Part 4

VII

Return with me, if you please, to fundamentals. The word "experience" is used freely in the essays and without much explanation. In view of the currency of subjectivistic interpretations of that term, the chief wonder is probably that the doctrine of the essays was not more misunderstood than was actually the case. I have already said something designed to clarify the sense in which the term was used. I now come back to the matter. What is the reason for using the term at all in philosophy? The history of philosophy supplies, I think, the answer. No matter how subjective a turn was given to the word by Hume and Kant, we have only to go to an earlier period to see that the appeal to experience in philosophy was coincident with the emancipation of science from occult essences and causes, and with the substitution of methods of observation, controlled by experimentation and employing mathematical considerations, for methods of mere dialectic definition and classification. The appeal to experience was the cry of the man from Missouri--the demand to be shown. It sprang from the desire to command nature by observing her, instead of anticipating her in order to deck her with aesthetic garlands and hold her with theological chains. The significance of experience was not that sun and moon, stick and stone, are creatures of the senses, but that men would not put their trust any longer in things which are said, however authoritatively, to exist, unless these things are capable of entering into specifiable connections with the organism and the organism with them. It was an emphatic assertion that until men could see how things got into belief, and what they did when they got there, intellectual acceptance would be withheld.

Has not the lesson, however, been so well learned that we can drop reference to experience? Would that such were the case. But the time does not seem to have come. Some things enter by way of the imagination, stimulated by emotional preferences and biases. For certain purposes, they are not the worse for having entered by that gate, instead of through sensory-motor adjustments. Or they may have entered because of the love of man for logical form and symmetry and system, and because of the emotional satisfaction which harmony awakens in a sensitive soul. They too need not be any worse for all that. But surely it is among the businesses of philosophy to discriminate between the kinds of goodness possessed by different kinds of things. And how can it discriminate unless by telling by what road they got into our experience and what they do after they get there? Assuredly the difference is not in intrinsic content. It is not because of self-obvious and self-contained traits of the immediate terms that Dante's world belongs to poetry and Newton's to scientific astronomy. No amount of pure inspection and excogitation could decide which belongs to which world. The difference in status and claim is made by what we call experience: by the place of the two systems in experience with respect to their generation and consequences. And assuredly any philosophy which takes science to be not an account of the world (which it is), but a literal and exhaustive apprehension of it in its full reality, a philosophy which therefore has no place for poetry or possibilities, still needs a theory of experience.

If a scientific man be asked what is truth, he will reply--if he frame his reply in terms of his practice and not of some convention--that which is accepted upon adequate evidence. And if he is asked for a description of adequacy of evidence, he certainly will refer to matters of observation and experiment. It is not the self-inclosed character of the terms and propositions nor their systematic ordering which settles the case for him; it is the way they were obtained and what he can do with them in getting other things. And when a mathematician or logician asks philosophy to abandon this method, then is just the time to be most vigorous in insisting upon the necessity of reference to "experience" in order to fix the import of mathematical and logical pretensions. When students influenced by the symmetry and system of mathematics cease building up their philosophies in terms of traits of mathematical subject-matter in isolation, then empirical philosophers will have less call to mention experience. Meantime, I know of no way of fixing the scope and claims of mathematics in philosophy save to try to point out just at what juncture it enters experience and what work it does after it has got entrance. I have made such an attempt in my account of the fixation and handling of suggestions as meanings. It is defective enough, but the defects are to be remedied by a better empirical account and not by setting up against experience the claims of a logic aloof from experience.

The objection then to a logic which rules out knowledge getting, and which bases logic exclusively upon the traits of known objects, is that it is self-contradictory. There is no way to know what are the traits of known objects, as distinct from imaginary objects, or objects of opinion, or objects of unanalytic common-sense, save by referring to the operations of getting, using, and testing evidence--the processes of knowledge getting. I am making no appeal for skepticism at large; I am not questioning the right of the physicist, the mathematician, or the symbolic logicist to go ahead with accepted objects and do what he can with them. I am pointing out that anyone who professes to be concerned with finding out what knowledge is, has for his primary work the job of finding out why it is so much safer to proceed with just these objects, than with those, say, of Aristotelian science. Aristotle was not lacking in acuteness nor in learning. To him it was clear that objects of knowledge are the things of ordinary perception, so far as they are referred to a form which comparison of perceived things, in the light of a final cause, makes evident. If this view of the objects of knowledge has gone into the discard, if quite other objects of knowledge are now received and employed, it is because the methods of getting knowledge have been transformed, till, for the working scientist, "objects of knowledge" mean precisely the objects which have been obtained by approved processes of inquiry. To exclude consideration of these processes is thus to throw away the key to understanding knowledge and its objects. There is a certain ironical humor in taking advantage of all the improved methods of experimental inquiry with respect to all objects of knowledge--save one, knowledge itself; in denying their relevancy to knowing knowledge, and falling back upon the method everywhere else disavowed--the method of relying upon isolated, self-contained properties of subject-matter.

