This suggests, finally, that the next move in philosophy is precisely to transfer attention from the details of the position assumed, and the arguments used in these two schools, to the practical motives that have unconsciously controlled the discussion. The positions have been sufficiently elaborated. Within the past one hundred years, within especially the last generation, each has succeeded in fully stating its case. The result, if we remain at this point, is practically a deadlock. Each can make out its case against the other. To stop at such a point is a patent absurdity. If we are to get out of the cul-de-sac it must be by bringing into consciousness the tacit reference to action that all the time has been the controlling factor.
In a word, another great rhythmic movement is seen to be approaching its end. The demand for science and philosophy was the demand for truth and a sure standard of truth which the new-born individual might employ in his efforts to build up a new world to afford free scope to the powers stirring within him. The urgency and acuteness of this demand caused, for the time being, the transfer of attention from the nature of practice to that of knowledge. The highly theoretical and abstract character of modern epistemology, combined with the fact that this highly abstract and theoretic problem has continuously engaged the attention of thought for more than three centuries, is, to my mind, proof positive that the question of knowledge was for the time being the point in which the question of practice centered, and through which it must find outlet and solution.
We return, then, to our opening problem: the meaning of the question of the possibility of knowledge raised by Kant a century ago, and of his assertion that sensation without thought is blind, thought without sensation empty. Once more I recall to the student of philosophy how this assertion of Kant has haunted and determined the course of philosophy in the intervening years--how his solution at once seems inevitable and unsatisfactory. It is inevitable in that no one can fairly deny that both sense and reason are implicated in every fruitful and significant statement of the world; unconvincing because we are after all left with these two opposed things still at war with each other, plus the miracle of their final combination.
When I say that the only way out is to place the whole modern industry of epistemology in relation to the conditions that gave it birth and the function it has to fulfil, I mean that the unsatisfactory character of the entire neo-Kantian movement lies in its assumption that knowledge gives birth to itself and is capable of affording its own justification. The solution that is always sought and never found so long as we deal with knowledge as a self-sufficing purveyor of reality, reveals itself when we conceive of knowledge as a statement of action, that statement being necessary, moreover, to the successful ongoing of action.
The entire problem of medieval philosophy is that of absorption, of assimilation. The result was the creation of the individual.
Hence the problem of modern life is that of reconstruction, reform, reorganization. The entire content of experience needs to be passed through the alembic of individual agency and realization. The individual is to be the bearer of civilization; but this involves a remaking of the civilization that he bears. Thus we have the dual question: How can the individual become the organ of corporate action?
How can he make over the truth authoritatively embodied in institutions of church and state into frank, healthy, and direct expressions of the simple act of free living? On the other hand, how can civilization preserve its own integral value and import when subordinated to the agency of the individual instead of exercising supreme sway over him?
The question of knowledge, of the discovery and statement of truth, gives the answer to this question; and it alone gives the answer.
Admitting that the practical problem of modern life is the maintenance of the moral values of civilization through the medium of the insight and decision of the individual, the problem is foredoomed to futile failure save as the individual in performing his task can work with a definite and controllable tool. This tool is science. But this very fact, constituting the dignity of science and measuring the importance of the philosophic theory of knowledge, conferring upon them the religious value once attaching to dogma and the disciplinary significance once belonging to political rules, also sets their limit.
The servant is not above his master.
When a theory of knowledge forgets that its value rests in solving the problem out of which it has arisen, viz., that of securing a method of action; when it forgets that it has to work out the conditions under which the individual may freely direct himself without loss to the historic values of civilization--when it forgets these things it begins to cumber the ground. It is a luxury, and hence a social nuisance and disturber. Of course, in the very nature of things, every means or instrument will for a while absorb attention so that it becomes the end. Indeed it is the end when it is an indispensable condition of onward movement. But when once the means have been worked out they must operate as such. When the nature and method of knowledge are fairly understood, then interest must transfer itself from the possibility of knowledge to the possibility of its application to life.
The sensationalist has played his part in bringing to effective recognition the demand in valid knowledge for individuality of experience, for personal participation in materials of knowledge.
