According to our view all knowledge is based on experience, but this does no longer mean any restriction of knowledge. In the older views the impossibility of metaphysics was due to some regrettable imperfection or incapacity of the human mind; in our view the impossibility is of a logical order, it is due to some intrinsic non-sense in the phrases which were supposed to express “metaphysical problems.” To regret the impossibility of metaphysics becomes impossible; it would be the same as regretting the impossibility of a round square.
All real questions (i. e. those combinations of words to which we can possibly give the meaning of a question) can in principle be answered (“There is no ‘Riddle of the Universe’,” as Ludwig Wittgenstein has put it), and they can be answered by experience only, by the methods of science. A heavy burden is taken from Philosophy, and it cannot quarrel any more with science. Its function is analytic and critical, it helps us to get rid of mere verbal disputes, and with unspeakable relief do we see great “problems” vanish without leaving empty places.
The greatest difference between the older empiricism and our new philosophy of experience lies, I think, in its method. The former started with an analysis of human faculties (such as thinking, perceiving, and so forth); the latter starts with something much more fundamental, namely: the analysis of “expression” in general. All propositions, all languages, all systems of symbols, also all philosophies, want to express something. They can do this only if there is something there that can be expressed: it is the material of all knowledge, and to say that it must be given by experience is but another way of saying that something must be there before we can have knowledge of it and about it.
The position of this philosophy is unassailable, because it rests on the acknowledgment of the hardest facts and the study of the strictest logic. On these foundations our Philosophy of Experience stands very securely as on a firm rock amidst a wild sea of various philosophical opinions. It is neither skeptical nor dogmatic, it cannot interfere with science or with human values; its only object is understanding. Only in this way can it attain that serene attitude which belongs to all genuine philosophy: the attitude of Wisdom.
