William James was a bundle of conflicting selves struggling with each other to find self-realization. Not surprisingly, this led to serious tensions if not downright inconsistencies in his philosophy. There was no issue on which James was more deeply conflicted than that of the nature and status of consciousness, it being seen as a two-headed monster of damnation and salvation. For his tough-minded scientistic self, the dualistic view of consciousness as some sort of ultimate stuff or process was seen as the source of the intractable pseudo-problems concerning the connection between the inner and outer, the mental and the physical, the subjective and the objective. But opposing this self was a mystical, romantic self that saw such consciousness as our glory and means to salvation. Each of these strains in James’s view of consciousness will be expounded. It will turn out that, ultimately, it was the romantic view that became dominant in his philosophy. Finally, I will make some brief comparisons between James and David Chalmers. The reason for this brevity is that we are fortunate to have Chalmers with us to speak for himself on this matter, but James, unfortunately, was able to make it.

I. The Misery of Consciousness

The tough-minded James rejects the enduring Cartesian soul substance, because it lacks the required empirical credentials. It is replaced by a succession of "Thoughts," in which a Thought is the total way in which a person is conscious at a some time. These Thoughts serve as the ultimate subjects or bearers of mental attributes. A person’s identity over time is ground in the ability of later Thoughts to remember the earlier ones. The active self that does the willing or endeavoring, upon phenomenological analysis, turns out to be nothing but a bunch of intra-cephalic sensations. So far, things sound pretty tough-minded.

But jettisoning the soul substance does not go far enough, since we are still left with an apparent dualism between mental and physical events or processes. The 1890 Principles of Psychology (PP), in spite of James’s later protestations, was committed to this dualism in more than name only. It wasn’t until the 1904-5 essays, which formed the nucleus of the posthumously published Essays in Radical Empiricism ERE), that James attempted to eliminate this dualism through his bold doctrine of Pure Experience. Herein James denies that there is any irreducible ontological dualism between the mental and the physical -- nothing is mental or physical simpliciter -- and instead claims that every individual in the sensible world is composed of some sort of neutral stuff called "pure experience" and has both the potentiality to become physical and the potentiality to become mental, the former being realized when it actually enters into a law-like sequence of events and the latter when the sequence is a rhapsody of causally unconnected events that comprise a person's mental history.

James motivated his doctrine by both therapeutic and phenomenological considerations. The therapeutic benefits of the doctrine is that it dissolves perplexing and stultifying epistemological dualisms, primarily that between the subject and object of experience. It enables you, as James put it, to "escape the noetic 'chasm,' with its discontinuity." ( Manuscripts Lectures (ML) 319) "Throughout the history of philosophy the subject and its object have been treated as absolutely discontinuous entities; and thereupon the presence of the latter to the former, or the 'apprehension' by the former of the latter, has assumed a paradoxical character which all sorts of theories had to be invented to overcome." (ERE 27) But, if the subject and object are made of the same underlying ontological stuff, namely pure experience, there ceases to be an unbridgeable ontological chasm between them. The extreme rival doctrines of idealism, which makes the object part of the subject's consciousness, and materialism, which reduces consciousness to physical processes and states, are seen to be "solutions" to a bogus problem. By neutralizing the problem of how the "inner" and the "outer," the "subjective" and "objective" are connected, the clash between them is neutralized.

But even if the doctrine of pure experience were to achieve its intended therapeutic purpose, the defenders of the doctrine that experience involves an "impalpable inner flowing" that is "pure diaphaneity" would not accept it. Like G. E. Moore in his 1903 "A Refutation of Idealism," they claim that when they introspect their own mind upon experiencing a sense datum, such as a yellow patch, they can separate off the yellow patch content from the conscious sensing that accompanies it, analogous to separating a paint into a menstruum and a pigmental mass. (ERE 6) James challenges their introspective reports, claiming that, at least in his own case, he is not able to make any such distinction. "I am as confident as I am of anything that, in myself, the stream of thinking...is only a careless name for what, when scrutinized, reveals itself to consist chiefly of the stream of my breathing." (ERE 19)

As I read the 1904-5 articles, they advance the following three tenets, which together comprise the doctrine of Pure Experience:

I. No event is mental or physical simpliciter, but is so only when related to earlier and later events in a certain manner;

II. All sensible events are made of the same neutral stuff -- pure experience.

III. For every sensible event there are actual sequences of events such that it qualifies as mental in some of them and as physical in others; or, more weakly

III'. For every sensible event there are possible sequences of events such that it qualifies as mental in some of them and as physical in others.

Each of these tenets needs further clarification.

