Provenance
Source & edition record
This page records where the text came from, what changed in presentation, and what remains unverified.
Bibliographic source
- Work
- A World of Pure Experience
- Author
- William James
- First publication
- The Journal of Philosophy, Psychology and Scientific Methods, 1904, vol. 1, pp. 533-543; 561-570
- Source edition
- Essays in Radical Empiricism, ed. Ralph Barton Perry, New York: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1912, pp. 39-91
- Accessed
- 2026-08-16
- Verification
- source-compared
- Source snapshot SHA-256
76d7ac8c1b70cc4c486c78efb875e892a77801dca8e24f50eb8e30db16870506
Transformations
- Removed the Project Gutenberg legal wrapper and the work-specific excluded matter recorded in the source manifest.
- Preserved source wording, spelling, punctuation, order, and plain-text emphasis markers.
- Normalised mechanical whitespace and line wrapping, while preserving diagrams and tables verbatim.
- Added semantic section files, stable routes, source-fragment links, and deterministic anchors.
- Inherited the Project Gutenberg transcription and its documented editorial corrections.
- Converted bracket-number note markers and definitions into stable section-local Markdown footnotes.
- Preserve the two original 1904 articles, dates, issues, page spans, and DOIs as separate bibliographic witnesses rather than inventing a single first-publication object.
- Compared the complete rendered essay against both exact 1904 journal scans; retained the frozen 1912 source-edition wording and recorded substantive earlier readings in the public source record.
- Did not expose original-page labels as if the altered 1912 text were an exact transcription of either 1904 journal installment.
Edition collation
The rendered text follows the frozen 1912 collected edition. Both exact 1904 journal installments were compared in full; substantive earlier readings are disclosed here rather than silently merged into the later text.
Witnesses
- Journal first publication, part I, 1904: Exact first-publication witness, vol. 1 no. 20, 29 September 1904, printed pp. 533-543, DOI 10.2307/2011912. PDF SHA-256
755ca871d8dc8da48b0bdfb8958a9b382e312ac891e5a3849f4bb9b95ecb3ea3. - Journal first publication, part II, 1904: Exact first-publication witness, vol. 1 no. 21, 13 October 1904, printed pp. 561-570, DOI 10.2307/2011356. PDF SHA-256
f2bc3b18ae61de13eedc4d5d0e466fff71a447050ea9d306c4bd491b1a6f3f2c.
Substantive earlier readings
| Location | Earlier witness | Rendered source edition |
|---|---|---|
| Part I, 1904 p. 535 | the efforts of naturalism to correct its incoherencies | the efforts of rationalism to correct its incoherencies |
| Part I, 1904 p. 538 | Representative theories simply shoved the subject-object gap a step farther, getting it now between the object and the representation. | Representative theories put a mental 'representation,' 'image,' or 'content' into the gap, as a sort of intermediary. |
| Part I, 1904 p. 538 | left it impassible in the finite realm, and brought an Absolute in to perform the bridging act | left it impossible to traverse by finite knowers, and brought an Absolute in to perform the saltatory act |
| Part I, 1904 p. 538 | To discuss all the types, the ways in which one experience may function | To discuss all the ways in which one experience may function |
| Part I, 1904 pp. 538-539 | I have given some account in two articles, published respectively in Mind ... and in the Psychological Review | I have given some account in two [earlier] articles |
| Part I, 1904 p. 539 | the actual experience-value and meaning of the mysterious cognitive relation | the actual meanings of the mysterious cognitive relation |
| Part I, 1904 pp. 539-540 | I now feel my idea, however bad it may have been, to be continued | I feel my idea, however imperfect it may have been, to have led hither and to be now terminated |
| Part I, 1904 p. 540 | every later moment matches and corroborates an earlier. In this matching and corroborating | every later moment continues and corroborates an earlier one. In this continuing and corroborating |
| Part I, 1904 p. 540 | Knowledge thus lives inside the tissue of experience. | Knowledge of sensible realities thus comes to life inside the tissue of experience. |
| Part I, 1904 p. 540 | That is what we mean here by being 'in mind.' | That is what we mean here by the object's being 'in mind.' |
| Part I, 1904 p. 540 | an act by which union is smitten into living being, over the head of the distinctness of its terms | an act by which two terms are smitten into one, over the head of their distinctness |
