Essays in Radical Empiricism Part 5

would seem (in spite of Mr. Bradley's somewhat undecided utterances[58]) to be the full Bradleyan answer. The 'whole' which he here treats as primary and determinative of each part's manner of 'contributing,' simply _must_, when it alters, alter in its entirety. There _must_ be total conflux of its parts, each into and through each other. The 'must' appears here as a _Machtspruch_, as an _ipse dixit_ of Mr. Bradley's absolutistically tempered 'understanding,' for he candidly confesses that how the parts _do_ differ as they contribute to different wholes, is unknown to him.[59]

Although I have every wish to comprehend the authority by which Mr.

Bradley's understanding speaks, his words leave me wholly unconverted.

'External relations' stand with their withers all unwrung, and remain, for aught he proves to the contrary, not only practically workable, but also perfectly intelligible factors of reality.

VI

Mr. Bradley's understanding shows the most extraordinary power of perceiving separations and the most extraordinary impotence in comprehending conjunctions. One would naturally say 'neither or both,'

but not so Mr. Bradley. When a common man a.n.a.lyzes certain _whats_ from out the stream of experience, he understands their distinctness _as thus isolated_. But this does not prevent him from equally well understanding their combination with each other _as originally experienced in the concrete_, or their confluence with new sensible experiences in which they recur as 'the same.' Returning into the stream of sensible presentation, nouns and adjectives, and _thats_ and abstract _whats_, grow confluent again, and the word 'is' names all these experiences of conjunction. Mr. Bradley understands the isolation of the abstracts, but to understand the combination is to him impossible.[60] "To understand a complex _AB_," he says, "I must begin with _A_ or _B_. And beginning, say with _A_, if I then merely find _B_, I have either lost _A_, or I have got beside _A_, [_the word 'beside' seems here vital, as meaning a conjunction 'external' and therefore unintelligible_] something else, and in neither case have I understood.[61] For my intellect can not simply unite a diversity, nor has it in itself any form or way of togetherness, and you gain nothing if, beside _A_ and _B_, you offer me their conjunction in fact. For to my intellect that is no more than another external element. And 'facts,' once for all, are for my intellect not true unless they satisfy it.... The intellect has in its nature no principle of mere togetherness."[62]

Of course Mr. Bradley has a right to define 'intellect' as the power by which we perceive separations but not unions--provided he give due notice to the reader. But why then claim that such a maimed and amputated power must reign supreme in philosophy, and accuse on its behoof the whole empirical world of irrationality? It is true that he elsewhere attributes to the intellect a _proprius motus_ of transition, but says that when he looks for _these_ transitions in the detail of living experience, he 'is unable to verify such a solution.'[63]

Yet he never explains what the intellectual transitions would be like in case we had them. He only defines them negatively--they are not spatial, temporal, predicative, or causal; or qualitatively or otherwise serial; or in any way relational as we navely trace relations, for relations _separate_ terms, and need themselves to be hooked on _ad infinitum_.

The nearest approach he makes to describing a truly intellectual transition is where he speaks of _A_ and _B_ as being 'united, each from its own nature, in a whole which is the nature of both alike.'[64]

But this (which, _pace_ Mr. Bradley, seems exquisitely a.n.a.logous to 'taking' a congeries in a 'lump,' if not to 'swamping') suggests nothing but that _conflux_ which pure experience so abundantly offers, as when 's.p.a.ce,' 'white' and 'sweet' are confluent in a 'lump of sugar,' or kinesthetic, dermal, and optical sensations confluent in 'my hand.'[65]

All that I can verify in the transitions which Mr. Bradley's intellect desiderates as its _proprius motus_ is a reminiscence of these and other sensible conjunctions (especially s.p.a.ce-conjunctions), but a reminiscence so vague that its originals are not recognized. Bradley in short repeats the fable of the dog, the bone, and its image in the water. With a world of particulars, given in loveliest union, in conjunction definitely various, and variously definite, the 'how' of which you 'understand' as soon as you see the fact of them,[66] for there is no 'how' except the const.i.tution of the fact as given; with all this given him, I say, in pure experience, he asks for some ineffable union in the abstract instead, which, if he gained it, would only be a duplicate of what he has already in his full possession. Surely he abuses the privilege which society grants to all us philosophers, of being puzzle-headed.

Polemic writing like this is odious; but with absolutism in possession in so many quarters, omission to defend my radical empiricism against its best known champion would count as either superficiality or inability. I have to conclude that its dialectic has not invalidated in the least degree the usual conjunctions by which the world, as experienced, hangs so variously together. In particular it leaves an empirical theory of knowledge[67] intact, and lets us continue to believe with common sense that one object _may_ be known, if we have any ground for thinking that it _is_ known, to many knowers.

