Notes on William James and the terminus

William James

James defined radical empiricism as a 'mosaic philosophy, a philosophy of plural facts', which means that the relations that connect experiences (both conjunctive and disjunctive) are also experienced.

The terminus exists as a concept's idea, an idea in one's mind, and only when this becomes a sensible percept (when movement has stopped), we can say that it has been fulfilled: "The only function that one experience can perform is to lead into another experience; and the only fulfilment we can speak of is the reaching of a certain experienced end." Before that, we have a purely substitutional, or conceptual world, and we are only 'virtual knowers'. Our experiences are always unterminated perceptually, and "we commit ourselves to the current as if the port were sure. We live, as it were, upon the front edge of an advancing wave-crest, and our sense of a determinate direction in falling forward is all we cover of the future of our path." A differential quotient becomes a substitute for a traced-out curve. Our experience is only of variations of rate and direction, living in transitions more than in ends, as an experience of tendency, in advance of the experience that is to terminate it: transitions and terminations are only rarely fulfilled. A knowledge 'in transitu' is a 'pure experience', the present instant, an unqualified actuality undifferentiated into thing and thought, and only virtually classifiable. While a thing is permanent and has states, a fact of consciousness is a state. "Since the acquisition of conscious quality on the part of an experience depends upon a context coming to it, it follows that the sum total of all experiences, having no context, can not strictly be called conscious at all. It is a that, an Absolute, a 'pure' experience on an enormous scale, undifferentiated and undifferentiable into thought and thing."