Note 96 — Chapter II · PRAGMATISM AND THE PRAGMATIST MOVEMENT

The following are my reasons for saying that the “New Realism” was already to some extent lurking in the “radical empiricism” of James. (1) Although teaching unmistakably the “activity” of mind, James seemed to think this activity “selective” rather than “creative” (falling in this idea behind his much-admired Bergson). (2) Despite this belief in the activity of the mind, he had the way of regarding consciousness as (to some extent) the mind’s “content”—an attitude common to all empirical psychologists since Hume and the English associationists. And from this position (legitimate so far from the psychological point of view) he went on to the idea (expressed in a troublesome form in the article, “Does Consciousness exist?”) that consciousness is not an entity or substance—of course it is not in the ordinary sense of “entity.” (3) Then from this he seemed to develop the idea that the various “elements” that enter into consciousness to be transformed into various “relationships” do not suffer any substantial change in this quasi-subjective “activity.” Therefore, as Professor Perry puts it (Present Tendencies, p. 353), “the elements or terms which enter into consciousness and become its content may now be regarded as the same elements which, in so far as otherwise related, compose physical nature [italics mine]. The elements themselves, the ‘materia prima,’ or stuff of pure experience, are neither psychical nor physical.” It is in this last absurd sentence [simply a piece of quasi-scientific analysis, the error of which Critical Idealism would expose in a moment] that the roots, I think, of “new realism” are to be found—a doctrine whose unmitigated externalism is the negation of all philosophy.