A Pluralistic Universe quotes

As these lectures are meant to be public, and so few, I have assumed all very special problems to be excluded, and some topic of general interest required.

Fortunately, our age seems to be growing philosophical again⁠—still in the ashes live the wonted fires.

Oxford, long the seedbed, for the English world, of the idealism inspired by Kant and Hegel, has recently become the nursery of a very different way of thinking.

It looks a little as if the ancient English empirism, so long put out of fashion here by nobler sounding Germanic formulas, might be repluming itself and getting ready for a stronger flight than ever.

It looks as if foundations were being sounded and examined afresh.

Individuality outruns all classification, yet we insist on classifying everyone we meet under some general head. As these heads usually suggest prejudicial associations to some hearer or other, the life of philosophy largely consists of resentments at the classing, and complaints of being misunderstood.

It looks as if foundations were being sounded and examined afresh.

Individuality outruns all classification, yet we insist on classifying everyone we meet under some general head.

As these heads usually suggest prejudicial associations to some hearer or other, the life of philosophy largely consists of resentments at the classing, and complaints of being misunderstood.

Reduced to their most pregnant difference, empiricism means the habit of explaining wholes by parts, and rationalism means the habit of explaining parts by wholes. Rationalism thus preserves affinities with monism, since wholeness goes with union, while empiricism inclines to pluralistic views.

No philosophy can ever be anything but a summary sketch, a picture of the world in abridgment, a foreshortened bird’s-eye view of the perspective of events.

And the first thing to notice is this, that the only material we have at our disposal for making a picture of the whole world is supplied by the various portions of that world of which we have already had experience.

For another, again, there is no really inherent order, but it is we who project order into the world by selecting objects and tracing relations so as to gratify our intellectual interests.

We carve out order by leaving the disorderly parts out; and the world is conceived thus after the analogy of a forest or a block of marble from which parks or statues may be produced by eliminating irrelevant trees or chips of stone.

Some thinkers follow suggestions from human life, and treat the universe as if it were essentially a place in which ideals are realized. Others are more struck by its lower features, and for them, brute necessities express its character better.

… to find reasons for what they want to think and do?—and I think the history of philosophy largely bears him out, “The aim of knowledge,” says Hegel, “is to divest the objective world of its strangeness, and to make us more at home in it.”

Different men find their minds more at home in very different fragments of the world.

Let me make a few comments, here, on the curious antipathies which these partialities arouse.

We crave alike to feel more truly at home with it, and to contribute our mite to its amelioration.

It would be pitiful if small aesthetic discords were to keep honest men asunder.

I shall myself have use for the diminutive epithets of empiricism. But if you look behind the words at the spirit, I am sure you will not find it matricidal. I am as good a son as any rationalist among you to our common mother.

One may be true without being a philosopher, true by guesswork or by revelation. What distinguishes a philosopher’s truth is that it is reasoned. Argument, not supposition, must have put it in his possession.

Common men find themselves inheriting their beliefs, they know not how. They jump into them with both feet, and stand there.

Philosophers must do more; they must first get reason’s license for them;

You must tie your opinion to Aristotle’s or Spinoza’s; you must define it by its distance from Kant’s; you must refute your rival’s view by identifying it with Protagoras’s. Thus does all spontaneity of thought, all freshness of conception, get destroyed.

Everything you touch is shopworn.

The over-technicality and consequent dreariness of the younger disciples at our American universities is appalling. It comes from too much following of German models and manners.

The abuse of technicality is seen in the infrequency with which, in philosophical literature, metaphysical questions are discussed directly and on their own merits. Almost always they are handled as if through a heavy woolen curtain, the veil of previous philosophers’ opinions.

Alternatives are wrapped in proper names, as if it were indecent for a truth to go naked.

The late Professor John Grote of Cambridge has some good remarks about this. “Thought,” he says, “is not a professional matter, not something for so-called philosophers only or for professed thinkers. The best philosopher is the man who can think most simply.

American students have to regain direct relations with our subject by painful individual effort in later life. Some of us have done so. Some of the younger ones, I fear, never will, so strong are the professional shop-habits already.

In a subject like philosophy it is really fatal to lose connection with the open air of human nature, and to think in terms of shop-tradition only.

In Germany the forms are so professionalized that anybody who has gained a teaching chair and written a book, however distorted and eccentric, has the legal right to figure forever in the history of the subject like a fly in amber.

The wonder is that, with their way of working philosophy, individual Germans should preserve any spontaneity of mind at all. That they still manifest freshness and originality in so eminent a degree, proves the indestructible richness of the German cerebral endowment.

Let me repeat once more that a man’s vision is the great fact about him.

Who cares for Carlyle’s reasons, or Schopenhauer’s, or Spencer’s? A philosophy is the expression of a man’s intimate character, and all definitions of the universe are but the deliberately adopted reactions of human characters upon it.

Let me repeat once more that a man’s vision is the great fact about him. Who cares for Carlyle’s reasons, or Schopenhauer’s, or Spencer’s?

