Synthesized answer
James describes the world's unity as something that is not an absolute fact given by experience. _Primâ facie_, the world appears as a pluralism, with its unity resembling that of any collection [1]. Our higher thinking involves an effort to redeem this initial crude form of unity, postulating more unity than first experiences yield and subsequently discovering more [1]. However, absolute unity remains undiscovered and is a _Grenzbegriff_ [1].
The real order of the world, as it is given objectively at any moment, is the sum total of all its beings and events. This order is characterized by "collateral contemporaneity" of disjointed events, such as a sea-gull catching a fish, a tree falling, and twins being born in different places simultaneously [2, 3]. This "collateral contemporaneity" does not necessarily form a rational bond between events or unite them into a meaningful world for us [3]. We tend to break this given order into histories, arts, and sciences to feel at home, creating separate serial orders [3]. The passages suggest that there is no single point of view from which the world would appear as an absolutely single fact, and that the universe is wild and not always…
Synthesized from the book passages below. Chat with the book on Feynman for follow-up.
From the book
of _radical empiricism_, in spite of the fact that such brief nicknames are nowhere more misleading than in philosophy. I say 'empiricism,' because it is contented to regard its most assured conclusions concerning matters of fact as hypotheses liable to modification in the course of future experience; and I say 'radical,' because it treats the doctrine of monism itself as an hypothesis, and, {viii} unlike so much of the half-way empiricism that is current under the name of positivism or agnosticism or scientific naturalism, it does not dogmatically affirm monism as something with…
icking of the clock, the various organic feelings you may happen individually to possess, do these make a whole at all? Is it not the only condition of your mental sanity in the midst of them that most of them should become non-existent for you, and that a few others--the sounds, I hope, which I am uttering--should evoke from places in your memory that have nothing to do with this scene associates fitted to combine with them in what we call a rational train of thought,--rational, because it leads to a conclusion which we have some organ to appreciate? We have no organ or faculty to…
ndack wilderness, a man sneezes in Germany, a horse dies in Tartary, and twins are born in France. What does that mean? Does the contemporaneity of these events with one another and with a million others as disjointed, form a rational bond between them, and unite them into anything that means for us a world? Yet just such a collateral contemporaneity, and nothing else, is the real order of the world. It is an order with which we have nothing to do but to get away from it as fast as possible. As I said, we break it: we break it into histories, and we break it into arts, and we break it…
; and there may be in the whole universe no one point of view extant from which this would not be found to be the case. "Reason," as a gifted writer says, "is {ix} but one item in the mystery; and behind the proudest consciousness that ever reigned, reason and wonder blushed face to face. The inevitable stales, while doubt and hope are sisters. Not unfortunately the universe is wild,--game-flavored as a hawk's wing. Nature is miracle all; the same returns not save to bring the different. The slow round of the engraver's lathe gains but the breadth of a hair, but the difference…
ncept can be a valid substitute for a concrete reality except with reference to a particular interest in the conceiver. The interest of theoretic rationality, the relief of identification, is but one of a thousand human purposes. When others rear their heads, it must pack up its little bundle and retire till its turn recurs. The exaggerated dignity and value that philosophers have claimed for their solutions is thus greatly reduced. The only virtue their theoretic conception need have is simplicity, and a simple conception is an equivalent for the world only so far as the world is…