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.
The generalized conclusion is that therefore the parts of experience
hold together from next to next by relations that are themselves parts
of experience. The directly apprehended universe needs, in short, no
extraneous trans-empirical connective support, but possesses in its own
right a concatenated or continuous structure.
The great obstacle to radical empiricism in the contemporary mind is the
rooted rationalist belief that experience as immediately given is all
disjunction and no conjunction, and that to make one world out of this
separateness, a higher unifying agency must be there. In the prevalent
idealism this agency is represented as the absolute all-witness which
'relates' things together by throwing 'categories' over them like a
net. The most peculiar and unique, perhaps, of all these categories is
supposed to be the truth-relation, which connects parts of reality in
pairs, making of one of them a knower, and of the other a thing known,
yet which is itself contentless experientially, neither describable,
explicable, nor reduceable to lower terms, and denotable only by
uttering the name 'truth.'
The pragmatist view, on the contrary, of the truth-relation is that it
has a definite content, and that everything in it is experienceable.
Its whole nature can be told in positive terms. The 'workableness'
which ideas must have, in order to be true, means particular workings,
physical or intellectual, actual or possible, which they may set up
from next to next inside of concrete experience. Were this pragmatic
contention admitted, one great point in the victory of radical
empiricism would also be scored, for the relation between an object and
the idea that truly knows it, is held by rationalists to be nothing of
this describable sort, but to stand outside of all possible temporal
experience; and on the relation, so interpreted, rationalism is wonted
to make its last most obdurate rally.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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