One of the points which gave much offense in the essays was the reference to genetic method--to a natural history of knowledge. I hope what has now been said makes clearer the nature of that reference. I was to blame for not making the point more explicit; but I cannot altogether blame myself for my naïveté in supposing that others understood by a natural history of knowledge what I understood by it. It had not occurred to me that anyone would think that the history by which human ignorance, error, dogma, and superstition had been transformed, even in its present degree of transformation, into knowledge was something which had gone on exclusively inside of men's heads, or in an inner consciousness. I thought of it as something going on in the world, in the observatory and the laboratory, and in the application of laboratory results to the control of human health, well-being, and progress. When a biologist says that the way to understand an organ, or the sociologist that the way to know an institution, resides in its genesis and history, he is understood to mean its history. I took the same liberty for knowledge, that is, for science. The accusation of "subjectivisim" taken in this light appears as a depressing revelation of what the current opinion about the processes of knowledge is. To stumble on a stone need not be a process of knowledge; to hit it with a hammer, to pour acid upon it, to put pieces in the crucible, to subject things to heat and pressure to see if one can make a similar stone, are processes of knowledge. So is fixing suggestions by attaching names, and so is devising ways of putting these terms together so that new suggestions will arise, or so that suggestions may be transferred from one situation to another. But not one of these processes is "subjective" in any sense which puts subjectivity in opposition to the public out-of-doors world of nature and human companionship. To set genesis in opposition to analysis is merely to overlook the fact that the sciences of existence have found that considerations of genesis afford their most effective methods of analysis.

The same kind of consideration applies to the favorable view taken of psychology. If reference to modes and ways of experience--to experiencing--is important for understanding the things with which philosophy deals, then psychology is useful as a matter of course. For what is meant by psychology is precisely a discrimination of the acts and attitudes of the organism which have a bearing upon respective subject-matters and which have accordingly to be taken account of before the subject-matters can be properly discriminated. The matter was especially striking in the case of Lotze. He protested constantly against the use of psychology, and yet his own data and procedures were infected at every turn by psychology, and, if I am at all correct, by a false psychology. The particular separation which he made between psychology and logic rested indeed upon a particular psychological assumption. The question is worth asking: Is not the marked aversion on the part of some philosophers to any reference to psychology a Freudian symptom?

A word more upon the place assigned by the essays to need and purpose and the humanistic factor generally. To save time I may quote a sentence from an early review which attributes to the essays the following doctrine: "If the plan turns out to be useful for our need, it is correct--the judgment is true. The real-ideal distinction is that between stimulus of environment and plan of action or tentative response. Both real and ideal are equally experiences of the individual man." These words can be interpreted either so as to convey the position fairly, or so as radically to misconceive it; the latter course is a little easier, as the words stand. That "real and ideal" are experiences of the individual man in the sense that they actually present themselves as specifications which can be studied by any man who desires to study them is true enough. That such a study is as much required for determining their characters as it is for determining those of carbon dioxide or of the constitution of Great Britain is also the contention of the paper. But if the words quoted suggest to anyone that the real or even the ideal are somehow possessions of an individual man, things secreted somewhere about him and then ejected, I can only say that I cannot understand the doctrine. I know of no ready-made and antecedent conception of "the individual man." Instead of telling about the nature of experience by means of a prior conception of individual man, I find it necessary to go to experience to find out what is meant by "individual" and by "man"; and also by "the." Consequently even in such an expression as "my experience," I should wish not to contradict this idea of method by using the term "my" to swallow up the term "experience," any more than if I said "my house," or "my country." On the contrary, I should expect that any intelligible and definite use of such phrases would throw much more light upon "me" than upon "house" or "country"--or "experience."

