'Pure experience' is the name which I gave to the immediate flux of life
which furnishes the material to our later reflection with its conceptual
categories. Only new-born babes, or men in semi-coma from sleep, drugs,
illnesses, or blows, may be assumed to have an experience pure in the
literal sense of a _that_ which is not yet any definite _what_, tho'
ready to be all sorts of whats; full both of oneness and of manyness,
but in respects that don't appear; changing throughout, yet so
confusedly that its phases interpenetrate and no points, either of
distinction or of identity, can be caught. Pure experience in this state
is but another name for feeling or sensation. But the flux of it no
sooner comes than it tends to fill itself with emphases, and these
salient parts become identified and fixed and abstracted; so that
experience now flows as if shot through with adjectives and nouns and
prepositions and conjunctions. Its purity is only a relative term,
meaning the proportional amount of unverbalized sensation which it still
embodies.
Far back as we go, the flux, both as a whole and in its parts, is that
of things conjunct and separated. The great continua of time, space, and
the self envelope everything, betwixt them, and flow together without
interfering. The things that they envelope come as separate in some ways
and as continuous in others. Some sensations coalesce with some ideas,
and others are irreconcilable. Qualities compenetrate one space, or
exclude each other from it. They cling together persistently in groups
that move as units, or else they separate. Their changes are abrupt or
discontinuous; and their kinds resemble or differ; and, as they do so,
they fall into either even or irregular series.
In all this the continuities and the discontinuities are absolutely
co-ordinate matters of immediate feeling. The conjunctions are as
primordial elements of 'fact' as are the distinctions and disjunctions.
In the same act by which I feel that this passing minute is a new pulse
of my life, I feel that the old life continues into it, and the feeling
of continuance in no wise jars upon the simultaneous feeling of a
novelty. They, too, compenetrate harmoniously. Prepositions, copulas,
and conjunctions, 'is,' 'isn't,' 'then,' 'before,' 'in,' 'on,' 'beside,'
'between,' 'next,' 'like,' 'unlike,' 'as,' 'but,' flower out of the
stream of pure experience, the stream of concretes or the sensational
stream, as naturally as nouns and adjectives do, and they melt into it
again as fluidly when we apply them to a new portion of the stream.
II
If now we ask why we must thus translate experience from a more concrete
or pure into a more intellectualized form, filling it with ever more
abounding conceptual distinctions, rationalism and naturalism give
different replies.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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