Page:Experience and nature (IA experiencenature00dewe 0).pdf/21

etc." The man who has the experience, as distinct from a philosopher theorizing about it, would probably say that he experienced the chair most fully not when looking at it but when meaning to sit down in it, and that he can mean to sit down in it precisely because his experience is not limited to color under specific conditions of light, and angular shape. He would probably say that when he looks at it, instead of experiencing something less than a chair he experiences a good deal more than a chair: that he lays hold of a wide spatial context, such as the room where the chair is, and a spread of its history, including the chair's period, price paid for it, consequences, public as well as personal, which flow from its use as household furniture, and so on.

Such remarks as these prove nothing. But they suggest how far away from the everyday sense of experience a certain kind of philosophic discourse, although nominally experiential, has wandered. Interesting results can be had by developing dialectically such a notion of experience as is contained in the quotation; problems can be made to emerge which exercise the ingenuity of the theorizer, and which convince many a student that he gets nearer to the reality of experience the further away he gets from all the experience he has ever had. The exercise would be harmless, were it not finally forgotten that the conclusions reached have but a dialectical status, being an elaboration of premises arrived at by technical analysis from a specialized physiological point of view. Consequently, I would rather take the behavior of the dog of Odysseus upon his master's return as an example of the sort of thing experience is for the philosopher than trust to such statements. A physiologist may for his