In [the next essay] I shall return to this last supposition, which seems to me to offer other difficulties much harder for a philosophy of pure experience to deal with than any of absolutism's dialectic objections.

FOOTNOTES:

[43] [Reprinted from _The Journal of Philosophy, Psychology and Scientific Methods_, vol. II, No. 2, January 19, 1905. Reprinted also as Appendix A in _A Pluralistic Universe_, pp. 347-369. The author's corrections have been adopted in the present text. ED.]

[44] [F. H. Bradley: _Appearance and Reality_, second edition, pp.

152-153, 23, 118, 104, 108-109, 570.]

[45] Compare Professor MacLennan's admirable _Auseinandersetzung_ with Mr. Bradley, in _The Journal of Philosophy, Psychology and Scientific Methods_, vol. I, [1904], pp. 403 ff., especially pp. 405-407.

[46] [Hume: _Treatise of Human Nature_, Appendix, Selby-Bigge's edition, p. 636.]

[47] Technically, it seems cla.s.sable as a 'fallacy of composition.' A duality, predicable of the two wholes, _L--M_ and _M--N_, is forthwith predicated of one of their parts, _M_.

[48] See above, pp. 42 ff.

[49] I may perhaps refer here to my _Principles of Psychology_, vol. I, pp. 459 ff. It really seems 'weird' to have to argue (as I am forced now to do) for the notion that it is one sheet of paper (with its two surfaces and all that lies between) which is both under my pen and on the table while I write--the 'claim' that it is two sheets seems so brazen. Yet I sometimes suspect the absolutists of sincerity!

[50] [For the author's criticism of Hegel's view of relations, cf. _Will to Believe_, pp. 278-279. ED.]

[51] [Cf. A. Spir: _Denken und Wirklichkeit_, part I, bk. III, ch. IV (containing also account of Herbart). ED.]

[52] [See above, pp. 42, 49.]

[53] Here again the reader must beware of slipping from logical into phenomenal considerations. It may well be that we _attribute_ a certain relation falsely, because the circ.u.mstances of the case, being complex, have deceived us. At a railway station we may take our own train, and not the one that fills our window, to be moving. We here put motion in the wrong place in the world, but in its original place the motion is a part of reality. What Mr. Bradley means is nothing like this, but rather that such things as motion are nowhere real, and that, even in their aboriginal and empirically incorrigible seats, relations are impossible of comprehension.

[54] Particularly so by Andrew Seth Pringle-Pattison, in his _Man and the Cosmos_; by L. T. Hobhouse, in chapter XII ("The Validity of Judgment") of his _Theory of Knowledge_; and by F. C. S. Schiller, in his _Humanism_, essay XI. Other fatal reviews (in my opinion) are Hodder's, in the _Psychological Review_, vol. I, [1894], p. 307; Stout's in the _Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society_, 1901-2, p. 1; and MacLennan's in [_The Journal of Philosophy, Psychology and Scientific Methods_, vol. I, 1904, p. 403].

[55] Once more, don't slip from logical into physical situations. Of course, if the table be wet, it will moisten the book, or if it be slight enough and the book heavy enough, the book will break it down.

But such collateral phenomena are not the point at issue. The point is whether the successive relations 'on' and 'not-on' can rationally (not physically) hold of the same constant terms, abstractly taken. Professor A. E. Taylor drops from logical into material considerations when he instances color-contrast as a proof that _A_, 'as contra-distinguished from _B_, is not the same thing as mere _A_ not in any way affected'

(_Elements of Metaphysics_, p. 145). Note the subst.i.tution, for 'related' of the word 'affected,' which begs the whole question.

[56] But "is there any sense," asks Mr. Bradley, peevishly, on p. 579, "and if so, what sense in truth that is only outside and 'about'

things?" Surely such a question may be left unanswered.

[57] _Appearance and Reality_, second edition, pp. 575-576.

[58] I say 'undecided,' because, apart from the 'so far,' which sounds terribly half-hearted, there are pa.s.sages in these very pages in which Mr. Bradley admits the pluralistic thesis. Read, for example, what he says, on p. 578, of a billiard ball keeping its 'character' unchanged, though, in its change of place, its 'existence' gets altered; or what he says, on p. 579, of the possibility that an abstract quality A, B, or C, in a thing, 'may throughout remain unchanged' although the thing be altered; or his admission that in red-hairedness, both as a.n.a.lyzed out of a man and when given with the rest of him, there may be 'no change' (p. 580). Why does he immediately add that for the pluralist to plead the non-mutation of such abstractions would be an _ignoratio elenchi_? It is impossible to admit it to be such. The entire _elenchus_ and inquest is just as to whether parts which you can abstract from existing wholes can also contribute to other wholes without changing their inner nature. If they can thus mould various wholes into new _gestaltqualitaten_, then it follows that the same elements are logically able to exist in different wholes [whether physically able would depend on additional hypotheses]; that partial changes are thinkable, and through-and-through change not a dialectic necessity; that monism is only an hypothesis; and that an additively const.i.tuted universe is a rationally respectable hypothesis also. All the theses of radical empiricism, in short, follow.