The possible misunderstanding is, I think, actual in the reference to "our needs" as a criterion of the correctness of truth of an idea or plan. According to the essays, it is the needs of a situation which are determinative. They evoke thought and the need of knowing, and it is only within the situation that the identification of the needs with a self occurs; and it is only by reflection upon the place of the agent in the encompassing situation that the nature of his needs can be determined. In fact, the actual occurrence of a disturbed, incomplete, and needy situation indicates that my present need is precisely to investigate, to explore, to hunt, to pull apart things now tied together, to project, to plan, to invent, and then to test the outcome by seeing how it works as a method of dealing with hard facts. One source of the demand, in short, for reference to experience as the encompassing universe of discourse is to keep us from taking such terms as "self," "my," "need," "satisfaction," etc., as terms whose meanings can be accepted and proved either by themselves or by even the most extensive dialectic reference to other terms.

Terms like "real" and "ideal," "individual," "man," "my," certainly allow of profitable dialectic (or purely prepositional) clarification and elaboration. But nothing is settled until these discursive findings have been applied, through action, to things, and an experience has been effected, which either meets or evades the specification conceptually laid down. To suppose, for example, that the import of the term "ideal" can be settled apart from exhibiting in experience some specific affair, is to maintain in philosophy that belief in the occult essence and hidden cause which science had to get rid of before it got on the right track. The idealistic misconception of experience is no reason for throwing away its significant point of contact with modern science and for having recourse then to objects distinguished from old-fashioned Dinge an Sich only because they involve just that reference to those experiences by which they were established and to which they are applied that propositional or analytic realism professedly and elaborately ignores. In revenge, this ignoring leaves on our hands the "me," or knowing self, as a separate thing within which experience falls (instead of its falling in a specifiable place within experience), and generates the insoluble problem of how a subjective experience can beget objective knowledge.

In concluding, let me say that reference to experience seems at present to be the easiest way of realizing the continuities among subject-matters that are always getting split up into dualisms. A creation of a world of subsistences or essences which are quite other than the world of natural existences (which are other than natural existences adapted to the successful performance of inference) is in itself a technical matter, though a discouraging one to a philosopher expertly acquainted with all the difficulties which that view has generated from the time of Plato down. But the assistance which such a philosophy lends to the practical and current divorce of the "ideal" from the natural world makes it a thing to be dreaded for other than professional reasons. God only knows how many of the sufferings of life are due to a belief that the natural scene and operations of our life are lacking in ideal import, and to the consequent tendency to flee for the lacking ideal factors to some other world inhabited exclusively by ideals. That such a cut-off, ideal world is impotent for direction and control and change of the natural world follows as a matter of course. It is a luxury; it belongs to the "genteel tradition" of life, the persistence of an "upper" class given to a detached and parasitic life. Moreover, it places the scientific inquirer within that irresponsible class. If philosophers could aid in making it clear to a troubled humanity that ideals are continuous with natural events, that they but represent their possibilities, and that recognized possibilities form methods for a conduct which may realize them in fact, philosophers would enforce the sense of a social calling and responsibility. I do not say that pointing out the continuity and interaction of various attitudes and interests in experience is the only way of effecting this consummation. But for a large number of persons today it is the readiest way.

Much may be said about that other great rupture of continuity which analytic realism would maintain: that between the world and the knower as something outside of it, engaged in an otiose contemplative survey of it. I can understand the social conditions which generated this conception of an aloof knower. I can see how it protected the growth of responsible inquiry which takes effect in change of the environment, by cultivating a sense of the innocuousness of knowing, and thus lulling to sleep the animosity of those who, being in control, had no desire to permit reflection which had practical import. I can see how specialists at any time, professional knowers, so to speak, find in this doctrine a salve for conscience--a solace which all thinkers need as long as an effective share in the conduct of affairs is not permitted them. Above all, I can see how seclusion and the absence of the pressure of immediate action developed a more varied curiosity, greater impartiality, and a more generous outlook. But all this is no reason for continuing the idealization of a remote and separate mind or knower now that the method of intelligence is perfected, and changed social conditions not only permit but demand that intelligence be placed within the procession of events. An intellectual integrity, an impartiality and detachment, which is maintained only in seclusion is unpleasantly reminiscent of other identifications of virtue with the innocence of ignorance. To place knowledge where it arises and operates in experience is to know that, as it arose because of the troubles of man, it is confirmed in reconstructing the conditions which occasioned those troubles. Genuine intellectual integrity is found in experimental knowing. Until this lesson is fully learned, it is not safe to dissociate knowledge from experiment nor experiment from experience.

