Human experience

“ Let any one then try to conceive of an extension of this realisation through all that has ever been wisely said of man and human life, and he will be endeavouring to imagine our experience. Engrossing, thrilling, overpowering as the experience is, we have each to bear it alone; for each of us is surrounded by the active and the busy, who have a different gift and a different office;—and if not, it is one of those experiences which are incommunicable. ”

“ But how do we human beings get at what we call natural truth? By observation—so men say—and by experience. But by whose experience? By the united, by the synthesized, by the revised, corrected, rationally criticized, above all by the common, experience of many individuals. ”

“ But this actual world of experience, in which we are, and which is in us, remains both the material and the limits of our consideration: a world which is so rich in content that even the most searching investigation of which the human mind is capable could not exhaust it. ”

“ Human experience and schemes of personal behavior are the most interesting of all themes, as is evidenced by fiction, the drama, biographies, and histories. And works of this kind contain materials which will be given a scientific value as we analyze, compare, and interpret them. ”

“ It is as if there were in the human consciousness a sense of reality, a feeling of objective presence, a perception of what we may call 'something there,' more deep and more general than any of the special and particular 'senses' by which the current psychology supposes existent realities to be originally revealed. If this were so, we might suppose the senses to waken our attitudes and conduct as they so habitually do, by first exciting this sense of reality; ”

“ A knowledge of the disposition and character of the human mind can be acquired only by experience: a great deal will be learned, I admit, by a habit of examining what passes in our bosoms, what are our own motives of action, and of what kind of sentiments we are conscious on any occasion. ”

“ They are constituent parts of human nature. How we are actuated, when we feel them, is matter of experience, which every one knows within himself. Their action is what it is, whether they are simple or compound. ”

“ Desires and Interests.—These complexes of thinking, feeling, and willing make up the conscious desires and interests that mould the individual life. Through the processes of attention to the stimuli that act upon human nature, discrimination between them, association of [346] impressions and ideas that come from present and past experience, and deliberate judgments of value, the mind moves to action for the satisfaction of personal desires and interests. ”

“ In which of its adventures would the human race, reviewing its whole experience, acknowledge a progress and a gain? To answer these questions, as they may be answered speculatively and provisionally by an individual, is the purpose of the following work. ”

“ The general observations treasured up by a course of experience, give us the clue of human nature, and teach us to unravel all its intricacies. Pretexts and appearances no longer deceive us. ”

“ The doctrines of Uniformity and Determinism are supposed to be based upon experience. But experience includes experience of the actions of human beings; and some of them certainly appear to be of a capricious and undetermined character. ”

“ If humanity has made some headway in realizing that the ultimate value of every institution is its distinctively human effect—its effect upon conscious experience—we may well believe that this lesson has been learned largely through dealings with the young. ”

“ First, in so far as I am a social being, I take my fellow’s experience to be as live and real an experience as is mine. In appealing to the consensus of other men’s experiences, I am so far appealing to what I regard as a real experience other than my own momentary experience, and not as a merely possible experience. ”

“ To begin, you surely know how to distinguish the really actual, that which is the true fact of your present experience and life, or that which you actually live and experience, from the non-actual, the merely imagined. ”

“ So vastly do the circumstances of our daily and hourly lives, the atmosphere of the society which we meet, the tone of the books and newspapers which we read, mould every thought which we think and modify every view which we take of the occurrences which surround us, that it is all but an impossibility to judge how those best known to us, or how even we ourselves, would think or speak or act in a set of circumstances widely different from those in which our actual experience has been cast. ”

“ This dialectic process which consciousness executes on itself—on its knowledge as well as on its object—in the sense that out of it the new and true object arises, is precisely what is termed Experience. ”

“ Is it not indeed plain that, as we ourselves have often heretofore said, when we talk of Being, we are indeed seeking for what, if present, would satisfy or tend to satisfy our conscious needs and meanings? Let us take this very character as the sole basis of our definition of what it is to be. Let us first say that whenever we talk of Being we mean a definitely Possible Fact of experience, viewed just as something possible for us. ”

“ But when we ask what reality Nature possesses, we must beware of letting our social interests, and the general motives that lead us to conceive the World of Description, blind us to the true principles upon which an interpretation of experience should be founded. The sharp contrast between Matter and Mind, the sharp dualism between the World of Description and the World of Appreciation, — we have seen from what motives in our own lives all such contrasts result. ”

“ My course of study had led me to believe, that all mental and moral feelings and qualities, whether of a good or of a bad kind, were the results of association; that we love one thing, and hate another, take pleasure in one sort of action or contemplation, and pain in another sort, through the clinging of pleasurable or painful ideas to those things, from the effect of education or of experience. ”

“ How do we gain knowledge of a human being, that is to say of his motives? "By observing his actions in many different circumstances, especially in extremities of joy, sorrow, fear, temptation, and then by comparing his actions with what we, or others, have done in the same circumstances?" ”

“ For is it not also plain that we are trying to find out, in all our search for Being, precisely what experience we may hope to get under given conditions, and what experience we may not expect to get? ”

“ But when we take a survey of the more sublime parts of the human frame; when we behold man's internal make and structure; his mental faculties; his social propensions, and those active powers which set all in motion—the passions,—what an illustrious display of consummate wisdom is presented to our admiring view! ”

