Human Experience - A Study Of Its Structure

HUMAN EXPERIENCE A Study of Its Structure By VISCOUNT HALDANE Author of The Reign of Relativity, The Philosophy of Humanism 1 etc-NEW YORK K P. DUTTON COMPANY 681 Firm AVENUE Copyright 1926 By E. P. All Rights Reserved Printed in the United States of America PREFACE WHAT this book aims at is a philosophical inquiry into the nature and meaning of human experience. The investigation is not directed to any particular variety of that experience, hut to what the very existence of experience implies. This is a question that involves philosophy, and the method employed has therefore to he a philosophical one. The problem is not only more vital than we are apt, in our easy-going fashion, to take it to be, but it is also a further-reaching one. It forces us into asking what we mean by our minds, and into endeavouring to discover the relation of mind to the objective world. For we seem to have assumed, too hastily and perhaps unconsciously, that mind is a sort of thing of which our experience is a detachable activity or property. In this volume a different view is submitted for consideration. There is nothing really strange or even new in the view so submitted. It is in principle as old as Plato and Aristotle and Plotinus. But from time to time questions of this sort have to vi PREFACE be examined afresh, if only that they may retain their vitality. There are those who may say that if the work of inquiry into the char acter of human experience had to be done over again it should have been done by one who was not on the verge of three score and ten. But experience is an obscure subject, despite our habitual employment of the word. A lifetime is required even for the reading of what has been saidabout it. Study is unavoidable, for I am unable to believe that the work of suc cessive generations of great thinkers, who have concentrated effort on the significance of this slippery term, is likely to have left us wholly without some light And more than the methods to which psychology is constrained to confine itself, even to-day, appears to be neces sary before we can be confident of what the real problem is. We have to be clear as to the difficulties that confront us if we are to be assured of freedom from assumptions we are pt to make inadvertently, assumptions of which the greatest of our intellectual fore fathers have told us, and which they have recorded for us But this book is no attempt at a history of these things. What it contains I have sought to work out in my own fashion PREFACE vii Psychology and philosophy are to-day not divorceable nor is there any lack of interest in either. The desire for philosophy has indeed assumed new forms. That the desire as fashioned in the forms of our period is widely diffused, the popular libraries and the pub lishers lists show us. We are moved by the spirit of our time, and it seems clear that this spirit has not really done with philosophy What shape philosophy will next assume no one can say. But its problems, as defined through the course of centuries that have passed, remain. The problems at least are still with us. To show why this must be so, is one of the purposes of the book. It is intended to be an introduction to the study of the problem of philosophy as it stands, and not of its history It is written to be read by those who are inter ested, but not of necessity much trained, in philosophical inquiry. The view of the char acterof reality set forth follows upon a pro longed study of the history of thought Whether I have disentangled aright the true nature of experience must be judged of by others than myself. I would not have ven tured to write had I not believed that the con clusions in these pages were at least in har viii PEEFACE mony with much that seems to have proved reliable in past endeavour in this region. In the Preface there are two points which may be specially mentioned...