| Part I, 1904 p. 540 | the conjunctions which we experience must be at least as real | conjunctions that are experienced must be at least as real |
| Part I, 1904 p. 541 | Whatever terminates that chain was, because it now is, what the idea had in mind. | Whatever terminates that chain was, because it now proves itself to be, what the concept had in mind. |
| Part I, 1904 p. 541 | being its substitute in various operations, yet leading to the same result | being its substitute in various operations, sometimes physical and sometimes mental, which lead us to its associates and results |
| Part I, 1904 p. 541 | According to radical empiricism, experience as a whole wears the form of a process in time | According to my view, experience as a whole is a process in time |
| Part I, 1904 p. 542 | Others follow them more livingly, are felt to increase or to enlarge their meaning | Others are felt to increase or to enlarge their meaning |
| Part I, 1904 p. 542 | the reaching of a certain kind of end | the reaching of a certain experienced end |
| Part I, 1904 p. 543 | The nucleus of every man's experience, the sense of his own body, is ... an absolutely continuous perception | The objective nucleus of every man's experience, his own body, is ... a continuous percept |
| Part I, 1904 p. 543 | Round the nucleus, partly continuous and partly discrete, of what we call the physical world of actual perception | Round their several objective nuclei, partly shared and common and partly discrete, of the real physical world |
| Part I, 1904 p. 543 | around the whole of the nucleus of relative 'reality' ... there floats the vast nimbus of experiences | around all the nuclei of shared reality ... floats the vast cloud of experiences |
| Part II, 1904 p. 561 | feels his experience as something substitutional | feels his experience to be something substitutional |
| Part II, 1904 p. 561 | From inside of its own entity it postulates reality existing elsewhere. | From inside of its own entity it says 'more' and postulates reality existing elsewhere. |
| Part II, 1904 p. 561 | conceptual knowledge to be wholly constituted by things that fall outside of the knowing experience itself | that conceptual knowledge is made such wholly by the existence of things that fall outside of the knowing experience itself |
| Part II, 1904 p. 561 | we were nailed down and certified to have been its actual knowers | we were certified to have been its actual knowers |
| Part II, 1912 addition after 1904 p. 561 | Sentence absent | Just so we are mortal all the time by reason of the virtuality of the inevitable event which will make us so when it shall have come. |
| Part II, 1904 p. 562 | The truncated experiences are sufficient to act upon | The experiences of tendency are sufficient to act upon |
| Part II, 1904 p. 563 | these are not actually there, so that our knowledge for the most part keeps only virtual | these are not actually but only virtually there |
| Part II, 1904 p. 563 | What then would the salto mortale, the immediate self-transcendency affirmed as something existing independently of experiential mediation or termination | What then would the self-transcendency affirmed to exist in advance of all experiential mediation or termination |
| Part II, 1904 p. 564 | such knowledge an acquaintance with what actually lies about the object ... puts within our grasp | an acquaintance with what actually lies about the object ... puts such knowledge within our grasp |
| Part II, 1904 p. 564 | such really next effects | such effects |
| Part II, 1904 p. 564 | my recent article entitled 'Does Consciousness Exist?' | my [essay] entitled 'Does Consciousness Exist?' |
| Part II, 1904 p. 565 | Why insist on its being a static relation out of time | Why insist that knowing is a static relation out of time |
| Part II, 1904 p. 567 | unless indeed they became 'co-conscious' over a still larger part of their content | unless indeed they flowed over it and became 'co-conscious' over a still larger part of their content |
| Part II, 1904 p. 567 | farther than any actual percept ... imperceptibles like molecules or ether | farther than any actual percept of either ... imperceptibles like atoms or ether |
Rights status
public-domain. Project Gutenberg records the 1912 source edition as public domain in the USA. Both journal articles were first published in 1904. This publication decision applies to US availability; readers elsewhere should check local law. Project Gutenberg’s licence and trademark terms apply to the frozen source artifact. View the rights record ↗