Elements of metaphysicsTaylor, A. E. (Alfred Edward)
Philosophy
Elements of metaphysics
Taylor, A. E. (Alfred Edward)
Metaphysics
§ 10. Our foregoing discussion of the metaphysical criterion will
suggest a fairly definite ideal of what a completely adequate
apprehension of the whole of reality would be. A completely adequate
apprehension of reality would be one which contained all reality and
nothing but reality, and thus involved no element whatever of deceptive
appearance. As such it would, in the first place, be all-embracing; it
would include in itself every datum of direct experience, and, since
nothing but data of experience, or, as we have also called them, matters
of psychical fact, are the materials of reality, it would contain
nothing else. In the second place, it would contain all its data without
contradiction or discrepancy as part of a single system with a
harmonious internal structure of its own. For wherever there is
discrepancy, as we have already seen, there is imperfect and therefore
partially false appearance. And, in the third place, such an
all-embracing harmonious apprehension of the whole data of experience
would clearly transcend that separation of existence from content which
is temporarily effected by our own efforts to restate _our_ experience
in a consistent form. It would, because complete in itself, involve at a
higher level that immediacy which, at a lower level, we know as
characteristic of feeling. It would thus experience the whole of real
existence directly as a system with internal consistency and structure,
but without any reference to anything beyond itself. As we said of the
artistic whole, so we may say of the whole of existence as it might be
apprehended by a completed insight, it would be what it meant, and mean
what it was. To such an ideally complete experience of reality as a
single system, by way of marking its exclusively experiential nature, we
may give the name, introduced into Philosophy by Avenarius, of a “pure”
experience, that is, an experience which is in all its parts experience
and nothing else. Of course, in adopting the name, we are not
necessarily identifying ourselves with the further views of Avenarius as
to what in particular the structure of such an experience would be.
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