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Title: The Influence of Darwin on Philosophy, and other essays in contemporary thought

Author: John Dewey

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Language: English

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Produced by Adrian Mastronardi, Charlie Howard, and the
Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net
(This file was produced from images generously made
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  THE INFLUENCE OF
  DARWIN ON PHILOSOPHY

  And Other Essays in Contemporary
  Thought

  BY
  JOHN DEWEY
  _Professor of Philosophy in Columbia University_

  [Illustration]

  NEW YORK
  HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY




  COPYRIGHT, 1910,
  BY
  HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY


  _Published April, 1910_




PREFACE


An elaborate preface to a philosophic work usually impresses one as a
last desperate effort on the part of its author to convey what he feels
he has not quite managed to say in the body of his book. Nevertheless,
a collection of essays on various topics written during a series
of years may perhaps find room for an independent word to indicate
the kind of unity they seem, to their writer, to possess. Probably
every one acquainted with present philosophic thought--found, with
some notable exceptions, in periodicals rather than in books--would
term it a philosophy of transition and reconstruction. Its various
representatives agree in what they oppose--the orthodox British
empiricism of two generations ago and the orthodox Neo-Kantian idealism
of the last generation--rather than in what they proffer.

The essays of this volume belong, I suppose, to what has come
to be known (since the earlier of them were written) as the
pragmatic phase of the newer movement. Now a recent German critic
has described pragmatism as, “Epistemologically, nominalism;
psychologically, voluntarism; cosmologically, energism; metaphysically,
agnosticism; ethically, meliorism on the basis of the Bentham-Mill
utilitarianism.”[1] It may be that pragmatism will turn out to be all
of this formidable array; but even should it, the one who thus defines
it has hardly come within earshot of it. For whatever else pragmatism
is or is not, the pragmatic spirit is primarily a revolt against that
habit of mind which disposes of anything whatever--even so humble an
affair as a new method in Philosophy--by tucking it away, after this
fashion, in the pigeon holes of a filing cabinet. There are other vital
phases of contemporary transition and revision; there are, for example,
a new realism and naturalistic idealism. When I recall that I find
myself more interested (even though their representatives might decline
to reciprocate) in such phases than in the systems marked by the labels
of our German critic, I am confirmed in a belief that after all it is
better to view pragmatism quite vaguely as part and parcel of a general
movement of intellectual reconstruction. For otherwise we seem to have
no recourse save to define pragmatism--as does our German author--in
terms of the very past systems against which it is a reaction; or, in
escaping that alternative, to regard it as a fixed rival system making
like claim to completeness and finality. And if, as I believe, one of
the marked traits of the pragmatic movement is just the surrender of
every such claim, how have we furthered our understanding of pragmatism?

Classic philosophies have to be revised because they must be squared
up with the many social and intellectual tendencies that have
revealed themselves since those philosophies matured. The conquest
of the sciences by the experimental method of inquiry; the injection
of evolutionary ideas into the study of life and society; the
application of the historic method to religions and morals as well
as to institutions; the creation of the sciences of “origins” and
of the cultural development of mankind--how can such intellectual
changes occur and leave philosophy what it was and where it was? Nor
can philosophy remain an indifferent spectator of the rise of what
may be termed the new individualism in art and letters, with its
naturalistic method applied in a religious, almost mystic spirit to
what is primitive, obscure, varied, inchoate, and growing in nature
and human character. The age of Darwin, Helmholtz, Pasteur, Ibsen,
Maeterlinck, Rodin, and Henry James must feel some uneasiness until
it has liquidated its philosophic inheritance in current intellectual
coin. And to accuse those who are concerned in this transaction of
ignorant contempt for the classic past of philosophy is to overlook
the inspiration the movement of translation draws from the fact that
the history of philosophy has become only too well understood.

Any revision of customary notions with its elimination--instead of
“solution”--of many traditionary problems cannot hope, however, for
any unity save that of tendency and operation. Elaborate and imposing
system, the regimenting and uniforming of thoughts, are, at present,
evidence that we are assisting at a stage performance in which
borrowed--or hired--figures are maneuvering. Tentatively and piecemeal
must the reconstruction of our stock notions proceed. As a contribution
to such a revision, the present collection of essays is submitted. With
one or two exceptions, their order is that of a reversed chronology,
the later essays coming first. The facts regarding the conditions of
their first appearance are given in connection with each essay. I
wish to thank the Editors of the _Philosophical Review_, of _Mind_,
of the _Hibbert Journal_, of the _Journal of Philosophy, Psychology,
and Scientific Methods_, and of the _Popular Science Monthly_, and
the Directors of the Press of Chicago and Columbia Universities,
respectively, for permission to reprint such of the essays as appeared
originally under their several auspices.

            JOHN DEWEY

      COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY,
  NEW YORK CITY, March 1, 1910.




CONTENTS


                                                          PAGE
  THE INFLUENCE OF DARWINISM ON PHILOSOPHY                   1

  NATURE AND ITS GOOD: A CONVERSATION                       20

  INTELLIGENCE AND MORALS                                   46

  THE EXPERIMENTAL THEORY OF KNOWLEDGE                      77

  THE INTELLECTUALIST CRITERION FOR TRUTH                  112

  A SHORT CATECHISM CONCERNING TRUTH                       154

  BELIEFS AND EXISTENCES                                   169

  EXPERIENCE AND OBJECTIVE IDEALISM                        198

  THE POSTULATE OF IMMEDIATE EMPIRICISM                    226

  “CONSCIOUSNESS” AND EXPERIENCE                           242

  THE SIGNIFICANCE OF THE PROBLEM OF KNOWLEDGE             271




THE INFLUENCE OF DARWINISM ON PHILOSOPHY[2]


I

That the publication of the “Origin of Species” marked an epoch in
the development of the natural sciences is well known to the layman.
That the combination of the very words origin and species embodied
an intellectual revolt and introduced a new intellectual temper is
easily overlooked by the expert. The conceptions that had reigned
in the philosophy of nature and knowledge for two thousand years,
the conceptions that had become the familiar furniture of the mind,
rested on the assumption of the superiority of the fixed and final;
they rested upon treating change and origin as signs of defect and
unreality. In laying hands upon the sacred ark of absolute permanency,
in treating the forms that had been regarded as types of fixity and
perfection as originating and passing away, the “Origin of Species”
introduced a mode of thinking that in the end was bound to transform
the logic of knowledge, and hence the treatment of morals, politics,
and religion.

No wonder, then, that the publication of Darwin’s book, a half century
ago, precipitated a crisis. The true nature of the controversy is
easily concealed from us, however, by the theological clamor that
attended it. The vivid and popular features of the anti-Darwinian row
tended to leave the impression that the issue was between science
on one side and theology on the other. Such was not the case--the
issue lay primarily within science itself, as Darwin himself early
recognized. The theological outcry he discounted from the start,
hardly noticing it save as it bore upon the “feelings of his
female relatives.” But for two decades before final publication he
contemplated the possibility of being put down by his scientific peers
as a fool or as crazy; and he set, as the measure of his success,
the degree in which he should affect three men of science: Lyell in
geology, Hooker in botany, and Huxley in zoology.

Religious considerations lent fervor to the controversy, but they did
not provoke it. Intellectually, religious emotions are not creative but
conservative. They attach themselves readily to the current view of
the world and consecrate it. They steep and dye intellectual fabrics
in the seething vat of emotions; they do not form their warp and woof.
There is not, I think, an instance of any large idea about the world
being independently generated by religion. Although the ideas that rose
up like armed men against Darwinism owed their intensity to religious
associations, their origin and meaning are to be sought in science and
philosophy, not in religion.


II

Few words in our language foreshorten intellectual history as much
as does the word species. The Greeks, in initiating the intellectual
life of Europe, were impressed by characteristic traits of the life of
plants and animals; so impressed indeed that they made these traits the
key to defining nature and to explaining mind and society. And truly,
life is so wonderful that a seemingly successful reading of its mystery
might well lead men to believe that the key to the secrets of heaven
and earth was in their hands. The Greek rendering of this mystery,
the Greek formulation of the aim and standard of knowledge, was in
the course of time embodied in the word species, and it controlled
philosophy for two thousand years. To understand the intellectual
face-about expressed in the phrase “Origin of Species,” we must, then,
understand the long dominant idea against which it is a protest.

Consider how men were impressed by the facts of life. Their eyes fell
upon certain things slight in bulk, and frail in structure. To every
appearance, these perceived things were inert and passive. Suddenly,
under certain circumstances, these things--henceforth known as seeds
or eggs or germs--begin to change, to change rapidly in size, form,
and qualities. Rapid and extensive changes occur, however, in many
things--as when wood is touched by fire. But the changes in the living
thing are orderly; they are cumulative; they tend constantly in one
direction; they do not, like other changes, destroy or consume, or
pass fruitless into wandering flux; they realize and fulfil. Each
successive stage, no matter how unlike its predecessor, preserves
its net effect and also prepares the way for a fuller activity on
the part of its successor. In living beings, changes do not happen
as they seem to happen elsewhere, any which way; the earlier changes
are regulated in view of later results. This progressive organization
does not cease till there is achieved a true final term, a τελὸς, a
completed, perfected end. This final form exercises in turn a plenitude
of functions, not the least noteworthy of which is production of germs
like those from which it took its own origin, germs capable of the same
cycle of self-fulfilling activity.

But the whole miraculous tale is not yet told. The same drama is
enacted to the same destiny in countless myriads of individuals so
sundered in time, so severed in space, that they have no opportunity
for mutual consultation and no means of interaction. As an old
writer quaintly said, “things of the same kind go through the same
formalities”--celebrate, as it were, the same ceremonial rites.

This formal activity which operates throughout a series of changes and
holds them to a single course; which subordinates their aimless flux to
its own perfect manifestation; which, leaping the boundaries of space
and time, keeps individuals distant in space and remote in time to a
uniform type of structure and function: this principle seemed to give
insight into the very nature of reality itself. To it Aristotle gave
the name, εῖδος. This term the scholastics translated as _species_.

The force of this term was deepened by its application to everything
in the universe that observes order in flux and manifests constancy
through change. From the casual drift of daily weather, through the
uneven recurrence of seasons and unequal return of seed time and
harvest, up to the majestic sweep of the heavens--the image of eternity
in time--and from this to the unchanging pure and contemplative
intelligence beyond nature lies one unbroken fulfilment of ends.
Nature as a whole is a progressive realization of purpose strictly
comparable to the realization of purpose in any single plant or animal.

The conception of εῖδος, species, a fixed form and final cause,
was the central principle of knowledge as well as of nature. Upon
it rested the logic of science. Change as change is mere flux and
lapse; it insults intelligence. Genuinely to know is to grasp a
permanent end that realizes itself through changes, holding them
thereby within the metes and bounds of fixed truth. Completely to
know is to relate all special forms to their one single end and good:
pure contemplative intelligence. Since, however, the scene of nature
which directly confronts us is in change, nature as directly and
practically experienced does not satisfy the conditions of knowledge.
Human experience is in flux, and hence the instrumentalities of
sense-perception and of inference based upon observation are condemned
in advance. Science is compelled to aim at realities lying behind and
beyond the processes of nature, and to carry on its search for these
realities by means of rational forms transcending ordinary modes of
perception and inference.

There are, indeed, but two alternative courses. We must either find the
appropriate objects and organs of knowledge in the mutual interactions
of changing things; or else, to escape the infection of change, we
_must_ seek them in some transcendent and supernal region. The human
mind, deliberately as it were, exhausted the logic of the changeless,
the final, and the transcendent, before it essayed adventure on the
pathless wastes of generation and transformation. We dispose all too
easily of the efforts of the schoolmen to interpret nature and mind in
terms of real essences, hidden forms, and occult faculties, forgetful
of the seriousness and dignity of the ideas that lay behind. We dispose
of them by laughing at the famous gentleman who accounted for the
fact that opium put people to sleep on the ground it had a dormitive
faculty. But the doctrine, held in our own day, that knowledge of the
plant that yields the poppy consists in referring the peculiarities
of an individual to a type, to a universal form, a doctrine so firmly
established that any other method of knowing was conceived to be
unphilosophical and unscientific, is a survival of precisely the same
logic. This identity of conception in the scholastic and anti-Darwinian
theory may well suggest greater sympathy for what has become unfamiliar
as well as greater humility regarding the further unfamiliarities that
history has in store.

Darwin was not, of course, the first to question the classic philosophy
of nature and of knowledge. The beginnings of the revolution are in
the physical science of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.
When Galileo said: “It is my opinion that the earth is very noble
and admirable by reason of so many and so different alterations and
generations which are incessantly made therein,” he expressed the
changed temper that was coming over the world; the transfer of interest
from the permanent to the changing. When Descartes said: “The nature
of physical things is much more easily conceived when they are beheld
coming gradually into existence, than when they are only considered as
produced at once in a finished and perfect state,” the modern world
became self-conscious of the logic that was henceforth to control
it, the logic of which Darwin’s “Origin of Species” is the latest
scientific achievement. Without the methods of Copernicus, Kepler,
Galileo, and their successors in astronomy, physics, and chemistry,
Darwin would have been helpless in the organic sciences. But prior
to Darwin the impact of the new scientific method upon life, mind,
and politics, had been arrested, because between these ideal or moral
interests and the inorganic world intervened the kingdom of plants and
animals. The gates of the garden of life were barred to the new ideas;
and only through this garden was there access to mind and politics. The
influence of Darwin upon philosophy resides in his having conquered the
phenomena of life for the principle of transition, and thereby freed
the new logic for application to mind and morals and life. When he said
of species what Galileo had said of the earth, _e pur si muove_, he
emancipated, once for all, genetic and experimental ideas as an organon
of asking questions and looking for explanations.


III

The exact bearings upon philosophy of the new logical outlook are, of
course, as yet, uncertain and inchoate. We live in the twilight of
intellectual transition. One must add the rashness of the prophet to
the stubbornness of the partizan to venture a systematic exposition of
the influence upon philosophy of the Darwinian method. At best, we can
but inquire as to its general bearing--the effect upon mental temper
and complexion, upon that body of half-conscious, half-instinctive
intellectual aversions and preferences which determine, after all, our
more deliberate intellectual enterprises. In this vague inquiry there
happens to exist as a kind of touchstone a problem of long historic
currency that has also been much discussed in Darwinian literature.
I refer to the old problem of design _versus_ chance, mind _versus_
matter, as the causal explanation, first or final, of things.

As we have already seen, the classic notion of species carried with it
the idea of purpose. In all living forms, a specific type is present
directing the earlier stages of growth to the realization of its own
perfection. Since this purposive regulative principle is not visible
to the senses, it follows that it must be an ideal or rational force.
Since, however, the perfect form is gradually approximated through the
sensible changes, it also follows that in and through a sensible realm
a rational ideal force is working out its own ultimate manifestation.
These inferences were extended to nature: (_a_) She does nothing in
vain; but all for an ulterior purpose. (_b_) Within natural sensible
events there is therefore contained a spiritual causal force, which
as spiritual escapes perception, but is apprehended by an enlightened
reason. (_c_) The manifestation of this principle brings about a
subordination of matter and sense to its own realization, and this
ultimate fulfilment is the goal of nature and of man. The design
argument thus operated in two directions. Purposefulness accounted for
the intelligibility of nature and the possibility of science, while
the absolute or cosmic character of this purposefulness gave sanction
and worth to the moral and religious endeavors of man. Science was
underpinned and morals authorized by one and the same principle, and
their mutual agreement was eternally guaranteed.

This philosophy remained, in spite of sceptical and polemic outbursts,
the official and the regnant philosophy of Europe for over two thousand
years. The expulsion of fixed first and final causes from astronomy,
physics, and chemistry had indeed given the doctrine something of
a shock. But, on the other hand, increased acquaintance with the
details of plant and animal life operated as a counterbalance and
perhaps even strengthened the argument from design. The marvelous
adaptations of organisms to their environment, of organs to the
organism, of unlike parts of a complex organ--like the eye--to the
organ itself; the foreshadowing by lower forms of the higher; the
preparation in earlier stages of growth for organs that only later had
their functioning--these things were increasingly recognized with the
progress of botany, zoology, paleontology, and embryology. Together,
they added such prestige to the design argument that by the late
eighteenth century it was, as approved by the sciences of organic life,
the central point of theistic and idealistic philosophy.

The Darwinian principle of natural selection cut straight under this
philosophy. If all organic adaptations are due simply to constant
variation and the elimination of those variations which are harmful
in the struggle for existence that is brought about by excessive
reproduction, there is no call for a prior intelligent causal force
to plan and preordain them. Hostile critics charged Darwin with
materialism and with making chance the cause of the universe.

Some naturalists, like Asa Gray, favored the Darwinian principle
and attempted to reconcile it with design. Gray held to what may be
called design on the installment plan. If we conceive the “stream of
variations” to be itself intended, we may suppose that each successive
variation was designed from the first to be selected. In that case,
variation, struggle, and selection simply define the mechanism of
“secondary causes” through which the “first cause” acts; and the
doctrine of design is none the worse off because we know more of its
_modus operandi_.

Darwin could not accept this mediating proposal. He admits or rather he
asserts that it is “impossible to conceive this immense and wonderful
universe including man with his capacity of looking far backwards and
far into futurity as the result of blind chance or necessity.”[3] But
nevertheless he holds that since variations are in useless as well as
useful directions, and since the latter are sifted out simply by the
stress of the conditions of struggle for existence, the design argument
as applied to living beings is unjustifiable; and its lack of support
there deprives it of scientific value as applied to nature in general.
If the variations of the pigeon, which under artificial selection give
the pouter pigeon, are not preordained for the sake of the breeder, by
what logic do we argue that variations resulting in natural species are
pre-designed?[4]


IV

So much for some of the more obvious facts of the discussion of design
_versus_ chance, as causal principles of nature and of life as a whole.
We brought up this discussion, you recall, as a crucial instance. What
does our touchstone indicate as to the bearing of Darwinian ideas
upon philosophy? In the first place, the new logic outlaws, flanks,
dismisses--what you will--one type of problems and substitutes for
it another type. Philosophy forswears inquiry after absolute origins
and absolute finalities in order to explore specific values and the
specific conditions that generate them.

Darwin concluded that the impossibility of assigning the world to
chance as a whole and to design in its parts indicated the insolubility
of the question. Two radically different reasons, however, may be
given as to why a problem is insoluble. One reason is that the problem
is too high for intelligence; the other is that the question in its
very asking makes assumptions that render the question meaningless.
The latter alternative is unerringly pointed to in the celebrated
case of design _versus_ chance. Once admit that the sole verifiable
or fruitful object of knowledge is the particular set of changes that
generate the object of study together with the consequences that then
flow from it, and no intelligible question can be asked about what,
by assumption, lies outside. To assert--as is often asserted--that
specific values of particular truth, social bonds and forms of beauty,
if they can be shown to be generated by concretely knowable conditions,
are meaningless and in vain; to assert that they are justified only
when they and their particular causes and effects have all at once been
gathered up into some inclusive first cause and some exhaustive final
goal, is intellectual atavism. Such argumentation is reversion to the
logic that explained the extinction of fire by water through the formal
essence of aqueousness and the quenching of thirst by water through the
final cause of aqueousness. Whether used in the case of the special
event or that of life as a whole, such logic only abstracts some
aspect of the existing course of events in order to reduplicate it as
a petrified eternal principle by which to explain the very changes of
which it is the formalization.

When Henry Sidgwick casually remarked in a letter that as he grew older
his interest in what or who made the world was altered into interest in
what kind of a world it is anyway, his voicing of a common experience
of our own day illustrates also the nature of that intellectual
transformation effected by the Darwinian logic. Interest shifts from
the wholesale essence back of special changes to the question of
how special changes serve and defeat concrete purposes; shifts from
an intelligence that shaped things once for all to the particular
intelligences which things are even now shaping; shifts from an
ultimate goal of good to the direct increments of justice and happiness
that intelligent administration of existent conditions may beget and
that present carelessness or stupidity will destroy or forego.

In the second place, the classic type of logic inevitably set
philosophy upon proving that life _must_ have certain qualities and
values--no matter how experience presents the matter--because of some
remote cause and eventual goal. The duty of wholesale justification
inevitably accompanies all thinking that makes the meaning of special
occurrences depend upon something that once and for all lies behind
them. The habit of derogating from present meanings and uses prevents
our looking the facts of experience in the face; it prevents serious
acknowledgment of the evils they present and serious concern with the
goods they promise but do not as yet fulfil. It turns thought to the
business of finding a wholesale transcendent remedy for the one and
guarantee for the other. One is reminded of the way many moralists and
theologians greeted Herbert Spencer’s recognition of an unknowable
energy from which welled up the phenomenal physical processes without
and the conscious operations within. Merely because Spencer labeled his
unknowable energy “God,” this faded piece of metaphysical goods was
greeted as an important and grateful concession to the reality of the
spiritual realm. Were it not for the deep hold of the habit of seeking
justification for ideal values in the remote and transcendent, surely
this reference of them to an unknowable absolute would be despised in
comparison with the demonstrations of experience that knowable energies
are daily generating about us precious values.

The displacing of this wholesale type of philosophy will doubtless not
arrive by sheer logical disproof, but rather by growing recognition
of its futility. Were it a thousand times true that opium produces
sleep because of its dormitive energy, yet the inducing of sleep in
the tired, and the recovery to waking life of the poisoned, would not
be thereby one least step forwarded. And were it a thousand times
dialectically demonstrated that life as a whole is regulated by a
transcendent principle to a final inclusive goal, none the less truth
and error, health and disease, good and evil, hope and fear in the
concrete, would remain just what and where they now are. To improve our
education, to ameliorate our manners, to advance our politics, we must
have recourse to specific conditions of generation.

Finally, the new logic introduces responsibility into the intellectual
life. To idealize and rationalize the universe at large is after
all a confession of inability to master the courses of things that
specifically concern us. As long as mankind suffered from this
impotency, it naturally shifted a burden of responsibility that
it could not carry over to the more competent shoulders of the
transcendent cause. But if insight into specific conditions of value
and into specific consequences of ideas is possible, philosophy must
in time become a method of locating and interpreting the more serious
of the conflicts that occur in life, and a method of projecting ways
for dealing with them: a method of moral and political diagnosis and
prognosis.

The claim to formulate _a priori_ the legislative constitution of the
universe is by its nature a claim that may lead to elaborate dialectic
developments. But it is also one that removes these very conclusions
from subjection to experimental test, for, by definition, these results
make no differences in the detailed course of events. But a philosophy
that humbles its pretensions to the work of projecting hypotheses for
the education and conduct of mind, individual and social, is thereby
subjected to test by the way in which the ideas it propounds work out
in practice. In having modesty forced upon it, philosophy also acquires
responsibility.

Doubtless I seem to have violated the implied promise of my earlier
remarks and to have turned both prophet and partizan. But in
anticipating the direction of the transformations in philosophy to
be wrought by the Darwinian genetic and experimental logic, I do not
profess to speak for any save those who yield themselves consciously
or unconsciously to this logic. No one can fairly deny that at present
there are two effects of the Darwinian mode of thinking. On the one
hand, there are making many sincere and vital efforts to revise our
traditional philosophic conceptions in accordance with its demands. On
the other hand, there is as definitely a recrudescence of absolutistic
philosophies; an assertion of a type of philosophic knowing distinct
from that of the sciences, one which opens to us another kind of
reality from that to which the sciences give access; an appeal through
experience to something that essentially goes beyond experience. This
reaction affects popular creeds and religious movements as well as
technical philosophies. The very conquest of the biological sciences by
the new ideas has led many to proclaim an explicit and rigid separation
of philosophy from science.

Old ideas give way slowly; for they are more than abstract
logical forms and categories. They are habits, predispositions,
deeply engrained attitudes of aversion and preference. Moreover,
the conviction persists--though history shows it to be a
hallucination--that all the questions that the human mind has asked
are questions that can be answered in terms of the alternatives that
the questions themselves present. But in fact intellectual progress
usually occurs through sheer abandonment of questions together with
both of the alternatives they assume--an abandonment that results from
their decreasing vitality and a change of urgent interest. We do not
solve them: we get over them. Old questions are solved by disappearing,
evaporating, while new questions corresponding to the changed attitude
of endeavor and preference take their place. Doubtless the greatest
dissolvent in contemporary thought of old questions, the greatest
precipitant of new methods, new intentions, new problems, is the one
effected by the scientific revolution that found its climax in the
“Origin of Species.”




NATURE AND ITS GOOD: A CONVERSATION[5]


A group of people are scattered near one another, on the sands of an
ocean beach; wraps, baskets, etc., testify to a day’s outing. Above the
hum of the varied conversations are heard the mock sobs of one of the
party.

_Various voices._ What’s the matter, Eaton?

_Eaton._ Matter enough. I was watching a beautiful wave; its lines were
perfect; at its crest, the light glinting through its infinitely varied
and delicate curves of foam made a picture more ravishing than any
dream. And now it has gone; it will never come back. So I weep.

_Grimes._ That’s right, Eaton; give it to them. Of course well-fed and
well-read persons--with their possessions of wealth and of knowledge
both gained at the expense of others--finally get bored; then they
wax sentimental over their boredom and are worried about “Nature” and
its relation to life. Not everybody takes it out that way, of course;
some take motor cars and champagne for that tired feeling. But the
rest--those who aren’t in that class financially, or who consider
themselves too refined for that kind of relief--seek a new sensation in
speculating why that brute old world out there will not stand for what
you call spiritual and ideal values--for short, your egotisms.

The fact is that the whole discussion is only a symptom of the leisure
class disease. If you had to work to the limit and beyond, to keep
soul and body together, and, more than that, to keep alive the soul of
your family in its body, you would know the difference between your
artificial problems and the genuine problem of life. Your philosophic
problems about the relation of “the universe to moral and spiritual
good” exist only in the sentimentalism that generates them. The
genuine question is why social arrangements will not permit the amply
sufficient body of natural resources to sustain all men and women in
security and decent comfort, with a margin for the cultivation of their
human instincts of sociability, love of knowledge and of art.

As I read Plato, philosophy began with some sense of its essentially
political basis and mission--a recognition that its problems were those
of the organization of a just social order. But it soon got lost in
dreams of another world; and even those of you philosophers who pride
yourselves on being so advanced that you no longer believe in “another
world,” are still living and thinking with reference to it. You may
not call it supernatural; but when you talk about a realm of spiritual
or ideal values in general, and ask about its relation to Nature in
general, you have only changed the labels on the bottles, not the
contents in them. For what makes anything transcendental--that is,
in common language, supernatural--is simply and only aloofness from
practical affairs--which affairs in their ultimate analysis are the
business of making a living.

_Eaton._ Yes; Grimes has about hit off the point of my little
parable--in one of its aspects at least. In matters of daily life you
say a man is “off,” more or less insane, when he deliberately goes
on looking for a certain kind of result from conditions which he has
already found to be such that they cannot possibly yield it. If he
keeps on looking, and then goes about mourning because stage money
won’t buy beefsteaks, or because he cannot keep himself warm by burning
the sea-sands here, you dismiss him as a fool or a hysteric. If you
would condescend to reason with him at all, you would tell him to look
for the conditions that will yield the results; to occupy himself
with some of the countless goods of life for which, by intelligently
directed search, adequate means may be found.

Well, before lunch, Moore was reiterating the old tale. “Modern science
has completely transformed our conceptions of Nature. It has stripped
the universe bare not only of all the moral values which it wore alike
to antique pagan and to our medieval ancestors, but also of any regard,
any preference, for such values. They are mere incidents, transitory
accidents, in her everlasting redistribution of matter in motion; like
the rise and fall of the wave I lament, or like a single musical note
that a screeching, rumbling railway train might happen to emit.” This
is a one-sided view; but suppose it were all so, what is the moral?
Surely, to change our standpoint, our angle of vision; to stop looking
for results among conditions that we know will not yield them; to turn
our gaze to the goods, the values that exist actually and indubitably
in experience; and consider by what natural conditions these particular
values may be strengthened and widened.

Insist, if you please, that Nature as a whole does not stand for good
as a whole. Then, in heaven’s name, just because good is both so plural
(so “numerous”) and so partial, bend your energies of intelligence
and of effort to selecting the specific plural and partial natural
conditions which will at least render values that we do have more
secure and more extensive. Any other course is the way of madness; it
is the way of the spoilt child who cries at the seashore because the
waves do not stand still, and who cries even more frantically in the
mountains because the hills do not melt and flow.

But no. Moore and his school will not have it so: we must “go back of
the returns.” All this science, after all, is a mode of knowledge.
Examine knowledge itself and find it implies a complete all-inclusive
intelligence; and then find (by taking another tack) that intelligence
involves sentiency, feeling, and also will. Hence your very physical
science, if you will only criticise it, examine it, shows that its
object, mechanical nature, is itself an included and superseded element
in an all-embracing spiritual and ideal whole. And there you are.

Well, I do not now insist that all this is mere dialectic
prestidigitation. No; accept it; let it go at its face value. But
what of it? Is any value more concretely and securely in life than it
was before? Does this perfect intelligence enable us to correct one
single mis-step, one paltry error, here and now? Does this perfect
all-inclusive goodness serve to heal one disease? Does it rectify one
transgression? Does it even give the slightest inkling of how to go to
work at any of these things? No; it just tells you: Never mind, for
they are already eternally corrected, eternally healed in the eternal
consciousness which alone is really Real. Stop: there is one evil, one
pain, which the doctrine mitigates--the hysteric sentimentalism which
is troubled because the universe as a whole does not sustain good as a
whole. But that is the only thing it alters. The “pathetic fallacy” of
Ruskin magnified to the _n_th power is the _motif_ of modern idealism.

_Moore._ Certainly nobody will accuse Eaton of
tender-mindedness--except in his logic, which, _as_ certainly, is not
tough-minded. His excitement, however, convinces me that he has at
least an inkling that he is begging the question; and like the true
pragmatist that he is, is trying to prevent by action (to wit, his
flood of speech) his false logic from becoming articulate to him. The
question being whether the values we seem to apprehend, the purposes
we entertain, the goods we possess, are anything more than transitory
waves, Eaton meets it by saying: “Oh, of course, they are waves; but
don’t think about that--just sit down hard on the wave or get another
wave to buttress it with!” No wonder he recommends action instead
of thinking! Men have tried this method before, as a counsel of
desperation or as cynical pessimism. But it remained for contemporary
pragmatism to label the drowning of sorrow in the intoxication of
thoughtless action, the highest achievement of philosophic method, and
to preach wilful restlessness as a doctrine of hope and illumination.
Meantime, I prefer to be tender-minded in my attitude toward Reality,
and to make that attitude more reasonable by a tough-minded logic.

_Eaton._ I am willing to be quiet long enough for you to translate your
metaphor into logic, and show how I have begged the question.

_Moore._ It is plain enough. You bid us turn to the cultivation, the
nurture, of certain values in human life. But the question is whether
these are or are not values. And that is a question of their relation
to the Universe--to Reality. If Reality substantiates them, then indeed
they are values; if it mocks and flouts them--as it surely does if what
mechanical science calls Nature be ultimate and absolute--then they are
_not_ values. You and your kind are really the sentimentalists, because
you are sheer subjectivists. You say: Accept the dream as real; do not
question about it; add a little iridescence to its fog and extend it
till it obscure even more of Reality than it naturally does, and all
is well! I say: Perhaps the dream is no dream but an intimation of the
solidest and most ultimate of all realities; and a thorough examination
of what the positivist, the materialist, accepts as solid, namely,
science, reveals as its own aim, standard, and presupposition that
Reality is one all-exhaustive spiritual Being.

_Eaton._ This is about the way I thought my begging of the question
would turn out. You insist upon translating my position into terms of
your own; I am not then surprised to hear that it would be a begging
of the question for _you_ to hold my views. My point is precisely
that it is only as long as you take the position that some Reality
beyond--some metaphysical or transcendental reality--is necessary to
substantiate empirical values that you can even discuss whether the
latter are genuine or illusions. Drop the presupposition that you read
into everything I say, the idea that the reality of things as they are
is dependent upon something beyond and behind, and the facts of the
case just stare you in the eyes: Goods _are_, a multitude of them--but,
unfortunately, evils also _are_; and all grades, pretty much, of both.
Not the contrast and relation of experience _in toto_ to something
beyond experience drives men to religion and then to philosophy; but
the contrast _within_ experience of the better and the worse, and the
consequent problem of how to substantiate the former and reduce the
latter. Until you set up the notion of a transcendental reality at
large, you cannot even raise the question of whether goods and evils
are, or only seem to be. The trouble and the joy, the good and the
evil, is _that_ they are; the hope is that they may be regulated,
guided, increased in one direction and minimized in another. Instead
of neglecting thought, we (I mean the pragmatists) exalt it, because
we say that intelligent discrimination of means and ends is the sole
final resource in this problem of all problems, the control of the
factors of good and ill in life. We say, indeed, not merely that that
is what intelligence _does_, but rather what it _is_.

Historically, it is quite possible to show how under certain social
conditions this human and practical problem of the relation of good and
intelligence generated the notion of the transcendental good and the
pure reason. As Grimes reminded us, Plato----

_Moore._ Yes, and Protagoras--don’t forget him; for unfortunately we
know both the origin and the consequences of your doctrine that being
and seeming are the same. We know quite well that pure empiricism leads
to the identification of being and seeming, and that is just why every
deeply moral and religious soul from the time of Plato and Aristotle to
the present has insisted upon a transcendent reality.

_Eaton._ Personally I don’t need an absolute to enable me to
distinguish between, say, the good of kindness and the evil of slander,
or the good of health and the evil of valetudinarianism. In experience,
things bear their own specific characters. Nor has the absolute
idealist as yet answered the question of _how_ the absolute reality
enables him to distinguish between being and seeming in one single
concrete case. The trouble is that for him _all_ Being is on the other
side of experience, and _all_ experience is seeming.

_Grimes._ I think I heard you mention history. I wish both of you
would drop dialectics and go to history. You would find history to be
a struggle for existence--for bread, for a roof, for protected and
nourished offspring. You would find history a picture of the masses
always going under--just missing--in the struggle, because others have
captured the control of natural resources, which in themselves, if not
as benign as the eighteenth century imagined, are at least abundantly
ample for the needs of all. But because of the monopolization of Nature
by a few persons, most men and women only stick their heads above the
welter just enough to catch a glimpse of better things, then to be
shoved down and under. The only problem of the relation of Nature to
human good which is real is the economic problem of the exploitation
of natural resources in the equal interests of all, instead of in the
unequal interests of a class. The problem you two men are discussing
has no existence--and never had any--outside of the heads of a few
metaphysicians. The latter would never have amounted to anything,
would never have had any career at all, had not shrewd monopolists
or tyrants (with the skill that characterizes them) have seen that
these speculations about reality and a transcendental world could be
distilled into opiates and distributed among the masses to make them
less rebellious. That, if you would know, Eaton, is the real historic
origin of the ideal world beyond. When you realize that, you will
perceive that the pragmatists are only half-way over. You will see
that practical questions _are_ practical, and are not to be solved
merely by having a theory _about_ theory different from the traditional
one--which is all your pragmatism comes to.

_Moore._ If you mean that your own crass Philistinism is all that
pragmatism comes to, I fancy you are about right. Forget that the
only end of action is to bring about an approximation to the complete
inclusive consciousness; make, as the pragmatists do, consciousness
a means to action, and one form of external activity is just as
good as another. Art, religion, all the generous reaches of science
which do not show up immediately in the factory--these things become
meaningless, and all that remains is that hard and dry satisfaction of
economic wants which is Grimes’s ideal.

_Grimes._ An ideal which exists, by the way, only in your imagination.
I know of no more convincing proof of the futile irrelevancy of
idealism than the damning way in which it narrows the content of actual
daily life in the minds of those who uphold idealism. I sometimes think
I am the only true idealist. If the conditions of an equitable and
ample physical existence for all were once secured, I, for one, have
no fears as to the bloom and harvest of art and science, and all the
“higher” things of leisure. Life is interesting enough for me; give it
a show for all.

_Arthur._ I find myself in a peculiar position in respect to this
discussion. An analysis of what is involved in this peculiarity may
throw some light on the points at issue, for I have to believe that
analysis and definition of what exists is the essential matter both
in resolution of doubts and in steps at reform. For brevity, not from
conceit, I will put the peculiarity to which I refer in a personal
form. I do not believe for a moment in some different Reality beyond
and behind Nature. I do not believe that a manipulation of the logical
implications of science can give results which are to be put in the
place of those which Science herself yields in her direct application.
I accept Nature as something which is, not seems, and Science as her
faithful transcript. Yet because I believe these things, not in spite
of them, I believe in the existence of purpose and of good. How Eaton
can believe that fulfilment and the increasing realization of purpose
can exist in human consciousness unless they first exist in the world
which is revealed in that consciousness is as much beyond me as how
Moore can believe that a manipulation of the method of knowledge can
yield considerations of a totally different order from those directly
obtained by use of the method. If purpose and fulfilment exist as
natural goods, then, and only then, can consciousness itself be a
fulfilment of Nature, and be also a natural good. Any other view is
inexplicable to sound thinking--save, historically, as a product of
modern political individualism and literary romanticism which have
combined to produce that idealistic philosophy according to which the
mind in knowing the universe creates it.

The view that purpose and realization are profoundly natural,
and that consciousness--or, if you will, experience--is itself a
culmination and climax of Nature, is not a new view. Formulated by
Aristotle, it has always persisted wherever the traditions of sound
thinking have not been obscured by romanticism. The modern scientific
doctrine of evolution confirms and specifies the metaphysical insight
of Aristotle. This doctrine sets forth in detail, and in verified
detail, as a genuine characteristic of existence, the tendency toward
cumulative results, the definite trend of things toward culmination and
achievement. It describes the universe as possessing, in terms of and
by right of its own subject-matter (not as an addition of subsequent
reflection), differences of value and importance--differences,
moreover, that exercise selective influence upon the course of things,
that is to say, genuinely determine the events that occur. It tells us
that consciousness itself is such a cumulative and culminating natural
event. Hence it is relevant to the world in which it dwells, and its
determinations of value are not arbitrary, not _obiter dicta_, but
descriptions of Nature herself.

Recall the words of Spencer which Moore quoted this morning: “There is
no pleasure in the consciousness of being an infinitesimal bubble on
a globe that is infinitesimal compared with the totality of things.
Those on whom the unpitying rush of changes inflicts sufferings which
are often without remedy, find no consolation in the thought that
they are at the mercy of blind forces,--which cause indifferently
now the destruction of a sun and now the death of an animalcule.
Contemplation of a universe which is without conceivable beginning or
end and without intelligible purpose, yields no satisfaction.” I am
naïve enough to believe that the only question is whether the object
of our “consciousness,” of our “thought,” of our “contemplation,”
is or is not as the quotation states it to be. If the statement be
correct, pragmatism, like subjectivism (of which I suspect it is
only a variation, putting emphasis upon will instead of idea), is an
invitation to close our eyes to what is, in order to encourage the
delusion that things are other than they are. But the case is not so
desperate. Speaking dogmatically, the account given of the universe
is just--not true. And the doctrine of evolution of which Spencer
professedly made so much is the evidence. A universe describable in
evolutionary terms is a universe which shows, not indeed design, but
tendency and purpose; which exhibits achievement, not indeed of a
single end, but of a multiplicity of natural goods at whose apex is
consciousness. No account of the universe in terms _merely_ of the
redistribution of matter in motion is complete, no matter how true as
far as it goes, for it ignores the cardinal fact that the character
of matter in motion and of its redistribution is such as cumulatively
to achieve ends--to effect the world of values we know. Deny this
and you deny evolution; admit it and you admit purpose in the only
objective--that is, the only intelligible--sense of that term. I do not
say that in addition to the mechanism there are other ideal causes or
factors which intervene. I only insist that the whole story be told,
that the character of the mechanism be noted--namely, that it is such
as to produce and sustain good in a multiplicity of forms. Mechanism is
the mechanism of achieving results. To ignore this is to refuse to open
our eyes to the total aspects of existence.

Among these multiple natural goods, I repeat, is consciousness itself.
One of the ends in which Nature genuinely terminates is just awareness
of itself--of its processes and ends. For note the implication as to
why consciousness is a natural good: not because it is cut off and
exists in isolation, nor yet because we may, pragmatically, cut off and
cultivate certain values which have no existence beyond it; but because
it _is_ good that things should be known in their own characters. And
this view carries with it a precious result: to know things as they are
is to know them as culminating in consciousness; it is to know that the
universe genuinely achieves and maintains its own self-manifestation.

A final word as to the bearing of this view upon Grimes’s position.
To conceive of human history as a scene of struggle of classes for
domination, a struggle caused by love of power or greed for gain,
is the very mythology of the emotions. What we call history is
largely non-human, but so far as it is human, it is dominated by
intelligence: history is the history of increasing consciousness. Not
that intelligence is actually sovereign in life, but that at least it
is sovereign over stupidity, error, and ignorance. The acknowledgment
of things as they are--that is the causal source of every step in
progress. Our present system of industry is not the product of greed
or tyrannic lust of power, but of physical science giving the mastery
over the mechanism of Nature’s energy. If the existing system is ever
displaced, it will be displaced not by good intentions and vague
sentiments, but by a more extensive insight into Nature’s secrets.

Modern sentimentalism is revolted at the frank naturalism of Aristotle
in saying that some are slaves by nature and others free by nature.
But let socialism come to-morrow and somebody--not anybody, but
_some_body--will be managing its machinery and somebody else will be
managed by the machinery. I do not wonder that my socialistic friends
always imagine themselves active in the first capacity--perhaps by
way of compensation for doing all of the imagining and none of the
executive management at present. But those who are managed, who are
controlled, deserve at least a moment’s attention. Would you not at
once agree that if there is any justice at all in these positions of
relative inferiority and superiority, it is because those who are
capable by insight deserve to rule, and those who are incapable on
account of ignorance, deserve to be ruled? If so, how do you differ,
save verbally, from Aristotle?