The rationalist has served his time in making it clear once for all that valid knowledge requires organization, and the operation of a relatively permanent and general factor. The Kantian epistemologist has formulated the claims of both schools in defining judgment as the relation of perception and conception. But when it goes on to state that this relation is itself knowledge, or can be found in knowledge, it stultifies itself. Knowledge can define the percept and elaborate the concept, but their union can be found only in action. The experimental method of modern science, its erection into the ultimate mode of verification, is simply this fact obtaining recognition. Only action can reconcile the old, the general, and the permanent with the changing, the individual, and the new. It is action as progress, as development, making over the wealth of the past into capital with which to do an enlarging and freer business, that alone can find its way out of the cul-de-sac of the theory of knowledge. Each of the older movements passed away because of its own success, failed because it did its work, died in accomplishing its purpose. So also with the modern philosophy of knowledge; there must come a time when we have so much knowledge in detail, and understand so well its method in general, that it ceases to be a problem. It becomes a tool. If the problem of knowledge is not intrinsically meaningless and absurd it must in course of time be solved. Then the dominating interest becomes the _use_ of knowledge; the conditions under which and ways in which it may be most organically and effectively employed to direct conduct.
Thus the Socratic period recurs; but recurs with the deepened meaning of the intervening weary years of struggle, confusion, and conflict in the growth of the recognition of the need of patient and specific methods of interrogation. So, too, the authoritative and institutional truth of scholasticism recurs, but recurs borne up upon the vigorous and conscious shoulders of the freed individual who is aware of his own intrinsic relations to truth, and who glories in his ability to carry civilization--not merely to carry it, but to carry it on. Thus another swing in the rhythm of theory and practice begins.
How does this concern us as philosophers? For the world it means that philosophy is henceforth a method and not an original fountain head of truth, nor an ultimate standard of reference. But what is involved for philosophy itself in this change? I make no claims to being a prophet, but I venture one more and final unproved statement, believing, with all my heart, that it is justified both by the moving logic of the situation, and by the signs of the times. I refer to the growing transfer of interest from metaphysics and the theory of knowledge to psychology and social ethics--including in the latter term all the related concrete social sciences, so far as they may give guidance to conduct.
There are those who see in psychology only a particular science which they are pleased to term purely empirical (unless it happen to restate in changed phraseology the metaphysics with which they are familiar). They see in it only a more or less incoherent mass of facts, interesting because relating to human nature, but below the natural sciences in point of certainty and definiteness, as also far below pure philosophy as to comprehensiveness and ability to deal with fundamental issues. But if I may be permitted to dramatize a little the position of the psychologist, he can well afford to continue patiently at work, unmindful of the occasional supercilious sneers of the epistemologist. The cause of modern civilization stands and falls with the ability of the individual to serve as its agent and bearer.
And psychology is naught but the account of the way in which individual life is thus progressively maintained and reorganized. Psychology is the attempt to state in detail the machinery of the individual considered as the instrument and organ through which social action operates. It is the answer to Kant’s demand for the formal phase of experience--how experience as such is constituted. Just because the whole burden and stress, both of conserving and advancing experience is more and more thrown upon the individual, everything which sheds light upon how the individual may weather the stress and assume the burden is precious and imperious.
Social ethics in inclusive sense is the correlative science. Dealing not with the form or mode or machinery of action, it attempts rather to make out its filling and make up the values that are necessary to constitute an experience which is worth while. The sociologist, like the psychologist, often presents himself as a camp follower of genuine science and philosophy, picking up scraps here and there and piecing them together in somewhat of an aimless fashion--fortunate indeed, if not vague and over-ambitious. Yet social ethics represents the attempt to translate philosophy from a general and therefore abstract method into a working and specific method; it is the change from inquiring into the nature of value in general to inquiring as to the _particular_ values that ought to be realized in the life of every one, and as to the conditions which render possible this realization.
There are those who will see in this conception of the outcome of a four-hundred-year discussion concerning the nature and possibility of knowledge a derogation from the high estate of philosophy. There are others who will see in it a sign that philosophy, after wandering aimlessly hither and yon in a wilderness without purpose or outcome, has finally come to its senses--has given up metaphysical absurdities and unverifiable speculations, and become a purely positive science of phenomena. But there are yet others who will see in this movement the fulfilment of its vocation, the clear consciousness of a function that it has always striven to perform; and who will welcome it as a justification of the long centuries when it appeared to sit apart, far from the common concerns of man, busied with discourse of essence and cause, absorbed in argument concerning subject and object, reason and sensation. To such this outcome will appear the inevitable sequel of the saying of Socrates that “an unexamined life is not one fit to be led by man”; and a better response to his injunction “Know thyself.”
