I. RADICAL EMPIRICISM
I give the name of 'radical empiricism' to
my _Weltanschauung_. Empiricism is known as
the opposite of rationalism. Rationalism tends
to emphasize universals and to make wholes
prior to parts in the order of logic as well as in
that of being. Empiricism, on the contrary,
lays the explanatory stress upon the part, the
element, the individual, and treats the whole
as a collection and the universal as an abstraction.
My description of things, accordingly,
starts with the parts and makes of the whole
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a being of the second order. It is essentially
a mosaic philosophy, a philosophy of plural
facts, like that of Hume and his descendants,
who refer these facts neither to Substances in
which they inhere nor to an Absolute Mind
that creates them as its objects. But it differs
from the Humian type of empiricism in one
particular which makes me add the epithet
radical.
To be radical, an empiricism must neither
admit into its constructions any element that
is not directly experienced, nor exclude from
them any element that is directly experienced.
For such a philosophy, _the_relations_that_connect_
_experiences_must_themselves_be_experienced_relations,_
_and_any_kind_of_relation_experienced_must_
_be_accounted_as_'real'_as_anything_else_in_the_
_system.
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