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James, William

"Essays In Radical Empiricism"

He did not yet discriminate between
his own movements and those outside himself."(1)
Such experiences point to a primitive
stage of perception in which discriminations
afterwards needful have not yet been made.
A piece of experience of a determinate sort
is there, but there at first as a 'pure' fact.
Motion originally simply _is_; only later is it
confined to this thing or to that. Something
like this is true of every experience, however
complex, at the moment of its actual presence.
Let the reader arrest himself in the act of reading
this article now. _Now_ this is a pure experience,
a phenomenon, or datum, a mere _that_ or
content of fact. _'Reading'_simply_is,_is_there_;
and whether there for some one's consciousness,
or there for physical nature, is a question
not yet put. At the moment, it is there for
---
1 Page 102.
146
neither; later we shall probably judge it to
have been there for both.
With the affectional experiences which we
are considering, the relatively 'pure' condition
lasts. In practical life no urgent need has
yet arisen for deciding whether to treat them
as rigorously mental or as rigorously physical
facts. So they remain equivocal; and, as the
world goes, their equivocality is one of their
great conveniences.


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