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
In whatever form we hear this question propounded, I think that it
always arises from two things, a belief that _causality_ must be
exerted in activity, and a wonder as to how causality is made. If we
take an activity-situation at its face-value, it seems as if we caught
_in flagrante delicto_ the very power that makes facts come and be. I
now am eagerly striving, for example, to get this truth which I seem
half to perceive, into words which shall make it show more clearly. If
the words come, it will seem as if the striving itself had drawn or
pulled them into actuality out from the state of merely possible being
in which they were. How is this feat performed? How does the pulling
_pull_? How do I get my hold on words not yet existent, and when they
come, by what means have I _made_ them come? Really it is the problem
of creation; for in the end the question is: How do I make them _be?_
Real activities are those that really make things be, without which
the things are not, and with which they are there. Activity, so far as
we merely feel it, on the other hand, is only an impression of ours,
it may be maintained; and an impression is, for all this way of
thinking, only a shadow of another fact.
Arrived at this point, I can do little more than indicate the
principles on which, as it seems to me, a radically empirical
philosophy is obliged to rely in handling such a dispute.
If there _be_ real creative activities in being, radical empiricism
must say, somewhere they must be immediately lived. Somewhere the
_that_ of efficacious causing and the _what_ of it must be experienced
in one, just as the what and the that of 'cold' are experienced in one
whenever a man has the sensation of cold here and now. It boots not to
say that our sensations are fallible. They are indeed; but to see the
thermometer contradict us when we say 'it is cold' does not abolish
cold as a specific nature from the universe. Cold is in the arctic
circle if not here. Even so, to feel that our train is moving when the
train beside our window moves, to see the moon through a telescope
come twice as near, or to see two pictures as one solid when we look
through a stereoscope at them, leaves motion, nearness, and solidity
still in being--if not here, yet each in its proper seat elsewhere.
And wherever the seat of real causality _is_, as ultimately known 'for
true' (in nerve-processes, if you will, that cause our feelings of
activity as well as the movements which these seem to prompt), a
philosophy of pure experience can consider the real causation as no
other _nature_ of thing than that which even in our most erroneous
experiences appears to be at work. Exactly what appears there is what
we _mean_ by working, tho we may later come to learn that working was
not exactly _there_. Sustaining, persevering, striving, paying with
effort as we go, hanging on, and finally achieving our intention--this
_is_ action, this _is_ effectuation in the only shape in which, by
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