ABSTRACT
Before Christmas I gave you two lectures on the methods of ‘cave-exploration’ that I proposed to follow in the remainder of my course. I said, in the first place, that I intended to proceed phenomenologically, studying human experience for what it gives itself out to be, and not distorting it by any appeal to origins, elements, underlying causes or real foundations, all of which generally bring in matters far more obscure and controversial than the phenomena they attempt to clarify or explain. I intended to proceed as a true empiricist, who describes the world as he finds it, and who is absolutely proof against the siren voice of arguments, backed by a portentous array of theoretical premisses, which tell him that the world must be like this, or that it cannot be like that, that such and such an object or experience in it ‘really only’ consists, of this or that, or that no sense can be given to an utterance except one which identifies this sense with so-and-so and such-and-such and nothing else. Such arguments have their place and their importance: they in fact represent some of the strange ways in which the phenomena transform themselves when we consider them intently, and have one or other of their features predominantly in mind. They are not, however, fit instruments for probing our untutored, undoctored experience, and even the irrefragable logic they wield so subtly has, mainly in its rules of formation, many conceptual narrownesses and rigidities, which may render it simly inapplicable to the material we seek to expound and connect. We must frame the forms and rules of our discourse in the face of the phenomena, letting the phenomena shape our utterances in what way they will, and not forcing them to conform to some predetermined pattern.
