Wendell T. Bush

“ How is the world constituted? is the question of philosophy. When this question is first asked, there is no doubt concerning our power to know how the world is constituted if we can only find it out. At the same time, psychology contributes little or nothing in giving shape to philosophy. Psychology hardly exists as an independent field, but forms a chapter in some system of metaphysics. The fate of metaphysical systems, however, contradictions discovered within and without, made the problem of knowledge more and more prominent, so that instead of the question. How is the world constituted? ”

“ The great role which materialism played thirty and forty years ago was an inevitable result of the great triumphs of physical science, when physicists defined the goal of their science as metaphysical insight, insight into the eternal laws of the movements of matter of which all change in the world is the resulting effect.
It is no doubt more intelligent to recognize science as the effort to describe experience rather than to try to regard it as explaining experience in any ultimate sense. ”

“ There is a progressive exclusion of possible judgments, a progressive definition of experience in the narrower sense, an evolution of pure experience by virtue of the law of habit. It is this evolution of pure experience in which Avenarius is primarily interested.
One has only to compare different civilizations and stages of culture to observe that the world may contain for one race and for one time very different objects of experience from those which it contains for another race or another time. Our own way of experiencing the world is certainly the outcome of an evolution. ”

“ By this emphasis laid upon the problem of knowledge, and the recognition that the mind is so constituted as perhaps to interfere with its own cognitive purposes, psychology becomes of decided importance for philosophy, and it is not long before the world of real objects shrinks to a region of things in themselves, set over against forms of experience. It is a matter of recent history how the content of the world, which seemed to be lost on the objective side, was brought back from the subjective side, and how from this point of view the great systems of idealism grew up. ”

“ Every such case of experience is a case of insight. The person who has the insight is not aware that he contributes anything toward the construction of what he perceives. He is sure that he is not mutilating any facts. He reports the truth as he perceives it. The command of God, a bit of geometry, excursions of the soul, facts of chemistry or mechanics are all facts which are directly observed and reported. From our point of view some reports of experience may be true reports of fact while others are not, but this is to say that experience is not necessarily valid experience. ”

“ I really see no reason why one should not be frankly and outspokenly materialistic in a natural science. It is understood that the question about ultimate reality is not raised at all, and until this question is raised there is no metaphysic.
But it certainly comes to the same thing in science to say that a physical state is the universal antecedent, or the universal concomitant, or the cause of a given mental state. When consciousness is disordered because of an observable accident to the brain, one says the condition of the brain thus introduced is the cause of the disordered consciousness. ”

“ What Avenarius would have us observe is that the evolution of experience is still in progress, and that what lies ahead must be a continuation of what lies behind. The progress thus far has been the development of that concept of nature which natural science has come to regard as the proper one, and the very general elimination of animism. The continuance of the same process should mean the complete elimination of animism, making the modern concept of nature wholly consistent and the complete acceptance of the world so defined as an object of experience. ”

“ There will be no effort to go behind what experience offers. Every single fact will be just this that we observe, the empirical fact before us. This is what Avenarius means by saying that the clarified and pennanent Weltbegriff will declare, 'Everything is this.' [13] And is not this precisely the philosophy, or, if you prefer, the lack of it, of the 'plain man'? He it is that does full justice to the empirical diversity of the world. Science seeks to remove diversity by reducing things to common denominators. ”

“ The special sciences are distributed, each to its own field. Within each field, novel facts are comprehended by reducing them to a group of known facts, which group undertakes to be as small as possible. In the same way the effort to understand the world would be the effort to reduce to a single concept the characters, common to the pure experience, which the special sciences are able to secure. This effort, based upon the special sciences, to describe the common character of the whole world, is, says Avenarius, philosophy. ”

“ Let us admit then, for the purpose of this discussion, that the principle of economy is the guiding principle in science, and that the principle of least resistance is its parallel principle in nerve-tissue.
Every special science seeks to get what it might call a valid experience of its objects, and this means that it tries to get the objects pure and uncontaminated by any personal equation. ”

“ We are disposed to think that we have awakened from credulity and superstition, and that we look out upon the world with a sane and critical observation. Perhaps we do, but it is interesting to note that experience has come to be what it is for the man of science among us as the result of the continual modification of a primitive and wholly uncritical experience. ”

“ In that primitive stage of culture in our own prehistoric past no doubt many things could be objects of experience which could not be objects of our experience. There has been a progressive elimination of certain objects of experience, and a progressive enrichment of experience by the acquisition of other objects. When we are in an imaginative mood we sometimes lament that nature has lost for us the vivifying presence of the gods of the soil, the groves and the streams. ”

“ Psychology seeks to describe those mental activities which are its subject-matter by formulating laws of their occurrence and in making out psychophysical relations wherever they can be found, and it is felt that it would be to give up the whole task to admit a principle of original and arbitrary energy as a factor in the explanation. We constantly hear that this is materialism, and for one who does not distinguish between science and metaphysics it is materialism. But that distinction should, in the light of present-day discussion, be fairly obvious. ”

“ In view of the continuity of experience, such an evolution as that described by Avenarius seems, then, extremely plausible, when once attention is called to it.
We can not cast off all at once habits of mind cultivated by centuries of faith; they bind us in ways we can not name. But the theological tradition is giving way, and in proportion as it does, we come more and more to feel that the truth about the world is to be found in a complete description of its empirical content. ”

