A Pluralistic Universe - free ebook by William James

A PLURALISTIC UNIVERSE

Hibbert Lectures at Manchester College on the Present Situation in Philosophy 1909...

6 minute read

Read Chapter

LECTURE I

Our age is growing philosophical again, 3. Change of tone since 1860, 4. Empiricism and Rationalism defined, 7. The process of Philosophizing: Philosophers choose some part of the world to interpret the whole by, 8. They seek to make it seem less strange, 11. Their temperamental differences, 12. Their systems must be reasoned out, 13. Their tendency to over-technicality, 15. Excess of this in Germany, 17. The type of vision is the important thing in a philosopher, 20. Primitive thought, 21. Spir

59 minute read

Read Chapter

LECTURE II

Recapitulation, 43. Radical Pluralism is to be the thesis of these lectures, 44. Most philosophers contemn it, 45. Foreignness to us of Bradley's Absolute, 46. Spinoza and 'quatenus,'47. Difficulty of sympathizing with the Absolute, 48. Idealistic attempt to interpret it, 50. Professor Jones quoted, 52. Absolutist refutations of Pluralism, 54. Criticism of Lotze's proof of Monism by the analysis of what interaction involves, 55. Vicious intellectualism defined, 60. Royce's alternative: either th

39 minute read

Read Chapter

LECTURE III

Hegel's influence. 85. The type of his vision is impressionistic, 87. The 'dialectic' element in reality, 88. Pluralism involves possible conflicts among things, 90. Hegel explains conflicts by the mutual contradictoriness of concepts, 91. Criticism of his attempt to transcend ordinary logic, 92. Examples of the 'dialectic' constitution of things, 95. The rationalistic ideal: propositions self-securing by means of double negation, 101. Sublimity of the conception, 104. Criticism of Hegel's accou

52 minute read

Read Chapter

LECTURE IV

Superhuman consciousness does not necessarily imply an absolute mind, 134. Thinness of contemporary absolutism, 135. The tone of Fechner's empiricist pantheism contrasted with that of the rationalistic sort, 144. Fechner's life, 145. His vision, the 'daylight view,' 150. His way of reasoning by analogy, 151. The whole universe animated, 152. His monistic formula is unessential, 153. The Earth-Soul, 156. Its differences from our souls, 160. The earth as an angel, 164. The Plant-Soul, 165. The log

35 minute read

Read Chapter

LECTURE V

THE COMPOUNDING OF CONSCIOUSNESS 179 The assumption that states of mind may compound themselves, 181. This assumption is held in common by naturalistic psychology, by transcendental idealism, and by Fechner, 184. Criticism of it by the present writer in a former book, 188. Physical combinations, so-called, cannot be invoked as analogous, 194. Nevertheless, combination must be postulated among the parts of the Universe, 197. The logical objections to admitting it, 198. Rationalistic treatment of

34 minute read

Read Chapter

LECTURE VI

Professor Bergson's personality, 225. Achilles and the tortoise, 228. Not a sophism, 229. We make motion unintelligible when we treat it by static concepts, 233. Conceptual treatment is nevertheless of immense practical use, 235. The traditional rationalism gives an essentially static universe, 237. Intolerableness of the intellectualist view, 240. No rationalist account is possible of action, change, or immediate life, 244. The function of concepts is practical rather than theoretical, 247. Ber

53 minute read

Read Chapter

LECTURE VII

Green's critique of Sensationalism, 278. Relations are as immediately felt as terms are, 280. The union of things is given in the immediate flux, not in any conceptual reason that overcomes the flux's aboriginal incoherence, 282. The minima of experience as vehicles of continuity, 284. Fallacy of the objections to self-compounding, 286. The concrete units of experience are 'their own others,' 287. Reality is confluent from next to next, 290. Intellectualism must be sincerely renounced, 291. The

36 minute read

Read Chapter

LECTURE VIII

Specifically religious experiences occur, 303. Their nature, 304. They corroborate the notion of a larger life of which we are a part, 308. This life must be finite if we are to escape the paradoxes of monism, 310. God as a finite being, 311. Empiricism is a better ally than rationalism, of religion, 313. Empirical proofs of larger mind may open the door to superstitions, 315. But this objection should not be deemed fatal, 316. Our beliefs form parts of reality, 317. In pluralistic empiricism ou

43 minute read

Read Chapter

THE TYPES OF PHILOSOPHIC THINKING

As these lectures are meant to be public, and so few, I have assumed all very special problems to be excluded, and some topic of general interest required. Fortunately, our age seems to be growing philosophical again—still in the ashes live the wonted fires. Oxford, long the seed-bed, for the english world, of the idealism inspired by Kant and Hegel, has recently become the nursery of a very different way of thinking. Even non-philosophers have begun to take an interest in a controversy over wha

31 minute read

Read Chapter

MONISTIC IDEALISM

Let me recall to you the programme which I indicated to you at our last meeting. After agreeing not to consider materialism in any shape, but to place ourselves straightway upon a more spiritualistic platform, I pointed out three kinds of spiritual philosophy between which we are asked to choose. The first way was that of the older dualistic theism, with ourselves represented as a secondary order of substances created by God. We found that this allowed of a degree of intimacy with the creative p

