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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 25 February 2009
In many contemporary philosophical writings, what is most surprising to me is not the things asserted, nor those denied, but those not even mentioned (or barely mentioned as of no importance). Several of these slighted topics are summed up in the title of this essay. At the age of twenty, when I was not reading any technical philosophers, nor any author (unless a poet or two) who held an essentially social view of experience, I attempted to persuade myself of the adequacy of a non-social view, expressed partly in a self-interest theory of motivation, and partly in an idea of perception as experience of things not themselves constituted by any sort of experiences. So far from succeeding in this attempt, I began to find reasons for regarding both motivation and perception as manifestations of a single principle, that of the overlapping or inter-individual unity of minds, not simply of human minds, but of mind on various levels of, nature, including inorganic nature. This overlapping I thought I found in experience itself, and not merely through speculation or postulation. Subsequent reading in philosophy has not shown me a basic error in Hhis early philosophizing, but only a vagueness and blurring of dis; Jinctions which, when taken into account, strengthen rather than weaken the case.
page 98 note 1 See, e.g., Wisdom, John, Philosophy and Psycho-analysis (1953), pp.42–5, 79 f., 85, 97, 133 f., 140 f., 144, 204–6, 233 ff., 236–43.Google Scholar
page 98 note 2 For an interesting contemporary instance, see Vax, L., “Introduction à la Métaphysique de Raymond Ruyer”, Rev. de Métaph. et de Morale, 58e Année (1953), pp. 188–202Google Scholar. Also Ruyer, , Néo-Finalisme (Paris, 1952), especially Chs. XIV-XV. Views such as Ruyer's are not discussed in England under the heading “metaphysics”. Indeed, at the moment, they are not discussed at all.Google Scholar
page 100 note 1 Collingwood's denial of truth to metaphysics (Essay on Metaphysics, pp. 13–14) rests on the notion that metaphysical generality means collapse of contrast. This is an error. No one says, e.g., that “everything feels”; for of course numbers do not, nor do mere loosely-unified aggregates.
page 100 note 2 E.g. Gerard, R., in The Scientific Monthly, LXIV (1947), pp. 500 ff.Google Scholar; Wright, S., The American Naturalist, LXXXVII (1953), pp. 12–17. Also some of the closing paragraphs of his article on “Evolution, Organic”, in Encyclopaedia Britannica (1949).Google Scholar
page 101 note 1 “Empirical Propositions and Hypothetical Statements.” Mind, 59 (1950), pp. 289–312.Google Scholar
page 101 note 2 Broad, C. D., The Mind and Its Place in Nature (1925), pp. 204,630 f. Broad assumes that all “mentalism” or psychicalism must agree with Berkeley and Leibniz as to the “delusiveness” of spatial experience. This assumption is inapplicable to some recent forms of psychicalism.Google Scholar
page 101 note 3 See, e.g., Peirce, , Collected Papers (1931–1935), pars. 6.133, 264–5, 277Google Scholar; Whitehead, , Adventures of Ideas, pp. 241–4, 259–60Google Scholar; Process and Reality, pp. 95–126. In the first passage cited, especially on p. 243, Whitehead shows, I think, how all that is cogent in Ryle's account of mind could and would be contained in a well-thought-out panpsychic system. See also Parker, DeWitt H., Experience and Substance (1941), Chs. V, VI, XIV.Google Scholar
page 103 note 1 See, e.g., Whitehead, , Nature and Life (republished as Part III of Modes of Thought—1938); also Adventures of Ideas (1932), Ch. XI. Collingwood complains that Whitehead has not told us “what are the real facts in nature which oblige us to make” the abstraction “matter”. (See The Idea of Nature—published posthumously in 1945—last chapter.) This is as surprising as much else in Collingwood's account of Whitehead, who of course has specified in some detail what the facts in question are, e.g., the monotonous regularity, due to slight creative originality, on low levels of experience; the limited objectives of physics, the structure of the human body, etc. Collingwood may have been misled by the use, in Nature and Life only, of “life” in the broadest possible sense, seeming to blur the careful distinction made elsewhere between “living” and “nonliving” systems or “societies”. That there is no contradiction a glance at Whitehead's Principles of Natural Knowledge, paragraph 64.6, should show.Google Scholar
page 103 note 2 See Other Minds, especially pp. 205 ff.
page 104 note 1 I venture to urge the reader to look up pp. 360–5 in Whitehead's Process and Reality.
page 106 note 1 Price, H. H., Thinking and Experience (1953), pp.58–60, 79 f.Google ScholarAnscombe, G. E. M., in her article, “The Reality of the Past”, in Philosophical Analysis (ed. by Black, Max), 1950, pp.42, 47–8, seems to me to make this identification.Google Scholar
page 106 note 2 See, e.g., Peirce, Collected Papers, I.37f.
page 106 note 3 See Whitehead, Adventures of Ideas, pp. 235 f., 284; Peirce, op. cit., I.37–39, 167, 170, 311, 325, 6.21, 70, 99, 127–31, 133 f., 264, 268, 277, 332. Broad's declared inability to understand this doctrine of Whitehead's is perhaps not surprising. For he seems never to have noted the social structure of experience on which the entire theory is based. Certainly Peirce would have understood, for he had to a considerable extent noted it. (C. D. Broad, in Mind, 57 (1948). pp. 144 f.)
page 107 note 1 See The Philosophy of G. E. Moore, ed. by P. A. Schilpp, pp. 223–52.Moore, in his reply (pp. 653–60), finds difficulties with both views—as well he might, since they are converse half-truths!
page 108 note 1 Some valuable discussions of the “argument by analogy” have recently appeared in Mind. See especially Allen, A. H. B., “Other Minds”, Mind, 61 (1952). pp.328–48. His theory of an identity of form between expressed emotions and their physical expressions can be carried somewhat farther than he carries it. See my “The Monistic Theory of Expression”, Journal of Philosophy, 50 (1953). PP.425–34.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
page 108 note 1 Other Minds, p. 217.