LONGMANS, GREEN, AND CO FOURTH AVENUE & 30TH STREET, NEW YORK LONDON, BOMBAY AND CALCUTTA 1912 COPYRIGHT, 1912, BY HENRY JAMES JR. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED The present volume is an attempt to carry out a plan which William James is known to have formed several years before his death. In 1907 he collected reprints in an envelope which he inscribed with the title ‘Essays in Radical Empiricism’; and he also had duplicate sets of these reprints bound, under the same title, and deposited for the u

‘Thoughts’ and ‘things’ are names for two sorts of object, which common sense will always find contrasted and will always practically oppose to each other. Philosophy, reflecting on the contrast, has varied in the past in her explanations of it, and may be expected to vary in the future. At first, ‘spirit and matter,’ ‘soul and body,’ stood for a pair of equipollent substances quite on a par in weight and interest. But one day Kant undermined the soul and brought in the transcendental ego, and e

It is difficult not to notice a curious unrest in the philosophic atmosphere of the time, a loosening of old landmarks, a softening of oppositions, a mutual borrowing from one another on the part of systems anciently closed, and an interest in new suggestions, however vague, as if the one thing sure were the inadequacy of the extant school-solutions. The dissatisfaction with these seems due for the most part to a feeling that they are too abstract and academic. Life is confused and superabundant

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

In [the essay] entitled ‘Does Consciousness Exist?’ I have tried to show that when we call an experience ‘conscious,’ that does not mean that it is suffused throughout with a peculiar modality of being (‘psychic’ being) as stained glass may be suffused with light, but rather that it stands in certain determinate relations to other portions of experience extraneous to itself. These form one peculiar ‘context’ for it; while, taken in another context of experiences, we class it as a fact in the phy

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. In opposition to this dualistic p

Brethren of the Psychological Association : In casting about me for a subject for your President this year to talk about it has seemed to me that our experiences of activity would form a good one; not only because the topic is so naturally interesting, and because it has lately led to a good deal of rather inconclusive discussion, but because I myself am growing more and more interested in a certain systematic way of handling questions, and want to get others interested also, and this question s

Humanism is a ferment that has ‘come to stay.’ [106] It is not a single hypothesis or theorem, and it dwells on no new facts. It is rather a slow shifting in the philosophic perspective, making things appear as from a new centre of interest or point of sight. Some writers are strongly conscious of the shifting, others half unconscious, even though their own vision may have undergone much change. The result is no small confusion in debate, the half-conscious humanists often taking part against th

Je voudrais vous communiquer quelques doutes qui me sont venus au sujet de la notion de Conscience qui règne dans tous nos traités de psychologie. On définit habituellement la Psychologie comme la Science des faits de Conscience, ou des phénomènes , ou encore des états de la Conscience. Qu’on admette qu’elle se rattache à des moi personnels, ou bien qu’on la croie impersonnelle à la façon du “moi transcendental” de Kant, de la Bewusstheit ou du Bewusstsein überhaupt de nos contemporains en Allem

If all the criticisms which the humanistic Weltanschauung is receiving were as sachgemäss as Mr. Bode’s, [120] the truth of the matter would more rapidly clear up. Not only is it excellently well written, but it brings its own point of view out clearly, and admits of a perfectly straight reply. The argument (unless I fail to catch it) can be expressed as follows: If a series of experiences be supposed, no one of which is endowed immediately with the self-transcendent function of reference to a r

Although Mr. Pitkin does not name me in his acute article on radical empiricism, [123] [...] I fear that some readers, knowing me to have applied that name to my own doctrine, may possibly consider themselves to have been in at my death. In point of fact my withers are entirely unwrung. I have, indeed, said [124] that ‘to be radical, an empiricism must not admit into its constructions any element that is not directly experienced.’ But in my own radical empiricism this is only a methodological po

Mr. Joseph’s criticism of my article ‘Humanism and Truth’ [130] is a useful contribution to the general clearing up. He has seriously tried to comprehend what the pragmatic movement may intelligibly mean; and if he has failed, it is the fault neither of his patience nor of his sincerity, but rather of stubborn tricks of thought which he could not easily get rid of. Minute polemics, in which the parties try to rebut every detail of each of the other’s charges, are a useful exercise only to the di

No seeker of truth can fail to rejoice at the terre-à-terre sort of discussion of the issues between Empiricism and Transcendentalism (or, as the champions of the latter would probably prefer to say, between Irrationalism and Rationalism) that seems to have begun in Mind . [141] It would seem as if, over concrete examples like Mr. J. S. Haldane’s, both parties ought inevitably to come to a better understanding. As a reader with a strong bias towards Irrationalism, I have studied his article [142