THE END INDEX Acquaintance, and knowledge, 79-82 Action, and problem of knowledge, _Essay XI._, 271-304 Appearance, and reality, 26-28, 118-121 Assurance, 85-88 Awareness, 93 Behavior, and intelligence, 44 Bosanquet, B., 281 Change, its supposed unreality, 1; in modern science, 8-9; and law, 72; and thought, 133; of truth, 153; of experience, 222-224, 259-260; Christianity, metaphysic of, 178 Consistency, as criterion, 128-136 Consciousness, as end of nature, 34-35; is partial, 43; Correspondence, 158 Cosmology, and morals, 54 Custom, as background of morals, 48, 52 Darwin, his influence on philosophy, _Essay I._, 1-19; quoted, 2, 12 Democracy, moral meaning of, 59-60, 266-267 Descartes, 8 Design, _see_ Teleology Economics, influences on morals, 57-59 Empiricism, 200-202; Error, and becoming, 100 Evolution, of species, 1, 8; and design, 12-13; and teleology, 32-35; and intelligence, 42-43 Experiment, and knowledge, _Essay IV._, 77-111 Feeling, 80-81 Final Cause, _see_ Teleology Functions, true data of psychology, 250-255 Galileo, 8 Genesis, and value, 261-264 Good, is concrete and plural, 15-17, 23, 27; and evolution, 31-35, 43; and mysticism, 39, 42; Greek view of, 46-50; medieval view of, 52-54; as fixed, 67 Gordon, K., 215 n.
Gray, Asa, on evolution and design, 12 Happiness, nature of, 69 Hegel, 65, 174 n.
Hobbes, 203 n.
Hume, 82 n., 204 n.
Ideas, nature of, 134, 155; their verification, 141 ff.; Intelligence, is discriminative, 39, 42, 75; is the good of nature, 44; cosmic and personal, 55, 59; as biological instrument, 68; indirection of activity, 133, 149 Judgment, Bradley’s theory of, 114-117; of the past, 160-61, 165; Kant’s theory of, 272 Knowledge, its proper object, 6, 10, 14; and nature, 41; and freedom, 73; The Experimental Theory of, _Essay IV._, 77-111; defined, 90; and inquiry, 184-189; Maine, Sir Henry, quoted, 46 Meaning, and knowledge, 87-90; and judgment, 116-117, 200 Memory, 220 Moore, A. W., 91 n.
Naturalism, 195 Nature, teleology of, 10; The Good of, _Essay II._, 20-45; animistic character of, 51; change in, 72 Newton, influence of, 61, 72 Organization, of experience, 208-211 Perception, ambiguity of term, 214-219 Philosophy, changes in, 14-19; political nature of, 21; defined, 45; and science, 51; and psychology, 189-191; _Essay X._, 242-270 Relation, and appearance, 119-120 Sciences, developed out of morals, 56; and industry, 57-58; as mode of knowledge, 108; and philosophy, 268-270, 287 Social Ethics, 302-304 Species, equivalent to scholastic form, 3-4; as eternal and teleological, 4-5; basis of knowledge, 6-7 Spinoza, 181 Stoicism, 172, 279 Teleology, of life, 4; of nature, 10, 32; basis of idealism, 11; concrete, 15, 22; and evolution, 32-35; subjective, 223-224 Theory, 124-127 Thinking, practical character of, 124-127 Tolstoi, 173 n.
Transcendence, of knowledge, 103 n., 156-157 Transcendental, and supernatural, 22, 29, 282; view of knowledge, 24, 27; freedom, 74 Truth, criterion of, 92, 95, 107-111; absolute, 137; identified with existence, 138, 145; eternal, 147, 152; 230-231, 237, 282 Utilitarianism, 62 Verification, making true, 139 ff., 162-164 FOOTNOTES [1] The affair is even more portentous in the German with its capital letters and series of _muses_: “Gewiss ist der Pragmatismus erkenntnisstheoretisch Nominalismus, psychologisch Voluntarismus, naturphilosophisch Energismus, metaphysisch Agnosticismus, ethisch Meliorismus auf Grundlage des Bentham-Millschen Utilitarismus.”
[2] A lecture in a course of public lectures on “Charles Darwin and His Influence on Science,” given at Columbia University in the winter and spring of 1909. Reprinted from the _Popular Science Monthly_ for July, 1909.
283-84. See also the closing portion of his “Variations of Animals and Plants under Domestication.”
[5] Reprinted from the _Hibbert Journal_, Vol. VII., No. 4, July, 1909.
[6] A public lecture delivered at Columbia University in March, 1908, under the title of “Ethics,” in a series of lectures on “Science, Philosophy, and Art.” Reprinted from a monograph published by the Columbia University Press.