“ The essential service of humanism, as I conceive the situation, is to have seen that though one part of our experience may lean upon another part to make it what it is in any one of several aspects in which it may be considered, experience as a whole is self-containing and leans on nothing. ”

“ Such portraitures of human peculiarities, gauged by their moral or social desirability as examples to be followed or avoided, form an attractive compendium for the interpretation of men and their ways. Their consideration, ranging from gossip to philosophy, supplies the common touch of nature that makes the world of every time and clime akin, and presents graphically for our psychological contemplation the outward issues of disposition as shaped by opportunity and circumstance. ”

“ Experience, as I see it, is our apprehension and our measure of what happens to us as social creatures—any intelligent report of which has to be based on that apprehension. The picture of the exposed and entangled state is what is required, and there are certainly always plenty of grounds for keeping down the complexities of a picture. ”

“ But there may be in a life some general direction, some continuous thread, due to a few dominant ideas and a few strong feelings, that explain the life and are characteristic of a human personality. Of my life, which has not been easy on the whole, I have described the general course and the essential features, and I trust that my story gives an understanding of the state of mind in which I have lived and worked. ”

“ We shall learn from wide and long experience to anticipate and provide for the steps of the unfolding mind, and train it, through carefully prearranged experiences, to a power of judgment, of self-control, of social perception, now utterly unthought of. ”

“ It is within the bounds of the same occupation that the greatest contrasts, the greatest distance, the greatest gulfs of feeling are to be found. I value an otherwise painful experience because it exhibited that philosophic truth in so vivid and striking a manner. ”

“ Is any better than experience, and wisdom, and reason?
There cannot be a better, he said.
Then, I said, reflect. Of the three individuals, which has the greatest experience of all the pleasures which we enumerated? Has the lover of gain, in learning the nature of essential truth, greater experience of the pleasure of knowledge than the philosopher has of the pleasure of gain? ”

“ Rather the purpose is to bring together in brief form the thoughts of some wise minds and the insight and appreciation of some deep characters, trained in the actual world of experience but attaining a vision of life in clear and wide perspective. ”

“ Now the sort of 'fact of experience' on which in my book I have proposed to compromise, is the so-called 'mental state,' in whose existence not only common men but philosophers have uniformly believed. ”

“ And in that day shall be discovered every inward working of every human soul: every appetite, passion, inclination, affection, with the various combinations of them, with every temper and disposition that constitute the whole complex character of each individual. ”

“ For, as I must repeat, our so-called external experience, that is, our experience taken as other than our meanings, and viewed as what confirms or refutes them here or there, never does more, in any question concerning the truth, than to decide our ideal issues, and to decide them in particular instances, whose character and meaning for us are determined solely by what ideas of our own are in question. ”

“ Except so far as there may have been direct communications from the Supreme Being, all man's knowledge of persons, objects, and relations is derived, in the last resort, from observation. Experience is merely remembered self-observation. ”

“ The 'Confessions of a Second-rate Sensitive Mind' are full of deep insight into human nature, and into those particular trials which are sure to beset men who think and feel for themselves at this epoch of social development. ”

“ Here, then, we have in one volume three aspects of human life as seen within the limits of one personality: the biographical facts, the supernal vision, and the ordered conclusions drawn from those facts and that vision, for the instruction of other men. ”

“ For you in reply ask this critic whence he gets the assurance of the being of his various men, of his diverse experiences, of his many human feelings and points of view. Has he himself experienced immediately, or felt at any one moment what the supposed other real men and women feel? ”

“ Look deeper into the interior of experience itself. There, if you only look deeper than all ordinary and partial immediacy, deeper than colors and sounds, and deeper than mortal love, then when once rightly prepared, you shall find a fact, an immediate and ineffable fact, such that it wholly satisfies every longing, answers every inquiry, and fulfils the aim of every thought. ”

“ These form, naturally and necessarily, the objective expression of moral ideas, and it is in some civic or social whole that the moral ideal must finally take concrete shape.
To ask “What is man?” is to ask “What is experience?” for experience means that of which I am conscious. The facts of consciousness are the only facts which, to begin with, we are justified in asserting to exist. ”

“ If we define experience as self- constitutive practical activity, whose output is the ever-changing identity of the individual or individuals carrying out the experience, logic derives from it, as do all knowledge and language. ”

“ The power to guess the unseen from the seen, to trace the implication of things, to judge the whole piece by the pattern, the condition of feeling life in general so completely that you are well on your way to knowing any particular corner of it—this cluster of gifts may almost be said to constitute experience, and they occur in country and in town, and in the most differing stages of education. If experience consists of impressions, it may be said that impressions are experience, just as (have we not seen it?) they are the very air we breathe. ”

“ Without Knowledge of the Human Nature. “Varied, according to character, are the demands made by heart and mind,” assures us a representative of modern philosophy, “corresponding to them is the image of the world to which the individual turns by inner necessity. ”

“ A knowledge of the characters of men, as they appear varied in different situations and countries;—the study of human nature indeed in all its forms and modifications, is highly interesting to the mind, and worthy the attention of the greatest man. ”

“ During that long period of time, the most delicate gradations of human personality, divinised, idealised, were presented to the contemplation of the consciousness which gave them being, in appropriate types. ”

“ Before attempting to speculate on these questions, it might be a good idea to consider for a moment the main, fundamental influences which have always been at work, to a greater or less extent, in determining the conduct of human beings. ”