FOOTNOTES:

I am indebted to an unpublished manuscript of Mr. S. Klyce of Winchester, Massachusetts, for the significance of the fact that our words divide into terms (of which more in the sequel) and into names which are not (strictly speaking) terms at all, but which serve to remind us of the vast and vague continuum, select portions of which only are designated by words as terms. He calls such words "infinity and zero" words. The word "experience" is a typical instance of an "infinity word." Mr. Klyce has brought out very clearly that a direct situation of experience ("situation" as I employ it is another such word) has no need of any word for itself, the thing to which the word would point being so egregiously there on its own behalf. But when communication about it takes place (as it does, not only in converse with others, but when a man attempts a mutual reference of different periods of his own life) a word is needed to remind both parties of this taken-for-granted whole (another infinity term), while confusion arises if explicit attention is not called to the fact that it is a very different sort of word from the definite terms of discourse which denote distinctions and their relations to one another. In the text, attention is called to the fact that the business man wrestling with a difficulty or a scientific man engaged in an inquiry finds his checks and control specifically in the situation in which he is employed, while the theorizer at large leaves out these checks and limits, and so loses his clews. Well, the words "experience," "situation," etc., are used to remind the thinker of the need of reversion to precisely something which never can be one of the terms of his reflection but which nevertheless furnishes the existential meaning and status of them all. "Intuition," mysticism, philosophized or sophisticated monism, are all of them aberrant ways of protesting against the consequences which result from failing to note what is conveyed by words which are not terms. Were I rewriting these essays in toto I should try to take advantage of these and other indispensable considerations advanced by Mr. Klyce; but as the essays must stand substantially as they were originally written, and as an Introduction to them must, in order to be intelligible, be stated in not incongruous phraseology, I wish simply to ask the reader to bear in mind this radical difference between such words as "experience," "reality," "universe," "situation," and such terms as "typewriter," "me," "consciousness," "existence," when used (as they must be used if they are to be terms) in a differential sense. The term "reality" is particularly treacherous, for the careless tradition of philosophy (a carelessness fostered, I am sure, by failure to make verbally explicit the distinction to which Mr. Klyce has called attention) uses "reality" both as a term of indifferent reference, equivalent to everything taken together or referred to en masse as over against some discrimination, and also as a discriminative term with a highly eulogistic flavor: as real money in distinction from counterfeit money. Then, although every inquiry in daily life, whether technological or scientific, asks whether a thing is real only in the sense of asking what thing is real, philosophy concludes to a wholesale distinction between the real and the unreal, the real and the apparent, and so creates a wholly artificial problem.

If the philosopher, whether idealistic or realistic, who holds that it is self-contradictory to criticize purely intellectualistic conceptions of the world, because the criticism itself goes on intellectualistic terms, so that its validity depends upon intellectual (or cognitive) conditions, will but think of the very brute doings in which a chemist engages to fix the meanings of his terms and to test his theories and conceptions, he will perceive that all intellectual knowing is but a method for conducting an experiment, and that arguments and objections are but stimuli to induce somebody to try a certain experiment--to have recourse, that is, to a non-logical non-intellectual affair. Or again, the argument is an invitation to him to note that at the very time in which he is thinking, his thinking is set in a continuum which is not an object of thought. The importance attached to the word "experience," then, both in the essays and in this Introduction, is to be understood as an invitation to employ thought and discriminative knowledge as a means of plunging into something which no argument and no term can express; or rather as an invitation to note the fact that no plunge is needed, since one's own thinking and explicit knowledge are already constituted by and within something which does not need to be expressed or made explicit. And finally, there is nothing mystical about this, though mysticism doubtless roots in this fact. Its import is only to call notice to the meaning of, say, formulae communicated by a chemist to others as the result of his experiment. All that can be communicated or expressed is that one believes such and such a thing. The communication has scientific instead of merely social significance because the communicated formula is a direction to other chemists to try certain procedures and see what they get. The direction is capable of expression; the result of the experiment, the experience, to which the propositions refer and by which they are tested, is not expressible. (Poetry, of course, is a more competent organ of suggesting it than scientific prose.) The word "experience" is, I repeat, a notation of an inexpressible as that which decides the ultimate status of all which is expressed; inexpressible not because it is so remote and transcendent, but because it is so immediately engrossing and matter of course.

