238 THE POSTULATE OF EMPIRICISM 



the absolute thought-experience. There is no need 

 of logical manipulation to effect the transforma 

 tion, nor could any logical consideration effect it. 

 If effected at all it is just by immediate experiences, 

 each of which is just as real (no more, no less) 

 as either of the two terms between which they lie. 

 Such, at least, is the meaning of the empiricist s 

 contention. So, when he talks of experience, he 

 does not mean some grandiose, remote affair that 

 / is cast like a net around a succession of fleeting 

 experiences; he does not mean an indefinite total, 

 comprehensive experience which somehow engirdles 

 an endless flux; he means that things are what 

 they are experienced to be, and that every experi 

 ence is some thing. 



From the postulate of empiricism, then (or, what 

 is the same thing, from a general consideration of 

 the concept of experience), nothing can be deduced, 

 not a single philosophical proposition. 1 The reader 



1 Excepting, of course, some negative ones. One could 

 say that certain views are certainly not true, because, by 

 hypothesis, they refer to nonentities, i.e., non-empiricals. 

 But even here the empiricist must go slowly. From his 

 own standpoint, even the most professedly transcendental 

 statements are, after all, real as experiences, and hence 

 negotiate some transaction with facts. For this reason, he 

 cannot, in theory, reject them in toto, but has to show con 

 cretely how they arose and how they are to be corrected. 

 In a word, his logical relationship to statements that pro 

 fess to relate to things-in-themselves, unknowables, inexperi 

 enced substances, etc., is precisely that of the psychologist 

 to the Zollner lines. 



