"Essays in Radical Empiricism" - читать интересную книгу автора (James William)

is a part of pure experience; one if its 'terms'
becomes the subject or bearer of the knowledge,
the knower,(1) the other becomes the object
known. This will need much explanation
before it can be understood. The best way to

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1 In my _Psychology_ I have tried to show that we need no knower
other than the 'passing thought.' [_Principles of Psychology, vol. I,
pp. 338 ff.]
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get it understood is to contrast it with the alternative
view; and for that we may take the
recentest alternative, that in which the evaporation
of the definite soul-substance has proceeded
as far as it can go without being yet
complete. If neo-Kantism has expelled earlier
forms of dualism, we shall have expelled all
forms if we are able to expel neo-kantism in its
turn.
For the thinkers I call neo-Kantian, the word
consciousness to-day does no more than signalize
the fact that experience is indefeasibly dualistic
in structure. It means that not subject,
not object, but object-plus-subject is the minimum
that can actually be. The subject-object
distinction meanwhile is entirely different from
that between mind and matter, from that between
body and soul. Souls were detachable,
had separate destinies; things could happen to
them. To consciousness as such nothing can
happen, for, timeless itself, it is only a witness
of happenings in time, in which it plays no
part. It is, in a word, but the logical correlative
of 'content' in an Experience of which the

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peculiarity is that _fact_comes_to_light_ in it, that
_awareness_of_content_ takes place. Consciousness
as such is entirely impersonal -- 'self' and its
activities belong to the content. To say that I
am self-conscious, or conscious of putting forth
volition, means only that certain contents, for
which 'self' and 'effort of will' are the names,
are not without witness as they occur.
Thus, for these belated drinkers at the Kantian
spring, we should have to admit consciousness
as an 'epistemological' necessity, even if