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

dualistic inner constitution, from which, if you
abstract the content, the consciousness will remain
revealed to its own eye. Experience, at
this rate, would be much like a paint of which
the world pictures were made. Paint has a dual
constitution, involving, as it does, a menstruum (2)
(oil, size or what not) and a mass of
content in the form of pigment suspended
therein. We can get the pure menstruum by
letting the pigment settle, and the pure pigment
by pouring off the size or oil. We operate
here by physical subtraction; and the usual
view is, that by mental subtraction we can
separate the two factors of experience in an

---
1 Paul Natorp: _Einleitung_in_die_Psychologie_, 1888, pp. 14, 112.
2 "Figuratively speaking, consciousness may be said to be the one
universal solvent, or menstruum, in which the different concrete kinds
of psychic acts and facts are contained, whether in concealed or in
obvious form." G.T.Ladd: _Psychology,_Descriptive_and_Explanatory_,
1894, p.30.
---

9
analogous way -- not isolating them entirely,
but distinguishing them enough to know that
they are two.

II

Now my contention is exactly the reverse of
this. _Experience,_I_believe,_has_no_such_inner_duplicity;_
_and_the_separation_of_it_into_consciousness_
_and_content_comes,_not_by_way_of_subtraction,_
_but_by_way_of_addition_ -- the addition, to a
given concrete piece of it, other sets of experiences,
in connection with which severally its
use or function may be of two different kinds.
The paint will also serve here as an illustration.
In a pot in a paint-shop, along with other
paints, it serves in its entirety as so much saleable
matter. Spread on a canvas, with other
paints around it, it represents, on the contrary,
a feature in a picture and performs a spiritual
function. Just so, I maintain, does a given undivided
portion of experience, taken in one
context of associates, play the part of a knower,
of a state of mind, of 'consciousness'; while in
a different context the same undivided bit of