The perfection with which any
philosophy may do this is the measure of its
human success and of its importance in philosophic
history. In [the last essay], 'A World
of Pure Experience,' I tried my own hand
sketchily at the problem, resisting certain
first steps of dialectics by insisting in a general
way that the immediately experienced conjunctive
relations are as real as anything else.
If my sketch is not to appear to _naif_, I must
come closer to details, and in the present essay
I propose to do so.
I
'Pure experience' is the name which I gave
to the immediate flux of life which furnishes
the material to our later reflection with its
conceptual categories. Only new-born babes,
or men in semi-coma from sleep, drugs, illnesses,
or blows, may be assumed to have an
experience pure in the literal sense of a _that_
which is not yet any definite _what_, tho' ready
to be all sorts of whats; full both of oneness
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and of manyness, but in respects that don't
appear; changing throughout, yet so confusedly
that its phases interpenetrate and no
points, either of distinction or of identity,
can be caught. Pure experience in this state
is but another name for feeling or sensation.
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