. Ed.]
40 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. [Cf. Morton Prince: The Nature of Mind, and Human Automatism, part i, ch. iii, iv; C. A. Strong: Why the Mind Has a Body, ch. xii.]
41 [Cf. below, p. 188; A Pluralistic Universe, Lect. iv-vii.]
42 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.]