[15] In respect of James’ later doctrine of “radical empiricism” we may quote, for the sake of intelligibility, from Professor Perry (his friend and literary executor) the following: “James’ empiricism means, then, first, that ideas are to be tested by direct knowledge, and, second, that knowledge is limited to what can be presented. There is, however, a third consideration which is an application of these, and the means of avoiding a difficulty which is supposed to be fatal to them. This is what James calls ‘radical empiricism,’ the discovery that ‘the relations between things, conjunctive as well as disjunctive, are just as much matters of direct particular experience, neither more nor less so, than the things themselves.’ ‘Adjacent minima of experience’ are united by the ‘persistent identity of certain units, or emphases, or points, or objects, or members ... of the experience-continuum.’ Owing to the fact that the connexions of things are thus found along with them, it is unnecessary to introduce any substance below them, or any subject above them, to hold things together” (_Present Philosophical Tendencies_, p. 365). In regard to this radical empiricism, I am obliged, as a Kantian, to say that, to my mind, it represents the reduction of all Pragmatism and Empiricism to an impossibility--to the fatuous attempt (exploded for ever by Hume) to attempt to explain knowledge and experience _without first principles_ of some kind or another. It is a “new Humism,” a thing which no one who has penetrated into the meaning of Hume’s _Treatise_ can possibly advocate. A philosophy without first principles, or a philosophy that reduces the relations between experiences to mere “bits” of experience, is indeed no philosophy at all. [16] See p. 82 and p. 154. [17] The Preface, pp. xv., xix. [18] See p. 159 and p. 212. [19] As for Dr. Schiller’s charge that Absolutism is essentially “irreligious” in spite of the fact of its having been (in England) religious at the outset, the best way of meeting this is to insist that it is mainly in its form, rather than its content, that Absolutism is (or was) irreligious in both Germany and England.