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last marked below.
EXPERIENCE AND NATURE
PUBLISHED ON THE FOUNDATION
ESTABLISHED IN MEMORY OF
PAUL CARUS
EDITOR OF THE OPEN COURT AND THE MONIST
1888-19x9
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EXPERIENCE AND
NATURE
JOHN DEWEY
LONDON
GEORGE ALLEN & UNWIN, LTD.
RUSKIN HOUSE, 40 MUSEUM STREET, W.CX
1929
PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
CONTENTS
JPAGE
THE PAUL CARUS FOUNDATION .... ix
CHAPTER
I. EXPERIENCE AND PHILOSOPHIC METHOD . la
II. EXISTP;NCE AS PRECARIOUS AND AS STABLE . 40
III. NATURE, ENDS AND HISTORIES .... 78
IV. NATURE, MEANS AND KNOWLEDGE . . . 121
V. NATURE, COMMUNICATION AND AS MEANING 166
VI. NATURE, MIND AND THE SUBJECT . . . 208
VII. NATURE, LIFE AND BODY-MIND . . . . 248
VIII. EXISTENCE, IDEAS AND CONSCIOUSNESS . . 298
IX. EXPERIENCE, NATURE AND ART . . . . 354
X. EXISTENCE, VALUE AND CRITICISM . . . 394
INDEX 439
THE PAUL CARUS FOUNDATION
Dr. Paul Carus was born in Usenburg, Germany, hi
1852. He was educated at the Universities of Strass-
burg and Tubingen, from the latter of which he received
the doctorate of philosophy in 1876. It was, however,
in the United States, to which he shortly after removed,
that his life-work was performed. He became editor of
the Open Court in 1888, and later established The Monist,
remaining throughout his career, editor of these two peri*
odicals and Director of the editorial policies of the Open
Court Company. He died in February, 1919, at La Salle,
Illinois.
The primary interests which actuated Dr. Carus's life-
work were in the field of philosophy, touching with almost
equal weight the two great phases of modern speculative
concern represented by the philosophy of science and com-
parative religion. To each of these he devoted numerous
special studies, and to each he gave the influence of the
press which he directed. This influence was in no sense
narrow or specialistic. Dr. Caxus was personally pro-
foundly concerned for the broadening of that understand-
ing in all intellectual fields which he felt must be the
foundation of whatever is to be valuable in our future
human culture; he saw his philosophy never as a closet
pursuit, but always as a quest for the social illumination
of mankind, in which his hope of betterment lay. In
this interest he combatted prejudice, in religion and
science alike, seeking to divest the spirit of truth of all
cloaking of formula, and turning with eager and open
x THE PAUL CARUS FOUNDATION
eyes in every direction in which there was a suggestion of
light and leading to men and to thought of every com-
plexion and to all levels of active human concern with
matters of reflection. Dr. Cams was, in fact, strongly
Socratic in disposition: he wished to bring philosophy
down from the skies of a too studied abstraction and
habituate it to the houses of men's souls and to the rich
and changing tides of cultural interests. Certainly so
far as America is concerned his service is a signal one.
During much of his career he stood almost alone as a
philosopher outside academic walls, a living exponent of
the fact that philosophy is significant as a force as well as
useful as an educational discipline. He looked to the
cultivation of philosophy as a frame of mind open to all,
lay and professional, who should come to see that social
liberty is made secure only where there is growth of a
sympathetic public intelligence.
It is with the spirit and intention of Dr. Carus's life-
work in mind that his family have established in his
memory the Paul Cams Lectures. In the United States,
foundations devoted to the cultivation of philosophy are
so confined to scholastic institutions that the whole field
of philosophic concern tends to assume the slant of an
immured and scholastic discipline; and the observer is
tempted to say that the greatest gift that can befall
philosophic liberalism is one that will cause its followers to
forget their professional character. Such a gift, certainly,
is more than suggested by a lectureship which comes
with no institutional atmosphere to further the free play
of the mind upon all phases of life. In the stipulations
for the Carus lectures, the themes of the lectures are left
without definition, for it is recognized that philosophy is
THE PAUL CARUS FOUNDATION xi
a spirit of approach rather than a set of problems or
theories; and the choice of the lecturers, while it is properly
placed in the hands of those who make the study of
philosophy their profession, is in no manner limited. The
Foundation is free, and it asks of its beneficiaries no other
response than the spirit of liberalism.
The conditions governing the lectures are few. They
are established as a memorial and are to be called the
"Paul Cams Lectures." The lecturers are to be chosen
by committees appointed from the Divisions of the Ameri-
can Philosophical Association. The lecturer is recognized
by an honorarium of one thousand dollars, and the lec-
tures are to be published by the Open Court Company in
a series of volumes, which, it is hoped, as the years pass,
will become representative of the finest phases of our
speculative thought. It is expected that series of lec-
tures will be delivered biennially, the time and place
being set by the committees to whom is delegated the
selection of the lecturers. It is more than happy that the
first series of the Paul Carus Lectures should have been
delivered by John Dewey, for there is no living American
philosopher of whom it can more truly be said that his
influence is oi the type which represents Dr. Carus's
ideal*
HARTLEY BURR ALEXANDER.
