(2) "The statement of fact is that _the relations between things, conjunctive as well as disjunctive, are just as much matters of direct particular experience, neither more so nor less so, than the things themselves_." (Cf. also _A Pluralistic Universe_, p. 280; _The Will to Believe_, p. 278.) This is the central doctrine of the present book. It distinguishes 'radical empiricism' from the "ordinary empiricism" of Hume, J. S. Mill, etc., with which it is otherwise allied. (Cf. below, pp. 42-44.) It provides an empirical and relational version of 'activity,' and so distinguishes the author's voluntarism from a view with which it is easily confused--the view which upholds a pure or transcendent activity. (Cf. below, Essay VI.) It makes it possible to escape the vicious disjunctions that have thus far baffled philosophy: such disjunctions as those between consciousness and physical nature, between thought and its object, between one mind and another, and between one 'thing' and another. These disjunctions need not be 'overcome' by calling in any "extraneous trans-empirical connective support" (_Meaning of Truth_, Preface, p. xiii); they may now be _avoided_ by regarding the dualities in question as only _differences of empirical relationship among common empirical terms_. The pragmatistic account of 'meaning' and 'truth,' shows only how a vicious disjunction between 'idea' and 'object' may thus be avoided. The present volume not only presents pragmatism in this light; but adds similar accounts of the other dualities mentioned above. Thus while pragmatism and radical empiricism do not differ essentially when regarded as _methods_, they are independent when regarded as doctrines. For it would be possible to hold the pragmatistic theory of 'meaning' and 'truth,' without basing it on any fundamental theory of relations, and without extending such a theory of relations to residual philosophical problems; without, in short, holding either to the above 'statement of fact,' or to the following 'generalized conclusion.'