dogmas, but he was content that others should believe them, and himself appreciated what he
regarded as the Christian myth. To James, such an attitude could not but appear immoral. He
retained from his Puritan ancestry a deep-seated belief that what is of most importance is good
conduct, and his democratic feeling made him unable to acquiesce in the notion of one truth for
philosophers and another for the vulgar. The temperamental opposition between Protestant and
Catholic persists among the unorthodox; Santayana was a Catholic free-thinker, William James a
Protestant, however heretical.
James doctrine of radical empiricism was first published in 1904, in an essay called "Does
'Consciousness' Exist?" The main purpose of this essay was to deny that the subject-object
relation is fundamental. It had, until then, been taken for granted by philosophers that there is a
kind of occurrence called "knowing," in which one entity, the knower or subject, is aware of
another, the thing known or the object. The knower was regarded as a mind or soul; the object
known might be a material object, an eternal essence, another mind, or, in self-consciousness,
identical with the knower. Almost everything in accepted philosophy was bound up with the
dualism of subject and object. The distinction of mind and matter, the contemplative ideal, and the
traditional notion of "truth," all need to be radically reconsidered if the distinction of subject and
object is not accepted as fundamental.
For my part, I am convinced that James was right on this matter, and would, on this ground alone,
deserve a high place among philosophers. I had thought otherwise until he, and those who agreed
with him, persuaded me of the truth of his doctrine. But let us proceed to his arguments.
Consciousness, he says, "is the name of a nonentity, and has no right to a place among first
principles. Those who still cling to it are clinging to a mere echo, the faint rumour left behind by
the disappearing 'soul' upon the air of philosophy." There is, he continues, "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." He explains that he is not denying that our thoughts perform a
function which is that of knowing, and that this function may be called "being conscious." What
he is denying might be put crudely as the view that consciousness is a "thing." He holds that there
is "only one primal stuff