[42] Compare James, “Continuous transition is one sort of conjunctive relation; and to be a radical empiricist means to hold fast to this conjunctive relation of all others, for this is the strategic point, the position through which, if a hole be made, all the corruptions of dialectics and all the metaphysical fictions pour into our philosophy.”—Journal of Philosophy, Psychology, and Scientific Methods, Vol. I., p. 536.
[43] One of the not least of the many merits of Santayana’s “Life of Reason” is the consistency and vigor with which is upheld the doctrine that significant idealism means idealization.
[44] Reprinted, with very slight change, from the Journal of Philosophy, Psychology, and Scientific Methods, Vol. II., No. 15, July, 1905.
[45] All labels are, of course, obnoxious and misleading. I hope, however, the term will be taken by the reader in the sense in which it is forthwith explained, and not in some more usual and familiar sense. Empiricism, as herein used, is as antipodal to sensationalistic empiricism, as it is to transcendentalism, and for the same reason. Both of these systems fall back on something which is defined in non-directly-experienced terms in order to justify that which is directly experienced. Hence I have criticised such empiricism (Philosophical Review, Vol. XI., No. 4, p. 364) as essentially absolutistic in character; and also (“Studies in Logical Theory,” pp. 30, 58) as an attempt to build up experience in terms of certain methodological checks and cues of attaining certainty.
[46] I hope the reader will not therefore assume that from the empiricist’s standpoint knowledge is of small worth or import. On the contrary, from the empiricist’s standpoint it has all the worth which it is concretely experienced as possessing—which is simply tremendous. But the exact nature of this worth is a thing to be found out in describing what we mean by experiencing objects as known—the actual differences made or found in experience.
[47] Since the non-empiricist believes in things-in-themselves (which he may term “atoms,” “sensations,” transcendental unities, a priori concepts, an absolute experience, or whatever), and since he finds that the empiricist makes much of change (as he must, since change is continuously experienced) he assumes that the empiricist means his own non-empirical Realities are in continual flux, and he naturally shudders at having his divinities so violently treated. But, once recognize that the empiricist doesn’t have any such Realities at all, and the entire problem of the relation of change to reality takes a very different aspect.
[48] It would lead us aside from the point to try to tell just what is the nature of the experienced difference we call truth. Professor James’s recent articles may well be consulted. The point to bear in mind here is just what sort of a thing the empiricist must mean by true, or truer (the noun Truth is, of course, a generic name for all cases of “Trues”). The adequacy of any particular account is not a matter to be settled by general reasoning, but by finding out what sort of an experience the truth-experience actually is.
[49] I say “relatively,” because the transcendentalist still holds that finally the cognition is imperfect, giving us only some symbol or phenomenon of Reality (which is only in the Absolute or in some Thing-in-Itself)—otherwise the curtain-wind fact would have as much ontological reality as the existence of the Absolute itself: a conclusion at which the non-empiricist perhorresces, for no reason obvious to me—save that it would put an end to his transcendentalism.
[50] In general, I think the distinction between -ive and -ed one of the most fundamental of philosophic distinctions, and one of the most neglected. The same holds of -tion and -ing.
[51] What is criticised, now as “geneticism” (if I may coin the word) and now as “pragmatism” is, in its truth, just the fact that the empiricist does take account of the experienced “drift, occasion, and contexture” of things experienced—to use Hobbes’s phrase.