122 PRESIDENTIAL ADDRESS SECTION E. 



things in terms of, or through a logical process of inference 

 from, whatever principle seemed to state most succinctly and 

 most suggestively the essential nature of experience; and as 

 philosophy has progressed the ideal of getting everything ex- 

 pressed in terms of experience itself has become more and more 

 insistent, until to-day this may be said to be the character of 

 all living philosophical thought. William James, for instance, 

 calls the fundamental method or " way of thinking " of his 

 philosophy " radical empiricism," meaning thereby that what- 

 ever is real for us must enter in one form or another into our 

 experience, and whatever enters into um experience — whether 

 " things " or " relations " — must be taken as real/ Similarly, 

 Richard Avenarius has formulated the philosophic ideal or 

 principle of pure experience, i.e., that all interpretation of ex- 

 perience should be in terms of experience itself and not of non- 

 experiential hypothesis.^ Lastly, Shadworth Hodgson, a 

 philosopher whose work may be said to be the culmination of the 

 English or British tradition of experiential philosophy, and whose 

 method of thinking is not less exact and thorough-going than 

 that of the most patient scientist — a distinguished French savant 

 has said of his philosophical writing that it is so clear that we 

 can see him thinking — has given an analysis O'f experience in its 

 general nature'^ which is thoroughly in keeping with the stand- 

 point of scientific investigation, while dififerentiating this from 

 the distinctive attitude of philosophy. It is not my intention 

 to state even in outline such a " general analysis " of experience 

 ■ — I have tried to do so elsewhere.* But I want to try to indicate 

 the standpoint of philosophy in relation to science. First of 

 all, however, I may perhaps be allowed briefly to illustrate what 

 is meant bv getting experience interpreted in terms of experience 

 itself, by reference to a question which happens to be a familiar 

 one to mvself, namely, that of the relation between body and 

 mind.\ 



From the general standpoint of science the body is simply 

 a portion of the material world, subject to its laws of cause 

 and effect, and itself the cause or " real condition " of the 

 appearance of mind. But however true this may be from the 

 point of view of the ascertainment of the general or objective 

 conditions of our experience, ])hilosophy insists that unless these 

 conditions can themselves be expressed in terms of experience, 

 we have still got an inadequate conception of the nature of body 

 and its relation to mind. If we ask what is the distinction in 



^Essays in Radical Eiiifricism, p. 42 aiui fassini : The Mcoiiini^ of 

 Truth. Preface, pp. xii-xiii. 



'Philosophic ah Denken der Welt genidss dent Priiizip des kleinsten 

 Kraftmasscs: Prolegomena su einer Kritik der reinen Rrfahrung, §§ 51 ff., 

 y\ ff. 



"The Metap:iv.uc of Experience, bk. i, ch. ii. etc. 



* English Philosophy: A Study - / its Method and Gencr.'l Dei<clop- 

 ment, ch. i.x. 



'Cy. my "Note'' on the subject in last year's Journal — Rcpt. S.A. Ass. 

 for Adv. of Sc: Stellenbosch (1917). 249. 



