SUGGESTIONS TOWARD A CONCEPT OF EXPERIENCE
Are we in a position to bring together any suggestions toward a concept of experience? Let us see.
Experience is, for our purpose, cognitive experience of objects,— experience in the narrower, and more precise sense. And the objects of experience are characterizations of experience, objects which may or may not be mythological objects.
The most important character of experience is the real outer world as a permanent transcendent object, or totality of objects, which contains certain objects of peculiar interest, my fellows, who in turn experience the same outer realities that I do.
This presence before me and about me of a real outer world and fellow beings like myself is a character of my experience. It is also a character of my experience that the experience of my fellows (those who are sane) has the same character as mine.
The possibility that this natural view of the world should ever cease to be a character of experience seems too remote to make it worth entertaining; the few cases we can observe where this has happened have been cases in which there was a profound disorganization of functions.
Other objects of experience are, however, observed to come or to disappear. But these variable objects appear to depend not merely upon the individual, but upon the social relations, current beliefs and attitudes, the 'Erkenntnissmenge' in which the individual grows up.
Experience is, therefore, not an individual fact, but a social fact, focussed in individuals but forming a system. The limits of this system must be arbitrarily defined, but within the system the experience of the individual is determined as regards a great deal of its cognitive character by the 'Erkenntniissmenge' of the whole.
This social system of experience has a history; the common fund of objects of experience is known to change. Certain objects or characters are eliminated by other objects or characters which replace them. Thus the sun as an object of experience which revolved about the earth has been replaced by the sun as an object of experience about which the earth revolves in an elliptical orbit. Other objects or characters are eliminated and not replaced. These are objects of the animistic type. I know an Egyptian dragoman who was terrified at hearing a lady under his guidance speak slightingly of the water of the Nile for drinking purposes. He feared the Nile would hear and
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