Or do you think that all that men want in order to _be_ men is to have
their bellies filled, with assurance of constant plenty and without too
much antecedent labor? No; believe me, Grimes, men _are_ men, and hence
their aspiration is for the divine--even when they know it not; their
desire is for the ruling element, for intelligence. Till they achieve
that they will still be discontented, rebellious, unruly--and hence
ruled--shuffle your social cards as much as you may.

_Grimes_ (after shrugging his shoulders contemptuously, finally says):
There is one thing I like about Arthur: he is frank. He comes out
with what you in all your hearts really believe--theory, supreme and
sublime. All is to the good in this best of all possible worlds, if
only some one be defining and classifying and syllogizing, according to
the lines already laid down. Aristotle’s God of pure intelligence (as
_he_ well knew) was the glorification of leisure; and Arthur’s point of
view, if Arthur but knew it, is as much the intellectual snobbery of a
leisure class economy, as the luxury and display he condemns are its
material snobbery. There is really nothing more to be said.

_Moore._ To get back into the game which Grimes despises. Doesn’t
Arthur practically say that the universe is good because it culminates
in intelligence, and that intelligence is good because it perceives
that the universe culminates in--itself? And, on this theory, are
ignorance and error, and consequent evil, any less genuine achievements
of Nature than intelligence and good? And on what basis does he
call by the titles of achievement and end that which at best is an
infinitesimally fragmentary and transitory episode? I said Eaton
begged the question. Arthur seems to regard it as proof of a superior
intelligence (one which realistically takes things as they are) to beg
the question. What is this Nature, this universe in which evil is as
stubborn a fact as good, in which good is constantly destroyed by the
very power that produces it, in which there resides a temporary bird of
passage--consciousness doomed to ultimate extinction--what is such a
Nature (all that Arthur offers us) save the problem, the contradiction
originally in question? A complacent optimism may gloss over its
intrinsic self-contradictions, but a more serious mind is forced to go
behind and beyond this scene to a permanent good which includes and
transcends goods defeated and hopes suborned. Not because idealists
have refused to note the facts as they are, but precisely because
Nature is, on its face, such a scene as Arthur describes, idealists
have always held that it is but Appearance, and have attempted to mount
through it to Reality.

_Stair._ I had not thought to say anything. My attitude is so different
from that of any one of you that it seemed unnecessary to inject
another varying opinion where already disagreement reigns. But when
Arthur was speaking, I felt that perhaps this disagreement exists
precisely because the solvent word had not been uttered. For, at
bottom, all of you agree with Arthur, and that is the cause of your
disagreement with him and one another. You have agreed to make reason,
intellect in some sense, the final umpire. But reason, intellect, is
the principle of analysis, of division, of discord. When I appeal
to feeling as the ultimate organ of unity, and hence of truth, you
smile courteously; say--or think--mysticism; and the case for you is
dismissed. Words like feeling, sensation, immediate appreciation,
self-communication of Being, I must indeed use when I try to tell
the truth I see. But I well know how inadequate the words are. And
why? Because language is the chosen tool of intelligence, and hence
inevitably bewrayeth the truth it would convey. But remember that words
are but symbols, and that intelligence must dwell in the realm of
symbols, and you realize a way out. These words, sensation, feeling,
etc., as I utter them are but invitations to woo you to put yourselves
into the one attitude that reveals truth--an attitude of direct vision.

The beatific vision? Yes, and No. No, if you mean something rare,
extreme, almost abnormal. Yes, if you mean the commonest and most
convincing, the _only_ convincing self-impartation of the ultimate
good in the scale of goods; the vision of blessedness in God. For
this doctrine is empirical; mysticism is the heart of all positive
empiricism, of all empiricism which is not more interested in denying
rationalism than in asserting itself. The mystical experience marks
every man’s realization of the supremacy of good, and hence measures
the distance that separates him from pure materialism. And since the
unmitigated materialist is the rarest of creatures, and the man with
faith in an unseen good the commonest, every man is a mystic--and the
most so in his best moments.

What an idle contradiction that Moore and Arthur should try to
adduce proofs of the supremacy of ideal values in the universe! The
sole possible proof is the proof that actually exists--the direct
unhindered realization of those values. For each value brings with it
of necessity its own depth of being. Let the pride of intellect and
the pride of will cease their clamor, and in the silences Being speaks
its own final word, not an argument or external ground of belief, but
the self-impartation of itself to the soul. Who are the prophets and
teachers of the ages? Those who have been accessible at the greatest
depths to these communications.

_Grimes._ I suppose that poverty--and possibly disease--are specially
competent ministers to the spiritual vision? The moral is obvious.
Economic changes are purely irrelevant, because purely material and
external. Indeed, upon the whole, efforts at reform are undesirable,
for they distract attention from the fact that the final thing, the
vision of good, is totally disconnected from external circumstance.
I do not say, Stair, you personally believe this; but is not such a
quietism the logical conclusion of all mysticism?

_Stair._ This is not so true as to say that in your efforts at reform
you are really inspired by the divine vision of justice; and that this
mystic vision and not the mere increase of quantity of eatables and
drinkables is your animating motive.

_Grimes_. Well, to my mind this whole affair of mystical values and
experiences comes down to a simple straight-away proposition. The
submerged masses do not occupy themselves with such questions as those
you are discussing. They haven’t the time even to consider whether
they want to consider them. Nor does the occasional free citizen
who even now exists--a sporadic reminder and prophecy of ultimate
democracy--bother himself about the relation of the cosmos to value.
Why? Not from mystic insight any more than from metaphysical proof;
but because he has so many other interests that are worth while.
His friends, his vocation and avocations, his books, his music, his
club--these things engage him and they reward him. To multiply such
men with such interests--that is the genuine problem, I repeat; and
it is a problem to be solved only through an economic and material
redistribution.

_Eaton_. Gladly, Stair, do all of us absolve ourselves from the
responsibility of having to create the goods that life--call it God
or Nature or Chance--provides. But we cannot, if we would, absolve
ourselves from responsibility for maintaining and extending these
goods when they have happened. To find it very wonderful--as Arthur
does--that intelligence perceives values as they are is trivial, for
it is only an elaborate way of saying that they have happened. To
invite us, ceasing struggle and effort, to commune with Being through
the moments of insight and joy that life provides, is to bid us to
self-indulgence--to enjoyment at the expense of those upon whom the
burden of conducting life’s affairs falls. For even the mystics still
need to eat and drink, be clothed and housed, and somebody must do
these unmystic things. And to ignore others in the interest of our own
perfection is not conducive to genuine unity of Being.

Intelligence is, indeed, as you say, discrimination, distinction.
But why? Because we have to _act_ in order to keep secure amid the
moving flux of circumstance, some slight but precious good that Nature
has bestowed; and because, in order to act successfully, we must act
after conscious selection--after discrimination of means and ends.
Of course, all goods arrive, as Arthur says, as natural results, but
so do all bads, and all grades of good and bad. To label the results
that occur culminations, achievements, and then argue to a quasi-moral
constitution of Nature because she effects such results, is to employ
a logic which applies to the life-cycle of the germ that, in achieving
itself, kills man with malaria, as well as to the process of human
life that in reaching its fullness cuts short the germ-fulfilment. It
is putting the cart before the horse to say that because Nature is
so constituted as to produce results of all types of value, therefore
Nature is actuated by regard for differences of value, Nature, till it
produces a being who strives and who thinks in order that he may strive
more effectively, does not know whether it cares more for justice
or for cruelty, more for the ravenous wolf-like competition of the
struggle for existence, or for the improvements incidentally introduced
through that struggle. Literally it has no mind of its own. Nor would
the mere introduction of a consciousness that pictured indifferently
the scene out of which consciousness developed, add one iota of reason
for attributing eulogistically to Nature regard for value. But when the
sentient organism, having experienced natural values, good and bad,
begins to select, to prefer, and to make battle for its preference; and
in order that it may make the most gallant fight possible picks out
and gathers together in perception and thought what is favorable to
its aims and what hostile, then and there Nature has at last achieved
significant regard for good. And this is the same thing as the birth
of intelligence. For the holding an end in view and the selecting
and organizing out of the natural flux, on the basis of this end,
conditions that are means, _is_ intelligence. Not, then, when Nature
produces health or efficiency or complexity does Nature exhibit regard
for value, but only when it produces a living organism that has settled
preferences and endeavors. The mere happening of complexity, health,
adjustment, is all that Nature effects, as rightly called accident as
purpose. But when Nature produces an intelligence--ah, then, indeed
Nature has achieved something. Not, however, because this intelligence
impartially pictures the nature which has produced it, but because
in human consciousness Nature becomes genuinely partial. Because in
consciousness an end is preferred, is selected for maintenance, and
because intelligence pictures not a world just as it is _in toto_,
but images forth the conditions and obstacles of the continued
maintenance of the selected good. For in an experience where values
are demonstrably precarious, an intelligence that is not a principle
of emphasis and valuation (an intelligence which defines, describes,
and classifies merely for the sake of knowledge,) is a principle of
stupidity and catastrophe.

As for Grimes, it is indeed true that problems are solved only where
they arise--namely, in action, in the adjustments of behavior. But,
for good or for evil, they can be solved there only with method; and
ultimately method is intelligence, and intelligence is method. The
larger, the more human, the less technical the problem of practice,
the more open-eyed and wide-viewing must be the corresponding method.
I do not say that all things that have been called philosophy
participate in this method; I do say, however, that a catholic and
far-sighted theory of the adjustment of the conflicting factors of
life _is_--whatever it be called--philosophy. And unless technical
philosophy is to go the way of dogmatic theology, it must loyally
identify itself with such a view of its own aim and destiny.




INTELLIGENCE AND MORALS[6]


“Except the blind forces of nature,” said Sir Henry Maine, “nothing
moves in this world which is not Greek in its origin.” And if we ask
why this is so, the response comes that the Greek discovered the
business of man to be pursuit of good, and intelligence to be central
in this quest. The utmost to be said in praise of Plato and Aristotle
is not that they invented excellent moral theories, but that they rose
to the opportunity which the spectacle of Greek life afforded. For
Athens presented an all but complete microcosm for the study of the
interaction of social organization and individual character. A public
life of rich diversity in concentrated and intense splendor trained
the civic sense. Strife of faction and the rapid oscillations of types
of polity provided the occasion for intellectual inquiry and analysis.
The careers of dramatic personalities, habits of discussion, ease of
legislative change, facilities for personal ambitions, distraction by
personal rivalries, fixed attention upon the elements of character,
and upon consideration of the effect of individual character on
social vitality and stability. Happy exemption from ecclesiastic
preoccupations, susceptibility to natural harmony, and natural piety
conspired with frank and open observation to acknowledgment of the rôle
played by natural conditions. Social instability and shock made equally
pertinent and obvious the remark that only intelligence can confirm
the values that natural conditions generate, and that intelligence is
itself nurtured and matured only in a free and stable society.

In Plato the resultant analysis of the mutual implications of the
individual, the social and the natural, converged in the ideas that
morals and philosophy are one: namely, a love of that wisdom which
is the source of secure and social good; that mathematics and the
natural sciences focused upon the problem of the perception of the good
furnish the materials of moral science; that logic is the method of the
pregnant organization of social conditions with respect to good; that
politics and psychology are sciences of one and the same human nature,
taken first in the large and then in the little. So far that large and
expansive vision of Plato.

But projection of a better life must be based upon reflection of the
life already lived. The inevitable limitations of the Greek city-state
were inevitably wrought into the texture of moral theory.

The business of thought was to furnish a substitute for customs which
were then relaxing from the pressure of contact and intercourse without
and the friction of strife within. Reason was to take the place of
custom as a guide of life; but it was to furnish rules as final, as
unalterable as those of custom. In short, the thinkers were fascinated
by the afterglow of custom. They took for their own ideal the
distillation from custom of its essence--ends and laws which should be
rigid and invariable. Thus Morals was set upon the track which it dared
not leave for nigh twenty-five hundred years: search for _the_ final
good, and for _the_ single moral force.

Aristotle’s assertions that the state exists by nature, and that in the
state alone does the individual achieve independence and completeness
of life, are indeed pregnant sayings. But as uttered by Aristotle they
meant that, in an isolated state, the Greek city-state, set a garlanded
island in the waste sea of _barbaroi_, a community indifferent when not
hostile to all other social groupings, individuals attain their full
end. In a social unity which signified social contraction, contempt,
and antagonism, in a social order which despised intercourse and
glorified war, is realized the life of excellence!

There is likewise a profound saying of Aristotle’s that the individual
who otherwise than by accident is not a member of a state is either a
brute or a god. But it is generally forgotten that elsewhere Aristotle
identified the highest excellence, the chief virtue, with pure thought,
and identifying this with the divine, isolated it in lonely grandeur
from the life of society. That man, so far as in him lay, should be
godlike, meant that he should be non-social, because supra-civic.
Plato the idealist had shared the belief that reason is the divine;
but he was also a reformer and a radical and he would have those who
attained rational insight descend again into the civic cave, and in
its obscurity labor patiently for the enlightenment of its blear-eyed
inhabitants. Aristotle, the conservative and the definer of what is,
gloried in the exaltation of intelligence in man above civic excellence
and social need; and thereby isolated the life of truest knowledge
from contact with social experience and from responsibility for
discrimination of values in the course of life.

Moral theory, however, accepted from social custom more than its
cataleptic rigidity, its exclusive area of common good, and its
unfructified and irresponsible reason. The city-state was a superficial
layer of cultured citizens, cultured through a participation in affairs
made possible by relief from economic pursuits, superimposed upon
the dense mass of serfs, artizans, and laborers. For this division,
moral philosophy made itself spiritual sponsor, and thus took it up
into its own being. Plato wrestled valiantly with the class problem;
but his outcome was the necessity of decisive demarcation, after
education, of the masses in whom reason was asleep and appetite much
awake, from the few who were fit to rule because alertly wise. The most
generously imaginative soul of all philosophy could not far outrun the
institutional practices of his people and his times. This might have
warned his successors of the danger of deserting the sober path of a
critical discernment of the better and the worse within contemporary
life for the more exciting adventure of a final determination of
absolute good and evil. It might have taught the probability that some
brute residuum or unrationalized social habit would be erected into an
apotheosis of pure reason. But the lesson was not learned. Aristotle
promptly yielded to the besetting sin of all philosophers, the
idealization of the existent: he declared that the class distinctions
of superiority and inferiority as between man and woman, master and
slave, liberal-minded and base mechanic, exist and are justified by
nature--a nature which aims at embodied reason.

What, finally, is this Nature to which the philosophy of society and
the individual so bound itself? It is the nature which figures in
Greek customs and myth; the nature resplendent and adorned which
confronts us in Greek poetry and art: the animism of savage man purged
of grossness and generalized by unerring esthetic taste into beauty
and system. The myths had told of the loves and hates, the caprices
and desertions of the gods, and behind them all, inevitable Fate.
Philosophy translated these tales into formulæ of the brute fluctuation
of rapacious change held in bounds by the final and supreme end: the
rational good. The animism of the popular mind died to reappear as
cosmology.

Repeatedly in this course we have heard of sciences which began as
parts of philosophy and which gradually won their independence. Another
statement of the same history is that both science and philosophy began
in subjection to mythological animism. Both began with acceptance of
a nature whose irregularities displayed the meaningless variability
of foolish wants held within the limits of order and uniformity by an
underlying movement toward a final and stable purpose. And when the
sciences gradually assumed the task of reducing irregular caprice to
regular conjunction, philosophy bravely took upon itself the task of
substantiating, under the caption of a spiritual view of the universe,
the animistic survival. Doubtless Socrates brought philosophy to earth;
but his injunction to man to know himself was incredibly compromised
in its execution by the fact that later philosophers submerged man in
the world to which philosophy was brought: a world which was the heavy
and sunken center of hierarchic heavens located in their purity and
refinement as remotely as possible from the gross and muddy vesture of
earth.

The various limitations of Greek custom, its hostile indifference to
all outside the narrow city-state, its assumption of fixed divisions of
wise and blind among men, its inability socially to utilize science,
its subordination of human intention to cosmic aim--all of these
things were worked into moral theory. Philosophy had no active hand in
producing the condition of barbarism in Europe from the fifth to the
fifteenth centuries. By an unwitting irony which would have shocked
none so much as the lucid moralists of Athens, their philosophic
idealization, under captions of Nature and Reason, of the inherent
limitations of Athenian society and Greek science, furnished the
intellectual tools for defining, standardizing, and justifying all
the fundamental clefts and antagonisms of feudalism. When practical
conditions are not frozen in men’s imagination into crystalline truths,
they are naturally fluid. They come and go. But when intelligence fixes
fluctuating circumstances into final ideals, petrifaction is likely to
occur; and philosophy gratuitously took upon itself the responsibility
for justifying the worst defects of barbarian Europe by showing their
necessary connection with divine reason.

The division of mankind into the two camps of the redeemed and the
condemned had not needed philosophy to produce it. But the Greek
cleavage of men into separate kinds on the basis of their position
within or without the city-state was used to rationalize this harsh
intolerance. The hierarchic organization of feudalism, within church
and state, of those possessed of sacred rule and those whose sole
excellence was obedience, did not require moral theory to generate
or explain it. But it took philosophy to furnish the intellectual
tools by which such chance episodes were emblazoned upon the cosmic
heavens as a grandiose spiritual achievement. No; it is all too easy
to explain bitter intolerance and desire for domination. Stubborn as
they are, it was only when Greek moral theory had put underneath them
the distinction between the irrational and the rational, between divine
truth and good and corrupt and weak human appetite, that intolerance
on system and earthly domination for the sake of eternal excellence
were philosophically sanctioned. The health and welfare of the body and
the securing for all of a sure and a prosperous livelihood were not
matters for which medieval conditions fostered care in any case. But
moral philosophy was prevailed upon to damn the body on principle,
and to relegate to insignificance as merely mundane and temporal the
problem of a just industrial order. Circumstances of the times bore
with sufficient hardness upon successful scientific investigation; but
philosophy added the conviction that in any case truth is so supernal
that it must be supernaturally revealed, and so important that it must
be authoritatively imparted and enforced. Intelligence was diverted
from the critical consideration of the natural sources and social
consequences of better and worse into the channel of metaphysical
subtleties and systems, acceptance of which was made essential
to participation in the social order and in rational excellence.
Philosophy bound the once erect form of human endeavor and progress to
the chariot wheels of cosmology and theology.

Since the Renaissance, moral philosophy has repeatedly reverted to
the Greek ideal of natural excellence realized in social life, under
the fostering care of intelligence in action. The return, however,
has taken place under the influence of democratic polity, commercial
expansion, and scientific reorganization. It has been a liberation
more than a reversion. This combined return and emancipation, having
transformed our practice of life in the last four centuries, will not
be content till it has written itself clear in our theory of that
practice. Whether the consequent revolution in moral philosophy be
termed pragmatism or be given the happier title of the applied and
experimental habit of mind is of little account. What is of moment is
that intelligence has descended from its lonely isolation at the remote
edge of things, whence it operated as unmoved mover and ultimate good,
to take its seat in the moving affairs of men. Theory may therefore
become responsible to the practices that have generated it; the good be
connected with nature, but with nature naturally, not metaphysically,
conceived, and social life be cherished in behalf of its own immediate
possibilities, not on the ground of its remote connections with a
cosmic reason and an absolute end.

There is a notion, more familiar than correct, that Greek thought
sacrificed the individual to the state. None has ever known better
than the Greek that the individual comes to himself and to his own
only in association with others. But Greek thought subjected, as we
have seen, both state and individual to an external cosmic order; and
thereby it inevitably restricted the free use in doubt, inquiry, and
experimentation, of the human intelligence. The _anima libera_, the
free mind of the sixteenth century, of Galileo and his successors, was
the counterpart of the disintegration of cosmology and its animistic
teleology. The lecturer on political economy reminded us that his
subject began, in the Middle Ages, as a branch of ethics, though,
as he hastened to show, it soon got into better association. Well,
the same company was once kept by all the sciences, mathematical and
physical as well as social. According to all accounts it was the
integrity of the number one and the rectitude of the square that
attracted the attention of Pythagoras to arithmetic and geometry as
promising fields of study. Astronomy was the projected picture book of
a cosmic object lesson in morals, Dante’s transcript of which is none
the less literal because poetic. If physics alone remained outside the
moral fold, while noble essences redeemed chemistry, occult forces
blessed physiology, and the immaterial soul exalted psychology, physics
is the exception that proves the rule: matter was so inherently immoral
that no high-minded science would demean itself by contact with it.

If we do not join with many in lamenting the stripping from nature
of those idealistic properties in which animism survived, if we do
not mourn the secession of the sciences from ethics, it is because
the abandonment by intelligence of a fixed and static moral end was
the necessary precondition of a free and progressive science of both
things and morals; because the emancipation of the sciences from ready
made, remote, and abstract values was necessary to make the sciences
available for creating and maintaining more and specific values here
and now. The divine comedy of modern medicine and hygiene is one of
the human epics yet to be written; but when composed it may prove no
unworthy companion of the medieval epic of other worldly beatific
visions. The great ideas of the eighteenth century, that expansive
epoch of moral perception which ranks in illumination and fervor
along with classic Greek thought, the great ideas of the indefinitely
continuous progress of humanity and of the power and significance of
freed intelligence, were borne by a single mother--experimental inquiry.

The growth of industry and commerce is at once cause and effect of
the growth in science. Democritus and other ancients conceived the
mechanical theory of the universe. The notion was not only blank and
repellent, because it ignored the rich social material which Plato and
Aristotle had organized into their rival idealistic views; but it was
scientifically sterile, a piece of dialectics. Contempt for machines as
the accouterments of despised mechanics kept the mechanical conception
aloof from these specific and controllable experiences which alone
could fructify it. This conception, then, like the idealistic, was
translated into a speculative cosmology and thrown like a vast net
around the universe at large, as if to keep it from coming to pieces.
It is from respect for the lever, the pulley, and the screw that modern
experimental and mathematical mechanics derives itself. Motion, traced
through the workings of a machine, was followed out into natural
events and studied just as motion, not as a poor yet necessary device
for realizing final causes. So studied, it was found to be available
for new machines and new applications, which in creating new ends
also promoted new wants, and thereby stimulated new activities, new
discoveries, and new inventions. The recognition that natural energy
can be systematically applied, through experimental observation, to
the satisfaction and multiplication of concrete wants is doubtless the
greatest single discovery ever imported into the life of man--save
perhaps the discovery of language. Science, borrowing from industry,
repaid the debt with interest, and has made the control of natural
forces for the aims of life so inevitable that for the first time
man is relieved from overhanging fear, with its wolflike scramble to
possess and accumulate, and is freed to consider the more gracious
question of securing to all an ample and liberal life. The industrial
life had been condemned by Greek exaltation of abstract thought and by
Greek contempt for labor, as representing the brute struggle of carnal
appetite for its own satiety. The industrial movement, offspring of
science, restored it to its central position in morals. When Adam Smith
made economic activity the moving spring of man’s unremitting effort,
from the cradle to the grave, to better his own lot, he recorded this
change. And when he made sympathy the central spring in man’s conscious
moral endeavor, he reported the effect which the increasing intercourse
of men, due primarily to commerce, had in breaking down suspicion and
jealousy and in liberating man’s kindlier impulses.

Democracy, the crucial expression of modern life, is not so much an
addition to the scientific and industrial tendencies as it is the
perception of their social or spiritual meaning. Democracy is an
absurdity where faith in the individual as individual is impossible;
and this faith is impossible when intelligence is regarded as a cosmic
power, not an adjustment and application of individual tendencies.
It is also impossible when appetites and desires are conceived to be
the dominant factor in the constitution of most men’s characters, and
when appetite and desire are conceived to be manifestations of the
disorderly and unruly principle of nature. To put the intellectual
center of gravity in the objective cosmos, outside of men’s own
experiments and tests, and then to invite the application of individual
intelligence to the determination of society, is to invite chaos.
To hold that want is mere negative flux and hence requires external
fixation by reason, and then to invite the wants to give free play to
themselves in social construction and intercourse, is to call down
anarchy. Democracy is estimable only through the changed conception of
intelligence, that forms modern science, and of want, that forms modern
industry. It is essentially a changed psychology. The substitution, for
_a priori_ truth and deduction, of fluent doubt and inquiry meant trust
in human nature in the concrete; in individual honesty, curiosity,
and sympathy. The substitution of moving commerce for fixed custom
meant a view of wants as the dynamics of social progress, not as the
pathology of private greed. The nineteenth century indeed turned sour
on that somewhat complacent optimism in which the eighteenth century
rested: the ideas that the intelligent self-love of individuals would
conduce to social cohesion, and competition among individuals usher in
the kingdom of social welfare. But the conception of a social harmony
of interests in which the achievement by each individual of his own
freedom should contribute to a like perfecting of the powers of all,
through a fraternally organized society, is the permanent contribution
of the industrial movement to morals--even though so far it be but the
contribution of a problem.

Intellectually speaking, the centuries since the fourteenth are the
true middle ages. They mark the transitional period of mental habit,
as the so-called medieval period represents the petrifaction, under
changed outward conditions, of Greek ideas. The conscious articulation
of genuinely modern tendencies has yet to come, and till it comes the
ethic of our own life must remain undescribed. But the system of morals
which has come nearest to the reflection of the movements of science,
democracy, and commerce, is doubtless the utilitarian. Scientific,
after the modern mode, it certainly would be. Newton’s influence dyes
deep the moral thought of the eighteenth century. The arrangements of
the solar system had been described in terms of a homogeneous matter
and motion, worked by two opposed and compensating forces: all because
a method of analysis, of generalization by analogy, and of mathematical
deduction back to new empirical details had been followed. The
imagination of the eighteenth century was a Newtonian imagination; and
this no less in social than in physical matters. Hume proclaims that
morals is about to become an experimental science. Just as, almost in
our own day, Mill’s interest in a method for social science led him to
reformulate the logic of experimental inquiry, so all the great men of
the Enlightenment were in search for the organon of morals which should
repeat the physical triumphs of Newton. Bentham notes that physics has
had its Bacon and Newton; that morals has had its Bacon in Helvétius,
but still awaits its Newton; and he leaves us in no doubt that at the
moment of writing he was ready, modestly but firmly, to fill the
waiting niche with its missing figure.

The industrial movement furnished the concrete imagery for this ethical
renovation. The utilitarians borrowed from Adam Smith the notion that
through industrial exchange in a free society the individual pursuing
his own good is led, under the guidance of the “invisible hand,” to
promote the general good more effectually than if he had set out to do
it. This idea was dressed out in the atomistic psychology which Hartley
built out from Locke--and was returned at usurious rates to later
economists.

From the great French writers who had sought to justify and promote
democratic individualism, came the conception that, since it is
perverted political institutions which deprave individuals and bring
them into hostility, nation against nation, class against class,
individual against individual, the great political problem is such a
reform of law and legislation, civil and criminal, of administration,
and of education as will force the individual to find his own interests
in pursuits conducing to the welfare of others.

Tremendously effective as a tool of criticism, operative in
abolition and elimination, utilitarianism failed to measure up to
the constructive needs of the time. Its theoretical equalization of
the good of each with that of every other was practically perverted
by its excessive interest in the middle and manufacturing classes.
Its speculative defect of an atomistic psychology combined with this
narrowness of vision to make light of the constructive work that
needs to be done by the state, before all can have, otherwise than in
name, an equal chance to count in the common good. Thus the age-long
subordination of economics to politics was revenged in the submerging
of both politics and ethics in a narrow theory of economic profit; and
utilitarianism, in its orthodox descendants, proffered the disjointed
pieces of a mechanism, with a monotonous reiteration that looked at
aright they form a beautifully harmonious organism.

Prevision, and to some extent experience, of this failure, conjoined
with differing social traditions and ambitions, evoked German idealism,
the transcendental morals of Kant and his successors. German thought
strove to preserve the traditions which bound culture to the past,
while revising these traditions to render them capable of meeting
novel conditions. It found weapons at hand in the conceptions borrowed
by Roman law from Stoic philosophy, and in the conceptions by which
Protestant humanism had re-edited scholastic Catholicism. Grotius had
made the idea of natural law, natural right and obligation, the central
idea of German morals, as thoroughly as Locke had made the individual
desire for liberty and happiness the focus of English and then of
French speculation. Materialized idealism is the happy monstrosity in
which the popular demand for vivid imagery is most easily reconciled
with the equally strong demand for supremacy of moral values; and the
complete idealistic materialism of Stoicism has always given its ideas
a practical influence out of all proportion to their theoretical vogue
as a system. To the Protestant, that is the German, humanist, Natural
Law, the bond of harmonious reason in nature, the spring of social
intercourse among men, the inward light of individual conscience,
united Cicero, St. Paul, and Luther in blessed union; gave a rational,
not superrational basis for morals, and provided room for social
legislation which at the same time could easily be held back from too
ruthless application to dominant class interests.

Kant saw the mass of empirical and hence irrelevant detail that had
found refuge within this liberal and diffusive reason. He saw that the
idea of reason could be made self-consistent only by stripping it naked
of these empirical accretions. He then provided, in his critiques, a
somewhat cumbrous moving van for transferring the resultant pure or
naked reason out of nature and the objective world, and for locating
it in new quarters, with a new stock of goods and new customers. The
new quarters were particular subjects, individuals; the stock of goods
were the forms of perception and the functions of thought by which
empirical flux is woven into durable fabrics; the new customers were a
society of individuals in which all are ends in themselves. There ought
to be an injunction issued that Kant’s saying about Hume’s awakening of
him should not be quoted save in connection with his other saying that
Rousseau brought him to himself, in teaching him that the philosopher
is of less account than the laborer in the fields unless he contributes
to human freedom. But none the less, the new tenant, the universal
reason, and the old homestead, the empirical tumultuous individual,
could not get on together. Reason became a mere voice which, having
nothing in particular to say, said Law, Duty, in general, leaving to
the existing social order of the Prussia of Frederick the Great the
congenial task of declaring just what was obligatory in the concrete.
The marriage of freedom and authority was thus celebrated with the
understanding that sentimental primacy went to the former and practical
control to the latter.

The effort to force a universal reason that had been used to the broad
domains of the cosmos into the cramped confines of individuality
conceived as merely “empirical,” a highly particularized creature of
sense, could have but one result: an explosion. The products of that
explosion constitute the Post-Kantian philosophies. It was the work of
Hegel to attempt to fill in the empty reason of Kant with the concrete
contents of history. The voice sounded like the voice of Aristotle,
Thomas of Aquino, and Spinoza translated into Swabian German; but the
hands were as the hands of Montesquieu, Herder, Condorcet, and the
rising historical school. The outcome was the assertion that history
is reason, and reason is history: the actual is rational, the rational
is the actual. It gave the pleasant appearance (which Hegel did not
strenuously discourage) of being specifically an idealization of the
Prussian nation, and incidentally a systematized apologetic for the
universe at large. But in intellectual and practical effect, it lifted
the idea of process above that of fixed origins and fixed ends, and
presented the social and moral order, as well as the intellectual, as a
scene of becoming, and it located reason somewhere within the struggles
of life.

Unstable equilibrium, rapid fermentation, and a succession of explosive
reports are thus the chief notes of modern ethics. Scepticism and
traditionalism, empiricism and rationalism, crude naturalisms and
all-embracing idealisms, flourish side by side--all the more flourish,
one suspects, because side by side. Spencer exults because natural
science reveals that a rapid transit system of evolution is carrying
us automatically to the goal of perfect man in perfect society; and
his English idealistic contemporary, Green, is so disturbed by the
removal from nature of its moral qualities, that he tries to show that
this makes no difference, since nature in any case is constituted and
known through a spiritual principle which is as permanent as nature is
changing. An Amiel genteelly laments the decadence of the inner life,
while his neighbor Nietzsche brandishes in rude ecstasy the banner of
brute survival as a happy omen of the final victory of nobility of
mind. The reasonable conclusion from such a scene is that there is
taking place a transformation of attitude towards moral theory rather
than mere propagation of varieties among theories. The classic theories
all agreed in one regard. They all alike assumed the existence of
_the_ end, the _summum bonum_, the final goal; and of _the_ separate
moral force that moves to that goal. Moralists have disputed as to
whether the end is an aggregate of pleasurable state of consciousness,
enjoyment of the divine essence, acknowledgment of the law of duty,
or conformity to environment. So they have disputed as to the path by
which the final goal is to be reached: fear or benevolence? reverence
for pure law or pity for others? self-love or altruism? But these very
controversies implied that there was but the one end and the one means.

The transformation in attitude, to which I referred, is the growing
belief that the proper business of intelligence is discrimination
of multiple and present goods and of the varied immediate means of
their realization; not search for the one remote aim. The progress of
biology has accustomed our minds to the notion that intelligence is not
an outside power presiding supremely but statically over the desires
and efforts of man, but is a method of adjustment of capacities and
conditions within specific situations. History, as the lecturer on
that subject told us, has discovered itself in the idea of process.
The genetic standpoint makes us aware that the systems of the past are
neither fraudulent impostures nor absolute revelations; but are the
products of political, economic, and scientific conditions whose change
carries with it change of theoretical formulations. The recognition
that intelligence is properly an organ of adjustment in difficult
situations makes us aware that past theories were of value so far as
they helped carry to an issue the social perplexities from which they
emerged. But the chief impact of the evolutionary method is upon the
present. Theory having learned what it cannot do, is made responsible
for the better performance of what needs to be done, and what only a
broadly equipped intelligence can undertake: study of the conditions
out of which come the obstacles and the resources of adequate life,
and developing and testing the ideas that, as working hypotheses, may
be used to diminish the causes of evil and to buttress and expand the
sources of good. This program is indeed vague, but only unfamiliarity
with it could lead one to the conclusion that it is less vague than the
idea that there is a single moral ideal and a single moral motive force.

From this point of view there is no separate body of moral rules; no
separate system of motive powers; no separate subject-matter of moral
knowledge, and hence no such thing as an isolated ethical science.
If the business of morals is not to speculate upon man’s final end
and upon an ultimate standard of right, it is to utilize physiology,
anthropology, and psychology to discover all that can be discovered of
man, his organic powers and propensities. If its business is not to
search for the one separate moral motive, it is to converge all the
instrumentalities of the social arts, of law, education, economics,
and political science upon the construction of intelligent methods of
improving the common lot.

If we still wish to make our peace with the past, and to sum up the
plural and changing goods of life in a single word, doubtless the term
happiness is the one most apt. But we should again exchange free morals
for sterile metaphysics, if we imagine that “happiness” is any less
unique than the individuals who experience it; any less complex than
the constitution of their capacities, or any less variable than the
objects upon which their capacities are directed.

To many timid, albeit sincere, souls of an earlier century, the decay
of the doctrine that all true and worthful science is knowledge of
final causes seemed fraught with danger to science and to morals. The
rival conception of a wide open universe, a universe without bounds in
time or space, without final limits of origin or destiny, a universe
with the lid off, was a menace. We now face in moral science a similar
crisis and like opportunity, as well as share in a like dreadful
suspense. The abolition of a fixed and final goal and causal force in
nature did not, as matter of fact, render rational conviction less
important or less attainable. It was accompanied by the provision of
a technique of persistent and detailed inquiry in all special fields
of fact, a technique which led to the detection of unsuspected forces
and the revelation of undreamed of uses. In like fashion we may
anticipate that the abolition of _the_ final goal and _the_ single
motive power and _the_ separate and infallible faculty in morals, will
quicken inquiry into the diversity of specific goods of experience, fix
attention upon their conditions, and bring to light values now dim and
obscure. The change may relieve men from responsibility for what they
cannot do, but it will promote thoughtful consideration of what they
may do and the definition of responsibility for what they do amiss
because of failure to think straight and carefully. Absolute goods
will fall into the background, but the question of making more sure
and extensive the share of all men in natural and social goods will be
urgent, a problem not to be escaped nor evaded.

Morals, philosophy, returns to its first love; love of the wisdom that
is nurse, as nature is mother, of good. But it returns to the Socratic
principle equipped with a multitude of special methods of inquiry and
testing; with an organized mass of knowledge, and with control of the
arrangements by which industry, law, and education may concentrate upon
the problem of the participation by all men and women, up to their
capacity of absorption, in all attained values. Morals may then well
leave to poetry and to art, the task (so unartistically performed by
philosophy since Plato) of gathering together and rounding out, into
one abiding picture, the separate and special goods of life. It may
leave this task with the assurance that the resultant synthesis will
not depict any final and all-inclusive good, but will add just one more
specific good to the enjoyable excellencies of life.

Humorous irony shines through most of the harsh glances turned towards
the idea of an experimental basis and career for morals. Some shiver
in the fear that morals will be plunged into anarchic confusion--a
view well expressed by a recent writer in the saying that if the _a
priori_ and transcendental basis of morals be abandoned “we shall have
merely the same certainty that now exists in physics and chemistry”!
Elsewhere lurks the apprehension that the progress of scientific method
will deliver the purposive freedom of man bound hand and foot to the
fatal decrees of iron necessity, called natural law. The notion that
laws govern and forces rule is an animistic survival. It is a product
of reading nature in terms of politics in order to turn around and then
read politics in the light of supposed sanctions of nature. This idea
passed from medieval theology into the science of Newton, to whom the
universe was the dominion of a sovereign whose laws were the laws of
nature. From Newton it passed into the deism of the eighteenth century,
whence it migrated into the philosophy of the Enlightenment, to make
its last stand in Spencer’s philosophy of the fixed environment and the
static goal.

No, nature is not an unchangeable order, unwinding itself majestically
from the reel of law under the control of deified forces. It is an
indefinite congeries of changes. Laws are not governmental regulations
which limit change, but are convenient formulations of selected
portions of change followed through a longer or shorter period of
time, and then registered in statistical forms that are amenable to
mathematical manipulation. That this device of shorthand symbolization
presages the subjection of man’s intelligent effort to fixity of law
and environment is interesting as a culture survival, but is not
important for moral theory. Savage and child delight in creating
bogeys from which, their origin and structure being conveniently
concealed, interesting thrills and shudders may be had. Civilized
man in the nineteenth century outdid these bugaboos in his image of
a fixed universe hung on a cast-iron framework of fixed, necessary,
and universal laws. Knowledge of nature does not mean subjection to
predestination, but insight into courses of change; an insight which is
formulated in “laws,” that is, methods of subsequent procedure.

Knowledge of the process and conditions of physical and social
change through experimental science and genetic history has one
result with a double name: increase of control, and increase of
responsibility; increase of power to direct natural change, and
increase of responsibility for its equitable direction toward fuller
good. Theory located within progressive practice instead of reigning
statically supreme over it, means practice itself made responsible
to intelligence; to intelligence which relentlessly scrutinizes the
consequences of every practice, and which exacts liability by an
equally relentless publicity. As long as morals occupies itself with
mere ideals, forces and conditions as they are will be good enough for
“practical” men, since they are then left free to their own devices
in turning these to their own account. As long as moralists plume
themselves upon possession of the domain of the categorical imperative
with its bare precepts, men of executive habits will always be at
their elbows to regulate the concrete social conditions through which
the form of law gets its actual filling of specific injunctions. When
freedom is conceived to be transcendental, the coercive restraint of
immediate necessity will lay its harsh hand upon the mass of men.

In the end, men do what they can do. They refrain from doing what they
cannot do. They do what their own specific powers in conjunction with
the limitations and resources of the environment permit. The effective
control of their powers is not through precepts, but through the
regulation of their conditions. If this regulation is to be not merely
physical or coercive, but moral, it must consist of the intelligent
selection and determination of the environments in which we act; and
in an intelligent exaction of responsibility for the use of men’s
powers. Theorists inquire after the “motive” to morality, to virtue and
the good, under such circumstances. What then, one wonders, is their
conception of the make-up of human nature and of its relation to virtue
and to goodness? The pessimism that dictates such a question, if it be
justified, precludes any consideration of morals.

The diversion of intelligence from discrimination of plural and
concrete goods, from noting their conditions and obstacles, and from
devising methods for holding men responsible for their concrete use
of powers and conditions, has done more than brute love of power
to establish inequality and injustice among men. It has done more,
because it has confirmed with social sanctions the principle of feudal
domination. All men require moral sanctions in their conduct: the
consent of their kind. Not getting it otherwise, they go insane to
feign it. No man ever lived with the exclusive approval of his own
conscience. Hence the vacuum left in practical matters by the remote
irrelevancy of transcendental morals has to be filled in somehow.
It is filled in. It is filled in with class-codes, class-standards,
class-approvals--with codes which recommend the practices and habits
already current in a given circle, set, calling, profession, trade,
industry, club, or gang. These class-codes always lean back upon
and support themselves by the professed ideal code. This latter
meets them more than half-way. Being in its pretense a theory for
regulating practice, it must demonstrate its practicability. It is
uneasy in isolation, and travels hastily to meet with compromise and
accommodation the actual situation in all its brute unrationality.
Where the pressure is greatest--in the habitual practice of the
political and economic chieftains--there it accommodates the most.

Class-codes of morals are sanctions, under the caption of ideals, of
uncriticised customs; they are recommendations, under the head of
duties, of what the members of the class are already most given to
doing. If there are to obtain more equable and comprehensive principles
of action, exacting a more impartial exercise of natural power and
resource in the interests of a common good, members of a class must
no longer rest content in responsibility to a class whose traditions
constitute its conscience, but be made responsible to a society whose
conscience is its free and effectively organized intelligence.

