[12] See [p. 40] and [p. 149].
[13] Pragmatism, pp. 244–245.
[14] A Pluralistic Universe, p. 34.
[15] In respect of James’ later doctrine of “radical empiricism” we may quote, for the sake of intelligibility, from Professor Perry (his friend and literary executor) the following: “James’ empiricism means, then, first, that ideas are to be tested by direct knowledge, and, second, that knowledge is limited to what can be presented. There is, however, a third consideration which is an application of these, and the means of avoiding a difficulty which is supposed to be fatal to them. This is what James calls ‘radical empiricism,’ the discovery that ‘the relations between things, conjunctive as well as disjunctive, are just as much matters of direct particular experience, neither more nor less so, than the things themselves.’ ‘Adjacent minima of experience’ are united by the ‘persistent identity of certain units, or emphases, or points, or objects, or members ... of the experience-continuum.’ Owing to the fact that the connexions of things are thus found along with them, it is unnecessary to introduce any substance below them, or any subject above them, to hold things together” (Present Philosophical Tendencies, p. 365). In regard to this radical empiricism, I am obliged, as a Kantian, to say that, to my mind, it represents the reduction of all Pragmatism and Empiricism to an impossibility—to the fatuous attempt (exploded for ever by Hume) to attempt to explain knowledge and experience without first principles of some kind or another. It is a “new Humism,” a thing which no one who has penetrated into the meaning of Hume’s Treatise can possibly advocate. A philosophy without first principles, or a philosophy that reduces the relations between experiences to mere “bits” of experience, is indeed no philosophy at all.
[16] See [p. 82] and [p. 154].
[17] The Preface, pp. xv., xix.
[18] See [p. 159] and [p. 212].
[19] As for Dr. Schiller’s charge that Absolutism is essentially “irreligious” in spite of the fact of its having been (in England) religious at the outset, the best way of meeting this is to insist that it is mainly in its form, rather than its content, that Absolutism is (or was) irreligious in both Germany and England.
[20] British students of philosophy are quite well aware that it was the religious and the spiritual motive that seemed to weigh most with Hutchison Stirling and John Caird and Green in their attempts (thirty years ago) to introduce German transcendental philosophy to their fellow-countrymen. Stirling was impressed with the idea of a working correspondence between Hegelianism and Calvinism. John Caird’s animus was against the agnosticism of Herbert Spencer and of Mansel, and he found inspiration in this connexion in Hegel’s treatment of Kant’s theory of the limitations of the understanding. And to Green the attractive thing about Kant was his vindication of a “spiritual principle” in “nature,” and in “knowledge,” and in “conduct,” a principle which rendered absurd the naturalism of the evolutionary philosophy. Friends of this spiritualistic interpretation of German Critical Rationalism find its richest and fullest expression in the books of Edward Caird upon the Evolution of Religion and the Evolution of Theology in the Greek Philosophers.
[21] The idea of a left wing is generally associated in the minds of British students with the destructive criticism of Mr. Bradley in Appearance and Reality, in which many, or most, of our ordinary ways of regarding reality (our beliefs in “primary” and “secondary” qualities of matter, in “space” and “time,” in “causation,” “activity,” a “self,” in “things in themselves,” etc.) are convicted of “fatal inconsistencies.” See, however, Professor Pringle-Pattison’s instructive account of his book in Man’s Place in the Cosmos, bringing out the positive side. The “left” is represented too, now, in Dr. Bosanquet’s Individuality and Value, which we examine below as the last striking output of British transcendentalism or absolutism. See in this entire connexion Professor James Seth’s recent account of the “Idealist Answers to Hume” in his English Philosophy and Schools of Philosophy.