When the whole universe seems only
to be making itself valid and to be still incomplete
(else why its ceaseless changing?) why, of
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all things, should knowing be exempt? Why
should it not be making itself valid like everything
else? That some parts of it may be already
valid or verified beyond dispute, the
empirical philosopher, of course, like any one
else, may always hope.
VI. THE CONTERMINOUSNESS OF DIFFERENT MINDS
With transition and prospect thus enthroned
in pure experience, it is impossible to subscribe
to the idealism of the English school.
Radical empiricism has, in fact, more affinities
with natural realism than with the views
of Berkeley or of Mill, and this can be easily
shown.
For the Berkeleyan school, ideas (the verbal
equivalent of what I term experiences) are discontinuous.
The content of each is wholly immanent,
and there are no transitions with
which they are consubstantial and through
which their beings may unite. Your Memorial
Hall and mine, even when both are percepts,
are wholly out of connection with each other.
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Our lives are a congeries of solipsisms, out of
which in strict logic only a God could compose
a universe even of discourse.
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