PREFACE
The publication of this new edition has made it possible
to rewrite completely the first chapter as well as to make a
few minor corrections throughout the volume. The first
chapter was intended as an introduction. It failed of its
purpose; it was upon the whole more technical and harder
reading than the chapters which it was supposed to intro-
duce. It was also rather confused in mode of presentation,
and at one important point in thought as well. It is hoped
that its new form is both simpler and possessed of greater
continuity. If the original intent is now better fulfilled, it
is largely due to the help of kindly critics. I wish to record
my especial indebtedness to Professor M. C. Otto of the
University of Wisconsin and Mr. Joseph Ratner of Colum-
bia University.
In addition to the complete revision of the first chapter,
the new edition affords an occasion for inserting in these
prefatory remarks what is not to be found in the earlier
text; namely, a summary of the thought of the book in the
order of its development. The course of the ideas is deter-
mined by a desire to apply in the more general realm of phi-
losophy the thought which is effective in dealing with any
and every genuine question, from the elaborate problems of
science to the practical deliberations of daily life, trivial or
momentous. The constant task of such thought is to estab-
lish working connections between old and new subject-mat-
ters. We cannot lay hold of the new, we cannot even keep
it before our minds, much less understand it, save by the use
ii PREFACE
of ideas and knowledge we already possess. But just be-
cause the new is nw it is not a mere repetition of something
already had and mastered. The old takes on new color and
meaning in being employed to grasp and interpret the new.
The greater the gap, the disparity, between what has be-
come a familiar possession and the traits presented in new
subject-matter, the greater is the burden imposed upon
reflection; the distance between old and new is the measure
of the range and depth of the thought required.
Breaks and incompatibilities occur in collective culture
as well as in individual life. Modern science, modern in-
dustry and politics, have presented us with an immense
amount of material foreign to, often inconsistent with, the
most prized intellectual and moral heritage of the western
world. This is the cause of our modern intellectual per-
plexities and confusions. It sets the especial problem for
philosophy to-day and for many days to come. Every
significant philosophy is an attempt to deal with it; those
theories to which this statement seems to apply least are
attempts to bridge the gulf by seeking an escape or refuge.
I have not striven in this volume for a reconciliation be-
tween the new and the old. I think such endeavors are
likely to give rise to casualties to good faith and candor.
But in employing, as one must do, a body of old beliefs and
ideas to apprehend and understand the new, I have also
kept in mind the modifications and transformations that
are exacted of those old beliefs.
I believe that the method of empirical naturalism pre-
sented in this volume provides the way, and the only way
although of course no two thinkers will travel it in just
the same fashion by which one can freely accept the
standpoint and conclusions of modern science: the wa by
PREFACE iii
which we can be genuinely naturalistic and yet maintain
cherished values, provided they are critically clarified and
reinforced. The naturalistic method, when it is con-
sistently followed, destroys many things once cherished;
but it destroys them by revealing their inconsistency with
the nature of things a flaw that always attended them
and deprived them of efficacy for aught save emotional
consolation. But its main purport is not destructive;
empirical naturalism is rather a winnowing fan. Only
chaff goes, though perhaps the chaff had once been treas-
ured. An empirical method which remains true to nature
does not "save"; it is not an insurance device nor a me-
chanical antiseptic. But it inspires the mind with courage
and vitality to create new ideals and values in the face of
the perplexities of a new world.
The new introductory chapter (Chapter I) accordingly
takes up the question of method, especially with respect
to the relation that exists between experience and nature.
It points to faith in experience when intelligently used as
a means of disclosing the realities of nature. It finds that
nature and experience are not enemies or alien. Experi-
ence is not a veil that shuts man off from nature; it is a
means of penetrating continually further into the heart of
nature. There is in the character of human experience
no index-hand pointing to agnostic conclusions, but rather
a growing progressive self -disclosure of nature itself. The
failures of philosophy have come from lack of confidence
in the directive powers that inhere in experience, if men
have but the wit and courage to follow them.
Chapter II explains our starting point: namely, that the
things of ordinary experience contain within themselves a
mixture of the perilous and uncertain with the settled and
iv PREFACE
uniform. The need for security compels men to fasten
upon the regular in order to minimize and to control the
precarious and fluctuating. In actual experience this is a
practical enterprise, made possible by knowledge of the
recurrent and stable, of facts and laws. Philosophies have
too often tried to forego the actual work that is involved
in penetrating the true nature of experience, by setting up
a purely theoretical security and certainty. The influence
of this attempt upon the traditional philosophic preference
for unity, permanence, universals, over plurality, change
and particulars is pointed out, as well as its effect in
creating the traditional notion of substance, now under-
mined by physical science. The tendency of modern
science to substitute qualitative events, marked by certain
similar properties and by recurrences, for the older notion
of fixed substances is shown to agree with the attitude of
naive experience, while both point to the idea of matter and
mind as significant characters of events, presented in dif-
ferent contexts, rather than underlying and ultimate sub-
stances.