In such a conscience alone will the Socratic injunction to man to know
himself be fulfilled.




THE EXPERIMENTAL THEORY OF KNOWLEDGE[7]


It should be possible to discern and describe a knowing as one
identifies any object, concern, or event. It must have its own marks;
it must offer characteristic features--as much so as a thunder-storm,
the constitution of a State, or a leopard. In the search for this
affair, we are first of all desirous for something which is for itself,
contemporaneously with its occurrence, a cognition, not something
called knowledge by another and from without--whether this other be
logician, psychologist, or epistemologist. The “knowledge” may turn
out false, and hence no knowledge; but this is an after-affair; it may
prove to be rich in fruitage of wisdom, but if this outcome be only
wisdom after the event, it does not concern us. What we want is just
something which takes itself as knowledge, rightly or wrongly.


I

This means a specific case, a sample. Yet instances are proverbially
dangerous--so naïvely and graciously may they beg the questions at
issue. Our recourse is to an example so simple, so much on its face
as to be as innocent as may be of assumptions. This case we shall
gradually complicate, mindful at each step to state just what new
elements are introduced. Let us suppose a smell, just a floating
odor. This odor may be anchored by supposing that it moves to action;
it starts changes that end in picking and enjoying a rose. This
description is intended to apply to the course of events witnessed and
recounted from without. What sort of a course must it be to constitute
a knowledge, or to have somewhere within its career that which
deserves this title? The smell, _imprimis_, is there; the movements
that it excites are there; the final plucking and gratification are
experienced. But, let us say, the smell is not the smell of the rose;
the resulting change of the organism is not a sense of walking and
reaching; the delicious finale is not the fulfilment of the movement,
and, through that, of the original smell; “is not,” in each case
meaning is “not experienced as” such. We may take, in short, these
experiences in a brutely serial fashion. The smell, _S_, is replaced
(and displaced) by a felt movement, _K_, this is replaced by the
gratification, _G_. Viewed from without, as we are now regarding it,
there is _S-K-G_. But from within, for itself, it is now _S_, now
_K_, now _G_, and so on to the end of the chapter. Nowhere is there
looking before and after; memory and anticipation are not born. Such an
experience neither is, in whole or in part, a knowledge, nor does it
exercise a cognitive function.

Here, however, we may be halted. If there is anything present in
“consciousness” at all, we may be told (at least we constantly are so
told) there must be knowledge of it as present--present, at all events,
in “consciousness.” There is, so it is argued, knowledge at least
of a simple apprehensive type, knowledge of the acquaintance order,
knowledge _that_, even though not knowledge _what_. The smell, it is
admitted, does not know _about_ anything else, nor is anything known
_about_ the smell (the same thing, perhaps); but the smell is known,
either by itself, or by the mind, or by some subject, some unwinking,
unremitting eye. No, we must reply; there is no apprehension without
some (however slight) context; no acquaintance which is not either
recognition or expectation. Acquaintance is presence honored with an
escort; presence is introduced as familiar, or an associate springs up
to greet it. Acquaintance always implies a little friendliness; a trace
of re-knowing, of anticipatory welcome or dread of the trait to follow.

This claim cannot be dismissed as trivial. If valid, it carries with
it the distance between being and knowing: and the recognition of
an element of mediation, that is, of art, in all knowledge. This
disparity, this transcendence, is not something which holds of _our_
knowledge, of finite knowledge, just marking the gap between our
type of consciousness and some other with which we may contrast it
after the manner of the agnostic or the transcendentalist (who hold
so much property in joint ownership!), but exists because knowing is
knowing, that way of bringing things to bear upon things which we call
reflection--a manipulation of things experienced in the light one of
another.

“Feeling,” I read in a recent article, “feeling is immediately
acquainted with its own quality, with its own subjective being.”[8] How
and whence this duplication in the inwards of feeling into feeling
the knower and feeling the known? into feeling as being and feeling
as acquaintance? Let us frankly deny such monsters. Feeling _is_
its own quality; is its own _specific_ (whence and why, once more,
_subjective_?) being. If this statement be dogmatism, it is at least
worth insistent declaration, were it only by way of counter-irritant
to that other dogmatism which asserts that being in “consciousness” is
always presence for or in knowledge. So let us repeat once more, that
to be a smell (or anything else) is one thing, to be _known_ as smell,
another; to be a “feeling” one thing, to be _known_ as a “feeling”
another.[9] The first is thinghood; existence indubitable, direct;
in this way all things _are_ that are in “consciousness” at all.[10]
The second is _reflected_ being, things indicating and calling for
other things--something offering the possibility of truth and hence
of falsity. The first is genuine immediacy; the second is (in the
instance discussed) a pseudo-immediacy, which in the same breath that
it proclaims its immediacy smuggles in another term (and one which
is unexperienced both in itself and in its relation) the subject or
“consciousness,” to which the immediate is related.[11]

But we need not remain with dogmatic assertions. To be acquainted
with a thing or with a person has a definite empirical meaning; we
have only to call to mind what it is to be genuinely and empirically
acquainted, to have done forever with this uncanny presence which,
though bare and simple presence, is yet known, and thus is clothed
upon and complicated. To be acquainted with a thing is to be assured
(from the standpoint of the experience itself) that it is of such and
such a character; that it will behave, if given an opportunity, in
such and such a way; that the obviously and flagrantly present trait
is associated with fellow traits that will show themselves, if the
leadings of the present trait are followed out. To be acquainted is
to anticipate to some extent, on the basis of prior experience. I am,
say, barely acquainted with Mr. Smith: then I have no extended body of
associated qualities along with those palpably present, but at least
some one suggested trait occurs; his nose, his tone of voice, the
place where I saw him, his calling in life, an interesting anecdote
about him, etc. To be acquainted is to know what a thing is _like_ in
some particular. If one is acquainted with the smell of a flower it
means that the smell is not just smell, but reminds one of some other
experienced thing which stands in continuity with the smell. There is
thus supplied a condition of control over or purchase upon what is
present, the possibility of translating it into terms of some other
trait not now sensibly present.

Let us return to our example. Let us suppose that _S_ is not just
displaced by _K_ and then by _G_. Let us suppose it persists; and
persists not as an unchanged _S_ alongside _K_ and _G_, nor yet as
fused with them into a new further quale _J_. For in such events, we
have only the type already considered and rejected. For an observer
the new quale might be more complex, or fuller of meaning, than the
original _S_, _K_, or _G_, but might not be experienced as complex. We
might thus suppose a composite photograph which should suggest nothing
of the complexity of its origin and structure. In this case we should
have simply another picture.

But we may also suppose that the blur of the photograph suggests
the superimposition of pictures and something of their character.
Then we get another, and for our problem, much more fruitful kind of
persistence. We will imagine that the final _G_ assumes this form:
Gratification-terminating-movement-induced-by-smell. The smell is still
present; it has persisted. It is not present in its original form,
but is represented with a quality, an office, that of having excited
activity and thereby terminating its career in a certain quale of
gratification. It is not _S_, but Σ; that is _S_ with an increment of
meaning due to maintenance and fulfilment through a process. _S_ is no
longer just smell, but smell which has excited and thereby secured.

Here we have a cognitive, but not a cognitional thing. In saying that
the smell is finally experienced as _meaning_ gratification (through
intervening handling, seeing, etc.) and meaning it not in a hapless
way, but in a fashion which operates to effect what is meant, we
retrospectively attribute intellectual force and function to the
smell--and this is what is signified by “cognitive.” Yet the smell is
not cognitional, because it did not knowingly intend to mean this; but
is found, after the event, to have meant it. Nor again is the final
experience, the Σ or transformed _S_, a knowledge.

Here again the statement may be challenged. Those who agree with the
denial that bare presence of a quale in “consciousness” constitutes
acquaintance and simple apprehension, may now turn against us, saying
that experience of fulfilment of meaning is just what we mean by
knowledge, and this is just what the Σ of our illustration is. The
point is fundamental. As the smell at first was presence or being, less
than knowing, so the fulfilment is an experience that is more than
knowing. Seeing and handling the flower, enjoying the full meaning of
the smell as the odor of just this beautiful thing, is not knowledge
because it is more than knowledge.

As this may seem dogmatic, let us suppose that the fulfilment,
the realization, experience, is a knowledge. Then how shall it be
distinguished from and yet classed with other things called knowledge,
viz., reflective, discursive cognitions? Such knowledges are what
they are precisely because they are not fulfilments, but intentions,
aims, schemes, symbols of overt fulfilment. Knowledge, perceptual and
conceptual, of a hunting dog is prerequisite in order that I may really
hunt with the hounds. The hunting in turn may increase my knowledge of
dogs and their ways. But the knowledge of the dog, _qua_ knowledge,
remains characteristically marked off from the use of that knowledge
in the fulfilment experience, the hunt. The hunt is a _realization_ of
knowledge; it alone, if you please, verifies, validates, knowledge, or
supplies tests of truth. The prior knowledge of the dog, was, if you
wish, hypothetical, lacking in assurance or categorical certainty. The
hunting, the fulfilling, realizing experience alone _gives_ knowledge,
because it alone completely assures; makes faith good in works.

Now there is and can be no objection to this definition of knowledge,
_provided it is consistently adhered to_. One has as much right to
identify knowledge with complete assurance, as I have to identify it
with anything else. Considerable justification in the common use of
language, in common sense, may be found for defining knowledge as
complete assurance. But even upon this definition, the fulfilling
experience is not, as such, complete assurance, and hence not a
knowledge. Assurance, cognitive validation, and guaranteeship, follow
from it, but are not coincident with its occurrence. It _gives_,
but _is_ not, assurance. The concrete construction of a story, the
manipulation of a machine, the hunting with the dogs, is not, so far as
it _is_ fulfilment, a confirmation of meanings previously entertained
as cognitional; that is, is not contemporaneously experienced as
such. To think of prior schemes, symbols, meanings, as fulfilled in a
subsequent experience, is reflectively to present in their relations
to one another both the meanings and the experiences in which they
are, as a matter of fact, embodied. This reflective attitude cannot
be identical with the fulfilment experience itself; it occurs only
in retrospect when the worth of the meanings, or cognitive ideas, is
critically inspected in the light of their fulfilment; or it occurs
as an interruption of the fulfilling experience. The hunter stops
his hunting as a fulfilment to reflect that he made a mistake in his
idea of his dog, or again, that his dog is everything he thought he
was--that his notion of him is confirmed. Or, the man stops the actual
construction of his machine and turns back upon his plan in correction
or in admiring estimate of its value. _The fulfilling experience is not
of itself knowledge_, then, even if we identify knowledge with fulness
of assurance or guarantee. Moreover it gives, affords, assurance only
in reference to a situation which we have not yet considered.[12]

Before the category of confirmation or refutation can be introduced,
there must be something which _means_ to mean something and which
therefore can be guaranteed or nullified by the issue--and this
is precisely what we have not as yet found. We must return to our
instance and introduce a further complication. Let us suppose that
the smell quale recurs at a later date, and that it recurs neither
as the original _S_ nor yet as the final Σ but as an _S_’ which is
fated or charged with the sense of the possibility of a fulfilment
like unto Σ. The _S_’ that recurs is aware of something else which
it means, which it intends to effect through an operation incited
by it and without which its own presence is abortive, and, so to
say, unjustified, senseless. Now we have an experience which is
_cognitional_, not merely cognitive; which is contemporaneously aware
of meaning something beyond itself, instead of having this meaning
ascribed by another at a later period. _The odor knows the rose; the
rose is known by the odor; and the import of each term is constituted
by the relationship in which it stands to the other._ That is, the
import of the smell is the indicating and demanding relation which it
sustains to the enjoyment of the rose as its fulfilling experience;
while this enjoyment is just the content or definition of what the
smell consciously meant, _i.e._, meant to mean. Both the thing
meaning and the thing meant are elements in the same situation. Both
are present, but both are not present in the same way. In fact, one
is present as-_not_-present-in-the-same-way-in-which-the-other-is.
It is present as something to be rendered present in the same way
through the intervention of an operation. We must not balk at a purely
verbal difficulty. It suggests a verbal inconsistency to speak of
a thing present-as-absent. But all ideal contents, all aims (that
is, things aimed at) are present in just such fashion. Things can
be presented as absent, just as they can be presented as hard or
soft, black or white, six inches or fifty rods away from the body.
The assumption that an ideal content must be either totally absent,
or else present _in just the same fashion_ as it will be when it is
realized, is not only dogmatic, but self-contradictory. The only
way in which an ideal content can be experienced at all is to be
presented as _not-present-in-the-same-way_ in which something else is
present, the latter kind of presence affording the standard or type
of _satisfactory_ presence. When present in the same way it ceases to
be an ideal content. Not a contrast of bare existence over against
non-existence, or of present consciousness over against reality out of
present consciousness, but of a satisfactory with an unsatisfactory
mode of presence makes the difference between the “really” and the
“ideally” present.

In terms of our illustration, handling and enjoying the rose are
present, but they are not present in the same way that the smell is
present. They are present as _going_ to be there in the same way,
through an operation which the smell stands sponsor for. The situation
is inherently an uneasy one--one in which everything hangs upon the
performance of the operation indicated; upon the adequacy of movement
as a connecting link, or real adjustment of the thing meaning and
the thing meant. Generalizing from the instance, we get the following
definition: An experience is a knowledge, if in its quale there is an
experienced distinction and connection of two elements of the following
sort: _one means or intends the presence of the other in the same
fashion in which itself is already present, while the other is that
which, while not present in the same fashion, must become so present
if the meaning or intention of its companion or yoke-fellow is to be
fulfilled through the operation it sets up_.


II

We now return briefly to the question of knowledge as acquaintance, and
at greater length to that of knowledge as assurance, or as fulfilment
which confirms and validates. With the recurrence of the odor as
meaning something beyond itself, there is apprehension, knowledge
_that_. One may now say I know what a _rose_ smells like; or I know
what _this_ smell is like; I am acquainted with the rose’s agreeable
odor. In short, on the basis of a present quality, the odor anticipates
and forestalls some further trait.

We have also the conditions of knowledge of the confirmation and
refutation type. In the working out of the situation just described,
in the transformation, self-indicated and self-demanded, of the
tensional into a harmonious or satisfactory situation, fulfilment
_or_ disappointment results. The odor either does or does not fulfil
itself in the rose. The smell as intention is borne out by the facts,
or is nullified. As has already been pointed out, the subsequent
experience of the fulfilment type is not primarily a confirmation or
refutation. Its import is too vital, too urgent to be reduced _in
itself_ just to the value of testing an intention or meaning.[13]
But it gets _in reflection_ just such verificatory significance.
If the smell’s intention is unfulfilled, the discrepancy may throw
one back, in reflection, upon the original situation. Interesting
developments then occur. The smell meant a rose; and yet it did not
(so it turns out) mean a rose; it meant another flower, or something,
one can’t just tell what. Clearly there is _something else_ which
enters in; something else beyond the odor as it was first experienced
determined the validity of its meaning. Here then, perhaps, we have a
transcendental, as distinct from an experimental reference? _Only if
this something else makes no difference, or no detectable difference,
in the smell itself._ If the utmost observation and reflection can find
no difference in the smell quales that fail and those that succeed
in executing their intentions, then there is an outside controlling
and disturbing factor, which, since it is outside of the situation,
can never be utilized in knowledge, and hence can never be employed
in any concrete testing or verifying. In this case, knowing depends
upon an extra-experimental or transcendental factor. But this very
transcendental quality makes both confirmation and refutation,
correction, criticism, of the pretensions or meanings of things,
impossible. For the conceptions of truth and error, we must, upon
the transcendental basis, substitute those of accidental success or
failure. Sometimes the intention chances upon one, sometimes upon
another. Why or how, the gods only know--and they only if to them
the extra-experimental factor is not extra-experimental, but makes
a concrete difference in the concrete smell. But fortunately the
situation is not one to be thus described. The factor that determines
the success or failure, does institute a difference in the thing which
means the object, and this difference is detectable, once attention,
through failure, has been called to the need of its discovery. At the
very least, it makes this difference: the smell is infected with an
element of uncertainty of meaning--and this as a part of the thing
experienced, not for an observer. This additional _awareness_ at least
brings about an additional _wariness_. Meaning is more critical, and
operation more cautious.

But we need not stop here. Attention may be fully directed to the
subject of smells. Smells may become the object of knowledge. They
may take, _pro tempore_,[14] the place which the rose formerly
occupied. One may, that is, observe the cases in which odors mean
other things than just roses, may voluntarily produce new cases for
the sake of further inspection, and thus account for the cases where
meanings had been falsified in the issue; discriminate more carefully
the peculiarities of those meanings which the event verified, and
thus safeguard and bulwark to some extent the employing of similar
meanings in the future. Superficially, it may then seem as if odors
were treated after the fashion of Locke’s simple ideas, or Hume’s
“distinct ideas which are separate existences.” Smells apparently
assume an independent, isolated status during this period of
investigation. “Sensations,” as the laboratory psychologist and the
analytic psychologist generally studies them, are examples of just
such detached things. But egregious error results if we forget that
this seeming isolation and detachment is the outcome of a deliberate
scientific device--that it is simply a part of the scientific technique
of an inquiry directed upon securing _tested_ conclusions. Just and
only because odors (or any group of qualities) are parts of a connected
world are they signs of things beyond themselves; and only because they
are signs is it profitable and necessary to study them _as if_ they
were complete, self-enclosed entities.

In the reflective determination of things with reference to their
specifically meaning other things, experiences of fulfilment,
disappointment, and going astray inevitably play an important and
recurrent _rôle_. They also are realistic facts, related in realistic
ways to the things that intend to mean other things and to the things
intended. When these fulfilments and refusals _are reflected upon_
in the determinate relations in which they stand to their relevant
meanings, they obtain a quality which is quite lacking to them in their
immediate occurrence as just fulfilments or disappointments; viz.,
the property of affording assurance and correction--of confirming
and refuting. Truth and falsity are not properties of any experience
or thing, in and of itself or in its first intention; _but of things
where the problem of assurance consciously enters in_. _Truth and
falsity present themselves as significant facts only in situations
in which specific meanings and their already experienced fulfilments
and non-fulfilments are intentionally compared and contrasted with
reference to the question of the worth, as to reliability of meaning,
of the given meaning or class of meanings._ Like knowledge itself,
truth is an experienced relation of things, and it has no meaning
outside of such relation,[15] any more than such adjectives as
comfortable applied to a lodging, correct applied to speech, persuasive
applied to an orator, etc., have worth apart from the _specific_ things
to which they are applied. It would be a great gain for logic and
epistemology, if we were always to translate the noun “truth” back into
the adjective “true,” and this back into the adverb “truly”; at least,
if we were to do so until we have familiarized ourselves thoroughly
with the fact that “truth” is an abstract noun, summarizing a quality
presented by specific affairs in their own specific contents.


III

I have attempted, in the foregoing pages, a description of the function
of knowledge in its own terms and on its merits--a description which
in intention is realistic, if by realistic we are content to mean
naturalistic, a description undertaken on the basis of what Mr.
Santayana has well called “following the lead of the subject-matter.”
Unfortunately at the present time all such undertakings contend with
a serious extraneous obstacle. Accomplishing the undertaking has
difficulties enough of its own to reckon with; and first attempts
are sure to be imperfect, if not radically wrong. But at present the
attempts are not, for the most part, even listened to on their own
account, they are not examined and criticised as naturalistic attempts.
_They are compared with undertakings of a wholly different nature, with
an epistemological theory of knowledge, and the assumptions of this
extraneous theory are taken as a ready-made standard by which to test
their validity._ Literally of course, “epistemology” means only theory
of knowledge; the term _might_ therefore have been employed simply as
a synonym for a descriptive logic; for a theory that takes knowledge
as it finds it and attempts to give the same kind of an account of it
that would be given of any other natural function or occurrence. But
the mere mention of what _might_ have been only accentuates what is.
The things that pass for epistemology all assume that knowledge is not
a natural function or event, but a mystery.

Epistemology starts from the assumption that certain conditions lie
back of knowledge. The mystery would be great enough if knowledge
were constituted by non-natural conditions back of knowledge, but the
mystery is increased by the fact that the conditions are defined so
as to be incompatible with knowledge. Hence the primary problem of
epistemology is: How is knowledge _überhaupt_, knowledge at large,
_possible_? Because of the incompatibility between the concrete
occurrence and function of knowledge and the conditions back of it to
which it must conform, a second problem arises: How is knowledge in
general, knowledge _überhaupt_, _valid_? Hence the complete divorce
in contemporary thought between epistemology as theory of knowledge
and logic as an account of the specific ways in which particular
beliefs that are better than other alternative beliefs regarding the
same matters are formed; and also the complete divorce between a
naturalistic, a biological and social psychology, setting forth how
the function of knowledge is evolved out of other natural activities,
and epistemology as an account of how knowledge is possible anyhow.

It is out of the question to set forth in this place in detail the
contrast between transcendental epistemology and an experimental theory
of knowledge. It may assist the understanding of the latter, however,
if I point out, baldly and briefly, how, _out of the distinctively
empirical situation_, there arise those assumptions which make
knowledge a mystery, and hence a topic for a peculiar branch of
philosophizing.

As just pointed out, epistemology makes the possibility of knowledge a
problem, because it assumes back of knowledge conditions incompatible
with the obvious traits of knowledge as it empirically exists. These
assumptions are that the organ or instrument of knowledge is not a
natural object, but some ready-made state of mind or consciousness,
something purely “subjective,” a peculiar kind of existence which
lives, moves, and has its being in a realm different from things to
be known; and that the ultimate goal and content of knowledge is a
fixed, ready-made thing which has no organic connections with the
origin, purpose, and growth of the attempt to know it, some kind of
_Ding-an-sich_ or absolute, extra-empirical “Reality.”

(1) It is not difficult to see at what point in the development
of natural knowledge, or the signifying of one thing by another,
there arises the notion of the knowing medium as something radically
different in the order of existence from the thing to be known. It
arises subsequent to the repeated experience of non-fulfilment, of
frustration and disappointment. The odor did not after all mean the
rose; it meant something quite different; and yet its indicative
function was exercised so forcibly that we could not help--or at least
_did_ not help--believing in the existence of the rose. This is a
familiar and typical kind of experience, one which very early leads
to the recognition that “things are not what they seem.” There are
two contrasted methods of dealing with this recognition: one is the
method indicated above (p. 93). We go more thoroughly, patiently, and
carefully into the facts of the case. We employ all sorts of methods,
invented for the purpose, of examining the things that are signs and
the things that are signified, and we experimentally produce various
situations, in order that we may tell _what_ smells mean roses _when_
roses are meant, what it is about the smell and the rose that led us
into error; and that we may be able to discriminate those cases in
which a suspended conclusion is all that circumstances admit. We simply
do the best we can to regulate our system of signs so that they become
as instructive as possible, utilizing for this purpose (as indicated
above) all possible experiences of success and of failure, and
deliberately instituting cases which will throw light on the specific
empirical causes of success and failure.

Now it so happens that when the facts of error were consciously
generalized and formulated, namely in Greek thought, such a technique
of specific inquiry and rectification did not exist--in fact, it hardly
could come into existence until _after_ error had been seized upon as
constituting a fundamental anomaly. Hence the method just outlined of
dealing with the situation was impossible. We can imagine disconsolate
ghosts willing to postpone any professed solution of the difficulty
till subsequent generations have thrown more light on the question
itself; we can hardly imagine passionate human beings exercising
such reserve. At all events, Greek thought provided what seemed a
satisfactory way out: there are two orders of existence, one permanent
and complete, the noumenal region, to which alone the characteristic
of Being is properly applicable, the other transitory, phenomenal,
sensible, a region of non-Being, or at least of mere Coming-to-be, a
region in which Being is hopelessly mixed with non-Being, with the
unreal. The former alone is the domain of knowledge, of truth; the
latter is the territory of opinion, confusion, and error. In short, the
contrast _within_ experience of the cases in which things successfully
and unsuccessfully maintained and executed the meanings of other things
was erected into a wholesale difference of status in the intrinsic
characters of the things involved in the two types of cases.

With the beginnings of modern thought, the region of the “unreal,” the
source of opinion and error, was located exclusively in the individual.
The object was _all_ real and _all_ satisfactory, but the “subject”
could approach the object only through his own subjective states,
his “sensations” and “ideas.” The Greek conception of two orders of
existence was retained, but instead of the two orders characterizing
the “universe” itself, one _was_ the universe, the other was the
individual mind trying to know that universe. This scheme would
obviously easily account for error and hallucination; but how could
_knowledge_, truth, ever come about such a basis? The Greek problem of
the possibility of error became the modern problem of the possibility
of knowledge.

Putting the matter in terms that are independent of history,
experiences of failure, disappointment, non-fulfilment of the
function of meaning and contention may lead the individual to the
path of science--to more careful and extensive investigation of
the things themselves, with a view to detecting specific sources
of error, and guarding against them, and regulating, so far as
possible, the conditions under which objects are bearers of meanings
beyond themselves. But impatient of such slow and tentative methods
(which insure not infallibility but increased probability of
valid conclusions), by reason of disappointment a person may turn
epistemologist. He may then take the discrepancy, the failure of the
smell to execute its own intended meaning, as a wholesale, rather
than as a specific fact: as evidence of a contrast in general between
things meaning and things meant, instead of as evidence of the need
of a more cautious and thorough inspection of odors and execution of
operations indicated by them. One may then say: Woe is me; smells are
only _my_ smells, subjective states existing in an order of being made
out of consciousness, while roses exist in another order made out of a
radically different sort of stuff; or, odors are made out of “finite”
consciousness as their stuff, while the real things, the objects which
fulfil them, are made out of an “infinite” consciousness as their
material. Hence some purely metaphysical tie has to be called in to
bring them into connection with each other. And yet this tie does not
concern knowledge; it does not make the meaning of one odor any more
correct than that of another, nor enable us to discriminate relative
degrees of correctness. As a principle of control, this transcendental
connection is related to all alike, and hence condemns and justifies
all alike.[16]

It is interesting to note that the transcendentalist almost invariably
first falls into the psychological fallacy; and then having himself
taken the psychologist’s attitude (the attitude which is interested in
meanings as themselves self-inclosed “ideas”) accuses the empiricist
whom he criticises of having confused mere psychological existence
with logical validity. That is, he begins by supposing that the smell
of our illustration (and all the cognitional objects for which this
is used as a symbol) is a purely mental or psychical state, so that
the question of logical reference or intention is the problem of how
the merely mental can “know” the extra-mental. But from a strictly
empirical point of view, the smell which knows is no more merely mental
than is the rose known. We may, if we please, say that the smell when
involving conscious meaning or intention is “mental,” but this term
“mental” does not denote some separate type of existence--existence
as a state of consciousness. It denotes only the fact that the smell,
a real and non-psychical object, now exercises an intellectual
_function_. This new property involves, as James has pointed out, an
_additive_ relation--a new property possessed by a non-mental object,
when that object, occurring in a new context, assumes a further
office and use.[17] To be “in the mind” means to be in a situation
in which the function of intending is directly concerned.[18] Will
not some one who believes that the knowing experience is _ab origine_
a strictly “mental” thing, explain how, as matter of fact, it does
get a specific, extra-mental reference, capable of being tested,
confirmed, or refuted? Or, if he believes that viewing it as merely
mental expresses only the form it takes for psychological analysis,
will he not explain why he so persistently attributes the inherently
“mental” characterization of it to the empiricist whom he criticises?
An object _becomes_ meaning when used empirically in a certain way;
and, under certain circumstances, the exact character and worth of
this meaning _becomes_ an object of solicitude. But the transcendental
epistemologist with his purely psychical “meanings” and his purely
extra-empirical “truths” assumes a _Deus ex Machina_ whose mechanism
is preserved a secret. And as if to add to the arbitrary character of
his assumption, he has to admit that the transcendental _a priori_
faculty by which mental states get objective reference does not in the
least help us to discriminate, _in the concrete_, between an objective
reference that is false and one that is valid.

(2) The counterpart assumption to that of pure aboriginal “mental
states” is, of course, that of an Absolute Reality, fixed and complete
in itself, of which our “mental states” are bare transitory hints,
their true meaning and their transcendent goal being the Truth _in
rerum natura_. If the organ and medium of knowing is a self-inclosed
order of existence different in kind from the Object to be known,
then that Object must stand out there in complete aloofness from the
concrete purpose and procedure of knowing it. But if we go back to
the knowing as a natural occurrence, capable of description, we find
that just as a smell does not mean Rose in general (or anything else
at large), but means a _specific_ group of qualities whose experience
is intended and anticipated, so the function of knowing is always
expressed in connections between a given experience and a specific
possible wanted experience. The “rose” that is meant in a particular
situation _is_ the rose of that situation. When this experience is
consummated, it is achieved as the fulfilment of the conditions in
which just _that_ intention was entertained--not as the fulfilment of
a faculty of knowledge or a meaning in general. Subsequent meanings
and subsequent fulfilments may increase, may enrich the consummating
experience; the object or content of the rose as known may be other and
fuller next time and so on. But we have no right to set up “a rose” at
large or in general as the object of the knowing odor; the object of a
knowledge is always strictly correlative to that particular thing which
means it. It is not something which can be put in a wholesale way over
against that which cognitively refers to it, as when the epistemologist
puts the “real” rose (object) over against a merely phenomenal or
empirical rose which _this_ smell happens to mean. As the meaning gets
more complex, fuller, more finely discriminated, the object which
realizes or fulfils the meaning grows similarly in quality. But we
cannot set up a rose, an object of fullest, complete, and exhaustive
content as that which is really meant by any and every odor of a
rose, whether it consciously meant to mean it or not. The test of
the cognitional rectitude of the odor lies in the _specific_ object
which it sets out to secure. This is the meaning of the statement that
the import of _each_ term is found in its relationship to the other.
It applies to object meant as well as to the meaning. Fulfilment,
completion are always relative terms. _Hence the criterion of the truth
or falsity of the meaning, of the adequacy, of the cognitional thing
lies within the relationships of the situation and not without._ The
thing that means another by means of an intervening operation either
succeeds or fails in accomplishing the operation indicated, while this
operation either gives or fails to give the object meant. Hence the
truth or falsity of the original cognitional object.


IV

From this excursion, I return in conclusion to a brief general
characterization of those situations in which we are aware that
things mean other things and are so critically aware of it that, in
order to increase the probability of fulfilment and to decrease the
chance of frustration, all possible pains are taken to regulate the
meanings that attach to things. These situations define that type of
knowing which we call _scientific_. There are things that claim to
mean other experiences; in which the trait of meaning other objects
is not discovered _ab extra_, and after the event, but is part of the
thing itself. This trait of the thing is as realistic, as specific,
as any other of its traits. It is, therefore, as open to inspection
and determination as to its nature, as is any other trait. Moreover,
since it is upon this trait that assurance (as distinct from accident)
of fulfilment depends, an especial interest, an absorbing interest,
attaches to its determination. Hence the scientific type of knowledge
and its growing domination over other sorts.

We _employ_ meanings in all intentional constructions of experience--in
all anticipations, whether artistic, utilitarian or technological,
social or moral. The success of the anticipation is found to depend
upon the character of the meaning. Hence the stress upon a right
determination of these meanings. Since they are the instruments upon
which fulfilment depends _so far as that is controlled_ or other than
accidental, they become themselves objects of surpassing interest. For
all persons at some times, and for one class of persons (scientists)
at almost all times, the determination of the meanings employed in
the control of fulfilments (of acting upon meanings) is central. The
experimental or pragmatic theory of knowledge explains the dominating
importance of science; it does not depreciate it or explain it away.

Possibly pragmatic writers are to blame for the tendency of their
critics to assume that the practice they have in mind is utilitarian
in some narrow sense, referring to some preconceived and inferior
use--though I cannot recall any evidence for this admission. But
what the pragmatic theory has in mind is precisely the fact that
all the affairs of life which need regulation--_all values of all
types_--depend upon utilizations of meanings. Action is not to be
limited to anything less than the carrying out of ideas, than the
execution, whether strenuous or easeful, of meanings. Hence the
surpassing importance which comes to attach to the careful, impartial
construction of the meanings, and to their constant survey and resurvey
with reference to their value as evidenced by experiences of fulfilment
and deviation.

That truth denotes _truths_, that is, specific verifications,
combinations of meanings and outcomes reflectively viewed, is,
one may say, the central point of the experimental theory. Truth,
in general or in the abstract, is a just name for an experienced
relation among the things of experience: that sort of relation in
which intents are retrospectively viewed from the standpoint of the
fulfilment which they secure through their own natural operation
or incitement. Thus the experimental theory explains directly and
simply the absolutistic tendency to translate concrete true things
into the general relationship, Truth, and then to hypostatize this
abstraction into identity with real being, Truth _per se_ and _in se_,
of which all transitory things and events--that is, all experienced
realities--are only shadowy futile approximations. This type of
relationship is central for man’s will, for man’s conscious endeavor.
To select, to conserve, to extend, to propagate those meanings which
the course of events has generated, to note their peculiarities, to
be in advance on the alert for them, to search for them anxiously, to
substitute them for meanings that eat up our energy in vain, defines
the aim of rational effort and the goal of legitimate ambition. The
absolutistic theory is the transfer of this moral or voluntary law of
selective action into a quasi-physical (that is, metaphysical) law of
indiscriminate being. Identify metaphysical being with _significant
excellent_ being--that is, with those relationships of things which, in
our moments of deepest insight and largest survey, we would continue
and reproduce--and the experimentalist, rather than the absolutist,
is he who has a right to proclaim the supremacy of Truth, and the
superiority of the life devoted to Truth for its own sake over that of
“mere” activity. But to read back into an order of things which exists
without the participation of our reflection and aim, the quality which
defines the purpose of our thought and endeavor is at one and the same
stroke to mythologize reality and to deprive the life of thoughtful
endeavor of its ground for being.




THE INTELLECTUALIST CRITERION FOR TRUTH[19]


I

Among the influences that have worked in contemporary philosophy
towards disintegration of intellectualism of the epistemological type,
and towards the substitution of a philosophy of experience, the work of
Mr. Bradley must be seriously counted. One has, for example, only to
compare his metaphysics with the two fundamental contentions of T. H.
Green, namely, that reality is a single, eternal, and all-inclusive
system of relations, and that this system of relations is one in kind
with that process of relating which constitutes our thinking, to be
instantly aware of a changed atmosphere. Much of Bradley’s writings
is a sustained and deliberate polemic against intellectualism of the
Neo-Kantian type. When, however, we find conjoined to this criticism
an equally sustained contention that the philosophic conception of
reality must be based on an exclusively intellectual criterion, a
criterion belonging to and confined to theory, we have a situation
that is thought-provoking. The situation grows in interest when it is
remembered that there is a general and growing tendency among those
who appeal in philosophy to a strictly intellectualistic _method_ of
defining “reality,” to insist that the reality reached by this method
has a super-intellectual _content_: that intellectual, affectional,
and volitional features are all joined and fused in “ultimate”
reality. The curious character of the situation is that Reality is
an “absolute experience” of which the intellectual is simply one
partial and transmuted moment. Yet this reality is attained unto,
in philosophic method, by exclusive emphasis upon the intellectual
aspect of present experience and by systematic exclusion of exactly
the emotional, volitional features which with respect to content are
insisted upon! Under such circumstances the cynically-minded are moved
to wonder whether this tremendous insistence upon one factor in present
experience at the expense of others, is not because this is the only
way to maintain the notion of “Absolute Experience,” and to prevent
it from collapsing into ordinary everyday experience. This paradox is
not peculiar to Mr. Bradley. Looking at the Neo-Kantian movement in
the broad in its modern form, one might almost say that its prominent
feature is its insistence upon reaching a “Reality” that includes
extra-intellectual factors and phases, traits that are ideal in a moral
and emotional sense, by an exclusive recognition of the function of
knowledge in its isolation.

Such being the case, an examination of Mr. Bradley’s method and
criterion may have far-reaching implications. First, let us set
before ourselves the general points of Mr. Bradley’s indictment of
intellectualism.[20] Knowledge or judgment works by means of thought;
it is predication of idea (meaning) of existence as its subject. Its
final aim is to effect a complete union or harmony of existence and
meaning. But it is fore-doomed to failure, for in realizing its end
it must employ means which contradict its own purpose. This inherent
incapacity lurks in judgment with respect to subject, predicate, and
copula. The predicate or meaning necessary to complete the reality
presented in the subject can be referred to the latter and united with
it only by being itself alienated from existence. It heals the wounds
or deficiencies of its own subject (and in the end all deficiencies are
to the modern idealist discrepancies) only on condition of inflicting
another wound,--only by sundering meaning from a prior union with
existence in some other phase. This latter existence, therefore, is
always left out in the cold. It is as if we wanted to get all the cloth
in the world into one garment and our only way of accomplishing this
were to tear off a portion from one piece of goods in order to patch it
on to another.

The subject of the judgment, moreover, as well as the predicate,
stands in the way of judgment fulfilling its own task. It has
“sensuous infinitude” and it has “immediacy,” but these two traits
contradict each other. The details of the subject always go beyond
itself, being indefinitely related to something beyond. “In its given
content it has relations which do not terminate within that content”
(_ibid._, p. 176), while in its immediacy it presents an undivided
union of existence and meaning. No subject can be mere existence any
more than it can be mere meaning. It is always existent or embodied
meaning. As such it claims individuality or the character of a single
subsistent whole. But this indispensable claim is inconsistent with its
ragged-edged character, its indefinite external reference, which is
indispensable to it as subject that it may require and receive further
meaning from predication.

With respect to the copula the following quotation from the
“Principles” of Logic (p. 10) may serve: “Judgment proper is the
_act_ which refers the ideal content (recognized as such) to the
reality beyond the act.” In other words, judgment as act (and it is
the act which is expressed in the copula) must always fall outside
of the content of knowledge as such; yet since this act certainly
falls within reality, it would have to be recognized and stated by
any knowledge pretending to competency with respect to reality as a
whole. These considerations, stated in this way, are highly technical
and presuppose a knowledge not merely of Mr. Bradley’s own logic, but
also of the logical analysis of knowledge initiated by Kant and carried
on by Herbart, Lotze, and others. Their main import may, however, be
stated in comparatively non-technical form. Human experience is full of
discrepancies. Were experience purely a matter of brute existence (such
as we sometimes imagine the animals’ experience to be) it would be
totally lacking in meaning and there would be no problems, no thinking,
no occasion for thinking, and hence no philosophy. On the other hand,
if experience were a complete, tight-jointed union of existence and
meaning, there would be no dissatisfaction, no problems, no cause for
efforts to patch up defects and contradictions. Existences, things,
would embody all the meanings that they suggest; while abstract
meanings, values that are _merely_ ideal, that are projected or thought
of but not fulfilled, would be totally unheard of. But our experience
stands in marked contrast to both these types of experience. It
is neither an affair of meaningless existence nor of existence
self-luminous with fulfilled meaning. All things that we experience
have _some_ meaning, but that meaning is always so partially embodied
in things that we cannot rest in them. They point beyond themselves;
they indicate meanings which they do not fulfil; they suggest values
which they fail to embody, and when we go to other things for the
fruition of what is denied, we either find the same situation of
division over again, or we find even more positive disappointment
and frustration--we find contrary meanings set up. Now all thinking
grows out of this discrepancy between existence and the meaning which
it partially embodies and partially refuses, which it suggests but
declines to express. Yet thinking, the mode of bringing existence and
meaning into harmony with each other, always works by selection, by
abstraction; it sets up and projects meanings which are ideal only,
footless, in the air, matters of thought only, not of sentiency or
immediate existence. It emphasizes the ideal of a completed union
of existence and meaning, but is helpless to effect it. And this
helplessness (according to Mr. Bradley) is not due to external pressure
but to the very structure of thought itself.

From every point of view knowledge operates under conditions, (and
these not externally imposed but inherent in its own nature as
judgment,) that render it incapable of realizing its aim of complete
union of existence and meaning. Granted the argument, and it is
difficult to imagine a more serious indictment against the pretensions
of philosophy to reach “Reality” _via_ the exclusive path of knowledge.

The presence of contradiction is Mr. Bradley’s criterion for
“appearance,” just as its absence is his criterion for “reality.” It
thus goes without saying that knowledge and truth which we can attain
are matters of appearance. Contradiction between existence and meaning
is its last word. This is not merely a logical deduction from Mr.
Bradley’s position, but is expressly stated by him. “Thus the truth
belongs to existence, but it does not as such exist.... Truth shows
a dissection but never an actual life” (“Appearance and Reality,” p.
167). Again, “every truth is appearance since in it we have divorce
of quality from being” (_ibid._, p. 187). “Even absolute truth seems
in the end to turn out erroneous.... Internal discrepancy belongs
irremovably to truth’s proper character.... Truth is one aspect of
experience and is therefore made imperfect and limited by what it fails
to include” (_ibid._, pp. 544-545). Nothing could be more explicit as
to the inherently contradictory character of truth, both as an ideal
and as an accomplished fact; nothing more positive as to the unreality
or appearance-character of truth. We cannot, on Mr. Bradley’s method,
stop here. Not only is knowledge--working as it does through thought
which is always partial, selective, abstractive--doomed to failure
in accomplishing its task, but the existence of the contradiction
between the suggestion of meanings by existence and this realization in
existence is itself due to thought.

