„Common sense appears thus as a perfectly definite stage in our understanding of things, a stage that satisfies in an extraordinarily successful way the purposes for which we think.“ (p. 147) #James #CommonSense
„Radical empiricism, as I understand it, does full justice to conjunctive relations, without, however, treating them as rationalism always tends to treat them, as being true in some supernal way, as if the unity of things and their variety belonged to different orders of truth and vitality altogether. (p. 38) #James #RadicalEmpiricism
„Personal histories are processes of change in time, and the change itself is one of the things immediately experienced. ‚Change‘ in this case means continuous as opposed to discontinuous transition. (p. 41) #James #change #process #transition
„Now, ordinary empiricism, in spite of the fact that conjunctive and disjunctive relations present themselves as being fully co-ordinate parts of experience, has always shown a tendency to do away with the connections of things, and to insist most on the disjunctions. Berkeley’s nominalism, Hume’s statement that whatever things we distinguish are as ‚loose and separate‘ as if they had ’no manner of connection.‘ James Mill’s denial that similars have anything ‚really‘ in common, the resolution of the causal tie into habitual sequence, John Mill’s account of both physical things and selves as composed of discontinuous possibilities, and the general pulverization of all Experience by association and the mind-dust theory, are examples of what I mean.“ (p. 38) #James #empiricism #experience #Berkeley #Hume #Mill
„A priori, we can imagine a universe of withness but no nextness; or one of nextness but no likeness, or of likeness with no activity, or of activity with no purpose, or of purpose with no ego. These would be universes, each with its own grade of unity. The universe of human experience is, by one or another of its parts, of each and all these grades. Whether or not it possibly enjoys some still more absolute grade of union does not appear upon the surface.“ (p. 40) #James #TheUniverseOfHumanExperience