… ‘an unearthly ballet of bloodless categories.’
This is from ‘Some Problems of Philosophy’ found in William James: Writings 1902-1910 (1987):
… A cause and its effect are two numerically discrete concepts, and yet in some inscrutable way the former must ‘produce’ the latter. How can it intelligibly do so, save by already hiding the latter in itself?
… the laws are potent for prediction, and many writers on science tell us that this is all we can demand. To explain, according to the way of thinking called positivistic, is only to substitute wider or more familiar for narrower or less familiar laws, and the laws at their widest only express uniformities empirically found.
[line break added] Why does the pump suck up water? Because the air keeps pressing it into the tube. Why does the air press in? Because the earth attracts it. Why does the earth attract it? Because it attracts everything — such attraction being in the end only a more universal sort of fact. Laws, according to their view, only generalize facts, they do not connect them in any intimate sense.
… Changes, in short, occur and ring throughout phenomena, but neither reasons nor activities in the sense of agencies, have any place in this world of scientific logic, which compared with the world of common sense, is so abstract as to be quite spectral, and merits the appellation (so often quoted from Mr. Bradley) of ‘an unearthly ballet of bloodless categories.’
My most recent post from James’s book is here.
-Julie
Coloring 