“ The heritage of animism which we have on our hands is, Avenarius thinks, the soul-concept and its consequences in philosophy.
The soul is conceived to be something within the body,—it is the basis of a literal distinction between inner and outer. The concept of the soul is, indeed, not prominent to-day, but the distinction between inner experience and outer experience, internal sense and external sense, is common enough. If there had been no soul-concept, the course of philosophy would no doubt have been very different from what it actually has been ”

“ Just why certain physical processes should have phenomena of consciousness as sequences no one pretends to say,—but the same mystery exists in all caudal relations. If one ask why the stream of consciousness continues to flow, why it didn't stop a minute ago instead of keeping on, one can only say it is because the heart con tinues to beat, the blood to circulate, and the brain to function. One can ask, if one has the courage, why the earth doesn't stop in its orbit, or why the sun doesn't stop shining. ”

“ To say that an explanation of cognitive experience must be wholly futile because the judgments which state the explanation will themselves express only other cognitive experience is to misunderstand the purpose. The real effort in a psychophysical account of pure experience is not so much to get back of pure experience, as to get a larger acquaintance with it— to extend cognitive experience so as to include judgments about cognitive experience itself. ”

“ No doubt the principle of economy leads, to a certain extent, to a misrepresentation of objects, but this is the ignoring of what is regarded as irrelevant from the point of view of the special interests, whereas a subjective enrichment of the object is the putting into it of what might make a difference in the description. This much seems clear, science feels at liberty to ignore as much detail in the objects as it is not interested in, but it denies the right to add anything. ”

“ Because psychology makes extensive use of psychophysical concepts, and speaks of an outer world as the source of stimuli, psychology is not therefore metaphysics. Psychology has its point of view and its favorite method. Its data are observed data. Its aim is to observe other data. Any instruments which lead to richer observations are legitimate, and do not commit the psychologist to a metaphysic just because the aim is to come around again to another observation, and not to rest in the concept of an ultimate ground of phenomena which can not be observed. ”

“ We have also the fact that the actual idealism of history is a result of the fortunes of the idea of the soul and the idea of God, both of which must be assumed to have had entirely natural origins. This is, of course, no refutation of idealism, but it strengthens the presumption that something is wrong somewhere about the premises of idealism. The difficulty of making out just where the error lies may well be due to the fact that we are all bred up in the point of view which leads so logically into idealism. ”

“ Among people of primitive culture an individual will declare it his experience that the moon, in case of an eclipse, is holding her child in her arms, that one visits distant places in sleep, that a shadowy being with a character something like a breath (hauchartig) is the source of feeling and movement in the body; and that a body can exist with a soul or without it, and that a soul can exist both embodied and disembodied. ”

“ We know of course that a great deal of consciousness depends upon brain-conditions. If we could make out these brain-conditions for given mental states, we should, to the extent we had done so, succeed in explaining the latter. We are able to explain many phenomena of consciousness in a general way. It is an explanation, though a very incomplete one, to say that a sufficient blow on the head puts an end to consciousness, to say that the sensations of sight or hearing or the power of speech can be eliminated by accidents of a given type to the brain. ”

“ Progress in science and philosophy is largely due to a capacity for discovering real problems. Oriental peoples have this genius in a far less degree than Europeans. The problems of the Oriental consciousness are solved. Only the Western consciousness is tormented with doubts about reality, duty, the past and the future. Avenarius loves to dwell on the satisfaction and relief which the solution of a real problem affords, and on the teasing, restless, unsatisfied state which accompanies an unsolved real problem. ”

“ By thus explaining idealism as the final result of the soul-concept which was itself a bit of introjection left over from the original animistic reine Erfahrung, Avenarius includes it among the E-values which will be eliminated in the course of the history of ΣC, if that history is not interrupted.
As the subjective additions to nature are eliminated from our view of the world, we approach a purely descriptive concept. We no longer speak of the world of our experience as the phenomenal world, while the real world is something else, we know not quite what. ”

“ If we are to understand by metaphysics the speculation which puts such stress on distinguishing 'appearance' from 'reality,' which defines reality as the source of appearance, a reality to some extent knowable but mostly unknowable, if metaphysics means this, Avenarius does seem to cast it ruthlessly overboard. As the task of philosophy he predicts that of stating the character common to all objects of experience. ”

“ Not every one has moved so far from the starting-point. And yet we may say that there is a large group of minds that take what we may call the scientific point of view, whose experience does not include mythological objects. Other minds, those that make up the great majority in our own civilization, while not distinguished by very consciously scientific points of view, do yet have an experience, more resembling the experience of a scientific mind than that of the primitive animistic mind. Yet there still remain, Avenarius thinks, some traces of the original fund of animistic objects. ”

“ But the 'plain man' never pretends that one thing is like another except for practical purposes. For him the common feature throughout the world is the fact that everything in it is a 'this.' And if one must ask the question 'Was ist alles?' one can answer from the point of view of pure experience only 'Alles ist dies. ”

“ A healthy man can not possibly find any real problem here. We may admit that the reality of other selves is problematic, but we shall be quite unable to experience the problematic character which we admit. ”

“ That is, the education of the system C has been controlled by certain R-values to the exclusion of others. This concept of physiological habit is of the first importance in the theory of Avenarius, but it is so important because the fact of habit is of such great importance in life.
The consequence of habit is that experience becomes less and less diversified. All sorts of E-values no longer occur. In its effects upon experience, growth by habit is a process of exclusion, which, so far as the character of the system C is concerned, could go on indefinitely. ”