V
Examination of the Content of Experience
(See Exposition on Brief, Chapter 5)
L
ET US
now fix our attention upon pure experience. In what
does this consist when it comes into our consciousness, not
elaborated by our thinking? It is merely juxtaposition in space and
succession in time; an aggregate of nothing but unrelated single
entities. No one of the objects which there come and go has anything
to do with any other. At this stage, the facts of which we become
aware, and which mingle with our inner life, are absolutely without
bearing one upon another.
There the world is
a multiplicity of things of uniform importance. No thing, no
occurrence, can lay claim to any greater function in the fabric
of the world than any other constituent in the realm of experience.
If it is to become clear to us that this or that fact possesses
greater significance than another, we must not merely observe things
but arrange them in thought-relationships. The rudimentary organ of
an animal, which may not have the least significance in its organic
functioning, possesses just as much value for our experience as the
most important organ of the animal's body. That distinction between
greater and lesser importance does not become apparent to us till we
think back over the relationships of the individual constituents;
that is, until we work over our experience.
For our experience the snail, which
belongs to a lower stage in organization, is of equal value with the
most highly evolved animal. The distinctions between degrees of
perfection in organization become evident to us only when we
lay hold conceptually upon the multiplicity given to us in
experience, and work it through. From this point of view, likewise,
the culture of the Eskimo and that of the educated European are of
equal value; Caesar's significance in the history of human evolution
appears to mere experience no greater than that of one of his
soldiers. In the history of literature, Goethe stands no higher
than Gottsched
so long as we are considering mere experiential
actualities.
At this stage of
observation, the world appears to our minds as an absolutely flat
surface. No part of this surface rises above any other; none reveals
to our minds any distinction as compared with others. Only when the
spark of thinking strikes this surface do there come to light
elevations and depressions; one thing appears more or less
lifted above the other, all takes on a certain sort of form, lines
run out from one form to another; the whole becomes a self-sufficient
harmony.
The illustrations
we have chosen seem to us to show with sufficient clearness
what we mean in speaking of the greater or lesser significance of the
objects of perception (here considered as identical with the things
of experience): what we mean by that knowledge which first comes into
existence when we observe these objects in their interrelationship.
These illustrations, we believe, insure us against the
objection that the realm of our experience already reveals
endless distinctions among its objects before thinking appears on the
field: that a red surface, for instance, is different from a
green surface even without any activity of thought. That is true. But
any one who would bring this argument to bear against us has
entirely misconstrued our assertion. This is just what we maintain:
that what is presented to us by experience is an endless mass of
single entities. These single entities must naturally be different
one from another; otherwise they would not appear to us as an endless
unrelated multiplicity. We do not refer to an indistinguishableness
among the things perceived, but to the absolute want of meaning in
the single facts of the senses for the totality of our image of
reality. It is just because we recognize this endless qualitative
difference that we are driven to the conclusion
indicated.
If we were met by
a unity, well defined, composed of harmoniously ordered
constituents, we could not speak of the lack of distinction in
significance among the constituents in relation to one
another.
Whoever for such a
reason considers the comparison we have used inapplicable must have
failed to take hold of it at the real point of similarity. It would
certainly be fallacious if we should compare the perceptual world,
with its endlessly varied forms, to the uniform monotony of a
surface. But our surface was not intended to resemble the
manifold world of phenomena, but the unified total image that we have
of this world so long as thinking has not come in contact with
it. After the action of thought, each single entity in this total
image appears, not as it was mediated by mere experience, but
with the significance which it bears in relation to the whole of
reality. At the same time, each appears with characteristics
which were wholly wanting in its experiential
form.
According to our conviction,
Johannes Volkelt has been
remarkably successful in delineating within clear outlines that
which we are justified in designating as pure experience. Five years
ago [1881] this was strikingly described in his book on
Kants Erkenntnistheorie;
[Kant's Theory of Knowledge]
[Johannes Volkelt: Immanuel Kants Erkenntnistheorie. Leipzig, 1879.]
and in his latest publication,
Erfahrung und Denken,
[Experience and Thought]
[Johannes Volkelt: Erfahrung und Denken. Kritische Grundlegung der Erkenntnistheorie. Hamburg and Leipzig, 1886.]
he has pursued the subject still further. He has done this, to be sure,
in support of a point of view fundamentally different from ours
and a purpose unlike that of the present book. But this need not
hinder us from setting down here his remarkable
characterization of pure experience. This description simply shows us
the images which pass before our consciousness in a brief period in a
manner utterly void of interrelationships.
Volkelt says
[Kants Erkenntnistheorie, p. 168 f.]:
“For example, my consciousness now has as its content
the impression that I have worked diligently to-day;
immediately thereto is linked the impression that I can with a
clear conscience take a walk; again there suddenly appears the
perceptual image of the door opening and the postman entering;
the image of the postman soon appears with out-stretched hand, then
with mouth opening, then doing the opposite; at the same time there
blend with the perceptual content of the opening mouth all sorts of
impressions of hearing — among others, that of rain beginning
outside. The image of the postman vanishes from my consciousness and
the impressions which now enter have as their content, one by one:
grasping the scissors, opening the letters, a critical feeling
at illegible writing, visual images of the most varied written
symbols, and, united with these, manifold imaginative images and
thoughts; scarcely is this series at an end when there reappears the
impression of having worked diligently and — accompanied by
depression — the consciousness of the continuing rain;
then both of these vanish from my consciousness and there emerges an
impression whose content is that a difficulty supposed to have
been overcome in to-day's work has not been overcome; accompanying
this there enter the impressions: freedom of will, empirical
necessity, responsibility, the value of virtue, incomprehensibility,
etc., and these unite with one another in the most varied and
complicated ways — and so it
continues.”
Here is described
for us, with regard to a certain limited space of time, what we
really experience, that form of reality in which thinking has no
participation.
It need not be
supposed that a different result would have been attained if, instead
of this every-day experience, we had described what occurs in a piece
of scientific research or in an unusual natural phenomenon. In
these cases as in that, what passes before consciousness
consists of unrelated images. Thinking for the first time institutes
interrelationship.
We must also attribute to the
pamphlet of Dr. Richard Wahle, Gehirn
und Bewusstsein[Brain and Consciousness.](Vienna 1884), the service of having indicated in clear contours
that which is given to us by experience void of any element of
thought, only we must make the reservation that what
Wahle describes as characteristics pertaining without restriction
to the phenomena of the outer and the inner world holds good only for
the first stage of our observation of the world, that stage which we
have described. According to Wahle, we know only a
juxtaposition in space and succession in time. There can be,
according to him, no talk of a relationship between the things
appearing beside one another or after one another. For example, there
may be somewhere and somehow an inner relationship between the warm
sunbeam and the warming of the stone, but we know nothing of a causal
relationship; to us the only thing that is clear is that the second
fact comes after the first. There may likewise be somewhere, in a
world inaccessible to us, an inner relationship between our
brain-mechanism and our mental activity; but we know only that the
two are occurrences running in parallel lines; we are not at all
justified, for example, in assuming a causal relationship between the
two.
Of course, when Wahle sets forth
this assertion as the ultimate truth of science, we must oppose this
extension of the assertion; but it is entirely correct as applied to
the first form in which we become aware of
reality.
Not only are the
things of the outer world and the processes of the inner void of
interrelationship at this stage of our knowledge, but even our
own personality is an isolated unit in comparison with the rest
of the world. We perceive ourselves as one of the numberless percepts
without relationship to the objects which surround
us.
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