Quote Resource

[gricketts04Member]

This May, I am speaking at the ALA Conference on Emerson and James. In my essay, I provide a quote from what I believe to be “Essays in Radical Empiricism.” I included the piece; however, I cannot find the actual text in “Essays” or any other Jamesian texts. Can anyone provide me with the actual resource?

“The dualism of subject and object is not so fundamental… as the dualism of what is presented and what presents itself. Presentation is a basal category, and subject and object are but secondary terms derived from it.”

Thank you!

Gary Ricketts
gricketts04@icloud.com

[Gary JaronModerator]

Gary,
I apologize for the delay in answering.
When I did a search using the online texts of James that we have links to on this site, I was not able to locate that quote you referred to in either the Essays in Radical Empiricism or in Some Problems of Philosophy, the Meaning of Truth, Pragmatism, Collected Essays and Reviews, Principles of Psychology vol 1 & 2, or the Will to Believe.

It does sound like James, yet I cannot locate it either in any of the original reprinted texts of his work.

Gary Jaron

[gricketts04Member]

Thank you! And how odd? I will more than likely have to swap the quote for a similar one… Perhaps “Does ‘Consciousness’ Exist?” will be a good starting place… Let me know if you have any other suggestions!

I appreciate your research and response!

[p.m.davis@liverpool.ac.ukMember]

I don’t think ‘basal’ is a James-like word. Perhaps it is from a commentary on James
You’re right to think of the passage from Does Consciousness Exist:

The room thus again gets counted twice over. It plays two different rôles, being Gedanke and Gedachtes, the thought-of-an-object, and the object-thought-of, both in one; and all this without paradox or mystery, just as the same material thing may be both low and high, or small and great, or bad and good, because of its relations to opposite parts of an environing world.

As ‘subjective’ we say that the experience represents; as ‘objective’ it is represented. What represents and what is represented is here numerically the same; but we must remember that no dualism of being represented and representing resides in the experience per se. In its pure state, or when isolated, there is no self-splitting of it into consciousness and what the consciousness is ‘of.’ Its subjectivity and objectivity are functional attributes solely, , realized only when the experience is ‘take,’ i.e., talked-of, twice, considered along with its two differing contexts respectively, by a new retrospective experience, of which that whole past complication now forms the fresh content. The instant field of the present is at all times what I call the ‘pure’ experience. It is only virtually or potentially either object or subject as yet.

[gricketts04Member]

Thank you for the response! Gary Jaron found the quote in Ralph Barton Perry’s preface to “Essays in Radical Empiricism” in which Perry quotes from James’s “The Meaning of Truth.”

[p.m.davis@liverpool.ac.ukMember]

Could I trouble you for the Perry quotation and the quotation from Meaning of Truth within it, please? Really interesting: your paper will surely impress
Philip

[gricketts04Member]

I am sorry but I was rather impulsive to post. Gary Jaron referenced another quote in my essay! Because we are conversing via email, I was confused!

[jammmMember]

Hi

Please double check your source, the quote you’re looking for might not be from “Essays in Radical Empiricism” or any other text by William James.

Thanks

[jammmMember]

Hi,

I think you should try the quote you are referring to does not appear to be from William James’s Essays in Radical Empiricism. It is possible that the quote is misattributed or paraphrased from another work. For accurate sourcing, I recommend double-checking the quote against primary texts or consulting secondary sources that analyze James’s work. You might also want to review James’s other writings or related academic literature for more context.

Thanks

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