remises with which they have no necessary connection.

I

A criticism of current philosophizing from the standpoint of the
traditional quality of its problems must begin somewhere, and the choice
of a beginning is arbitrary. It has appeared to me that the notion of
experience implied in the questions most actively discussed gives a
natural point of departure. For, if I mistake not, it is just the
inherited view of experience common to the empirical school and its
opponents which keeps alive many discussions even of matters that on
their face are quite remote from it, while it is also this view which is
most untenable in the light of existing science and social practice.
Accordingly I set out with a brief statement of some of the chief
contrasts between the orthodox description of experience and that
congenial to present conditions.

(i) In the orthodox view, experience is regarded primarily as a
knowledge-affair. But to eyes not looking through ancient spectacles, it
assuredly appears as an affair of the intercourse of a living being with
its physical and social environment. (ii) According to tradition
experience is (at least primarily) a psychical thing, infected
throughout by "subjectivity." What experience suggests about itself is a
genuinely objective world which enters into the actions and sufferings
of men and undergoes modifications through their responses. (iii) So far
as anything beyond a bare present is recognized by the established
doctrine, the past exclusively counts. Registration of what has taken
place, reference to precedent, is believed to be the essence of
experience. Empiricism is conceived of as tied up to what has been, or
is, "given." But experience in its vital form is experimental, an effort
to change the given; it is characterized by projection, by reaching
forward into the unknown; connexion with a future is its salient trait.
(iv) The empirical tradition is committed to particularism. Connexions
and continuities are supposed to be foreign to experience, to be
by-products of dubious validity. An experience that is an undergoing of
an environment and a striving for its control in new directions is
pregnant with connexions. (v) In the traditional notion experience and
thought are antithetical terms. Inference, so far as it is other than a
revival of what has been given in the past, goes beyond experience;
hence it is either invalid, or else a measure of desperation by which,
using experience