A Pluralistic Universe · William James
VI
Mr. Bradley's understanding shows the most extraordinary power of perceiving separations and the most extraordinary impotence in comprehending conjunctions. One would naturally say 'neither or both,' but not so Mr. Bradley. When a common man analyzes certain _whats_ from out the stream of experience, he understands their distinctness _as thus isolated_. But this does not prevent him from equally well understanding their combination with each other as _originally experienced in the concrete_, or their confluence with new sensible experiences in which they recur as 'the same.' Returning into the stream of sensible presentation, nouns and adjectives, and _thats_ and abstract _whats_, grow confluent again, and the word 'is' names all these experiences of conjunction. Mr. Bradley understands the isolation of the abstracts, but to understand the combination is to him impossible.[1] 'To understand a complex _AB_,' he says, 'I must begin with _A_ or _B_. And beginning, say with _A_, if I then merely find _B_, I have either lost _A_, or I have got beside _A_, [_the word 'beside' seems here vital, as meaning a conjunction 'external' and therefore unintelligible_] something else, and in neither case have I understood.[1] For my intellect cannot simply unite a diversity, nor has it in itself any form or way of togetherness, and you gain nothing if, beside _A_ and _B_, you offer me their conjunction in fact. For to my intellect that is no more than another external element. And "facts," once for all, are for my intellect not true unless they satisfy it.... The intellect has in its nature no principle of mere togetherness' (pp. 570, 572).
Text from Project Gutenberg, public domain in the United States.