Essays in Radical Empiricism shows William James concerned with ultimate reality and moving toward a metaphysical system. The twelve essays originally appeared in journals between 1904 and 1906. James himself collected them to illustrate what he called �radical empiricism,� but this volume was not published until 1912, two years after his death. Included are such seminal essays as �Does Consciousness Exist?� and �A World of Pure Experience.� The distinguished scholar and biographer Ralph Barton Perry, who edited this volume, called the essays essential to an understanding of James�s writings. Radical empiricism takes us into a �world of pure experience.� In the essays, as introducer Ellen Kappy Suckiel notes, �James inquires into the metaphysically basic reality underlying the common-sense objects of our world. It is here that he defends his view that �experience� is the sole and ultimate reality.� The essays deal with the applications of this �pure� or �neutral� experience: the general problem of relations, the role of feeling in experience, the nature of truth. Horace M. Kallen observed: �The fundamental point of these essays is that the relations between things, holding them together or separating them, are at least as real as the things themselves . . . and that no hidden substrata are necessary to account for the clashes and coherences of the world.� Ellen Kappy Suckiel, a professor of philosophy at the University of California, Santa Cruz, is the author of The Pragmatic Philosophy of William James and Pragmatism and Religious Belief: A Study of the Philosophy of William James.