A philosophy is the expression of a man’s intimate character, and all definitions of the universe are but the deliberately adopted reactions of human characters upon it.

In the recent book from which I quoted the words of Professor Paulsen, a book of successive chapters by various living German philosophers, we pass from one idiosyncratic personal atmosphere into another almost as if we were turning over a photograph album.

Tempests and conflagrations, pestilences and earthquakes, reveal supramundane powers, and instigate religious terror rather than philosophy.

Nature, more demonic than divine, is above all things multifarious.

So many creatures that feed or threaten, that help or crush, so many beings to hate or love, to understand or start at—which is on top and which subordinate? Who can tell?

Who can tell? They are coordinate, rather, and to adapt ourselves to them singly, to “square” the dangerous powers and keep the others friendly, regardless of consistency or unity, is the chief problem.

The symbol of nature at this stage, as Paulsen well says, is the sphinx, under whose nourishing breasts the tearing claws are visible.

But in due course of time the intellect awoke, with its passion for generalizing, simplifying, and subordinating, and then began those divergences of conception which all later experience seems rather to have deepened than to have effaced, because objective nature has contributed to both sides …

The inner life of things must be substantially akin anyhow to the tenderer parts of man’s nature in any spiritualistic philosophy. The word “intimacy” probably covers the essential difference.

Materialism holds the foreign in things to be more primary and lasting, it sends us to a lonely corner with our intimacy.

The brutal aspects overlap and outwear; refinement has the feebler and more ephemeral hold on reality.

We have so many different businesses with nature that no one of them yields us an all-embracing clasp.

The philosophic attempt to define nature so that no one’s business is left out, so that no one lies outside the door saying “Where do I come in?” is sure in advance to fail.

The most a philosophy can hope for is not to lock out any interest forever. No matter what doors it closes, it must leave other doors open for the interests which it neglects.

The philosophic attempt to define nature so that no one’s business is left out, so that no one lies outside the door saying “Where do I come in?” is sure in advance to fail.

The most a philosophy can hope for is not to lock out any interest forever.

No matter what doors it closes, it must leave other doors open for the interests which it neglects.

I suffer those consequences. The absolute knows of those things, of course, for it knows me and my suffering, but it doesn’t itself suffer. It can’t be ignorant, for simultaneous with its knowledge of each question goes its knowledge of each answer.

It can’t be patient, for it has to wait for nothing, having everything at once in its possession.

It can’t be surprised; it can’t be guilty.

“Aus dieser erde quellen meine freuden, und ihre sonne scheinet meinen leiden.” I have neither eyes nor ears nor heart nor mind for anything of an opposite description, and the stagnant felicity of the absolute’s own perfection moves me as little as I move it.

If we were readers only of the cosmic novel, things would be different: we should then share the author’s point of view and recognize villains to be as essential as heroes in the plot. But we are not the readers but the very personages of the world-drama.

In your own eyes each of you here is its hero, and the villains are your respective friends or enemies.

This satisfaction the absolute denies us; we can neither help nor hinder it, for it stands outside of history.

It surely is a merit in a philosophy to make the very life we lead seem real and earnest.

Pluralism, in exorcising the absolute, exorcises the great de-realizer of the only life we are at home in, and thus redeems the nature of reality from essential foreignness.

Pluralism, in exorcising the absolute, exorcises the great de-realizer of the only life we are at home in, and thus redeems the nature of reality from essential foreignness.

Every end, reason, motive, object of desire or aversion, ground of sorrow or joy that we feel is in the world of finite multifariousness, for only in that world does anything really happen, only there do events come to pass.

In one sense this is a far-fetched and rather childish objection, for so much of the history of the finite is as formidably foreign to us as the static absolute can possibly be—in fact that entity derives its own foreignness largely from the bad character …

To construe any one of their abstract names as making their total nature impossible is a misuse of the function of naming.

The real way of rescue from the abstract consequences of one name is not to fly to an opposite name, equally abstract, but rather to correct the first name by qualifying adjectives that restore some concreteness to the case.

Don’t take your “independence” simpliciter, as Lotze does, take it secundum quid.

I don’t see how anyone can help being struck in absolutist writings by that curious tendency to fly to violent extremes of which I have already said a word.

The universe must be rational; well and good; but how rational? in what sense of that eulogistic but ambiguous word?⁠—this would seem to be the next point to bring up.

There are surely degrees in rationality that might be discriminated and described. Things can be consistent or coherent in very diverse ways.

“But surely, surely there must be some connection among things!” As if I must necessarily be an uncontrolled monomanic insanely denying any connection whatever.

The whole question revolves in very truth about the word “some.”

Radical empiricism and pluralism stand out for the legitimacy of the notion of some:

His mind is in very truth impressionistic; and his thought, when once you put yourself at the animating centre of it, is the easiest thing in the world to catch the pulse of and to follow.

Any author is easy if you can catch the centre of his vision.

From the centre in Hegel come those towering sentences of his that are comparable only to Luther’s, as where, speaking of the ontological proof of God’s existence from the concept of him as the ens perfectissimum to which no attribute can be lacking, he says:

The impression that any naive person gets who plants himself innocently in the flux of things is that things are off their balance.

