Radical empiricism

“ The great obstacle to radical empiricism in the contemporary mind is the rooted rationalist belief that experience as immediately given is all disjunction and no conjunction, and that to make one world out of this separateness, a higher unifying agency must be there. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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 ”

“ 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.” ”

“ The first duty of radical empiricism, taking given conjunctions at their face-value, is to class some of them as more intimate and some as more external. When two terms are similar, their very natures enter into the relation. [Pg 110] Being what they are, no matter where or when, the likeness never can be denied, if asserted. It continues predicable as long as the terms continue. Other relations, the where and the when, for example, seem adventitious. ”

“ Man can’t be good, said the sophists, for man is man and good is good; and Hegel [50] and Herbart in their day, more recently A. Spir, [51] and most recently and elaborately of all, Mr. Bradley, informs us that a term can logically only be a punctiform unit, and that not one of the conjunctive relations between things, which experience seems to yield, is rationally possible.
[Pg 107]
Of course, if true, this cuts off radical empiricism without even a shilling. Radical empiricism takes conjunctive relations at their face value, holding them to be as real as the terms united by them. ”

“ If they can thus mould various wholes into new gestaltqualitäten, then it follows that the same elements are logically able to exist in different wholes [whether physically able would depend on additional hypotheses] ; that partial changes are thinkable, and through-and-through change not a dialectic necessity; that monism is only an hypothesis; and that an additively constituted universe is a rationally respectable hypothesis also. All the theses of radical empiricism, in short, follow. ”

“ 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 ”

“ Time, space, kind, number, serial order, cause, consciousness, are hard things not to objectify—even transcendental idealism leaves them standing as ‘empirically real.’ Substance, matter, force, fall down more easily before criticism, and secondary qualities make almost no resistance at all. Nevertheless, when we survey the field of speculation, from Scholasticism through Kantism to Spencerism, we find an ever-recurring tendency to convert the pre-human into a merely logical object, an unknowable ding-an-sich, that but starts the process, or a vague materia prima that but receives our forms. ”

“ Really it is the problem of creation; for in the end the question is: How do [Pg 182] I make them be? Real activities are those that really make things be, without which the things are not, and with which they are there. Activity, so far as we merely feel it, on the other hand, is only an impression of ours, it may be maintained; and an impression is, for all this way of thinking, only a shadow of another fact.
Arrived at this point, I can do little more than indicate the principles on which, as it seems to me, a radically empirical philosophy is obliged to rely in handling such a dispute. ”

“ In point of fact the ultimate common barrier can always be pushed, by both minds, farther than any actual percept of either, until at last it resolves itself into the mere notion of imperceptibles like atoms or ether, so that, where we do terminate in percepts, our knowledge is only speciously completed, being, in theoretic strictness, only a virtual knowledge of those remoter objects which conception carries out.
Is natural realism, permissible in logic, refuted then by empirical fact? Do our minds have no object in common after all? ”

“ The future experience, however, may be of things outside the thinker; and that this is so the humanist may believe as freely as any other kind of empiricist philosopher. [Pg 252]
The critics of humanism (though here I follow them but darkly) appear to object to any infusion whatever of subjectivism into truth. All must be archetypal; every truth must pre-exist to its perception. Humanism sees that an enormous quantity of truth must be written down as having pre-existed to its perception by us humans. ”

“ If the senses are not able to explain simple notions, much less still are they able to explain the principles in which these notions are met, which are universal and necessary. In fact, the senses clearly perceive such and such facts, but it is impossible for them to embrace what is universal; experience attests what is, it does not reach what cannot but be.
We go farther. Not only is empiricism unable to explain universal and necessary principles; but we maintain that, without these principles, empiricism cannot even account for the knowledge of the sensible world. ”

“ 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. ”

“ What do the terms empiricism and rationalism mean? Reduced to their most pregnant difference, empiricism means the habit of explaining wholes by parts, and rationalism means the habit of explaining parts by wholes. Rationalism thus preserves affinities with monism, since wholeness goes with union, while empiricism inclines to pluralistic views. No philosophy can ever be anything but a summary sketch, a picture of the world in abridgment, a foreshortened bird's-eye view of the perspective of events. ”

“ Philosophy "by taking part in empirical questions sinks both itself and them." These doctrines bring high claims, but are they more valuable for human guidance than the empirical method?65
356"The knowledge that is superhuman only is ridiculous in man." No man can ever find his way home with the pure circle unless he has also the art of the impure. It is the conviction of this paper that in ethics, as in knowledge, thoughts without contents are empty; percepts without concepts are blind. Description of what has been—empiricism—is futile in itself to project and criticize. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ While pure understanding usurps authority in the world of sense, and empiricism attempts to subject this intellect to the conditions of experience, these two rival directions arrive at the highest possible development, and exhaust the whole extent of their sphere. While, on the one hand, imagination, by its tyranny, ventures to destroy the order of the world, it forces reason, on the other side, to rise up to the supreme sources of knowledge, and to invoke against this predominance of fancy the help of the law of necessity. ”

“ That fact, indeed, is present to no human observer’s experience. And yet, although it thus transcends every man’s observation and verification, it is an ‘accredited’ fact.” But the thesis, as thus amended, is no longer even a relatively pure empiricism. It is a synthesis of an appeal to human experience with an admission of principles that, whatever they are, or however they are grounded, transcend every man's experience. ”

“ 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 ”

“ 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. ”

“ Every falsification of fact is an assault upon the foundations of our intellectual life. As against the metaphysical poetising that arrogates the power to penetrate to the essence of Nature, and determine from mere conceptions that which experience alone can teach us, materialism as a counterpoise is therefore a real benefaction.” But on the other contrary again, idealism met a want that mere empiricism cannot supply. ”

“ Thus the principles of science must be held in subordination to an enlightened empiricism in such arts as medicine, agriculture, etc. Science can not yet undertake to guide these arts with confidence. So is it also, and in a much greater degree, in the case of human society; for here we have the most difficult art, and the most complex and imperfect science. It must be yet a very long time before the science of sociology can presume to guide the course of social progress. Premature interference with the results of an enlightened empiricism can do nothing but harm. ”

“ 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. ”

“ And since perception always presents a number of universals, what determines which one shall perform the reproduction? Finally, since there are infinite differences of the universal that might be reproduced, what determines just which differences shall be reproduced? In this wise the controversy has gone on ever since the challenge of the old rationalistic logic by the nominalists launched the issue of empiricism and rationalism. All the charges which each makes against the other are easily retorted upon itself. Each side is resistless in attack, but helpless in defense. ”

“ We cannot admit the idealism which destroys the real world; but the empiricism which annihilates the ideal order, is equally objectionable. If we cannot rise above the sensible representations, let us renounce philosophy, give up thinking, and confine ourselves to sensation. ”

“ For the main lesson of Empiricism is that man must see for himself and feel that he is present in every fact of knowledge which he has to accept.
When it is carried out to its legitimate consequences, Empiricism—being in its facts limited to the finite sphere—denies the super-sensible in general, or at least any knowledge of it which would define its nature; it leaves thought no powers except abstraction and formal universality and identity. But there is a fundamental delusion in all scientific empiricism. ”

“ 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. ”

“ But to castigate empiricism is to flog a dead horse; to go on an expedition against apriorism is to plunge into an enchanted forest in which it is easy to miss the truth by reason of the multitude of “universal and necessary truths” which bar one’s way. ”