I. James, no doubt wanting a grabber to get the reader's attention, makes the startling assertion that "'consciousness'...is the name of a nonentity." (ERE 3) What he means is that there are no conscious or mental entities, be they substances or processes, as understood by common sense, according to which an individual is conscious or mental simpliciter, meaning that the predicate or function "__is conscious (or mental)" is one-place or monadic. But grammatical appearances deceive. James is going to argue that "is conscious" is really a relational predicate, and likewise for "is physical." By denying that "is mental" and "is physical" are monadic predicates James in effect is rejecting the Cartesian dualism between the mental and the physical, each of which is supposed to be an ultimate monadic form of stuff.

James's claim that what is experientially given is neither mental nor physical simpliciter can be viewed as following up the British phenomenalist tradition by adding that what it took the immediately given to be, namely a sensum or sense-datum, is in itself neither mental nor physical, pace Berkeley and representative realists who took it to be mental, as well as naive realists who took it to be physical. Although the mental-physical dualism does not apply to a given piece of pure experience taken in isolation, it does apply to temporal sequences of events so that an individual piece of pure experience qualifies as mental or physical when it is taken as a member of a mental or physical type of sequence respectively. James leans very heavily on the analogy of a pure experience with a letter in a crossword puzzle that can be placed in either a vertical or horizontal series, thus forming a part of different words in these two ways of being taken, the "a" in "cat" and "bat" for example. (Meaning of Truth (MT) 36 and ERE 269) Analogously, by taking a piece of pure experience in a certain way, we make it to be mental or physical. This is yet another instance of James's promethean humanism that the world is what we make it. Just as we determine by our interest-based acts of attending which world is the actual world, we determine by these acts whether the ontological status of the members of the selected world, provided it is one comprised of sensible particulars, in respect to their being mental or physical.

James initially characterizes the difference between a physical and mental type of temporal sequence of events in a viciously regressive manner, since he fails to use topically-neutral words to describe the members of the sequences. He winds up saying, roughly, that an event qualifies as mental when it is placed in a succession of other mental events, and physical when placed in a succession of physical events. An experience counts as mental if it "is the last term of a train of sensations, emotions, decisions, movements, classifications, expectations, etc., ending in the present, and the first term of a series of similar 'inner' operations extending into the future" and the very same experience counts as physical if it is the "terminus ad quem of a lot of previous physical operations, carpentering, papering, furnishing, warming, etc." (ERE 8-9) James's placing of "inner" within scare quotation marks does not protect him against the charge that he is analyzing a mental sequence in terms of mentalistic concepts that themselves refer to inner episodes or states that are conscious simpliciter, which are the very states that he wants to eliminate through his analysis. But his later, more considered account is based on whether the events comprising the succession are connected in a stable, law-like manner, which is a close cousin of Kant's Second Analogy of Experience criterion for objectivity. The percept of a pen counts as physical if "it is a stable feature, holds ink, marks paper...So far as it is unstable, on the contrary, coming and going with the movements of my eyes, altering with what I call my fancy" it counts as mental. (ERE 61) James seems to appeal to Kant's irreversibility of the order in which a sequence of events is experienced as a criterion for objectivity and thus for being a physical sequence: If I can reverse the order in which I sense a succession of events, as by moving my head for example, it is not an objective order. To speak more accurately, in a mental ordering it is the contents of the related experiences, what they represent, that do not stand in law-like connections: the experiences qua events can stand in cause and effect relations, as happens in sequences of experiences in a dream whose contents are not nomically connected according to scientific laws but which can stand in cause and effect relations to each other in which a later dream experience is caused by an earlier one, my dream experience of fear being caused by my early seeming to see a monster in my dream. But the contents of dreams experiences, what they represent, are not connectable according to scientific laws with either each other or the contents of waking experiences that precede or succeed the dream. Causal anomalies break out between these contents. I dream I am swimming in Georgian Bay and the next instant am walking in Pittsburgh.

James attempted to dissolve the problem of other minds by appeal to Pure Experience. The problem of other minds is rooted in the assumption that a state of consciousness cannot be common to two or more minds, with the result that the only way in which one mind can know what is going on in another is through the risky Cartesian argument from analogy. James used his doctrine to challenge this assumption by showing how a conscious or mental state could be had or shared by two minds, thereby closing the conceptual gap between them that invited scepticism. Just as a point can be a common member of intersecting lines, a piece of pure experience can be common to the mental histories of two minds in virtue of later members of each historical sequence remembering this experience. A pen percept is a piece of pure experience, in itself neither mental nor physical. For it to qualify as conscious requires that it be known by being remembered by a later piece of pure experience. There is no absurdity in this pen percept being remembered by both you and me, which would involve "its being felt in two different ways at once, as yours, namely, and as mine." (ERE 66. see also 269)

But if it is possible for our mental histories to share a common pen percept when each of us remembers it, it must be possible for our earlier perceptions of the pen to be one and the same percept. James waffles over whether this is possible and finally comes to a negative view. Initially, James sides with a common sense "natural realism" that holds that "Your mind and mine may terminate in the same percept, not merely against it, as if it were a third external thing, but by inserting themselves into it and coalescing with it." (ERE 40) "We believe that we all know and think about the same world, because we believe our PERCEPTS are possessed by us in common. (MT 30) Common sense believes that "my percept is held to be the pen for the time being--percepts and physical realities being treated by common sense as identical." (MT 87)

