Page:Avenarius and the Standpoint of Pure Experience.djvu/10

2 Wundt's criticism is marked by a hostile polemical spirit that effectually interferes with its usefulness. In French, however, the articles by Delacroix are not unsuccessful, but they hardly show how much can be gotten out of the works reviewed.

I have spoken of this essay as the effort to reach a point of view, and such an effort must have reference to present philosophical tendencies. Every student of metaphysics has got to take account of idealism, and take account of it logically. Idealism claims to rest upon demonstrable facts of experience, and to be a strictly logical deduction. The really candid critic must inspect experience as impartially as he can, and see whether the premises of idealism are really all that they claim to be. That is, the critic must place himself at the standpoint of pure experience, and putting theories and definitions out of his head, must get acquainted directly with those aspects of experience which will later constitute the basis of a philosophy.

This effort to appreciate experience in an undistorted way, to take it as it comes, not checking the coming by asking metaphysical questions, but simply trying to see what comes, is what concerns the first section of the essay. As the duty of squaring myself with idealism looms in the background, it is the independent outer world aspect of experience that interests me most. The thesis of my first section is that naïve realism is a perfectly correct description of experience as such, but that this does not make it a true metaphysical theory of existence. It may be true and it may not.

As experience we have the world with all its empirical detail. It interests us and we want to know about it. We can feel two kinds of curiosity about the world. We can, on the one hand, wish to become better and better acquainted with its empirical character, or we can conceive it as a whole and ask what is the cause or ground or nature of the whole in view of which we shall interpret and comprehend the parts that come within our ken. The first type of interest desires description of experience, the second desires an explanation of experience, and the second and third sections of the paper are entitled, respectively, 'The Description of Experience' and 'The Explanation of Experience.'

The complete description of experience is the task of all the special sciences working together, and recently there has arisen in scientific circles a point of view which regards the concepts of science, such concepts as atom, ether, energy, etc., as conceptual instruments for effecting convenient descriptions or increasing our fund of empirical data, but it is not regarded as of the smallest