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
Of course, if true, this cuts off radical empiricism without even a
shilling. Radical empiricism takes conjunctive relations at their
face-value, holding them to be as real as the terms united by them.
The world it represents as a collection, some parts of which are
conjunctively and others disjunctively related. Two parts, themselves
disjoined, may nevertheless hang together by intermediaries with which
they are severally connected, and the whole world eventually may hang
together similarly, inasmuch as _some_ path of conjunctive transition
by which to pass from one of its parts to another may always be
discernible. Such determinately various hanging-together may be called
_concatenated_ union, to distinguish it from the 'through-and-through'
type of union, 'each in all and all in each' (union of _total
conflux_, as one might call it), which monistic systems hold to obtain
when things are taken in their absolute reality. In a concatenated
world a partial conflux often is experienced. Our concepts and our
sensations are confluent; successive states of the same ego, and
feelings of the same body are confluent. Where the experience is not
of conflux, it may be of conterminousness (things with but one thing
between); or of contiguousness (nothing between); or of likeness; or
of nearness; or of simultaneousness; or of in-ness; or of on-ness; or
of for-ness; or of simple with-ness; or even of mere and-ness, which
last relation would make of however disjointed a world otherwise, at
any rate for that occasion a universe 'of discourse.' Now Mr. Bradley
tells us that none of these relations, as we actually experience them,
can possibly be real.[1] My next duty, accordingly, must be to rescue
radical empiricism from Mr. Bradley. Fortunately, as it seems to me,
his general contention, that the very notion of relation is
[Footnote 1: Here again the reader must beware of slipping from
logical into phenomenal considerations. It may well be that we
_attribute_ a certain relation falsely, because the circumstances of
the case, being complex, have deceived us. At a railway station we
may take our own train, and not the one that fills our window, to be
moving. We here put motion in the wrong place in the world, but in its
original place the motion is a part of reality. What Mr. Bradley
means is nothing like this, but rather that such things as motion
are nowhere real, and that, even in their aboriginal and empirically
incorrigible seats, relations are impossible of comprehension.]
unthinkable clearly, has been successfully met by many critics.[1]
It is a burden to the flesh, and an injustice both to readers and to
the previous writers, to repeat good arguments already printed. So,
in noticing Mr. Bradley, I will confine myself to the interests of
radical empiricism solely.
V
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