This direct realism, however, seems to be taken back when James says that "when you and I are said to know the 'same' Memorial Hall, our minds do [not] terminate at or in a numerically identical perception," the reason being that "we see the Hall in different perspectives" because of our different spatial locations. (ERE 40) James is assuming that among the conditions for percept identity is having the same look, feel, appearance, and the like. Your percept of the Hall has a different shape than mine. Because the Hall is felt equivocally by us,

The only way in which our percepts could be one and the same is if our heads were to be spatially coincident at that time, like Siamese twins joined at the head. To assume that this is possible is to assume more than many would grant. Judging by the fact that James repeatedly gives the Cartesian argument from analogy for other minds and their contents (at ERE 36, 38 and MT 24, 30), it would appear that he has failed to convince even himself that an experience can be

II. This thesis, which holds "that there is only one primal stuff or material in the world, a stuff of which everything is composed," has created great consternation for interpreters, since James seems to be back with the pre-Socratics seeking for the underlying metaphysical stuff that composes all things. Dewey so interpreted him when he disapprovingly quipped in a letter to Bentley that at times James "seems to mix his neutrals with a kind of jelly-like cosmic world-stuff of pure experience." This Milesian interpretation of James finds support in James’s explicit identification of pure experience with Aristotle's prime matter. "There is no thought-stuff different from thing-stuff, I said; but the same identical piece of 'pure experience' (which was the name I gave to the materia prima of everything) can stand alternately for a 'fact of consciousness' or for a physical reality, according as it is taken in one context or in another." (ERE 69) That James was serious in this identification of pure experience with prime matter is further evidenced in his imputing to it the same role as pure potentiality that Aristotle did to prime matter. "The instant field of the present is at all times what I call the 'pure' experience. It is only virtually or potentially either object or subject as yet. For the time being, it is plain, unqualified actuality or existence." (ERE 13. my italics) At one point James seems to identify his universal metaphysical stuff with a Platonic type receptacle of being. "Save for time and space (and, if you like, for 'being') there appears no universal element of which all things are made." (ERE 15) The formless space of Plato's receptacle, which should be upgraded to space-time, plays the same metaphysical role as does prime matter of offering a realm of pure potentiality that grounds the possibility of forms being instantiated and

III. This tenet holds that for every sensible event there are actual, for the strong version, and, for the weak version, possible sequences of events such that it qualifies as mental in some of them and as physical in others. The strong version obviously is too strong, since there are numerous sensible experiences for which there are no actual sequences of events in which they qualify as mental and/or physical. There is a menagerie of recalcitrant cases for the strong thesis, consisting of unobserved events, such as the infamous tree falling in a forest unobserved, as well as unveridical experiences, such as delusions and dreams, that are not accommodated by any actual mental or physical sequence respectively. In a more fine-grained analysis a distinction would be made between unobserved events that are accommodated by some actual physical sequence, and thus qualify as physical, and those that are not, these qualifying as neither mental nor physical. An analogous distinction can be made between unveridical experiences that are accommodated by an actual mental sequence, and thus qualify as mental, and those that are not, such as an unintegrated free-floating bit of experience as might occur in an extreme case of multiple personality, and thus qualify as neither mental nor physical.

James was well aware of these types of counter-examples to the strong thesis.

"It is possible to imagine a universe of experiences in which the only alternative between neighbors would be either physical interaction or complete inertness. In such a world the mental or the physical status of any piece of experience would be unequivocal." (ERE 71) In these quotations James realizes that an event could qualify only as mental or only as physical, and thus be per accidens unambiguously mental or physical; however he fails to realize that an event could per accidens fail to qualify as either, since, as already seen, not every sequence of events need be of a mental or physical sort. James has three ways of protecting the weak version of III against recalcitrant cases -- by appeal to (i) "alternate worlds," (ii) "nonenergistic properties,"and (iii) "panpsychism." (i) yields a sound but unexciting version of Pure Experience, (ii) a false but exciting version, and (iii) an unwitting abandonment of the central idea of the doctrine of Pure Experience.

