We find an analogue of such a brain-condition in the accomplished man of the world.[1] He is adjusted to all the situations he is liable to meet. Nothing surprises him or throws him out of composure. So long as the world remains the sort of place he has found it to be, he knows how to live in it, and how to adjust himself to its demands. And this attitude of adjustment is not a theoretical attitude; he does not have a theory about the world he knows; he has the certainty of reine Erfahrung. He has 'sized up' the world and knows what it is, and the world, as he understands it, is the world of his experience with nothing problematic about it. Such a final and definite comprehension of the world is, in the above case, evidently arrived at by a process of growth from something less mature, less aufgeklärt, and accordingly not well fitted to maintain itself in the face of a large and varied experience.
We have here an evolution of experience, and at the beginning we have a certain fund of convictions and experience and 'knowledge,' and at the end we have another fund of experience. Such a fund of experience Avenarius calls an 'Erkenntnissmenge.' Evidently the second Erkenninissmenge is obtained by a gradual modification of the first. In actual experience, we know well enough how this happens. The world does not correspond to our expectations and we have to make our expectations correspond to the world. But what Avenarius wants is a comprehension of just this process in psychophysical terms. And the process to be comprehended is not the history of an individual system C.
Whatever 'Weltbcgriff our remote ancestors may have had, it no doubt expressed their assurance about the world and not their doubts and problems concerning it. But, as we can observe, doubts and problems arose; the E-values of the Weltbegriff lost their qualities of existence, acquaintance and security, and became problematized. Or as Avenarius puts it, the 'world concept' turned into the 'world problem.' It was bound to do this, because the world had been conceived animistically by the imaginative projection into it of characters which it did not possess, while the system C has got to be formed by the real R-values and not by mythical ones.
But, as in the case of the man of the world, so here the goal of the process is the deliverance from illusion, the winning of a clarified idea of the world which is in accord with the facts. But, some will exclaim, what kind of a system C will that be which can have a history like this, beginning in the dim past and reaching into the future?
At this point I take leave to recall the social basis of the concept of validity. Validity as a fact in actual experience, as a character
- ↑ I owe this illustration to Professor Royce.
