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Yet the Church included the true parts for both, not by asserting anything about the atoms but by recognising two different worlds, the world of bodies and the world of spirits, in a dramatic union in this transitory Universe. In the same way the Church cut off the extremities and one-sidedness in empiricism and supernaturalism, in rationalism and mysticism, in optimism and pessimism.
I believe that radical empiricism, on the contrary, holding to the each-form, and making of God only one of the caches, affords the higher degree of intimacy. The general thesis of these lectures I said would be a defence of the pluralistic against the monistic view.
Empiricism, according to Kant, confines human knowledge to experience, and thus avoids the errors which beset the dogmatist. But then, as Hume seemed to have shown, empiricism must run out into skepticism. If all our knowledge has its foundations in experience, how can we expect to find in our possession any universal or necessary truths? May not a later experience contradict an earlier?
* "Essays in Radical Empiricism," pp. 32-3. In this passage James speaks, by mere inadvertence, as though the phenomena which he is describing as "mental" had NO effects. This is, of course, not the case: they have their effects, just as much as physical phenomena do, but their effects follow different laws.
While pure understanding usurps authority in the world of sense, and empiricism attempts to subject this intellect to the conditions of experience, these two rival directions arrive at the highest possible development, and exhaust the whole extent of their sphere.
You may say, and doubtless some of you now are saying inwardly, that his remanding us to sensation in this wise is only a regress, a return to that ultra-crude empiricism which your own idealists since Green have buried ten times over. I confess that it is indeed a return to empiricism, but I think that the return in such accomplished shape only proves the latter's immortal truth.
Of course no teacher professes to teach empirically; on the contrary, every method is called scientific, no matter what materials it embodies. Indeed, a very little attention paid to breathing, attack, registers, and nasal resonance, is enough to relieve any teacher of the reproach of empiricism.
The great obstacle to radical empiricism in the contemporary mind is the rooted rationalist belief that experience as immediately given is all disjunction and no conjunction, and that to make one world out of this separateness, a higher unifying agency must be there.
Whatever is to be knowable must be given as a real in sensuous intuition. The only organ of reality is sensibility. Rationalism judges correctly concerning the origin of the most important classes of ideas; empiricism concerning the sphere of their validity.
It has already been intimated that sensational empiricism represents neither the idea of experience justified by modern psychology nor the idea of knowledge suggested by modern scientific procedure. With respect to the former, it omits the primary position of active response which puts things to use and which learns about them through discovering the consequences that result from use.
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