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A World Of Pure Experience
by
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.