The skull
forms a solid nucleus; but innumerable feathers,
leaves, strings, beads, and loose appendices
of every description float and dangle
from it, and, save that they terminate in it, seem
to have nothing to do with one another. Even
so my experiences and yours float and dangle,
47
terminating, it is true, in a nucleus of common
perception, but for the most part out of sight
and irrelevant and unimaginable to one another.
This imperfect intimacy, this bare relation
of _withness) between some parts of the
sum total of experience and other parts, is the
fact that ordinary empiricism over-emphasizes
against rationalism, the latter always tending
to ignore it unduly. Radical empiricism, on
the contrary, is fair to both the unity and the
disconnection. It finds no reason for treating
either as illusory. It allots to each its definite
sphere of description, and agrees that there
appear to be actual forces at work which tend,
as time goes on, to make the unity greater.
The conjunctive relation that has given
most trouble to philosophy is _the_co-conscious_
_transition_, so to call it, by which one experience
passes into another when both belong to the
same self.
Pages:
28
29
30
31
32
33
34
35
36
37
38
39
40
41
42
43
44
45
46
47
48
49
50
51
52