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 my last lecture I gave a miserably scanty outline of the way
of thinking of a philosopher remarkable for the almost unexampled
richness of his imagination of details. I owe to Fechner's shade an
apology for presenting him in a manner so unfair to the most essential
quality of his genius; but the time allotted is too short to say more
about the particulars of his work, so I proceed to the programme
I suggested at the end of our last hour. I wish to discuss the
assumption that states of consciousness, so-called, can separate and
combine themselves freely, and keep their own identity unchanged while
forming parts of simultaneous fields of experience of wider scope.
Let me first explain just what I mean by this. While you listen to
my voice, for example, you are perhaps inattentive to some bodily
sensation due to your clothing or your posture. Yet that sensation
would seem probably to be there, for in an instant, by a change of
attention, you can have it in one field of consciousness with the
voice. It seems as if it existed first in a separate form, and then as
if, without itself changing, it combined with your other co-existent
sensations. It is after this analogy that pantheistic idealism thinks
that we exist in the absolute. The absolute, it thinks, makes the
world by knowing the whole of it at once in one undivided eternal
act.[1] To 'be,' _really_ to be, is to be as it knows us to be, along
with everything else, namely, and clothed with the fulness of our
meaning. Meanwhile we _are_ at the same time not only really and as it
knows us, but also apparently, for to our separate single selves we
appear _without_ most other things and unable to declare with
any fulness what our own meaning is. Now the classic doctrine of
pantheistic idealism, from the Upanishads down to Josiah Royce, is
that the finite knowers, in spite of their apparent ignorance, are one
with the knower of the all. In the most limited moments of our private
experience, the absolute idea, as Dr. McTaggart told us, is implicitly
contained. The moments, as Royce says, exist only in relation to it.
They are true or erroneous only through its overshadowing presence. Of
the larger self that alone eternally is, they are the organic parts.
They _are_, only inasmuch as they are implicated in its being.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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