34 minute read

Read Chapter

HEGEL AND HIS METHOD

Directly or indirectly, that strange and powerful genius Hegel has done more to strengthen idealistic pantheism in thoughtful circles than all other influences put together. I must talk a little about him before drawing my final conclusions about the cogency of the arguments for the absolute. In no philosophy is the fact that a philosopher's vision and the technique he uses in proof of it are two different things more palpably evident than in Hegel. The vision in his case was that of a world in

38 minute read

Read Chapter

CONCERNING FECHNER

The prestige of the absolute has rather crumbled in our hands. The logical proofs of it miss fire; the portraits which its best court-painters show of it are featureless and foggy in the extreme; and, apart from the cold comfort of assuring us that with it all is well, and that to see that all is well with us also we need only rise to its eternal point of view, it yields us no relief whatever. It introduces, on the contrary, into philosophy and theology certain poisonous difficulties of which bu

37 minute read

Read Chapter

THE COMPOUNDING OF CONSCIOUSNESS

In my last lecture I gave a miserably scanty outline of the way of thinking of a philosopher remarkable for the almost unexampled richness of his imagination of details. I owe to Fechner's shade an apology for presenting him in a manner so unfair to the most essential quality of his genius; but the time allotted is too short to say more about the particulars of his work, so I proceed to the programme I suggested at the end of our last hour. I wish to discuss the assumption that states of conscio

35 minute read

Read Chapter

BERGSON AND HIS CRITIQUE OF INTELLECTUALISM

I gave you a very stiff lecture last time, and I fear that this one can be little less so. The best way of entering into it will be to begin immediately with Bergson's philosophy, since I told you that that was what had led me personally to renounce the intellectualistic method and the current notion that logic is an adequate measure of what can or cannot be. Professor Henri Bergson is a young man, comparatively, as influential philosophers go, having been born at Paris in 1859. His career has b

41 minute read

Read Chapter

THE CONTINUITY OF EXPERIENCE

I fear that few of you will have been able to obey Bergson's call upon you to look towards the sensational life for the fuller knowledge of reality, or to sympathize with his attempt to limit the divine right of concepts to rule our mind absolutely. It is too much like looking downward and not up. Philosophy, you will say, doesn't lie flat on its belly in the middle of experience, in the very thick of its sand and gravel, as this Bergsonism does, never getting a peep at anything from above. Phil

20 minute read

Read Chapter

CONCLUSIONS

At the close of my last lecture I referred to the existence of religious experiences of a specific nature. I must now explain just what I mean by such a claim. Briefly, the facts I have in mind may all be described as experiences of an unexpected life succeeding upon death. By this I don't mean immortality, or the death of the body. I mean the deathlike termination of certain mental processes within the individual's experience, processes that run to failure, and in some individuals, at least, ev

24 minute read

Read Chapter

LECTURE I

Note 1, page 5.—Bailey: op. cit. , First Series, p. 52. Note 2, page 11.— Smaller Logic , § 194. Note 3, page 16.— Exploratio philosophica , Part I, 1865, pp. xxxviii, 130. Note 4, page 20.—Hinneberg: Die Kultur der Gegenwart: Systematische Philosophie . Leipzig: Teubner, 1907....

15 minute read

Read Chapter

LECTURE II

Note 1, page 50.—The difference is that the bad parts of this finite are eternal and essential for absolutists, whereas pluralists may hope that they will eventually get sloughed off and become as if they had not been. Note 2, page 51.—Quoted by W. Wallace: Lectures and Essays , Oxford, 1898, p. 560. Note 3, page 51.— Logic , tr. Wallace, 1874, p. 181. Note 4, page 52.— Ibid. , p. 304. Note 5, page 53.— Contemporary Review , December, 1907, vol. 92, p. 618. Note 6, page 57.— Metaphysic , sec. 69

1 minute read

Read Chapter

LECTURE III

Note 1, page 94.—Hegel, Smaller Logic , pp. 184-185. Note 2, page 95.—Cf. Hegel's fine vindication of this function of contradiction in his Wissenschaft der Logik , Bk. ii, sec. 1, chap, ii, C, Anmerkung 3. Note 3, page 95— Hegel , in Blackwood's Philosophical Classics , p. 162. Note 4, page 95— Wissenschaft der Logik , Bk. i, sec. 1, chap, ii, B, a. Note 5, page 96—Wallace's translation of the Smaller Logic , p. 128. Note 6, page 101—Joachim, The Nature of Truth , Oxford, 1906, pp. 22, 178. The

1 minute read

Read Chapter

LECTURE IV

Note 1, page 143.— The Spirit of Modern Philosophy , p. 227. Note 2, page 165.—Fechner: Über die Seelenfrage , 1861, p. 170. Note 3, page 168.—Fechner's latest summarizing of his views, Die Tagesansicht gegenüber der Nachtansicht , Leipzig, 1879, is now, I understand, in process of translation. His Little Book of Life after Death exists already in two American versions, one published by Little, Brown &amp; Co., Boston, the other by the Open Court Co., Chicago. Note 4, page 176.—Mr. Bradley o

