William James, answered from the texts and cited to the page.
Pure experience is the immediate flux of life itself, before reflection has had the chance to shatter our instinctive world into pieces.1 Only the newborn infant, or the man stunned into semi-coma by sleep or illness or a blow, approaches it in its literal purity — a that which is not yet any definite what, full of both oneness and manyness, but in respects that do not yet appear; changing throughout, yet so confusedly that its phases interpenetrate and no points of distinction or identity can be caught.2
In that state it is but another name for feeling or sensation. The flux, however, no sooner arrives than it begins to fill itself with emphases; salient parts become identified, fixed, abstracted, so that experience flows as if shot through with adjectives and nouns and prepositions and conjunctions.3 Purity, then, is only a relative term — it measures the proportional amount of unverbalized sensation that any given experience still embodies, not an absolute condition we can inhabit for long.
What makes the doctrine philosophically consequential is the claim about relations. Far back as we go into the flux, continuities and discontinuities are absolutely co-ordinate matters of immediate feeling — the conjunctions are as primordial as the disjunctions.4 Prepositions, copulas, conjunctions — "is," "then," "before," "beside," "unlike" — flower out of the stream of pure experience as naturally as nouns and adjectives do.5
This is the move that separates radical empiricism from the British empiricism of Hume: Hume left relations external to the relata, something the mind had to supply by association after the fact. I insist that the relations are themselves given, experienced, part of the flux. The metaphysical upshot follows directly. If we start with the supposition that there is only one primal stuff in the world and call that stuff pure experience, then knowing itself can be explained as a particular sort of relation into which portions of pure experience enter — one portion becoming the knower, another the object known, the relation itself no less a part of experience than the terms it connects.6
Consciousness, on this view, is not a separate aboriginal entity made of some ghostly substance over against the material world; it is a function, the function of knowing, performed within and by pure experience.7 The experience of blue, looked at honestly, illustrates the point. As immediately given it can only be called by some neutral name — phenomenon — for it does not come to us already sorted into a mental side and a physical side.
Only when we trace its relations to other things does it double itself, figuring as a physical quality in one set of connections and as a feeling in the mind in another.8 The dualism is derivative, not aboriginal; pure experience is the ground from which both poles emerge. And within even the smallest pulse of experience, something always goes indissolubly with something else — you cannot separate the same from its other without abandoning the real and taking to the conceptual system.9 Names cut the continuum into separate entities, but no cuts existed in the continuum in which things originally came.10
Experience in its immediacy seems perfectly fluent. The active sense of living which we all enjoy, before reflection shatters our instinctive world for us, is self-luminous and suggests no paradoxes.Essays in Radical Empiricism, pp. 92–94
'Pure experience' is the name which I gave to the immediate flux of life which furnishes the material to our later reflection with its conceptual categories. Only new-born babes, or men in semi-coma from sleep, drugs, illnesses, or blows, may be assumed to have an experience pure in the literal sense of a that which is not yet any definite what, tho' ready to be all sorts of whats; full both of oneness and of manyness, but in respects that don't appear; changing throughout, yet so confusedly that its phases interpenetrate and no points, either of distinction or of identity, can be caught.Essays in Radical Empiricism, pp. 92–94
But the flux of it no sooner comes than it tends to fill itself with emphases, and these salient parts become identified and fixed and abstracted; so that experience now flows as if shot through with adjectives and nouns and prepositions and conjunctions.Essays in Radical Empiricism, pp. 94–96
In all this the continuities and the discontinuities are absolutely co-ordinate matters of immediate feeling. The conjunctions are as primordial elements of 'fact' as are the distinctions and disjunctions.Essays in Radical Empiricism, pp. 94–96
Prepositions, copulas, and conjunctions, 'is,' 'isn't,' 'then,' 'before,' 'in,' 'on,' 'beside,' 'between,' 'next,' 'like,' 'unlike,' 'as,' 'but,' flower out of the stream of pure experience, the stream of concretes or the sensational stream, as naturally as nouns and adjectives do.Essays in Radical Empiricism, pp. 94–96
My thesis is that if we start with the supposition that there is only one primal stuff or material in the world, a stuff of which everything is composed, and if we call that stuff 'pure experience,' then knowing can easily be explained as a particular sort of relation towards one another into which portions of pure experience may enter.Essays in Radical Empiricism, pp. 3–5
I mean only to deny that the word stands for an entity, but to insist most emphatically that it does stand for a function. There is, I mean, no aboriginal stuff or quality of being, contrasted with that of which material objects are made, out of which our thoughts of them are made; but there is a function in experience which thoughts perform.Essays in Radical Empiricism, pp. 3–5
It does not come to us immediately as a relation between two realities, one mental and one physical. It is only when, still thinking of it as the same blue, we trace relations between it and other things, that it doubles itself, so to speak, and develops in two directions; and, taken in connection with some associates, figures as a physical quality, whilst with others it figures as a feeling in the mind.Psychology Briefer Course, pp. 464–465
The gist of the matter is always the same—something ever goes indissolubly with something else. You cannot separate the same from its other, except by abandoning the real altogether and taking to the conceptual system.A Pluralistic Universe, p. 24
Their names, to be sure, cut them into separate conceptual entities, but no cuts existed in the continuum in which they originally came.A Pluralistic Universe, p. 24