(i) Alternate Worlds. This attempted solution is found in a passage that James quotes from Hugo Munsterberg with full approval: "The objects of dreamers and hallucinated persons are wholly without general validity. But even were they centaurs and golden mountains, they still would be 'off there,' in fairy land, and not inside' of ourselves." (ERE 11) This gets developed by James in terms of his many worlds, engaged in a competition with each other to capture the subject's passing interest so as to qualify for the time being as the "actual world." Were there no perceptual world that primarily engaged our interest and precluded one of these imaginary, merely thought of worlds, "our world of thought would be the only world, and would enjoy complete reality in our belief. This actually happens in our dreams, and in our day-dreams so long as percepts do not interrupt them." (ERE 12)

All of the recalcitrant cases of a piece of unaccommodated pure experience can be handled by including them in an alternative world to the sensible one, such as were discussed in Section II on Ontological Relativism. In regard to the unobserved falling of the tree in the forest, James can avail himself of the sort of counter-factual analysis that is supplied by phenomenalism: If there were to have been an observer present in the forest (though there wasn't) who took the requisite steps, she would have been visually appeared to in a tree-falling like manner. This counter-factual proposition describes some alternative world to the one that we now take to be actual on the basis of our present sensible-based interests. We can create a counter-factual world for any recalcitrant piece of pure experience you please. The free-floating bit of consciousness experience is such that there is a counter-factual sequence of events in which it is remembered by later members and thus qualifies as mental. In other words, if the multiple personality subject of the original experience were to have had, though she didn't, subsequent experiences that remembered this experience, it would have qualified as mental. If the totality of history were to consist in a single event, a brief loud noise, it would satisfy the weak version of III, because if there were to exist the right sort of successions of events, ones in which it is remembered and others to whose members it is nomically connected, it would qualify respectively as both mental and physical in James's relational sense.

The worry is that the weak version of III is too weak, because the counter-factual alternative possible worlds it must invoke are not possible enough. On the basis of James's own analysis of possibility, he would be among those most dissatisfied. In league with Aristotle, as he is on all matters concerning possibility, James claims that a possibility must be grounded in actuality. For something to be possible in the weakest sense, a "bare" possibility, it is required that

A campfire burning unattended in a strong wind in a dry forest is a possible forest fire in James's "concretely grounded" sense, since nothing is afoot that will prevent its developing into a forest fire and moreover there are actual forces favoring its so developing.

The sort of counter-factual possibilities that must be employed to save the weak version of III fail to qualify as either bare or concretely grounded possibilities. The unobserved falling of the tree might occur in a world devoid of all observers, and thus there would be nothing in actuality that concretely grounds the possibility of there being someone who observes this event. What is more, this possibility is not even a bare possibility, since its realization is prevented by what exists in this observer-less world, namely that every individual that exists in this world has some property that is incompatible with being an observer. Imagine that its sole members are the tree, a clump of soil, and a rock. Being a tree logically precludes being an observer, and so on for the sortal properties possessed by the other members of this world.

(ii) Nonenergistic Properties. Although James did not explicitly deploy his analysis of possibility against the "alternative world" version, it is clear that he felt a need to find another version that would not invoke its ungrounded possibilities. He played around with a second way of dealing with recalcitrant cases that made use of a distinction between two ways in which an object can possess a causal power or disposition -- "energetically" and "nonenergetically." A delusory or purely imaginary object need not be placed in some counter-factual physical sequence in order to have physical properties, such as the causal powers that are possessed by the kind of object it is, and thereby qualify as physical. Rather, it can possess them in the actual world and thus qualify as physical relative to the actual world alone but have them in a funny sort of "nonenergetic" manner.

It should be obvious to the reader that something has gone radically wrong. Imagine that you have ordered a set of ginzu knives for $19.95 from the William Sonoma James Company that you saw advertised on television as having exceptional sharpness, capable of cutting through even a two by four. You get the knives and to your dismay find that they quite literally can't even cut the mustard, no less a two by four. You write a letter of complaint to the Company demanding a refund because the knives do not have the advertised property of sharpness. You would not be satisfied if the company were to respond that the knives sold to you are sharp, as advertised, only they are not sharp "energetically," meaning that they do have the causal power to cut but only in respect to imaginary objects. "Mental knives may be sharp, but they won't cut real wood." (ERE 17) Enjoy your ginzu knives, you are told, but remember to cut only imaginary objects with them.

What has gone wrong here? James fails to realize that 'nonenergetically' is a reality-canceling modifier in the way that "toy" and "decoy" are, a toy or decoy duck not being a duck, as Austin has said. Similarly, to have a causal power or disposition nonenergetically is not to have it. As a result, James's claim that some fires have the causal power to warm and some water the causal power to put out fires but have them only nonenergetically commits him to there being fire and water that are devoid of their relevant causal powers. But this is conceptually impossible, since their causal powers are essential to them. If something cannot quench thirst or put out fires and the like, it isn't water, only "fool's water." Your $19.95 ginzu knives are only "fool's ginzu knives."