[59] _Op. cit._, pp. 577-579.

[60] So far as I catch his state of mind, it is somewhat like this: 'Book,' 'table,' 'on'--how does the existence of these three abstract elements result in _this_ book being livingly on _this_ table. Why isn't the table on the book? Or why doesn't the 'on' connect itself with another book, or something that is not a table? Mustn't something _in_ each of the three elements already determine the two others to _it_, so that they do not settle elsewhere or float vaguely? Mustn't the _whole fact be pre-figured in each part_, and exist _de jure_ before it can exist _de facto_? But, if so, in what can the jural existence consist, if not in a spiritual miniature of the whole fact's const.i.tution actuating every partial factor as its purpose? But is this anything but the old metaphysical fallacy of looking behind a fact _in esse_ for the ground of the fact, and finding it in the shape of the very same fact _in posse_? Somewhere we must leave off with a _const.i.tution_ behind which there is nothing.

[61] Apply this to the case of 'book-on-table'! W. J.

[62] _Op. cit._, pp. 570, 572.

[63] _Op. cit._, pp. 568, 569.

[64] _Op. cit._, p. 570.

[65] How meaningless is the contention that in such wholes (or in 'book-on-table,' 'watch-in-pocket,' etc.) the relation is an additional ent.i.ty _between_ the terms, needing itself to be related again to each!

Both Bradley (_op. cit._, pp. 32-33) and Royce (_The World and the Individual_, vol. I, p. 128) lovingly repeat this piece of profundity.

[66] The 'why' and the 'whence' are entirely other questions, not under discussion, as I understand Mr. Bradley. Not how experience gets itself born, but how it can be what it is after it is born, is the puzzle.

[67] Above, p. 52.

IV

HOW TWO MINDS CAN KNOW ONE THING[68]

In [the essay] ent.i.tled 'Does Consciousness Exist?' I have tried to show that when we call an experience 'conscious,' that does not mean that it is suffused throughout with a peculiar modality of being ('psychic'

being) as stained gla.s.s may be suffused with light, but rather that it stands in certain determinate relations to other portions of experience extraneous to itself. These form one peculiar 'context' for it; while, taken in another context of experiences, we cla.s.s it as a fact in the physical world. This 'pen,' for example, is, in the first instance, a bald _that_, a datum, fact, phenomenon, content, or whatever other neutral or ambiguous name you may prefer to apply. I called it in that article a 'pure experience.' To get cla.s.sed either as a physical pen or as some one's percept of a pen, it must a.s.sume a _function_, and that can only happen in a more complicated world. So far as in that world it is a stable feature, holds ink, marks paper and obeys the guidance of a hand, it is a physical pen. That is what we mean by being 'physical,' in a pen. So far as it is instable, on the contrary, coming and going with the movements of my eyes, altering with what I call my fancy, continuous with subsequent experiences of its 'having been' (in the past tense), it is the percept of a pen in my mind. Those peculiarities are what we mean by being 'conscious,' in a pen.

In Section VI of another [essay][69] I tried to show that the same _that_, the same numerically identical pen of pure experience, can enter simultaneously into many conscious contexts, or, in other words, be an object for many different minds. I admitted that I had not s.p.a.ce to treat of certain possible objections in that article; but in [the last essay] I took some of the objections up. At the end of that [essay] I said that still more formidable-sounding objections remained; so, to leave my pure-experience theory in as strong a state as possible, I propose to consider those objections now.

I

The objections I previously tried to dispose of were purely logical or dialectical. No one identical term, whether physical or psychical, it had been said, could be the subject of two relations at once. This thesis I sought to prove unfounded. The objections that now confront us arise from the nature supposed to inhere in psychic facts specifically.

Whatever may be the case with physical objects, a fact of consciousness, it is alleged (and indeed very plausibly), can not, without self-contradiction, be treated as a portion of two different minds, and for the following reasons.

In the physical world we make with impunity the a.s.sumption that one and the same material object can figure in an indefinitely large number of different processes at once. When, for instance, a sheet of rubber is pulled at its four corners, a unit of rubber in the middle of the sheet is affected by all four of the pulls. It _transmits_ them each, as if it pulled in four different ways at once itself. So, an air-particle or an ether-particle 'compounds' the different directions of movement imprinted on it without obliterating their several individualities. It delivers them distinct, on the contrary, at as many several 'receivers'