Essays in Radical EmpiricismWilliam James

James died in 1910; his colleague Ralph Barton Perry gathered these essays in 1912. Most were written in a burst during 1904 and 1905, and the two that open the volume, "Does 'Consciousness' Exist?" and "A World of Pure Experience," state the doctrine. Consciousness is a function, an entity nowhere to be found. There is one primal stuff, pure experience, and knower and known are two ways of sorting it after the fact.

The empiricism is radical because of what it refuses to leave out. Classical empiricism from Hume onward admitted sensations while treating the connections between them as the mind's addition. James insists that relations, transitions, and tendencies are experienced as directly as colors and sounds; the "and" and the "with" are given, along with the things they join. The world therefore hangs together without a transcendental ego to glue it. The essays complete the account of mind begun in The Principles of Psychology and give Pragmatism its metaphysical footing, and Russell's neutral monism takes its starting point here.