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V0L. XIII. No. 6.	November, 1906

THE

psychological Review

EDITED BY

|	J. MARK BALDWIN	HOWARD C. WARREN

Johns Hopkins University	and	Princeton University

CHARLES H. JUDD, Yale University (Editor of the Monograph Series).
|	WITH THE CO-OPERATION FOR THIS SECTION OF

A. C. ARMSTRONG, Wesleyan University ; ALFRED BINET, Ecole des Hautes-
$tudes, Paris; W. L. BRYAN, Indiana University; WILLIAM CALDWELL, Mc-
(Jjill University; MARY W. CALKINS, Wellesley College; JOHN DEWEY,
Columbia University; J. R. ANGELL,University of Chicago ; C, LADD FRANKLIN,
^Baltimore; H. N. GARDINER, Smith College; G. H. HOWISON, University of
California; P. JANET,College de France; JOSEPH JASTROW,University of Wis-
consin ; ADOI.F MEYER, N. Y. Pathol. Institute; C. LLOYD MORGAN, University
College, Bristol; HUGO MtJNSTERBERG, Harvard University; E. A. PACE,
Catholic University, Washington ; G. T. W. PATRICK, University of Iowa ; CARL
StTUMPF, University, Berlin; R. W. WENLEY, University of Michigan.

CERTAIN CHARACTERISTICS OF EXPERIENCE

By STEPHEN S. COLVIN,

University of Illinois.

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CERTAIN CHARACTERISTICS OF EXPERIENCE.

Recent philosophical discussions have made extensive use of the
term experience. This is practically true of the new empiricism
which styles itself pragmatism and of absolute idealism as set forth by
Rbyce. These discussions haVe made it apparent that this term, like
many others of its kind, has no finally settled meaning, and that it can
thus be pressed into service as the starting point of lines of thought
which in the end are widely Separated.

That any ultimate agreement as to what experience really signifies
can be reached is perhaps too much to be hoped, yet any attempt to
clear up some of the obscurities which attach to the present use of the
term need not offer a plea of justification. I venture, therefore, to
suggest in the following pages some of those marks of experience
Which seem most important in the present state of philosophic un-
certainty.

I. There are some points of common agreement in regard to the
nature of experience, and I believe it can be stated without serious
fear of contradiction that experience must be taken as the ultimate
essence of the universe. It is neither derived from, nor conditioned
by, anything else. Both pragmatist and absolute idealist have clearly
recognized this truth. To have done this is a great gain, but the value
of the position has been materially lessened by the interpretation of
the meaning of experience which these two schools of thought have
afrived at. Roth have found in experience something that goes be-
yond human consciousness. The pragmatist, if we are to follow
James, seems to find his starting point in an infra-human and infra-
conscious experience, the absolutist seeks the goal of reality in a super-
human experience. In the speculations of James 6 pure experience '
has come to designate the primitive reality from which related human
experience has sprung, while on the other hand Royce and Bradley
have passed beyond human experience and have arrived at the expe-
rience of an absolute thinker, who because of his very absoluteness
is completely transcendent. The absolute idealist enquires whither
thought is tending, while the pragmatist enquires whence it came,

396397 CERTAIN CHARACTERISTICS OF EXPERIENCE.

but neither has arrived at anything actual. Both found their specu-
lations on consciousness, consciousness as we know it, human con-
sciousness, with all its limitations and imperfections. There is no
way of transcending this individual consciousness unless we take the
deadly leap. Absolute idealism leaps forward, pragmatism backward ;
absolute idealism carries thought to its completion and its negation,
while pragmatism traces it back to its original chaos whence it came.
In a world of infinite possibilities of experience we cannot arrive at
the completion the absolutist posits, neither in a world of finite rela-
tions can we trace thought back to its pure immanency before these
relations were evolved.