Whatever equilibriums our finite experiences attain to are but provisional.

Martinique volcanoes shatter our Wordsworthian equilibrium with nature. Accidents, either moral, mental, or physical, break up the slowly built-up equilibriums men reach in family life and in their civic and professional relations.

The rest of things invades and overflows both it and you together, and defeats your rash attempt. Any partial view whatever of the world tears the part out of its relations, leaves out some truth concerning it, is untrue of it, falsifies it.

The full truth about anything involves more than that thing.

In the end nothing less than the whole of everything can be the truth of anything at all.

Accidents, either moral, mental, or physical, break up the slowly built-up equilibriums men reach in family life and in their civic and professional relations. Intellectual enigmas frustrate our scientific systems, and the ultimate cruelty of the universe upsets our religious attitudes and outlooks.

Of no special system of good attained does the universe recognize the value as sacred.

Down it tumbles, over it goes, to feed the ravenous appetite for destruction, of the larger system of history in which it stood for a moment as a landing-place and stepping-stone.

Empirical instances of the way in which higher unities reconcile contradictions are innumerable, so here again Hegel’s vision, taken merely impressionistically, agrees with countless facts.

Somehow life does, out of its total resources, find ways of satisfying opposites at once.

This is precisely the paradoxical aspect which much of our civilization presents. Peace we secure by armaments, liberty by laws and constitutions; simplicity and naturalness are the consummate result of artificial breeding and training;

The only way of making your affirmation about A self-securing is by getting it into a form which will by implication negate all possible negations in advance.

The mere absence of negation is not enough; it must be present, but present with its fangs drawn.

What you posit as A must already have cancelled the alternative or made it innocuous, by having negated it in advance. Double negation is the only form of affirmation that fully plays into the hands of the dogmatic ideal.

so that whatever demand for rationality we find satisfied by a philosophic hypothesis, we are liable to find some other demand for rationality unsatisfied by the same hypothesis.

The rationality we gain in one coin we thus pay for in another; and the problem accordingly seems at first sight to resolve itself into that of getting a conception which will yield the largest balance of rationality rather than one which will yield perfect rationality of every description.

In general, it may be said that if a man’s conception of the world lets loose any action in him that is easy, or any faculty which he is fond of exercising, he will deem it rational in so far forth, be the faculty that …

One can follow the pathway of reasoning soberly enough, but the picture itself has to be effulgent. This admirable faculty of transcending, whilst inwardly preserving, every contrariety, is the absolute’s characteristic form of rationality.

We are but syllables in the mouth of the Lord; if the whole sentence is divine, each syllable is absolutely what it should be, in spite of all appearances.

In making up the balance for or against absolutism, this emotional value weights heavily the credit side of the account.

In any pluralistic metaphysic, the problems that evil presents are practical, not speculative.

Not why evil should exist at all, but how we can lessen the actual amount of it, is the sole question we need there consider.

“God,” in the religious life of ordinary men, is the name not of the whole of things, heaven forbid, but only of the ideal tendency in things, believed in as a superhuman person who calls us to cooperate in his purposes, and who furthers ours …

He was in fact a philosopher in the “great” sense, although he cared so much less than most philosophers care for abstractions of the “thin” order.

For him the abstract lived in the concrete, and the hidden motive of all he did was to bring what he called the daylight view of the world into ever greater evidence, that daylight view being this, that the whole universe in its different spans and wavelengths, exclusions and envelopments, is everywhere alive and conscious.

It has taken fifty years for his chief book, Zend-Avesta, to pass into a second edition (1901). “One swallow,” he cheerfully writes, “does not make a summer. But the first swallow would not come unless the summer were coming;

or if we believe in a Divine Spirit, we fancy him on the one side as bodiless, and nature as soulless on the other. What comfort, or peace, Fechner asks, can come from such a doctrine?

The flowers wither at its breath, the stars turn into stone; our own body grows unworthy of our spirit and sinks to a tenement for carnal senses only.

The book of nature turns into a volume on mechanics, in which whatever has life is treated as a sort of anomaly; a great chasm of separation yawns between us and all that is higher than ourselves; and God becomes a thin nest of abstractions.

What comfort, or peace, Fechner asks, can come from such a doctrine? The flowers wither at its breath, the stars turn into stone; our own body grows unworthy of our spirit and sinks to a tenement for carnal senses only.

The book of nature turns into a volume on mechanics, in which whatever has life is treated as a sort of anomaly; a great chasm of separation yawns between us and all that is higher than ourselves; and God becomes a thin nest of abstractions.

Fechner’s great instrument for vivifying the daylight view is analogy; not a rationalistic argument is to be found in all his many pages—only reasonings like those which men continually use in practical life. For example:

She is self-sufficing in a million respects in which we are not so. We depend on her for almost everything, she on us for but a small portion of her history.

She swings us in her orbit from winter to summer and revolves us from day into night and from night into day.

