Polemic writing like this is odious; but with absolutism in possession in so many quarters, omission to defend my radical empiricism against its best known champion would count as either superficiality or inability. I have to conclude that its dialectic has not invalidated in the least degree the usual conjunctions by which the world, as experienced, hangs so variously together. In particular it leaves an empirical theory of knowledge[67] intact, and lets us continue to believe with common sense that one object may be known, if we have any ground for thinking that it is known, to many knowers.
In [the next essay] I shall return to this last supposition, which seems to me to offer other difficulties much harder for a philosophy of pure experience to deal with than any of absolutism’s dialectic objections.
FOOTNOTES:
[43] [Reprinted from The Journal of Philosophy, Psychology and Scientific Methods, vol. ii, No. 2, January 19, 1905. Reprinted also as Appendix A in A Pluralistic Universe, pp. 347-369. The author’s corrections have been adopted in the present text. Ed.]
[44] [F. H. Bradley: Appearance and Reality, second edition, pp. 152-153, 23, 118, 104, 108-109, 570.]
[45] Compare Professor MacLennan’s admirable Auseinandersetzung with Mr. Bradley, in The Journal of Philosophy, Psychology and Scientific Methods, vol. I, [1904], pp. 403 ff., especially pp. 405-407.
[46] [Hume: Treatise of Human Nature, Appendix, Selby-Bigge’s edition, p. 636.]
[47] Technically, it seems classable as a ‘fallacy of composition.’ A duality, predicable of the two wholes, L—M and M—N, is forthwith predicated of one of their parts, M.