Page:Philosophical Review Volume 22.djvu/135

No. 2.] sensational flux, instead of taking it just as it comes. Philosophy should seek this kind of living understanding of the movement of reality, not follow science in vainly patching together fragments of its dead results. Radical empiricism makes for pluralism: experience shows us multiplicity, diversity, opposition, and not a block-universe, not the completely organized harmonious system of the Absolutists and Monists in which all differences and oppositions are reconciled. Pluralism takes perceptual experience at its face value, and such experience reveals countless independent individual beings. The concrete perceptual flux, taken just as it comes, offers in our activity-situations perfectly comprehensible instances of causal agency. Free will means nothing but real novelty: we also experience perceptual novelties all the while. Hence there is room for chance, for novelty, for freedom in the world of radical experience. Moreover, the pluralistic universe satisfies the demands of our moral nature, while there is no room for morality in the rigorous deterministic universe of the absolutist. In such a world of novelty and change, in which not everything is the necessary effect of something else, man is free to risk realizing his ideal. Each concrete moral situation is something new, special, unique, in which the agent must eventually judge and act for himself.

James bases his world-view upon the testimony of immediate experience and upon the demands of the human will. The intellect in the form of natural science and the old philosophies fastens a block-universe upon us, while the will cries out for independence and a plastic malleable world, and unanalyzed experience gives us the world we want. Pragmatism not only suggests that we trust direct experience and follow the will, but modifies the conception of truth to meet the situation. The will itself becomes the test of truth; the test of a theory, belief, or doctrine is its practical consequences, its effect upon us, its relation to the human will. "The possession of truth is not an end in itself, but only a preliminary means to other vital satisfactions." Always ask yourself what difference it will make in your experience whether you accept materialism or spiritualism,