[MD] Radical Empiricism in 20 minutes or less

[John Carl]

http://www.bartleby.com/227/1025.html


Most of James’s life was a fight against accepting the monistic philosophy
simply because of its æsthetic nobility. He rejected it precisely because it
was “too buttoned up and white-chokered, too clean-shaven a thing to speak
for the vast slow-breeding, unconscious kosmos with its dread abysses and
its unknown tides.” It is true, however, that absorption in the psychologic
factor, personal or æsthetic, which actually does make some people prefer a
narrowly classic universe and others a generously romantic one, made him
obscure the distinction between the causes of belief and the evidence for
the truth which we believe. We may all start with a biased or emotional
preface, but that is neither evidence nor guaranty of our arriving at
scientific truth.

 Like other violent opponents of intellectualism, James himself falls into
the intellectualistic assumption that we must either wholly believe or
wholly disbelieve, just as one must either go to church or stay out. He
ignores the scientific attitude of suspended judgment and the fact that men
may be compelled to act without being constrained in judgment. We may vote
for X or Y and yet know that owing to the absence of adequate information
our choice has been little more than a blind guess. His interest in vital
preferences and his impatience with the emotionally thin air of purely
logical argumentation led James, towards the end of his life, to the
acceptance of the extreme anti-logical view of Bergson that our logical and
mathematical ideas are inherently incapable of revealing the real and
changing world.