Page:Experience and nature (IA experiencenature00dewe 0).pdf/18
and social world in which we live. And if scientific method is intrinsically empirical, then the subject-matter of experience cannot be what introspective psychologists have told us it is.
Whether or no this suggestion is correct, recognition of the inconsistency is of use in enabling us, writer and reader alike, to trap and hold the slippery idea of experience, whenever it is proposed to set forth the implications of experience for philosophy; especially when, as in this discussion, its implications for a theory of nature, of the world, of the universe, form the issue. And I know of no better way of warning the reader against misconception of this purpose than to remind him that, as he reads the statement, he should interpret "experience" in the sense in which he himself uses the term when he professes to be faithful to the empirical method, not in the sense in which he uses it when he implies that experience is momentary, private and psychical.
There are two avenues of approach to the goal of philosophy. We may begin with experience in gross, experience in its primary and crude forms, and by means of its distinguishing features and its distinctive trends, note something of the constitution of the world which generates and maintains it. Or, we may begin with refined selective products, the most authentic statements of com- mended methods of science, and work from them back to the primary facts of life. The two methods differ in starting point and direction, but not in objective or eventual content. Those who start with coarse, everyday experience must bear in mind the findings of the most competent knowledge, and those who start from the latter must somehow journey back to the homely facts of daily existence.