Chapters III and IV discuss one of the outstanding
problems in philosophy namely, the question of laws,
mechanical uniformities, on one hand and, on the other,
ends, purposes, uses and enjoyments. It is pointed out
that in actual experience the latter represent the conse-
quences of series of changes in which the outcomes or ends
have the value of consummation and fulfillment; and that
because of this value there is a tendency to perpetuate
them, render them stable, and repeat them. It is then
shown that the foundation for value and the striving to
realize it is found in nature, because when nature is viewed
as consisting of events rather than substances, it is char-
PREFACE v
acterized by histories, that is, by continuity of change pro-
ceeding from beginnings to endings. Consequently, it is
natural for genuine initiations and consummations to oc-
cur in experience. Owing to the presence of uncertain and
precarious factors in these histories, attainment of ends, of
goods, is unstable and evanescent. The only way to
render them more secure is by ability to control the
changes that intervene between the beginning and the end
of a process. These intervening terms when brought under
control are means in the literal and in the practical sense
of the word. When mastered in actual experience they
constitute tools, techniques, mechanisms, etc. Instead of
being foes of purposes, they are means of execution; they
are also tests for differentiating genuine aims from merely
emotional and fantastic ideals.
The office of physical science is to discover those prop-
erties and relations of things in virtue of which they are
capable of being used as instrumentalities; physical science
makes claim to disclose not the inner nature of things but
only those connections of things with one another that
determine outcomes and hence can be used as means. The
intrinsic nature of events is revealed in experience as the
immediately felt qualities of things. The intimate co-
ordination and even fusion of these qualities with the
regularities that form the objects of knowledge, in the
proper sense of the word "knowledge," characterizes intel-
ligently directed experience, as distinct from mere casual
and uncritical experience.
This conception of the instrumental nature of the ob-
jects of scientific knowing forms the pivot upon which
further 'discussion turns (Chapter V). That character of
everyday experience which has been most systematically
vi PREFACE
ignored by philosophy is the extent to which it is saturated
with the results of social intercourse and communication.
Because this factor has been denied, meanings have either
been denied all objective validity, or have been treated as
miraculous extra-natural intrusions. If, however, lan-
guage, for example, is recognized as the instrument of so-
cial cooperation and mutual participation, continuity is
established between natural events (animal sound, cries,
etc.) and the origin and development of meanings. Mind
is seen to be a function of social interactions, and to be a
genuine character 'of natural events when these attain the
stage of widest and most complex interaction with one
another. Ability to respond to meanings and to employ
them, instead of reacting merely to physical contacts,
makes the difference between man and other animals;
it is the agency for elevating man into the realm of what
is usually called the ideal and spiritual. In other words,
the social participation affected by communication, through
language and other tools, is the naturalistic link which does
away with the often alleged necessity of dividing the ob-
jects of experience into two worlds, one physical and one
ideal.
Chapter VI makes the transition from this realization
that the social character of meanings forms the solid con-
tent of mind to considering mind as individual or "sub-
jective." One of the most marked features of modern
thought as distinct from ancient and medieval thought is
its emphasis upon mind as personal or even private, its
identification with selfhood. The connection of this under-
lying but misinterpreted fact with experience is made by
showing that modern as distinct from ancient culture is
characterized by the importance attached to initiation,
PREFACE vii
invention and variation. Thus mind in its individual aspect
is shown to be the method of change and progress in the
significances and values attached to things. This trait is
linked up to natural events by recurring to their particular
and variable, their contingent, quality. In and of itself
this factor is puzzling; it accounts for accidents and irra-
tionalities. It was long treated as such in the history of
mankind; the individual characteristics of mind were re-
garded as deviations from the normal, and as dangers
against which society had to protect itself. Hence the
long rule of custom, the rigid conservatism, and the still
existing regime of conformity and intellectual standardiza-
tion. The development of modern science began when
there was recognized in certain technical fields a power
to utilize variations as the starting points of new observa-
tions, hypotheses and experiments. The growth of the
experimental as distinct from the dogmatic habit of mind
is due to increased ability to utilize variations for con-
structive ends instead of suppressing them.
Life, as a trait of natural organisms, was incidentally
treated in connection with the development of tools, of
language and of individual variations. Its consideration
as the link between physical nature and experience forms
the topic of the mind-body problem (Chapter VII). The
isolation of nature and experience from each other has
rendered the undeniable connection of thought and effec-
tiveness of knowledge and purposive action, with the body,
an insoluble mystery. Restoration of continuity is shown
to do away with the mind-body problem. It leaves us with
an organism in which events have those qualities, usually
called feelings, not realized in events that form inanimate
thiflgs, and which, when living creatures communicate with
viii PREFACE
one another so as to share in common, and hence uni-
versalized, objects, take on distinctively mental properties.
The continuity of nature and experience is shown to resolve
many problems that become only the more taxing when
continuity is ignored.
The traits of living creatures are then considered (Chap-
ter VIII) in connection with the conscious aspect of be-
havior and experience, the quality of immediacy attaching
to events when they are actualized in experience by means
of organic and social interactions. The difference and the
connection of mind and consciousness is set forth. The
meanings that form mind become consciousness, or ideas,
impressions, etc., when something within the meanings or
in their application becomes dubious, and the meaning in
question needs reconstruction. This principle explains
the focal and rapidly shifting traits of the objects of con-
sciousness as such. A sensitive and vital mental career
thus depends upon being awake to questions and problems;
consciousness stagnates and becomes restricted and dull
when this interest wanes.