There are certain points of similarity between this doctrine and that of Holt regarding contradictions and that of Montague regarding "consciousness" as a case of potential energy. But the latter doctrine seems to me to suffer, first, from an isolation of the brain from the organism, which leads to ignoring the active doing, and, secondly, from an isolation of the "moment" of reduction of actual to potential energy. It appears as a curiously isolated and self-sufficient event, instead of as the focus of readjustment in an organized activity at the pivotal point of maximum "tension"--that is, of greatest inhibition in connection with greatest tendency to discharge. And while I think Holt is wholly right in connecting the possibility of error with objectively plural and conflicting forces, I should hardly regard it as linguistically expedient to call counterbalancing forces "contradictory." The counterbalancing forces of the vaulting do not seem to me contradictory in the arch. But if their presence led me to attempt to say "up" and "down" at the same time there would be contradiction. But even admitting that contradictory propositions are merely about forces which are contradictory--heating and cooling--it is still a long way to error. For propositions about such "contradictions" are obviously true propositions. It is only when we make that reaction to one factor which is appropriate to dealing with the other that there is error; and this can happen where there are no contradictory forces at all beyond the fact that the agent is pulled two incompatible and opposed ways at the same time.

For emphasis I am here exaggerating by condensing into a single decisive act an operation which is continuously going on.

I would remark in passing that a recognition that a thing may be continuous in one respect and discrete in another would obviate a good many difficulties.

In effect, the fallacy is the same as that of an idealistic theory which holds that all objects are "really" associations of sensations.

This statement is meant literally. The "sensations" of color, sound, etc., to which appeal is made in a scientific inquiry are nothing mental in structure or stuff; they are actual, extra-organic things analyzed down to what is so indubitably there that it may safely be taken as a basis of inference.

A term is not of course a mere word; a mere word is non-sense, for a sound by itself is not a word at all. Nor is it a mere meaning, which is not even natural non-sense, being (if it be at all) supernatural or transcendental nonsense. "Terms" signify that certain absent existences are indicated by certain given existences, in the respect that they are abstracted and fixed for intellectual use by some physically convenient means, such as a sound or a muscular contraction of the vocal organs.

This distinction of indication as existential and implication as conceptual or essential, I owe to Mr. Alfred Sidgwick. See his Fallacies, p. 50.

James, Psychology, II, 665.

I have even seen, in a criticism of the essays, the method of genesis opposed to the method of experimentation--as if experimentation were anything but the generation of some special object!

THE RELATIONSHIP OF THOUGHT AND ITS SUBJECT-MATTER

No one doubts that thought, at least reflective as distinct from what is sometimes called constitutive thought, is derivative and secondary. It comes after something and out of something, and for the sake of something. No one doubts that the thinking of everyday practical life and of science is of this reflective type. We think about; we reflect over. If we ask what it is which is primary and radical to thought; if we ask what is the final objective for the sake of which thought intervenes; if we ask in what sense we are to understand thought as a derived procedure, we are plunging ourselves into the very heart of the logical problem: the relation of thought to its empirical antecedents and to its consequent, truth, and the relation of truth to reality.

Yet from the naïve point of view no difficulty attaches to these questions. The antecedents of thought are our universe of life and love; of appreciation and struggle. We think about anything and everything: snow on the ground; the alternating clanks and thuds that rise from below; the relation of the Monroe Doctrine to the embroglio in Venezuela; the relation of art to industry; the poetic quality of a painting by Botticelli; the battle of Marathon; the economic interpretation of history; the proper definition of cause; the best method of reducing expenses; whether and how to renew the ties of a broken friendship; the interpretation of an equation in hydrodynamics, etc.

Through the madness of this miscellaneous citation there appears so much of method: anything--event, act, value, ideal, person, or place--may be an object of thought. Reflection busies itself alike with physical nature, the record of social achievement, and the endeavors of social aspiration. It is with reference to such affairs that thought is derivative; it is with reference to them that it intervenes or mediates. Taking some part of the universe of action, of affection, of social construction, under its special charge, and having busied itself therewith sufficiently to meet the special difficulty presented, thought releases that topic and enters into further more direct experience.