Complexity in unity is another sign of superiority. The total earth’s complexity far exceeds that of any organism, for she includes all our organisms in herself, along with an infinite number of things that our organisms fail to include.

Our animal organization comes from our inferiority. Our need of moving to and fro, of stretching our limbs and bending our bodies, shows only our defect.

What are our legs but crutches, by means of which, with restless efforts, we go hunting after the things we have not inside of ourselves.

But the earth is no such cripple; why should she who already possesses within herself the things we so painfully pursue, have limbs analogous to ours? Shall she mimic a small part of herself? What need has she of arms, with nothing to reach for?

If you speak of circulation, what need has she of a heart when the sun keeps all the showers of rain that fall upon her and all the springs and brooks and rivers that irrigate her, going?

What need has she of internal lungs, when her whole sensitive surface is in living commerce with the atmosphere that clings to it?

The organ that gives us most trouble is the brain. All the consciousness we directly know seems tied to brains.—Can there be consciousness, we ask, where there is no brain?

She has no proper muscles or limbs of her own, and the only objects external to her are the other stars. To these her whole mass reacts by most exquisite alterations in its total gait, and by still more exquisite vibratory responses in its substance.

Her ocean reflects the lights of heaven as in a mighty mirror, her atmosphere refracts them like a monstrous lens, the clouds and snowfields combine them into white, the woods and flowers disperse them into colors.

Polarization, interference, absorption, awaken sensibilities in matter of which our senses are too coarse to take any note.

Every quality of landscape that has a name would then be visible in her at once—all that is delicate or graceful, all that is quiet, or wild, or romantic, or desolate, or cheerful, or luxuriant, or fresh.

That landscape is her face⁠—a peopled landscape, too, for men’s eyes would appear in it like diamonds among the dewdrops.

Green would be the dominant color, but the blue atmosphere and the clouds would enfold her as a bride is shrouded in her veil—a veil the vapory transparent folds of which the earth, through her ministers the winds, never tires of laying and folding about …

… But such an experience as this passes for fantastic. The earth is a globular body, and what more she may be, one can find in mineralogical cabinets.”

Where there is no vision the people perish.

Few professorial philosophers have any vision. Fechner had vision, and that is why one can read him over and over again, and each time bring away a fresh sense of reality.

or that when the flowering and fertilization which are the culmination of their life take place, they should not feel their own existence more intensely and enjoy something like what we call pleasure in ourselves?

Does the water-lily, rocking in her triple bath of water, air, and light, relish in no wise her own beauty?

When the plant in our room turns to the light, closes her blossoms in the dark, responds to our watering or pruning by increase of size or change of shape and bloom, who has the right to say she does not feel, or that she …

Plants develop centrifugally, spread their organs abroad. For that reason people suppose that they can have no consciousness, for they lack the unity which the central nervous system provides. But the plant’s consciousness may be of another type, being connected with other structures.

Violins and pianos give out sounds because they have strings. Does it follow that nothing but strings can give out sound?

How then about flutes and organ-pipes? Of course their sounds are of a different quality, and so may the consciousness of plants be of a quality correlated exclusively with the kind of organization that they possess. Nutrition, respiration, propagation take place in them without nerves.

By ourselves we are simply out of relation with each other, for it we are both of us there, and different from each other, which is a positive relation. What we are without knowing, it knows that we are.

We are closed against its world, but that world is not closed against us.

It is as if the total universe of inner life had a sort of grain or direction, a sort of valvular structure, permitting knowledge to flow in one way only, so that the wider might always have the narrower under observation, but never the narrower …

May not satisfaction with the rationalistic absolute as the alpha and omega, and treatment of it in all its abstraction as an adequate religious object, argue a certain native poverty of mental demand?

Things reveal themselves soonest to those who most passionately want them, for our need sharpens our wit. To a mind content with little, the much in the universe may always remain hid.

To be candid, one of my reasons for saying so much about Fechner has been to make the thinness of our current transcendentalism appear more evident by an effect of contrast. Scholasticism ran thick; Hegel himself ran thick; but English and American transcendentalisms run thin.

The theory of combination, I was forced to conclude, is thus untenable, being both logically nonsensical and practically unnecessary.

Say what you will, twelve thoughts, each of a single word, are not the selfsame mental thing as one thought of the whole sentence.

The higher thoughts, I insisted, are psychic units, not compounds; but for all that, they may know together as a collective multitude the very same objects which under other conditions are known separately by as many simple thoughts.

But objects of thought are not things per se. They are there only for their thinker, and only as he thinks them. How, then, can they become severally alive on their own accounts and think themselves quite otherwise than as he thinks them?

It is as if the characters in a novel were to get up from the pages, and walk away and transact business of their own outside of the author’s story.

A third difficulty is this: The bird-metaphor is physical, but we see on reflection that in the physical world there is no real compounding. “Wholes” are not realities there, parts only are realities.

In my heart of hearts, however, I knew that my situation was absurd and could be only provisional.

That secret of a continuous life which the universe knows by heart and acts on every instant cannot be a contradiction incarnate.