The highest because most complete incorporation of
natural forces and operations in experience is found in
art (Chapter IX). Art is a process of production in which
natural materials are re-shaped in a projection toward
consummatory fulfillment through regulation of trains
of events that occur in a less regulated way on lower levels
of nature. Art is "fine" in the degree in which ends, the
final termini, of natural processes are dominant and con-
spicuously enjoyed. All art is instrumental in its use of
techniques and tools. It is shown that normal artistic
experience involves bringing to a better balance than is
found elsewhere in either nature or experience the consilm-
PREFACE
matory and instrumental phases of events. Art thus rep-
resents the culminating event of nature as well as the
climax of experience. In this connection the usual sharp
separation made between art and science is criticized; it
is argued that science as method is more basic than science
as subject-matter, and that scientific inquiry is an art, at
once instrumental in control and final as a pure enjoyment
of mind.
This recurrence to the topic of ends, or consummatory
consequences, and of desire and striving for them, raises
the question of the nature of values (Chapter X). Values
are naturalistically interpreted as intrinsic qualities of
events in their consummatory reference. The question of
the control of the course of events so that it may yield,
as ends or termini, objects that are stable and that tend
toward creation of other values, introduces the topic of
value-judgments or valuations. These constitute what is
generically termed criticism. A return is made to the
theme of the first chapter by emphasizing the crucial sig-
nificance of criticism in all phases of experience for its
intelligent control. Philosophy, then, is a generalized
theory of criticism. Its ultimate value for life-experience
is that it continuously provides instruments for the criti-
cism of those values whether of beliefs, institutions, ac-
tions or products that are found in all aspects of
experience. The chief obstacle to a more effective criticism
of current values lies in the traditional separation of nature
and experience, which it is the purpose of this volume to
replace by the idea of continuity.
January, 1929, New York City.
JOHN DEWEY.
CHAPTER ONE
EXPERIENCE AND PHILOSOPHIC METHOD
The title of this volume, Experience and Nature, is in-
tended to signify that the philosophy here presented may
be termed either empirical naturalism or naturalistic em-
piricism, or, taking "experience" in its usual signification,
naturalistic humanism.
To many the associating of the two words will seem like
talking of a round square, so engrained is the notion of the
separation of man and experience from nature. Experi-
ence, they say, is important for those beings who have it,
but is too casual and sporadic in its occurrence to carry
with it any important implications regarding the nature of
Nature. Nature, on the other hand, is said to be complete
apart from experience. Indeed, according to some think-
ers the case is even in worse plight: Experience to them is
not only something extraneous which is occasionally super-
imposed upon nature, but it forms a veil or screen which
shuts us off from nature, unless in some way it can be
"transcended." So something non-natural by way of rea-
son or intuition is introduced, something supra-empirical.
According to an opposite school experience fares as badly,
nature being thought to signify something wholly material
and mechanistic; to frame a theory of experience in
naturalistic terms is, accordingly, to degrade and deny the
noble and ideal values that characterize experience.
I know of no route by which dialectical argument can
answer such objections. They arise from associations with
woi;ds and cannot be dealt with argumentatively. One can
la
2a EXPERIENCE AND NATURE
only hope in the course of the whole discussion to disclose
the meanings which are attached to "experience" and
"nature," and thus insensibly produce, if one is fortunate,
a change in the significations previously attached to them.
This process of change may be hastened by calling atten-
tion to another context in which nature and experience get
on harmoniously together wherein experience presents it-
self as the method, and the only method, for getting at
nature, penetrating its secrets, and wherein nature em-
pirically disclosed (by the use of empirical method in
natural science) deepens, enriches and directs the further
development of experience.
In the natural sciences there is a union of experience and
nature which is not greeted as a monstrosity; on the con-
trary, the inquirer must use empirical method if his findings
are to be treated as genuinely scientific. The investigator
assumes as a matter of course that experience, controlled
in specifiable ways, is the avenue that leads to the facts
and laws of nature. He uses reason and calculation freely;
he could not get along without them. But he sees to it that
ventures of this theoretical sort start from and terminate
in directly experienced subject-matter. Theory may in-
tervene in a long course of reasoning, many portions of
which are remote from what is directly experienced. But
the vine of pendant theory is attached at both ends to the
pillars of observed subject-matter. And this experienced
material is the same for the scientific man and the man
in the street. The latter cannot follow the intervening
reasoning without special preparation. But stars, rocks,
trees, and creeping things are the same material of ex-
perience for both.
These commonplaces take on significance when the rela-
tion of experience to the formation of a philosophic theory
PHILOSOPHIC METHOD 3a
of nature is in question. They indicate that experience,
if scientific inquiry is justified, is no infinitesimally thin
layer or foreground of nature, but that it penetrates into
it, reaching down into its depths, and in such a way that
its grasp is capable of expansion; it tunnels in all direc-
tions and in so doing brings to the surface things at first
hidden as miners pile high on the surface of the earth
treasures brought from below. Unless we are prepared to
deny all validity to scientific inquiry, these facts have a
value that cannot be ignored for the general theory of the
relation of nature and experience.
