IMMEDIATISM 233 



about is but a reformulation of a meaningless problem, how 

 things-in-themselves can be known. 



The path of evolutionary doctrine is abandoned in the treat- 

 ment of sense-experience, which is only relatively pure, as if it 

 were absolutely so, and thus radically different from conceptual 

 experience. It is not true to say of any sensation that it is just 

 an experience in which facts come and are. The fixity and deter- 

 minateness of the things of sense-experience is after all only the 

 comparative fixity of any product of evolution. If we ask the 

 pragmatist himself how the original pure experience of the babe 

 or of the race comes to be transformed into such an experience 

 as ours, his answer is that a simon pure experience can have no 

 survival value. Sentience has developed only in so far as the 

 pure experience has been broken up and become cognitive. Con- 

 sciousness in us tends to persist and extend because "the ten- 

 dency of raw experience to extinguish the experient himself is 

 lessened just in the degree in which the elements in it that have a 

 practical bearing upon life are analyzed out of the continuum and 

 verbally fixed and coupled together, so that we may know what 

 is in the wind for us and get ready to react in time." 1 The diver- 

 sified character of our purest sense-experience is thus attributable 

 in an indefinite degree to the work of past thought (using 'thought' 

 in its broadest sense). There is, then, on the pragmatist's own 

 showing, no chasm between a perceptualized and a conceptualized 

 experience. And if the difference between them is only one of 

 degree, why should he so urgently maintain that the criteria of 

 truth and falsity are utterly inapplicable to sense-experience? 

 Surely the reality of sense-experience must be correlative with 

 its truth. To affirm reality of it at large has no significance. 

 Everything is real in some sense. It is relevant to predicate 

 i eality of any thing, or even quality, in sense-experience, only if 

 we mean that it is really the sort of thing, or the specific quality, 

 we have perceived it as; and the perceiving or taking it as of 

 any sort or species is always a true or false way of taking it. 



l Op. cit., p. 350. 



