A Pluralistic Universe

Gustav Theodor Fechner

Fechner barely registers with English readers, yet James treats him as the coming influence, the thinker whose intense concreteness fills him with admiration. Against the shiveringly thin wrappings of transcendental idealism, Fechner offers a world thick and burly enough to live in, and James contrasts him with absolutism precisely to show that the doctrine of the absolute need not fill the whole welkin. His presence in the lectures gives pluralism a vivid, concrete ally rather than a mere abstraction.

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

Hegel saw a real dialectic movement in things, and James grants that, taken in the rough, he is not only harmless but accurate. His originality lay in transporting the process from the sphere of percepts to that of concepts, making contradiction germinative and superseding the old logic of identity. But he clung to the rationalist contempt for the given world of sense, and his studious vagueness leaves James confessing he makes no claim to understand him — only to treat him impressionistically.

Henri Bergson

Bergson insists that concepts yield only static relations — maps of positions, eternal truths of comparison — and never touch the world of causal and dynamic relations, of activity and history. James agrees, and uses him to argue that insight into moving life requires perception, not bare conception. Yet James presses further than Bergson: concepts also bring new values into life, and abstractness itself seems to carry a touch of ideality, so the break with intellectualism is not total.

F. H. Bradley

Bradley defines his desired intellectual transitions only negatively — not spatial, temporal, predicative, causal, or relational — and his nearest approach to describing them suggests nothing but the conflux pure experience already offers, as when space, white, and sweet are confluent in a lump of sugar. James finds him repeating the fable of the dog, the bone, and its image in the water, asking for a duplicate of what he already possesses. Polemic against him is odious, James admits, but with absolutism in possession in so many quarters, silence would count as superficiality or inability.

Immanuel Kant

Kant's unity of apperception — the fact that to be counted in experience a thing must be witnessed — gets transformed by his successors into a living spirit of the world, and hence into a monism of a devout kind. James uses this genealogy to show how rationalism preserves affinities with monism, since wholeness goes with union, while empiricism inclines to pluralistic views. Kant thus stands behind the whole debate the lectures stage: the habit of explaining parts by wholes against the habit of explaining wholes by parts.

Josiah Royce

Royce appears in these lectures as a philosopher of continuity and absolute truth, quoted on 'loyalty to loyalty' and on truth at large as a momentous issue against the poor scraps of true particulars. He is also one of the combatants in the scandal of activity, excluding opponents with a grundsätzlich ausgeschlossen and reviewing Stout in the ongoing quarrel. James treats him with respect but keeps his distance, since Royce's absolutism is exactly the monistic position radical empiricism must answer.