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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.'[64] 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.'[65] 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), 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,[66] 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 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[67] 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.

In [the next essay] I shall return to this last supposition, which seems to me to offer other difficulties much harder for a philosophy of pure experience to deal with than any of absolutism’s dialectic objections.

FOOTNOTES:

[43] [Reprinted from The Journal of Philosophy, Psychology and Scientific Methods, vol. II, No. 2, January 19, 1905. Reprinted also as Appendix A in A Pluralistic Universe, pp. 347-369. The author’s corrections have been adopted in the present text. ED.]

[44] [F. H. Bradley: Appearance and Reality, second edition, pp. 152-153, 23, 118, 104, 108-109, 570.]

[45] Compare Professor MacLennan’s admirable Auseinandersetzung with Mr. Bradley, in The Journal of Philosophy, Psychology and Scientific Methods, vol. I, [1904], pp. 403 ff., especially pp. 405-407.

[46] [Hume: Treatise of Human Nature, Appendix, Selby-Bigge’s edition, p. 636.]

[47] 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.

[48] See above, pp. 42 ff.

[49] 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!