APPENDICES

APPENDIX A

THE THING AND ITS RELATIONS[1]

Experience in its immediacy seems perfectly fluent. The active
sense of living which we all enjoy, before reflection shatters our
instinctive world for us, is self-luminous and suggests no paradoxes.
Its difficulties are disappointments and uncertainties. They are not
intellectual contradictions.

When the reflective intellect gets at work, however, it discovers
incomprehensibilities in the flowing process. Distinguishing its
elements and parts, it gives them separate names, and what it thus
disjoins it cannot easily put together. Pyrrhonism accepts the
irrationality and revels in its dialectic elaboration. Other
philosophies try, some by ignoring, some by resisting, and some by
turning the dialectic procedure against itself, negating its first
negations, to restore the fluent sense of life again, and let
redemption take the place of innocence. The perfection with which any
philosophy may do this is the measure of its human success and of its
importance in philosophic history. In an article entitled 'A world of
pure experience,[2] I tried my own hand sketchily at

[Footnote 1: Reprinted from the _Journal of Philosophy, Psychology,
and Scientific Methods_, vol. ii, New York, 1905, with slight verbal
revision.]

[Footnote 2: _Journal of Philosophy, Psychology, and Scientific
Methods_, vol. i, No. 20, p. 566.]

the problem, resisting certain first steps of dialectics by insisting
in a general way that the immediately experienced conjunctive
relations are as real as anything else. If my sketch is not to appear
too _naeif_, I must come closer to details, and in the present essay I
propose to do so.

I

'Pure experience' is the name which I gave to the immediate flux of
life which furnishes the material to our later reflection with its
conceptual categories. Only new-born babes, or men in semi-coma
from sleep, drugs, illnesses, or blows, may be assumed to have an
experience pure in the literal sense of a _that_ which is not yet any
definite _what_, tho ready to be all sorts of whats; full both of
oneness and of manyness, but in respects that don't appear; changing
throughout, yet so confusedly that its phases interpenetrate and no
points, either of distinction or of identity, can be caught. Pure
experience in this state is but another name for feeling or sensation.
But the flux of it no sooner comes than it tends to fill itself with
emphases, an