The key to the logic of the situation has not yet been found, although I think the first step toward finding it has been taken.[1]
'The dualistic discontent,' as Avenarius calls it, expresses a desire to conceive the world in a way corresponding to our natural experience of it. In view of the continuity of experience, such an evolution as that described by Avenarius seems, then, extremely plausible, when once attention is called to it.
We can not cast off all at once habits of mind cultivated by centuries of faith; they bind us in ways we can not name. But the theological tradition is giving way, and in proportion as it does, we come more and more to feel that the truth about the world is to be found in a complete description of its empirical content. It seems not at all unlikely that the theological tradition will in time cease to affect metaphysics, and that in consequence metaphysics will no longer give the lie to common sense. Of the metaphysics of this third stage Avenarius says only that it will be 'biologisch haltbar.' He does not say it will be true.
If we are to understand by metaphysics the speculation which puts such stress on distinguishing 'appearance' from 'reality,' which defines reality as the source of appearance, a reality to some extent knowable but mostly unknowable, if metaphysics means this, Avenarius does seem to cast it ruthlessly overboard. As the task of philosophy he predicts that of stating the character common to all objects of experience. And for one who really occupies the pure experience position, and is not concerned with polemical attitudes toward any other, the common character of all objects of experience must be the most abstract, the most unimportant and the most uninteresting of predicates. Far more important and interesting will be what is concrete and actual.
To come back into the terminology of the 'Kritik der Reinen Erfahrung,' the final view of the world will express a knowledge of genuine R-values only such as affect the system C. This concept of nature being the result of complete determination by habit, will not be liable to change.
Of course it is not meant that this final Weltbegriff is necessarily going to be attained, but only that the process is of such a kind as to have this for its limit. The process may be interrupted by a catastrophe at any moment.
I beg the reader not to accept this account of the views of Avenarius as anything more than a fragmentary one. I have cared very much more for the general purpose and outcome than for details of method and the system of terminology that is so characteristic.
- ↑ William James in the Journal of Philosophy, Psychology and Scientific Methods, Vol. I., No. 18, 'Does Consciousness Exist.'
