Page:Avenarius and the Standpoint of Pure Experience.djvu/52

44 therefore, an insignificant idea. It is the concept of the natural limit of that kind of process which we are perfectly familiar with as habit.

It is easy to get the impression that every vital series must be started by an outer R-value. This, however, is not the case. If we recall the formula for stability, f(R)+ f(S) =0, we perceive that a vital series can be initiated by a variation of f(S) as well as of f(R).

The system C is, after all, the brain,—blood is being constantly supplied to it and its own complex constitution and energy must be a continual source of instability.

A judgment is an E-value. Judgments accordingly follow the same law of habit that all E-values follow. There is a progressive exclusion of possible judgments, a progressive definition of experience in the narrower sense, an evolution of pure experience by virtue of the law of habit. It is this evolution of pure experience in which Avenarius is primarily interested.

One has only to compare different civilizations and stages of culture to observe that the world may contain for one race and for one time very different objects of experience from those which it contains for another race or another time. Our own way of experiencing the world is certainly the outcome of an evolution. The discussion about possible objects of experience in the first section of this paper sought to make clear that almost anything can be an object of experience. We conceive of our experience to-day as being very much more valid, more adjusted to the facts of nature, more 'scientific' than the experience of our ancestors a few centuries back.

"We are disposed to think that we have awakened from credulity and superstition, and that we look out upon the world with a sane and critical observation. Perhaps we do, but it is interesting to note that experience has come to be what it is for the man of science among us as the result of the continual modification of a primitive and wholly uncritical experience.

About that primitive experience we, of course, know very little, but there is reason enough to suppose that it had a decidedly 'animistic' character. In that primitive stage of culture in our own prehistoric past no doubt many things could be objects of experience which could not be objects of our experience. There has been a progressive elimination of certain objects of experience, and a progressive enrichment of experience by the acquisition of other objects. When we are in an imaginative mood we sometimes lament that nature has lost for us the vivifying presence of the gods of the soil, the groves and the streams. But in a rationalizing mood, we say that we no longer introject into nature the likeness of ourselves.