In any case the best way to study the character of those cognitional
factors which are merely incidental in so many of our experiences is
to study them in the type of experience where they are most prominent,
where they dominate; where knowing, in short, is the prime concern.
Such study will also, by a reflex reference, throw into greater relief
the contrasted characteristic traits of the non-reflectional types of
experience. In such contrast the significant traits of the latter are
seen to be internal organization: (1) the factors and qualities hang
together; there is a great variety of them but they are saturated with
a pervasive quality. Being ill with the grippe is an experience which
includes an immense diversity of factors, but none the less is the one
qualitatively unique experience which it is. Philosophers in their
exclusively intellectual preoccupation with analytic knowing are only
too much given to overlooking the primary import of the term "thing":
namely, _res_, an affair, an occupation, a "cause"; something which is
similar to having the grippe, or conducting a political campaign, or
getting rid of an overstock of canned tomatoes, or going to school, or
paying attention to a young woman:--in short, just what is meant in
non-philosophic discourse by "an experience." Noting things only as if
they were objects--that is, objects of knowledge--continuity is
rendered a mystery; qualitative, pervasive unity is too often regarded
as a subjective state injected into an object which does not possess
it, as a mental "construct," or else as a trait of being to be
attained to only by recourse to some curious organ of knowledge termed
intuition. In like fashion, organization is thought of as the achieved
outcome of a highly scientific knowledge, or as the result of
transcendental rational synthesis, or as a fiction superinduced by
association, upon elements each of which in its own right "is a
separate existence." One advantage of an excursion by one who
philosophizes upon knowledge into primary non-reflectional experience
is that the excursion serves to remind him that every empirical
situation has its own organization of a direct, non-logical character.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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