[7] Reprinted, with considerable change in the arrangement and in the matter of the latter portion, from _Mind_, Vol. XV., N.S., July, 1906.
[8] I must remind the reader again of a point already suggested. It is the identification of presence in consciousness with knowledge as such that leads to setting up _a_ mind (_ego_, subject) which has the peculiar property of knowing (only so often it knows wrong!), or else that leads to supplying “sensations” with the peculiar property of surveying their own entrails. Given the correct feeling that knowledge involves relationship, there being, by supposition, no other _thing_ to which the thing in consciousness is related, it is forthwith related to a soul substance, or to its ghostly offspring, a “subject,” or to “consciousness” itself.
[9] Let us further recall that this theory requires either that things present shall already be psychical things (feelings, sensations, etc.), in order to be assimilated to the knowing mind, subject to consciousness; or else translates genuinely naïve realism into the miracle of a mind that gets outside itself to lay its ghostly hands upon the things of an external world.
[10] This means that things may be present _as_ known, just as they be present as hard or soft, agreeable or disgusting, hoped for or dreaded. The mediacy, or the art of intervention, which characterizes knowledge, indicates precisely the way in which known things as known are immediately present.
[11] If Hume had had a tithe of the interest in the _flux_ of perceptions and in _habit_--principles of continuity and of organization--which he had in distinct and isolated existences, he might have saved us both from German _Erkenntnisstheorie_, and from that modern miracle play, the psychology of elements of consciousness, that under the ægis of science, does not hesitate to have psychical elements compound and breed, and in their agile intangibility put to shame the performances of their less acrobatic cousins, physical atoms.
[12] In other words, the situation as described is not to be confused with the case of hunting on purpose to test an idea regarding the dog.
[13] Dr. Moore, in an essay in “Contributions to Logical Theory” has brought out clearly, on the basis of a criticism of the theory of meaning and fulfilment advanced in Royce’s “World and Individual,” the full consequences of this distinction. I quote one sentence (p. 350): “Surely there is a pretty discernible difference between experience as a purposive idea, and the experience which fulfils this purpose. To call them both ‘ideas’ is at least confusing.” The text above simply adds that there is also a discernible and important difference between experiences which, _de facto_, are purposing and fulfilling (that is, are seen to be such _ab extra_), and those which meant to be such, and are found to be what they meant.
[14] The association of science and philosophy with leisure, with a certain economic surplus, is not accidental. It is practically worth while to postpone practice; to substitute theorizing, to develop a new and fascinating mode of practice. But it is the excess achievement of practice which makes this postponement and substitution possible.
[15] It is the failure to grasp the coupling of truth of meaning with a _specific_ promise, undertaking, or intention expressed by a thing which underlies, so far as I can see, the criticisms passed upon the experimental or pragmatic view of the truth. It is the same failure which is responsible for the wholly _at large_ view of truth which characterizes the absolutists.
[16] The belief in the _metaphysical_ transcendence of the object of knowledge seems to have its real origin in an _empirical_ transcendence of a very specific and describable sort. The thing meaning is one thing; the thing meant is another thing, and is (as already pointed out) a thing presented as not given in the same way as is the thing which means. It is something _to be_ so given. No amount of careful and thorough inspection of the indicating and signifying things can remove or annihilate this gap. The _probability_ of correct meaning may be increased in varying degrees--and this is what we mean by control.
But final certitude can never be reached except experimentally--except by performing the operations indicated and discovering whether or no the intended meaning is fulfilled _in propria persona_. In this experimental sense, truth or the object of any given meaning is always beyond or outside of the cognitional thing that means it. Error as well as truth is a necessary function of knowing. But the non-empirical account of this transcendent (or beyond) relationship puts _all_ the error in one place (_our_ knowledge), and _all_ the truth in another (absolute consciousness or else a thing-in-itself).
[17] Compare his essay, “Does Consciousness Exist?” in the _Journal of Philosophy, Psychology, and Scientific Methods_, Vol. I., p. 480.
[18] Compare the essay on the “Problem of Consciousness,” by Professor Woodbridge, in the Garman Memorial Volume, entitled “Studies in Philosophy and Psychology.”
[19] Reprinted, with many changes, from an article in _Mind_, Vol.
XVI., N.S., July 1907. Although the changes have been made to render the article less technical, it still remains, I fear, too technical to be intelligible to those not familiar with recent discussions of logical theory.
[20] I follow chiefly Chapter XV. of “Appearance and Reality”--the chapter on “Thought and Reality.”
