CHAPTER VII 



THE INTERPRETATION OF EXPERIENCE 



I. Experience 



The most naive and unphilosophical of persons makes certain 

 distinctions in experience, whether he gives names to them or not. 

 He knows that when he is feehng satisfied or sad he is hav- 

 ing an experience that is different in some way or an- 

 other from that which occupies his attention when he is think- 

 ing how to solve some question that puzzles him ; and he knows 

 that to imagine what might happen in certain circumstances is 

 quite different from wishing that he had acted otherwise than 

 he did yesterday. The average individual habitually makes these 

 distinctions and is apt to regard thinking and feeling and wish- 

 ing and imagining, quite as distinct from one another as tea and 

 sugar and bread and butter are, all the former being kinds of 

 experience much in the same way that all the latter are kinds 

 of food. 



Yet neither genetically nor ultimately is this analysis of ex- 

 perience into hard and fast and sharply separated kinds justified. 

 James has reminded us — and our own memories corroborate him 

 — that the child's experience is a blooming buzzing confusion, 

 in which there is such a wealth of material, such a profusion of 

 possibilities of new and intensely interesting experiences that even 

 the great and blatant distinction between one's self and the things 

 about one is not made. This closeness to nature, this unification 

 with the things of experience is one of the first of those beauties 

 of the innocence of childhood to succumb to the dangers of a 

 little knowledge. It is only as one passes through the stage of 

 the sharp distinction between the self and the world, and con- 

 scientiously thinks away this dualism that seems a necessary 



56 