If logic says it is one, so much the worse for logic. Logic being the lesser thing, the static incomplete abstraction, must succumb to reality, not reality to logic. Our intelligence cannot wall itself up alive, like a pupa in its chrysalis.

If logic says it is one, so much the worse for logic. Logic being the lesser thing, the static incomplete abstraction, must succumb to reality, not reality to logic.

Our intelligence cannot wall itself up alive, like a pupa in its chrysalis. It must at any cost keep on speaking terms with the universe that engendered it.

Fechner, Royce, and Hegel seem on the truer path. Fechner has never heard of logic’s veto, Royce hears the voice but cannily ignores the utterances, Hegel hears them but to spurn them—and all go on their way rejoicing. Shall we alone obey the veto?

… the fact that a hundred sensations get compounded or known together by thinking that a “soul” does the compounding than you see into a man’s living eighty years by thinking of him as an octogenarian, or into our having five fingers by calling us pentadactyls.

Souls have worn out both themselves and their welcome, that is the plain truth.

Philosophy ought to get the manifolds of experience unified on principles less empty. Like the word “cause,” the word “soul” is but a theoretic stopgap—it marks a place and claims it for a future explanation to occupy.

It has an imperishable use in human life, but that use is not to make us theoretically acquainted with the essential nature of reality—just what it is I can perhaps suggest to you a little later.

Reality, life, experience, concreteness, immediacy, use what word you will, exceeds our logic, overflows and surrounds it.

If you like to employ words eulogistically, as most men do, and so encourage confusion, you may say that reality obeys a higher logic, or enjoys a higher rationality.

Once classed, a thing can be treated by the law of its class, and the advantages are endless. Both theoretically and practically this power of framing abstract concepts is one of the sublimest of our human prerogatives.

We come back into the concrete from our journey into these abstractions, with an increase both of vision and of power.

It is no wonder that earlier thinkers, forgetting that concepts are only man-made extracts from the temporal flux, should have ended by treating them as a superior type of being, bright, changeless, true, divine, and utterly opposed in nature to the turbid, restless lower world.

The definition that fails to yield it must exclude or negate it. This is Hegel’s regular method of establishing his system.

It is but the old story, of a useful practice first becoming a method, then a habit, and finally a tyranny that defeats the end it was used for.

Concepts, first employed to make things intelligible, are clung to even when they make them unintelligible.

It is but the old story, of a useful practice first becoming a method, then a habit, and finally a tyranny that defeats the end it was used for.

Concepts, first employed to make things intelligible, are clung to even when they make them unintelligible.

Thus it comes that when once you have conceived things as “independent,” you must proceed to deny the possibility of any connection whatever among them, because the notion of connection is not contained in the definition of independence.

Many of us are profusely original, in that no man can understand us—violently peculiar ways of looking at things are no great rarity.

The rarity is when great peculiarity of vision is allied with great lucidity and unusual command of all the classic expository apparatus.

Bergson’s resources in the way of erudition are remarkable, and in the way of expression they are simply phenomenal.

Neither one of Taine’s famous principles of explanation of great men, the race, the environment, or the moment, no, nor all three together, will explain that peculiar way of looking at things that constitutes his mental individuality.

Originality in men dates from nothing previous, other things date from it, rather.

I have to confess that Bergson’s originality is so profuse that many of his ideas baffle me entirely. I doubt whether anyone understands him all over, so to speak;

Fechner’s term of the “threshold,” which has played such a part in the psychology of perception, is only one way of naming the quantitative discreteness in the change of all our sensible experiences.

They come to us in drops.

Time itself comes in drops.

Fechner’s term of the “threshold,” which has played such a part in the psychology of perception, is only one way of naming the quantitative discreteness in the change of all our sensible experiences. They come to us in drops.

Time itself comes in drops.

Our ideal decomposition of the drops which are all that we feel into still finer fractions is but an incident in that great transformation of the perceptual order into a conceptual order of which I spoke in my last lecture.

It is made in the interest of our rationalizing intellect solely. The times directly felt in the experiences of living subjects have originally no common measure. Let a lump of sugar melt in a glass, to use one of M. Bergson’s instances.

We feel the time to be long while waiting for the process to end, but who knows how long or how short it feels to the sugar?

All felt times coexist and overlap or compenetrate each other thus vaguely, but the artifice of plotting them on a common scale helps us to reduce their aboriginal confusion, and it helps us still more to plot, against the same scale, the successive possible steps …

The immutability of such an abstract system is its great practical merit; the same identical terms and relations in it can always be recovered and referred to—change itself is just such an unalterable concept.

But all these abstract concepts are but as flowers gathered, they are only moments dipped out from the stream of time, snapshots taken, as by a kinetoscopic camera, at a life that in its original coming is continuous.

Useful as they are as samples of the garden, or to reenter the stream with, or to insert in our revolving lantern, they have no value but these practical values.

But the conceptual method is a transformation which the flux of life undergoes at our hands in the interests of practice essentially and only subordinately in the interests of theory.