It is sometimes contended, for example, that since ex-
perience is a late comer in the history of our solar system
and planet, and since these occupy a trivial place in the
wide areas of celestial space, experience is at most a slight
and insignificant incident in nature. No one with an hon-
est respect for scientific conclusions can deny that experi-
ence as an existence is something that occurs only under
highly specialized conditions, such as are found in a highly
organized creature which in turn requires a specialized en-
vironment. There is no evidence that experience occurs
everywhere and everywhen. But candid regard for scien-
tific inquiry also compels the recognition that when ex-
perience does occur, no matter at what limited portion of
time and space, it enters into possession of some portion of
nature and in such a manner as to render other of its
precincts accessible.
A geologist living in 1928 tells us about events that
happened not only before he was born but millions of
years before any human being came into existence on this
earth. He does so by starting from things that are now
the material of experience. Lyell revolutionized geology
by perceiving that the sort of thing that can be experienced
4a EXPERIENCE AND NATURE
now in the operations of fire, water, pressure, is the sort
of thing by which the earth took on its present structural
forms. Visiting a natural history museum, one beholds a
mass of rock and, reading a label, finds that it comes from
a tree that grew, so it is affirmed, five million years ago.
The geologist did not leap from the thing he can see and
touch to some event in by-gone ages; he collated this
observed thing with many others, of different kinds, found
all over the globe; the results of his comparisons he then
compared with data of other experiences, say, the as-
tronomer's. He translates, that is, observed coexistences
into non-observed, inferred sequences. Finally he dates his
object, placing it in an order of events. By the same sort
of method he predicts that at certain places some things
not yet experienced will be observed, and then he takes
pains to bring them within the scope of experience. The
scientific conscience is, moreover, so sensitive with respect
to the necessity of experience that when it reconstructs the
past it is not fully satisfied with inferences drawn from
even a large and cumulative mass of uncontradicted evi-
dence; it sets to work to institute conditions of heat and
pressure and moisture, etc., so as actually to reproduce in
experiment that which he has inferred.
These commonplaces prove that experience is of as well
as in nature. It is not experience which is experienced,
but nature stones, plants, animals, diseases, health, tem-
perature, electricity, and so on. Things interacting in
certain ways are experience; they are what is experienced.
Linked in certain other ways with another natural object
the human organism they are how things are experi-
enced as well. Experience thus reaches down into nature;
it has depth. It also has breadth and to an indefinitely
PHILOSOPHIC METHOD i
elastic extent. It stretches. That stretch constitutes
inference.
Dialectical difficulties, perplexities due to definitions
given to the concepts that enter into the discussion, may be
raised. It is said to be absurd that what is only a tiny
part of nature should be competent to incorporate vast
reaches of nature within itself. But even were it logically
absurd one would be bound to cleave to it as a fact. Logic,
however, is not put under a strain. The fact that some-
thing is an occurrence does not decide what kind of an
occurrence it is; that can be found out only by examina-
tion. To argue from an experience "being an experience"
to what it is of and about is warranted by no logic, even
though modern thought has attempted it a thousand times.
A bare event is no event at all; something happens. What
that something is, is found out by actual study. This
applies to seeing a flash of lightning and holds of the longer
event called experience. The very existence of science is
evidence that experience is such an occurrence that it pene-
trates into nature and expands without limit through it.
These remarks are not supposed to prove anything about
experience and nature for philosophical doctrine; they are
not supposed to settle anything about the worth of em-
pirical naturalism. But they do show that in the case of
natural science we habitually treat experience as starting-
point, and as method for dealing with nature, and as the
goal in which nature is disclosed for what it is. To realize
this fact is at least to weaken those verbal associations
which stand in the way of apprehending the force of em-
pirical method in philosophy.
The same considerations apply to the other objection
that. was suggested: namely, that to view experience natur-
alistically is to reduce it to something materialistic, depriv-
2 EXPERIENCE AND NATURE
ing it of all ideal significance. If experience actually pre-
sents esthetic and moral traits, then these traits may also
be supposed to reach down into nature, and to testify to
something that belongs to nature as truly as does the me-
chanical structure attributed to it in physical science. To
rule out that possibility by some general reasoning is to
forget that the very meaning and purport of empirical
method is that things are to be studied on their own
account, so as to find out what is revealed when they are
experienced. The traits possessed by the subject-matters
of experience are as genuine as the characteristics of sun
and electron. They are jound, experienced, and are not to
be shoved out of being by some trick of logic. When
found, their ideal qualities are as relevant to the philo-
sophic theory of nature as are the traits found by physical
inquiry.
To discover some of these general features of experi-
enced things and to interpret their significance for a phil-
osophic theory of the universe in which we live is the aim
of this volume. From the point of view adopted, the
theory of empirical method in philosophy does for experi-
enced subject-matter on a liberal scale what it does for
special sciences on a technical scale. It is this aspect of
method with which we are especially concerned in the
present chapter.
