class="pginternal" tag="{http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml}a">ix, x, xi, and xii. On the other hand, he has sought to bring together in one volume a set of essays treating systematically of one independent, coherent, and fundamental doctrine. To this end it has seemed best to include three essays (iii, vi, and vii), which, although included in the original plan, were afterwards reprinted elsewhere; and one essay, xii, not included in the original plan. Essays iii, vi, and vii are indispensable to the consecutiveness of the series, and are so interwoven with the rest that it is necessary that the student should have them at hand for ready consultation. Essay xii throws an important light on the author’s general ‘empiricism,’ and forms an important link between ‘radical empiricism’ and the author’s other doctrines.

In short, the present volume is designed not as a collection but rather as a treatise. It is intended that another volume shall be issued which shall contain papers having biographical or historical importance which have not yet been reprinted in book form. The present volume is intended not only for students of Professor James’s philosophy, but for students of metaphysics and the theory of knowledge. It sets forth systematically and within brief compass the doctrine of ‘radical empiricism.’

A word more may be in order concerning the general meaning of this doctrine. In the Preface to the Will to Believe (1898), Professor James gives the name “radical empiricism” to his “philosophic attitude,” and adds the following explanation: “I say ‘empiricism,’ because it is contented to regard its most assured conclusions concerning matters of fact as hypotheses liable to modification in the course of future experience; and I say ‘radical,’ because it treats the doctrine of monism itself as an hypothesis, and, unlike so much of the halfway empiricism that is current under the name of positivism or agnosticism or scientific naturalism, it does not dogmatically affirm monism as something with which all experience has got to square” (pp. vii-viii). An ‘empiricism’ of this description is a “philosophic attitude” or temper of mind rather than a doctrine, and characterizes all of Professor James’s writings. It is set forth in Essay xii of the present volume.

In a narrower sense, ‘empiricism’ is the method of resorting to particular experiences for the solution of philosophical problems. Rationalists are the men of principles, empiricists the men of facts. (Some Problems of Philosophy, p. 35; cf. also, ibid., p. 44; and Pragmatism, pp. 9, 51.) Or, “since principles are universals, and facts are particulars, perhaps the best way of characterizing the two tendencies is to say that rationalist thinking proceeds most willingly by going from wholes to parts, while empiricist thinking proceeds by going from parts to wholes.” (Some Problems of Philosophy, p. 35; cf. also ibid., p. 98; and A Pluralistic Universe, p. 7.) Again, empiricism “remands us to sensation.” (Op. cit., p. 264.) The “empiricist view” insists that, “as reality is created temporally day by day, concepts ... can never fitly supersede perception.... The deeper features of reality are found only in perceptual experience.” (Some Problems of Philosophy, pp. 100, 97.) Empiricism in this sense is as yet characteristic of Professor James’s philosophy as a whole. It is not the distinctive and independent doctrine set forth in the present book.

The only summary of ‘radical empiricism’ in this last and narrowest sense appears in the Preface to The Meaning of Truth (pp. xii-xiii); and it must be reprinted here as the key to the text that follows.[1]

“Radical empiricism consists (1) first of a postulate, (2) next of a statement of fact, (3) and finally of a generalized conclusion.”

(1) “The postulate is that the only things that shall be debatable among philosophers shall be things definable in terms drawn from experience. (Things of an unexperienceable nature may exist ad libitum, but they form no part of the material for philosophic debate.)” This is “the principle of pure experience” as “a methodical postulate.” (Cf. below, pp. 159, 241.) This postulate corresponds to the notion which the author repeatedly attributes to Shadworth Hodgson, the notion “that realities are only what they are ‘known as.’” (Pragmatism, p. 50; Varieties of Religious Experience, p. 443; The Meaning of Truth, pp. 43, 118.) In this sense ‘radical empiricism’ and pragmatism are closely allied. Indeed, if pragmatism be defined as the assertion that “the meaning of any proposition can always be brought down to some particular consequence in our future practical experience, ... the point lying in the fact that the experience must be particular rather than in the fact that it must be active” (Meaning of Truth, p. 210); then pragmatism and the above postulate come to the same thing. The present book, however, consists not so much in the assertion of this postulate as in the use of it. And the method is successful in special applications by virtue of a certain “statement of fact” concerning