[21] The crux of the argument is contained in Chapters XIII. and XIV., on the “General Nature of Reality.”
[22] The same point comes out in Mr. Bradley’s treatment of the way in which the practical demand for the good or satisfaction is to be taken account of in a philosophical conception of the nature of reality.
He admits that it comes in; but holds that it enters not directly, but because if left outside it indirectly introduces a feature of “discontent” on the intellectual side (see p. 155). This, as an argument for the supremacy of the isolated theoretical standard, loses all its force if we cease to conceive of intellect as from the start an independent function, and realize that intellectual discontent is the practical conflict becoming deliberately aware of itself as the most effective means of its own rectification.
[23] This suggests that many of the stock arguments against pragmatism fail to take its contention seriously enough. They proceed from the assumption that it is an account of truth which leaves untouched current notions of the nature of intelligence. But the essential point of pragmatism is that it bases its changed account of truth on a changed conception of the nature of intelligence, both as to its objective and its method. Now this different account of intelligence may be wrong, but controversy which leaves standing the conventionally current theories about thought and merely discusses “truth” will not go far. Since truth is the adequate fulfilment of the function of intelligence, the question turns on the nature of the latter.
[24] Such a statement as, for example, Mr. Bradley’s (_Mind_, Vol.
works...but is able to work because I have chosen the right idea” surely loses any argumentative force it may seem to have, when it is recalled that, upon the theory argued against, ability to work and rightness are one and the same thing. If the wording is changed to read “The idea is able to work because I have chosen an idea which is able to work” the question-begging character of the implied criticism is evident. The change of phraseology also may suggest the crucial and pregnant question: How does any one know that an idea is able to work excepting by setting it at work?
[25] A paper read in the spring of 1909 before the Philosophical Club of Smith College and not previously published.
[26] Read as the Presidential Address at the fifth annual meeting of the American Philosophical Association, at Cambridge, December 28, 1905, and reprinted with verbal revisions from the _Philosophical Review_, Vol. XV., March, 1906. The substitution of the word “Existences” for the word “Realities” (in the original title) is due to a subsequent recognition on my part that the eulogistic historic associations with the word “Reality” (against which the paper was a protest) infected the interpretation of the paper itself, so that the use of some more colorless word was desirable.
[27] Since writing the above I have read the following words of a candidly unsympathetic friend of philosophy: “Neither philosophy nor science can institute man’s relation to the universe, because such reciprocity must have existed before any kind of science or philosophy can begin; since each investigates phenomena by means of the intellect, and independent of the position and feeling of the investigator; whereas the relation of man to the universe is defined, not by the intellect alone, but by his sensitive perception aided by all his spiritual powers. However much one may assure and instruct a man that all real existence is an idea, that matter is made up of atoms, that the essence of life is corporality or will, that heat, light, movement, electricity, are different manifestations of one and the same energy, one cannot thereby explain to a being with pains, pleasures, hopes, and fears his position in the universe.” Tolstoi, essay on “Religion and Morality,” in “Essays, Letters, and Miscellanies.”
[28] Hegel may be excepted from this statement. The habit of interpreting Hegel as a Neo-Kantian, a Kantian enlarged and purified, is a purely Anglo-American habit. This is no place to enter into the intricacies of Hegelian exegesis, but the subordination of both logical meaning and of mechanical existence to _Geist_, to life in its own developing movement, would seem to stand out in any unbiased view of Hegel. At all events, I wish to recognize my own personal debt to Hegel for the view set forth in this paper, without, of course, implying that it represents Hegel’s own intention.
[29] There will of course come in time with the development of this point of view an organon of beliefs. The signs of a genuine as against a simulated belief will be studied; belief as a vital personal reaction will be discriminated from habitual, incorporate, unquestioned (because unconsciously exercised) traditions of social classes and professions. In his “Will to Believe” Professor James has already laid down two traits of genuine belief (viz., “forced option,” and acceptance of responsibility for results) which are almost always ignored in criticisms (really caricatures) of his position. In the light of such an organon, one might come to doubt whether _belief_ in, say, immortality (as distinct from hope on one side and a sort of intellectual balance of probability of opinion on the other) can genuinely exist at all.
[30] Reprinted, with slight verbal changes, from the _Philosophical Review_, Vol. XV. (1906).
[33] “Essay concerning Human Understanding,” Book II., Chapter II., § 2. Locke doubtless derived this notion from Bacon.
[34] It is hardly necessary to refer to the stress placed upon mathematics, as well as upon fundamental propositions in logic, ethics, and cosmology.
