Empiricism

“ From empiricism we have retained the maxim which gives empiricism its whole force—that the conditions of science, of art, of ethics, are in experience, and often in sensible experience. But we profess at the same time this other maxim, that the foundation of science is absolute truth, that the direct foundation of art is absolute beauty, that the direct foundation of ethics and politics is the good, is duty, is right, and that what reveals to us{355} these absolute ideas of the true, the beautiful, and the good, is reason. ”

“ After so-called “rational knowledge” is accounted for, empiricism now has the right and the power to claim the whole field of knowledge. We know nothing except by experience, and experience is the only criterion of the truth or falsity of any real proposition. ”

“ Were I obliged to give a short name to the attitude in question, I should call it that of radical empiricism, in spite of the fact that such brief nicknames are nowhere more misleading than in philosophy. ”

“ We all start by being empiricists. But our empiricism is confined within our immediate interests. The more clearly we grasp the intellectual analysis of a way regulating procedure for the sake of those interests, the more decidedly we reject the inclusion of evidence which refuses to be immediately harmonized with the method before us. ”

“ Experience seems to most of us to lead to conclusions, but empiricism has sworn never to draw them. ”

“ If only those warm panegyrists of empiricism, who exalt it at the expense of science, did not, true to the idea of empiricism, try to palm off upon us as empiricism their own judgments, and what they have put into nature, and imposed upon objects ”

“ Taking then the old empiricism first, we observe that there seems to be little doubt about its standpoint. Its derivation of the axioms is frankly psychological, and describes how the mind may be conceived actually to come by them. Its psychology is doubtless mistaken, and its recourse to psychology to settle the problem of knowledge may often be crudely worded, but it propounds a definite method of answering a real question. ”

“ While then philosophy is unable to predict a priori the special contents of human experience, it is forced to insist that by the term “human experience” we always mean more than the facts that are verified by individual men.
It remains perfectly true, of course, that the empiristic thesis which has just been examined is not without its deep significance, and that what empiricism has intended to emphasize is, when its statement has been properly modified, a truth, and one of the first importance. ”

“ The counter-tendencies of naturalism and absolutism are always connected, and often coincide with, the epistemological opposition between empiricism, which proclaims perception, and rationalism, which proclaims reason, to be the proper organ of knowledge. ”

“ To be radical, an empiricism must neither admit into its constructions any element that is not directly experienced, nor exclude from them any element that is directly experienced. For such a philosophy, the relations that connect experiences must themselves be experienced relations, and any kind of relation experienced must be accounted as ‘real’ as anything else in the system. ”

“ As empiricism sprang from the striving to subject the intellectual to the material, to materialize the spiritual, so on the other hand, idealism had its source in the effort to spiritualize the material, or so to apprehend the conception of mind that matter could be subsumed under it. ”

“ Experience as Experimentation.—It has already been intimated that sensational empiricism represents neither the idea of experience justified by modern psychology nor the idea of knowledge suggested by modern scientific procedure. ”

“ The methods are then considered by which men have thought it possible to attain knowledge of the self on the one hand, and the not-self on the other. The common view of philosophers and men of science that truth is given in general concepts, or universals, or categories, is taken up, and the special form of the doctrine given in empiricism is considered and found to be a doctrine wanting in all its forms. Yet it is pointed out that the concept has its uses in the mental economy. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Problems are raised which are not merely urgent in themselves, but which present wholly new alternatives to the metaphysician. Rationalism and empiricism, realism and idealism, are doctrines which, though springing from the epistemological query concerning the possibility of knowledge, may [179] determine an entire philosophical system. They bear upon every question of metaphysics, whether the fundamental conception of being, or the problems of the world's unity, origin, and significance for human life. ”

“ Yet it is 19not at all uncommon to find thinkers modern in tone and intent who regard any philosophy of experience as necessarily committed to denial of the existence of genuinely general propositions, and who take empiricism to be inherently averse to the recognition of the importance of an organizing and constructive intelligence. ”

“ We may regard as a certain conquest of the experimental method and of true psychological analysis, the establishment of principles which at the same time that they are given to us by the surest of all experiences, that of consciousness, have a bearing superior to experience, and open to us regions inaccessible to empiricism. ”

“ I am convinced that the philosophers have had a harmful effect upon the progress of scientific thinking in removing certain fundamental concepts from the domain of empiricism where they are under our control to the intangible heights of the a priori. ”

“ 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 ”

“ Civilised humanity would be only empiricists and the sciences only the experimental sciences. Causalism and empiricism are undoubtedly mighty forces in our presentday mental life, but it may come to be otherwise. ”

“ All attempts at an inference that is anything more than an elaborated and often confused restatement of non-logical operations break down. The associational inference of empiricism, the subsumptive inference of rationalism, the transcendental inference of objective idealism, the77 analytical inference of neo-realism—all alike face the dilemma of an inference that is trifling or miraculous, tautologous or false. ”

