Page:A Brief History of Modern Philosophy.djvu/305

 302 correct the classical English philosophy. He has elaborated his theory more fully in a series of articles which appeared in the above-mentioned periodical during the years 1904 and 1905. He had already placed great stress on the continuity of psychic life in his Principles of Psychology (1890), by insisting that what is actually given in psychical experience consists of an incessant "stream of thought," and he has applied this conception to the special problems of psychology with telling effect. He calls this original flux of life "pure experience" (an expression which he uses more consistently than Avenarius). It is only for practical reasons that we depart from the original flux of life: distinctions, definitions, and axioms are postulated for the purpose of realizing certain ends. This conception of knowledge is what constitutes pragmatism, whilst rationalism, which accords the highest place to abstract thought, regards those intellectual instruments of thought as immediate revelations of the absolute. If we establish the elements, which we carve out of this continuous stream for the purposes of solving our problems conceptually, they may be interchanged, and operations with these elements enable us to attain results similar to those of actual experience. But this is not the case with all the elements however. There is more discontinuity in the universe than we ordinarily suppose and we cannot always combine one part of our experience with another or substitute it for another.

Just as pragmatism leads to empiricism, so, according to James, does empiricism also lead to pluralism. James has stated this clearly in his preface to the collection of essays published under the title The Will to Believe (1897). Pure experience really presents nothing more than factual transitions, no "intellectual" transitions.