II. In opposition to both these views I venture to suggest that
experience has a complete identity with finite consciousness. The
two terms should be taken as interchangeable. There is no conscious-
ness that is not experience and no experience that is not conscious. If
we make experience wider than consciousness then we shall be obliged
to think of an experience which is prior to consciousness. Such an
experience, however, could never be known, and must forever remain
a pure abstraction, a veritable Ding-an-sich for human beings. James
thinks of pure experience as the original stuff from which everything
is derived. Known and knower are parts of pure experience and
develop from it. Yet he also describes this same pure experience as
the original flux of life before reflection has categorized it. "Only
new-born babes and persons in a semi-coma from sleep, dreams, ill-
ness or blows can have an experience pure in the literal sense of a
that which may not yet be defined as a what" Here pure experience
is made identical, apparently, with mere sensation or feeling. It is a
subconscious affair — but the subconscious is still conscious. I
emphasize this apparent contradiction to show how difficult it is to
escape the assumption that experience must be conscious in order to
be experience. Consciousness cannot be a function of experience,
then, as James would have us believe. He himself cannot carry this
doctrine to its legitimate conclusion, but is forced to find in pure
experience rudimentary consciousness.

While we must be on our guard to avoid this error of an infra-con-
scious experience, we must be equally careful to recognize that there
can be no consciousness (at least as far as we can know it) that is not
itself experience. In other words there can be no pure consciousness
which can ever be gotten at.

Experience implies a content, and consciousness must possess, even
in its lowest forms, a noetic element in order to be conceived as con-DISCUSSION.

398

sciousness. Mere immediate consciousness, a pure feeling without
differentiation or direction, if it exists cannot be known. Only objects
are known and for an experience to be an element in a subsequent and
wider experience it must contain objective elements.

III. Further it must be insisted that experience is always the sub-
iect and never the object. What we actually know are objects ex-
perienced and not experience as such. From this it can be seen that
the assertion of Spinoza that we not only know, but know that we
know, is impossible. Thought is buried in its object and not turned
on itself in the moment of knowing. Consciousness is that which
conditions all objects but which cannot be conditioned by itself. The
experience of the moment is always immediate, directly given, pure
actuality, while things experienced are always mediate. Immediate
knowledge is a contradiction in terms.

Further we can no more know past experience as such than we can
know present experience. What we know are objects of past experi-
ence and not the past experience itself as subject. When we introspect
and examine a state of consciousness which has past, we cannot do this
by bringing up the consciousness as such but by again experiencing
the objects of the past state. If a contentless experience could exist,
therefore, it could not be known. Between it and the present there
would be an absolute break, a gulf that could not be bridged.

No purely immanent state of consciousness could be recalled in
memory, for memory is composed of images. We at once are con-
vinced on introspection that as the content of an experience grows less
exact the experience itself tends to slip out of consciousness. There
has been much talk of late about the truth of feeling, but this is to my
mind a manifest absurdity, if by feeling is implied pure affective im-
manence without content or direction. Truth means relation of one
part of experience to another, and if there are no parts to relate
there can be no truth.

Perhaps the meaning of the above point of view may be better
shown by a concrete illustration. As I am writing these words, I see
the lamp before me. It is the focal element in a complex noetic state.
I shut my eyes and try to analyze this state as a past experience. What
I really arrive at in my introspection is not the subjective state of con-
sciousness, but the experienced objects of my past state. The objects
of my introspective state are, as far as I am able to recall the past
moment of consciousness, the same, as were the objects of my direct
visual and motor experience a moment before. They are somewhat
less permanent and vivid and definite than they were in the original399 CERTAIN CHARACTERISTICS OF EXPERIENCE.

state. However, in this introspective analysis I have nothing given
that was not present in the direct perception and I in no way arrive at
my past experience as such in distinction from the objects of my past
experience.

Consciousness reveals to us various classes of objects. First of all
there are the objects given to us through the direct sensory experience.
This is the stuff from which all experience as such is supposed to take
its rise, yet it cannot constitute experience itself, because as mere sensa-
tion it cannot be known, but only as sensation interpreted or objectified.
It is this interpretation or objectification that gives the reality to objects
of experience, and it is this same tendency which gives various classes
of objects in experience and leads to the separation of the world into
mind and matter, res cogitantes and res extensce. Objects are always
in the last analysis partly sensory and partly ideational. This is clearly
true of all objects perceived and imagined. Of objects of reason this
is not quite as evident, since the symbol of the objective reality has
come to take the place of the concrete sensory experience. This
symbol itself, however, is sensory and stands in the last analysis for
the original sensory experience. The relationships between objects,
which from a large part of our conscious life, are themselves not
detached nor separated from the objects, but inhere in them and are
experienced in these objects just as much as any aspect of the objects
such as color, or form, or hardness or odor. Relations are not super-
imposed on the objects but arise in the objects — they are not detached
ideas. Further our experience of bodily states, which give rise to the
feelings and emotions and, in muscular adjustments, to the experience
of will, are clearly also sensory in their character and attach themselves
to objects in the world outside the body. It is erroneous to suppose
that these subjective states are experienced as purely subjective and
contentless. An emotion has locality and externality both in the world
outside the body and in the body itself. Indeed there can be no affec-
tive state that does not take a concrete and objective form, nor can
there be a state of will that does not have an objective point of attach-
ment. It is often held, apparently, that these states exist as pure and
immediate, that they can be arrived at directly. Introspection shows
that this is not a true analysis of the experience. All our experience
whether sensorial, imaginary, rational, affective or voluntary, is the
experience of something objective.

