relations.

(2) “The statement of fact is that the relations between things, conjunctive as well as disjunctive, are just as much matters of direct particular experience, neither more so nor less so, than the things themselves.” (Cf. also A Pluralistic Universe, p. 280; The Will to Believe, p. 278.) This is the central doctrine of the present book. It distinguishes ‘radical empiricism’ from the “ordinary empiricism” of Hume, J. S. Mill, etc., with which it is otherwise allied. (Cf. below, pp. 42-44.) It provides an empirical and relational version of ‘activity,’ and so distinguishes the author’s voluntarism from a view with which it is easily confused—the view which upholds a pure or transcendent activity. (Cf. below, Essay vi.) It makes it possible to escape the vicious disjunctions that have thus far baffled philosophy: such disjunctions as those between consciousness and physical nature, between thought and its object, between one mind and another, and between one ‘thing’ and another. These disjunctions need not be ‘overcome’ by calling in any “extraneous trans-empirical connective support” (Meaning of Truth, Preface, p. xiii); they may now be avoided by regarding the dualities in question as only differences of empirical relationship among common empirical terms. The pragmatistic account of ‘meaning’ and ‘truth,’ shows only how a vicious disjunction between ‘idea’ and ‘object’ may thus be avoided. The present volume not only presents pragmatism in this light; but adds similar accounts of the other dualities mentioned above.

Thus while pragmatism and radical empiricism do not differ essentially when regarded as methods, they are independent when regarded as doctrines. For it would be possible to hold the pragmatistic theory of ‘meaning’ and ‘truth,’ without basing it on any fundamental theory of relations, and without extending such a theory of relations to residual philosophical problems; without, in short, holding either to the above ‘statement of fact,’ or to the following ‘generalized conclusion.’

(3) “The generalized conclusion is that therefore the parts of experience hold together from next to next by relations that are themselves parts of experience. The directly apprehended universe needs, in short, no extraneous trans-empirical connective support, but possesses in its own right a concatenated or continuous structure.” When thus generalized, ‘radical empiricism’ is not only a theory of knowledge comprising pragmatism as a special chapter, but a metaphysic as well. It excludes “the hypothesis of trans-empirical reality” (Cf. below, p. 195). It is the author’s most rigorous statement of his theory that reality is an “experience-continuum.” (Meaning of Truth, p. 152; A Pluralistic Universe, Lect. v, vii.) It is that positive and constructive ‘empiricism’ of which Professor James said: “Let empiricism once become associated with religion, as hitherto, through some strange misunderstanding, it has been associated with irreligion, and I believe that a new era of religion as well as of philosophy will be ready to begin.” (Op. cit., p. 314; cf. ibid., Lect. viii, passim; and The Varieties of Religious Experience, pp. 515-527.)

The editor desires to acknowledge his obligations to the periodicals from which these essays have been reprinted, and to the many friends of Professor James who have rendered valuable advice and assistance in the preparation of the present volume.

Ralph Barton Perry.

Cambridge, Massachusetts.
      January 8, 1912.

CONTENTS