Elements may indeed be redistributed,
the original placing of things getting corrected,
but a real place must be found for every kind
of thing experienced, whether term or relation,
in the final philosophic arrangement.
Now, ordinary empiricism, in spite of the
fact that conjunctive and disjunctive relations
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present themselves as being fully co-ordinate
parts of experience, has always shown a tendency
to do away with the connections of
things, and to insist most on the disjunctions.
Berkeley's nominalism, Hume's statement that
whatever things we distinguish are as 'loose
and separate' as if they had 'no manner of connection.'
James Mill's denial that similars have
anything 'really' in common, the resolution
of the causal tie into habitual sequence, John
Mill's account of both physical things and
selves as composed of discontinuous possibilities,
and the general pulverization of all Experience
by association and the mind-dust
theory, are examples of what I mean.
The natural result of such a world-picture
has been the efforts of rationalism to correct
its incoherencies by the addition of trans-
experiential agents of unification, substances,
intellectual categories and powers, or Selves;
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whereas, if empiricism had only been radical
and taken everything that comes without disfavor,
conjunction as well as separation, each
at its face value, the results would have called
for no such artificial correction.
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