It happens, however, that among these various objects there are
some elements which seem more permanent and abiding, more general
and universal, and these are taken to belong to the material world,DISCUSSION.

400

while others are regarded as individual, peculiar, variable and are
looked upon as mental. There is no object that cannot be looked at
from these two standpoints and as the emphasis is given to one or to
the other of these aspects the object is regarded as mental or as ma-
terial. Thus arose the ancient distinction between primary and sec-
ondary qualities of matter, which, however, is only a relative distinction
and never one that can be made absolute.

Psychology has to do with objects in so far as they exhibit mental
constituents and relations, but it has no objects that belong entirely to
itself. It has nothing absolutely peculiar, and does not consider con-
sciousness as such apart from objects, as is often held to be the case.
The gravest confusions have arisen when the mental world has been
made identical with experience (consciousness) as such. We are
told, for example, that the mind knows only ideas, the reason for this
assertion being that the mind cannot know something outside of con-
sciousness— which is a self-evident assertion. Ideas, however, strictly
speaking are simply aspects of objects and cannot be detached from
these objects and be known in their purity.

Many tangles of epistemology may be traced, I believe, to this con-
fusion of consciousness as subject and the mental world as object. The
two aspects of objects have been violently separated and then the at-
tempt is made to bridge the gulf by various theories of knowledge,
none of which is adequate to accomplish its purpose. The trend of
all such assumptions is toward subjective idealism or absolute idealism
and away from the healthful realism which gives vitality to our thinking.

IV. As a matter of fact all experience is realistic, but experience
itself is not real. This may seem a contradiction, but a closer ex-
amination will reveal the truth of the statement. As to the first part
of the proposition, its truth lies in the fact that to have any experience
means to have an object, ultimately an object with a sensory basis, an
object which has a degree of permanence, stability and universality,
and hence a reality.

There is no question of going outside of the experience to a trans-
experiential reality, a manifest impossibility, but of giving to the ob-
ject in experience this quality of reality. Indeed, to have an experi-
ence, to be conscious, means nothing more nor less than to objectify,
to have a content, to give a permanence. There is no experience,
never mind how rudimentary and incomplete, which is not of this
nature — if one should exist it could not be known. All experience
must therefore be realistic.

Yet experience as such, being the immanence of pure being, can401 CERTAIN CHARACTERISTICS OF EXPERIENCE.

be called neither real nor true. These terms apply only to objects of
experience in their relations and connections. Experience simply is,
the ultimate fact of the universe, which, because of its ultimate nature,
cannot be in itself described nor known.

Some recent discussions in regard to the nature of feeling hint at
an experience that is purely immanent. Dr. Washburn, for example,
speaks of feelings that are u absolutely unanalyzable and unrealiz-
able." Among these she gives feelings of relation and of pleasure-
pain. Neither of these experiences, I would insist, ever occurs with-
out attaching itself to some object, either within or without the body
and cannot be known except as objective. Indeed, Dr. Washburn
should hold that they possess this objective characteristic, since she
considers them as motor attitudes, the feelings of relation as of a ves-
tigial nature, and pleasure-pain u as representing the most fundamental
of all primitive motor attitudes."1

In the sense in which I am using the term there can be no state
that is entirely mental and subjective, as some writers would hold. I
cannot, therefore, believe, as Professor Stratton affirms,2 that imagina-
tion, for example, is purely mental.

It is as clearly objective in certain of its aspects as is perception,
and is to be treated from the same realistic standpoint. The objects
which it contains are not any less real nor true than those given in sen-
sory experience. It is an error to consider imagination thus peculiarly
subjective and unreal.

