"The Spatial Quale": A Corrective to James's Radical Empiricism

212 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY "THE SPATIAL QUALE": A CORRECTIVE TO JAMES'S RADICAL EMPIRICISM "Space," William James confessed, "is [both] a direfully difficult subject [and the] driest of subjects.'" Nonetheless, convinced that most previous accounts of space were either incoherent or mythological, he set out to describe space as it is actually experienced. His first effort, "The Spatial Quale," appeared in The Journal of Speculative Philosophy in 1879.2 This article is historically important; as Ralph Barton Perry notes, "his peculiar view of the amplitude and eonnectedness of experience seems to have begun with the application to space. ''3 But, despite this fact, it is seldom read today. It was not reprinted in James's Collected Essays and Reviews because the editor found "no important difference" between the content of this article and that of the chapter in The Principles of Psychology dealing with the same topic. 4 And it has not been included in more recent anthologies of James's writings. James would undoubtedly have concurred with the reasoning behind these editorial decisions. In the preface to the Psychology he wrote: Chapter 20, on Space-perception, is a terrible thing, which, unless written with all that detail, could not be fairly treated at all. An abridgment of it, called The Spatial Quale' ... may be found by some persons a useful substitute for the entire chapter? In fact, however, there is a significant philosophical difference between the two accounts of space. In the Psychology, anticipating the bold doctrine of his radical empiricism, James argues that all space-relations are sensations and that nothing "needs to be put into the sensations by a mysterious act of 'relating thought'" (PP 2: 125, 153 n.).6 In "The Spatial Quale," however, he is more conservative. Here he claims that although some spatial relations can be immediately experienced, the recognition of others involves constructive intellectual activity. That is, while experience is not merely a collection of discrete items, neither does it contain all of the relations in terms of which we know it. t James to Carl Stumpf, 6 February 1887,and James to G. Stanley Hall, 3 September 1879.In Ralph Barton Perry, The Thoughtand Characterof WilliamJames,2 vols. (Boston: Little, Brown, &Co. 1935), 2:70 and 16. Vol. 13. Hereafter cited in the text as "SQ." aThoughtand Character, 1: 564. 4Perry, "Preface" to William James, CollectedEssaysand Reviews (New York: Longmans, Green & Co., 1920),p. vii. s The Principlesof Psychology,2 vols. (New York: Henry Holt& Co, 1890),1: v. Hereafter cited in the text as PP. 6James not onlyclaims in the Psychologythat spatial relations between sensations are "nothing more or less than pure sensational objects" (PP2: 151).He also asserts that, unlike most other types of relations, theyare "factsof the same orderwiththefacts they relate,lf these latterbepatchesin the circleof vision, theformerare certainotherpatches between them"(PP2: 149).For instance, distance is"the sensation of a linejoining the twodistant points: lengthen the line, youalter the feeling and with it the distance felt" (PP 2: 148).And magnitude is the feeling of morewe get when we pass from a smaller to a larger space. Later in the chapter James incorporates, with some revisions,a passage from"The Spatial Quale" which distinguishes between sensible space-relations and intellectual relations which "obtain between the elements of the space-system" (PP2: 275).This passage, however, is not in harmonywith James's efforts in the Psychologyto reduce the intellectual relations of "The Spatial Quale" to relations which are directly experienced. NOTES AND DISCUSSIONS 213 The empiricism of "The Spatial Quale" is not so radical as that of the Psychology, and compared to James's later writings it seems positively Kantian in its emphasis on the constructive activity of the intellect. Nonetheless, I think a case can be made (though I shall not argue this case in any detail) that the model of experience--and particularly the view of relations--outlined in this paper is richer and more intelligible than that offered by radical empiricism. Radical empiricism explicitly recognizes only two main categories of relations. First, there are "the relations that connect experiences" which must, James asserts, "themselves be experienced relations .'7 And second, there are the "house-born" rational relations which, being the...