IIAXIOMS AS POSTULATES
I.
1. Agreement that the world is experience + connecting principles—why we should start rather than conclude with this.
2. But (a) whose experience? Ours. Why self cannot be analysed away; why knowledge of self depends on experience.
3. (b) Experience of what? The world. But what the world is, it is not yet possible to say completely.
4. (1) The World not ready-made datum but constructed by a process of evolution,
5. (2) i.e. of trial or experiment—original flexibility or indeterminateness of world. Experiment suggested by practical needs—conscious and unconscious experimenting.
6. (3) Limits of experimenting—‘matter’ as resisting medium—impossibility of saying what it is in itself. Conception of material world developing in experience. Value of Aristotelian description of a ύλη capable of being moulded.
7. (4) The ‘World,’ therefore, is what is made of it—plastic. How far, to be determined only by trying. But methodologically plasticity assumed to be complete. Provisional character of our ‘facts.’
8. Bearing of this ‘pragmatism’ or ‘radical empiricism’ on the nature of axioms. Their origin as postulates to which we try to get world to conform. Contrast with the old empiricism and apriorism.
II.
9. (1) Its standpoint psychological, (2) intellectualist, (3) axioms presupposed in the experience which is supposed to impress them on us—Mill’s admissions, (4) derivation not historical, but ex post facto reconstruction, (5) its incompleteness, (6) impossibility of really tracing development of axioms and so unprogressiveness.
III.
10-25. Its superficial plausibility and real obscurity. Fallacy of inferring from § 9. (3) that there are a priori truths.
11. How postulates also yield ‘universality’ and ‘necessity.’ ‘Necessity’ and need.
12. ‘Condition of all possible experience’ means? Might be (1) cause or psychical antecedent, (2) presupposition of reflection (logical), or (3) ethical or æsthetical. Objections.
13. Meaning of ‘a priori’; (1) logical or (2) psychological? Equivocations of apriorist authority.
14-18. The a priori as logical. But why analyse in Kant’s way? Exclusive correctness of Kantian analysis not to be based either (1) on its a priori truth, or (2) on experience of its satisfactory working. Else why should Kantians have tried to better it?
15. Kant’s derivation of his analysis from psychology.
16. Even if it were satisfactory, no proof that it would be the only or the best possible.
17. If a priori is not in time, its superiority to the a posteriori merely honorific.
18. Kant’s analysis neither simple nor lucid.
19-22. A priori as psychical fact. But if so, has it (1) been correctly described? (2) how is it distinguished from innate idea? (3) does not epistemology merge in psychology?
20. As facts a priori truths have a history, which must be inquired into.
21. A priori faculties tautologous, and
22. should not be treated as ultimate.
23. Result that science of epistemology rests on systematic confusion of alternative interpretations of apriority. The proper extension of logic and psychology.
24. Intellectualism of both apriorism and empiricism incapacitates them from recognising unity and activity of organism. How this may be recognised by deriving axioms from a volitional source by postulation.
25. Kant’s recognition of postulation in ethics—its conflict with his ‘critical’ theory of knowledge—resulting dualism intolerable. Hence either (1) suppress the Practical Reason or preferably (2) extend postulation to Theoretic Reason.
IV.
26. Postulates at first tentative and not always successful—their various stages and common origin—the theoretic possibility of changing axioms not practically to be feared.
27. Postulates not a coherent system inter se except as rooted in personality.
V.
28. Not to be derived out of nothing, but out of a prior psychical fact on the sentient level of consciousness—why consciousness itself cannot be derived—its characteristics on the sentient level.
29. Hence identity (of self) first felt in the coherence and continuity of mental processes, and forms basis for the postulation of identity—the practical necessity of recognising the ‘same’ in the ‘like.’
30. Once postulated, identity proves a great success, though never completely realised in fact. Stages of identity-postulation: (1) recognition of others and objects of perception. But these change and so do not provide a stable standard of comparison. Hence (2) postulation of ideally identical selves.