Speaking of thought he says: “The relational form is a compromise on
which thought stands and which it develops.” And all the particular
antinomies which he discusses are interpreted as having their basis
in the category of relation (_ibid._, p. 180). In his section on
Appearance he goes through various aspects and distinctions of the
world, such as primary and secondary qualities, substance and its
properties, relation and qualitative elements, space and time, motion
and change, causation, etc., pointing out irreconcilable discrepancies
in them. He does not, in a _generalized_ way, expressly refer them
to any common source or root. But it seems a fair inference that the
relational character of thought is at the bottom of the whole trouble:
so that we have in the cases mentioned precisely the same situation
_in concreto_ which is set forth _in abstracto_ in the discussion of
thought. The contradictions brought up are in every case resolved
into the fundamental discrepancy supposed to exist between relations
and elements related. In each case there is the ideal of a final
unity in which relations and elements as such disappear, while in
every case the nature of relation is such as to prevent the desired
consummation. In at least one place, it is expressly declared that it
is the knowledge function which is responsible for the degradation of
reality to appearance. “We do not suggest that the thing always itself
is an appearance. We mean its character is such _that it becomes one as
soon as we judge it_. And this character we have seen throughout our
work, is ideality. Appearance consists in the looseness of content from
existence.... And we have found that everywhere throughout the world
such ideality prevails” (_ibid._, p. 486, italics not in the original).
It is not then strictly true that the divorce of meaning and existence
instigates thought; rather thought is the unruly member that creates
the divorce and then engages in the task (in which it is self-condemned
to failure) of trying to establish the unity which it has gratuitously
destroyed. Thinking, self-consciousness, is disease of the naïve unity
of thoughtless experience.

On the one hand there is a systematic discrediting of the ultimate
claims of the knowledge function, and this not from external
physiological or psychological reasons such as are sometimes alleged
against its capacity, but on the basis of its own interior logic. But
on the other hand, a strictly logical criterion is deliberately adopted
and employed as the fundamental and final criterion for the philosophic
conception of reality. Long familiarity has not dulled my astonishment
at finding exactly the same set of considerations which in the earlier
portion of the book are employed to condemn things as experienced by us
to the region of Appearance, employed in the latter portion of the book
to afford a triumphant demonstration of the existence and character of
Absolute Reality. The argument I take up first on its formal side, and
then with reference to material considerations.[21]

The positive conception of Reality is reached by the conception that
“ultimate reality must be such that it does not contradict itself;
here is an absolute criterion. And it is proved absolute by the fact
that either in endeavoring to deny it or even in attempting to doubt
it, we tacitly assume its validity” (_ibid._, pp. 136-137). That is
to say, when one sets out to think one must avoid self-contradiction;
this avoidance, or, put positively, the attainment of consistency,
harmony, is the basic law of all thinking. Since in thinking we
set out to attain reality, it follows that reality itself must be
self-consistent, and that its self-consistency determines the law
of thought. Or, as Mr. Bradley again puts the matter, “In order to
think at all you must subject yourself to the standard, a standard
which implies an absolute knowledge of reality; and while you doubt
this, you accept it, and obey, while you rebel” (_ibid._, p. 153). The
absolute knowledge referred to is, of course, the knowledge of the
thoroughly self-consistent, non-contradictory character of reality.
Every reader of Mr. Bradley’s book knows how he goes on from this point
to supply positive content to reality; to give an outline sketch of the
characters it must possess and the way in which it must possess them
in order to maintain its thoroughly self-consistent character. It is,
however, only the strictly formal aspect of the matter that I am here
concerned with.

On this side we reach, I think, the heart of the matter by asking,
in reference to the first quotation: Absolute _for what_? Surely
absolute for the process under consideration, that is absolute for
thought. But the significance of this absolute for thought is, one
may say, “absolutely” (since we are here confessedly in the realm
just of thought) determined by the nature of thought itself. Now
this nature has been already referred by considerations “belonging
irremovably to truth’s proper character,” to the world of appearance
and of internal discrepancy. Yes, one may say (speaking formally),
the criterion of thought is absolute--that is to say absolute or final
for thought; but how can one imagine that this in any way alters the
essential nature and value of thought? If knowledge works by thought,
and thought institutes appearance over against reality, any further
fact about thought--such as a statement of its criterion--falls wholly
within the limits of this situation. It is comical to suppose that a
_special_ trait of thought can be employed to alter the fundamental and
essential nature of thought. The criterion of thought must be infected
by the nature of thought, instead of being a redeeming angel which at
a critical juncture transforms the fragile creature, thought, into an
ambassador with power plenipotentiary to the court of the Absolute.

There really seems to be ground for supposing that the whole argument
turns on an ambiguity in the use of the word “absolute.” Keeping
strictly within the limits of the argument, it means nothing more than
that thinking has a certain principle, a law of its own; that it has
an appropriate mode of procedure which must not be violated. It means,
in short, whatever is finally controlling for the thought-function.
But Mr. Bradley immediately takes the word to mean absolute in the
sense of describing a reality which by its very nature is totally
contradistinguished from appearance--that is to say, from the realm
of thought. Upon the ambiguity of a word, the systematic indictment
of intellectualism becomes the cornerstone of a systematically
intellectualistic method of conceiving reality!

Mr. Bradley has himself recognized the seeming contradiction between
his indictment of thought and his use of the criterion of thought as
the exclusive path to a philosophic notion of the real. In dealing
with it, he (to my mind) comes within an ace of stating a truer
doctrine, and also exhibits even more clearly the weakness of his own
position. He goes so far as to put the following words into the mouth
of an objector, and to accept their general import: “All axioms, as
a matter of fact, are practical ... for none of them in the end can
amount to more than the impulse to behave in a certain way. And they
cannot express more than this impulse, together with the impossibility
of satisfaction unless it is complied with” (p. 151). After accepting
this (p. 152) he goes on to say: “Take for example the law of avoiding
contradiction. When two elements will not remain quietly together,
but collide and struggle, we cannot rest satisfied with that state.
Our impulse is to alter it and, on the theoretical side, to bring
the content to such shape that the variety remains peaceably in one.
And this inability to rest otherwise and this tendency to alter in a
certain way and direction is, _when reflected upon and made explicit_,
our axiom and our intellectual standard” (p. 152; italics mine).

The retort is obvious: if _the_ intellectual criterion, the principle
of non-contradiction on which his whole Absolute Reality rests, is
itself a practical principle, then surely the ultimate criterion for
regulating intellectual undertakings is practical. To this obvious
answer Mr. Bradley makes reply as follows: “You may call the intellect,
if you like, a mere tendency to a movement, but you must remember that
it is a movement of a _very special kind_.... Thinking is the attempt
to satisfy a _special_ impulse, and the attempt implies an assumption
about reality.... But why, it may be objected, is this assumption
better than what holds for practice? Why is the theoretical to be
superior to the practical end? I have never said that this is so, only
_here_, that is, in _metaphysics_, I must be allowed to reply, we are
acting theoretically.... The _theoretical standard within theory must
surely be absolute_” (p. 153. The italics again are mine; compare with
the quotation this, from p. 485: “Our attitude, however, in metaphysics
must be theoretical.” So, also, p. 154, “Since metaphysics is mere
theory and since theory from its nature must be made by the intellect,
it is here the intellect alone which is to be satisfied”).

Grant that intellect is a special movement or mode of practice; grant
that we are not merely acting (are we ever _merely_ acting?) but are
“specially occupied and therefore subject to special conditions,”
and the problem remains _what_ special kind of activity is thinking?
what is its experienced differentia from other kinds? what is its
commerce with them? When the problem is _what_ special kind of an
activity is thinking and of _what_ nature is the consistency which
is its criterion, somehow we do not get forward by being told that
thinking _is_ a special mode of practice and that its criterion _is_
consistency. The unquestioned presupposition of Mr. Bradley is that
thinking is such a wholly separate activity (the “intellect _alone_”
which has to be satisfied), that to give it autonomy is to say that it,
and its criterion, have nothing to do with other activities; that it is
“independent” as to criterion, in a way which excludes interdependence
in function and outcome. Unless the term “special” be interpreted to
mean _isolated_, to say that thinking is a _special_ mode of activity
no more nullifies the proposition that it arises in a practical contest
and operates for practical ends, than to say that blacksmithing is a
_special_ activity, negates its being one connected mode of industrial
activity.

His underlying presupposition of the separate character of thought
comes out in the passage last quoted. “Our impulse,” he says, “is to
alter the conflicting situation and, _on the theoretical side_, to
bring its contents into peaceable unity.” If one substitutes for the
word “on” the word “through,” one gets a conception of theory and of
thinking that does justice to the autonomy of the operation and yet so
connects it with other activities as to give it a serious business,
real purpose, and concrete responsibility and hence testibility.
From this point of view the theoretical activity is simply the form
that certain practical activities take after colliding, as the most
effective and fruitful way of securing their own harmonization.
The collision is not theoretical; the issue in “peaceable unity”
is not theoretical. But theory names the type of activity by which
the transformation from war to peace is most amply and securely
effected.[22]

Admit, however, the force of Mr. Bradley’s contention on its own terms
and see how futile is the result. It is quite true, as Mr. Bradley
says (p. 153), that if a man sits down to play the metaphysical game,
he must abide by the rules of thinking; but if thinking be already,
with respect to reality, an idle and futile game, simply abiding by
the rules does not give additional value to its stakes. Grant the
premises as to the character of thought, and the assertion of the
final character of the theoretical standard within metaphysics--since
metaphysics is a form of theory--is a warning against metaphysics. If
the intellect involves self-contradiction, it is either impossible that
it should be satisfied, or else self-contradiction is its satisfaction.


II

Let us, however, turn from Mr. Bradley’s formal proof that the
criterion of philosophic truth must be exclusively a canon of formal
thought. Let us ignore the contradiction involved in first making the
work of thought to be the producing of appearance and then making
the law of this thought the law of an Absolute Reality. What about
the intellectualist criterion? The intellectualism of Mr. Bradley’s
philosophy is represented in the statement that it is “the theoretical
standard which guarantees that reality is a self-consistent system”
(p. 148). But how can the fact that the criterion of thinking is
consistency be employed to determine the nature of the consistency of
its object? Consistency in one sense, consistency of reasoning with
itself, we know; but what is the nature of the consistency of reality
which this consistency necessitates? Thinking without doubt must be
logical; but does it follow from this that the reality about which
one thinks, and about which one must think consistently if one is to
think to any purpose, must itself be already logical? The pivot of
the argument is, of course, the old ontological argument, stripped of
all theological irrelevancies and reduced to its fighting weight as
a metaphysical proposition. Those who question this basic principle
of intellectualism will, of course, question it here. They will urge
that, instead of the consistency of “reality” resting on the basis of
consistency in the reasoning process the latter derives its meaning
from the material consistency at which it aims. They will say that
the definition of the nature of the consistency which is the end of
thinking and which prescribes its technique is to be reached from
inquiry into such questions as these: What sort of an activity in the
concrete is thinking? what are the specific conditions which it has
to fulfil? what is its use; its relevancy; its purport in present
concrete experiences? The more it is insisted that the theoretical
standard--consistency--is final within theory, the more germane and
the more urgent is the question: What then in the concrete is theory?
and of what nature _is_ the material consistency which is the test of
its formal consistency?[23]

Take the instance of a man who wishes to deny the criterion of
self-consistency in thinking. Is he refuted by pointing to the “fact”
that eternal reality is eternally self-consistent? Would not his
obvious answer to such a mode of refutation be: “What of it? What is
the relevancy of that proposition to my procedure in thinking here
and now? Doubtless absolute reality may be a great number of things,
possibly very sublime and precious things; but what I am concerned with
is a particular job of thinking, and until you show me the intermediate
terms which link that job to the asserted self-consistent character
of absolute reality, I fail to see what difference this doubtless
wholly amiable trait of reality has to make in what I am here and now
concerned with. You might as well quote any other irrelevant fact, such
as the height of the Empress of China.” We take another tack in dealing
with the man in question. We call his attention to his specific aim in
the situation with reference to which he is thinking, and point out the
conditions that have to be observed if that aim is to fulfil itself. We
show that if he does not observe the conditions imposed by his aim his
thinking will go on so wildly as to defeat itself. It is to consistency
of means with the end of the concrete activity that we appeal. “Try
thinking,” we tell such a man, “experiment with it, taking pains
sometimes to have your reasonings consistent with one another, and at
other times deliberately introducing inconsistencies; then see what
you get in the two cases and how the result reached is related to your
purpose in thinking.” We point out that since that purpose is to reach
a settled conclusion, that purpose will be defeated unless the steps of
reasoning are kept consistent with one another. We do not appeal from
the mere consistency of the reasoning process--the intellectual aspect
of the matter--to an absolute self-consistent reality; but we appeal
from the material character of the end to be reached to the type of the
formal procedure necessary to accomplish it.

With all our heart, then, the standard of thinking is absolute
(that is final) within thinking. But what is thinking? The standard
of blacksmithing must be absolute within blacksmithing, but what is
blacksmithing? No prejudice prevents acknowledging that blacksmithing
is one practical activity existing as a distinct and relevant member
of a like system of activities: that it is because men use horses to
transport persons and goods that horses need to be shod. The ultimate
criterion of blacksmithing is producing a good shoe, but the nature
of a good shoe is fixed, not by blacksmithing, but by the activities
in which horses are used. The end is ultimate (absolute) for the
operation, but this very finality is evidence that the operation is not
absolute and self-inclosed, but is related and responsible. Why must
the fact that the end of thinking is ultimate for thought stand on any
different footing?

Let us then, by way of experiment, follow this suggestion. Let us
assume that among real objects in their values and significances, real
oppositions and incompatibilities exist; that these conflicts are both
troublesome in themselves, and the source of all manner of further
difficulties--so much so that they may be suspected of being the source
of all man’s woe, of all encroachment upon and destruction of value,
of good. Suppose that thinking is, not accidentally but essentially,
a way, and the only way that proves adequate, of dealing with these
predicaments--that being “in a hole,” in difficulty, is the fundamental
“predicament” of intelligence. Suppose when effort is made in a brute
way to remove these oppositions and to secure an arrangement of things
which means satisfaction, fulfilment, happiness, that the method of
brute attack, of trying directly to force warrings into peace fails;
suppose then an effort to effect the transformation by an indirect
method--by inquiry into the disordered state of affairs and by framing
views, conceptions, of what the situation would be like were it reduced
to harmonious order. Finally, suppose that upon this basis a plan of
action is worked out, and that this plan, when carried into overt
effect, succeeds infinitely better than the brute method of attack in
bringing about the desired consummation. Suppose again this indirection
of activity is precisely what we mean by thinking. Would it not hold
that harmony is the end and the test of thinking? that observations are
pertinent and ideas correct just in so far as, overtly acted upon, they
succeed in removing the undesirable, the inconsistent.

But, it is said, the very process of thinking makes a certain
assumption regarding the nature of reality, viz., that reality is
self-consistent. This statement puts the end for the beginning. The
assumption is not that “reality” _is_ self-consistent, but that by
thinking it may, for some special purpose, or as respects some
concrete problem, attain greater consistency. Why should the assumption
regarding “reality” be other than that specific realities with which
thought is concerned are _capable of receiving_ harmonization? To say
that thought must assume, in order to go on, that reality already
possesses harmony is to say that thought must begin by contradicting
its own direct data, and by assuming that its concrete aim is vain and
illusory. Why put upon thought the onus of introducing discrepancies
into reality in order just to give itself exercise in the gymnastic
of removing them? The assumption that concrete thinking makes about
“reality” is that things just as they exist may acquire _through
activity, guided by thinking_, a certain character which it is
excellent for them to possess; and may acquire it more liberally and
effectively than by other methods. One might as well say that the
blacksmith could not think to any effect concerning iron, without a
Platonic archetypal horseshoe, laid up in the heavens. His thinking
also makes an assumption about present, given reality, viz., that
this piece of iron, through the exercise of intelligently directed
activity, may be shaped into a satisfactory horseshoe. The assumption
is practical: the assumption that a specific thing may take on in a
specific way a specific needed value. The test, moreover, of this
assumption is practical; it consists in acting upon it to see if it
will do what it pretends it can do, namely, guide activities to the
required result. The assumption about reality is not something in
addition to the idea, which an idea already in existence makes; some
assumption about the possibility of a change in the state of things as
experienced _is_ the idea--and its test or criterion is whether this
possible change can be effected when the idea is acted upon in good
faith.

In any case, how much simpler the case becomes when we stick by the
empirical facts. According to them there is no wholesale discrepancy
of existence and meaning; there is simply a “loosening” of the two
when objects do not fulfil our plans and meet our desires; or when we
project inventions and cannot find immediately the means for their
realization. The “collisions” are neither physical, metaphysical, nor
logical; they are moral and practical. They exist between an aim and
the means of its execution. Consequently the object of thinking is
not to effect some wholesale and “Absolute” reconciliation of meaning
and existence, but to make a specific adjustment of things to our
purposes and of our purposes to things at just the crucial point of
the crisis. Making the utmost concessions to Mr. Bradley’s account
of the discrepancy of meaning and existence in our experience, to
his statement of the relation of this to the function of judgment
(as involving namely an explicit _statement_ at once of the actual
sundering and the ideal union) and to his account of consistency as
the goal and standard, there is still not a detail of the account
that is not met amply and with infinitely more empirical warrant by
the conception that the “collision” in which thinking starts and the
“consistency” in which it terminates are practical and human.


III

This brings us explicitly to the question of truth, “truth” being
confessedly the end and standard of thinking. I confess to being much
at a loss to realize just what the intellectualists conceive to be the
relation of truth to ideas on one side and to “reality” on the other.
My difficulty occurs, I think, because they describe so little in
analytical detail; in writing of truth they seem rather to be under a
strong emotional influence--as if they were victims of an uncritical
pragmatism--which leaves much of their thought to be guessed at. The
implication of their discussions assigns three distinct values to the
term “truth.” On the one hand, truth is something which characterizes
ideas, theories, hypotheses, beliefs, judgments, propositions,
assertions, etc.,--anything whatsoever involving _intellectual_
statement. From this standpoint a criterion of truth means the test
of the worth of the intellectual intent, import, or claim of any
intellectual statement as intellectual. This is an intelligible sense
of the term truth. In the second place, it seems to be assumed that
a certain kind of reality is already, apart from ideas or meanings,
Truth, and that _this_ Truth is the criterion of that lower and more
unworthy kind of truth that may be possessed or aimed at by ideas.
But we do not stop here. The conception that _all_ truth must have a
criterion haunts the intellectualist, so that the reality, which, as
contrasted with ideas, is taken to be The Truth (and the criterion
of _their_ truth) is treated as if it itself had to have support and
warrant from some other Reality, lying back of it, which is _its_
criterion. This, then, gives the third type of truth, _The Absolute
Truth_. (Just why this process should not go on indefinitely is not
clear, but the necessity of infinite regress may be emotionally
prevented by always referring to this last type of truth as Absolute).
Now this scheme may be “true,” but it is not self-explanatory or even
easily apprehensible. In just what sense, truth is (1) that to which
ideas as ideas lay claim and yet is (2) Reality which as reality is
the criterion of truth of ideas, and yet again is (3) a Reality which
completely annuls and transcends all reference to ideas, is not in the
least clear to me: nor, till better informed, shall I believe it to be
clear to any one.

In his more strictly logical discussions, Mr. Bradley sets out from
the notion that truth refers to intellectual statements and positions
as such. But the Truth soon becomes a sort of transcendent essence
on its own account. The identification of reality and truth on page
146 may be a mere casual phrase, but the distinction drawn between
validity and absolute truth (p. 362), and the discussion of Degrees
of Truth and Reality, involve assumptions of an identity of truth and
reality. Truth in this sense turns out to be the criterion for the
truth, the truth, that is, of ideas. But, again (p. 545), a distinction
is made between “Finite Truth,” that is, a view of reality which would
completely satisfy intelligence as such, and “Absolute Truth,” which is
obtained only by _passing beyond intelligence_--only when intelligence
as such is absorbed in some Absolute in which it loses its distinctive
character.

It would advance the state of discussion, I am sure, if there were
more explicit statements regarding the relations of “true idea,”
“truth,” “the criterion of truth” and “reality,” to one another. A
more explicit exposition also of the view that is held concerning the
relation of verification and truth could hardly fail to be of value.
Not infrequently the intellectualist admits that the process of
verification is experimental, consisting in setting on foot various
activities that express the intent of the idea and confirm or refute
it according to the changes effected. This seems to mean that truth
is simply the tested or verified belief as such. But then a curious
reservation is introduced; the experimental process _finds_, it is
said, that an idea is true, while the error of the pragmatist is to
take the process by which truth is _found_ as one by which it is made.
The claim of “making truth” is treated as blasphemy against the very
notion of truth: such are the consequences of venturing to translate
the Latin “verification” into the English “making true.”

If we face the bogie thus called up, it will be found that the horror
is largely sentimental. Suppose we stick to the notion that truth is a
character which belongs to a meaning so far as tested through action
that carries it to successful completion. In this case, to make an idea
true is to modify and transform it until it reaches this successful
outcome: until it initiates a mode of response which in its issue
realizes its claim to be the method of harmonizing the discrepancies of
a given situation. The meaning is remade by constantly acting upon it,
and by introducing into its content such characters as are indicated
by any resulting failures to secure harmony. From this point of view,
verification and truth are two names for the same thing. We call it
“verification” when we regard it as process; when the development of
the idea is strung out and exposed to view in all that makes it true.
We call it “truth” when we take it as product, as process telescoped
and condensed.

Suppose the idea to be an invention, say of the telephone. In this
case, is not the verification of the idea and the construction of
the device which carries out its intent one and the same? In this
case, does the truth of the idea mean anything else than that the
issue proves the idea can be carried into effect? There are certain
intellectualists who are not of the absolutist type; who do not believe
that all of men’s aims, designs, projects, that have to do with action,
whether industrial, social, or moral in scope, have been from all
eternity registered as already accomplished in reality. How do such
persons dispose of this problem of the truth of practical ideas?

Is not the truth of _such_ ideas an affair of _making_ them true by
constructing, through appropriate behavior, a condition that satisfies
the requirements of the case? If, in this case, truth means the
effective capacity of the idea “to make good,” what is there in the
logic of the case to forbid the application of analogous considerations
to any idea?

I hear a noise in the street. It suggests as its meaning a street-car.
To test this idea I go to the window and through listening and
looking intently--the listening and the looking being modes of
behavior--organize into a single situation elements of existence and
meaning which were previously disconnected. In this way an idea is made
true; that which was a proposal or hypothesis is no longer merely a
propounding or a guess. If I had not reacted in a way appropriate to
the idea it would have remained a mere idea; at most a candidate for
truth that, unless acted upon upon the spot, would always have remained
a theory. Now in such a case--where the end to be accomplished is the
discovery of a certain order of facts--would the intellectualist claim
that apart from the forming and entertaining of some interpretation,
the category of truth has either existence or meaning? Will he claim
that without an original practical uneasiness introducing a practical
aim of inquiry there must have been, whether or no, an idea? Must
the world for some purely intellectual reason be intellectually
reduplicated? Could not that occurrence which I now identify as a noisy
street-car have retained, so far as pure intelligence is concerned,
its unidentified status of being mere physical alteration in a vast
unidentified complex of matter-in-motion? Was there any _intellectual_
necessity that compelled the event to arouse just this judgment,
that it meant a street-car? Was there any physical or metaphysical
necessity? Was there any necessity save a need of characterizing
it for some purpose of our own? And why should we be mealy-mouthed
about calling this need practical? If the necessity which led to the
formation and development of an intellectual judgment was purely
objective (whether physical or metaphysical) why should not the thing
have also to be characterized in countless millions of other ways; for
example, as to its distance from some crater in the moon, or its effect
upon the circulation of my blood, or upon my irascible neighbor’s
temper, or bearing upon the Monroe Doctrine? In short, do not
intellectual positions and statements mean new and significant events
in the treatment of things?

It is perhaps dangerous to attempt to follow the inner workings of
the processes by which truth is first identified with some superior
type of Reality, and then this Truth is taken as the criterion of the
truth of ideas; while all the time it is held that truth is something
already possessed by ideas as purely intellectual. But there seems
to be some ground for believing that this identification is due to a
twofold confusion, one having to do with ideas, and the other with
things. As to the first point: After an idea is made true, we naturally
say, in retrospect, “it _was_ true all the time.” Now this truism is
quite innocuous as a truism, being just a restatement of the fact that
the idea has, as matter of fact, worked successfully. But it may be
regarded not as a truism but as furnishing some additional knowledge;
as if it were, indeed, the dawning of a revelation regarding truth.
Then it is said that the idea worked or was verified because it was
already inherently, just as idea, the truth; the pragmatist, so it
is said, making the error of supposing that it is true because it
works. If one remembers that what the experimentalist means is that
the effective working of an idea and its truth are one and the same
thing--this working being neither the cause nor the evidence of truth
but its nature--it is hard to see the point of this statement. A
man under peculiarly precarious circumstances has been rescued from
drowning. A by-stander remarks that now he is a saved man. “Yes,”
replies some one, “but he was a saved man all the time, and the process
of rescuing, while it gives evidence of that fact, does not constitute
it.” Now even such a statement as pure tautology, as characterizing the
entire process in terms of its issue, is objectionable only in the fact
that, like all tautology, it seems to say something but does not. But
if it be regarded as revealing the earlier condition of affairs, apart
from the active process by which it was carried to a happy conclusion,
such a statement would be monstrously false; and would declare its
falsity in the fact that, if acted upon, the man would have been left
to drown. In like fashion, to say, _after the event_, that a given
idea was true all the time, is to lose sight of what makes an idea an
idea, its hypothetical character; and thereby deliberately to transform
it into brute dogma--something to which no canon of verification can
ever be applied. The intellectualist almost always treats the pragmatic
account as if it were, from the standpoint of the pragmatist as well as
from his own, a denial of the existence of truth, while it is nothing
but a statement of its nature. When the intellectualist realizes this,
he will, I hope, ask himself: What, then, on the pragmatic basis is
meant by the proposition that an idea is true all the time? If the
statement that an idea was true all the time has no meaning except that
the idea was one which as matter of fact succeeded through action in
achieving its intent, mere reiteration that the idea was true all the
time or it could not have succeeded, does not take us far.[24]

On the side of things, _reality_ is identified with truth; then on the
principle that two things that are equal to the same thing are equal
to each other, truth as idea and truth as reality are taken to be one
and the same thing. Wherever there is an improved or tested idea, an
idea which has made good, there is a concrete existence in the way of a
completed or harmonized situation. The same activity which proves the
idea constructs an inherently satisfied situation out of an inherently
dissentient one,--for it is precisely the capacity of the idea as an
aim and method of action to determine such transformation that is the
criterion of its truth. Now unless all the elements in the situation
are held steadily in view, the specific way in which the harmonized
reality affords the criterion of truth (namely, through its function of
being the last term of a process of active determination) is lost from
sight; and the achieved existence in its merely existent character,
apart from its practical or fulfilment character, is treated as The
Truth. But when the reality is thus separated from the process by which
it is achieved, when it is taken just as given, it is neither truth
nor a criterion of truth. It is a state of facts like any other. The
achieved telephone is a criterion of the validity of a certain prior
idea in so far as it is the fulfilment of activities that embody the
nature of that idea, but just as telephone, as a machine actually in
existence, it is no more truth nor criterion of truth than is a crack
in the wall or a cobble-stone on the street.

The intervening term that mediates and completes the confusion of truth
with ideas on one hand and “reality” on the other, is, I think, the
fact that ideas after they have been tested in action are employed
in the development and grounding of further beliefs. There are cases
in which an idea ceases to exist as idea as soon as it is made true;
this is so as matter of fact and it is impossible to conceive any
reason why it should not be so in point of theory. Such is the case, I
take it, with a large part--possibly the major portion--of the ideas
that mediate the smaller and transient crises of daily practice.
I cannot imagine the situation in which the truth to which I have
referred above--the verification of a certain idea about a certain
noise--would ever function again as truth--save as I have given it a
function in this paper by using it as a corroboration of a certain
theory. Such ideas mostly cease, giving way to a matter-of-fact status:
say, the perception of the noisy street-car. One at the time may say
“My idea regarding that noise was a true idea”; or one may not even
go so far as that, he may just stop with the eventual perception.
But the tested idea need not ever recur as a factor of proof in any
other problem. Such, however, is conspicuously not the case with
our scientific ideas. In its first value, the idea or hypothesis of
gravitation entertained by Newton, stood, when verified, on exactly
the same level as the hypothesis regarding the noise in the street.
Theoretically, that truth might have been so isolated that its truth
character would disappear from thought as soon as a certain factual
condition was ascertained. But practically quite the opposite has
happened. The idea operates in many other inquiries, and operates no
longer as mere idea, but as _proved_ idea. Such truths get an “eternal”
status;--one irrespective of application just now and here, because
there are so many nows and heres in which they are useful. Just as to
say an idea was true all the time is a way of saying _in retrospect_
that it has come out in a certain fashion, so to say that an idea is
“eternally true” is to indicate _prospective_ modes of application
which are indefinitely anticipated. Its meaning, therefore, is
strictly pragmatic. It does not indicate a property inherent in the
idea as intellectualized existence, but denotes a property of use and
employment. Always at hand when needed is a good enough eternal for
reasonably minded persons.


IV

I have gone from the very general considerations which occupied us in
the earlier portions of this article to matters which relatively at
least are specific. I conclude with a summary in the hope that it may
bind together the earlier and the later parts of this paper.

1. The condition which antecedes and provokes any particular exercise
of reflective knowing is always one of discrepancy, struggle,
“collision.” This condition is practical, for it involves the habits
and interests of the organism, an agent. This does not mean that the
struggle is merely personal, or subjective, or psychological. The
agent or individual is one factor in the situation--not the situation
something subsisting in the individual. The individual has to be
identified in the situation, before any situation can be referred--as
in psychology--to the individual. But the discrepancy calls out and
controls reflective knowing only as the fortunes of an agent are
implicated in the crisis. Certain elements stand out as obstacles,
as interferences, as deficiencies--in short as unsatisfactory and as
requiring something for their completion. Other elements stand out
as wanted--as required, as a satisfaction which does not exist. This
clash (an accompaniment of all desire) between the given and the
wanted, between the present and the absent, is at once the root and
the type of that peculiar paradoxical relation between existence and
meaning which Bradley insists upon as the essence of judgment. It
is not irrational in the sense that we are dealing with appearance
wholesale, but it is non-rational--an evidence that we are dealing with
a practical affair.

2. The intellectual or reflective and logical is a _statement_ of
this conflict: an attempt to describe and define it. It is, as it
were, the practical clash held off at arm’s length for inspection
and investigation. In this way brute blind reaction against the
unsatisfactoriness of the situation is suspended. Action is turned
into the channel of observing, of inferring, of reasoning, or defining
means and end. It is this change in the quality of activity, from
directly overt, to indirect, or inquiring with view to stating, that
constitutes the _specific_ nature of reflective practice to which Mr.
Bradley calls attention. The discovery of the nature of the conflict
supplies materials for the fact or existence side of the judgement.
The conception or projection of the object in which the conflict
would be terminated furnishes material for the meaning side of the
judgment. It is ideal because anticipatory, just as the fact side
is existential, because reminiscent or recording. Hence the two are
necessarily both distinguished from and yet referred to each other:
only through location of a problem can a solution be conceived; only
in reference to the intent of finding a solution can the elements of
a problem be selected and interpreted. In origin and in destiny, this
correlative determination of existence and meaning is tentative and
experimental. The aim of the subject of the judgment is not to include
all possible reality, but to select those elements of a reality that
are useful in locating the source and nature of the difficulty in
hand. The aim of the predicate is not to bunch all possible meaning
and refer it in one final act indiscriminately to all existence, but
to state the standpoint and method through which the difficulty of the
particular situation may most effectively be dealt with. The selection
of what is relevant to the characterization of the problem and the
projection of the method of dealing with it are theoretic, hypothetic,
intellectual:--that is, they are tentative ways of viewing the matter
for the sake of guiding, economizing, and freeing the activities
through which it may _really_ be dealt with.

3. The criterion of the worth of the idea is thus the capacity of
the idea (as a definition of the end or outcome in terms of what is
likely to be serviceable as a method) to operate in fulfilling the
object for the sake of which it was projected. Capacity of operation
in this fashion is the test, measure, or criterion of truth. Hence the
criterion is practical in the most overt sense of that term. We may,
if we choose, regard the object in which the idea terminates through
its use in guiding action, as the criterion; but if we so choose, it is
at our peril that we forget that this object serves as criterion in its
capacity of fulfilment and not as sheer objective existence.

4. Difficulties overlap; problems recur which resemble each other
in the kind of treatment they demand for solution. Various modes of
activity with their respective ends, going on at some time more or
less independently, get organized into single comprehensive systems of
behavior. The solution of one problem is found to create difficulties
elsewhere; or the truth that is made in the solution of one problem
is found to afford an effective method of dealing with questions
arising apparently from unallied sources. Thus certain tested ideas
in performing a constant or recurrent function secure a certain
permanent status. The prospective use of such truths, the satisfaction
that we anticipate in their employ, the assurance of control that we
feel in their possession, becomes relatively much more important than
the circumstances under which they were first made true. In becoming
permanent resources, such tested ideas get a generalized energy of
position. They are truths in general, truths “in themselves” or in the
abstract, truths to which positive value is assigned on their own
account. Such truths are the “eternal truths” of current discussion.
They naturally and properly add to their intellectual and to their
practical worth a certain esthetic quality. They are interesting to
contemplate, and their contemplation arouses emotions of admiration
and reverence. To make these emotions the basis of assigning peculiar
inherent sanctity to them apart from their warrant in use, is simply
to give way to that mood which in primitive man is the cause of
attributing magical efficacy to physical things. Esthetically such
truths are more than instrumentalities. But to ignore both the
instrumental and the esthetic aspect, and to ascribe values due to an
instrumental and esthetic character to some interior and _a priori_
constitution of truth is to make fetishes of them.

We may not exaggerate the permanence and stability of such truths with
respect to their recurring and prospective use. It is only relatively
that they are unchanging. When applied to new cases, used as resources
for coping with new difficulties, the oldest of truths are to some
extent remade. Indeed it is only through such application and such
remaking that truths retain their freshness and vitality. Otherwise
they are relegated to faint reminiscences of an antique tradition. Even
the truth that two and two make four has gained a new meaning, has had
its truth in some degree remade, in the development of the modern
theory of number. If we put ourselves in the attitude of a scientific
inquirer in asking what is the meaning of truth _per se_, there spring
up before us those ideas which are actively employed in the mastery
of new fields, in the organization of new materials. This is the
essential difference between truth and dogma; between the living and
the dead and decaying. Above all, it is in the region of moral truth
that this perception stands out. Moral truths that are not recreated in
application to the urgencies of the passing hour, no matter how true
in the place and time of their origin, are pernicious and misleading,
_i.e._, false. And it is perhaps through emphasizing this fact,
embodied in one form or another in every system of morals and in every
religion of moral import, that one most readily realizes the character
of truth.




A SHORT CATECHISM CONCERNING TRUTH[25]


_Pupil._ I am desirous, respected teacher, of forming an independent
judgment concerning the novel theory of truth that you are said to
profess. My eagerness is whetted because the theory as expounded
to me by my old teacher, Professor Purus Intellectus, so obviously
contravenes common sense, science, and philosophy that I do not
understand how it can be advanced in good faith by any reasonable man.

_Teacher._ As you are already somewhat acquainted with the theory (or
at least with what it purports to be), perhaps if you will set forth
in order your objections, it will appear that the theory that you are
acquainted with is not advanced by any reasonable persons, and that by
understanding the theory as it is you will also be led to embrace it.

_Pupil: Objection One._ Pragmatism makes truth a subjective affair,
namely the satisfaction afforded individuals by ideas, while everybody
knows that the truth of ideas depends upon their relation to things.

_Teacher: Reply._ If I were to reply that I hold to existences
independent of ideas, existences prior to, synchronous with, and
subsequent to ideas, that might seem to you to express only my personal
opinion and to have no logical connection with pragmatism. So I beg
to remind you that, according to pragmatism, ideas (judgments and
reasonings being included for convenience in this term) are attitudes
of response taken toward extra-ideal, extra-mental things. Instinct and
habit express, for instance, modes of response, but modes inadequate
for a progressive being, or for adaptation to an environment presenting
novel and unmastered features. Under such conditions, ideas are
their surrogates. The origin of an idea is thus in some empirical,
extra-mental situation which provokes ideas as modes of response, while
their meaning is found in the modifications--the “differences”--they
make in this extra-mental situation. Their validity is in turn measured
by their capacity to effect the transformation they intend. Origin,
content, and value--all alike are extra-ideational. The satisfaction
upon which the pragmatist dwells is just the better adjustment of
living beings to their environment effected by transformations of the
environment through forming and applying ideas.

_Pupil: Objection Two._ But, as I understand it and as you have
yourself confessed in your language, these external things, while they
may be external to the particular idea in question, are _empirical_;
they are just other experiences and so mental after all. You hold, I
have been informed, that truth is an _experienced_ relation, instead
of a relation between experience and what transcends it; why then be
mealy-mouthed (pardon my eagerness if it leads me astray) in admitting
that the whole business is intra-mental?

_Teacher: Reply._ Your objection combines and confuses two things.
To disentangle them is to answer the objection. (1) The notion of
transcendence has a double meaning; first, it denotes that which lies
inherently and essentially beyond experience. It is interesting to note
that the opponents of pragmatism have been forced by the exigencies
of their hostility to resuscitate a doctrine supposedly dead: the
doctrine of unexperienceable, unknowable “Things in Themselves.” And
as if this were not enough, they identify Truth with relationship to
this unknowable. Thereby in behalf of the notion of Truth in general,
they land in scepticism with reference to the possibility of any truth
in particular. The pragmatist _is_ bound to deny _such_ transcendence.
(2) That he is thereby landed in pure subjectivism or the reduction of
every existence to the purely mental, follows only if experience means
only mental states. The critic appears to hold the Humian doctrine
that experience is made up of states of mind, of sensations and
ideas. It is then for _him_ to decide how, on _his_ basis, he escapes
subjective idealism, or “mentalism.” The pragmatist starts from a
much more commonplace notion of experience, that of the plain man who
never dreams that to experience a thing is first to destroy the thing
and then to substitute a mental state for it. More particularly, the
pragmatist has insisted that experience is a matter of functions and
habits, of active adjustments and re-adjustments, of co-ordinations
and activities, rather than of states of consciousness. To criticise
the pragmatist by reading into him exactly the notion of experience
that he denies and replaces, may be psychological and unregenerately
“pragmatic,” but it is hardly “intellectual.”

_Pupil: Objection Three._ You remind me, curiously enough, of a
contention of my old instructor to the effect that the pragmatist,
when criticised, always shifts his ground. To avoid solipsism and
subjectivism, he falls back on things independent of ideas, adducing
them in order to pass upon the truth or falsity of the latter. But
thereby he only covertly recognizes the intellectualistic standard.
Thus he swings unevenly between a denial of science and a clamorous
reiteration, in new phraseology, of what all philosophers hold.

_Teacher: Reply._ Your words have indeed a familiar sound. Apparently,
the average intellectualist has got so accustomed to taking truth as a
Relation at Large, without specification or analysis, that any attempt
at a concrete statement of just what the relationship is appears to
be a denial of the relation itself; in which case, he interprets an
occasional reminder from the pragmatist that the latter is, after all,
attempting to specify the nature of the relation, to be a surrender of
the pragmatist’s own case, since it admits after all that there is some
relation!

However that may be, the pragmatist holds that the relation in
question is one of correspondence between existence and thought;
but he holds that correspondence instead of being an ultimate and
unanalyzable mystery, to be defined by iteration, is precisely a
matter of cor-respondence in its plain, familiar sense. A condition of
dubious and conflicting tendencies calls out thinking as a method of
handling it. This condition produces its own appropriate consequences,
bearing its own fruits of weal and woe. The thoughts, the estimates,
intents, and projects it calls out, just because they are attitudes
of response and of attempted adjustment (_not_ mere “states of
consciousness”), produce their effects also. The kind of interlocking,
of interadjustment that then occurs between these two sorts of
consequences constitutes the correspondence that makes truth, just as
failure to respond to each other, to work together, constitutes mistake
and error--mishandling and wandering. This account may, of course, be
wrong--may involve a maladjustment of consequences--but the error in
the account, if it exists, must be specific and empirical, and cannot
be located by general epistemological accusations.

_Pupil: Objection Four._ Well, even admitting this version of
pragmatism, you cannot deny it still contravenes common sense; for,
according to you, the correspondence that constitutes truth does not
exist till _after_ ideas have worked, while common sense perceives and
knows that it is the antecedent agreement of the ideas with reality
that enables them to work. If you make the truth of the existence of a
Carboniferous age, or the landing of Columbus in 1492, depend upon a
future working of an idea about them, you commit yourself to the most
fantastic of philosophies.

_Teacher: Reply._ May I recall to your attention the accusation of
“shifting ground” when hard pressed? The intellectualist began, if I
remember correctly, with conceiving truth as a relation of thought
and existence; has he not, in your last objection, substituted for
this conception an identification of the bare existence or event with
truth? Which does he mean? How will he have it? The existence of the
Carboniferous age, the discovery of America by Columbus are not
truths; they are events. Some conviction, some belief, some judgment
with reference to them is necessary to introduce the category of truth
and falsity. And since the conviction, the judgment, is as matter of
fact subsequent to the event, how can its truth consist in the kind of
blank, wholesale relationship the intellectualist contends for? How
can the present belief jump out of its present skin, dive into the
past, and land upon just the one event (that _as_ past is gone forever)
which, by definition, constitutes its truth? I do not wonder the
intellectualist has much to say about “transcendence” when he comes to
dealing with the truth of judgments about the past; but why does he not
tell us how we manage to know when one thought lands straight on the
devoted head of something past and gone, while another thought comes
down on the wrong thing in the past?

