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 naively 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” (p. 570). But this (which, pace Mr. Bradley, seems exquisitely analogous to “taking a congeries in a lump,” if not to “swamping”) suggests nothing but that conflux which pure experience so abundantly offers, as when “space,” “white,” and “sweet” are confluent in a “lump of sugar,” or kinesthetic, dermal, and optical sensations confluent in “my hand.”67 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 space-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,68 for there is no how except the constitution 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 of 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 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.
Appendix B
The Experience of Activity69
… Mr. Bradley calls the question of activity a scandal to philosophy, and if one turns to the current literature of the subject—his own writings included—one easily gathers what he means. The opponents cannot even understand one another. Mr. Bradley says to Mr. Ward: “I do not care what your oracle is, and your preposterous psychology may here be gospel if you please; … but if the revelation does contain a meaning, I will commit myself to this: either the oracle is so confused that its signification is not discoverable, or, upon the other hand, if it can be pinned down to any definite statement, then that statement will be false.”70 Mr. Ward in turn says of Mr. Bradley: “I cannot even imagine the state of mind to which his description applies. … It reads like an unintentional travesty of Herbartian Psychology by one who has tried to improve upon it without being at the pains to master it.” Münsterberg excludes a view opposed to his own by saying that with anyone who holds it a verständigung with him is “grundsätzlich ausgeschlossen”; and Royce, in a review of Stout,71 hauls him over the coals at great length for defending “efficacy” in a way which I, for one, never gathered from reading him, and which I have heard Stout himself say was quite foreign to the intention of his text.
In these discussions distinct questions are habitually jumbled and different points of view are talked of durcheinander.
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There is a psychological question: Have we perceptions of activity? and if so, what are they like, and when and where do we have them?
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There is a metaphysical question: Is there a fact of activity? and if so, what idea must we frame of it? What is it like? and what does it do, if it does anything? And finally there is a logical question:
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Whence do we know activity? By our own feelings of it solely? or by some other source of information?
Throughout page after page of the literature one knows not which of these questions is before one; and mere description of the surface-show of experience is proffered as if it implicitly answered every one of them. No one of the disputants, moreover, tries to show what pragmatic consequences his own view would carry, or what assignable particular differences in anyone’s experience it would make if his adversary’s were triumphant.
It seems to me that if radical empiricism be good for anything, it ought, with its pragmatic method and its principle of pure experience, to be able to avoid such tangles, or at least to simplify them somewhat. The pragmatic method starts from the postulate that there is no difference of truth that doesn’t make a difference of fact somewhere; and it seeks to determine the meaning of all differences of opinion by making the discussion hinge as soon as possible upon some practical or particular issue. The principle of pure experience is also a methodical postulate. Nothing shall be admitted as fact, it says, except what can be experienced at some definite time by some experient; and for
