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
Motion, to take a good example, is originally a turbid sensation, of
which the native shape is perhaps best preserved in the phenomenon of
vertigo. In vertigo we feel that movement _is_, and is more or less
violent or rapid, more or less in this direction or that, more or less
alarming or sickening. But a man subject to vertigo may gradually
learn to co-ordinate his felt motion with his real position and that
of other things, and intellectualize it enough to succeed at last in
walking without staggering. The mathematical mind similarly organizes
motion in its way, putting it into a logical definition: motion is now
conceived as 'the occupancy of serially successive points of space
at serially successive instants of time.' With such a definition we
escape wholly from the turbid privacy of sense. But do we not also
escape from sense-reality altogether? Whatever motion really may be,
it surely is not static; but the definition we have gained is of the
absolutely static. It gives a set of one-to-one relations between
space-points and time-points, which relations themselves are as fixed
as the points are. It gives _positions_ assignable ad infinitum, but
how the body gets from one position to another it omits to mention.
The body gets there by moving, of course; but the conceived positions,
however numerously multiplied, contain no element of movement, so
Zeno, using nothing but them in his discussion, has no alternative
but to say that our intellect repudiates motion as a non-reality.
Intellectualism here does what I said it does--it makes experience
less instead of more intelligible.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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