35 minute read

Read Chapter

LECTURE V

Note 1, page 182.—Royce: The Spirit of Modern Philosophy , p. 379. Note 2, page 184.— The World and the Individual , vol. ii, pp. 58-62. Note 3, page 190.—I hold to it still as the best description of an enormous number of our higher fields of consciousness. They demonstrably do not contain the lower states that know the same objects. Of other fields, however this is not so true; so, in the Psychological Review for 1895, vol. ii, p. 105 (see especially pp. 119-120), I frankly withdrew, in princi

39 minute read

Read Chapter

LECTURE VI

Note 1, page 250.—For a more explicit vindication of the notion of activity, see Appendix B, where I try to defend its recognition as a definite form of immediate experience against its rationalistic critics. I subjoin here a few remarks destined to disarm some possible critics of Professor Bergson, who, to defend himself against misunderstandings of his meaning, ought to amplify and more fully explain his statement that concepts have a practical but not a theoretical use. Understood in one way,

6 minute read

Read Chapter

LECTURE VII

Note 1, page 278.— Introduction to Hume , 1874, p. 151. Note 2, page 279.— Ibid. , pp. 16, 21, 36, et passim . Note 3, page 279.—See, inter alia , the chapter on the 'Stream of Thought' in my own Psychologies; H. Cornelius, Psychologie , 1897, chaps, i and iii; G.H. Luquet, Idées Générales de Psychologie , 1906, passim . Note 4, page 280.—Compare, as to all this, an article by the present writer, entitled 'A world of pure experience,' in the Journal of Philosophy , New York, vol. i, pp. 533, 561

1 minute read

Read Chapter

LECTURE VIII

Note 1, page 330.—Blondel: Annales de Philosophie Chrétienne , June, 1906, p. 241....

4 minute read

Read Chapter

APPENDIX A

Experience in its immediacy seems perfectly fluent. The active sense of living which we all enjoy, before reflection shatters our instinctive world for us, is self-luminous and suggests no paradoxes. Its difficulties are disappointments and uncertainties. They are not intellectual contradictions. When the reflective intellect gets at work, however, it discovers incomprehensibilities in the flowing process. Distinguishing its elements and parts, it gives them separate names, and what it thus disj

1 minute read

Read Chapter

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 tha

1 minute read

Read Chapter

II

If now we ask why we must translate experience from a more concrete or pure into a more intellectualized form, filling it with ever more abounding conceptual distinctions, rationalism and naturalism give different replies. The rationalistic answer is that the theoretic life is absolute and its interests imperative; that to understand is simply the duty of man; and that who questions this need not be argued with, for by the fact of arguing he gives away his case. The naturalist answer is that the

3 minute read

Read Chapter

III

In Section the 6th of my article, 'A world of pure experience,' I adopted in a general way the common-sense belief that one and the same world is cognized by our different minds; but I left undiscussed the dialectical arguments which maintain that this is logically absurd. The usual reason given for its being absurd is that it assumes one object (to wit, the world) to stand in two relations at once; to my mind, namely, and again to yours; whereas a term taken in a second relation cannot logicall

5 minute read

Read Chapter

IV

For aught this argument proves, then, we may continue to believe that one thing can be known by many knowers. But the denial of one thing in many relations is but one application of a still profounder dialectic difficulty. Man can't be good, said the sophists, for man is man and good is good; and Hegel and Herbart in their day, more recently H. Spir, and most recently and elaborately of all, Mr. Bradley, inform us that a term can logically only be a punctiform unit, and that not one of the conju

2 minute read

Read Chapter

V

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. 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. The sheet of paper may be 'off' or 'on' the table,

7 minute read

Read Chapter

VI

Mr. Bradley's understanding shows the most extraordinary power of perceiving separations and the most extraordinary impotence in comprehending conjunctions. One would naturally say 'neither or both,' but not so Mr. Bradley. When a common man analyzes certain whats from out the stream of experience, he understands their distinctness as thus isolated . But this does not prevent him from equally well understanding their combination with each other as originally experienced in the concrete , or thei

5 minute read

Read Chapter

THE EXPERIENCE OF ACTIVITY[1]

… Mr. Bradley calls the question of activity a scandal to philosophy, and if one turns to the current literature of the subject—his own writings included—one easily gathers what he means. The opponents cannot even understand one another. Mr. Bradley says to Mr. Ward: 'I do not care what your oracle is, and your preposterous psychology may here be gospel if you please; … but if the revelation does contain a meaning, I will commit myself to this: either the oracle is so confused that its significa

31 minute read

Read Chapter

ON THE NOTION OF REALITY AS CHANGING

In my Principles of Psychology (vol. ii, p. 646) I gave the name of the 'axiom of skipped intermediaries and transferred relations' to a serial principle of which the foundation of logic, the dictum de omni et nullo (or, as I expressed it, the rule that what is of a kind is of that kind's kind), is the most familiar instance. More than the more is more than the less, equals of equals are equal, sames of the same are the same, the cause of a cause is the cause of its effects, are other examples o

11 minute read

Read Chapter