Wendell T. Bush

“ Well, the only sound thing to start from is actual experience, experience not viewed through the assumptions and dialect of previous systems, but taken in an absolutely empirical fashion. We must make the effort to beg as few questions as possible at the outset. If we are rigorous enough we shall discover just what questions we have to beg and why we beg them. ”

“ That is, the critic must place himself at the standpoint of pure experience, and putting theories and definitions out of his head, must get acquainted directly with those aspects of experience which will later constitute the basis of a philosophy. ”

“ The complete description of experience is the task of all the special sciences working together, and recently there has arisen in scientific circles a point of view which regards the concepts of science, such concepts as atom, ether, energy, etc., as conceptual instruments for effecting convenient descriptions or increasing our fund of empirical data, but it is not regarded as of the smallest consequence for the purpose in hand, that anything corresponding to these concepts actually exists. ”

“ As the duty of squaring myself with idealism looms in the background, it is the independent outer world aspect of experience that interests me most. The thesis of my first section is that naïve realism is a perfectly correct description of experience as such, but that this does not make it a true metaphysical theory of existence. ”

“ We can feel two kinds of curiosity about the world. We can, on the one hand, wish to become better and better acquainted with its empirical character, or we can conceive it as a whole and ask what is the cause or ground or nature of the whole in view of which we shall interpret and comprehend the parts that come within our ken. ”

“ The contention of Avenarius is that when this process of rejecting animism is completed, the theory of idealism must disappear. This concept is the concept of a genuine history, in which theories of reality have been determined by the fund of animism not yet rejected.
Finally, in the fifth and last section, I take up some contemporary discussions of pure experience. Professor William James has recently published his conviction that consciousness as a kind of stuff or entity does not exist. ”