We live forward, we understand backward, said a Danish writer; and to understand life by concepts is to arrest its movement, cutting it up into bits as if with scissors, and immobilizing these in our logical herbarium where, comparing them as dried specimens, we can ascertain which of them statically includes or excludes which other.

This treatment supposes life to have already accomplished itself, for the concepts, being so many views taken after the fact, are retrospective and post mortem. Nevertheless we can draw conclusions from them and project them into the future.

What exists for thought, we are told, is at most the results that we illusorily ascribe to such activities, strung along the surfaces of space and time by regeln der verknüpfung, laws of nature which state only coexistences and successions.

Thought deals thus solely with surfaces.

It can name the thickness of reality, but it cannot fathom it, and its insufficiency here is essential and permanent, not temporary.

Thought deals thus solely with surfaces.

It can name the thickness of reality, but it cannot fathom it, and its insufficiency here is essential and permanent, not temporary.

The only way in which to apprehend reality’s thickness is either to experience it directly by being a part of reality one’s self, or to evoke it in imagination by sympathetically divining someone else’s inner life.

Thought deals thus solely with surfaces. It can name the thickness of reality, but it cannot fathom it, and its insufficiency here is essential and permanent, not temporary.

The only way in which to apprehend reality’s thickness is either to experience it directly by being a part of reality one’s self, or to evoke it in imagination by sympathetically divining someone else’s inner life.

But what we thus immediately experience or concretely divine is very limited in duration, whereas abstractly we are able to conceive eternities.

The literally present moment is a purely verbal supposition, not a position; the only present ever realized concretely being the “passing moment” in which the dying rearward of time and its dawning future forever mix their lights.

Say “now” and it was even while you say it.

It is just intellectualism’s attempt to substitute static cuts for units of experienced duration that makes real motion so unintelligible.

Take its continuity as an example. Terms like A and C appear to be connected by intermediaries, by B for example. Intellectualism calls this absurd, for “B-connected-with-A” is, “as such,” a different term from “B-connected-with-C.”

But real life laughs at logic’s veto.

Imagine a heavy log which takes two men to carry it. First A and B take it. Then C takes hold and A drops off; then D takes hold and B drops off, so that C and D now bear it; and so on.

My thoughts animate and actuate this very body which you see and hear, and thereby influence your thoughts. The dynamic current somehow does get from me to you, however numerous the intermediary conductors may have to be.

Distinctions may be insulators in logic as much as they like, but in life distinct things can and do commune together every moment.

The conflict of the two ways of knowing is best summed up in the intellectualist doctrine that “the same cannot exist in many relations.”

But keep outside, use your postmortem method, try to build the philosophy up out of the single phrases, taking first one and then another and seeking to make them fit, and of course you fail.

You crawl over the thing like a myopic ant over a building, tumbling into every microscopic crack or fissure, finding nothing but inconsistencies, and never suspecting that a centre exists.

I hope that some of the philosophers in this audience may occasionally have had something different from this intellectualist type of criticism applied to their own works!

I hope that some of the philosophers in this audience may occasionally have had something different from this intellectualist type of criticism applied to their own works!

What really exists is not things made but things in the making.

Once made, they are dead, and an infinite number of alternative conceptual decompositions can be used in defining them.

It is but turning over the same few threadbare categories, bringing the same objections, and urging the same answers and solutions, with never a new fact or a new horizon coming into sight.

But open Bergson, and new horizons loom on every page you read.

It is like the breath of the morning and the song of birds. It tells of reality itself, instead of merely reiterating what dusty-minded professors have written about what other previous professors have thought. Nothing in Bergson is shopworn or at second hand.

I confess that it is indeed a return to empiricism, but I think that the return in such accomplished shape only proves the latter’s immortal truth.

What won’t stay buried must have some genuine life.

Am anfang war die tat; fact is a first; to which all our conceptual handling comes as an inadequate second, never its full equivalent.

This is just what we mean by the stream’s sensible continuity. No element there cuts itself off from any other element, as concepts cut themselves from concepts.

No part there is so small as not to be a place of conflux.

No part there is not really next its neighbors; which means that there is literally nothing between; which means again that no part goes exactly so far and no farther; that no part absolutely excludes another, but that they compenetrate and are cohesive;

We have the same many-in-one in the matter that fills the passing time. The rush of our thought forward through its fringes is the everlasting peculiarity of its life.

We realize this life as something always off its balance, something in transition, something that shoots out of a darkness through a dawn into a brightness that we feel to be the dawn fulfilled.

In the very midst of the continuity our experience comes as an alteration. “Yes,” we say at the full brightness, “this is what I just meant.” “No,” we feel at the dawning, “this is not yet the full meaning, there is more to come.”

If, with all this in our mind, we turn to our own particular predicament, we see that our old objection to the self-compounding of states of consciousness, our accusation that it was impossible for purely logical reasons, is unfounded in principle.

Every smallest state of consciousness, concretely taken, overflows its own definition.

Only concepts are self-identical; only “reason” deals with closed equations; nature is but a name for excess; every point in her opens out and runs into the more;

Every smallest state of consciousness, concretely taken, overflows its own definition.

