Sense experience

“ I 'Pure experience' is the name which I gave to the immediate flux of life which furnishes the material to our later reflection with its conceptual categories. Only new-born babes, or men in semi-coma from sleep, drugs, illnesses, or blows, may be assumed to have an experience pure in the literal sense of a that which is not yet any definite what, tho ready to be all sorts of whats; full both of oneness and of manyness, but in respects that don't appear; changing throughout, yet so confusedly that its phases interpenetrate and no points, either of distinction or of identity, can be caught. ”

“ But the conditions which make many moments of experience, many thoughts, or many people, refer to the same content or moment of experience, or to the same fact in any sense, are not themselves, as conditions of the sameness of reference, contents of anybody’s experience, or part of the flow of its ceaseless stream. These conditions, then, presupposed in all rationality, are ipso facto transcendent. ”

“ V THE PLACE OF AFFECTIONAL FACTS IN A WORLD OF PURE EXPERIENCE [75]
Common sense and popular philosophy are as dualistic as it is possible to be. Thoughts, we all naturally think, are made of one kind of substance, and things of another. Consciousness, flowing inside of us in the forms of conception or judgment, or concentrating itself in the shape of passion or emotion, can be directly felt as the spiritual activity which it is, and known in contrast with the space-filling objective ‘content’ which it envelopes and accompanies. ”

“ But his great mental characteristic seems to have been wisdom—that fine, just inward sense of things, which, like poetry, is born in a man, not acquired—the result, generally, as in his case, of an innate power, combined with large, varied, and calming experience. ”

“ The commonest objection which the doctrine there laid down runs up against is drawn from the existence of our ‘affections.’ In our pleasures and pains, our loves and fears and angers, in the beauty, comicality, importance or preciousness of certain objects and situations, we have, I am told by many critics, a great realm of experience intuitively recognized as spiritual, made, and felt to be made, of consciousness exclusively, and different in nature from the space-filling kind of being which is enjoyed by physical objects. ”

“ For—how shall I express it?—the fruit of living is experience, and experience tends more and more to lose sight of the concrete in the abstract, to replace the substance of the form with the higher reality of the idea. ”

“ The simplest rudiment of mystical experience would seem to be that deepened sense of the significance of a maxim or formula which occasionally sweeps over one. ”

“ 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. ”

“ But solemnity, and gravity, and all such emotional attributes, admit of various shades; and, do what we will with our defining, the truth must at last be confronted that we are dealing with a field of experience where there is not a single conception that can be sharply drawn. ”

“ Good sense, disciplined by experience and inspired by goodness, issues in practical wisdom. ”

“ By the Sensation, we mean the whole state of consciousness, under an actual or present impression of sense, as in looking at the moon, in listening to music, in tasting wine. By the Idea is meant the state of mind that remains after the sensible agent is withdrawn, or that may be afterwards recovered by the force of recollection. ”

“ 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. ”

“ This was the experience, then, of ‘distinct pre-eminence’ in whose recollection his mind was ‘nourished and invisibly repaired.’ It is in such a moment that the soul’s strength is shown; when common objects evoke what he calls the imagination, the reality, of which they are a suggestion. ”

“ These principles, based on the data of experience,—that is, on sensations the existence of which we know from consciousness, assure us that the objectiveness of sensations, or the reality of the external world, is a truth. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Can we see, then, any way in which a unit of pure experience might enter into and figure in two diverse streams of consciousness without turning itself into the two units which, on our hypothesis, it must not be? ”

“ If experience has not ‘conscious’ existence, if it be not partly made of ‘consciousness,’ of what then is it made? Matter we know, and thought we know, and conscious content we know, but neutral and simple ‘pure experience’ is something we know not at all. ”

“ What is it that makes a sensation, a perception, a memory, or an apprehended relation pleasant under some circumstances and unpleasant under others? The rule appears to be that when the experience harmonizes with our present train of thought, when it promotes our present interests and intentions, it is pleasant ”

“ 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. ”

“ Experience in general consists in the whole body of conclusions thus deduced from a comparison of all the particular sensations, emotions, and ideas which make up the conscious life of the individual. ”

“ One's capacity for expression is also affected by his experience,—not experience in time and space, but soul-experience,—joy, sorrow, pleasure, pain, love, hope, aspiration, and all intense feeling by which the genesis of the inward man unfolded. ”

