Consciousness

HO W C O MES TH E world to be here at all instead of the nonentity which might be imagined in its place? Schopenhauer’s remarks on this question may be considered classical. ‘Apart from man,’ he says, ‘no being wonders at its own existence. When man first becomes conscious, he takes himself for granted, as something needing no explanation. But not for long; for, with the rise of the first reflection, that wonder begins which is the mother of metaphysics, and which made Aristotle say that men now and always seek to philosophize because of wonder — The lower a man stands in intellectual respects the less of a riddle does existence seem to him... but, the clearer his consciousness becomes the more the problem grasps him in its greatness. In fact the unrest which keeps the never stopping clock of metaphysics going is the thought that the non-existence of this world is just as possible as its existence.

The present percept in its immediacy may thus often sink to the status of a bare sign of the consequences which the substituted concept suggests. The substitution of concepts and their connections, of a whole conceptual order, in short, for the immediate perceptual flow, thus widens enormously our mental panorama. Had we no concepts we should live simply ‘getting’ each successive moment of experience, as the sessile sea-anemone on its rock receives whatever nourishment the wash of the waves may bring. With concepts we go in quest of the absent, meet the remote, actively turn this way or that, bend our experience, and make it tell us whither it is bound. We change its order, run it backwards, bring far bits together and separate near bits, jump about over its surface instead of plowing through its continuity, string its items on as many ideal diagrams as our mind can frame. All these are ways of handling the perceptual flux and meeting distant parts of it; and as far as this primary function of conception goes, we can only conclude it to be what I began by calling it, a faculty superadded to our barely perceptual consciousness for its use in practically adapting us to a larger environment than that of which brutes take account. We harness perceptual reality in concepts in order to drive it better to our ends.

Two years later Professor James published The Meaning of Truth and A Pluralistic Universe, and inserted in these volumes several of the articles which he had intended to use in the ‘Essays in Radical Empiricism.’ Whether he would nevertheless have carried out his original plan, had he lived, cannot be certainly known. Several facts, however, stand out very clearly. In the first place, the articles included in the original plan but omitted from his later volumes are indispensable to the understanding(Pg iv) of his other writings. To these articles he repeatedly alludes. Thus, in The Meaning of Truth (p. 127), he says: “This statement is probably excessively obscure to any one who has not read my two articles ‘Does Consciousness Exist?’ and ‘A World of Pure Experience.’” Other allusions have been indicated in the present text. In the second place, the articles originally brought together as ‘Essays in Radical Empiricism’ form a connected whole.

(2) “The statement of fact is that the relations between things, conjunctive as well as disjunctive, are just as much matters of direct particular experience, neither more so nor less so, than the things themselves.” (Cf. also A Pluralistic Universe, p. 280; The Will to Believe, p. 278.) This is the central doctrine of the present book. It distinguishes ‘radical empiricism’ from the “ordinary empiricism” of Hume, J. S. Mill, etc., with which it is otherwise allied. (Cf. below, pp. 42-44.) It provides an empirical and relational version of ‘activity,’ (Pg xi)and so distinguishes the author’s voluntarism from a view with which it is easily confused — the view which upholds a pure or transcendent activity. (Cf. below, Essay vi.) It makes it possible to escape the vicious disjunctions that have thus far baffled philosophy: such disjunctions as those between consciousness and physical nature, between thought and its object, between one mind and another, and between one ‘thing’ and another. These disjunctions need not be ‘overcome’ by calling in any “extraneous trans-empirical connective support” (Meaning of Truth, Preface, p. xiii); they may now be avoided by regarding the dualities in question as only differences of empirical relationship among common empirical terms. The pragmatistic account of ‘meaning’ and ‘truth,’ shows only how a vicious disjunction between ‘idea’ and ‘object’ may thus be avoided. The present volume not only presents pragmatism in this light; but adds similar accounts of the other dualities mentioned above.

MORE P R O B LEMS ! W H Y should we read them if they are not our problems, but only Mr. Lewes’s? Of all forms of earthly worry, the metaphysical worry seems the most gratuitous. If it lands us in permanently skeptical conclusions, it is worse than superfluous; and if (as is almost always the case with non-skeptical systems) it simply ends by “indorsing” common-sense, and reinstating us in the possession of our old feelings, motives, and duties, we may fairly ask if it was worth while to go so far round in order simply to return to our starting-point and be put back into the old harness. Is not the primal state of philosophic innocence, since the practical difference is nil, as good as the state of reflective enlightenment? And need we, provided we can stay at home and take the world for granted, undergo the fatigues of a campaign with such uncomfortable spirits as the present author, merely for the sake of coming to our own again, with nothing gained but the pride of having accompanied his expedition? So we may ask. But is the pride nothing? Consciousness is the only measure of utility, and even if no philosophy could ever alter a man’s motives in life, — which is untrue, — that it should add to their conscious completeness is enough to make thousands take upon themselves its burden of perplexities. We like the sense of companionship with better and more eager intelligences than our own, and that increment of self-respect which we all experience in passing from an instinctive to a reflective state, and adopting a belief which hitherto we simply underwent.

However different a philosophy one may hold from his, however one may deem that the lack of emotional bias which left him contented with the mere principle of parsimony as a criterion of universal truth was really due to a defect in the active or impulsive part of his mental nature, one must value none the less his formulæ. For as yet philosophy has celebrated hardly any stable achievements. The labors of philosophers have, however, been confined to deepening enormously the philosophic consciousness, and revealing more and more minutely and fully the import of metaphysical problems. In this preliminary task ontologists and phenomenalists, mechanists and teleologists, must join friendly hands, for each has been indispensable to the work of the other, and the only foe of either is the common foe of both — namely, the practical, conventionally thinking man, to whom, as has been said, nothing has true seriousness but personal interests, and whose dry earnestness in those is only excelled by that of the brute, which takes everything for granted and never laughs.