_Pupil._ Well, of course, knowledge of the past is very mysterious, but
how is the pragmatist any better off?

_Teacher._ The reply to that may be inferred from what has already been
said. The past event has left effects, consequences, that are present
and that will continue in the future. Our belief about it, if genuine,
must also modify action in _some_ way and so have objective effects. If
these two sets of effects interlock harmoniously, then the judgment is
true. If perchance the past event had no discoverable consequences or
our thought of it can work out to no assignable difference anywhere,
then there is no possibility of genuine judgment.

_Pupil._ You have, perhaps, anticipated my next objection, which was
that upon the pragmatic theory (by which truth is constituted by future
consequences) there are no truths about what is past and gone, since
in respect to that ideas can make no difference. For, I suppose, you
would say that the difference made is in the effects that continue,
since ideas may work out to facilitate or to confuse our relations to
these effects. Nevertheless, I am not quite satisfied. For when I say
it is true that it rained yesterday, surely the object of my judgment
is something past, not future, while pragmatism makes all objects of
judgment future.

_Teacher: Reply._ You confuse the content of a judgment with
the _reference_ of that content. The content of any idea about
yesterday’s rain certainly involves past time, but the distinctive or
characteristic aim of judgment is none the less to give this content a
future reference and function.

_Pupil: Objection Five._ But your argument requires an absurd
identification of truth and verification. To verify ideas is to find
out that they were already true; or possessed of the truth relation
prior to its discovery in verification. But the pragmatist holds that
the act of finding out that ideas are true creates the thing that is
found. In short, you confuse the psychology of finding out with the
reality found out.

_Teacher: Reply._ Many intellectualists have now gone so far as
to admit that _verification_ is the testing of a judgment by the
consequence it imports, the difference it makes--its working. But
they still deny any organic connection between the “antecedent” truth
property of ideas and the verification (or “making true”) process.
Surely they admit either too much or too little. (i) If an idea
about a past event is already true because of some mysterious static
correspondence that it possesses to that past event, how in the world
can its truth be _proved_ by the _future consequences_ of that idea?
Why is it that the intellectualist has not produced any positive
theory about the relation of verification to his notion of truth?
(ii) Moreover, if verification consists in the experimental working
out of a belief, the intellectualist thereby admits that his _own_
theory of truth can be _known_ to be true only as it is verified by
its workings. But if the theory that truth is a ready-made static
property of judgments _is_ true, how in the world _can_ it be verified
by making any specific differences in the course of events? Everywhere
we have to proceed _as if_ the pragmatic theory were the right one.
(iii) If he admits that the pragmatic theory of verification is true,
what meaning remains to the statement that the idea had the truth
property in advance? Why, simply that it had the property of _ability
to work_--an ability revealed by its actual working. How can a given
fact be an objection to the pragmatic theory when that fact has a
definitely assignable meaning on the pragmatic theory, while upon
the anti-pragmatic theory it just has to be accepted as an ultimate,
unanalyzable fact?

As to your remark about verification being merely psychological, I have
something to say. Colleagues of mine are steadily at work in various
laboratories on various researches, forming hypotheses, experimenting,
testing, corroborating, refuting, modifying ideas. One of them, for
example, recently put an immense pendulum in place in order to repeat
and test Foucault’s experiment with reference to the earth’s rotation.
Do you regard such verification processes as merely psychological?

_Pupil._ I don’t know. Why do you ask?

_Teacher._ Because if the objector means that such experimental
provings are _merely_ psychological, he has of course relegated to the
merely psychological (wherever that may be) all the technique of all
the physical sciences--a rather high price to pay for the confutation
of the pragmatist. The intellectualist is thus in the dilemma either
of conceding to the pragmatist the whole sphere of concrete scientific
logic or else of himself regarding all science as merely subjective?
Which horn does he choose?

_Pupil: Objection Six._ I noticed a moment ago that you spoke of the
pragmatic theory of truth being true. Surely the pragmatist does not
live up to his reputation of having a sense of humor when he claims
assent to his theory on the ground that it is true. What is this but to
admit intellectualism?

_Teacher: Reply._ My son, we are evidently nearing the end. Naturally,
the pragmatist claims his theory to be true in the pragmatic sense of
truth: it works, it clears up difficulties, removes obscurities, puts
individuals into more experimental, less dogmatic, and less arbitrarily
sceptical relations to life; aligns philosophic with scientific
method; does away with self-made problems of epistemology; clarifies
and reorganizes logical theory, etc. He is quite content to have the
truth of his theory consist in its working in these various ways, and
to leave to the intellectualist the proud possession of a static,
unanalyzable, unverifiable, unworking property.

_Pupil: Objection Seven._ Nevertheless, the pragmatist is always
appealing to the judgments of others to corroborate his own judgment.
Surely this admits the principle of a judgment that is correct, true,
_in se_.

_Teacher: Reply._ The pragmatist says that judgment _is_ pragmatic,
_i.e._, originated under conditions of need for a survey and statement,
and tested by efficiency in meeting this need. And then you think
you have refuted him by saying that any appeal to judgment is
intellectualistic! Such begging of the question convinces me that the
radical difficulty of the intellectualist is that he conceives of the
pragmatist as beginning with a theory of truth, when in reality the
latter begins with a theory about judgments and meanings of which the
theory of truth is a corollary.

_Pupil: Objection Eight._ Nevertheless, you are endeavoring to convert
your opponent to a certain theory. Surely that is an intellectual
undertaking, and in theory (at least) the theoretical criterion, as Mr.
Bradley has well said, must be supreme.

_Teacher: Reply._ A little reflection will convince you that you are
going around in the same old circle. Since men have to act together,
since the individual subsists in social bonds and activities, to
convert another to a certain way of looking at things is to make social
ties and functions better adapted, more prosperous in their workings.
Only if the pragmatist held the _intellectualist’s_ position, would
he appeal to other than what is ultimately a practical need and a
practical criterion in endeavoring to convert others.

_Pupil: Objection Nine._ Still the pragmatic criterion, being
satisfactory working, is purely personal and subjective. Whatever works
so as to please me is true. Either this is your result (in which case
your reference to social relations only denotes at bottom a _number_ of
purely subjectivistic satisfactions) or else you unconsciously assume
an intellectual department of our nature that has to be satisfied; and
whose satisfaction is truth. Thereby you admit the intellectualistic
criterion.

_Teacher: Reply._ We seem to have got back to our starting-point, the
nature of satisfaction. The intellectualist seems to think that because
the pragmatist insists upon the factor of human want, purpose, and
realization in the making and testing of judgments, the impersonal
factor is therefore denied. But what the pragmatist does is to insist
that the human factor must work itself out in _co-operation_ with
the environmental factor, and that their co-adaptation _is_ both
“correspondence” and “satisfaction.” As long as the human factor
is ignored and denied, or is regarded as _merely_ psychological
(whatever, once more, that means), this human factor will assert
itself in irresponsible ways. So long as, particularly in philosophy,
a flagrantly unchastened pragmatism reigns, we shall find, as at
present, the most ambitious intellectualistic systems accepted simply
because of the personal comfort they yield those who contrive and
accept them. Once recognize the human factor, and pragmatism is at
hand to insist that the believer must accept the full consequences of
his beliefs, and that his beliefs must be tried out, through acting
upon them, to discover what is their meaning or consequence. Till so
tested, he insists that beliefs, no matter how noble and seemingly
edifying, are dogmas, not truths. Till the testing has been worked out
very completely and patiently, he holds his beliefs as but provisional,
as working hypotheses, as methods:--and he recognizes the probability
that, as additional modes of testing develop, more and more so-called
truths will be relegated to the category of working hypotheses--till
the dogmatic mind is crowded out and starved out. At present, the
ignoring by philosophers of the part played by personal education,
temperament, and preference in their philosophies is the chief source
of pretentiousness and insincerity in their systems, and is the ground
of the popular disregard for them.

_Pupil._ What you say calls to mind something of Chesterton’s that I
read recently: “I agree with the pragmatists that apparent objective
truth is not the whole matter; that there is an authoritative need to
believe the things that are necessary to the human mind. But I say
that one of those necessities precisely is a belief in objective truth.
Pragmatism is a matter of human needs and one of the first of human
needs is to be something more than a pragmatist.” You would say, if I
understand you aright, that to fall back upon a supposed necessity of
the “human mind” to believe in certain absolute truths, is to evade a
proper demand for testing the human mind and all its works.

_Teacher._ My son, I am glad to leave the last word with you. This
_enfant terrible_ of intellectualism has revealed that the chief
objection of absolutists to the pragmatic doctrine of the personal (or
“subjective”) factor in belief is that the pragmatist has spilled the
personal milk in the absolutist’s cocoanut.




BELIEFS AND EXISTENCES[26]


I

Beliefs look both ways, towards persons and toward things. They are
the original Mr. Facing-both-ways. They form or judge--justify or
condemn--the agents who entertain them and who insist upon them. They
are of things whose immediate meanings form their content. To believe
is to ascribe value, impute meaning, assign import. The collection and
interaction of these appraisals and assessments is the world of the
common man,--that is, of man as an individual and not as a professional
being or class specimen. Thus things are characters, not mere entities;
they behave and respond and provoke. In the behavior that exemplifies
and tests their character, they help and hinder; disturb and pacify;
resist and comply; are dismal and mirthful, orderly and deformed, queer
and commonplace; they agree and disagree; are better and worse.

Thus the human world, whether or no it have core and axis, has presence
and transfiguration. It means here and now, not in some transcendent
sphere. It moves, of itself, to varied incremental meaning, not to some
far off event, whether divine or diabolic. Such movement constitutes
conduct, for conduct is the working out of the commitments of belief.
That believed better is held to, asserted, affirmed, acted upon. The
moments of its crucial fulfilment are the natural “transcendentals”;
the decisive, the critical, standards of further estimation, selection,
and rejection. That believed worse is fled, resisted, transformed into
an instrument for the better. Characters, in being condensations of
belief, are thus at once the reminders and the prognostications of
weal and woe; they concrete and they regulate the terms of effective
apprehension and appropriation of things. This general regulative
function is what we mean in calling them characters, forms.

For beliefs, made in the course of existence, reciprocate by making
existence still farther, by developing it. Beliefs are not made
_by_ existence in a mechanical or logical or psychological sense.
“Reality” naturally instigates belief. It appraises itself and
through this self-appraisal manages its affairs. As things are
surcharged valuations, so “consciousness” means ways of believing and
disbelieving. It is interpretation; not merely existence aware of
itself as fact, but existence discerning, judging itself, approving and
disapproving.

This double outlook and connection of belief, its implication, on one
side, with beings who suffer and endeavor, and, its complication on
the other, with the meanings and worths of things, is its glory or
its unpardonable sin. We cannot keep connection on one side and throw
it away on the other. We cannot preserve significance and decline the
personal attitude in which it is inscribed and operative, any more than
we can succeed in making things “states” of a “consciousness” whose
business is to be an interpretation of things. Beliefs are personal
affairs, and personal affairs are adventures, and adventures are, if
you please, shady. But equally discredited, then, is the universe of
meanings. For the world has meaning as somebody’s, somebody’s at a
juncture, taken for better or worse, and you shall not have completed
your metaphysics till you have told whose world is meant and how and
what for--in what bias and to what effect. Here is a cake that is had
only by eating it, just as there is digestion only _for_ life as well
as _by_ life.

So far the standpoint of the common man. But the professional man,
the philosopher, has been largely occupied in a systematic effort
to discredit the standpoint of the common man, that is, to disable
belief as an ultimately valid principle. Philosophy is shocked at
the frank, almost brutal, evocation of beliefs by and in natural
existence, like witches out of a desert heath--at a mode of production
which is neither logical, nor physical, nor psychological, but just
natural, empirical. For modern philosophy is, as every college senior
recites, epistemology; and epistemology, as perhaps our books and
lectures sometimes forget to tell the senior, has absorbed Stoic dogma.
Passionless imperturbability, absolute detachment, complete subjection
to a ready-made and finished reality--physical it may be, mental it
may be, logical it may be--is its professed ideal. Forswearing the
reality of affection, and the gallantry of adventure, the genuineness
of the incomplete, the tentative, it has taken an oath of allegiance to
Reality, objective, universal, complete; made perhaps of atoms, perhaps
of sensations, perhaps of logical meanings. This ready-made reality,
already including everything, must of course swallow and absorb
belief, must produce it psychologically, mechanically, or logically,
according to its own nature; must in any case, instead of acquiring
aid and support from belief, resolve it into one of its own preordained
creatures, making a desert and calling it harmony, unity, totality.[27]

Philosophy has dreamed the dream of a knowledge which is other than
the propitious outgrowth of beliefs that shall develop aforetime their
ulterior implications in order to recast them, to rectify their errors,
cultivate their waste places, heal their diseases, fortify their
feeblenesses:--the dream of a knowledge that has to do with objects
having no nature save to be known.

Not that their philosophers have admitted the concrete realizability
of their scheme. On the contrary, the assertion of the absolute
“Reality” of what is empirically unrealizable is a part of the scheme;
the ideal of a universe of pure, cognitional objects, fixed elements
in fixed relations. Sensationalist and idealist, positivist and
transcendentalist, materialist and spiritualist, defining this object
in as many differing ways as they have different conceptions of the
ideal and method of knowledge, are at one in their devotion to an
identification of Reality with something that connects monopolistically
with passionless knowledge, belief purged of all personal reference,
origin, and outlook.[28]

What is to be said of this attempt to sever the cord which naturally
binds together personal attitudes and the meaning of things? This much
at least: the effort to extract meanings, values, from the beliefs that
ascribe them, and to give the former absolute metaphysical validity
while the latter are sent to wander as scapegoats in the wilderness
of mere phenomena, is an attempt, which, as long as “our interest’s
on the dangerous edge of things,” will attract an admiring, even if
suspicious, audience. Moreover, we may admit that the attempt to
catch the universe of immediate experience, of action and passion,
coming and going, to damn it in its present body in order expressly
to glorify its spirit to all eternity, to validate the meaning of
beliefs by discrediting their natural existence, to attribute absolute
worth to the intent of human convictions just because of the absolute
worthlessness of their content--that the performance of this feat
of virtuosity has developed philosophy to its present wondrous, if
formidable, technique.

But can we claim more than a _succès d’estime_? Consider again the
nature of the effort. The world of immediate meanings, of the world
empirically sustained in beliefs, is to be sorted out into two
portions, metaphysically discontinuous, one of which shall alone be
good and true “Reality,” the fit material of passionless, beliefless
knowledge; while the other part, that which is excluded, shall be
referred exclusively to belief and treated as mere appearance,
purely subjective, impressions or effects in consciousness, or as
that ludicrously abject modern discovery--an epiphenomenon. And this
division into the real and the unreal is accomplished by the very
individual whom his own “absolute” results reduce to phenomenality,
in terms of the very immediate experience which is infected with
worthlessness, and on the basis of preference, of selection that are
declared to be unreal! Can the thing be done?

Anyway, the snubbed and excluded factor may always reassert itself.
The very pushing it out of “Reality” may but add to its potential
energy, and invoke a more violent recoil. When affections and
aversions, with the beliefs in which they record themselves and the
efforts they exact, are reduced to epiphenomena, dancing an idle
attendance upon a reality complete without them, to which they vainly
strive to accommodate themselves by mirroring, then may the emotions
flagrantly burst forth with the claim that, as a friend of mine puts
it, reason is _only_ a fig leaf for _their_ nakedness. When one
man says that need, uncertainty, choice, novelty, and strife have
no place in Reality, which is made up wholly of established things
behaving by foregone rules, then may another man be provoked to reply
that all such fixities, whether named atoms or God, whether they be
fixtures of a sensational, a positivistic, or an idealistic system,
have existence and import only in the problems, needs, struggles, and
instrumentalities of conscious agents and patients. For home rule may
be found in the unwritten efficacious constitution of experience.

That contemporaneously we are in the presence of such a reaction is
apparent. Let us, in pursuit of our topic, inquire how it came about
and why it takes the form that it takes. This consideration may not
only occupy the hour, but may help diagram some future parallelogram
of forces. The account calls for some sketching (1) of the historical
tendencies which have shaped the situation in which a Stoic theory of
knowledge claims metaphysical monopoly, and (2) of the tendencies that
have furnished the despised principle of belief opportunity and means
of reassertion.


II

Imagination readily travels to a period when a gospel of intense,
and, one may say, deliberate passionate disturbance appeared to be
conquering the Stoic ideal of passionless reason; when the demand
for individual assertion by faith against the established, embodied
objective order was seemingly subduing the idea of the total
subordination of the individual to the universal. By what course
of events came about the dramatic reversal, in which an ethically
conquered Stoicism became the conqueror, epistemologically, of
Christianity?

How are our imaginations haunted by the idea of what might have
happened if Christianity had found ready to its hand intellectual
formulations corresponding to its practical proclamations!

That the ultimate principle of conduct is affectional and volitional;
that God is love; that access to the principle is by faith, a personal
attitude; that belief, surpassing logical basis and warrant, works
out through its own operation its own fulfilling evidence: such was
the implied moral metaphysic of Christianity. But this implication
needed to become a theory, a theology, a formulation; and in this
need, it found no recourse save to philosophies that had identified
true existence with the proper object of logical reason. For, in Greek
thought, after the valuable meanings, the meanings of industry and art
that appealed to sustained and serious choice, had given birth and
status to reflective reason, reason denied its ancestry of organized
endeavor, and proclaimed itself in its function of self-conscious
logical thought to be the author and warrant of all genuine things.
Yet how nearly Christianity had found prepared for it the needed means
of its own intellectual statement! We recall Aristotle’s account
of moral knowing, and his definition of man. Man as man, he tells
us, is a principle that may be termed either desiring thought or
thinking desire. Not as pure intelligence does _man_ know, but as an
organization of desires effected through reflection upon their own
conditions and consequences. What if Aristotle had only assimilated
his idea of theoretical to his notion of practical knowledge! Because
practical thinking was so human, Aristotle rejected it in favor of
pure, passionless cognition, something superhuman. Thinking desire is
experimental, is tentative, not absolute. It looks to the future and
to the past for help in the future. It is contingent, not necessary.
It doubly relates to the individual: to the individual thing as
experienced by an individual agent; not to the universal. Hence
desire is a sure sign of defect, of privation, of non-being, and
seeks surcease in something which knows it not. Hence desiring reason
culminating in beliefs relating to imperfect existence, stands forever
in contrast with passionless reason functioning in pure knowledge,
logically complete, of perfect being.

I need not remind you how through Neo-Platonism, St. Augustine, and the
Scholastic renaissance, these conceptions became imbedded in Christian
philosophy; and what a reversal occurred of the original practical
principle of Christianity. Belief is henceforth important because
it is the mere antecedent in a finite and fallen world, a temporal
and phenomenal world infected with non-being, of true knowledge to
be achieved only in a world of completed Being. Desire is but the
self-consciousness of defect striving to its own termination in
perfect possession, through perfect knowledge of perfect being. I
need not remind you that the _prima facie_ subordination of reason to
authority, of knowledge to faith, in the medieval code, is, after all,
but the logical result of the doctrine that man as man (since only
reasoning desire) is merely phenomenal; and has his reality in God, who
as God is the complete union of rational insight and being--the term
of man’s desire, and the fulfilment of his feeble attempts at knowing.
Authority, “faith” as it then had to be conceived, meant just that this
Being comes externally to the aid of man, otherwise hopelessly doomed
to misery in long drawn out error and non-being, and disciplines him
till, in the next world under more favoring auspices, he may have his
desires stilled in good, and his faith may yield to knowledge:--for we
forget that the doctrine of immortality was not an appendage, but an
integral part of the theory that since knowledge is the _true_ function
of man, happiness is attained only in knowledge, which itself exists
only in achievement of perfect Being or God.

For my part, I can but think that medieval absolutism, with its
provision for authoritative supernatural assistance in this world and
assertion of supernatural realization in the next, was more logical,
as well as more humane, than the modern absolutism, that, with the
same logical premises, bids man find adequate consolation and support
in the fact that, after all, his strivings are already eternally
fulfilled, his errors already eternally transcended, his partial
beliefs already eternally comprehended.

The modern age is marked by a refusal to be satisfied with the
postponement of the exercise and function of reason to another and
supernatural sphere, and by a resolve to practise itself upon its
present object, nature, with all the joys thereunto appertaining. The
pure intelligence of Aristotle, thought thinking itself, expresses
itself as free inquiry directed upon the present conditions of its
own most effective exercise. The principle of the inherent relation
of thought to being was preserved intact, but its practical locus was
moved down from the next world to this. Spinoza’s “God or Nature” is
the logical outcome; as is also his strict correlation of the attribute
of matter with the attribute of thought; while his combination of
thorough distrust of passion and faith with complete faith in reason
and all-absorbing passion for knowledge is so classic an embodiment of
the whole modern contradiction that it may awaken admiration where less
thorough-paced formulations call out irritation.

In the practical devotion of present intelligence to its present
object, nature, science was born, and also its philosophical
counterpart, the theory of knowledge. Epistemology only generalized in
its loose, although narrow and technical way, the question practically
urgent in Europe: How is science possible? How can intelligence
actively and directly get at its object?

Meantime, through Protestantism the values, the meanings formerly
characterizing the next life (the opportunity for full perception
of perfect being), were carried over into present-day emotions and
responses.

The dualism between faith authoritatively supported as the principle of
this life, and knowledge supernaturally realized as the principle of
the next, was transmuted into the dualism between intelligence now and
here occupied with natural things, and the affections and accompanying
beliefs, now and here realizing spiritual worths. For a time this
dualism operated as a convenient division of labor. Intelligence, freed
from responsibility for and preoccupation with supernatural truths,
could occupy itself the more fully and efficiently with the world
that now is; while the affections, charged with the values evoked in
the medieval discipline, entered into the present enjoyment of the
delectations previously reserved for the saints. Directness took the
place of systematic intermediation; the present of the future; the
individual’s emotional consciousness of the supernatural institution.
Between science and faith, thus conceived, a bargain was struck.
Hands off; each to his own, was the compact; the natural world to
intelligence, the moral, the spiritual world to belief. This (natural)
world for knowledge; that (supernatural) world for belief. Thus the
antithesis, unexpressed, ignored, _within experience_, between belief
and knowledge, between the purely objective values of thought and the
personal values of passion and volition, was more fundamental, more
determining, than the opposition, explicit and harassing, _within
knowledge_, between subject and object, mind and matter.

This latent antagonism worked out into the open. In scientific detail,
knowledge encroached upon the historic traditions and opinions with
which the moral and religious life had identified itself. It made
history to be as natural, as much its spoil, as physical nature. It
turned itself upon man, and proceeded remorselessly to account for
his emotions, his volitions, his opinions. Knowledge, in its general
theory, as philosophy, went the same way. It was pre-committed to
the old notion: the absolutely real is the object of _knowledge_,
and hence is something universal and impersonal. So, whether by the
road of sensationalism or rationalism, by the path of mechanicalism
or objective idealism, it came about that concrete selves, specific
feeling and willing beings, were relegated with the beliefs in which
they declare themselves to the “phenomenal.”


III

So much for the situation against which some contemporary tendencies
are a deliberate protest.

What of the positive conditions that give us not mere protest, like
the unreasoning revolt of heart against head found at all epochs, but
something articulate and constructive? The field is only too large,
and I shall limit myself to the evolution of the knowledge standpoint
itself. I shall suggest, first, that the progress of intelligence
directed upon natural materials has evolved a procedure of knowledge
that renders untenable the inherited conception of knowledge; and,
secondly, that this result is reinforced by the specific results of
some of the special sciences.

1. First, then, the very use of the knowledge standpoint, the very
expression of the knowledge preoccupation, has produced methods and
tests that, when formulated, intimate a radically different conception
of knowledge, and of its relation to existence and belief, than the
orthodox one.

The one thing that stands out is that thinking is inquiry, and that
knowledge as science is the outcome of systematically directed inquiry.
For a time it was natural enough that inquiry should be interpreted
in the old sense, as just change of subjective attitudes and opinions
to make them square up with a “reality” that is already there in
ready-made, fixed, and finished form. The rationalist had one notion
of the reality, _i.e._, that it was of the nature of laws, genera,
or an ordered system, and so thought of concepts, axioms, etc.,
as the indicated modes of representation. The empiricist, holding
reality to be a lot of little discrete particular lumps, thought of
disjointed sensations as its appropriate counterpart. But both alike
were thorough conformists. If “reality” is already and completely
given, and if knowledge is just submissive acceptance, then, of
course, inquiry is only a subjective change in the human “mind” or in
“consciousness,”--these being subjective and “unreal.”

But the very development of the sciences served to reveal a peculiar
and intolerable paradox. Epistemology, having condemned inquiry once
for all to the region of subjectivity in an invidious sense, finds
itself in flat opposition in principle and in detail to the assumption
and to the results of the sciences. Epistemology is bound to deny to
the results of the special sciences in detail any ulterior objectivity
just because they always _are_ in a process of inquiry--_in_ solution.
While a man may not be halted at being told that his mental activities,
since his, are not genuinely real, many men will draw violently back
at being told that all the discoveries, conclusions, explanations,
and theories of the sciences share the same fate, being the products
of a discredited mind. And, in general, epistemology, in relegating
human thinking as inquiry to a merely phenomenal region, makes concrete
approximation and conformity to objectivity hopeless. Even if it did
square itself up to and by “reality” it never could be sure of it.
The ancient myth of Tantalus and his effort to drink the water before
him seems to be ingeniously prophetic of modern epistemology. The
thirstier, the needier of truth the human mind, and the intenser the
efforts put forth to slake itself in the ocean of being just beyond
the edge of consciousness, the more surely the living waters of truth
recede!

When such self-confessed sterility is joined with consistent derogation
of all the special results of the special sciences, some one is sure to
raise the cry of “dog in the manger,” or of “sour grapes.” A revision
of the theory of thinking, of inquiry, would seem to be inevitable;
a revision which should cease trying to construe knowledge as an
attempted approximation to a reproduction of reality under conditions
that condemn it in advance to failure; a revision which should start
frankly from the fact of thinking as inquiring, and purely external
realities as terms in inquiries, and which should construe validity,
objectivity, truth, and the test and system of truths, on the basis of
what they actually mean and do within inquiry.

Such a standpoint promises ample revenge for the long damnation and
longer neglect to which the principle of belief has been subjected.
The whole procedure of thinking as developed in those extensive and
intensive inquiries that constitute the sciences, is but rendering
into a systematic technique, into an art deliberately and delightfully
pursued, the rougher and cruder means by which practical human beings
have in all ages worked out the implications of their beliefs, tested
them, and endeavored in the interests of economy, efficiency, and
freedom, to render them coherent with one another. Belief, sheer,
direct, unmitigated belief, reappears as the working hypothesis; action
that at once develops and tests belief reappears in experimentation,
deduction, demonstration; while the machinery of universals, axioms,
_a priori_ truths, etc., becomes a systematization of the way in which
men have always worked out, in anticipation of overt action, the
implications of their beliefs, with a view to revising them, in the
interests of obviating unfavorable, and securing welcome consequences.
Observation, with its machinery of sensations, measurements, etc.,
is the resurrection of the way in which agents have always faced and
tried to define the problems that face them; truth is the union of
abstract postulated meanings and of concrete brute facts in a way that
circumvents the latter by judging them from a new standpoint, while it
tests concepts by using them as methods in the same active experience.
It all comes to experience personally conducted and personally
consummated.

Let consciousness of these facts dawn a little more brightly over the
horizon of epistemological prejudices, and it will be seen that nothing
prevents admitting the genuineness both of thinking activities and of
their characteristic results, except the notion that belief itself is
not a genuine ingredient of existence--a notion which itself is not
only a belief, but a belief which, unlike the convictions of the common
man and the hypotheses of science, finds its proud proof in the fact
that it does not demean itself so unworthily as to work.

Once believe that beliefs themselves are as “real” as anything else
can ever be, and we have a world in which uncertainty, doubtfulness,
really inhere; and in which personal attitudes and responses are real
both in their own distinctive existence, and as the only ways in which
an as yet undetermined factor of reality takes on shape, meaning,
value, truth. If “to wilful men the injuries that they themselves
procure, must be their schoolmasters”--and all beliefs are wilful--then
by the same token the propitious evolutions of meaning, which wilful
men secure to an expectant universe, must be their compensation and
their justification. In a doubtful and needy universe elements must be
beggarly, and the development of personal beliefs into experimentally
executed systems of actions, is the organized bureau of philanthropy
which confers upon a travailing universe the meaning for which it cries
out. The apostrophe of the poet is above all to man the thinker, the
inquirer, the knower:

    O Dreamer! O Desirer, goer down
    Unto untraveled seas in untried ships,
    O crusher of the unimagined grape,
    On unconceivèd lips.

2. Biology, psychology, and the social sciences proffer an imposing
body of concrete facts that also point to the rehabilitation of
belief--to the interpretation of knowledge as a human and practical
outgrowth of belief, not to belief as the state to which knowledge is
condemned in a merely finite and phenomenal world. I need not, as I
cannot, here summarize the psychological revision which the notions of
sensation, perception, conception, cognition in general have undergone,
all to one intent. “Motor” is writ large on their face. The testimony
of biology is unambiguous to the effect that the organic instruments
of the whole intellectual life, the sense-organs and brain and their
connections, have been developed on a definitely practical basis and
for practical aims, for the purpose of such control over conditions
as will sustain and vary the meanings of life. The historic sciences
are equally explicit in their evidence that knowledge as a system of
information and instruction is a coöperative social achievement, at
all times socially toned, sustained, and directed; and that logical
thinking is a reweaving through individual activity of this social
fabric at such points as are indicated by prevailing needs and aims.

This bulky and coherent body of testimony is not, of course, of itself
philosophy. But it supplies, at all events, facts that have scientific
backing, and that are as worthy of regard as the facts pertinent to any
science. At the present time these facts seem to have some peculiar
claim just because they present traits largely ignored in prior
philosophic formulations, while those belonging to mathematics and
physics have so largely wrought their sweet will on systems. Again, it
would seem as if in philosophies built deliberately upon the knowledge
principle, any body of known facts should not have to clamor for
sympathetic attention.

Such being the case, the reasons for ruling psychology and sociology
and allied sciences out of competency to give philosophic testimony
have more significance than the bare denial of jurisdiction. They are
evidences of the deep-rooted preconception that whatever concerns a
particular conscious agent, a wanting, struggling, satisfied and
dissatisfied being, must of course be only “phenomenal” in import.

This aversion is the more suggestive when the professed idealist
appears as the special champion of the virginity of pure knowledge.
The idealist, so content with the notion that consciousness determines
reality, provided it be done once for all, at a jump and in lump, is
so uneasy in presence of the idea that empirical conscious beings
genuinely determine existences now and here! One is reminded of the
story told, I think, by Spencer. Some committee had organized and
contended, through a long series of parliaments, for the passage of
a measure. At last one of their meetings was interrupted with news
of success. Consternation was the result. What was to become of the
occupation of the committee? So, one asks, what is to become of
idealism at large, of the wholesale unspecifiable determination of
“reality” by or in “consciousness,” if specific conscious beings, John
Smiths, and Susan Smiths (to say nothing of their animal relations),
beings with bowels and brains, are found to exercise influence upon the
character and existence of reals?

One would be almost justified in construing idealism as a Pickwickian
scheme, so willing is it to idealize the principle of intelligence
at the expense of its specific undertakings, were it not that this
reluctance is the necessary outcome of the Stoic basis and tenor of
idealism--its preoccupation with logical contents and relations in
abstraction from their _situs_ and function in conscious living beings.


IV

I have suggested to you the naïve conception of the relation of beliefs
to realities: that beliefs are themselves real without discount,
manifesting their reality in the usual proper way, namely, by modifying
and shaping the reality of other things, so that they connect the bias,
the preferences and affections, the needs and endeavors of personal
lives with the values, the characters ascribed to things:--the latter
thus becoming worthy of human acquaintance and responsive to human
intercourse. This was followed by a sketch of the history of thought,
indicating how beliefs and all they insinuate were subjected to
preconceived notions of knowledge and of “reality” as a monopolistic
possession of pure intellect. Then I traced some of the _motifs_ that
make for reconsideration of the supposed uniquely exclusive relation
of logical knowledge and “reality”; _motifs_ that make for a less
invidiously superior attitude towards the convictions of the common man.

In concluding, I want to say a word or two to mitigate--for escape is
impossible--some misunderstandings. And, to begin with, while possible
doubts inevitably troop with actual beliefs, the doctrine in question
is not particularly sceptical. The radical empiricist, the humanist,
the pragmatist, label him as you will, believes not in fewer but in
more “realities” than the orthodox philosophers warrant. He is not
concerned, for example, in discrediting objective realities and logical
or universal thinking; he is interested in such a reinterpretation of
the sort of “reality” which these things possess as will accredit,
without depreciation, concrete empirical conscious centers of action
and passion.

My second remark is to the opposite effect. The intent is not
especially credulous, although it starts from and ends with the radical
credulity of all knowledge. To suppose that because the sciences are
ultimately instrumental to human beliefs, we are therefore to be
careless of the most exact possible use of extensive and systematic
scientific methods, is like supposing that because a watch is made to
tell present time, and not to be an exemplar of transcendent, absolute
time, watches might as well be made of cheap stuffs, casually wrought
and clumsily put together. It is the task of telling present time, with
all its urgent implications, that brings home, steadies, and enlarges
the responsibility for the best possible use of intelligence, the
instrument.

For one, I have no interest in the old, old scheme of derogating from
the worth of knowledge in order to give an uncontrolled field for some
_special_ beliefs to run riot in,--be these beliefs even faith in
immortality, in some special sort of a Deity, or in some particular
brand of freedom. Any one of our beliefs is subject to criticism,
revision, and even ultimate elimination through the development of its
own implications by intelligently directed action. Because reason is
a scheme of working out the meanings of convictions in terms of one
another and of the consequences they import in further experience,
convictions are the more, not the less, amenable and responsible to the
full exercise of reason.[29]

Thus we are put on the road to that most desirable thing,--the union
of acknowledgment of moral powers and demands with thoroughgoing
naturalism. No one really wants to lame man’s practical nature; it is
the supposed exigencies of natural science that force the hand. No one
really bears a grudge against naturalism for the sake of obscurantism.
It is the need of some sacred reservation for moral interests that
coerces. We all want to be as naturalistic as we can be. But the “can
be” is the rub. If we set out with a fixed dualism of belief and
knowledge, then the uneasy fear that the natural sciences are going
to encroach and destroy “spiritual values” haunts us. So we build
them a citadel and fortify it; that is, we isolate, professionalize,
and thereby weaken beliefs. But if beliefs are the most natural, and
in that sense, the most metaphysical of all things, and if knowledge
is an organized technique for working out their implications and
interrelations, for directing their formation and employ, how
unnecessary, how petty the fear and the caution. Because freedom of
belief is ours, free thought may exercise itself; the freer the thought
the more sure the emancipation of belief. Hug some special belief and
one fears knowledge; believe in belief and one loves and cleaves to
knowledge.

We have here, too, the possibility of a common understanding, in
thought, in language, in outlook, of the philosopher and the common
man. What would not the philosopher give, did he not have to part
with some of his common humanity in order to join a class? Does he
not always, when challenged, justify himself with the contention that
all men naturally philosophize, and that he but does in a conscious
and orderly way what leads to harm when done in an indiscriminate
and irregular way? If philosophy be at once a natural history _and_
a logic--an art--of beliefs, then its technical justification is at
one with its human justification. The natural attitude of man, said
Emerson, is believing; “the philosopher, after some struggle, having
only reasons for believing.” Let the struggle then enlighten and
enlarge beliefs; let the reasons kindle and engender new beliefs.

Finally, it is not a solution, but a problem which is presented. As
philosophers, our disagreements as to conclusions are trivial compared
with our disagreement as to problems. To see the problem another
sees, in the same perspective and at the same angle--that amounts to
something. Agreement in solutions is in comparison perfunctory. To
experience the same problem another feels--that perhaps is agreement.
In a world where distinctions are as invidious as comparisons are
odious, and where intellect works only by comparison and distinction,
pray what is one to do?

But beliefs are personal matters, and the person, we may still
believe, is social. To be a man is to be thinking desire; and the
agreement of desires is not in oneness of intellectual conclusion,
but in the sympathies of passion and the concords of action:--and yet
significant union in affection and behavior may depend upon a consensus
in thought that is secured only by discrimination and comparison.




EXPERIENCE AND OBJECTIVE IDEALISM[30]


I

Idealism as a philosophic system stands in such a delicate relation
to experience as to invite attention. In its subjective form, or
sensationalism, it claims to be the last word of empiricism. In its
objective, or rational form, it claims to make good the deficiencies of
the subjective type, by emphasizing the work of thought that supplies
the factors of objectivity and universality lacking in sensationalism.
With reference to experience _as it now is_, such idealism is half
opposed to empiricism and half committed to it,--antagonistic, so
far as existing experience is regarded as tainted with a sensational
character; favorable, so far as this experience is even now prophetic
of some final, all-comprehensive, or absolute experience, which in
truth is one with reality.

That this combination of opposition to present experience with devotion
to the cause of experience in the abstract leaves objective idealism
in a position of unstable equilibrium from which it can find release
only by euthanasia in a thorough-going empiricism seems evident.
Some of the reasons for this belief may be readily approached by
a summary sketch of three historic episodes in which have emerged
important conceptions of experience and its relation to reason. The
first takes us to classic Greek thought. Here experience means the
preservation, through memory, of the net result of a multiplicity of
particular doings and sufferings; a preservation that affords positive
skill in maintaining further practice, and promise of success in new
emergencies. The craft of the carpenter, the art of the physician
are standing examples of its nature. It differs from instinct and
blind routine or servile practice because there is some knowledge of
materials, methods, and aims, in their adjustment to one another.
Yet the marks of its passive, habitual origin are indelibly stamped
upon it. On the knowledge side it can never aspire beyond opinion,
and if true opinion be achieved, it is only by happy chance. On the
active side it is limited to the accomplishment of a special work or
a particular product, following some unjustified, because assumed,
method. Thus it contrasts with the true knowledge of reason, which
is direct apprehension, self-revealing and self-validating, of an
eternal and harmonious content. The regions in which experience and
reason respectively hold sway are thus explained. Experience has to do
with production, which, in turn, is relative to decay. It deals with
generation, becoming, not with finality, being. Hence it is infected
with the trait of relative non-being, of mere imitativeness; hence its
multiplicity, its logical inadequacy, its relativity to a standard and
end beyond itself. Reason, _per contra_, has to do with meaning, with
significance (ideas, forms), that is eternal and ultimate. Since the
meaning of anything is the worth, the good, the end of that thing,
experience presents us with partial and tentative efforts to achieve
the embodiment of purpose, under conditions that doom the attempt to
inconclusiveness. It has, however, its meed of reality in the degree in
which its results _participate_ in meaning, the good, reason.

From this classic period, then, comes the antithesis of experience as
the historically achieved _embodiments_ of meaning, partial, multiple,
insecure, to reason as the source, author, and container of _meaning_,
permanent, assured, unified. Idealism means ideality, experience means
brute and broken facts. That things exist because of and for the
sake of meaning, and that experience gives us meaning in a servile,
interrupted, and inherently deficient way--such is the standpoint.
Experience gives us meaning in process of becoming; special and
isolated instances in which it _happens_, temporally, to appear, rather
than meaning pure, undefiled, independent. Experience presents purpose,
the good, struggling against obstacles, “involved in matter.”

Just how much the vogue of modern neo-Kantian idealism, professedly
built upon a strictly epistemological instead of upon a cosmological
basis, is due, in days of a declining theology, to a vague sense that
affirming the function of reason in the constitution of a knowable
world (which in its own constitution as logically knowable may be,
morally and spiritually, anything you please), carries with it an
assurance of the superior reality of the good and the beautiful as
well as of the “true,” it would be hard to say. Certainly unction
seems to have descended upon epistemology, in apostolic succession,
from classic idealism; so that neo-Kantianism is rarely without a tone
of edification, as if feeling itself the patron of man’s spiritual
interests in contrast to the supposed crudeness and insensitiveness
of naturalism and empiricism. At all events, we find here one element
in our problem: Experience considered as the summary of past episodic
adventures and happenings in relation to fulfilled and adequately
expressed meaning.

The second historic event centers about the controversy of innate
ideas, or pure concepts. The issue is between empiricism and
rationalism as theories of the origin and validation of scientific
knowledge. The empiricist is he who feels that the chief obstacle
which prevents scientific method from making way is the belief in
pure thoughts, not derived from particular observations and hence not
responsible to the course of experience. His objection to the “high _a
priori_ road” is that it introduces in irresponsible fashion a mode
of presumed knowledge which may be used at any turn to stand sponsor
for mere tradition and prejudice, and thus to nullify the results of
science resting upon and verified by observable facts. Experience
thus comes to mean, to use the words of Peirce, “that which is forced
upon a man’s recognition will-he, nill-he, and shapes his thoughts
to something quite different from what they naturally would have
taken.”[31] The same definition is found in James, in his chapter on
Necessary Truths: “Experience means experience of something foreign
supposed to impress us whether spontaneously or in consequence of our
own exertions and acts.”[32] As Peirce points out, this notion of
experience as the foreign element that forces the hand of thought and
controls its efficacy, goes back to Locke. Experience is “observation
employed either about external sensible objects, or about the internal
operations of our minds”[33]--as furnishing in short all the valid
data and tests of thinking and knowledge. This meaning, thinks Peirce,
should be accepted “as a landmark which it would be a crime to disturb
or displace.”