[35] Of course there are internal historic connections between experience as effective “memory,” and experience as “observation.”
But the motivation and stress, the problem, has quite shifted. It may be remarked that Hobbes still writes under the influence of the Aristotelian conception. “Experience is nothing but Memory” (“Elements of Philosophy,” Part I., Chapter I., § 2), and hence is opposed to science.
[36] There are, of course, anticipations of Hume in Locke. But to regard Lockeian experience as equivalent to Humian is to pervert history. Locke, as he was to himself and to the century succeeding him, was not a subjectivist, but in the main a common sense objectivist.
It was this that gave him his historic influence. But so completely has the Hume-Kant controversy dominated recent thinking that it is constantly projected backward. Within a few weeks I have seen three articles, all insisting that the meaning of the term experience must be subjective, and stating or implying that those who take the term objectively are subverters of established usage! But a casual study of the dictionary will reveal that experience has always meant “_what_ is experienced,” observation as a source of knowledge, as well as the act, fact, or mode of experiencing. In the Oxford Dictionary, the (obsolete) sense of “experimental testing,” of actual “observation of facts and events,” and “the fact of being consciously affected by an act” have almost contemporaneous datings, viz., 1384, 1377, and 1382 respectively. A usage almost more objective than the second, the Baconian use, is “what has been experienced; the events that have taken place within the knowledge of an individual, a community, mankind at large, either during a particular period or generally.” This dates back to 1607. Let us have no more captious criticisms and plaints based on ignorance of linguistic usage. [This pious wish has not been met.
J. D., 1909.]
[37] The relationship of organization and thought is precisely that which we find psychologically typified by the rhythmic functions of habit and attention, attention being always, _ab quo_, a sign of the failure of habit, and, _ad quem_, a reconstructive modification of habit.
[38] Compare, for example, Dr. Stuart’s paper in the “Studies in Logical Theory,” pp. 253-256. I may here remark that I remain totally unable to see how the _interpretation_ of objectivity to mean controlling conditions of action (negative and positive as above) derogates at all from its naïve objectivity, or how it connotes cognitive subjectivity, or is in any way incompatible with a common-sense realistic theory of perception.
[39] For this suggested interpretation of the esthetic as surprising, or unintended, gratuitous collateral reinforcement, see Gordon, [40] This, however, is not strictly true, since Locke goes far to supply the means of his own correction in his account of the “workmanship of the understanding.”
[41] Plato, especially in his “Theætetus,” seems to have begun the procedure of blasting the good name of perceptive experience by identifying a late and instrumental distinction, having to do with logical control, with all experience whatsoever.
[42] Compare James, “Continuous transition is one sort of conjunctive relation; and to be a radical empiricist means to hold fast to this conjunctive relation of all others, for this is the strategic point, the position through which, if a hole be made, all the corruptions of dialectics and all the metaphysical fictions pour into our philosophy.”--_Journal of Philosophy, Psychology, and Scientific [43] One of the not least of the many merits of Santayana’s “Life of Reason” is the consistency and vigor with which is upheld the doctrine that significant idealism means idealization.
[44] Reprinted, with very slight change, from the _Journal of Philosophy, Psychology, and Scientific Methods_, Vol. II., No. 15, July, 1905.
[45] All labels are, of course, obnoxious and misleading. I hope, however, the term will be taken by the reader in the sense in which it is forthwith explained, and not in some more usual and familiar sense. Empiricism, as herein used, is as antipodal to sensationalistic empiricism, as it is to transcendentalism, and for the same reason.
Both of these systems fall back on something which is defined in non-directly-experienced terms in order to justify that which is directly experienced. Hence I have criticised such empiricism (_Philosophical Review_, Vol. XI., No. 4, p. 364) as essentially absolutistic in character; and also (“Studies in Logical Theory,” pp. 30, 58) as an attempt to build up experience in terms of certain methodological checks and cues of attaining _certainty_.
[46] I hope the reader will not therefore assume that from the empiricist’s standpoint knowledge is of small worth or import. On the contrary, from the empiricist’s standpoint it has _all_ the worth which it is concretely experienced as possessing--which is simply tremendous.
But the exact _nature_ of this worth is a thing to be found out in describing what we mean by experiencing objects as known--the actual differences made or found in experience.
[47] Since the non-empiricist believes in things-in-themselves (which he may term “atoms,” “sensations,” transcendental unities, _a priori_ concepts, _an_ absolute experience, or whatever), and since he finds