radical empiricism' and pragmatism are closely
allied. Indeed, if pragmatism be defined as the assertion that "the
meaning of any proposition can always be brought down to some particular
consequence in our future practical experience, ... the point lying in
the fact that the experience must be particular rather than in the fact
that it must be active" (_Meaning of Truth_, p. 210); then pragmatism
and the above postulate come to the same thing. The present book,
however, consists not so much in the assertion of this postulate as in
the _use_ of it. And the method is successful in special applications by
virtue of a certain "statement of fact" concerning relations.

(2) "The statement of fact is that _the relations between things,
conjunctive as well as disjunctive, are just as much matters of direct
particular experience, neither more so nor less so, than the things
themselves_." (Cf. also _A Pluralistic Universe_, p. 280; _The Will to
Believe_, p. 278.) This is the central doctrine of the present book. It
distinguishes 'radical empiricism' from the "ordinary empiricism" of
Hume, J. S. Mill, etc., with which it is otherwise allied. (Cf. below,
pp. 42-44.) It provides an empirical and relational version of
'activity,' and so distinguishes the author's voluntarism from a view
with which it is easily confused--the view which upholds a pure or
transcendent activity. (Cf. below, Essay VI.) It makes it possible to
escape the vicious disjunctions that have thus far baffled philosophy:
such disjunctions as those between consciousness and physical nature,
between thought and its object, between one mind and another, and
between one 'thing' and another. These disjunctions need not be
'overcome' by calling in any "extraneous trans-empirical connective
support" (_Meaning of Truth_, Preface, p. xiii); they may now be
_avoided_ by regarding the dualities in question as only _differences of
empirical relationship among common empirical terms_. The pragmatistic
account of 'meaning' and 'truth,' shows only how a vicious disjunction
between 'idea' and 'object' may thus be avoided. The present volume not
only presents pragmatism in this light; but adds similar accounts of the
other dualities mentioned above.

Thus while pragmatism and radical empiricism do not differ essentially
when regarded as _methods_, they are independent when regarded as
doctrines. For it would be possible to hold the pragmatistic theory of
'meaning' and 'truth,' w