(iii) Panpsychism. Obviously, James was not fully satisfied with the ways (i) and (ii) handle recalcitrant cases, especially ones involving unobserved events. This third solution applies only to these types of recalcitrant cases. It contends that "unobserved events" really aren't unobserved, since they are at least present for themselves. Of such an event James says, "If not a future experience of our own or a present one of our neighbor, it must be...an experience for itself whose relation to other things we translate into the action of molecules, ether-waves, or whatever else the physical symbols may be. This opens the chapter of the relations of radical empiricism to panpsychism, into which I cannot enter now. (ERE 43) Two years earlier, in The Varieties of Religious Experience, James embraces this panpsychism. "The only meaning we can attach to the notion of a thing as it is 'in itself' is by conceiving it as it is for itself; i.e., as a piece of full experience with a private sense of 'pinch' or inner activity of some sort going with it." (VRE 394) This means that when a rock falls off a ledge without any observers being around its fall is at least present "for itself," which, I assume, means that it is conscious of its own falling, and, if it could talk, might say, "I have fallen down and I can't get up." This is panpsychism, because it imputes an inner consciousness to every sensible particular, even apparently insentient ones like rocks.

It is not an accident that James did not develop his panpsychic suggestion for dealing with unobserved events in his articles of 1904-5, for it amounts to a complete abandonment of the central idea of Pure Experience -- that nothing is mental or conscious simpliciter but only in relation to other bits of pure experience. The rock's inner consciousness of its own fall does not seem to depend on its being related to any earlier or later world mates. James's suggestion of panpsychism is more than just a suggestion, since he commits himself to panpsychism in his wrtings both prior and subsequent to the 1904-5 articles. James wound up embracing panpsychism in his final two books, A Pluralistic Universe and Some Problems of Philosophy and thereby gave up the doctrine of Pure Experience. No mention is made of the doctrine of Pure Experience in his post-1905 publications. What James eventually wound up espousing was not just panpsychism but the more extreme doctrine of idealism or spiritualism in which everything is nothing but consciousness through and through. Unlike pure experience, the stuff of which reality is made is not ontologically neutral. Therefore, pure experience is not identical with but rather has been replaced by the conscious and spiritual realities of his final two books and The Varieties of Religious Experience, since pure experience is pure potentiality but these spirits are already partly determined in virtue of having the monadic property of being conscious.

II. The Glory of Consciousness

Why did James’s neutral monism turn into spiritualism? It is because James, along with his fellow pragmatists and their absolute idealist opponents, shared a common fear of the fate suffered by Humpty Dumpty. Once he fell off the wall and disintegrated into separate pieces all the king's horses and all the king's men couldn't put him back together again. They had a "Humpty Dumpty Intuition," for they believed that if we ever allow reality to fall apart into numerically distinct substances there is no way that all the king's philosophers can put them back together again into relational complexes. According to the Humpty Dumpty intuition it is impossible for numerically distinct individuals to stand in a direct, that is, nonmediated relation of any kind to each other.

The most obvious and important application of the Humpty Dumpty intuition is to change. What our conceptualizing intellect falsely cuts asunder into discretely successive events really "compenetrate and "telescope" through a sort of "endosmosis" or "conflux." (Pluralistic Universe (PU) 114) "In the real concrete sensible flux of life experiences compenetrate each other so that it is not easy to know just what is excluded and what not." (PU 113) This agrees with Some Problem of Philosophy's claim that "Boundaries are things that intervene; but nothing intervenes save parts of the perceptual flux itself, and these are overflowed by what they separate, so that whatever we distinguish and isolate conceptually is found perceptually to telescope and compenetrate and diffuse into its neighbors." (SPP 32)

It is further claimed that in the mushing relation each relatum become its own other in Hegel's sense.

James realizes that his mushing together relation defies the ordinary logic of identity, since it gives us an identity that is not really an identity because it is non-transitive. "For conceptual logic, the same is nothing but the same, and all sames with a third thing are the same with each other. Not so in concrete experience." (PU 114-5) Furthermore, James's realizes that his counter-logical descriptions of our experience of change "will sound queer and dark." (97) But an "empirical look into the constitution of [reality shows]...that some of them are their own others, and indeed are so in the self-same sense in which the absolute is maintained to be so by Hegel." Spatial neighbors also behave like Playdoh. "What is true here of successive states must also be true of simultaneous characters. They also overlap each other with their being." (PU 130. See also MEN 123) James seems to be saying, if I may paraphrase the punch line to the old shaggy dog joke, that these immediate neighbors are identical but not that identical.

