Radical empiricism, British idealism, and the reality of relations

Abstract

This chapter focuses on the relationship between James and Bradley, and their metaphysical disputes around the reality of relations and the nature of immediate experience. The respect that Bradley accorded to radical empiricism was clearly in part due to the similarity he saw between it and his own monistic idealism. James also appreciated this similarity. In fact, both the public and private correspondence between the two is haunted by a palpable frustration – a frustration which comes from the lurking sense that it is only one or two confusions or misinterpretations which block the two thinkers from heartfelt agreement. According to James, both the classical empiricists and the idealists make the same mistake: they assume that the manifold of feeling is discontinuous. The final feature of James’s radical empiricism to note is that experience is neutral between subject and object:The instant field of the present is at all times what I call the ‘pure experience’.