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I wish I might believe myself to have made 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.

FOOTNOTES:

[2] [Reprinted from the Journal of Philosophy, Psychology and Scientific Methods, vol. I, No. 18, September 1, 1904. For the relation between this essay and those which follow, cf. below, pp. 53-54. ED.]

[3] Articles by Baldwin, Ward, Bawden, King, Alexander and others. Dr. Perry is frankly over the border.

[4] [Similarly, there is no “activity of ‘consciousness’ as such.” See below, pp. 170 ff., note. ED.]

[5] 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.]

[6] G. E. Moore: Mind, vol. XII, N. S., [1903], p. 450.

[7] Paul Natorp: Einleitung in die Psychologie, 1888, pp. 14, 112.

[8] “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] [For a parallel statement of this view, cf. the author’s Meaning of Truth, p. 49, note. Cf. also below, pp. 196-197. ED.]

[10] [For the author’s recognition of “concepts as a co-ordinate realm” of reality, cf. his Meaning of Truth, pp. 42, 195, note; A Pluralistic Universe, pp. 339-340; Some Problems of Philosophy, pp. 50-57, 67-70; and below, p. 16, note. Giving this view the name ‘logical realism,’ he remarks elsewhere that his philosophy “may be regarded as somewhat eccentric in its attempt to combine logical realism with an otherwise empiricist mode of thought” ( Some Problems of Philosophy, p. 106). ED.]

[11] 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. [Cf. below, p. 42.]

[12] Of the representative function 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. [Cf. below, pp. 52 ff.]

[13] Muensterberg: Grundzuege der Psychologie, vol. I, p. 48.

[14] Cf. A. L. Hodder: The Adversaries of the Sceptic, pp. 94-99.

[15] 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. [Cf. above, p. 16.]

[16] Note the ambiguity of this term, which is taken sometimes objectively and sometimes subjectively.

[17] 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 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.

[18] I have given a partial account of the matter in Mind, vol. X, p. 27, 1885 [reprinted in The Meaning of Truth, pp. 1-42], and in the Psychological Review, vol. II, p. 105, 1895 [partly reprinted in The Meaning of Truth, pp. 43-50]. 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. [See below, pp. 52 ff.]

[19] [Cf. Shadworth Hodgson: The Metaphysic of Experience, vol. I. passim; The Philosophy of Reflection, bk. II, ch. IV, Sec. 3. ED.]

[20] 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. [Cf. Spencer: Principles of Psychology, part VII, ch. XIX.]

[21] I speak here of the complete inner life in which the mind plays freely with its materials. Of course the mind’s free play is restricted when it seeks to copy real things in real space.

[22] [But there are also “mental activity trains,” in which thoughts do “work on each other.” Cf. below, p. 184, note. ED.]

[23] [This topic is resumed below, pp. 137 ff. ED.]

[24] [ Principles of Psychology, vol. I, pp. 299-305. Cf. below, pp. 169-171 (note).]