James's Humpty Dumpty Intuition applies across the board to all concrete relations, not just temporal ones. James enlists Bradley as an ally in this regard because Bradley agrees that "immediate feeling possesses a native wholeness which conceptual treatment analyzes into a many, but can't unite." (SPP 52. My italics) Paradoxes of the Zenoian and Bradleyian sort "arise from the vain attempt to reconvert the manifold into which our conception has resolved things, back into the continuum out of which it came." (SPP 51) In the "The Miller-Bode Objections" manuscript, which is a most valuable document for helping us to see the gut intuitions that drove James's philosophy, he makes the same point when he succinctly remarks that "You can't confine content." (MEN 84) We fall into these paradoxes because our conceptualizing intellect commits us to "No discrimination without separation; no separation without absolute 'independence' and thereupon impossibility of union." (MEN 113)

James seems to claim that we ordinarily experience change in the mushing together manner, but I don’t believe that this was his considered position. Speaking for myself, I no more see the immediately adjoined temporal phases of a moving arm's trajectory as mushing together than I see it in the Hindu God-like manner, as is required by the sensory model of James’s doctrine of the specious present. Maybe James did see them as having "a sort of later suffusion from one thing into another, like a gas, or warmth, or light. The places involved are fixed, but what fills one place radiates and suffuses into the other by lateral movement, 'endosmosis.'" (MEN 91-2) If he did, he must having been smoking some funny cigarettes, or the damage to his eyes from his 1865 bout of small-pox was more severe than he let on. Of course, if an arm moves very rapidly, I do see its trajectory in a blurry manner, but this is not so for the vast majority of movements. Furthermore, I do not see spatial neighbors engaging in "endosmosis" except in the rare cases in which they actually do engage in endosmosis or are abutting ice cream cones in a hot sun. Maybe I'm too clean-minded, but I do not find that promiscuity runs rampant in my experience. I believe that James’s considered view is that we ordinarily fail to experience reality as "melting, merging, fusing, and flowing together," "undergoing endosmosis," "compenetrating," as well as "telescoping and diffusing into each other" because of our promethean penchant to conceptualize our experience so as to aid us in our endeavor to gain cotrol and mastery over our world. The mushing together experience can be had only by a subject who has followed the proper mystical way and learned to perceive in a pure, conceptless way. This endeavor is aided by the koanssupplied by the a priori arguments of Zeno and Bradly against the possibility of reality consisting of a collection ofdiscrete, numerically distinct individuals.

From Promiscuity to Panpsychism

With the Humpty Dumpty intuition clearly in mind, we can see how James went from the view of reality as a promiscuous mushing-together affair to panpsychism and from that to spiritualism. The general schema of his argument for panpsychism from his Humpty Dumpty intuition is as follows.

1. A relation can immediately obtain between concrete relata only if they are non-transitively identical with each, i.e. are identical but not that identical. the Humpty Dumpty Intuition

2. Only in the wondrously mysterious medium of consciousness can there be such a relation of non-transitive identity--an identity that is not an identity. some kind of truth

3. Therefore, every concrete individual that is a relatum in an immediate relation, which would include every concrete thing, has an inner core of consciousness.

The argument for the Humpty Dumpty Intuition on which premise 1 rests is yet to be given, and the best that can be marshaled in support of premise 2 is that we are unable to think of any other medium in which mushing together relations could occur. That we cannot imagine any alternative does not establish that there isn't any; but in philosophy we must ultimately settle for what we can make intelligible to ourselves after we have made the best effort we can.

It now will be shown how James filled in this general argument from promiscuity with the specific cases of change and causation. James seems to have been born with an innate fear of Zeno, for as early as The Principles of Psychology (237) he claims that Zeno's paradoxes show the impossibility of change through a succession of numerically distinct states, whether it be mathematically dense, continuous or discrete. In the final two books he argues that the theory of the continuum in modern mathematics fails to neutralize Zeno's challenge, because there cannot be a succession of numerically distinct states even if their ordering is dense or mathematically continuous. The problem is to explain how there can be a transition from an earlier to a later state. Given the Humpty Dumpty Intuition, there is no way to explain this if the states are discrete. Herein it is clear that the Humpty Dumpty Intuition is appealed to in support of a key premise in the Zenoian a priori argument to prove the impossibility of change without immediate successors mushing together. The only way in which change can be understood is by introspecting what goes on when we intentionally move or change. Thus, he indicts the mathematical physicist's account of change because it "it fails to connect us with the inner life of the flux, or with the real causes that govern its direction. Instead of being interpreters of reality, concepts negate the inwardness of reality altogether..." (PU 110) The physicist gives us a "knowledge about things, as distinguished from living contemplation or sympathetic acquaintance with them"...[which] "touches only the outer surface of reality." (PU 111) The only way to understand change or flux "is either to experience it directly by being a part of reality one's self, or to evoke it in imagination by sympathetically divining someone else's inner life." (PU112) Only in this way can we penetrate to "the inner nature of reality" and understand "what really makes it go." (PU 112)

