A Pluralistic Universe: Hibbert Lectures at Manchester College on the Present Situation in PhilosophyJames, William
Philosophy
A Pluralistic Universe: Hibbert Lectures at Manchester College on the Present Situation in Philosophy
James, William
Philosophy, Modern
[Footnote 2: _Journal of Philosophy, Psychology, and Scientific
Methods_, vol. i, No. 20, p. 566.]
the problem, resisting certain first steps of dialectics by insisting
in a general way that the immediately experienced conjunctive
relations are as real as anything else. If my sketch is not to appear
too _näif_, I must come closer to details, and in the present essay I
propose to do so.
I
'Pure experience' is the name which I gave to the immediate flux of
life which furnishes the material to our later reflection with its
conceptual categories. Only new-born babes, or men in semi-coma
from sleep, drugs, illnesses, or blows, may be assumed to have an
experience pure in the literal sense of a _that_ which is not yet any
definite _what_, tho ready to be all sorts of whats; full both of
oneness and of manyness, but in respects that don't appear; changing
throughout, yet so confusedly that its phases interpenetrate and no
points, either of distinction or of identity, can be caught. Pure
experience in this state is but another name for feeling or sensation.
But the flux of it no sooner comes than it tends to fill itself with
emphases, and these salient parts become identified and fixed and
abstracted; so that experience now flows as if shot through with
adjectives and nouns and prepositions and conjunctions. Its purity is
only a relative term, meaning the proportional amount of unverbalized
sensation which it still embodies.
Far back as we go, the flux, both as a whole and in its parts, is that
of things conjunct and separated. The great continua of time, space,
and the self envelop everything, betwixt them, and flow together
without interfering. The things that they envelop come as separate in
some ways and as continuous in others. Some sensations coalesce with
some ideas, and others are irreconcilable. Qualities compenetrate one
space, or exclude each other from it. They cling together persistently
in groups that move as units, or else they separate. Their changes are
abrupt or discontinuous; and their kinds resemble or differ; and, as
they do so, they fall into either even or irregular series.
In all this the continuities and the discontinuities are absolutely
co-ordinate matters of immediate feeling. The conjunctions are
as primordial elements of 'fact' as are the distinctions and
disjunctions. In the same act by which I feel that this passing minute
is a new pulse of my life, I feel that the old life continues into it,
and the feeling of continuance in no wise jars upon the simultaneous
feeling of a novelty. They, too, compenetrate harmoniously.
Prepositions, copulas, and conjunctions, 'is,' 'isn't,' 'then,'
'before,' 'in,' 'on,' 'beside,' 'between,' 'next,' 'like,' 'unlike,'
'as,' 'but,' flower out of the stream of pure experience, the stream
of concretes or the sensational stream, as naturally as nouns and
adjectives do, and they melt into it again as fluidly when we apply
them to a new portion of the stream.
II
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