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could have overcome. Santayana also liked religion, but in a very different way. He liked it aesthetically and historically, not as a help towards a moral life; as was natural, he greatly preferred Catholicism to Protestantism. He did not intellectually accept any of the Christian 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's 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 partly 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 or material', out of which everything in the world is composed. This stuff he calls 'pure experience'. Knowing, he says, is a particular sort of relation between two portions of pure experience. The subject-object relation is derivative: 'experience, I believe, has no such inner duplicity'. A given undivided portion of experience can be in one context a knower, and in another something known.

He defines 'pure experience' as 'the immediate flux of life which furnishes the material to our later reflection'.

It will be seen that this doctrine abolishes the distinction between mind and matter, if regarded as a distinction between two different kinds of what James calls 'stuff'. Accordingly those who agree with James in this matter advocate what they call 'neutral monism', according to which the material of which the world is constructed is neither mind nor matter, but something anterior to both. James himself did not develop this implication of his theory; on the contrary, his use of the phrase 'pure experience' points to a perhaps unconscious Berkeleian idealism. The word 'experience' is one often used by philosophers, but seldom defined. Let us consider for a moment what it can mean.

Common sense holds that many things which occur are not 'experienced', for instance, events on the invisible side of the