If the empirical method were universally or even gen-
erally adopted in philosophizing, there would be no need of
referring to experience. The scientific inquirer talks and
writes about particular observed events and qualities, about
specific calculations and reasonings. He makes no allu-
sion to experience; one would probably have to search a
long time through reports of special researches in order to
find the word. The reason is that everything desig-
PHILOSOPHIC METHOD 3
nated by the word "experience" is so adequately incorpor-
ated into scientific procedures and subject-matter that to
mention experience would be only to duplicate in a general
term what is already covered in definite terms.
Yet this was not always so. Before the technique of
empirical method was developed and generally adopted, it
was necessary to dwell explicitly upon the importance of
"experience" as a starting point and terminal point, as
setting problems and as testing proposed solutions. We
need not be content with the conventional allusion to Roger
Bacon and Francis Bacon. The followers of Newton and
the followers of the Cartesian school carried on a definite
controversy as to the place occupied by experience and
experiment in science as compared with intuitive concepts
and with reasoning from them. The Cartesian school
relegated experience to a secondary and almost accidental
place, and only when the Galilean-Newtonian method had
wholly triumphed did it cease to be necessary to mention
the importance of experience. We may, if sufficiently
hopeful, anticipate a similar outcome in philosophy. But
the date does not appear to be close at hand ; we are nearer
in philosophic theory to the time of Roger Bacon than to
that of Newton.
In short, it is the contrast of empirical method with
other methods employed in philosophizing, together with
the striking dissimilarity of results yielded by an em-
pirical method and professed non-empirical methods that
make the discussion of the methodological import of
"experience" for philosophy pertinent and indeed
indispensable.
This consideration of method may suitably begin with
the Contrast between gross, macroscopic, crude subject-
matters in primary experience and the refined, derived
4 EXPERIENCE AND NATURE
objects of reflection. The distinction is one between what
is experienced as the result of a minimum of incidental
reflection and what is experienced in consequence of con-
tinued and regulated reflective inquiry. For derived and
refined products are experienced only because of the inter-
vention of systematic thinking. The objects of both
science and philosophy obviously belong chiefly to the
secondary and refined system. But at this point we come
to a marked divergence between science and philosophy.
For the natural sciences not only draw their material
from primary experience, but they refer it back again
for test. Darwin began with the pigeons, cattle and
plants of breeders and gardeners. Some of the con-
clusions he reached were so contrary to accepted beliefs
that they were condemned as absurd, contrary to common-
sense, etc. But scientific men, whether they accepted his
theories or not, employed his hypotheses as directive ideas
for making new observations and experiments among the
things of raw experience just as the metallurgist who
extracts refined metal from crude ore makes tools that are
then set to work to control and use other crude materials.
An Einstein working by highly elaborate methods of reflec-
tion, calculates theoretically certain results in the deflection
of light by the presence of the sun. A technically equipped
expedition is sent to South Africa so that by means of
experiencing a thing an eclipse in crude, primary, ex-
perience, observations can be secured to compare with,
and test the theory implied in, the calculated result.
The facts are familiar enough. They are cited in order
to invite attention to the relationship between the objects
of primary and of secondary or reflective experience. That
the subject-matter of primary experience sets the problems
and furnishes the first data of the reflection which con-
PHILOSOPHIC METHOD 5
structs the secondary objects is evident; it is also obvious
that test and verification of the latter is secured only by
return to things of crude or macroscopic experience the
sun, earth, plants and animals of common, every-day life.
But just what role do the objects attained in reflection
play? Where do they come in? They explain the primary
objects, they enable us to grasp them with understanding,
instead of just having sense-contact with them. But how?
Well, they define or lay out a path by which return to
experienced things is of such a sort that the meaning, the
significant content, of what is experienced gains an en-
riched and expanded force because of the path or method
by which it was reached. Directly, in immediate contact
it may be just what it was before hard, colored, odorous,
etc. But when the secondary objects, the refined objects,
are employed as a method or road for coming at them,
these qualities cea^e to be isolated details; they get the
meaning contained in a whole system of related objects;
they are rendered continuous with the rest of nature and
take on the import of the things they are now seen to be
continuous with. The phenomena observed in the eclipse
tested and, as far as they went, confirmed Einstein's theory
of deflection of light by mass. But that is far from being
the whole story. The phenomena themselves got a far-
reaching significance they did not previously have. Per-
haps they would not even have been noticed if the theory
had not been employed as a guide or road to observation
of them. But even if they had been noticed, they would
have been dismissed as of no importance, just as we daily
drop from attention hundreds of perceived details for
which we have no intellectual use. But approached by
means of theory these lines of slight deflection take on a
6 EXPERIENCE AND NATURE
significance as large as that of the revolutionary theory
that lead to their being experienced.
This empirical method I shall call the denotative method.
That philosophy is a mode of reflection, often of a subtle
and penetrating sort, goes without saying. The charge
that is brought against the non-empirical method of phil-
osophizing is not that it depends upon theorizing, but that
it fails to use refined, secondary products as a path point-
ing and leading back to something in primary experience.
The resulting failure is three-fold.
