Pragmatism: A New Name for Some Old Ways of ThinkingJames, William
Philosophy
Pragmatism: A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking
James, William
Pragmatism
Even to-day science and philosophy are still laboriously trying to part
fancies from realities in our experience; and in primitive times they
made only the most incipient distinctions in this line. Men believed
whatever they thought with any liveliness, and they mixed their dreams
with their realities inextricably. The categories of 'thought' and
'things' are indispensable here--instead of being realities we now call
certain experiences only 'thoughts.' There is not a category, among
those enumerated, of which we may not imagine the use to have thus
originated historically and only gradually spread.
That one Time which we all believe in and in which each event has its
definite date, that one Space in which each thing has its position,
these abstract notions unify the world incomparably; but in their
finished shape as concepts how different they are from the loose
unordered time-and-space experiences of natural men! Everything that
happens to us brings its own duration and extension, and both are
vaguely surrounded by a marginal 'more' that runs into the duration
and extension of the next thing that comes. But we soon lose all our
definite bearings; and not only do our children make no distinction
between yesterday and the day before yesterday, the whole past being
churned up together, but we adults still do so whenever the times are
large. It is the same with spaces. On a map I can distinctly see the
relation of London, Constantinople, and Pekin to the place where I am;
in reality I utterly fail to FEEL the facts which the map symbolizes.
The directions and distances are vague, confused and mixed. Cosmic space
and cosmic time, so far from being the intuitions that Kant said they
were, are constructions as patently artificial as any that science can
show. The great majority of the human race never use these notions, but
live in plural times and spaces, interpenetrant and DURCHEINANDER.
Permanent 'things' again; the 'same' thing and its various 'appearances'
and 'alterations'; the different 'kinds' of thing; with the 'kind' used
finally as a 'predicate,' of which the thing remains the 'subject'--what
a straightening of the tangle of our experience's immediate flux and
sensible variety does this list of terms suggest! And it is only
the smallest part of his experience's flux that anyone actually does
straighten out by applying to it these conceptual instruments. Out of
them all our lowest ancestors probably used only, and then most vaguely
and inaccurately, the notion of 'the same again.' But even then if
you had asked them whether the same were a 'thing' that had endured
throughout the unseen interval, they would probably have been at a
loss, and would have said that they had never asked that question, or
considered matters in that light.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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