Only concepts are self-identical; only “reason” deals with closed equations; nature is but a name for excess; every point in her opens out and runs into the more; and the only question, with reference to any point we may be considering, is how far into the rest of nature we may have to go in order to get entirely beyond its overflow.

In the pulse of inner life immediately present now in each of us is a little past, a little future, a little awareness of our own body, of each other’s persons, of these sublimities we are trying to talk about, of the earth’s geography and …

It is like the log carried first by William and Henry, then by William, Henry, and John, then by Henry and John, then by John and Peter, and so on.

All real units of experience overlap.

Let a row of equidistant dots on a sheet of paper symbolize the concepts by which we intellectualize the world. Let a ruler long enough to cover at least three dots stand for our sensible experience.

What is true here of successive states must also be true of simultaneous characters. They also overlap each other with their being.

My present field of consciousness is a centre surrounded by a fringe that shades insensibly into a subconscious more.

I use three separate terms here to describe this fact; but I might as well use three hundred, for the fact is all shades and no boundaries. Which part of it properly is in my consciousness, which out?

I am tiring myself and you, I know, by vainly seeking to describe by concepts and words what I say at the same time exceeds either conceptualization or verbalization. As long as one continues talking, intellectualism remains in undisturbed possession of the field.

The return to life can’t come about by talking.

It is an act;

… of rationalism’s disdain for the particular, the personal, and the unwholesome, the drift of all the evidence we have seems to me to sweep us very strongly towards the belief in some form of superhuman life with which we may, unknown to ourselves, be co-conscious.

We may be in the universe as dogs and cats are in our libraries, seeing the books and hearing the conversation, but having no inkling of the meaning of it all.

The intellectualist objections to this fall away when the authority of intellectualist logic is undermined by criticism, and then the positive empirical evidence remains.

Everything is smothered in the litter that is fated to accompany it.

Without too much you cannot have enough, of anything.

Lots of inferior books, lots of bad statues, lots of dull speeches, of tenth-rate men and women, as a condition of the few precious specimens in either kind being realized!

Without too much you cannot have enough, of anything. Lots of inferior books, lots of bad statues, lots of dull speeches, of tenth-rate men and women, as a condition of the few precious specimens in either kind being realized!

The gold-dust comes to birth with the quartz-sand all around it, and this is as much a condition of religion as of any other excellent possession.

There must be extrication; there must be competition for survival; but the clay matrix and the noble gem must first come into being unsifted. Once extricated, the gem can be examined separately, conceptualized, defined, and insulated.

It may, as I said, possess and handle itself differently in consequence of us philosophers, with our theories, being here; it may trust itself or mistrust itself the more, and, by doing the one or the other, deserve more the trust or the mistrust.

What mistrusts itself deserves mistrust.

This is the philosophy of humanism in the widest sense. Our philosophies swell the current of being, add their character to it. They are part of all that we have met, of all that makes us be.

Our philosophies swell the current of being, add their character to it. They are part of all that we have met, of all that makes us be. As a French philosopher says, “Nous sommes du réel dans le réel.”

Our thoughts determine our acts, and our acts redetermine the previous nature of the world.

Thus does foreignness get banished from our world, and far more so when we take the system of it pluralistically than when we take it monistically. We are indeed internal parts of God and not external creations, on any possible reading of the panpsychic system.

Everything you can think of, however vast or inclusive, has on the pluralistic view a genuinely “external” environment of some sort or amount. Things are “with” one another in many ways, but nothing includes everything, or dominates over everything.

The word “and” trails along after every sentence.

Something always escapes. “Ever not quite” has to be said of the best attempts made anywhere in the universe at attaining all-inclusiveness. The pluralistic world is thus more like a federal republic than like an empire or a kingdom.

Things are “with” one another in many ways, but nothing includes everything, or dominates over everything. The word “and” trails along after every sentence.

Something always escapes.

“Ever not quite” has to be said of the best attempts made anywhere in the universe at attaining all-inclusiveness. The pluralistic world is thus more like a federal republic than like an empire or a kingdom.

The word “and” trails along after every sentence. Something always escapes. “Ever not quite” has to be said of the best attempts made anywhere in the universe at attaining all-inclusiveness.

The pluralistic world is thus more like a federal republic than like an empire or a kingdom.

However much may be collected, however much may report itself as present at any effective centre of consciousness or action, something else is self-governed and absent and unreduced to unity.

Whatever I may say, each of you will be sure to take pluralism or leave it, just as your own sense of rationality moves and inclines. The only thing I emphatically insist upon is that it is a fully coordinate hypothesis with monism.

This world may, in the last resort, be a block-universe; but on the other hand it may be a universe only strung-along, not rounded in and closed.

Reality may exist distributively just as it sensibly seems to, after all. On that possibility I do insist.

Not one step in this process is logical, yet it is the way in which monists and pluralists alike espouse and hold fast to their visions.

It is life exceeding logic, it is the practical reason for which the theoretic reason finds arguments after the conclusion is once there.

