To these objections the Kantian school have never found an answer. They have simply repeated Kant's phrases about the necessary 'presuppositions' which were to be added to Hume's data. The English psychologists (the Mills, Bain, etc.) exhibited a similar fidelity. They never accepted the a priori, but relied on 'the association of ideas' to build up a mind out of isolated sensations. But was this expedient really thinkable? For if all 'sensations' or qualities are separate entities, how can the addition of more 'distinct existences' of the same sort really bind them together? If in 'the cat is upon the wall,' 'upon' is a distinct entity which has to relate 'cat' and 'wall,' what is to connect 'cat' with 'upon' and 'upon' with 'wall'? The atomizing method carried to its logical extreme demands that not only 'sensations' but also 'thoughts' should be essentially disconnected, and then, of course, no thinking can cohere.
Psychology, then, had worked itself to a breakdown by accepting the 'sensationalistic' analysis offered by Hume, and dragged philosophy with it. Yet the escape was as easy as the egg of Columbus to the insight of genius. William James had merely to invert the problem. Instead of assuming with Hume that because some experiences seemed to attest the presence of distinct objects, all connections were illusory and all experience must ultimately consist of psychical atoms, James had merely to maintain that this separation was secondary and artificial, and that experience was initially a continuum. Once this is pointed out, the fact is obvious. The stream of experience no doubt contains what it is afterwards possible to single out as 'sensations,' but it presents them also as connected by 'relations.' Moreover, the 'sensations' or 'qualities' and their 'relations' exhibit the immediate indiscerptible unity of a fluid rather than a succession of flashes. Temporal and spatial relations with all the connections they sustain are perceived just as directly as what we come to distinguish as the 'things' in them. 'Consciousness,' James insists, 'does not appear to itself chopped up in bits,' and 'we ought to say a feeling of and, a feeling of if, a feeling of but, and a feeling of by, quite as readily as we say a feeling of blue or a feeling of cold. All things in experience naturally 'compenetrate,' to use a phrase of Bergson's; they are distinct and they are united at the same time.
The great crux in Hume is thus seen to be illusory. Immediate experience does not require 'synthesis': it calls for 'analysis.' It is not a jigsaw puzzle, to be pieced together without glue: it is a confused whole which has to be divided and set in order for clear thinking. Hume's mistake was to have started from experience as partly analysed by common sense, and not from the flux as given. His 'sensations' were the qualities already analysed out of the flux; he took these selections for the whole and neglected the other less obvious features in it—viz., the relations which floated them.
Thus the puzzle 'How do "relations" relate?' received its solution in this new account of experience. Philosophers are puzzled by this question because they confuse percepts with concepts. Percepts are given in relation; but concepts, being ideal dissections of the perceptual flux, are discontinuous terms which have to be related by an act of thought, because they were made for this very purpose of distinction. Thus the eye sees cats sitting upon walls, as parts of a rural landscape, and without the sharp distinctions which exist between the concepts 'cat,' 'upon,' 'wall.' These ideas were meant to disconnect 'the cat' in thought from the site it sat upon. Thought, then, has made the 'atomism' it professed to find. It has only to unmake it, and to allow the distinctions it held apart to merge again into the stream of change.
All Hume's problems, therefore, are unreal, and those of his apriorist critics are doubly removed from reality. The whole conception of philosophy as aiming at uniting disjointed data in a higher synthesis runs counter to the real movement, which aims at the analysis of a given whole. The real question about causation is not how events can be connected causally, but why are certain antecedents preferred and dissected out and entitled 'causes.' So the 'self' is not one (undiscoverable) item imagined to keep in order a host of other such items. Any given moment of a consciousness is just the mass of its 'sensations,' but these are consciously the heirs of its history and connected with a past which is remembered. No Transcendental Ego could do more to support the process of experience than is achieved by 'a stream of consciousness which carries its own past along.' Here, then, is the straight way James desiderated, a critical philosophy which goes, not 'through' the complexities of Kantism, but leaves them on one side as superfluous 'curios.'
But there remains an even more important deduction from the new psychology. Hume had been convicted of error in selecting those elements of the flux which served his purpose and neglecting the rest. But this mistake might reveal the important fact that all analysis was a choice, and inspired by volitions. A mind that analyses cannot but be active in handling its experience. It manipulates it to serve its ends. It emphasizes only those portions of the flux which seem to it important. In a better and fairer analysis than Hume's these features will persist. It, too, would be a product of selection, of a selection depending on its maker's preferences. As James showed, the distinction between 'dreams' and 'realities,' between 'things' and 'illusions,' results only from the differential values we attach to the parts of the flux according as they seem important or interesting to us or not. The volitional contribution is all-pervasive in our thinking. And once this volitional interference with 'pure perception' is shown to be indispensable, it must be allowed to be legitimate. Nor can this approval of our interference be restricted to selections. It must be extended to additions. Just as we can select factors from 'the given' to construct 'reality,' we can add hypotheses to it to make it 'intelligible.' We can claim the right of causal analysis, and assume that our dissections have laid bare the inner springs of the connection of events. Moreover, to the 'real world which our choice has built out of the chaos of 'appearances' we may hypothetically add 'infernal' and 'heavenly' regions.[[B]] Both are transformations of 'the given' by the will, but, like the postulate of causal series, experience may confirm them. Kant's a priori activity of the mind may thus in a sense supply an answer to Hume—but only in a voluntaristic philosophy which would probably have seemed too bold both to him and to Hume.
There can be no doubt that we do not approach the data of perception in an attitude of quiescent resignation. Our desires and needs equip us with assumptions and 'first principles,' which originate from within, not from without. But how precisely should this mental contribution to knowledge be conceived? In the last chapter of his Psychology James suggested that the mind's organization is essentially biological. It has evolved according to sound Darwinian principles, and in so doing the fittest of its 'variations' have survived. But were these variations quite fortuitous? May they not have been purposive responses to the stimulation of environment? Can logic have been invented like saws and ships for purposes of human service? These are some of the stimulating questions which James's work in Psychology has suggested.
FOOTNOTES:
[A] Not in Bradley's "Logic."
[B] This is the substance of the doctrine of 'The Will to Believe.'