In order to create a synthesis, a human mind was supposed to enter at this point to create the relations that the initial experience could not initially provide. Here we find ourselves in such a ‘bifurcated’ nature that everything that comes out of experience has to make a choice, so to speak, and either line up on the side of the thing to be known, or on the side of the knowing consciousness, without having the right to lead somewhere or to come from somewhere. (9)

Now the originality of James, which was clearly recognized by Whitehead, was to attack this situation—but not (as had been done for two centuries) in the name of subjective values, transcendence, or spiritual domains, but quite simply in the name of experience itself. It is undignified, says James, to call oneself an empiricist yet to deprive experience of what it makes most directly available: relations. For him it is scandalously inaccurate to limit experiential facts to sensory data, while waiting for a hypothetical mind to produce relations by some mysterious manoeuvre of which the world itself is entirely deprived. Here is the famous passage from the Principles of Psychology:
But from our point of view both Intellectualists and Sensationalists are wrong. If there be such things as feelings at all, then so surely as relations between objects exist in rerum natura, and more surely, do feelings exist to which these relations are known. There is not a conjunction or a preposition, and hardly an adverbial phrase, syntactic form, or inflection of voice, in human speech, that does not express some shading or other of relation which we at some moment actually feel to exist between the larger objects of our thought. If we speak objectively, it is the real relations that appear revealed; if we speak subjectively, it is the stream of consciousness that matches each of them by an inward colouring of its own. In either case the relations are numberless, and no existing language is capable of doing justice to all their shades. We ought to say a feeling of and, a feeling of if, a feeling of but and a feeling of by, quite as readily as we say a feeling of blue, a feeling of cold. Yet we do not, so inveterate has our habit become of recognizing the substantive parts alone that language almost refuses to lend itself to any other use. (10)

__________________________________________
9. Isabelle Stengers, Penser avec Whitehead: Une libre et sauvage création de concepts, Paris, Gallimard, 2002.
10. William James, Principles of Psychology, 1. p. 245. This can be found, in a similar form, in numerous passages
in William James’ Essays in Radical Empiricism, Longman Green and Co. New York, 1912.