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James, William

"Essays In Radical Empiricism"

' Immediate experience
has to be broken into subjects and
qualities, terms and relations, to be understood
as truth at all. Yet when so broken it is less
consistent than ever. Taken raw, it is all undistinguished.
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Intellectualized, it is all distinction
without oneness. 'Such an arrangement
may _work_, but the theoretic problem is
not solved.' The question is '_how_ the diversity
can exist in harmony with the oneness.' To go
back to pure experience is unavailing. 'Mere
feeling gives no answer to our riddle.' Even if
your intuition is a fact, it is not an _understanding_.
'It is a mere experience, and furnishes
no consistent view.' The experience offered as
facts or truths 'I find that my intellect rejects
because they contradict themselves. They
offer a complex of diversities conjoined in a
way which it feels is not its way and which it
can not repeat as its own. . . . For to be satisfied,
my intellect must understand, and it can
not understand by taking a congeries in the
lump'(1) So Mr. Bradley, in the sole interests
of 'understanding' (as he conceives that function),
turns his back on finite experience forever.
Truth must lie in the opposite direction,
the direction of the Absolute; and this kind of
---
1 [F.


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