“ 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? ”

“ 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. ”

“ For we have not failed strictly to discriminate between Conceptions which, by means of Experience, find their way into the understanding of the mere sensuous man; and Ideas which, independent of all Experience, kindle into self-sustaining life in those who are inspired by them. ”

“ But as soon as these two faculties have passed into action, and man has verified by his experience, through the medium of sensation, a determinate existence, and through the medium of consciousness its absolute existence, the two fundamental impulses exert their influence directly their object is given. The sensuous impulse is awakened with the experience of life—with the beginning of the individual ”

“ By the cognitive element, which is equally necessary with emotions to the existence of a valuable appreciation, I mean merely the actual cognition or consciousness of any or all of an object’s beautiful qualities—that is to say, any or all of those elements in the object which possess any positive beauty. ”

“ By definition, reason and experience were antithetical, so that the concern of reason was not the fruitful expansion and guidance of the course of experience, but a realm of considerations too sublime to touch, or be touched by, experience. ”

“ Hold thought steadfastly to the enduring, the good, and the true, and you will bring these into your experience proportionably to their occupancy of your thoughts. ”

“ But when such observation is ended or at fault, and the man retreats, as it were, into his inner self, then in the quiet all the senses merge and harmonize into a single perfect instrument of perception. ”

“ Every impulse must be awakened by experience if it is to arrive at consciousness, and must be developed by numerous experiences of the same kind if it is to become a desire, and its appropriate gratification a want, of man. ”

“ The question how the human mind, regarded as a thing of definite or indefinite characteristics, comes to have the filling-in which we call experience, opens out, when duly considered, into the much wider problem as to the relation of any individual consciousness to the sum total of things, a relation which may be either cognitive, or practical, or religious. ”

“ It is obvious that the world is not the same for all of us; but that it is for each one of us simply the world of his individual perceptions.
As Many Worlds as Minds
The whole subject of sense-impressions, [Pg 53] sensation and perception may, therefore, be looked at from the standpoint of the mind as an active influence, as well as from the standpoint of outside objects as the exciting causes of sense-impressions. ”

“ For perceptions of sense are the instrumentality by which the will vivifies the heart, so disposing the particulars of the surrounding universe as to give the definite form of thoughts to consciousness. ”

“ Life is complex in its expression, involving more than percipience, namely desire, emotion, will, and feeling. ”

“ All senses are used, not disused, but used in a sort of overtone of function which perceives without contact and translates with the deeper perception of the essence-sense rather than the crude extracts of the old senses. ”

“ The finest poetry was first experience: but the thought has suffered a transformation since it was an experience. ”

“ Affection first says in presence of an object, imperfectly presented in experience, not only that there shall be further experience completing and fulfilling this meaning, but also that there shall be in this further experience such unity as constitutes an unique object. ”

“ But the moment the mind opens, and reveals the laws which traverse the universe, and make things what they are, then shrinks the great world at once into a mere illustration and fable of this mind. What am I? and What is? asks the human spirit with a curiosity new-kindled, but never to be quenched. ”

“ Sensation, therefore, produces concepts of kind, and the correlates of likeness and unlikeness are involved. We may define sensation as the cognition of properties as kinds in their effects, and it is a compound of judgments; and a judgment is a combination of a sense impression, a consciousness, a choice, a concept, and a comparison. ”

“ Leaving out of view the Will, which is a simple homogeneous mental state, forming the link between feeling and action, and not admitting of subdivisions; our states of consciousness fall into two great classes—Cognitions and Feelings. ”

“ By the side of the intellectual element, by which we estimate our thoughts and actions, there is feeling; that is, the sensibility which modifies the judgment and enlightens the deep thought determining our responsibility. ”

“ What our psychological description depicts is never the experience as it actually was while we were having it, but the experience as it appears from the point of view of subsequent reflection, interpreted in the light of all sorts of conscious or unconscious hypotheses about its conditions and its constituents. ”

“ The mental sense, by the help of which we feel the spirit of a people, is like the sense of sight, or of touch,—it is a natural gift. It finds its objects, not by analysis, but by direct apprehension. ”

“ The sense of activity is thus in the broadest and vaguest way synonymous with the sense of ‘life.’ We should feel our own subjective life at least, even in noticing and proclaiming an otherwise inactive world. ”