The first duty of radical empiricism, taking given conjunctions at their
face-value, is to class some of them as more intimate and some as more
external. When two terms are _similar_, their very natures enter into
the relation. Being _what_ they are, no matter where or when, the
likeness never can be denied, if asserted. It continues predicable as
long as the terms continue. Other relations, the _where_ and the _when_,
for example, seem adventitious. The sheet of paper may be 'off' or 'on'
the table, for example; and in either case the relation involves only
the outside of its terms. Having an outside, both of them, they
contribute by it to the relation. It is external: the term's inner
nature is irrelevant to it. Any book, any table, may fall into the
relation, which is created _pro hac vice_, not by their existence, but
by their casual situation. It is just because so many of the
conjunctions of experience seem so external that a philosophy of pure
experience must tend to pluralism in its ontology. So far as things have
space-relations, for example, we are free to imagine them with different
origins even. If they could get to _be_, and get into space at all, then
they may have done so separately. Once there, however, they are
_additives_ to one another, and, with no prejudice to their natures, all
sorts of space-relations may supervene between them. The question of
how things could come to be anyhow, is wholly different from the
question what their relations, once the being accomplished, may consist
in.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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