I wish I might believe myself to have made

38
that plausible in this article.  IN another article
I shall try to make the general notion of a
world composed of pure experiences still more
clear.

39

                                   II

                       A WORLD OF PURE EXPERIENCE

IT is difficult not to notice a curious unrest in
the philosophic atmosphere of the time, always
loosening of old landmarks, a softening of oppositions,
a mutual borrowing from one another reflecting
on the part of systems anciently closed,
and an interest in new suggestions, however
vague, as if the one thing sure were the inadequacy
of the extant school-solutions.  The dissatisfaction
with these seems due for the most
part to a feeling that they are too abstract and
academic.  Life is confused and superabundant,
and what the younger generation appears to
crave is more of the temperament of life in its
philosophy, even thought it were at some cost
of logical rigor and of formal purity.  Transcendental

40
idealism is inclining to let the world
wag incomprehensibly, in spite of its Absolute
Subject and his unity of purpose.  Berkeleyan
idealism is abandoning the principle of parsimony
and dabbling in panpsychic speculations.
Empiricism flirts with teleology; and,
strangest of all, natural realism, so long decently
buried, raises its head above the turf,
and finds glad hands outstretched from the
most unlikely quarters to help it to its feet
again.  We are all biased by our personal feelings,
I know, and I am personally discontented
with extant solutions; so I seem to read the
signs of a great unsettlement, as if the upheaval
of more real conceptions and more fruitful
methods were imminent, as if a true landscape
might result, less clipped, straight-edged
and artificial.

     If philosophy be really on the eve of any considerable
rearrangement, the time should be
propitious for any one who has suggestions of
his own to bring forward.  For many years past
my mind has bee growing into a certain type
of _Weltanschauung_.  Rightly or wrongly, I have
41
got to the point where I can hardly see things
in any other pattern.  I propose, therefore, to
describe the pattern as clearly as I can consistently
with great brevity, and to throw my
description into the bubbling vat of publicity
where, jostled by rivals and torn by critics, it
will eventually either disappear from notice,
or else, if better luck befall it, quietly subside
to the profundities, and serve as a possible
ferment of new growths or a nucleus of new
crystallization.

                    I. RADICAL EMPIRICISM

     I give the name of 'radical empiricism' to
my _Weltanschauung_.  Empiricism is known as
the opposite of rationalism.  Rationalism tends
to emphasize universals and to make wholes
prior to parts in the order of logic as well as in
that of being.  Empiricism, on the contrary,
lays the explanatory stress upon the part, the
element, the individual, and treats the whole
as a collection and the universal as an abstraction.
My description of things, accordingly,
starts with the parts and makes of the whole

42
a being of the second order.  It is essentially
a mosaic philosophy, a philosophy of plural
facts, like that of Hume and his descendants,
who refer these facts neither to Substances in
which they inhere nor to an Absolute Mind
that creates them as its objects.  But it differs
from the Humian type of empiricism in one
particular which makes me add the epithet
radical.

     To be radical, an empiricism must neither
admit into its constructions any element that
is not directly experienced, nor exclude from
them any element that is directly experienced.
For such a philosophy, _the_relations_that_connect_