[32] Psychology, Vol. II., p. 618.
[33] “Essay concerning Human Understanding,” Book II., Chapter II., § 2. Locke doubtless derived this notion from Bacon.
[34] It is hardly necessary to refer to the stress placed upon mathematics, as well as upon fundamental propositions in logic, ethics, and cosmology.
[35] Of course there are internal historic connections between experience as effective “memory,” and experience as “observation.” But the motivation and stress, the problem, has quite shifted. It may be remarked that Hobbes still writes under the influence of the Aristotelian conception. “Experience is nothing but Memory” (“Elements of Philosophy,” Part I., Chapter I., § 2), and hence is opposed to science.
[36] There are, of course, anticipations of Hume in Locke. But to regard Lockeian experience as equivalent to Humian is to pervert history. Locke, as he was to himself and to the century succeeding him, was not a subjectivist, but in the main a common sense objectivist. It was this that gave him his historic influence. But so completely has the Hume-Kant controversy dominated recent thinking that it is constantly projected backward. Within a few weeks I have seen three articles, all insisting that the meaning of the term experience must be subjective, and stating or implying that those who take the term objectively are subverters of established usage! But a casual study of the dictionary will reveal that experience has always meant “what is experienced,” observation as a source of knowledge, as well as the act, fact, or mode of experiencing. In the Oxford Dictionary, the (obsolete) sense of “experimental testing,” of actual “observation of facts and events,” and “the fact of being consciously affected by an act” have almost contemporaneous datings, viz., 1384, 1377, and 1382 respectively. A usage almost more objective than the second, the Baconian use, is “what has been experienced; the events that have taken place within the knowledge of an individual, a community, mankind at large, either during a particular period or generally.” This dates back to 1607. Let us have no more captious criticisms and plaints based on ignorance of linguistic usage. [This pious wish has not been met. J. D., 1909.]
[37] The relationship of organization and thought is precisely that which we find psychologically typified by the rhythmic functions of habit and attention, attention being always, ab quo, a sign of the failure of habit, and, ad quem, a reconstructive modification of habit.
[38] Compare, for example, Dr. Stuart’s paper in the “Studies in Logical Theory,” pp. 253–256. I may here remark that I remain totally unable to see how the interpretation of objectivity to mean controlling conditions of action (negative and positive as above) derogates at all from its naïve objectivity, or how it connotes cognitive subjectivity, or is in any way incompatible with a common-sense realistic theory of perception.
[39] For this suggested interpretation of the esthetic as surprising, or unintended, gratuitous collateral reinforcement, see Gordon, “Psychology of Meaning.”
[40] This, however, is not strictly true, since Locke goes far to supply the means of his own correction in his account of the “workmanship of the understanding.”
[41] Plato, especially in his “Theætetus,” seems to have begun the procedure of blasting the good name of perceptive experience by identifying a late and instrumental distinction, having to do with logical control, with all experience whatsoever.