The demand to understand change from the "inside" by an act of "intuitive sympathy" is based on James's gut intuitions about what constitutes a rationally satisfying account of reality -- a case in point of his own "the sentiment of rationality" doctrine according to which philosophers attracted to radically opposed philosophies have different personal predilections about what will count as an adequate explanation. James is an inside man who wants to penetrate to the conscious inner core of everything, motion included. Thus, motion must be explained by introspecting what goes on in our consciousness when we intentionally move. Not surprisingly, it is found that our action-guiding recipe is not, and conceptually could not be, that of the physicist's description of a traversal of a distance, since it fails to specify an initial and final doing and thereby fails to satisfy a conceptual requirement for being a recipe. This is the point that James really is making when he asserts that the runner "perceives nothing, while running, of the mathematician's homogeneous time and space, of the infinitely numerous succession of cuts in both, or of their order." (PU114) By placing yourself "at the point of view of the thing's interior doing...all these back-looking and conflicting conceptions lie harmoniously in your hand." (PU 117) The demand to understand change as an intentional action also informs his discussion of Zeno in Some Problems of Philosophy. He interprets Zeno's dichotomy paradox as demanding that the "number of points to be occupied...be enumerated in succession." (SPP 82. my italics) This converting of a motion into an intentional action clearly underlies James claim that the "continuous process to be traversed...is a task--not only for our philosophic imagination, but for any real agent who might try physically to compass the entire performance." (SPP 88)

Given James's Humpty Dumpy type sentiment of rationality, the only way to explain change is by promiscuous succession. James, however, avoids this transcendental form of argumentation and instead engages in some fake Jack Horner type phenomenology. When we introspect our mind we are supposed to find that motion is a type of flowing sludge. The only case in which we are experientially acquainted with such change is in our own consciousness. It is not that our awareness of our own consciousness when we perform an action of moving gives us a paradigm case or even a case that is seminal in the order of concept acquisition. It gives us the only case of motion that we can imagine, every case of motion having to be understood in these agency terms. And this is panpsychism!

James's argument is perspicuously rendered as a special case of the general from-promiscuity-to-panpsychism argument.

4. Change requires promiscuous succession. Humpty Dumpty Intuition

5. Promiscuous succession can occur only in consciousness. some kind of truth

6. Therefore, all change involves an inner core of consciousness.

If change is a nonpromiscuous succession, Zeno wins. There is change, and the only way it is possible, given the impossibility of nonpromiscuous succession, is by promiscuous succession.

The case of causation is yet another special instance of the general from-promiscuity-to-panpsychism argument. Because of the widespread acceptance of Hume's unjustified confinement of the possible objects of introspection to sensible ideas, it was widely believed that causation cannot be anything more than uniform association. While James agrees that we do not have a sensible idea of causation, or any relation for that matter, he claims that we have a feeling of causation from an introspection of our own mind when we act so as to bring something about. This is the only way in which causation can be understood, just as the only way motion could be understood is by introspection of what goes on in our consciousness when we intentionally move. Other cases of causation must be understood by projecting onto external objects what we find to go on in our consciousness when we act. And this is panpsychism!

Exactly what do we find through introspection in the cases in which we act?

What we observe in these personal cases is "the essential process of creation" and "where we predicate activities elsewhere...we have a right to suppose aught different in kind from this." (SPP 108) Since we take our personal experiences "as the type of what actual causation is, we should have to ascribe to cases of causation outside of our own life, to physical cases also, an inwardly experiential nature." (SPP 109) And this is panpsychism!

The argument, when explicitly mounted, is an instance of the general argument from-promiscuity-to-panpsychism.

7. Causation requires a promiscuous relation between cause and effect. Humpty Dumpty Intuition

8. A promiscuous relation between cause and effect can occur only in consciousness. some kind of truth

9. Therefore, all causation involves a conscious process.

From Promiscuity to Ineffability

The a priori arguments of Zeno and Bradley for the impossibility of discrete concrete relations also show that reality is ineffable. Before presenting James's best argument for this, it is necessary, so as to avoid confusion, to set aside two very bad reasons James gives for reality being ineffable. The first is based on the impossibility of any description capturing the full richness and determinateness of reality. "Conceptual knowledge is forever inadequate to the fullness of the reality to be known." (SPP 45) The second is based on the failure of concepts to be qualitatively isomorphic with their instantiators. One version of this claim is the indictment against conceptual representations for failing to produce what they represent. Activity and causation, for example, are said to be incomprehensible, because "the conceptual scheme yields nothing like them." (SPP 48) The physicist's space-time diagram of a motion is deficient because it fails to "reproduce it" (SPP 47) It doesn't leap off the blackboard and run around the room.

Another version of the lack-of-qualitative-isomorphism objection is that necessarily concepts are discrete (there is no "coming and going" in the Platonic heaven) and the percepts or concrete individuals they represent mush together and thus they fail to be qualitatively identical with these concreta.

Plainly, this ground for the charge of ineffability rests on a self-predication howler that would have done Plato proud. It is required that concepts or words be autological (i.e. apply to themselves) if they are to be adequate representations of reality. Since concepts of a qualitatively continuous or mushing together reality are themselves discrete, they fail to meet this requirement. By this reasoning it could be shown that the concepts of the morning star and evening star fail to be coreferential since they are not identical with each other.

