Now my contention is exactly the reverse of this. _Experience, I
believe, has no such inner duplicity; and the separation of it into
consciousness and content comes, not by way of subtraction, but by way
of addition_--the addition, to a given concrete piece of it, of other
sets of experiences, in connection with which severally its use or
function may be of two different kinds. The paint will also serve here
as an illustration. In a pot in a paint-shop, along with other paints,
it serves in its entirety as so much saleable matter. Spread on a
canvas, with other paints around it, it represents, on the contrary, a
feature in a picture and performs a spiritual function. Just so, I
maintain, does a given undivided portion of experience, taken in one
context of associates, play the part of a knower, of a state of mind, of
'consciousness'; while in a different context the same undivided bit of
experience plays the part of a thing known, of an objective 'content.'
In a word, in one group it figures as a thought, in another group as a
thing. And, since it can figure in both groups simultaneously we have
every right to speak of it as subjective and objective both at once. The
dualism connoted by such double-barrelled terms as 'experience,'
'phenomenon,' 'datum,' '_Vorfindung_'--terms which, in philosophy at any
rate, tend more and more to replace the single-barrelled terms of
'thought' and 'thing'--that dualism, I say, is still preserved in this
account, but reinterpreted, so that, instead of being mysterious and
elusive, it becomes verifiable and concrete. It is an affair of
relations, it falls outside, not inside, the single experience
considered, and can always be particularized and defined.
The entering wedge for this more concrete way of understanding the
dualism was fashioned by Locke when he made the word 'idea' stand
indifferently for thing and thought, and by Berkeley when he said that
what common sense means by realities is exactly what the philosopher
means by ideas. Neither Locke nor Berkeley thought his truth out into
perfect clearness, but it seems to me that the conception I am defending
does little more than consistently carry out the 'pragmatic' method
which they were the first to use.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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