It may seem that the foregoing analysis had done away with con-
sciousness as such and has left merely objects of experience, since ex-
perience expresses itself objectively and cannot exist without its objects.
Although this relation between experience and its objects is one that
cannot be dissolved, experience is not its objects, — it is, however,
capable of description and analysis only through its objects. As the
ultimate it cannot be known, but still it must be. To say that it is
nothing is both true and false, — true in the sense that it is not an object
among objects, false in the sense that it has no being. It cannot be
imagined, for imagination exists only in terms of objects of conscious-
ness ; no more can it be perceived, because perception rests on imagi-
nation and sensation. It cannot be rationally deduced, for reason em-
ploys symbols (themselves objects and standing for objects).

Yet, on the other hand, experience is the final solvent of all things.

*See Journal oj Philosophy, Psychology, and Scientific Methods, February i,
1906.

2 See Psychological Bulletin, January 15, 1906.DISCUSSION.

402

The reality of any content of experience maybe doubted, but the being
of the experience is the final fact which cannot be brought into ques-
tion. Such a doctrine as this may perhaps be designated as mystical,
but if it is mystical I believe it is necessarily so. The seeming mysti-
cism which it contains results from the impossibility of giving an ob-
jective account of the immediate fact of being, and does not arise from
an attempt to transcend the immediate and to reach a supra- or infra-
experiential reality. It is not due to an attempt to know the unknow-
able. It rests in the fact that we cannot put into objective terms that
which forever must remain subject.

Experience should not be looked on as merely a logical fact, made
necessary as an antithesis to the object experienced. It is more than
formal, it is actual. It has been recognized at various times by various
names, but it is always, whether recognized or not, present in some
form. It has been termed, for example, the 4 soul/the 4 synthetic
unity of apperception,' the 4 pure ego.' Attempts of recent date have
been made to banish it, or its equivalent, consciousness, from psy-
chology. James has styled consciousness 44 the faint rumor left behind
by the disappearing 4 soul' upon the air of philosophy," but though
thus condemned to live a spook-like existence, it still refuses to pass
completely. Like the ghost of Banquo it reappears when the least
desired to put to confusion the philosophic feast the pragmatist would
spread. It will not down, but claims its place at the table of experience.

V. Another mark of experience is that it comes always with a tinge
of personality, but is not itself identical with personality. Per-
sonality is an object of consciousness. As has been previously stated,
we know no consciousness that has not this characteristic of personal
warmth. This peculiarity of all human experience joins together
objects experienced in certain groups and does not permit the free
interchange of these with objects of other groups. Whether this
grouping is ever transcended or not cannot be experienced. We seem
to have evidence from mental pathology of one set of experiences
passing over and uniting writh another set in cases of dual and multiple
personality. However, multiple personality may be legitimately in-
ferred but never experienced. The experience is always that of
grouped objects tinged with the coloring of our personality. What is
true of multiple personality is likewise true of the infra-conscious.
As soon as objects inferred to exist in the infra-conscious become
known, they have become stamped with the mark of personality.

By way of summary it may be added that experience is the final
being of the universe and the only purely immanent actuality that403 CERTAIN CHARACTERISTICS OF EXPERIENCE.

exists. It is itself not known, but only described in terms of its objects
with which, however, it cannot be identified. This experience is
always given in a finite, personal way and is equivalent to human con-
sciousness, being nothing more nor less. It is not, however, to be
confused with the mental aspect of objects, which is the subject matter
of psychology, and is not to be put in antithesis with the material
world which is merely an aspect of objects of experience on an equal
footing with the mental aspect. Experience embraces both the material
and the mental and the existence of one can no more be doubted than
that of the other. On this basis all difficulty of relating the mental
and the material disappears, together with many problems of episte-
mology and the contentions of idealism and realism. Indeed, experi-
ence is clearly and always realistic in the sense that reality attaches to
all objects of experience, which by the very fact of objectification are
given a permanence, stability and universality. And here the value
of this point of view is seen, since it does away with old time useless
contentions and gives back to the philosopher and psychologist the
common-sense view of reality which physical science and practical
thinking have never for a moment abandoned. It opens the way for
a sane discussion of parallelism and the complex questions which
arise in the problem of the relations between mind and body; it ban-
ishes that spectre of philosophic thought, subjective idealism and
leaves psychology free to go about its business like any other science.

Stephen S. Colvin.

University of Iuinois.

^he MS. of this article was received July 6, 1906. — Ed.This book is a preservation facsimile produced for
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