First, there is no verification, no effort even to test and
check. What is even worse, secondly, is that the things of
ordinary experience do not get enlargement and enrich-
ment of meaning as they do when approached through
the medium of scientific principles and reasonings. This
lack of function reacts, in the third place, back upon the
philosophic subject-matter in itself. Not tested by being
employed to see what it leads to in ordinary experience
and what new meanings it contributes, this subject-matter
becomes arbitrary, aloof what is called "abstract" when
that word is used in a bad sense to designate something
which exclusively occupies a realm of its own without
contact with the things of ordinary experience.
As the net outcome of these three evils, we find that
extraordinary phenomenon which accounts for the revul-
sion of many cultivated persons from any form of phil-
osophy. The objects of reflection in philosophy, being
reached by methods that seem to those who employ them
rationally mandatory are taken to be "real" in and of
themselves and supremely real. Then it becomes an
insoluble problem why the things of gross, primary ex-
perience, should be what they are, or indeed why .they
should be at all. The refined objects of reflection in the
PHILOSOPHIC METHOD 7
natural sciences, however, never end by rendering the
subject-matter from which they are derived a problem;
rather, when used to describe a path by which some goal
in primary experience is designated or denoted, they solve
perplexities to which that crude material gives rise but
which it cannot resolve of itself. They become means of
control, of enlarged use and enjoyment of ordinary things.
They may generate new problems, but these are problems
of the same sort, to be dealt with by further use of the
same methods of inquiry and experimentation. The prob-
lems to which empirical method gives rise afford, in a word,
opportunities for more investigations yielding fruit in new
and enriched experiences. But the problems to which non-
empirical method gives rise in philosophy are blocks to
inquiry, blind alleys; they are puzzles rather than prob-
lems, solved only by calling the original material of primary
experience, "phenomenal," mere appearance, mere impres-
sions, or by some other disparaging name.
Thus there is here supplied, I think, a first-rate test of
the value of any philosophy which is offered us: Does it
end in conclusions which, when they are referred back
to ordinary life-experiences and their predicaments, render
them more significant, more luminous to us, and make our
dealings with them more fruitful? Or does it terminate in
rendering the things of ordinary experience more opaque
than they were before, and in depriving them of having in
"reality" even the significance they had previously seemed
to have? Does it yield the enrichment and increase of
power of ordinary things which the results of physical
science afford when applied in every-day affairs? Or does
it become a mystery that these ordinary things should be
what they are; and are philosophic concepts left to dwell in
separation in some technical realm of their own? It is the
8 EXPERIENCE AND NATURE
fact, I repeat, that so many philosophies terminate in con-
clusions that make it necessary to disparage and condemn
primary experience, leading those who hold them to meas-
ure the sublimity of their "realities" as philosophically
defined by remoteness from the concerns of daily life,
which leads cultivated common-sense to look askance at
philosophy.
These general statements must be made more definite.
We must illustrate the meaning of empirical method by
seeing some of its results in contrast with those to which
non-empirical philosophies conduct us. We begin by not-
ing that "experience" is what James called a double-
barrelled word. 1 Like its congeners, life and history, it
includes what men do and suffer, what they strive for, love,
believe and endure, and also how men act and are acted
upon, the ways in which they do and suffer, desire and
enjoy, see, believe, imagine in short, processes of experi-
encing. "Experience" denotes the planted field, the sowed
seeds, the reaped harvests, the changes of night and day,
spring and autumn, wet and dry, heat and cold, that are
observed, feared, longed for; it also denotes the one who
plants and reaps, who works and rejoices, hopes, fears,
plans, invokes magic or chemistry to aid him, who is down-
cast or triumphant. It is "double-barrelled" in that it
recognizes in its primary integrity no division between act
and material, subject and object, but contains them both
in an unanalyzed totality. "Thing" and "thought," as
James says in the same connection, are single-barrelled;
they refer to products discriminated by reflection out of
primary experience. 2
It is significant that "life" and "history" have the same
1 Essays in Radical Empiricism, p. 10.
2 It is not intended, however, to attribute to James precisely the in-
terpretation given in the text.
PHILOSOPHIC METHOD 9
fullness of undivided meaning. Life denotes a function, a
comprehensive activity, in which organism and environ-
ment are included. Only upon reflective analysis does it
break up into external conditions air breathed, food
taken, ground walked upon and internal structures
lungs respiring, stomach digesting, legs walking. The
scope of "history" is notorious: it is the deeds enacted,
the tragedies undergone; and it is the human comment,
record, and interpretation that inevitably follow. Objec-
tively, history takes in rivers, mountains, fields and for-
ests, laws and institutions; subjectively it includes the
purposes and plans, the desires and emotions, through
which these things are administered and transformed.
Now empirical method is the only method which can do
justice to this inclusive integrity of "experience." It alone
takes this integrated unity as the starting point for phil-
osophic thought. Other methods begin with results of a
reflection that has already torn in two the subject-matter
experienced and the operations and states of experiencing.
