Has not the lesson, however, been so well learned that we can drop
reference to experience? Would that such were the case. But the time
does not seem to have come. Some things enter by way of the
imagination, stimulated by emotional preferences and biases. For
_certain_ purposes, they are not the worse for having entered by that
gate, instead of through sensory-motor adjustments. Or they may have
entered because of the love of man for logical form and symmetry and
system, and because of the emotional satisfaction which harmony
awakens in a sensitive soul. They too need not be any worse for all
that. But surely it is among the businesses of philosophy to
discriminate between the kinds of goodness possessed by different
kinds of things. And how can it discriminate unless by telling by what
road they got into our experience and what they do after they get
there? Assuredly the difference is not in _intrinsic_ content. It is
not because of self-obvious and self-contained traits of the immediate
terms that Dante's world belongs to poetry and Newton's to scientific
astronomy. No amount of pure inspection and excogitation could decide
which belongs to which world. The difference in status and claim is
made by what we call experience: by the place of the two systems in
experience with respect to their generation and consequences. And
assuredly any philosophy which takes science to be not an _account_ of
the world (which it is), but a literal and exhaustive apprehension of
it in its full reality, a philosophy which therefore has no place for
poetry or possibilities, still needs a theory of experience.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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