Essays in Radical Empiricism

(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.