In just this way do some of us hold to the unfinished pluralistic universe; in just this way do others hold to the timeless universe eternally complete.

Experience in its immediacy seems perfectly fluent.

The active sense of living which we all enjoy, before reflection shatters our instinctive world for us, is self-luminous and suggests no paradoxes. Its difficulties are disappointments and uncertainties. They are not intellectual contradictions.

Experience in its immediacy seems perfectly fluent. The active sense of living which we all enjoy, before reflection shatters our instinctive world for us, is self-luminous and suggests no paradoxes.

Its difficulties are disappointments and uncertainties.

They are not intellectual contradictions.

Experience in its immediacy seems perfectly fluent. The active sense of living which we all enjoy, before reflection shatters our instinctive world for us, is self-luminous and suggests no paradoxes. Its difficulties are disappointments and uncertainties.

They are not intellectual contradictions.

When the reflective intellect gets at work, however, it discovers incomprehensibilities in the flowing process. Distinguishing its elements and parts, it gives them separate names, and what it thus disjoins it cannot easily put together. Pyrrhonism accepts the irrationality and revels in its dialectic elaboration.

Experience in its immediacy seems perfectly fluent.

The active sense of living which we all enjoy, before reflection shatters our instinctive world for us, is self-luminous and suggests no paradoxes.

Its difficulties are disappointments and uncertainties. They are not intellectual contradictions.

This persistent identity of certain units, or emphases, or points, or objects, or members—call them what you will—of the experience-continuum, is just one of those conjunctive features of it, on which I am obliged to insist so emphatically.

For samenesses are parts of experience’s indefeasible structure.

When I hear a bell-stroke and, as life flows on, its afterimage dies away, I still hark back to it as “that same bell-stroke.”

Bare activity, then, as we may call it, means the bare fact of event or change. “Change taking place” is a unique content of experience, one of those “conjunctive” objects which radical empiricism seeks so earnestly to rehabilitate and preserve.

The sense of activity is thus in the broadest and vaguest way synonymous with the sense of “life.”

We should feel our own subjective life at least, even in noticing and proclaiming an otherwise inactive world. Our own reaction on its monotony would be the one thing experienced there in the form of something coming to pass.

What “sustaining” means here is clear to anyone who has lived through the experience, but to no one else; just as “loud,” “red,” “sweet,” mean something only to beings with ears, eyes, and tongues.

The percipi in these originals of experience is the esse; the curtain is the picture.

If there is anything hiding in the background, it ought not to be called activity, but should get itself another name.

We thus acquire a habit, in discussing activity-experiences, of defining them by their relation to something more. If an experience be one of narrow span, it will be mistaken as to what activity it is and whose.

You think that you are acting while you are only obeying someone’s push.

You think you are doing this, but you are doing something of which you do not dream. For instance, you think you are but drinking this glass; but you are really creating the liver-cirrhosis that will end your days.

If an experience be one of narrow span, it will be mistaken as to what activity it is and whose. You think that you are acting while you are only obeying someone’s push.

You think you are doing this, but you are doing something of which you do not dream.

For instance, you think you are but drinking this glass; but you are really creating the liver-cirrhosis that will end your days.

We know as an empirical fact that farseeing tendencies often carry out their purpose, but we know also that they are often defeated by the failure of some contemptibly small process on which success depends.

A little thrombus in a statesman’s meningeal artery will throw an empire out of gear.

Therefore I cannot even hint at any solution of the pragmatic issue. I have only wished to show you that that issue is what gives the real interest to all inquiries into what kinds of activity may be real.

Causation inhabits no more sublime level than anything else. It lives, apparently, in the dirt of the world as well as in the absolute, or in man’s unconquerable mind.

The worth and interest of the world consists not in its elements, be these elements things, or be they the conjunctions of things; it exists rather in the dramatic outcome of the whole process, and in the meaning of the succession stages which the elements work out.

My colleague and master, Josiah Royce, in a page of his review of Stout’s Analytic Psychology, in Mind for 1897, has some fine words on this point with which I cordially agree.

cit., III, 188), which means exactly the same thing as Bergson’s “évolution créatrice.”

Novelty, as empirically found, doesn’t arrive by jumps and jolts, it leaks in insensibly, for adjacents in experience are always interfused, the smallest real datum being both a coming and a going, and even numerical distinctness being realized effectively only after a concrete interval has passed.

The intervals also deflect us from the original paths of direction, and all the old identities at last give out, for the fatally continuous infiltration of otherness warps things out of every original rut.

Peirce, articles the originality of which has apparently prevented their making an immediate impression, but which, if I mistake not, will prove a goldmine of ideas for thinkers of the coming generation. Mr. Peirce’s views, though reached so differently, are altogether congruous with Bergson’s.

Both philosophers believe that the appearance of novelty in things is genuine.

To an observer standing outside of its generating causes, novelty can appear only as so much “chance”; to one who stands inside it is the expression of “free creative activity.” Peirce’s “tychism” is thus practically synonymous with Bergson’s “devenir réel.”