some discrimination, and also as a discriminative term with a highly
eulogistic flavor: as _real_ money in distinction from counterfeit
money. Then, although every inquiry in daily life, whether
technological or scientific, asks _whether_ a thing is real only in
the sense of asking _what_ thing is real, philosophy concludes to a
wholesale distinction between the real and the unreal, the real and
the apparent, and so creates a wholly artificial problem.
If the philosopher, whether idealistic or realistic, who holds that it
is self-contradictory to criticize purely intellectualistic
conceptions of the world, because the criticism itself goes on
intellectualistic terms, so that its validity depends upon
intellectual (or cognitive) conditions, will but think of the very
brute doings in which a chemist engages to fix the meanings of his
terms and to test his theories and conceptions, he will perceive that
all intellectual knowing is but a method for conducting an experiment,
and that arguments and objections are but stimuli to induce somebody
to try a certain experiment--to have recourse, that is, to a
non-logical non-intellectual affair. Or again, the argument is an
invitation to him to note that at the very time in which he is
thinking, his thinking is set in a continuum which is not an object of
thought. The importance attached to the word "experience," then, both
in the essays and in this Introduction, is to be understood as an
invitation to employ thought and discriminative knowledge as a means
of plunging into something which no argument and no term can express;
or rather as an invitation to note the fact that no plunge is needed,
since one's own thinking and explicit knowledge are already
constituted by and within something which does not need to be
expressed or made explicit. And finally, there is nothing mystical
about this, though mysticism doubtless roots in this fact. Its import
is only to call notice to the meaning of, say, formulae communicated
by a chemist to others as the result of his experiment. All that can
be communicated or expressed is that one believes such and such a
thing. The communication has scientific instead of merely social
significance because the communicated formula is a direction to other
chemists to try certain procedures and see what they get. The
_direction_ is capable of expression; the result of the experiment,
the experience, to which the propositions refer and by which they are
tested, is not expressible. (Poetry, of course, is a more competent
organ of suggesting it than scientific prose.) The word "experience"
is, I repeat, a notation of an inexpressible as that which decides the
ultimate status of all which is expressed; inexpressible not because
it is so remote and transcendent, but because it is so immediately
engrossing and matter of course.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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