Page:Experience and nature (IA experiencenature00dewe 0).pdf/20

of direct experience interpretations of it made by previous thinkers. Too often, indeed, the professed empiricist only substitutes a dialectical development of some notion about experience for an analysis of experience as it is humanly lived.

The philosophy which since the seventeenth century has almost achieved a monopoly of the title “empiricism”’ strikingly illustrates this danger. Not safely can an ‘“ism”’ be made out of experience. For any interpretation of experience must perforce simplify; simplifications tend in a particular direction; and the direction may be set by custom which one assumes to be natural simply because it is traditionally congenial. For at least two hundred years many interests, religious, industrial, political, have centered about the status of the individual. Hence the drift in all systems save the classic traditional school, has been to think in ways that make individuality something isolated as well as central. When the notion of experiences is introduced, who is not familiar with the query, uttered with a crushingly triumphant tone, “‘Whose experience?’ The implication is that experience is not only always somebody’s, but that the peculiar nature of ‘‘somebody” infects experience so pervasively that experience is merely somebody’s and hence of nobody and nothing else.

The dialectical situation which results may be illustrated by a quotation which is selected because it is typical of much contemporary philosophizing. ‘‘When I look at a chair, I say I experience it. But what I actually experience is only a very few of the elements that go to make up a chair, namely, that color that belongs to the chair under these particular conditions of light, the shape which the chair displays when viewed from this angle,