A Pluralistic Universe · Chapter
Lecture VII: The Continuity of Experience explained
James argues against intellectualism and for a radical empiricism that recognizes relations as directly given in sensational experience.
What happens
James argues against intellectualism and for a radical empiricism that recognizes relations as directly given in sensational experience. He critiques T. H. Green's view that sensations are unrelated and unknowable, asserting that conjunctive relations are as immediate as disjunctive ones. He then applies this to the problem of compounding consciousness, suggesting that immediate experience pulses are many-in-one, and that this opens the possibility of a higher consciousness in which finite minds are confluent. He recounts his own intellectual crisis and conversion after reading Bergson, concluding that the absolute is a legitimate hypothesis.
Themes in this chapter
The Primacy of Experience
James argues that immediate sensational life, with its conjunctive relations, is the true source of reality, and that concepts are secondary and inadequate.
The Limits of Conceptual Thought
James contends that intellectualism and conceptual logic cannot capture the many-in-one nature of experience; concepts are tools for practice, not insight.
Pluralism vs. Monism
The chapter addresses the problem of compounding consciousness and suggests that finite minds may be confluent in a higher consciousness, making the absolute a legitimate hypothesis.
Characters to notice
- Henri Bergson
James credits Bergson with calling attention to the richness of sensational life and for showing that concepts are made for practice, not insight; Bergson's work prompted James's intellectual crisis.
- T. H. Green
Green is critiqued for his intellectualist view that sensations are fleeting, unrelated, and unknowable without a self-distinguishing absolute mind; James calls his belaboring of Locke 'pathetic'.
- John Locke
Mentioned as 'poor old Locke' whom Green belabored for not seeing that ideas of sensation are unrelated; James defends Locke against Green's critique.
- Socrates
Used as an example in the analysis of thought: 'Socrates is mortal' illustrates the forward movement of meaning in a proposition.
- Plato
Mentioned alongside Aristotle as part of the traditional Oxford devotion that James contrasts with Bergson's sensationalism.
- Aristotle
Mentioned alongside Plato as part of the traditional Oxford devotion that James contrasts with Bergson's sensationalism.
Key passages
“A relation, he said, is not contingent with the contingency of feeling. It is permanent with the permanence of the combining and comparing thought which alone constitutes it.”
Green claimed that relations are not part of fleeting feelings but are permanent products of thought that combines and compares.
James quotes Green to illustrate the intellectualist view that relations are conceptual, not sensational.
“Every examiner of the sensible life in concreto must see that relations of every sort, of time, space, difference, likeness, change, rate, cause, or whatnot, are just as integral members of the sensational flux as terms are.”
Anyone who actually examines concrete sensory experience will see that all kinds of relations are as much a part of the flow of sensation as the things they relate.
James asserts his radical empiricist doctrine that relations are directly given in experience.
“The concrete pulses of experience appear pent in by no such definite limits as our conceptual substitutes for them are confined by. They run into one another continuously and seem to interpenetrate.”
Actual moments of experience are not sharply bounded like our concepts; they flow into each other and overlap.
James describes the continuity and interpenetration of immediate experience, contrasting it with conceptual abstractions.
“I saw that philosophy had been on a false scent ever since the days of Socrates and Plato, that an intellectual answer to the intellectualist's difficulties will never come, and that the real way out of them, far from consisting in the discovery of such an answer, consists in simply closing one's ears to the question.”
James realized that philosophy has been misguided since ancient Greece: intellectual problems cannot be solved intellectually; the solution is to ignore the question.
James recounts his intellectual crisis and his Bergsonian turn away from conceptualism.