Furthermore, both of these ineffability claims are vacuous, because James fails to subject them to his pragmatic requirement that the success of concepts in representing reality is to be determined by how well they realize the purpose for which they are used. By abstracting from a context of human interests and purposes, James renders vacuous, by his own pragmatic principle, the question whether descriptions are adequate representations of reality. When James is making mystically-based claims about the true nature or essence of reality he is abstracting from any context of human interest or use.

There is another, and far more interesting, argument to be found in James based on the discreteness of concepts and the Humpty Dumpty based intuition that concreta are nondiscrete because they must participate in promiscuous relations with their spatio-temporal neighbors. He begins by granting Hegel's premise that every concrete thing "must in some sort be its own other," and then adds that "When conceptually...treated, they of course cannot be their own others." (PU 53) No element of our active life can "be treated as a...stable grammatical subject, but that whatever is has the durcheinander character, meaning by that that when you say it is anything, it obliges you also to say not only that it is more and other than that thing, but that it is not that thing, both the is and the is not implying at bottom only that our grammatical forms, condemned as they are to staticality and alternation, are inadequate, if we use them as literal substitutes for the reality." (MEN 123)

Promiscuous relations violate the law of identity, because each of the concrete relata in an immediate relation fails to be strictly identical with itself in virtue of being identical, but not that identical, with the other relatum. "To act on anything means to get into it somehow; but that would mean to get out of one's self and be one's other, which for intellectualism is self-contradictory." (PU 115) The reason that a conceptual system must satisfy the law of identity is that the purpose of a concept is to be discriminatory by partitioning the world up into those individuals that are and those that are not instances of it. This entails that any instance of a concept cannot enter into promiscuous relations, since then it would fall on both sides of the partitioning. The reason for this is that the concrete individual which is an instance of concept F would also fail to be an instance of F because it merges with one of its spatio-temporal neighbors that has a property incompatible with being F. But it is just this that is necessarily the case with concrete individuals. Therefore, it is conceptually impossible that concepts apply to them and thus they are absolutely ineffable. This argument, when explicitly mounted, looks like this.

10. Necessarily, every concrete individual is promiscuously related to its others. Humpty Dumpty Intuition

11. Necessarily, concepts can apply only to individuals that are not promiscuously related to their others. law of identity

12. Therefore, concepts do not apply to concrete individuals, i.e. they are ineffable.

This argument uses conceptually-based reasons to show the limitations of concepts.

If we are to penetrate to the inner essence of reality we must learn "to think in non-conceptualized terms." (PU 131) James's task, like that of the traditional mystic, is to "deafen [us] to talk" (PU 131), and he accomplishes this, not by following the traditional mystical way of meditation and asceticism, but rather by contemplating the koans supplied by the arguments of Zeno, Green, Bradley, McTaggart, Taylor, and Royce to show the contradictory nature of our ordinary conceptual scheme.

V. From Panpsychism to Spiritualism

In the previous section arguments were given to show that the Humpty Dumpty Intuition entails panpsychicism -- that every concrete individual has an inner consciousness and thus has some properties of a conscious sort. It now will be shown that the conjunction of panpsychism with the rationalist's a priori arguments against the possibility of a nonpromiscuous immediate relation entails spiritualism or idealism -- that every concrete individual is nothing but consciousness, has only properties of a conscious sort. This is demonstrated by the following from-panpsychism-to-spiritualism argument.

10. A concrete individual can have a property of a physical sort only if it stands in certain immediate nomic relations to other concrete individuals. James's doctrine of Pure Experience

11. It is impossible for a concrete individual to stand in an immediate relation to another individual that it doesn't promiscuously mush together with. from the a priori arguments of the rationalists

2. Only in the wondrously mysterious medium of consciousness can there be such a promiscuous mushing together relation. some kind of a truth

12. Every property of a concrete individual is of either a physical or conscious sort. some kind of truth

13. The only properties possessed by a concrete individual are conscious ones. from 10, 11, 2, and 12

3. Every concrete individual has an inner core of consciousness and thus has some properties of a conscious sort. stylistic variation of the conclusion of the from-promiscuity-to-panpsychism argument

14. Every concrete individual has properties of a conscious sort. from 3

15. Every concrete individual has properties of a conscious sort and only such properties. from 13 and 14

Although the scholastic look of this argument would horrify James, all of its premises are ones that James accepts or is committed to accepting. Premise 10 rests on the first tenet of James's doctrine of Pure Experience, according to which no piece of pure experience, no concrete individual in other words, counts as mental or physical simpliciter but only as it is related to earlier and later events. Some of these relations, of course, will be nonmediated. It will count as physical when its relations to these temporally surrounding events obey causal laws of science. I am not sure how to argue for premise 12, and it is the only premise that can't be traced directly to something that James wrote.

III. Chalmers and James

I am going to conclude my talk by making some comparisons between Chalmers and James.