Now, ordinary empiricism, in spite of the fact that conjunctive and
disjunctive relations present themselves as being fully co-ordinate
parts of experience, has always shown a tendency to do away with the
connections of things, and to insist most on the disjunctions.
Berkeley's nominalism, Hume's statement that whatever things we
distinguish are as 'loose and separate' as if they had 'no manner of
connection,' James Mill's denial that similars have anything 'really' in
common, the resolution of the causal tie into habitual sequence, John
Mill's account of both physical things and selves as composed of
discontinuous possibilities, and the general pulverization of all
Experience by association and the mind-dust theory, are examples of what
I mean.[26]
The natural result of such a world-picture has been the efforts of
rationalism to correct its incoherencies by the addition of
trans-experiential agents of unification, substances, intellectual
categories and powers, or Selves; whereas, if empiricism had only been
radical and taken everything that comes without disfavor, conjunction as
well as separation, each at its face value, the results would have
called for no such artificial correction. _Radical empiricism_, as I
understand it, _does full justice to conjunctive relations_, without,
however, treating them as rationalism always tends to treat them, as
being true in some supernal way, as if the unity of things and their
variety belonged to different orders of truth and vitality altogether.
II. CONJUNCTIVE RELATIONS
Relations are of different degrees of intimacy. Merely to be 'with' one
another in a universe of discourse is the most external relation that
terms can have, and seems to involve nothing whatever as to farther
consequences. Simultaneity and time-interval come next, and then
space-adjacency and distance. After them, similarity and difference,
carrying the possibility of many inferences. Then relations of activity,
tying terms into series involving change, tendency, resistance, and the
causal order generally. Finally, the relation experienced between terms
that form states of mind, and are immediately conscious of continuing
each other. The organization of the Self as a system of memories,
purposes, strivings, fulfilments or disappointments, is incidental to
this most intimate of all relations, the terms of which seem in many
cases actually to compenetrate and suffuse each other's being.[27]
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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