Pragmatism - Fragment

1.317-321    G-c.1910-2

  317. The whole content of consciousness is made up of
qualities of feeling, as truly as the whole of space is made up of
points or the whole of time of instants.
  318. Contemplate anything by itself -- anything
whatever that can be so contemplated. Attend to the whole and
drop the parts out of attention altogether. One can
approximate nearly enough to the accomplishment of that to see that
the result of its perfect accomplishment would be that one
would have in his consciousness at the moment nothing but a
quality of feeling. This quality of feeling would in itself, as so
contemplated, have no parts. It would be unlike any other
such quality of feeling. In itself, it would not even resemble
any other; for resemblance has its being only in comparison.
It would be a pure priman. Since this is true of whatever we
contemplate, however complex may be the object, it follows
that there is nothing else in immediate consciousness. To be
conscious is nothing else than to feel.
  319. What room, then, is there for secundans and tertians?
Was there some mistake in our demonstration that they must
also have their places in the phaneron? No, there was no
mistake. I said that the phaneron is made up entirely of qualities
of feeling as truly as space is entirely made up of points. There
is a certain protoidal aspect -- I coin the word for the need -- 
under which space is truly made up of nothing but points. Yet
it is certain that no collection of points -- using the word
collection to mean merely a plural, without the idea of the objects
being brought together -- no collection of points,nomatter how
abnumerable its multitude, can in itself constitute space....
  320. The phaneron does contain genuine secundans.
Standing on the outside of a door that is slightly ajar, you put your
hand upon the knob to open and enter it. You experience an
unseen, silent resistance. You put your shoulder against the
door and, gathering your forces, put forth a tremendous effort.
Effort supposes resistance. Where there is no effort there is no
resistance, where there is no resistance there is no effort either

 * From "Pragmatism," Fragment 2, c. 1910.
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in this world or any of the worlds of possibility. It follows that
an effort is not a feeling nor anything priman or protoidal.
There are feelings connected with it: they are the sum of
consciousness during the effort. But it is conceivable that a man
should have it in his power directly to summon up all those
feelings, or any feelings. He could not, in any world, be
endowed with the power of summoning up an effort to which
there did not happen to be a resistance all ready to exist. For
it is an absurdity to suppose that a man could directly will to
oppose that very will. A very little thinking will show that this
is what it comes to. According to such psychological analysis
as I can make, effort is a phenomenon which only arises when
one feeling abuts upon another in time, and which then always
arises. But my psychological pretensions are little, if they exist
at all, and I only mention my theory in order that contrast
should impress the reader with the irrelevancy of psychology
to our present problem, which is to say of what sort that is
which is in our minds when we make an effort and which
constitutes it an effort.
   321. We live in two worlds, a world of fact and a world of
fancy. Each of us is accustomed to think that he is the creator
of his world of fancy; that he has but to pronounce his fiat, and
the thing exists, with no resistance and no effort; and although
this is so far from the truth that I doubt not that much the
greater part of the reader's labor is expended on the world of
fancy, yet it is near enough the truth for a first approximation.
For this reason we call the world of fancy the internal world,
the world of fact the external world. In this latter we are
masters, each of us, of his own voluntary muscles, and of
nothing more. But man is sly, and contrives to make this little
more than he needs. Beyond that, he defends himself from the
angles of hard fact by clothing himself with a garment of
contentment and of habituation. Were it not for this garment, he
would every now and then find his internal world rudely
disturbed and his fiats set at naught by brutal inroads of ideas
from without. I call such forcible modification of our ways of
thinking the influence of the world of fact or experience. But
he patches up his garment by guessing what those inroads are
likely to be and carefully excluding from his internal world
every idea which is likely to be so disturbed. Instead of waiting|p161

for experience to come at untoward times, he provokes it
when it can do no harm and changes the government of his
internal world accordingly.