The contention of idealism, here bound up with rationalism, is that
perception and observation cannot guarantee knowledge in its honorific
sense (science); that the peculiar differentia of scientific knowledge
is a constancy, a universality, and necessity that contrast at every
point with perceptual data, and that indispensably require the
function of conception.[34] In short, _qualitative transformation_
of _facts_ (data of perception), not their mechanical subtraction
and recombination, is the difference between scientific and
perceptual knowledge. Here the problem which emerges is, of course,
the significance of perception and of conception in respect to
experience.[35]

The third episode reverses in a curious manner (which confuses present
discussion) the notion of experience as a foreign, alien, coercive
material. It regards experience as a fortuitous association, by merely
psychic connections, of individualistic states of consciousness.
This is due to the Humian development of Locke. The “objects”
and “operations,” which to Locke were just given and secured in
observation, become shifting complexes of subjective sensations and
ideas, whose apparent permanency is due to discoverable illusions.
This, of course, is the empiricism which made Kant so uneasily toss
in his dogmatic slumbers (a tossing that he took for an awakening);
and which, by reaction, called out the conception of thought as a
function operating both to elevate perceptual data to scientific
status, and also to confer objective status, or knowable character,
upon even sensational data and their associative combinations.[36]
Here emerges the third element in our problem: The function of thought
as furnishing objectivity to any experience that claims cognitive
reference or capacity.

Summing up the matter, idealism stands forth with its assertion of
thought or reason as (1) the sponsor for all significance, ideality,
purpose, in experience,--the author of the good and the beautiful
as well as the true; (2) the power, located in pure conceptions,
required to elevate perceptive or observational material to the plane
of science; and (3) the constitution that gives objectivity, even the
semblance of order, system, connection, mutual reference, to sensory
data that without its assistance are mere subjective flux.


II

I begin the discussion with the last-named function. Thought is
here conceived as _a priori_, not in the sense of particular innate
ideas, but of a function that constitutes the very possibility
of any objective experience, any experience involving reference
beyond its own mere subjective happening. I shall try to show that
idealism is condemned to move back and forth between two inconsistent
interpretations of this _a priori_ thought. It is taken to mean both
the organized, the regulated, the informed, established character
of experience, an order immanent and constitutional; and an agency
which organizes, regulates, forms, synthesizes, a power operative and
constructive. And the oscillation between and confusion of these two
diverse senses is necessary to Neo-Kantian idealism.

When Kant compared his work in philosophy to that of the men who
introduced construction into geometry, and experimentation into physics
and chemistry, the point of his remarks depends upon taking the _a
priori_ worth of thought in a regulative, directive, controlling sense,
thought as consciously, intentionally, making an experience _different_
in a _determinate_ sense and manner. But the point of his answer to
Hume consists in taking the _a priori_ in the other sense, as something
which is _already_ immanent in _any_ experience, and which accordingly
makes no determinate difference to any one experience as compared with
any other, or with any past or future form of itself. The concept is
treated first as that which makes an experience actually different,
controlling its evolution towards consistency, coherency, and objective
reliability; then, it is treated as that which has already effected
the organization of any and every experience that comes to recognition
at all. The fallacy from which he never emerges consists in vibrating
between the definition of a concept as a rule of constructive synthesis
in a _differential_ sense, and the definition of it as a static
endowment lurking in “mind,” and giving automatically a hard and fixed
law for the determination of every experienced object. The _a priori_
conceptions of Kant as immanent fall, like the rain, upon the just and
the unjust; upon error, opinion, and hallucination. But Kant slides
into these _a priori_ functions the preferential values exercised
by empirical reflective thought. The concept of triangle, taken
geometrically, means doubtless a determinate method of construing space
elements; but to Kant it also means something that exists in the mind
_prior_ to all such geometrical constructions and that unconsciously
lays down the law not only for their conscious elaboration, but also
for any space perception, even for that which takes a rectangle to
be a triangle. The first of the meanings is intelligible, and marks a
definite contribution to the logic of science. But it is not “objective
idealism”; it is a contribution to a revised empiricism. The second is
a dark saying.

That organization of some sort exists in every experience I make no
doubt. That isolation, discrepancy, the fragmentary, the incompatible,
are brought to recognition and to logical function only with reference
to some prior existential mode of organization seems clear. And
it seems equally clear that reflection goes on with profit only
because the materials with which it deals have already some degree
of organization, or exemplify various relationships. As against
Hume, or even Locke, we may be duly grateful to Kant for enforcing
acknowledgment of these facts. But the acknowledgment means simply an
improved and revised empiricism.

For, be it noted, this organization, first, is not the work of reason
or thought, unless “reason” be stretched beyond all identification;
and, secondly, it has no sacrosanct or finally valid and worthful
character. (1) Experience always carries with it and within it certain
systematized arrangements, certain classifications (using the term
without intellectualistic prejudice), coexistent and serial. If we
attribute these to “thought” then the structure of the brain of a
Mozart which hears and combines sounds in certain groupings, the
psycho-physical visual habit of the Greek, the locomotor apparatus of
the human body in the laying-out and plotting of space is “thought.”
Social institutions, established political customs, effect and
perpetuate modes of reaction and of perception that compel a certain
grouping of objects, elements, and values. A national constitution
brings about a definite arrangement of the factors of human action
which holds even physical things together in certain determinate
orders. Every successful economic process, with its elaborate divisions
and adjustments of labor, of materials and instruments, is just such
an objective organization. Now it is one thing to say that thought has
played a part in the origin and development of such organizations, and
continues to have a rôle in their judicious employment and application;
it is another to say that these organizations _are_ thought, or
are its exclusive product. Thought that functions in these ways is
distinctively _reflective_ thought, thought as practical, volitional,
deliberately exercised for specific aims--thought as an act, an art of
skilled mediation. As _reflective_ thought, its end is to terminate its
own first and experimental forms, and to secure an organization which,
while it may evoke new reflective thinking, puts an end to the thinking
that secured the organization. _As organizations_, as established,
effectively controlling arrangements of objects in experience, their
mark is that they are not thoughts, but habits, customs of action.[37]

Moreover, such reflective thought as does intervene in the formation
and maintenance of these practical organizations harks back to prior
practical organizations, biological and social in nature. It serves
to _valuate_ organizations already existent as biological functions
and instincts, while, as itself a biological activity, it redirects
them to new conditions and results. Recognize, for example, that a
geometric concept is a practical locomotor function of arranging
stimuli in reference to maintenance of life activities _brought into
consciousness_, and then serving as a center of reorganization of
such activities to freer, more varied flexible and valuable forms;
recognize this, and we have the truth of the Kantian idea, without
its excrescences and miracles. The concept is the practical activity
doing consciously and artfully what it had aforetime done blindly and
aimlessly, and thereby not only doing it better but opening up a freer
world of significant activities. Thought as such a reorganization
of natural functions does naturally what Kantian forms and
schematizations do only supernaturally. In a word, the constructive
or organizing activity of “thought” does not inhere in thought as a
transcendental function, a form or mode of some supra-empirical ego,
mind, or consciousness, but in thought as itself vital activity. And
in any case we have passed to the idea of thought as reflectively
reconstructive and directive, and away from the notion of thought as
immanently constitutional and organizational. To make this passage
and yet to ignore its existence and import is essential to objective
idealism.

(2) No final or ultimate validity attaches to these original
arrangements and institutionalizations in any case. Their value is
teleological and experimental, not fixedly ontological. “Law and
order” are good things, but not when they become rigidity, and create
mechanical uniformity or routine. Prejudice is the acme of the _a
priori_. Of the _a priori_ in this sense we may say what is always
to be said of habits and institutions: They are good servants, but
harsh and futile masters. Organization as already effected is always
in danger of becoming a _mortmain_; it may be a way of sacrificing
novelty, flexibility, freedom, creation to static standards. The
curious inefficiency of idealism at this point is evident in the fact
that genuine thought, empirical reflective thought, is required
precisely for the purpose of re-forming established and set formations.

In short, (_a_) _a priori_ character is no exclusive function of
thought. Every biological function, every motor attitude, every vital
impulse as the carrying vehicle of experience is thus _apriorily_
regulative in prospective reference; what we call apperception,
expectation, anticipation, desire, demand, choice, are pregnant with
this constitutive and organizing power. (_b_) In so far as “thought”
does exercise such reorganizing power, it is because thought is itself
still a _vital_ function. (_c_) Objective idealism depends not only
upon ignoring the existence and capacity of vital functions, but upon a
profound confusion of the constitutional _a priori_, the unconsciously
dominant, with empirically reflective thought. In the sense in which
the _a priori_ is worth while as an attribute of thought, thought
cannot be what the objective idealist defines it as being. Plain,
ordinary, everyday empirical reflections, operating as centers of
inquiry, of suggestion, of experimentation, exercise the valuable
function of regulation, in an auspicious direction, of subsequent
experiences.

The categories of accomplished systematization cover alike the just
and the unjust, the false and the true, while (unlike God’s rain) they
exercise no _specific_ or _differential_ activity of stimulation and
control. Error and inefficiency, as well as value and energy, are
embodied in our objective institutional classifications. As a special
favor, will not the objective idealist show how, in some one single
instance, his immanent “reason” makes any difference as respects
the detection and elimination of error, or gives even the slightest
assistance in discovering and validating the truly worthful? This
practical work, the life blood of intelligence in everyday life and
in critical science, is done by the despised and rejected matter of
concrete empirical contexts and functions. Generalizing the issue: If
the immanent organization be ascribed to thought, why should its work
be such as to demand continuous correction and revision? If specific
reflective thought, as empirical, be subject to all the limitations
supposed to inhere in experience as such, how can it assume the burden
of making good, of supplementing, reconstructing, and developing
meanings? The logic of the case seems to be that Neo-Kantian idealism
gets its status against empiricism by first accepting the Humian idea
of experience, while the express import of its positive contribution
is to show the _non-existence_ (not merely the cognitive invalidity)
of anything describable as mere states of subjective consciousness.
Thus in the end it tends to destroy itself and to make way for a more
adequate empiricism.


III

In the above discussion, I have unavoidably anticipated the second
problem: the relation of conceptual thought to perceptual data.
A distinct aspect still remains, however. Perception, as well as
apriority, is a term harboring a fundamental ambiguity. It may mean
(1) a distinct type of activity, predominantly practical in character,
though carrying at its heart important cognitive and esthetic
qualities; or (2) a distinctively cognitional experience, the function
of observation as explicitly logical--a factor in science _qua_ science.

In the first sense, as recent functional empiricism (working in
harmony with psychology, but not itself peculiarly psychological) has
abundantly shown, perception is primarily an act of adjustment of
organism and environment, differing from a mere reflex or instinctive
adaptation in that, in order to compensate for the failure of the
instinctive adjustment, it requires an objective or discriminative
presentation of conditions of action: the negative conditions or
obstacles, and the positive conditions or means and resources.[38]
This, of course, is its cognitive phase. In so far as the material
thus presented not only serves as a direct cue to further successful
activity (successful in the overcoming of obstacles to the maintenance
of the function entered upon) but presents auxiliary collateral
objects and qualities that give additional range and depth of meaning
to the activity of adjustment, perceiving is esthetic as well as
intellectual.[39]

Now such perception cannot be made antithetical to thought, for it may
itself be surcharged with any amount of imaginatively supplied and
reflectively sustained ideal factors--such as are needed to determine
and select relevant stimuli and to suggest and develop an appropriate
plan and course of behavior. The amount of such saturating intellectual
material depends upon the complexity and maturity of the behaving
agent. Such perception, moreover, is strictly teleological, since it
arises from an experienced need and functions to fulfil the purpose
indicated by this need. The cognitional content is, indeed, carried by
affectional and intentional contexts.

Then we have perception as scientific observation. This involves the
deliberate, artful exclusion of affectional and purposive factors as
exercising mayhap a vitiating influence upon the cognitive or objective
content; or, more strictly speaking, a transformation of the more
ordinary or “natural” emotional and purposive concomitants, into what
Bain calls “neutral” emotion, and a purpose of finding out what the
present conditions of the problem are. (The practical feature is not
thus denied or eliminated, but the overweening influence of a present
dominating end is avoided, so that _change of the character of the end_
may be effected, if found desirable.) Here observation may be opposed
to thought, in the sense that exact and minute description may be set
over against interpretation, explanation, theorizing, and inference.
In the wider sense of thought as equaling reflective process, the work
of observation and description forms a constituent division of labor
_within_ thought. The impersonal demarcation and accurate registration
of what is objectively there or present occurs for the sake (_a_) of
eliminating meaning which is habitually but uncritically referred, and
(_b_) of getting a basis for a meaning (at first purely inferential
or hypothetical) that may be consistently referred; and that (_c_),
resting upon examination and not upon mere _a priori_ custom, may
weather the strain of subsequent experiences. But in so far as
thought is identified with the conceptual phase as such of the entire
logical function, observation is, of course, set over against thought:
deliberately, purposely, and artfully so.

It is not uncommon to hear it said that the Lockeian movement was
all well enough for psychology, but went astray because it invaded
the field of logic. If we mean by psychology a natural history of
what at any time _passes_ for knowledge, and by logic conscious
control in the direction of grounded assurance, this remark appears
to reverse the truth. As a natural history of knowledge in the sense
of opinion and belief, Locke’s account of discrete, simple ideas or
meanings, which are compounded and then distributed, does palpable
violence to the facts. But every line of Locke shows that he was
interested in knowledge in its honorific sense--controlled certainty,
or, where this is not feasible, measured probability. And to logic
as an account of the way in which we by art build up a _tested_
assurance, a rationalized conviction, Locke makes an important positive
contribution. The pity is that he inclined to take it for the whole
of the logic of science,[40] not seeing that it was but a correlative
division of labor to the work of hypotheses or inference; and that he
tended to identify it with a natural history or psychology. The latter
tendency exposed Locke to the Humian interpretation, and permanently
sidetracked the positive contribution of his theory to logic, while it
led to that confusion of an untrue psychology with a logic valid within
limits, of which Mill is the standard example.

In analytic observation, it is a positive object to strip off all
inferential meaning so far as may be--to reduce the facts as nearly
as may be to derationalized data, in order to make possible a new and
better rationalization. In and because of this process, the perceptual
data approach the limit of a disconnected manifold, of the brutely
given, of the merely sensibly present; while meaning stands out as
a searched for principle of unification and explanation, that is,
as a thought, a concept, an hypothesis. The extent to which this is
carried depends wholly upon the character of the specific situation and
problem; but, speaking generally, or of limiting tendencies, one may
say it is carried to mere observation, pure brute description, on the
one side, and to mere thought, that is hypothetical inference, on the
other.

So far as Locke ignored this instrumental character of observation, he
naturally evoked and strengthened rationalistic idealism; he called
forth its assertion of the need of reason, of concepts, of universals,
to constitute knowledge in its eulogistic sense. But two contrary
errors do not make a truth, although they suggest and determine the
nature of some relevant truth. This truth is the empirical origin, in
a determinate type of situation, of the contrast of observation and
conception; the empirical relevancy and the empirical worth of this
contrast in controlling the character of subsequent experiences. To
suppose that perception as it concretely exists, either in the early
experiences of the animal, the race, or the individual, or in its
later refined and expanded experiences, is identical with the sharply
analyzed, objectively discriminated and internally disintegrated
elements of scientific observation, is a perversion of experience; a
perversion for which, indeed, professed empiricists set the example,
but which idealism must perpetuate if it is not to find its end in an
improved, functional empiricism.[41]


IV

We come now to the consideration of the third element in our problem;
ideality, important and normative value, in relation to experience;
the antithesis of experience as a tentative, fragmentary, and
ineffectual embodiment of meaning over against the perfect, eternal
system of meanings which experience suggests even in nullifying and
mutilating.

That from the _memory_ standpoint experience presents itself as a
multiplicity of episodic events with just enough continuity among
them to suggest principles true “on the whole” or usually, but
without furnishing instruction as to their exact range and bearing,
seems obvious enough. Why should it not? The motive which leads to
reflection on _past_ experience could be satisfied in no other way.
Continuities, connecting links, dynamic transitions drop out because,
for the purpose of the recollection, they would be hindrances if now
repeated; or because they are now available only when themselves
objectified in definite terms and thus given a _quasi_ independent, a
_quasi_ atomistic standing of their own. This is the only alternative
to what the psychologists term “total reminiscence,” which, so far
as total, leave us with an elephant on our hands. Unless we are
going to have a wholesale revivification of the past, giving us just
another embarrassing present experience, illusory because irrelevant,
memory must work by retail--by summoning _distinct_ cases, events,
sequences, precedents. Dis-membering is a positively necessary part
of re-membering. But the resulting _disjecta membra_ are in no sense
experience as it was or is; they are simply elements held apart, and
yet tentatively implicated together, in present experience for the
sake of its most favorable evolution; evolution in the direction of
the most excellent meaning or value conceived. If the remembering is
efficacious and pertinent, it reveals the possibilities of the present;
that is to say, it clarifies the transitive, transforming character
that belongs inherently to the present. The dismembering of the vital
present into the disconnected past is correlative to an anticipation,
an idealization of the future.

Moreover, the contingent character of the principle or rule that
emerges from a survey of cases, instances, as distinct from a fixed or
necessary character, secures just what is wanted in the exigency of
a prospective idealization, or refinement of excellence. It is just
this character that secures flexibility and variety of outlook, that
makes possible a consideration of alternatives and an attempt to select
and to execute the more worthy among them. The fixed or necessary law
would mean a future like the past--a dead, an unidealized future. It
is exasperating to imagine how completely different would have been
Aristotle’s valuation of “experience” with respect to its contingency,
if he had but once employed the function of developing and perfecting
value, instead of the function of knowing an unalterable object, as the
standard by which to estimate and measure intelligence.

The one constant trait of experience from its crudest to its most
mature forms is that its contents undergo change of meaning, and
of meaning in the sense of excellence, value. Every experience
is in-course,[42] in course of becoming worse or better as to
its contents, or in course of conscious endeavor to sustain some
satisfactory level of value against encroachment or lapse. In this
effort, both precedent, the reduction of the present idealization,
the anticipation of the possible, though doubtful, future, emerge.
Without idealization, that is, without conception of the favorable
issue that the present, defined in terms of precedents, may portend in
its transition, the recollection of precedents, and the formulation
of tentative rules is nonsense. But without the identification of
the present in terms of elements suggested by the past, without
recognition, the ideal, the value projected as end, remains inert,
helpless, sentimental, without means of realization. Resembling cases
and anticipation, memory and idealization, are the corresponding terms
in which a present experience has its transitive force analyzed into
reciprocally pertinent means and ends.

_That_ an experience will change in content and value is the one thing
certain. _How_ it will change is the one thing naturally uncertain.
Hence the import of the art of reflection and invention. Control of
the character of the change in the direction of the worthful is the
common business of theory and practice. Here is the province of the
episodic recollection of past history and of the idealized foresight
of possibilities. The irrelevancy of an objective idealism lies in the
fact that it totally ignores the position and function of ideality in
sustained and serious endeavor. Were values automatically injected and
kept in the world of experience by any force not reflected in human
memories and projects, it would make no difference whether this force
were a Spencerian environment or an Absolute Reason. Did purpose ride
in a cosmic automobile toward a predestined goal, it would not cease to
be physical and mechanical in quality because labeled Divine Idea, or
Perfect Reason. The moral would be “let us eat, drink, and be merry,”
for to-morrow--or if not this to-morrow, then upon some to-morrow,
unaffected by our empirical memories, reflections, inventions, and
idealizations--the cosmic automobile arrives. Spirituality, ideality,
meaning as purpose, would be the last things to present themselves if
objective idealism were true. Values cannot be both ideal and given,
and their “given” character is emphasized, not transformed, when they
are called eternal and absolute. But natural values become ideal the
moment their maintenance is dependent upon the intentional activities
of an empirical agent. To suppose that values are ideal because
they are so eternally given is the contradiction in which objective
idealism has intrenched itself. Objective ontological teleology
spells machinery. Reflective and volitional, experimental teleology
alone spells ideality.[43] Objective, rationalistic idealism breaks
upon the fact that it can have no intermediary between a brutally
achieved embodiment of meaning (physical in character or else of that
peculiar quasi-physical character which goes generally by the name
of metaphysical) and a total opposition of the given and the ideal,
connoting their mutual indifference and incapacity. An empiricism
that acknowledges the transitive character of experience, and that
acknowledges the possible control of the character of the transition
by means of intelligent effort, has abundant opportunity to celebrate
in productive art, genial morals, and impartial inquiry the grace and
the severity of the ideal.




THE POSTULATE OF IMMEDIATE EMPIRICISM[44]


The criticisms made upon that vital but still unformed movement
variously termed radical empiricism, pragmatism, humanism,
functionalism, according as one or another aspect of it is uppermost,
have left me with a conviction that the _fundamental_ difference is
not so much in matters overtly discussed as in a presupposition that
remains tacit: a presupposition as to what experience is and means. To
do my little part in clearing up the confusion, I shall try to make
my own presupposition explicit. The object of this paper is, then, to
set forth what I understand to be the postulate and the criterion of
_immediate empiricism_.[45]

Immediate empiricism postulates that things--anything, everything, in
the ordinary or non-technical use of the term “thing”--are what they
are experienced as. Hence, if one wishes to describe anything truly,
his task is to tell what it is experienced as being. If it is a horse
that is to be described, or the _equus_ that is to be defined, then
must the horse-trader, or the jockey, or the timid family man who
wants a “safe driver,” or the zoologist or the paleontologist tell us
what the horse is which is experienced. If these accounts turn out
different in some respects, as well as congruous in others, this is
no reason for assuming the content of one to be exclusively “real,”
and that of others to be “phenomenal”; for each account of what is
experienced will manifest that it is the account _of_ the horse-dealer,
or _of_ the zoologist, and hence will give the conditions requisite
for understanding the differences as well as the agreements of the
various accounts. And the principle varies not a whit if we bring in
the psychologist’s horse, the logician’s horse, or the metaphysician’s
horse.

In each case, the nub of the question is, _what sort of experience_ is
denoted or indicated: a concrete and determinate experience, varying,
when it varies, in specific real elements, and agreeing, when it
agrees, in specific real elements, so that we have a contrast, not
between _a_ Reality, and various approximations to, or phenomenal
representations of Reality, but between different reals of experience.
And the reader is begged to bear in mind that from this standpoint,
when “an experience” or “some sort of experience” is referred to, “some
thing” or “some sort of thing” is always meant.

Now, this statement that things are what they are experienced to be
is usually translated into the statement that things (or, ultimately,
Reality, Being) _are_ only and just what they are _known_ to be or that
things are, or Reality _is_, what it is for a conscious knower--whether
the knower be conceived primarily as a perceiver or as a thinker
being a further, and secondary, question. This is the root-paralogism
of all idealisms, whether subjective or objective, psychological
or epistemological. By our postulate, things are what they are
experienced to be; and, unless knowing is the sole and only genuine
mode of experiencing, it is fallacious to say that Reality is just and
exclusively what it is or would be to an all-competent all-knower; or
even that it _is_, relatively and piecemeal, what it is to a finite
and partial knower. Or, put more positively, knowing is one mode of
experiencing, and the primary philosophic demand (from the standpoint
of immediatism) is to find out _what_ sort of an experience knowing
is--or, concretely how things are experienced when they are experienced
_as_ known things.[46] By concretely is meant, obviously enough
(among other things), such an account of the experience of things as
known that will bring out the characteristic traits and distinctions
they possess as things of a knowing experience, as compared with
things experienced esthetically, or morally, or economically, or
technologically. To assume that, because from the _standpoint of
the knowledge experience_ things _are_ what they are known to be,
therefore, metaphysically, absolutely, without qualification,
everything in its reality (as distinct from its “appearance,” or
phenomenal occurrence) is what a knower would find it to be, is, from
the immediatist’s standpoint, if not the root of all philosophic evil,
at least one of its main roots. For this leaves out of account what
the knowledge standpoint is itself _experienced as_.

I start and am flustered by a noise heard. Empirically, that noise
_is_ fearsome; it _really_ is, not merely phenomenally or subjectively
so. That _is what_ it is experienced as being. But, when I experience
the noise as a _known_ thing, I find it to be innocent of harm. It
is the tapping of a shade against the window, owing to movements of
the wind. The experience has changed; that is, the thing experienced
has changed--not that an unreality has given place to a reality, nor
that some transcendental (unexperienced) Reality has changed,[47]
not that truth has changed, but just and only the concrete reality
experienced has changed. I now feel ashamed of my fright; and the noise
as fearsome is changed to noise as a wind-curtain fact, and hence
practically indifferent to my welfare. This is a change of experienced
existence effected through the medium of cognition. The content of the
latter experience cognitively regarded is doubtless _truer_ than the
content of the earlier; but it is in no sense more real. To call it
truer, moreover, must, from the empirical standpoint, mean a concrete
_difference_ in actual things experienced.[48] Again, in many cases,
only in retrospect is the prior experience cognitionally regarded at
all. In such cases, it is only in regard to contrasted content _in_ a
subsequent experience that the determination “truer” has force.

Perhaps some reader may now object that as matter of fact the entire
experience _is_ cognitive, but that the earlier parts of it are only
imperfectly so, resulting in a phenomenon that is not real; while
the latter part, being a more complete cognition, results in what
is relatively, at least, more real.[49] In short, a critic may say
that, when I was frightened by the noise, I _knew_ I was frightened;
otherwise there would have been no experience at all. At this point, it
is necessary to make a distinction so simple and yet so all-fundamental
that I am afraid the reader will be inclined to pooh-pooh it away as
a mere verbal distinction. But to see that to the empiricist this
distinction is not verbal, but genuine, is the precondition of any
understanding of him. The immediatist must, by his postulate, ask
what is the fright experienced _as_. Is what is actually experienced,
I-know-I-am-frightened, or I-_am_-frightened? I see absolutely no
reason for claiming that the experience _must_ be described by the
former phrase. In all probability (and all the empiricist logically
needs is just one case of this sort) the experience is simply and just
of fright-at-the-noise. Later one may (or may not) have an experience
describable _as_ I-know-I-am-(or-was) and improperly or properly,
frightened. But this is a different experience--that is, a different
_thing_. And if the critic goes on to urge that the person “_really_”
must have known that he was frightened, I can only point out that the
critic is shifting the venue. He may be right, but, if so, it is only
because the “really” is something not concretely experienced (whose
nature accordingly is the critic’s business); and this is to depart
from the empiricist’s point of view, to attribute to him a postulate he
expressly repudiates.

The material point may come out more clearly if I say that we must
make a distinction between a thing as _cognitive_, and one as
_cognized_.[50] I should define a cognitive experience as one that has
certain bearings or implications which induce, and fulfil themselves
in, a subsequent experience in which the relevant thing is experienced
_as_ cognized, _as_ a known object, and is thereby transformed, or
reorganized. The fright-at-the-noise in the case cited is obviously
_cognitive_, in this sense. By description, it induces an investigation
or inquiry in which both noise and fright are objectively stated or
presented--the noise as a shade-wind fact, the fright as an organic
reaction to a sudden acoustic stimulus, a reaction that under the
given circumstances was useless or even detrimental, a maladaptation.
Now, pretty much all of experience is of this sort (the “is” meaning,
of course, is experienced _as_), and the empiricist is false to his
principle if he does not duly note this fact.[51] But he is equally
false to his principle if he permits himself to be confused as to the
concrete differences in the two things experienced.

There are two little words through explication of which the
empiricist’s position may be brought out--“_as_” and “_that_.” We may
express his presupposition by saying that things are what they are
experienced _as_ being; or that to give a just account of anything
is to tell what _that_ thing is experienced to be. By these words I
want to indicate the absolute, final, irreducible, and inexpugnable
concrete _quale_ which everything experienced not so much _has_ as
_is_. To grasp this aspect of empiricism is to see what the empiricist
means by objectivity, by the element of control. Suppose we take,
as a crucial case for the empiricist, an out and out illusion, say
of Zöllner’s lines. These are experienced as convergent; they are
“truly” parallel. If things are what they are experienced as being,
how can the distinction be drawn between illusion and the true state
of the case? There is no answer to this question except by sticking
to the fact that the experience of the lines as divergent is a
concrete qualitative thing or _that_. It is _that_ experience which
it is, and no other. And if the reader rebels at the iteration of
such obvious tautology, I can only reiterate that the realization of
the _meaning_ of this tautology is the key to the whole question of
the objectivity of experience, as that stands to the empiricist. The
lines of _that_ experience _are_ divergent; not merely _seem_ so. The
question of truth is not as to whether Being or Non-Being, Reality or
mere Appearance, is experienced, but as to the _worth_ of a certain
concretely experienced thing. The only way of passing upon this
question is by sticking in the most uncompromising fashion to _that_
experience as real. _That_ experience is that two lines with certain
cross-hatchings are apprehended as convergent; only by taking that
experience as real and as fully real, is there any basis for, or way of
going to, an experienced knowledge that the lines are parallel. It is
in the concrete thing _as experienced_ that all the grounds and clues
to its own intellectual or logical rectification are contained. It is
because this thing, afterwards adjudged false, is a concrete _that_,
that it develops into a corrected experience (that is, experience of a
corrected thing--we reform things just as we reform ourselves or a bad
boy) whose full content is not a whit more real, but which is true or
truer.[52]

If _any_ experience, then a _determinate_ experience; and this
determinateness is the only, and is the adequate, principle of
control, or “objectivity.” The experience may be of the vaguest sort.
I may not see anything which I can identify as a familiar object--a
table, a chair, etc. It may be dark; I may have only the vaguest
impression that there is something which looks like a table. Or I may
be completely befogged and confused, as when one rises quickly from
sleep in a pitch-dark room. But this vagueness, this doubtfulness,
this confusion is the thing experienced, and, _qua_ real, is as “good”
a reality as the self-luminous vision of an Absolute. It is not just
vagueness, doubtfulness, confusion, at large or in general. It is
_this_ vagueness, and no other; absolutely unique, absolutely what
_it_ is.[53] Whatever gain in clearness, in fullness, in trueness of
content is experienced must grow out of some element in the experience
of _this_ experienced _as_ what it is. To return to the illusion: If
the experience of the lines as convergent is illusory, it is because of
some elements in the thing as experienced, not because of something
defined in terms of externality to this particular experience. If the
illusoriness can be detected, it is because the thing experienced
is real, having within its experienced reality elements whose _own
mutual_ tension effects its reconstruction. Taken concretely, the
experience of convergent lines contains within itself the elements
of the transformation of its own content. It is _this_ thing, and
not some separate truth, that clamors for its own reform. There is,
then, from the empiricist’s point of view, no need to search for some
aboriginal _that_ to which all successive experiences are attached,
and which is somehow thereby undergoing continuous change. Experience
is always of _thats_; and the most comprehensive and inclusive
experience of the universe that the philosopher himself can obtain
is the experience of a characteristic _that_. From the empiricist’s
point of view, this is as true of the exhaustive and complete insight
of a hypothetical all-knower as of the vague, blind experience of the
awakened sleeper. As reals, they stand on the same level. As trues,
the latter has by definition the better of it; but if this insight is
in any way the truth of the blind awakening, it is because the latter
has, in its _own_ determinate _quale_, elements of real continuity
with the former; it is, _ex hypothesi_, transformable through a series
of experienced reals without break of continuity, into the absolute
thought-experience. There is no need of logical manipulation to effect
the transformation, nor _could_ any logical consideration effect it.
If effected at all it is just by immediate experiences, each of which
is just as real (no more, no less) as either of the two terms between
which they lie. Such, at least, is the meaning of the empiricist’s
contention. So, when he talks of experience, he does not mean some
grandiose, remote affair that is cast like a net around a succession
of fleeting experiences; he does not mean an indefinite total,
comprehensive experience which somehow engirdles an endless flux; he
means that _things_ are what they are experienced to be, and that every
experience is _some_ thing.

From the postulate of empiricism, then (or, what is the same thing,
from a _general_ consideration of the concept of experience), nothing
can be deduced, not a single philosophical proposition.[54] The
reader may hence conclude that all this just comes to the truism that
experience is experience, or is what it is. If one attempts to draw
conclusions from the bare concept of experience, the reader is quite
right. But the real significance of the principle is that of a method
of philosophical analysis--a method identical in kind (but differing
in problem and hence in operation) with that of the scientist. If you
wish to find out what subjective, objective, physical, mental, cosmic,
psychic, cause, substance, purpose, activity, evil, being, quality--any
philosophic term, in short--means, go to experience and see what the
thing is experienced _as_.

Such a method is not spectacular; it permits of no offhand
demonstrations of God, freedom, immortality, nor of the exclusive
reality of matter, or ideas, or consciousness, etc. But it supplies a
way of telling what all these terms mean. It may seem insignificant,
or chillingly disappointing, but only upon condition that it be not
worked. Philosophic conceptions have, I believe, outlived their
usefulness considered as stimulants to emotion, or as a species of
sanctions; and a larger, more fruitful and more valuable career awaits
them considered as specifically experienced meanings.

    [NOTE: The reception of this essay proved that I was unreasonably
    sanguine in thinking that the foot-note of warning, appended
    to the title, would forfend radical misapprehension. I see now
    that it was unreasonable to expect that the word “immediate”
    in a philosophic writing could be generally understood to
    apply to anything except _knowledge_, even though the body of
    the essay is a protest against such limitation. But I venture
    to repeat that the essay is not a denial of the necessity of
    “mediation,” or reflection, in knowledge, but is an assertion
    that the inferential factor must _exist_, or must occur, and
    that all existence is direct and vital, so that philosophy can
    pass upon its nature--as upon the nature of all of the rest of
    its subject-matter--only by first ascertaining what it exists or
    occurs _as_.

    I venture to repeat also another statement of the text: I do not
    mean by “immediate experience” any aboriginal stuff out of which
    things are evolved, but I use the term to indicate the necessity
    of employing in philosophy the direct descriptive method that
    has now made its way in all the natural sciences, with such
    modifications, of course, as the subject itself entails.

    There is nothing in the text to imply that things exist
    in experience atomically or in isolation. When it is said
    that a thing as cognized is _different_ from an earlier
    non-cognitionally experienced thing, the saying no more implies
    lack of continuity between the things, than the obvious remark
    that a seed is different from a flower or a leaf denies their
    continuity. The amount and kind of continuity or discreteness
    that exists is to be discovered by recurring to what actually
    occurs in experience.

    Finally, there is nothing in the text that denies the existence
    of things temporally prior to human experiencing of them.
    Indeed, I should think it fairly obvious that we experience most
    things _as_ temporally prior to our experiencing of them. The
    import of the article is to the effect that we are not entitled
    to draw philosophic (as distinct from scientific) conclusions
    as to the meaning of prior temporal existence till we have
    ascertained what it is to experience a thing as past. These four
    disclaimers cover, I think, all the misapprehensions disclosed in
    the four or five controversial articles (noted below) that the
    original essay evoked. One of these articles (that of Professor
    Woodbridge), raised a point of fact, holding that cognitional
    experience tells us, without alteration, just what the things
    of other types of experience are, and in that sense transcends
    other experiences. This is too fundamental an issue to discuss
    in a note, and I content myself with remarking that with respect
    to it, the bearing of the article is that the issue must be
    settled by a careful descriptive survey of things as experienced,
    to see whether modifications do not occur in existences when
    they are experienced _as_ known; _i.e._, as true or false in
    character. The reader interested in following up this discussion
    is referred to the following articles: Vol. II. of the _Journal
    of Philosophy, Psychology, and Scientific Methods_, two articles
    by Bakewell, p. 520 and p. 687; one by Bode, p. 658; one by
    Woodbridge, p. 573; Vol. III. of the same Journal, by Leighton,
    p. 174.]




“CONSCIOUSNESS” AND EXPERIENCE[55]


Every science in its final standpoint and working aims is controlled
by conditions lying outside itself--conditions that subsist in the
practical life of the time. With no science is this as obviously true
as with psychology. Taken without nicety of analysis, no one would
deny that psychology is specially occupied with the individual; that
it wishes to find out those things that proceed peculiarly from the
individual, and the mode of their connection with him. Now, the way
in which the individual is conceived, the value that is attributed to
him, the things in his make-up that arouse interest, are not due at the
outset to psychology. The scientific view regards these matters in a
reflected, a borrowed, medium. They are revealed in the light of social
life. An autocratic, an aristocratic, a democratic society propound
such different estimates of the worth and place of individuality;
they procure for the individual as an individual such different sorts
of experience; they aim at arousing such different impulses and
at organizing them according to such different purposes, that the
psychology arising in each must show a different temper.

In this sense, psychology is a political science. While the professed
psychologist, in his conscious procedure, may easily cut his
subject-matter loose from these practical ties and references, yet the
starting point and goal of his course are none the less socially set.
In this conviction I venture to introduce to an audience that could
hardly be expected to be interested in the technique of psychology, a
technical subject, hoping that the human meaning may yet appear.

There is at present a strong, apparently a growing tendency to conceive
of psychology as an account of the consciousness of the individual,
considered as something in and by itself; consciousness, the assumption
virtually runs, being of such an order that it may be analyzed,
described, and explained in terms of just itself. The statement, as
commonly made, is that psychology is an account of consciousness, _qua_
consciousness; and the phrase is supposed to limit psychology to a
certain definite sphere of fact that may receive adequate discussion
for scientific purposes, without troubling itself with what lies
outside. Now if this conception be true, there is no intimate, no
important connection of psychology and philosophy at large. That
philosophy, whose range is comprehensive, whose problems are catholic,
should be held down by a discipline whose voice is as partial as its
material is limited, is out of the range of intelligent discussion.

But there is another possibility. If the individual of whom psychology
treats be, after all, a social individual, any absolute setting off and
apart of a sphere of consciousness as, even for scientific purposes,
self-sufficient, is condemned in advance. All such limitation, and
all inquiries, descriptions, explanations that go with it, are only
preliminary. “Consciousness” is but a symbol, an anatomy whose life is
in natural and social operations. To know the symbol, the psychical
letter, is important; but its necessity lies not within itself, but
in the need of a language for reading the things signified. If this
view be correct, we cannot be so sure that psychology is without large
philosophic significance. Whatever meaning the individual has for the
social life that he both incorporates and animates, that meaning has
psychology for philosophy.

This problem is too important and too large to suffer attack in
an evening’s address. Yet I venture to consider a portion of it,
hoping that such things as appear will be useful clues in entering
wider territory. We may ask what is the effect upon psychology of
considering its material as something so distinct as to be capable
of treatment without involving larger issues. In this inquiry we
take as representative some such account of the science as this:
Psychology deals with consciousness “as such” in its various modes and
processes. It aims at an isolation of each such as will permit accurate
description: at statement of its place in the serial order such as will
enable us to state the laws by which one calls another into being,
or as will give the natural history of its origin, maturing, and
dissolution. It is both analytic and synthetic--analytic in that it
resolves each state into its constituent elements; synthetic in that it
discovers the processes by which these elements combine into complex
wholes and series. It leaves alone--it shuts out--questions concerning
the validity, the objective import of these modifications: of their
value in conveying truth, in effecting goodness, in constituting
beauty. For it is just with such questions of worth, of validity, that
philosophy has to do.

Some such view as this is held by the great majority of working
psychologists to-day. A variety of reasons have conspired to bring
about general acceptance. Such a view seems to enroll one in the ranks
of the scientific men rather than of the metaphysicians--and there are
those who distrust the metaphysicians. Others desire to take problems
piecemeal and in detail, avoiding that excursion into ultimates, into
that never-ending panorama of new questions and new possibilities
that seems to be the fate of the philosopher. While no temperate
mind can do other than sympathize with this view, it is hardly more
than an expedient. For, as Mr. James remarks, after disposing of
the question of free-will by relegating it to the domain of the
metaphysician:--“Metaphysics means only an unusually obstinate attempt
to think clearly and consistently”--and clearness and consistency are
not things to be put off beyond a certain point. When the metaphysician
chimes in with this new-found modesty of the psychologist, so different
from the disposition of Locke and Hume and the Mills, salving his
metaphysical conscience with the remark--it hardly possesses the
dignity of a conviction--that the partial sciences, just because they
are partial, are not expected to be coherent with themselves nor with
one another; when the metaphysician, I say, praises the psychologist
for sticking to his last, we are reminded that another motive is
also at work. There is a half-conscious irony in this abnegation of
psychology. It is not the first time that science has assumed the work
of Cinderella; and, since Mr. Huxley has happily reminded her, she is
not altogether oblivious, in her modesty, of a possible future check to
the pride of her haughty sister, and of a certain coronation that shall
mark her coming to her own.

But, be the reasons as they may, there is little doubt of the fact.
Almost all our working psychologists admit, nay, herald this limitation
of their work. I am not presumptuous enough to set myself against this
array. I too proclaim myself of those who believe that psychology has
to do (at a certain point, that is) with “consciousness as such.” But
I do not believe that the limitation is final. Quite the contrary:
if “consciousness” or “state of consciousness” be given intelligible
meaning, I believe that this conception is the open gateway into the
fair fields of philosophy. For, note you, the phrase is an ambiguous
one. It may mean one thing to the metaphysician who proclaims: Here
finally we have psychology recognizing her due metes and bounds,
giving bonds to trespass no more. It may mean quite another thing to
the psychologist in his work--whatever he may happen to say about it.
It may be that the psychologist deals with states of consciousness
as the significant, the analyzable and describable form, to which he
reduces the things he is studying. Not that they _are_ that existence,
but that they are its indications, its clues, in shape for handling
by scientific methods. So, for example, does the paleontologist
work. Those curiously shaped and marked forms to which he is devoted
are not life, nor are they the literal termini of his endeavor; but
through them as signs and records he construes a life. And again, the
painter-artist might well say that he is concerned only with colored
paints as such. Yet none the less through them as registers and
indices, he reveals to us the mysteries of sunny meadow, shady forest,
and twilight wave. These are the things-in-themselves of which the oils
on his palette are phenomena.