“ 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 ”

“ It is important to note that both scepticism and agnosticism agree in regarding perception as the essential factor in knowledge. So far at any rate as our knowledge is concerned, the certification of being consists in perceivability. Knowledge is coextensive with actual and possible human experience. This account of the source and criterion of knowledge is called empiricism, in distinction from the counter-theory of rationalism.
The rationalistic motive was a quickening influence in Greek philosophy long before it became deliberate and conspicuous in Socrates and Plato. ”

“ The instances of new theories agreeing with and explaining old empiricisms, are innumerable. All the just remarks made by experienced persons on human character and conduct, are so many special laws, which the general laws of the human mind explain and resolve. ”

“ The directly apprehended universe needs, in short, no extraneous trans-empirical connective support, but possesses in its own right a concatenated or continuous structure.” When thus generalized, ‘radical empiricism’ is not only a theory of knowledge comprising pragmatism as a special chapter, but a metaphysic as well. It excludes “the hypothesis of trans-empirical reality” (Cf. below, p. 195) . It is the author’s most rigorous statement of his theory that reality is an “experience-continuum.” ”

“ This much, however, follows from what has now been said:—History is mere Empiricism; it has only facts to communicate, and all its proofs are founded upon facts alone. To attempt to rise from such facts to Primeval History, or to argue how such or such a thing might have been, and then to take for granted that it has been so in reality,—is to stray beyond the limits of History, and produce an a priori History; just as the Philosophy of Nature, referred to in our preceding lecture, endeavoured to find an a priori Science of Physics. ”

“ Discreet rationalists confined themselves to theology and allied branches of abtruse science, and to mathematics. Rationalism would have been a doctrine reserved for academic specialists and abstract formalists had it not assumed the task of providing an apologetics for traditional morals and theology, thereby getting into touch with actual human beliefs and concerns. It is notorious that historic empiricism was strong in criticism and in demolition of outworn beliefs, but weak for purposes of constructive social direction. ”

“ All the questions which have what is called a human interest—such, for example, as the question of a future life—belong, at least in theory, to special sciences, and are capable, at least in theory, of being decided by empirical evidence. Philosophers have too often, in the past, permitted themselves to pronounce on empirical questions, and found themselves, as a result, in disastrous conflict with well-attested facts. We must, therefore, renounce the hope that philosophy can promise satisfaction to our mundane desires. ”

“ Those sciences, which thus got the name of philosophy, we call empirical sciences, for the reason that they take their departure from experience. Still the essential results which they aim at and provide, are laws, general propositions, a theory—the thoughts of what is found existing. ”

“ The knowledge that is possible to the empiricist, then, is merely that which is derived from direct experience, and simple summations or generalisations into a single assertion of a number of similar assertions, all of which were individually derived from experience. This is the position scientists as such, and believers in the theory of naturalism, take up as to the possibility of the knowledge of truth to the human mind. ”

“ What we call objective reality is not identical with what we perceive. We invariably distinguish objective reality from what perception yields us. Mathematical propositions, then, are independent of experience. Is not epistemology also such an independent science? If the conclusions of critical research affirm anything concerning the manner in which real occurrences, e.g., perception and thought, take place, then epistemology is logically dependent on the facts of experience ”

“ The laws of mind as characterized in the preceding chapter, compose the universal or abstract portion of the philosophy of human nature; and all the truths of common experience, constituting a practical knowledge of mankind, must, to the extent to which they are truths, be results or consequences of these. Such familiar maxims, when collected a posteriori from observation of life, occupy among the truths of the science the place of what, in our analysis of Induction, have so often been spoken of under the title of Empirical Laws. ”

“ Any unwelcome empirical fact has, namely, its own positive characters, as a fact that in our human experience appears at a point of time, in certain relations in space, and with numerous other positively definable features, all of which the thought of any historian or any student of science who describes the fact, may define as the object of his own ideas. In addition to these, its own relatively internal and positive features, the unwelcome fact also appears as involving the present temporal defeat of a purpose which, but for this fact, might here have been won. ”

“ It contains analysis and abstraction. Whereas the merely empirical thinker stares at a fact in its entirety, and remains helpless, or gets 'stuck,' if it suggests no concomitant or similar, the reasoner breaks it up and notices some one of its separate attributes. This attribute he takes to be the essential part of the whole fact before him. This attribute has properties or consequences which the fact until then was not known to have, but which, now that it is noticed to contain the attribute, it must have. ”

“ Thus logical knowledge is not derivable from experience alone, and the empiricist’s philosophy can therefore not be accepted in its entirety, in spite of its excellence in many matters which lie outside logic. ”