So the preoccupation of the psychologist with states of consciousness
may signify that they are the media, the concrete conditions to which
he purposely reduces his material, in order, _through them_, as
methodological helps, to get at and understand that which is anything
but a state of consciousness. To him, however, who insists upon the
fixed and final limitation of psychology, the state of consciousness is
not the shape some fact takes from the exigency of investigation; it
is literally the full fact itself. It is not an intervening term; it
bounds the horizon. Here, then, the issue defines itself. I conceive
that states of consciousness (and I hope you will take the phrase
broadly enough to cover all the specific data of psychology) have no
existence before the psychologist begins to work. He brings them into
existence. What we are really after is the process of experience, the
way in which it arises and behaves. We want to know its course, its
history, its laws. We want to know its various typical forms; how
each originates; how it is related to others; the part it plays in
maintaining an inclusive, expanding, connected course of experience.
Our problem as psychologists is to learn its _modus operandi_, its
method.

The paleontologist is again summoned to our aid. In a given district
he finds a great number and variety of footprints. From these he goes
to work to construct the structure and the life habits of the animals
that made them. The tracks exist undoubtedly; they are there; but yet
he deals with them not as final existences but as signs, phenomena in
the literal sense. Imagine the hearing that the critic would receive
who should inform the paleontologist that he is transcending his
field of scientific activity; that his concern is with footprints
as such, aiming to describe each, to analyze it into its simplest
forms, to compare the different kinds with one another so as to detect
common elements, and finally, thereby, to discover the laws of their
arrangement in space!

Yet the immediate data are footprints, and footprints only. The
paleontologist does in a way do all these things that our imaginary
critic is urging upon him. The difference is not that he arbitrarily
lugs in other data; that he invents entities and faculties that are
not there. The difference is in his standpoint. His interest is in
the animals, and the data are treated in whatever way seems likely to
serve this interest. So with the psychologist. He is continually and
perforce occupied with minute and empirical investigation of special
facts--states of consciousness, if you please. But these neither define
nor exhaust his scientific problem. They are his footprints, his
clues through which he places before himself the life-process he is
studying--with the further difference that his footprints are not after
all given to him, but are developed by his investigation.[56]

The supposition that these states are somehow existent by themselves
and in this existence provide the psychologist with ready-made
material is just the supreme case of the “psychological fallacy”: the
confusion of experience as it is to the one experiencing with what the
psychologist makes out of it with his reflective analysis.

The psychologist begins with certain operations, acts, functions as
his data. If these fall out of sight in the course of discussion, it
is only because having been taken for granted, they remain to control
the whole development of the inquiry, and to afford the sterling medium
of redemption. Acts such as perceiving, remembering, intending, loving
give the points of departure; they alone are concrete experiences.
To understand these experiences, under what conditions they arise,
and what effects they produce, analysis into states of consciousness
occurs. And the modes of consciousness that are figured remain
unarranged and unimportant, save as they may be translated back into
acts.

To remember is to do something, as much as to shoe a horse, or to
cherish a keepsake. To propose, to observe, to be kindly affectioned,
are terms of value, of practice, of operation; just as digestion,
respiration, locomotion express functions, not observable “objects.”
But there is an object that may be described: lungs, stomach,
leg-muscles, or whatever. Through the structure we present to
ourselves the function; it appears laid out before us, spread forth
in detail--objectified in a word. The anatomist who devotes himself
to this detail may, if he please (and he probably does please to
concentrate his devotion) ignore the function: to discover what
is there, to analyze, to measure, to describe, gives him outlet
enough. But nevertheless it is the function that fixed the point
of departure, that prescribed the problem and that set the limits,
physical as well as intellectual, of subsequent investigation.
Reference to function makes the details discovered other than a
jumble of incoherent trivialities. One might as well devote himself
to the minute description of a square yard of desert soil were it not
for this translation. States of consciousness are the morphology of
certain functions.[57] What is true of analysis, of description, is
true equally of classification. Knowing, willing, feeling, name states
of consciousness not in terms of themselves, but in terms of acts,
attitudes, found in experience.[58]

Explanation, even of an “empirical sort” is as impossible as
determination of a “state” and its classification, when we
rigidly confine ourselves to modifications of consciousness as
a self-existent. Sensations are always defined, classified, and
explained by reference to conditions which, according to the theory,
are extraneous--sense-organs and stimuli. The whole physiological
side assumes a ludicrously anomalous aspect on this basis.[59] While
experimentation is retained, and even made much of, it is at the cost
of logical coherence. To experiment with reference to a bare state
of consciousness is a performance of which one cannot imagine the
nature, to say nothing of doing it; while to experiment with reference
to acts and the conditions of their occurrence is a natural and
straightforward undertaking. Such simple processes as association are
concretely inexplicable when we assume states of consciousness as
existences by themselves. As recent psychology testifies, we again have
to resort to conditions that have no place nor calling on the basis
of the theory--the principle of habit, of neural action, or else some
connection in the object.[60]

We have only to note that there are two opposing schools in psychology
to see in what an unscientific status is the subject. We have only
to consider that these two schools are the result of assuming states
of consciousness as existences _per se_ to locate the source of
the scientific scandal. No matter what the topic, whether memory
or association or attention or effort, the same dualisms present
themselves, the same necessity of choosing between two schools. One,
lost in the distinctions that it has developed, denies the function
because it can find objectively presented only states of consciousness.
So it abrogates the function, regarding it as a mere aggregate of
such states, or as a purely external and factitious relation between
them. The other school, recognizing that this procedure explains away
rather than explains, the values of experience, attempts to even up
by declaring that certain functions are themselves immediately given
data of consciousness, existing side by side with the “states,” but
indefinitely transcending them in worth, and apprehended by some higher
organ. So against the elementary contents and external associations of
the analytic school in psychology, we have the complicated machinery
of the intellectualist school, with its pure self-consciousness as a
source of ultimate truths, its hierarchy of intuitions, its ready-made
faculties. To be sure, these “spiritual faculties” are now largely
reduced to some one comprehensive form--Apperception, or Will, or
Attention, or whatever the fashionable term may be. But the principle
remains the same; the assumption of a function as a given existent,
distinguishable in itself and acting upon other existences--as if
the functions digestion and vision were regarded as separate from
organic structures, somehow acting upon them from the outside so as
to bring co-operation and harmony into them![61] This division into
psychological schools is as reasonable as would be one of botanists
into rootists and flowerists; of those proclaiming the root to be
the rudimentary and essential structure, and those asserting that
since the function of seed-bearing is the main thing, the flower is
really the controlling “synthetic” principle. Both sensationalist and
intellectualist suppose that psychology has some special sphere of
“reality” or of experience marked off for it within which the data are
just lying around, self-existent and ready-made, to be picked up and
assorted as pebbles await the visitor on the beach. Both alike fail to
recognize that the psychologist first has experience to deal with; the
same experience that the zoologist, geologist, chemist, mathematician,
and historian deal with, and that what characterizes his specialty is
not some data or existences which he may call uniquely his own; but the
problem raised--the problem of the _course_ of the acts that constitute
experiencing.

Here psychology gets its revenge upon those who would rule it out of
possession of important philosophical bearing. As a matter of fact,
the larger part of the questions that are being discussed in current
epistemology and what is termed metaphysic of logic and ethic arise
out of (and are hopelessly compromised by) this original assumption
of “consciousness as such”--in other words, are provoked by the exact
reason that is given for denying to psychology any essential meaning
for epistemology and metaphysic. Such is the irony of the situation.
The epistemologist’s problem is, indeed, usually put as the question of
how the subject can so far “transcend” itself as to get valid assurance
of the objective world. The very phraseology in which the problem is
put reveals the thoroughness of the psychologist’s revenge. Just and
only because experience has been reduced to “states of consciousness”
as independent existences, does the question of self-transcendence
have any meaning. The entire epistemological industry is one--shall
I say it--of a Sisyphean nature. _Mutatis mutandis_, the same holds
of the metaphysic of logic, ethic, and esthetic. In each case, the
basic problem has come to be how a mere state of consciousness can be
the vehicle of a system of truth, of an objectively valid good, of
beauty which is other than agreeable feeling. We may, indeed, excuse
the psychologist for not carrying on the special inquiries that are
the business of logical, ethical, and esthetical philosophy; but can
we excuse ourselves for forcing his results into such a shape as to
make philosophic problems so arbitrary that they are soluble only by
arbitrarily wrenching scientific facts?

Undoubtedly we are between two fires. In placing upon psychology
the responsibility of discovering the method of experience, as a
sequence of acts and passions, do we not destroy just that limitation
to concrete detail which now constitutes it a science? Will not the
psychologist be the first to repudiate this attempt to mix him up
in matters philosophical? We need only to keep in mind the specific
facts involved in the term Course or Process of Experience to avoid
this danger. The immediate preoccupation of the psychologist is with
very definite and empirical facts--questions like the limits of
audition, of the origin of pitch, of the structure and conditions of
the musical scale, etc. Just so the immediate affair of the geologist
is with particular rock-structures, of the botanist with particular
plants, and so on. But through the collection, description, location,
classification of rocks the geologist is led to the splendid story
of world-forming. The limited, fixed, and separate piece of work is
dissolved away in the fluent and dynamic drama of the earth. So, the
plant leads with inevitableness to the whole process of life and its
evolution.

In form, the botanist still studies the genus, the species, the
plant--hardly, indeed, that; rather the special parts, the structural
elements, of the plant. In reality, he studies life itself; the
structures are the indications, the signature through which he
renders transparent the mystery of life growing in the changing
world. It was doubtless necessary for the botanist to go through the
Linnean period--the period of engagement with rigid detail and fixed
classifications; of tearing apart and piecing together; of throwing
all emphasis upon peculiarities of number, size, and appearance of
matured structure; of regarding change, growth, and function as
external, more or less interesting, attachments to form. Examination
of this period is instructive; there is much in contemporary
investigation and discussion that is almost unpleasantly reminiscent in
its suggestiveness. The psychologist should profit by the intervening
history of science. The conception of evolution is not so much an
additional law as it is a face-about. The fixed structure, the separate
form, the isolated element, is henceforth at best a mere stepping-stone
to knowledge of process, and when not at its best, marks the end of
comprehension, and betokens failure to grasp the problem.

With the change in standpoint from self-included existence to including
process, from structural unit of composition to controlling unity
of function, from changeless form to movement in growth, the whole
scheme of values is transformed. Faculties are definite directions of
development; elements are products that are starting-points for new
processes; bare facts are indices of change; static conditions are
modes of accomplished adjustment. Not that the concrete, empirical
phenomenon loses in worth, much less that unverifiable “metaphysical”
entities are impertinently introduced; but that our aim is the
discovery of a process of actions in its adaptations to circumstance.
If we apply this evolutionary logic in psychology, where shall we
stop? Questions of limits of stimuli in a given sense, say hearing,
are in reality questions of temporary arrests, adjustments marking the
favorable equilibrium of the whole organism; they connect with the
question of the use of sensation in general and auditory sensations
in particular for life-habits; of the origin and use of localized and
distinguished perception; and this, in turn, involves within itself
the whole question of space and time recognition; the significance
of the thing-and-quality experience, and so on. And when we are told
that the question of the origin of space experience has nothing at all
to do with the question of the nature and significance of the space
experienced, the statement is simply evidence that the one who makes
it is still at the static standpoint; he believes that things, that
relations, have existence and significance apart from the particular
conditions under which they come into experience, and apart from the
special service rendered in those particular conditions.

Of course, I am far from saying that every psychologist must make the
whole journey. Each individual may contract, as he pleases, for any
section or subsection he prefers; and undoubtedly the well-being of
the science is advanced by such division of labor. But psychology
goes over the whole ground from detecting every distinct act of
experiencing, to seeing what need calls out the special organ fitted to
cope with the situation, and discovering the machinery through which it
operates to keep a-going the course of action.

But, I shall be told, the wall that divides psychology from philosophy
cannot be so easily treated as non-existent. Psychology is a matter of
natural history, even though it may be admitted that it is the natural
history of the course of experience. But philosophy is a matter of
values; of the criticism and justification of certain validities. One
deals, it is said, with genesis, with conditions of temporal origin
and transition; the other with analysis, with eternal constitution. I
shall have to repeat that just this rigid separation of genesis and
analysis seems to me a survival from a pre-evolutionary, a pre-historic
age. It indicates not so much an assured barrier between philosophy
and psychology as the distance dividing philosophy from all science.
For the lesson that mathematicians first learned, that physics and
chemistry pondered over, in which the biological disciplines were
finally tutored, is that sure and delicate analysis is possible only
through the patient study of conditions of origin and development.
The method of analysis in mathematics is the method of construction.
The experimental method is the method of making, of following the
history of production; the term “cause” that has (when taken as an
existent entity) so hung on the heels of science as to impede its
progress, has universal meaning when read as condition of appearance
in a process. And, as already intimated, the conception of evolution
is no more and no less the discovery of a general law of life than it
is the generalization of all scientific method. Everywhere analysis
that cannot proceed by examining the successive stages of its subject,
from its beginning up to its culmination, that cannot control this
examination by discovering the conditions under which successive stages
appear, is only preliminary. It may further the invention of proper
tools of inquiry, it may help define problems, it may serve to suggest
valuable hypotheses. But as science it breathes an air already tainted.
There is no way to sort out the results flowing from the subject-matter
itself from those introduced by the assumptions and presumptions of
our own reflection. Not so with natural history when it is worthy of
its name. Here the analysis is the unfolding of the existence itself.
Its distinctions are not pigeon-holes of our convenience; they are
stakes that mark the parting of the ways in the process itself. Its
classifications are not a grasp at factors resisting further analysis;
they are the patient tracings of the paths pursued. Nothing is more
out of date than to suppose that interest in genesis is interest in
reducing higher forms to cruder ones: it is interest in locating the
exact and objective conditions under which a given fact appears, and
in relation to which accordingly it has its meaning. Nothing is more
naïve than to suppose that in pursuing “natural history” (term of scorn
in which yet resides the dignity of the world-drama) we simply learn
something of the temporal conditions under which a given value appears,
while its own eternal essential quality remains as opaque as before.
Nature knows no such divorce of quality and circumstance. Things come
when they are wanted and as they are wanted; their quality is precisely
the response they give to the conditions that call for them, while
the furtherance they afford to the movement of their whole is their
meaning. The severance of analysis and genesis, instead of serving as
a ready-made test by which to try out the empirical, temporal events
of psychology from the rational abiding constitution of philosophy,
is a brand of philosophic dualism: the supposition that values are
externally obtruded and statically set in irrelevant rubbish.

There are those who will admit that “states of consciousness” are
but the cross-sections of flow of behavior, arrested for inspection,
made in order that we may reconstruct experience in its lifehistory.
Yet in the knowledge of the course and method of our experience,
they will hold that we are far from the domain proper of philosophy.
Experience, they say, is just the historic achievement of finite
individuals; it tells the tale of approach to the treasures of truth,
of partial victory, but larger defeat, in laying hold of the treasure.
But, they say, reality is not the path to reality, and record of
devious wanderings in the path is hardly a safe account of the goal.
Psychology, in other words, may tell us something of how we mortals
lay hold of the world of things and truths; of how we appropriate
and assimilate its contents; and of how we react. It may trace the
issues of such approaches and apprehensions upon the course of our
own individual destinies. But it cannot wisely ignore nor sanely deny
the distinction between these individual strivings and achievements,
and the “Reality” that subsists and supports its own structure
outside these finite futilities. The processes by which we turn over
The Reality into terms of our fragmentary unconcluded, inconclusive
experiences are so extrinsic to the Reality itself as to have no
revealing power with reference to it. There is the _ordo ad universum_,
the subject of philosophy; there is the _ordo ad individuum_, the
subject of psychology.

Some such assumption as this lies latent, I am convinced, in all
forswearings of the kinship of psychology and philosophy. Two
conceptions hang together. The opinion that psychology is an account
only and finally of states of consciousness, and therefore can throw
no light upon the objects with which philosophy deals, is twin to
the doctrine that the whole conscious life of the individual is not
organic to the world. The philosophic basis and scope of this doctrine
lie beyond examination here. But even in passing one cannot avoid
remarking that the doctrine is almost never consistently held; the
doctrine logically carried out leads so directly to intellectual and
moral scepticism that the theory usually prefers to work in the dark
background as a disposition and temper of thought rather than to make a
frank statement of itself. Even in the half-hearted expositions of the
process of human experience as something merely annexed to the reality
of the universe, we are brought face to face to the consideration with
which we set out: the dependence of theories of the individual upon
the position at a given time of the individual practical and social.
The doctrine of the accidental, futile, transitory significance of the
individual’s experience as compared with eternal realities; the notion
that at best the individual is simply realizing for and in himself
what already has fixed completeness in itself is congruous only with
a certain intellectual and political scheme and must modify itself as
that shifts. When such rearrangement comes, our estimate of the nature
and importance of psychology will mirror the change.

When man’s command of the methods that control action was precarious
and disturbed; when the tools that subject the world of things and
forces to use and operation were rare and clumsy, it was unavoidable
that the individual should submit his perception and purpose blankly to
the blank reality beyond. Under such circumstances, external authority
must reign; the belief that human experience in itself is approximate,
not intrinsic, is inevitable. Under such circumstances, reference to
the individual, to the subject, is a resort only for explaining error,
illusion, and uncertainty. The necessity of external control and
external redemption of experience reports itself in a low valuation of
the self, and of all the factors and phases of experience that spring
from the self. That the psychology of medievalism should appear only as
a portion of its theology of sin and salvation is as obvious as that
the psychology of the Greeks should be a chapter of cosmology.

As against all this, the assertion is ventured that psychology,
supplying us with knowledge of the behavior of experience, is a
conception of democracy. Its postulate is that since experience
fulfils itself in individuals, since it administers itself through
their instrumentality, the account of the course and method of this
achievement is a significant and indispensable affair.

Democracy is possible only because of a change in intellectual
conditions. It implies tools for getting at truth in detail, and day
by day, as we go along. Only such possession justifies the surrender
of fixed, all-embracing principles to which, as universals, all
particulars and individuals are subject for valuation and regulation.
Without such possession, it is only the courage of the fool that would
undertake the venture to which democracy has committed itself--the
ordering of life in response to the needs of the moment in accordance
with the ascertained truth of the moment. Modern life involves the
deification of the here and the now; of the specific, the particular,
the unique, that which happens once and has no measure of value save
such as it brings with itself. Such deification is monstrous fetishism,
unless the deity be there; unless the universal lives, moves, and has
its being in experience as individualized.[62] This conviction of the
value of the individualized finds its further expression in psychology,
which undertakes to show how this individualization proceeds, and in
what aspect it presents itself.

Of course, such a conception means something for philosophy as well
as for psychology; possibly it involves for philosophy the larger
measure of transformation. It involves surrender of any claim on
the part of philosophy to be the sole source of some truths and the
exclusive guardian of some values. It means that philosophy be a
method; not an assurance company, nor a knight errant. It means an
alignment with science. Philosophy may not be sacrificed to the
partial and superficial clamor of that which sometimes officiously
and pretentiously exhibits itself as Science. But there is a sense
in which philosophy must go to school to the sciences; must have no
data save such as it receives at their hands; and be hospitable to no
method of inquiry or reflection not akin to those in daily use among
the sciences. As long as it claims for itself special territory of
fact, or peculiar modes of access to truth, so long must it occupy a
dubious position. Yet this claim it has to make until psychology comes
to its own. There is something in experience, something in things,
which the physical and the biological sciences do not touch; something,
moreover, which is not just more experiences or more existences;
but without which their materials are inexperienced, unrealized.
Such sciences deal only with what _might_ be experienced; with the
content of experience, provided and assumed there be experience. It is
psychology which tells us how this possible experience loses its barely
hypothetical character, and is stamped with categorical unquestioned
experiencedness; how, in a word, it becomes here and now in some
uniquely individualized life. Here is the necessary transition of
science into philosophy; a passage that carries the verified and solid
body of the one into the large and free form of the other.

    [NOTE: I have let this paper stand much as written, though now
    conscious that much more is crowded into it than could properly
    be presented in one paper. The drift of the ten years from ’99 to
    ’09 has made, I venture to believe, for increased clearness in
    the main positions of the paper: The revival of a naturalistic
    realism, the denial of the existence of “consciousness,” the
    development of functional and dynamic psychology (accompanied
    by aversion to interpretation of functions as faculties of a
    soul-substance)--all of these tendencies are sympathetic with
    the aim of the paper. There is another reason for letting it
    stand: the new functional and pragmatic empiricism proffered
    in this volume has been constantly objected to on the ground
    that its conceptions of knowledge and verification lead only
    to subjectivism and solipsism. The paper may indicate that the
    identification of experience with bare states of consciousness
    represents the standpoint of the critic, not of the empiricism
    criticised, and that it is for him, not for me, to fear the
    subjective implications of such a position. The paper also
    clearly raises the question as to how far the isolation of
    “consciousness” from nature and social life, which characterizes
    the procedure of many psychologists of to-day, is responsible for
    keeping alive quite unreal problems in philosophy.]




THE SIGNIFICANCE OF THE PROBLEM OF KNOWLEDGE[63]


It is now something over a century since Kant called upon philosophers
to cease their discussion regarding the nature of the world and the
principles of existence until they had arrived at some conclusion
regarding the nature of the knowing process. But students of philosophy
know that Kant formulated the question “how knowledge is possible”
rather than created it. As matter of fact, reflective thought for two
centuries before Kant had been principally interested in just this
problem, although it had not generalized its own interest. Kant brought
to consciousness the controlling motive. The discussion, both in Kant
himself and in his successors, often seems scholastic, lost in useless
subtlety, scholastic argument, and technical distinctions. Within the
last decade in particular there have been signs of a growing weariness
as to epistemology, and a tendency to turn away to more fertile
fields. The interest shows signs of exhaustion.

Students of philosophy will recognize what I mean when I say that this
growing conviction of futility and consequent distaste are associated
with the outcome of the famous dictum of Kant, that perception without
conception is blind, while conception without perception is empty. The
whole course of reflection since Kant’s time has tended to justify this
remark. The sensationalist and the rationalist have worked themselves
out. Pretty much all students are convinced that we can reduce
knowledge neither to a set of associated sensations, nor yet to a
purely rational system of relations of thought. Knowledge is judgment,
and judgment requires both a material of sense perception and an
ordering, regulating principle, reason; so much seems certain, but we
do not get any further. Sensation and thought themselves seem to stand
out more rigidly opposed to each other in their own natures than ever.
Why both are necessary, and how two such opposed factors coöperate in
bringing about the unified result of science, becomes more and more of
a mystery. It is the continual running up against this situation which
accounts for the flagging of interest and the desire to direct energy
where it will have more outcome.

This situation creates a condition favorable to taking stock of the
question as it stands; to inquiring what this interest, prolonged
for over three centuries, in the possibility and nature of knowledge,
stands for; what the conviction as to the necessity of the union of
sensation and thought, together with the inability to reach conclusions
regarding the nature of the union, signifies.

I propose then to raise this evening precisely this question: What
is the meaning of the problem of knowledge? What is its meaning, not
simply for reflective philosophy or in terms of epistemology itself,
but what is its meaning in the historical movement of humanity and as
a part of a larger and more comprehensive experience? My thesis is
perhaps sufficiently indicated in the mere taking of this point of
view. It implies that the abstractness of the discussion of knowledge,
its remoteness from everyday experience, is one of form, rather than of
substance. It implies that the problem of knowledge is not a problem
that has its origin, its value, or its destiny within itself. The
problem is one which social life, the organized practice of mankind,
has had to face. The seemingly technical and abstruse discussion of the
philosophers results from the formulation and statement of the question.

I suggest that the problem of the possibility of knowledge is but
an aspect of the question of the relation of knowing to acting, of
theory to practice. The distinctions which the philosophers raise, the
oppositions which they erect, the weary treadmill which they pursue
between sensation and thought, subject and object, mind and matter, are
not invented _ad hoc_, but are simply the concise reports and condensed
formula of points of view and practical conflicts having their source
in the very nature of modern life, conflicts which must be met and
solved if modern life is to go on its way untroubled, with clear
consciousness of what it is about. As the philosopher has received his
problem from the world of action, so he must return his account there
for auditing and liquidation.

More especially, I suggest that the tendency of all the points at issue
to precipitate in the opposition of sensationalism and rationalism
is due to the fact that sensation and reason stand for the two
forces contending for mastery in social life: the radical and the
conservative. The reason that the contest does not end, the reason for
the necessity of the combination of the two in the resultant statement,
is that both factors are necessary in action; one stands for stimulus,
for initiative; the other for control, for direction.

I cannot hope, in the time at my command this evening, to justify
these wide and sweeping assertions regarding either the origin, the
work, or the final destiny of philosophic reflection. I simply hope,
by reference to some of the chief periods of the development of
philosophy, to illustrate to you something of what I mean.

At the outset we take a long scope in our survey and present to
ourselves the epoch when philosophy was still consciously, and not
simply by implication, human, when reflective thought had not developed
its own technique of method, and was in no danger of being caught in
its own machinery--the time of Socrates. What does the assertion of
Socrates that an unexamined life is not one fit to be led by man; what
does his injunction “Know thyself” mean? It means that the corporate
motives and guarantees of conduct are breaking down. We have got away
from the time when the individual could both regulate and justify his
course of life by reference to the ideals incarnate in the habits of
the community of which he is a member. The time of direct and therefore
unconscious union with corporate life, finding therein stimuli, codes,
and values, has departed. The development of industry and commerce, of
war and politics, has brought face to face communities with different
aims and diverse habits; the development of myth and animism into crude
but genuine scientific observation and imagination has transformed
the physical widening of the horizon, brought about by commerce
and intercourse, into an intellectual and moral expansion. The old
supports fail precisely at the time when they are most needed--before
a widening and more complex scene of action. Where, then, shall the
agent of action turn? The “Know thyself” of Socrates is the reply to
the practical problem which confronted Athens in his day. Investigation
into the true ends and worths of human life, sifting and testing of all
competing ends, the discovery of a method which should validate the
genuine and dismiss the spurious, had henceforth to do for man what
consolidated and incorporate custom had hitherto presented as a free
and precious gift.

With Socrates the question is as direct and practical as the question
of making one’s living or of governing the state; it is indeed the
same question put in its general form. It is a question that the flute
player, the cobbler, and the politician must face no more and no less
than the reflective philosopher. The question is addressed by Socrates
to every individual and to every group with which he comes in contact.
Because the question is practical it is individual and direct. It is a
question which every one must face and answer for himself, just as in
the Protestant scheme every individual must face and solve for himself
the question of his final destiny.

Yet the very attitude of Socrates carried with it the elements of its
own destruction. Socrates could only raise the question, or rather
demand of every individual that he raise it for himself. Of the answer
he declared himself to be as ignorant as was any one. The result
could be only a shifting of the center of interest. If the question is
so all-important, and yet the wisest of all men must confess that he
only knows his own ignorance as to its answer, the inevitable point
of further consideration is the discovery of a method which shall
enable the question to be answered. This is the significance of Plato.
The problem is the absolutely inevitable outgrowth of the Socratic
position; and yet it carried with it just as inevitably the separation
of philosopher from shoemaker and statesman, and the relegation of
theory to a position remote for the time being from conduct.

If the Socratic command, “Know thyself,” runs against the dead wall of
inability to conduct this knowledge, some one must take upon himself
the discovery of how the requisite knowledge may be obtained. A new
profession is born, that of the thinker. At this time the means,
the discovery of how the aims and worths of the self may be known
and measured, becomes, for this class, an end in itself. Theory is
ultimately to be applied to practice; but in the meantime the theory
must be worked out as theory or else no application. This represents
the peculiar equilibrium and the peculiar point of contradiction in
the Platonic system. All philosophy is simply for the sake of the
organization and regulation of social life; and yet the philosophers
must be a class by themselves, working out their peculiar problems
with their own particular tools.

With Aristotle the attempted balance failed. Social life is
disintegrating beyond the point of hope of a successful reorganization,
and thinking is becoming a fascinating pursuit for its own sake. The
world of practice is now the world of compromise and of adjustment.
It is relative to partial aims and finite agents. The sphere of
absolute and enduring truth and value can be reached only in and
through thought. The one who acts compromises himself with the animal
desire that inspires his action and with the alien material that forms
its stuff. In two short generations the divorce of philosophy from
life, the isolation of reflective theory from practical conduct, has
completed itself. So great is the irony of history that this sudden and
effective outcome was the result of the attempt to make thought the
instrument of action, and action the manifestation of truth reached by
thinking.

But this statement must not be taken too literally. It is impossible
that men should really separate their ideas from their acts. If we
look ahead a few centuries we find that the philosophy of Plato and
Aristotle has accomplished, in an indirect and unconscious way,
what perhaps it could never have effected by the more immediate and
practical method of Socrates. Philosophy became an organ of vision,
an instrument of interpretation; it furnished the medium through which
the world was seen and the course of life estimated. Philosophy died
as philosophy, to rise as the set and bent of the human mind. Through
a thousand and devious and roundabout channels, the thoughts of the
philosophers filtered through the strata of human consciousness and
conduct. Through the teachings of grammarians, rhetoricians, and a
variety of educational schools, they were spread in diluted form
through the whole Roman Empire and were again precipitated in the
common forms of speech. Through the earnestness of the moral propaganda
of the Stoics they became the working rules of life for the more
strenuous and earnest spirits. Through the speculations of the Sceptics
and Epicureans they became the chief reliance and consolation of a
large number of highly cultured individuals amid social turmoil and
political disintegration. All these influences and many more finally
summed themselves up in the two great media through which Greek
philosophy finally fixed the intellectual horizon of man, determined
the values of its perspective, and meted out the boundaries and
divisions of the scene of human action.

These two influences were the development of Christian theology
and moral theory, and the organization of the system of Roman
jurisprudence. There is perhaps no more fascinating chapter in
the history of humanity than the slow and tortuous processes by
which the ideas set in motion by that Athenian citizen who faced
death as serenely as he conversed with a friend, finally became the
intellectually organizing centers of the two great movements that
bridge the span between ancient civilization and modern. As the
personal and immediate force and enthusiasm of the movement initiated
by Jesus began to grow fainter and the commanding influence of his own
personality commenced to dim, the ideas of the world and of life, of
God and of man, elaborated in Greek philosophy, served to transform
moral enthusiasm and personal devotion to the redemption of humanity,
into a splendid and coherent view of the universe; a view that resisted
all disintegrating influences and gathered into itself the permanent
ideas and progressive ideals thus far developed in the history of man.

We have only a faint idea of how this was accomplished, or of the
thoroughness of the work done. We have perhaps even more inadequate
conceptions of the great organizing and centralizing work done by Greek
thought in the political sphere. When the military and administrative
genius of Rome brought the whole world in subjection to itself, the
most pressing of practical problems was to give unity of practical
aim and harmony of working machinery to the vast and confused
mass of local custom and tradition, religious, social, economic,
and intellectual, as well as political. In this juncture the great
administrators and lawyers of Rome seized with avidity upon the
results of the intellectual analysis of social and political relations
elaborated in Greek philosophy. Caring naught for these results in
their reflective and theoretical character, they saw in them the
possible instrument of introducing order into chaos and of transforming
the confused and conflicting medley of practice and opinion into a
harmonious social structure. Roman law, that formed the vertebral
column of civilization for a thousand years, and which articulated the
outer order of life as distinctly as Christianity controlled the inner,
was the outcome.

Thought was once more in unity with action, philosophy had become the
instrument of conduct. Mr. Bosanquet makes the pregnant remark “that
the weakness of medieval science and philosophy are connected rather
with excess of practice than with excess of theory. The subordination
of philosophy to theology is a subordination of science to a formulated
conception of human welfare. Its essence is present, not wherever there
is metaphysics but wherever the spirit of truth is subordinated to any
preconceived practical intent.” (“History of Esthetics,” p. 146.)

Once more the irony of history displays itself. Thought has become
practical, it has become the regulator of individual conduct and
social organization, but at the expense of its own freedom and power.
The defining characteristic of medievalism in state and in church, in
political and spiritual life, is that truth presents itself to the
individual only through the medium of organized authority.

There was a historical necessity on the external as well as the
internal side. We have not the remotest way of imagining what the
outcome would finally have been if, at the time when the intellectual
structure of the Christian church and the legal structure of the
Roman Empire had got themselves thoroughly organized, the barbarians
had not made their inroads and seized upon all this accumulated and
consolidated wealth as their own legitimate prey. But this was what did
happen. As a result, truths originally developed by the freest possible
criticism and investigation became external, and imposed themselves
upon the mass of individuals by the mere weight of authoritative law.
The external, transcendental, and supernatural character of spiritual
truth and of social control during the Middle Ages is naught but
the mirror, in consciousness, of the relation existing between the
eager, greedy, undisciplined horde of barbarians on one side, and the
concentrated achievements of ancient civilization on the other. There
was no way out save that the keen barbarian whet his appetite upon
the rich banquet spread before him. But there was equally no way out
so far as the continuity of civilization was concerned save that the
very fullness and richness of this banquet set limits to the appetite,
and finally, when assimilated and digested, it be transformed into the
flesh and blood, the muscles and sinew of him who sat at the feast.
Thus the barbarian ceased to be a barbarian and a new civilization
arose.

But the time came when the work of absorption was fairly complete.
The northern barbarians had eaten the food and drunk the wine of
Græco-Roman civilization. The authoritative truth embodied in medieval
state and church succeeded, in principle, in disciplining the untrained
masses. Its very success issued its own death warrant. To say that it
had succeeded means that the new people had finally eaten their way
into the heart of the ideas offered them, had got from them what they
wanted, and were henceforth prepared to go their own way and make their
own living. Here a new rhythm of the movement of thought and action
begins to show itself.

The beginning of this change in the swing of thought and action forms
the transition from the Middle Ages to the modern times. It is the
epoch of the Renaissance. The individual comes to a new birth and
asserts his own individuality and demands his own rights in the way
of feeling, doing, and knowing for himself. Science, art, religion,
political life, must all be made over on the basis of recognizing the
claims of the individual.

Pardon me these commonplaces, but they are necessary to the course of
the argument. By historic fallacy we often suppose, or imagine that
we suppose, that the individual had been present as a possible center
of action all through the Middle Ages, but through some external
and arbitrary interference had been weighted down by political and
intellectual despotism. All this inverts the true order of the case.
The very possibility of the individual making such unlimited demands
for himself, claiming to be the legitimate center of all action and
standard for all organization, was dependent, as I have already
indicated, upon the intervening medievalism. Save as having passed
through this period of tremendous discipline, and having gradually
worked over into his own habits and purposes the truths embodied in
the church and state that controlled his conduct, the individual could
be only a source of disorder and a disturber of civilization. The very
maintenance of the spiritual welfare of mankind was bound up in the
extent to which the claim of truth and reality to be universal and
objective, far above all individual feeling and thought, could make
itself valid. The logical realism and universalism of scholastic
philosophy simply reflect the actual subjection of the individual to
that associated and corporate life which, in conserving the past,
provided the principle of control.

But the eager, hungry barbarian was there, implicated in this
universalism. He must be active in receiving and in absorbing the
truth authoritatively doled out to him. Even the most rigid forms of
medieval Christianity could not avoid postulating the individual will
as having a certain initiative with reference to its own salvation. The
impulses, the appetite, the instinct of the individual were all assumed
in medieval morals, religion, and politics. The imagined medieval
tyranny took them for granted as completely as does the modern herald
of liberty and equality. But the medieval civilization knew that the
time had not come when these appetites and impulses could be trusted to
work themselves out. They must be controlled by the incorporate truths
inherited from Athens and Rome.

The very logic of the relationship, however, required that the time
come when the individual makes his own the objective and universal
truths. He is now the incorporation of truth. He now has the control as
well as the stimulus of action within himself. He is the standard and
the end, as well as the initiator and the effective force of execution.
Just because the authoritative truth of medievalism has succeeded, has
fulfilled its function, the individual can begin to assert himself.

Contrast this critical period, finding its expression equally in
the art of the Renaissance, the revival of learning, the Protestant
Reformation, and political democracy, with Athens in the time of
Socrates. Then individuals felt their own social life disintegrated,
dissolving under their very feet. The problem was how the value of that
social life was to be maintained against the external and internal
forces that were threatening it. The problem was on the side neither
of the individual nor of progress; save as the individual was seen
to be an intervening instrument in the reconstruction of the social
unity. But with the individual of the fourteenth century, it was not
his own intimate community life which was slipping away from him. It
was an alien and remote life which had finally become his own; which
had passed over into his own inner being. The problem was not how a
unity of social life should be conserved, but what the individual
should do with the wealth of resources of which he found himself the
rightful heir and administrator. The problem looked out upon the
future, not back to the past. It was how to create a new order, both
of modes of individual conduct and forms of social life that should
be the appropriate manifestations of the vigorous and richly endowed
individual.

Hence the conception of progress as a ruling idea; the conception of
the individual as the source and standard of rights; and the problem
of knowledge, were all born together. Given the freed individual, who
feels called upon to create a new heaven and a new earth, and who
feels himself gifted with the power to perform the task to which he is
called:--and the demand for science, for a method of discovering and
verifying truth, becomes imperious. The individual is henceforth to
supply control, law, and not simply stimulation and initiation. What
does this mean but that instead of any longer receiving or assimilating
truth, he is now to search for and create it? Having no longer the
truth imposed by authority to rely upon, there is no resource save
to secure the authority of truth. The possibility of getting at and
utilizing this truth becomes therefore the underlying and conditioning
problem of modern life. Strange as it may sound, the question which
was formulated by Kant as that of the possibility of knowledge, is the
fundamental political problem of modern life.

Science and metaphysics or philosophy, though seeming often to be at
war, with their respective adherents often throwing jibes and slurs
at each other, are really the most intimate allies. The philosophic
movement is simply the coming to consciousness of this claim of the
individual to be able to discover and verify truth for himself,
and thereby not only to direct his own conduct, but to become an
influential and decisive factor in the organization of life itself.
Modern philosophy is the formulation of this creed, both in general and
in its more specific implications. We often forget that the technical
problem “_how_ knowledge is possible,” also means “how _knowledge_ is
possible”; how, that is, shall the individual be able to back himself
up by truth which has no authority save that of its own intrinsic
truthfulness. Science, on the other hand, is simply this general faith
or creed asserting itself in detail; it is the practical faith at work
engaged in subjugating the foreign territory of ignorance and falsehood
step by step. If the ultimate outcome depends upon this detailed and
concrete work, we must not forget that the earnestness and courage, as
well as the intelligence and clearness with which the task has been
undertaken, have depended largely upon the wider, even if vaguer,
operation of philosophy.

But the student of philosophy knows more than that the problem of
knowledge has been with increasing urgency and definiteness the
persistent and comprehensive problem. So conscious is he of the two
opposed theories regarding the nature of science, that he often forgets
the underlying bond of unity of which we have been speaking. These two
opposing schools are those which we know as the sensationalist and the
intellectualist, the empiricist and the rationalist. Admitting that the
dominance of the question of the possibility and nature of knowledge is
at bottom a fundamental question of practice and of social direction,
is _this_ distinction anything more than the clash of scholastic
opinions, a rivalry of ideas meaningless for conduct?

I think it is. Having made so many sweeping assertions I must venture
one more. Fanciful and forced as it may seem, I would say that the
sensational and empirical schools represent in conscious and reflective
form the continuation of the principle of the northern and barbarian
side of medieval life; while the intellectualist and the rationalist
stand for the conscious elaboration of the principle involved in the
Græco-Roman tradition.

Once more, as I cannot hope to prove, let me expand and illustrate.
The sensationalist has staked himself upon the possibility of
explaining and justifying knowledge by conceiving it as the grouping
and combination of the qualities directly given us in sensation. The
special reasons advanced in support of this position are sufficiently
technical and remote. But the motive which has kept the sensationalist
at work, which animated Hobbes and Locke, Hume and John Stuart Mill,
Voltaire and Diderot, was a human not a scholastic one. It was the
belief that only in sensation do we get any personal contact with
reality, and hence, any genuine guarantee of vital truth. Thought is
pale, and remote from the concrete stuff of knowledge and experience.
It only formulates and duplicates; it only divides and recombines that
fullness of vivid reality got directly and at first hand in sense
experience. Reason, compared with sense, is indirect, emasculate, and
faded.

Moreover, reason and thought in their very generality seem to lie
beyond and outside the individual. In this remoteness, when they claim
any final value, they violate the very first principle of the modern
consciousness. What is the distinguishing characteristic of modern
life, unless it be precisely that the individual shall not simply
get, and reason about, truth in the abstract, but shall make it his
own in the most intimate and personal way? He has not only to know
the truth in the sense of knowing about it, but he must feel it. What
is sensation but the answer to this demand for the most individual
and intimate contact with reality? Show me a sensationalist and I
will show you not only one who believes that he is on the side of
concreteness and definiteness, as against washed-out abstractions and
misty general notions: but also one who believes that he is identified
with the cause of the individual as distinct from that of external
authority. We have only to go to our Locke and our Mill to see that
opposition to the innate and the _a priori_ was felt to be opposition
to the deification of hereditary prejudice and to the reception of
ideas without examination or criticism. Personal contact with reality
through sensation seemed to be the only safeguard from opinions which,
while masquerading in the guise of absolute and eternal truth, were in
reality but the prejudices of the past become so ingrained as to insist
upon being standards of truth and action.

Positively as well as negatively, the sensationalists have felt
themselves to represent the side of progress. In its supposed eternal
character, a general notion stands ready made, fixed forever, without
reference to time, without the possibility of change or diversity.
As distinct from this, the sensation represents the never-failing
eruption of the new. It is the novel, the unexpected, that which
cannot be reasoned out in eternal formula, but must be hit upon in the
ever-changing flow of our experience. It thus represents stimulation,
excitation, momentum onwards. It gives a constant protest against the
assumption of any theory or belief to possess finality; and it supplies
the ever-renewed presentation of material out of which to build up new
objects and new laws.

The sensationalist appears to have a good case. He stands for
vividness and definiteness against abstraction; for the engagement
of the individual in experience as against the remote and general
thought about experience; and for progress and for variety against the
eternal fixed monotony of the concept. But what says the rationalist?
What value has experience, he inquires, if it is simply a chaos of
disintegrated and floating débris? What is the worth of personality and
individuality when they are reduced to crudity of brute feeling and
sheer intensity of impulsive reaction? What is there left in progress
that we should desire it, when it has become a mere unregulated flux of
transitory sensations, coming and going without reasonable motivation
or rational purpose?

Thus the intellectualist has endeavored to frame the structure of
knowledge as a well-ordered economy, where reason is sovereign, where
the permanent is the standard of reference for the changing, and where
the individual may always escape from his own mere individuality
and find support and reinforcement in a system of relations that
lies outside of and yet gives validity to his own passing states of
consciousness. Thus the rationalists hold that we must find in a
universal intelligence a source of truth and guarantee of value that is
sought in vain in the confused and flowing mass of sensations.

The rationalist, in making the concept or general idea the
all-important thing in knowledge, believes himself to be asserting the
interests of order as against destructive caprice and the license of
momentary whim. He finds that his cause is bound up with that of the
discovery of truth as the necessary instrument and method for action.
Only by reference to the general and the rational can the individual
find perspective, secure direction for his appetites and impulses, and
escape from the uncontrolled and ruinous reactions of his own immediate
tendency.

The concept, once more, in its very generality, in its elevation above
the intensities and conflicts of momentary passions and interests, is
the conserver of the experience of the past. It is the wisdom of the
past put into capitalized and funded form to enable the individual to
get away from the stress and competition of the needs of the passing
moment. It marks the difference between barbarism and civilization,
between continuity and disintegration, between the sequence of
tradition that is the necessity of intelligent thought and action, and
the random and confused excitation of the hour.

When we thus consider not the details of the positions of the
sensationalist and rationalist, but the motives that have induced them
to assume these positions, we discover what is meant in saying that the
question is still a practical, a social one, and that the two schools
stand for certain one-sided factors of social life. If we have on one
side the demand for freedom, for personal initiation into experience,
for variety and progress, we have on the other side the demand for
general order, for continuous and organized unity, for the conservation
of the dearly bought resources of the past. This is what I mean by
saying that the sensationalist abstracts in conscious form the position
and tendency of the Germanic element in modern civilization, the
factor of appetite and impulse, of keen enjoyment and satisfaction, of
stimulus and initiative. Just so the rationalist erects into conscious
abstraction the principle of the Græco-Roman world, that of control, of
system, of order and authority.

That the principles of freedom and order, of past and future, or
conservation and progress, of incitement to action and control of that
incitation, are correlative, I shall not stop to argue. It may be
worth while, however, to point out that exactly the same correlative
and mutually implicating connection exists between sensationalism and
rationalism, considered as philosophical accounts of the origin and
nature of knowledge.

The strength of each school lies in the weakness of its opponent.
The more the sensationalist appears to succeed in reducing knowledge
to the associations of sensation, the more he creates a demand for
thought to introduce background and relationship. The more consistent
the sensationalist, the more openly he reveals the sensation in its
own nakedness crying aloud for a clothing of value and meaning which
must be borrowed from reflective and rational interpretation. On the
other hand, the more reason and the system of relations that make up
the functioning of reason are magnified, the more is felt the need of
sensation to bring reason into some fruitful contact with the materials
of experience. Reason must have the stimulus of this contact in order
to be incited to its work and to get materials to operate with. The
cause, then, why neither school can come to rest in itself is precisely
that each abstracts one essential factor of conduct.

This suggests, finally, that the next move in philosophy is precisely
to transfer attention from the details of the position assumed, and
the arguments used in these two schools, to the practical motives that
have unconsciously controlled the discussion. The positions have been
sufficiently elaborated. Within the past one hundred years, within
especially the last generation, each has succeeded in fully stating
its case. The result, if we remain at this point, is practically a
deadlock. Each can make out its case against the other. To stop at such
a point is a patent absurdity. If we are to get out of the cul-de-sac
it must be by bringing into consciousness the tacit reference to action
that all the time has been the controlling factor.

In a word, another great rhythmic movement is seen to be approaching
its end. The demand for science and philosophy was the demand for
truth and a sure standard of truth which the new-born individual might
employ in his efforts to build up a new world to afford free scope
to the powers stirring within him. The urgency and acuteness of this
demand caused, for the time being, the transfer of attention from the
nature of practice to that of knowledge. The highly theoretical and
abstract character of modern epistemology, combined with the fact that
this highly abstract and theoretic problem has continuously engaged the
attention of thought for more than three centuries, is, to my mind,
proof positive that the question of knowledge was for the time being
the point in which the question of practice centered, and through which
it must find outlet and solution.

We return, then, to our opening problem: the meaning of the question
of the possibility of knowledge raised by Kant a century ago, and of
his assertion that sensation without thought is blind, thought without
sensation empty. Once more I recall to the student of philosophy
how this assertion of Kant has haunted and determined the course of
philosophy in the intervening years--how his solution at once seems
inevitable and unsatisfactory. It is inevitable in that no one can
fairly deny that both sense and reason are implicated in every fruitful
and significant statement of the world; unconvincing because we are
after all left with these two opposed things still at war with each
other, plus the miracle of their final combination.

When I say that the only way out is to place the whole modern industry
of epistemology in relation to the conditions that gave it birth and
the function it has to fulfil, I mean that the unsatisfactory character
of the entire neo-Kantian movement lies in its assumption that
knowledge gives birth to itself and is capable of affording its own
justification. The solution that is always sought and never found so
long as we deal with knowledge as a self-sufficing purveyor of reality,
reveals itself when we conceive of knowledge as a statement of action,
that statement being necessary, moreover, to the successful ongoing of
action.

The entire problem of medieval philosophy is that of absorption,
of assimilation. The result was the creation of the individual.
Hence the problem of modern life is that of reconstruction, reform,
reorganization. The entire content of experience needs to be passed
through the alembic of individual agency and realization. The
individual is to be the bearer of civilization; but this involves a
remaking of the civilization that he bears. Thus we have the dual
question: How can the individual become the organ of corporate action?
How can he make over the truth authoritatively embodied in institutions
of church and state into frank, healthy, and direct expressions of
the simple act of free living? On the other hand, how can civilization
preserve its own integral value and import when subordinated to the
agency of the individual instead of exercising supreme sway over him?

The question of knowledge, of the discovery and statement of truth,
gives the answer to this question; and it alone gives the answer.
Admitting that the practical problem of modern life is the maintenance
of the moral values of civilization through the medium of the insight
and decision of the individual, the problem is foredoomed to futile
failure save as the individual in performing his task can work with
a definite and controllable tool. This tool is science. But this
very fact, constituting the dignity of science and measuring the
importance of the philosophic theory of knowledge, conferring upon
them the religious value once attaching to dogma and the disciplinary
significance once belonging to political rules, also sets their limit.
The servant is not above his master.

When a theory of knowledge forgets that its value rests in solving the
problem out of which it has arisen, viz., that of securing a method of
action; when it forgets that it has to work out the conditions under
which the individual may freely direct himself without loss to the
historic values of civilization--when it forgets these things it begins
to cumber the ground. It is a luxury, and hence a social nuisance and
disturber. Of course, in the very nature of things, every means or
instrument will for a while absorb attention so that it becomes the
end. Indeed it is the end when it is an indispensable condition of
onward movement. But when once the means have been worked out they must
operate as such. When the nature and method of knowledge are fairly
understood, then interest must transfer itself from the possibility of
knowledge to the possibility of its application to life.

The sensationalist has played his part in bringing to effective
recognition the demand in valid knowledge for individuality of
experience, for personal participation in materials of knowledge.
The rationalist has served his time in making it clear once for all
that valid knowledge requires organization, and the operation of a
relatively permanent and general factor. The Kantian epistemologist
has formulated the claims of both schools in defining judgment as
the relation of perception and conception. But when it goes on to
state that this relation is itself knowledge, or can be found in
knowledge, it stultifies itself. Knowledge can define the percept and
elaborate the concept, but their union can be found only in action. The
experimental method of modern science, its erection into the ultimate
mode of verification, is simply this fact obtaining recognition. Only
action can reconcile the old, the general, and the permanent with the
changing, the individual, and the new. It is action as progress, as
development, making over the wealth of the past into capital with which
to do an enlarging and freer business, that alone can find its way
out of the cul-de-sac of the theory of knowledge. Each of the older
movements passed away because of its own success, failed because it did
its work, died in accomplishing its purpose. So also with the modern
philosophy of knowledge; there must come a time when we have so much
knowledge in detail, and understand so well its method in general,
that it ceases to be a problem. It becomes a tool. If the problem of
knowledge is not intrinsically meaningless and absurd it must in course
of time be solved. Then the dominating interest becomes the _use_ of
knowledge; the conditions under which and ways in which it may be most
organically and effectively employed to direct conduct.

Thus the Socratic period recurs; but recurs with the deepened meaning
of the intervening weary years of struggle, confusion, and conflict
in the growth of the recognition of the need of patient and specific
methods of interrogation. So, too, the authoritative and institutional
truth of scholasticism recurs, but recurs borne up upon the vigorous
and conscious shoulders of the freed individual who is aware of his
own intrinsic relations to truth, and who glories in his ability to
carry civilization--not merely to carry it, but to carry it on. Thus
another swing in the rhythm of theory and practice begins.

How does this concern us as philosophers? For the world it means that
philosophy is henceforth a method and not an original fountain head of
truth, nor an ultimate standard of reference. But what is involved for
philosophy itself in this change? I make no claims to being a prophet,
but I venture one more and final unproved statement, believing, with
all my heart, that it is justified both by the moving logic of the
situation, and by the signs of the times. I refer to the growing
transfer of interest from metaphysics and the theory of knowledge to
psychology and social ethics--including in the latter term all the
related concrete social sciences, so far as they may give guidance to
conduct.

There are those who see in psychology only a particular science
which they are pleased to term purely empirical (unless it happen to
restate in changed phraseology the metaphysics with which they are
familiar). They see in it only a more or less incoherent mass of facts,
interesting because relating to human nature, but below the natural
sciences in point of certainty and definiteness, as also far below
pure philosophy as to comprehensiveness and ability to deal with
fundamental issues. But if I may be permitted to dramatize a little
the position of the psychologist, he can well afford to continue
patiently at work, unmindful of the occasional supercilious sneers of
the epistemologist. The cause of modern civilization stands and falls
with the ability of the individual to serve as its agent and bearer.
And psychology is naught but the account of the way in which individual
life is thus progressively maintained and reorganized. Psychology
is the attempt to state in detail the machinery of the individual
considered as the instrument and organ through which social action
operates. It is the answer to Kant’s demand for the formal phase of
experience--how experience as such is constituted. Just because the
whole burden and stress, both of conserving and advancing experience is
more and more thrown upon the individual, everything which sheds light
upon how the individual may weather the stress and assume the burden is
precious and imperious.

Social ethics in inclusive sense is the correlative science. Dealing
not with the form or mode or machinery of action, it attempts rather
to make out its filling and make up the values that are necessary to
constitute an experience which is worth while. The sociologist, like
the psychologist, often presents himself as a camp follower of genuine
science and philosophy, picking up scraps here and there and piecing
them together in somewhat of an aimless fashion--fortunate indeed, if
not vague and over-ambitious. Yet social ethics represents the attempt
to translate philosophy from a general and therefore abstract method
into a working and specific method; it is the change from inquiring
into the nature of value in general to inquiring as to the _particular_
values that ought to be realized in the life of every one, and as to
the conditions which render possible this realization.

There are those who will see in this conception of the outcome of a
four-hundred-year discussion concerning the nature and possibility
of knowledge a derogation from the high estate of philosophy. There
are others who will see in it a sign that philosophy, after wandering
aimlessly hither and yon in a wilderness without purpose or outcome,
has finally come to its senses--has given up metaphysical absurdities
and unverifiable speculations, and become a purely positive science
of phenomena. But there are yet others who will see in this movement
the fulfilment of its vocation, the clear consciousness of a function
that it has always striven to perform; and who will welcome it as a
justification of the long centuries when it appeared to sit apart, far
from the common concerns of man, busied with discourse of essence and
cause, absorbed in argument concerning subject and object, reason and
sensation. To such this outcome will appear the inevitable sequel of
the saying of Socrates that “an unexamined life is not one fit to be
led by man”; and a better response to his injunction “Know thyself.”


THE END




INDEX


  Absolutism, 18, 25, 98, 102, 109-110, 121-123, 130-132;
    _Essay IV._, 142-153, 176, 180-181

  Acquaintance, and knowledge, 79-82

  Action, and problem of knowledge, _Essay XI._, 271-304

  _A priori_, 206-213, 292-294

  Appearance, and reality, 26-28, 118-121

  Aristotle, referred to, 5, 32, 35, 37, 48, 50, 78, 221, 278

  Assurance, 85-88

  Awareness, 93


  Behavior, and intelligence, 44

  Belief, _Essay VI._, 169-197

  Bosanquet, B., 281

  Bradley, F. H., _Essay IV._, 112-153


  Change, its supposed unreality, 1;
    in modern science, 8-9;
    and law, 72;
    and thought, 133;
    of truth, 153;
    of experience, 222-224, 259-260;

  Christianity, metaphysic of, 178

  Cognitive, 84-85, 230-233

  Conflict, and thinking, 116-117, 126-127, 132, 148-149

  Consistency, as criterion, 128-136

  Consciousness, as end of nature, 34-35;
    is partial, 43;
    and knowledge, 79-80, 102, 171;
    _Essay X._, 242-270;
    non-existence of, 247-248

  Correspondence, 158

  Cosmology, and morals, 54

  Custom, as background of morals, 48, 52


  Darwin, his influence on philosophy, _Essay I._, 1-19;
    quoted, 2, 12

  Democracy, moral meaning of, 59-60, 266-267

  Descartes, 8

  Design, _see_ Teleology


  Economic Struggle, 21, 29, 35, 41, 50

  Economics, influences on morals, 57-59

  Empiricism, 200-202;
    _Essay IX._, 226-241, 289-291

  Epistemology, _versus_ logic, 95-107, 172, 185, 201, 296-298

  Error, and becoming, 100

  Evolution, of species, 1, 8;
    and design, 12-13;
    and teleology, 32-35;
    and intelligence, 42-43

  Experience, _Essay VII._, 198-225

  Experiment, and knowledge, _Essay IV._, 77-111

  Feeling, 80-81


  Final Cause, _see_ Teleology

  Functions, true data of psychology, 250-255


  Galileo, 8

  Genesis, and value, 261-264

  Good, is concrete and plural, 15-17, 23, 27;
    of Nature, _Essay II._, 20-45;
    and evolution, 31-35, 43;
    and mysticism, 39, 42;
    Greek view of, 46-50;
    medieval view of, 52-54;
    as fixed, 67

  Gordon, K., 215 n.

  Gray, Asa, on evolution and design, 12


  Happiness, nature of, 69

  Hegel, 65, 174 n.

  Hobbes, 203 n.

  Hume, 82 n., 204 n.


  Idealism, 28, 38, 191;
    _Essay VII._, 198-225, 228

  Ideality, 89, 120, 219-225

  Ideas, nature of, 134, 155;
    their verification, 141 ff.;
    are hypothetical, 144, 150-151, 187

  Individual, 244, 265-68, 285, 297

  Intellectualism, _Essay IV._, 112-153, 159

  Intelligence, is discriminative, 39, 42, 75;
    is the good of nature, 44;
    and Morals, _Essay III._, 46-76;
    cosmic and personal, 55, 59;
    as biological instrument, 68;
    indirection of activity, 133, 149

  Introspection, 250 n.


  James, Wm., 104, 194 n., 202, 222 n., 246

  Judgment, Bradley’s theory of, 114-117;
    of the past, 160-61, 165;
    Kant’s theory of, 272


  Kant, 63-65, 206-213, 271

  Knowledge, its proper object, 6, 10, 14;
    and nature, 41;
    and freedom, 73;
    The Experimental Theory of, _Essay IV._, 77-111;
    defined, 90;
    and inquiry, 184-189;
    _Essay XI._, problem of, 271-304


  Locke, 93, 202-204, 217-218


  Maine, Sir Henry, quoted, 46

  Meaning, and knowledge, 87-90;
    and judgment, 116-117, 200

  Mechanism, 23, 34, 57

  Memory, 220

  Moore, A. W., 91 n.

  Morals, _Essay III._, 46-76

  Mysticism, 38-40, 42


  Naturalism, 195

  Nature, teleology of, 10;
    The Good of, _Essay II._, 20-45;
    animistic character of, 51;
    change in, 72

  Newton, influence of, 61, 72


  Organization, of experience, 208-211


  Perception, ambiguity of term, 214-219

  Philosophy, changes in, 14-19;
    political nature of, 21;
    defined, 45;
    and science, 51;
    and psychology, 189-191;
    _Essay X._, 242-270

  Plato, 21, 47, 49, 72, 219 n., 278

  Pragmatism, 25, 31, 33, 55, 95 n., 109, 130 n., 144;
    _Essay V._, 154-168, 193

  Psychical, 81 n., 104

  Psychology, and philosophy, _Essay X._, 242-270, 301


  Rationalism, _Essay XI._, 271-304

  “Reality,” 98, 105, 113, 129, 169 n., 172, 228, 264

  Relation, and appearance, 119-120


  Santayana, G., 96, 224 n.

  Sciences, developed out of morals, 56;
    and industry, 57-58;
    as mode of knowledge, 108;
    and philosophy, 268-270, 287

  Sensation, 94, 262 n.

  Sensationalism, _Essay XI._, 271-304

  Social Ethics, 302-304

  Socrates, 51, 76, 275, 304

  Species, equivalent to scholastic form, 3-4;
    as eternal and teleological, 4-5;
    basis of knowledge, 6-7

  Spencer, Herbert, 16, 33, 66

  Spinoza, 181

  Stoicism, 172, 279

  Stuart, H. W., 214 n.

  Subjective, 98, 155, 204 n., 270


  Teleology, of life, 4;
    of nature, 10, 32;
    basis of idealism, 11;
    concrete, 15, 22;
    and evolution, 32-35;
    subjective, 223-224

  Theory, 124-127

  Thinking, practical character of, 124-127

  Tolstoi, 173 n.

  Transcendence, of knowledge, 103 n., 156-157

  Transcendental, and supernatural, 22, 29, 282;
    view of knowledge, 24, 27;
    freedom, 74

  Truth, criterion of, 92, 95, 107-111;
    _Essay IV._, 112-153;
    absolute, 137;
    identified with existence, 138, 145;
    eternal, 147, 152;
    _Essay V._, 154-168;
    230-231, 237, 282


  Utilitarianism, 62


  Verification, making true, 139 ff., 162-164


  Woodbridge, F. J. E., 104 n., 240 n.




FOOTNOTES


[1] The affair is even more portentous in the German with its
capital letters and series of _muses_: “Gewiss ist der Pragmatismus
erkenntnisstheoretisch Nominalismus, psychologisch Voluntarismus,
naturphilosophisch Energismus, metaphysisch Agnosticismus, ethisch
Meliorismus auf Grundlage des Bentham-Millschen Utilitarismus.”

[2] A lecture in a course of public lectures on “Charles Darwin and His
Influence on Science,” given at Columbia University in the winter and
spring of 1909. Reprinted from the _Popular Science Monthly_ for July,
1909.

[3] “Life and Letters,” Vol. I., p. 282; cf. 285.

[4] “Life and Letters,” Vol. II., pp. 146, 170, 245; Vol. I., pp.
283-84. See also the closing portion of his “Variations of Animals and
Plants under Domestication.”

[5] Reprinted from the _Hibbert Journal_, Vol. VII., No. 4, July, 1909.

[6] A public lecture delivered at Columbia University in March, 1908,
under the title of “Ethics,” in a series of lectures on “Science,
Philosophy, and Art.” Reprinted from a monograph published by the
Columbia University Press.

[7] Reprinted, with considerable change in the arrangement and in the
matter of the latter portion, from _Mind_, Vol. XV., N.S., July, 1906.

[8] I must remind the reader again of a point already suggested. It
is the identification of presence in consciousness with knowledge as
such that leads to setting up _a_ mind (_ego_, subject) which has the
peculiar property of knowing (only so often it knows wrong!), or else
that leads to supplying “sensations” with the peculiar property of
surveying their own entrails. Given the correct feeling that knowledge
involves relationship, there being, by supposition, no other _thing_ to
which the thing in consciousness is related, it is forthwith related
to a soul substance, or to its ghostly offspring, a “subject,” or to
“consciousness” itself.

[9] Let us further recall that this theory requires either that things
present shall already be psychical things (feelings, sensations,
etc.), in order to be assimilated to the knowing mind, subject to
consciousness; or else translates genuinely naïve realism into the
miracle of a mind that gets outside itself to lay its ghostly hands
upon the things of an external world.

[10] This means that things may be present _as_ known, just as they
be present as hard or soft, agreeable or disgusting, hoped for or
dreaded. The mediacy, or the art of intervention, which characterizes
knowledge, indicates precisely the way in which known things as known
are immediately present.

[11] If Hume had had a tithe of the interest in the _flux_ of
perceptions and in _habit_--principles of continuity and of
organization--which he had in distinct and isolated existences, he
might have saved us both from German _Erkenntnisstheorie_, and from
that modern miracle play, the psychology of elements of consciousness,
that under the ægis of science, does not hesitate to have psychical
elements compound and breed, and in their agile intangibility put to
shame the performances of their less acrobatic cousins, physical atoms.

[12] In other words, the situation as described is not to be confused
with the case of hunting on purpose to test an idea regarding the dog.

[13] Dr. Moore, in an essay in “Contributions to Logical Theory” has
brought out clearly, on the basis of a criticism of the theory of
meaning and fulfilment advanced in Royce’s “World and Individual,” the
full consequences of this distinction. I quote one sentence (p. 350):
“Surely there is a pretty discernible difference between experience as
a purposive idea, and the experience which fulfils this purpose. To
call them both ‘ideas’ is at least confusing.” The text above simply
adds that there is also a discernible and important difference between
experiences which, _de facto_, are purposing and fulfilling (that is,
are seen to be such _ab extra_), and those which meant to be such, and
are found to be what they meant.

[14] The association of science and philosophy with leisure, with a
certain economic surplus, is not accidental. It is practically worth
while to postpone practice; to substitute theorizing, to develop a new
and fascinating mode of practice. But it is the excess achievement of
practice which makes this postponement and substitution possible.

[15] It is the failure to grasp the coupling of truth of meaning with
a _specific_ promise, undertaking, or intention expressed by a thing
which underlies, so far as I can see, the criticisms passed upon the
experimental or pragmatic view of the truth. It is the same failure
which is responsible for the wholly _at large_ view of truth which
characterizes the absolutists.

[16] The belief in the _metaphysical_ transcendence of the object of
knowledge seems to have its real origin in an _empirical_ transcendence
of a very specific and describable sort. The thing meaning is one
thing; the thing meant is another thing, and is (as already pointed
out) a thing presented as not given in the same way as is the thing
which means. It is something _to be_ so given. No amount of careful
and thorough inspection of the indicating and signifying things can
remove or annihilate this gap. The _probability_ of correct meaning may
be increased in varying degrees--and this is what we mean by control.
But final certitude can never be reached except experimentally--except
by performing the operations indicated and discovering whether or
no the intended meaning is fulfilled _in propria persona_. In this
experimental sense, truth or the object of any given meaning is always
beyond or outside of the cognitional thing that means it. Error as well
as truth is a necessary function of knowing. But the non-empirical
account of this transcendent (or beyond) relationship puts _all_ the
error in one place (_our_ knowledge), and _all_ the truth in another
(absolute consciousness or else a thing-in-itself).

[17] Compare his essay, “Does Consciousness Exist?” in the _Journal of
Philosophy, Psychology, and Scientific Methods_, Vol. I., p. 480.

[18] Compare the essay on the “Problem of Consciousness,” by Professor
Woodbridge, in the Garman Memorial Volume, entitled “Studies in
Philosophy and Psychology.”

[19] Reprinted, with many changes, from an article in _Mind_, Vol.
XVI., N.S., July 1907. Although the changes have been made to render
the article less technical, it still remains, I fear, too technical
to be intelligible to those not familiar with recent discussions of
logical theory.

[20] I follow chiefly Chapter XV. of “Appearance and Reality”--the
chapter on “Thought and Reality.”

[21] The crux of the argument is contained in Chapters XIII. and XIV.,
on the “General Nature of Reality.”

[22] The same point comes out in Mr. Bradley’s treatment of the way in
which the practical demand for the good or satisfaction is to be taken
account of in a philosophical conception of the nature of reality.
He admits that it comes in; but holds that it enters not directly,
but because if left outside it indirectly introduces a feature of
“discontent” on the intellectual side (see p. 155). This, as an
argument for the supremacy of the isolated theoretical standard, loses
all its force if we cease to conceive of intellect as from the start an
independent function, and realize that intellectual discontent is the
practical conflict becoming deliberately aware of itself as the most
effective means of its own rectification.

[23] This suggests that many of the stock arguments against pragmatism
fail to take its contention seriously enough. They proceed from the
assumption that it is an account of truth which leaves untouched
current notions of the nature of intelligence. But the essential
point of pragmatism is that it bases its changed account of truth on
a changed conception of the nature of intelligence, both as to its
objective and its method. Now this different account of intelligence
may be wrong, but controversy which leaves standing the conventionally
current theories about thought and merely discusses “truth” will not
go far. Since truth is the adequate fulfilment of the function of
intelligence, the question turns on the nature of the latter.

[24] Such a statement as, for example, Mr. Bradley’s (_Mind_, Vol.
XIII., No. 51, N.S., p. 3, article on “Truth and Practice”) “The idea
works ... but is able to work because I have chosen the right idea”
surely loses any argumentative force it may seem to have, when it is
recalled that, upon the theory argued against, ability to work and
rightness are one and the same thing. If the wording is changed to
read “The idea is able to work because I have chosen an idea which is
able to work” the question-begging character of the implied criticism
is evident. The change of phraseology also may suggest the crucial and
pregnant question: How does any one know that an idea is able to work
excepting by setting it at work?

[25] A paper read in the spring of 1909 before the Philosophical Club
of Smith College and not previously published.

[26] Read as the Presidential Address at the fifth annual meeting of
the American Philosophical Association, at Cambridge, December 28,
1905, and reprinted with verbal revisions from the _Philosophical
Review_, Vol. XV., March, 1906. The substitution of the word
“Existences” for the word “Realities” (in the original title) is due
to a subsequent recognition on my part that the eulogistic historic
associations with the word “Reality” (against which the paper was a
protest) infected the interpretation of the paper itself, so that the
use of some more colorless word was desirable.

[27] Since writing the above I have read the following words of a
candidly unsympathetic friend of philosophy: “Neither philosophy nor
science can institute man’s relation to the universe, because such
reciprocity must have existed before any kind of science or philosophy
can begin; since each investigates phenomena by means of the intellect,
and independent of the position and feeling of the investigator;
whereas the relation of man to the universe is defined, not by the
intellect alone, but by his sensitive perception aided by all his
spiritual powers. However much one may assure and instruct a man that
all real existence is an idea, that matter is made up of atoms, that
the essence of life is corporality or will, that heat, light, movement,
electricity, are different manifestations of one and the same energy,
one cannot thereby explain to a being with pains, pleasures, hopes, and
fears his position in the universe.” Tolstoi, essay on “Religion and
Morality,” in “Essays, Letters, and Miscellanies.”

[28] Hegel may be excepted from this statement. The habit of
interpreting Hegel as a Neo-Kantian, a Kantian enlarged and purified,
is a purely Anglo-American habit. This is no place to enter into the
intricacies of Hegelian exegesis, but the subordination of both logical
meaning and of mechanical existence to _Geist_, to life in its own
developing movement, would seem to stand out in any unbiased view of
Hegel. At all events, I wish to recognize my own personal debt to Hegel
for the view set forth in this paper, without, of course, implying that
it represents Hegel’s own intention.

[29] There will of course come in time with the development of this
point of view an organon of beliefs. The signs of a genuine as against
a simulated belief will be studied; belief as a vital personal reaction
will be discriminated from habitual, incorporate, unquestioned
(because unconsciously exercised) traditions of social classes and
professions. In his “Will to Believe” Professor James has already
laid down two traits of genuine belief (viz., “forced option,” and
acceptance of responsibility for results) which are almost always
ignored in criticisms (really caricatures) of his position. In the
light of such an organon, one might come to doubt whether _belief_
in, say, immortality (as distinct from hope on one side and a sort
of intellectual balance of probability of opinion on the other) can
genuinely exist at all.

[30] Reprinted, with slight verbal changes, from the _Philosophical
Review_, Vol. XV. (1906).

[31] C. S. Peirce, _Monist_, Vol. XVI., p. 150.

[32] _Psychology_, Vol. II., p. 618.

[33] “Essay concerning Human Understanding,” Book II., Chapter II., §
2. Locke doubtless derived this notion from Bacon.

[34] It is hardly necessary to refer to the stress placed upon
mathematics, as well as upon fundamental propositions in logic, ethics,
and cosmology.

[35] Of course there are internal historic connections between
experience as effective “memory,” and experience as “observation.”
But the motivation and stress, the problem, has quite shifted. It
may be remarked that Hobbes still writes under the influence of the
Aristotelian conception. “Experience is nothing but Memory” (“Elements
of Philosophy,” Part I., Chapter I., § 2), and hence is opposed to
science.

[36] There are, of course, anticipations of Hume in Locke. But to
regard Lockeian experience as equivalent to Humian is to pervert
history. Locke, as he was to himself and to the century succeeding him,
was not a subjectivist, but in the main a common sense objectivist.
It was this that gave him his historic influence. But so completely
has the Hume-Kant controversy dominated recent thinking that it is
constantly projected backward. Within a few weeks I have seen three
articles, all insisting that the meaning of the term experience must
be subjective, and stating or implying that those who take the term
objectively are subverters of established usage! But a casual study of
the dictionary will reveal that experience has always meant “_what_
is experienced,” observation as a source of knowledge, as well as the
act, fact, or mode of experiencing. In the Oxford Dictionary, the
(obsolete) sense of “experimental testing,” of actual “observation
of facts and events,” and “the fact of being consciously affected by
an act” have almost contemporaneous datings, viz., 1384, 1377, and
1382 respectively. A usage almost more objective than the second, the
Baconian use, is “what has been experienced; the events that have taken
place within the knowledge of an individual, a community, mankind at
large, either during a particular period or generally.” This dates back
to 1607. Let us have no more captious criticisms and plaints based
on ignorance of linguistic usage. [This pious wish has not been met.
J. D., 1909.]

[37] The relationship of organization and thought is precisely that
which we find psychologically typified by the rhythmic functions of
habit and attention, attention being always, _ab quo_, a sign of the
failure of habit, and, _ad quem_, a reconstructive modification of
habit.

[38] Compare, for example, Dr. Stuart’s paper in the “Studies in
Logical Theory,” pp. 253-256. I may here remark that I remain
totally unable to see how the _interpretation_ of objectivity to
mean controlling conditions of action (negative and positive as
above) derogates at all from its naïve objectivity, or how it
connotes cognitive subjectivity, or is in any way incompatible with a
common-sense realistic theory of perception.

[39] For this suggested interpretation of the esthetic as surprising,
or unintended, gratuitous collateral reinforcement, see Gordon,
“Psychology of Meaning.”

[40] This, however, is not strictly true, since Locke goes far
to supply the means of his own correction in his account of the
“workmanship of the understanding.”

[41] Plato, especially in his “Theætetus,” seems to have begun the
procedure of blasting the good name of perceptive experience by
identifying a late and instrumental distinction, having to do with
logical control, with all experience whatsoever.

[42] Compare James, “Continuous transition is one sort of conjunctive
relation; and to be a radical empiricist means to hold fast to this
conjunctive relation of all others, for this is the strategic point,
the position through which, if a hole be made, all the corruptions
of dialectics and all the metaphysical fictions pour into our
philosophy.”--_Journal of Philosophy, Psychology, and Scientific
Methods_, Vol. I., p. 536.

[43] One of the not least of the many merits of Santayana’s “Life of
Reason” is the consistency and vigor with which is upheld the doctrine
that significant idealism means idealization.

[44] Reprinted, with very slight change, from the _Journal of
Philosophy, Psychology, and Scientific Methods_, Vol. II., No. 15,
July, 1905.

[45] All labels are, of course, obnoxious and misleading. I hope,
however, the term will be taken by the reader in the sense in which
it is forthwith explained, and not in some more usual and familiar
sense. Empiricism, as herein used, is as antipodal to sensationalistic
empiricism, as it is to transcendentalism, and for the same reason.
Both of these systems fall back on something which is defined in
non-directly-experienced terms in order to justify that which is
directly experienced. Hence I have criticised such empiricism
(_Philosophical Review_, Vol. XI., No. 4, p. 364) as essentially
absolutistic in character; and also (“Studies in Logical Theory,”
pp. 30, 58) as an attempt to build up experience in terms of certain
methodological checks and cues of attaining _certainty_.

[46] I hope the reader will not therefore assume that from the
empiricist’s standpoint knowledge is of small worth or import. On the
contrary, from the empiricist’s standpoint it has _all_ the worth which
it is concretely experienced as possessing--which is simply tremendous.
But the exact _nature_ of this worth is a thing to be found out in
describing what we mean by experiencing objects as known--the actual
differences made or found in experience.

[47] Since the non-empiricist believes in things-in-themselves (which
he may term “atoms,” “sensations,” transcendental unities, _a priori_
concepts, _an_ absolute experience, or whatever), and since he finds
that the empiricist makes much of change (as he must, since change is
continuously experienced) he assumes that the empiricist means _his
own_ non-empirical Realities are in continual flux, and he naturally
shudders at having his divinities so violently treated. But, once
recognize that the empiricist doesn’t have any such Realities at all,
and the entire problem of the relation of change to reality takes a
very different aspect.

[48] It would lead us aside from the point to try to tell just what
is the nature of the experienced difference we call truth. Professor
James’s recent articles may well be consulted. The point to bear in
mind here is just what sort of a thing the empiricist must mean by
true, or truer (the noun Truth is, of course, a generic name for all
cases of “Trues”). The adequacy of any particular account is not a
matter to be settled by general reasoning, but by finding out what sort
of an experience the truth-experience actually is.

[49] I say “relatively,” because the transcendentalist still holds
that finally the cognition is imperfect, giving us only some symbol
or phenomenon of Reality (which _is_ only in the Absolute or in some
Thing-in-Itself)--otherwise the curtain-wind fact would have as
much ontological reality as the existence of the Absolute itself: a
conclusion at which the non-empiricist perhorresces, for no reason
obvious to me--save that it would put an end to his transcendentalism.

[50] In general, I think the distinction between -_ive_ and -_ed_ one
of the most fundamental of philosophic distinctions, and one of the
most neglected. The same holds of -_tion_ and -_ing_.

[51] What is criticised, now as “geneticism” (if I may coin the word)
and now as “pragmatism” is, in its truth, just the fact that the
empiricist does take account of the experienced “drift, occasion, and
contexture” of things experienced--to use Hobbes’s phrase.

[52] Perhaps the point would be clearer if expressed in this way:
Except as subsequent estimates of _worth_ are introduced, “real”
means only existent. The eulogistic connotation that makes the term
Reality equivalent to _true_ or _genuine_ being has great pragmatic
significance, but its confusion with reality as existence is the point
aimed at in the above paragraph.

[53] One does not so easily escape medieval Realism as one thinks.
Either every experienced thing has its own determinateness, its own
unsubstitutable, unredeemable reality, or else “generals” _are_
separate existences after all.

[54] Excepting, of course, some negative ones. One could say that
certain views are certainly _not_ true, because, by hypothesis,
they refer to nonentities, _i.e._, non-empiricals. But even here
the empiricist must go slowly. From his own standpoint, even the
most professedly transcendental statements are, after all, real as
experiences, and hence negotiate some transaction with facts. For
this reason, he cannot, in theory, reject them _in toto_, but has to
show concretely how they arose and how they are to be corrected. In a
word, his logical relationship to statements that profess to relate to
things-in-themselves, unknowables, inexperienced substances, etc., is
precisely that of the psychologist to the Zöllner lines.

[55] Delivered as a public address before the Philosophic Union of the
University of California, with the title “Psychology and Philosophic
Method,” May, 1899, and published in the _University Chronicle_ for
August, 1899. Reprinted, with slight verbal changes, mostly excisions.

[56] This is a fact not without its bearings upon the question of the
nature and value of introspection. The objection that introspection
“alters” the reality and hence is untrustworthy, most writers dispose
of by saying that, after all, it need not alter the reality so very
much--not beyond repair--and that, moreover, memory assists in
restoring the ruins. It would be simpler to admit the fact: that the
purpose of introspection is precisely to effect the right sort of
alteration. If introspection should give us the original experience
again, we should just be living through the experience over again in
direct fashion; as psychologists we should not be forwarded one bit.
Reflection upon this obvious proposition may bring to light various
other matters worthy of note.

[57] Thus to divorce “structure psychology” from “function psychology”
is to leave us without possibility of scientific comprehension of
function, while it deprives us of all standard of reference in
selecting, observing, and explaining the structure.

[58] The following answer may fairly be anticipated: “This is true of
the operations cited, but only because complex processes have been
selected. Such a term as ‘knowing’ does of course express a function
involving a system of intricate references. But, for that very reason,
we go back to the sensation which is the genuine type of the ‘state of
consciousness’ as such, pure and unadulterate and unsophisticated.” The
point is large for a footnote, but the following considerations are
instructive: (1) The same psychologist will go on to inform us that
sensations, as we experience them, are networks of reference--they
are perceptual, and more or less conceptual even. From which it
would appear that whatever else they are or are not, the sensations,
for which self-inclosed existence is claimed, are _not_ states of
consciousness. And (2) we are told that these are reached by scientific
abstraction in order to account for complex forms. From which it would
appear that they are hypothecated as products of interpretation and for
purposes of further interpretation. Only the delusion that the more
complex forms are just aggregates (instead of being acts, like seeing,
hoping, etc.) prevents recognition of the point in question--that the
“state of consciousness” is an instrument of inquiry or methodological
appliance.

[59] On the other hand, if what we are trying to get at is just the
course and procedure of experiencing, of course any consideration that
helps distinguish and make comprehensible that process is thoroughly
pertinent.

[60] It may avoid misunderstanding if I anticipate here a subsequent
remark: that my point is not in the least that “states of
consciousness” require some “synthetic unity” or faculty of substantial
mind to effect their association. Quite the contrary; for this theory
also admits the “states of consciousness” as existences in themselves
also. My contention is that the “state of consciousness” as such is
always a methodological product, developed in the course and for the
purposes of psychological analysis.

[61] The “functions” are in truth ordinary everyday acts and attitudes:
seeing, smelling, talking, listening, remembering, hoping, loving,
fearing.

[62] This is perhaps a suitable moment to allude to the absence, in
this discussion, of reference to what is sometimes termed rational
psychology--the assumption of a separate, substantialized ego, soul,
or whatever, existing side by side with particular experiences and
“states of consciousness,” acting upon them and acted upon by them. In
ignoring this and confining myself to the “states of consciousness”
theory and the “natural history” theory, I may appear not only to have
unduly narrowed the concerns at issue, but to have weakened my own
point, as this doctrine seems to offer a special vantage ground whence
to defend the close relationship of psychology and philosophy. The
“narrowing,” if such it be, will have to pass--from limits of time and
other matters. But the other point I cannot concede. The independently
existing soul restricts and degrades individuality, making of it a
separate thing outside of the full flow of things, alien to things
experienced and consequently in either mechanical or miraculous
relations to them. It is vitiated by just the quality already objected
to--that psychology has a separate piece of reality apportioned to
it, instead of occupying itself with the manifestation and operation
of any and all existences in reference to concrete action. From this
point of view, the “states of consciousness” attitude is a much more
hopeful and fruitful one. It ignores certain considerations, to be
sure; and when it turns its ignoring into denial, it leaves us with
curious hieroglyphics. But after all, there is a key; these symbols
can be read; they may be translated into terms of the course of
experience. When thus translated, selfhood, individuality, is neither
wiped out nor set up as a miraculous and foreign entity; it is seen as
the unity of reference and function involved in all things when fully
experienced--the pivot about which they turn.

[63] Delivered before the Philosophical Club of the University of
Michigan, in the winter of 1897, and reprinted with slight change from
a monograph in the “University of Chicago Contributions to Philosophy,”
1897.




Transcriber’s Notes


Punctuation, hyphenation, and spelling were made consistent when a
predominant preference was found in this book; otherwise they were not
changed.

Simple typographical errors were corrected; occasional unbalanced
quotation marks retained.

Ambiguous hyphens at the ends of lines were retained.

Index not checked for proper alphabetization or correct page references.

Page 24: “transgression” was misprinted as “trangression”; changed here.

Page 39: “bewrayeth” was printed that way.

Page 158: “cor-respondence” was printed with the hyphen.







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