The problem is then to get together again what has been
sundered which is as if the king's men started with the
fragments of the egg and tried to construct the whole egg
out of them. For empirical method the problem is nothing
so impossible of solution. Its problem is to note how and
why the whole is distinguished into subject and object,
nature and mental operations. Having done this, it is in a
position to see to what effect the distinction is made: how
the distinguished factors function in the further control and
enrichment of the subject-matters of crude but total experi-
ence. Non-empirical method starts with a reflective
product as if it were primary, as if it were the originally
"given." To non-empirical method, therefore, object and
10 EXPERIENCE AND NATURE
subject, mind and matter (or whatever words and ideas are
used) are separate and independent. Therefore it has
upon its hands the problem of how it is possible to know at
all ; how an outer world can affect an inner mind ; how the
acts of mind can reach out and lay hold of objects defined
in antithesis to them. Naturally it is at a loss for an
answer, since its premisses make the fact of knowledge
both unnatural and unempirical. One thinker turns meta-
physical materialist and denies reality to the mental; an-
other turns psychological idealist, and holds that matter
and force are merely disguised psychical events. Solutions
are given up as a hopeless task, or else different schools pile
one intellectual complication on another only to arrive by
a long and tortuous course at that which nai've experience
already has in its own possession.
The first and perhaps the greatest difference made in
philosophy by adoption respectively of empirical or non-
empirical method is, thus, the difference made in what is
selected as original material. To a truly naturalistic em-
piricism, the moot problem of the relation of subject and
object is the problem of what consequences follow in and
for primary experience from the distinction of the physical
and the psychological or mental from each other. The
answer is not far to seek. To distinguish in reflection the
physical and to hold it in temporary detachment is to be
set upon the road that conducts to tools and technologies,
to construction of mechanisms, to the arts that ensue in
the wake of the sciences. That these constructions make
possible a better regulation of the affairs of primary ex-
perience is evident. Engineering and medicine, all the
utilities that make for expansion of life, are the answer.
There is better administration of old familiar things, 'and
there is invention of new objects and satisfactions. Along
PHILOSOPHIC METHOD 11
with this added ability in regulation goes enriched mean-
ing and value in things, clarification, increased depth and
continuity a result even more precious than is the added
power of control.
The history of the development of the physical sciences
is the story of the enlarging possession by mankind of more
efficacious instrumentalities for dealing witth the conditions
of life and action. But when one neglects the connection
of these scientific objects with the affairs of primary
experience, the result is a picture of a world of things
indifferent to human interests because it is wholly apart
from experience. It is more than merely isolated, for it
is set in opposition. Hence when it is viewed as fixed and
final in itself it is a source of oppression to the heart and
paralysis to imagination. Since this picture of the physical
universe and philosophy of the character of physical ob-
jects is contradicted by every engineering project and
every intelligent measure of public hygiene, it would seem
to be time to examine the foundations upon which it rests,
and find out how and why such conclusions are come to.
When objects are isolated from the experience through
which they are reached and in which they function, ex-
perience itself becomes reduced to the mere process of
experiencing, and experiencing is therefore treated as if it
were also complete in itself. We get the absurdity of an
experiencing which experiences only itself, states and
processes of consciousness, instead of the things of nature.
Since the seventeenth century this conception of experience
as the equivalent of subjective private consciousness set
over against nature, which consists wholly of physical
objects, has wrought havoc in philosophy. It is responsible
for the feeling mentioned at the outset that "nature" and
12 EXPERIENCE AND NATURE
"experience" are names for things which have nothing to
do with each other.
Let us inquire how the matter stands when these mental
and psychical objects are looked at in their connection with
experience in its primary and vital modes. As has been
suggested, these objects are not original, isolated and self-
sufficient. They represent the discriminated analysis of the
process of experiencing from subject-matter experienced.
Although breathing is in fact a function that includes both
air and the operations of the lungs, we may detach the
latter for study, even though we cannot separate it in
fact. So while we always know, love, act for and against
things, instead of experiencing ideas, emotions and mental
intents, the attitudes themselves may be made a special
object of attention, and thus come to form a distinctive
subject-matter of reflective, although not of primary, ex-
perience.
We primarily observe things, not observations. But the
act of observation may be inquired into and form a sub-
ject of study and become thereby a refined object; so may
the acts of thinking, desire, purposing, the state of affec-
tion, reverie, etc. Now just as long as these attitudes are
not distinguished and abstracted, they are incorporated
into subject-matter. It is a notorious fact that the one
who hates finds the one hated an obnoxious and despicable
character; to the lover his adored one is full of intrin-
sically delightful and wonderful qualities. The connection
between such facts and the fact of animism is direct.
The natural and original bias of man is all toward the
objective; whatever is experienced is taken to be there
independent of the attitude and act of the self. Its "there-
ness," its independence of emotion and volition, render the
properties of things, whatever they are, cosmic. Only
PHILOSOPHIC METHOD 13
when vanity, prestige, rights of possession are involved does
an individual tend to separate off from the environment and
the group in which he, quite literally, lives, some things as
being peculiarly himself. It is obvious that a total, un-
analyzed world does not lend itself to control; that, on the
contrary it is equivalent to the subjection of man to what-
ever occurs, as if to fate. Until some acts and their con-
sequences are discriminatingly referred to the human
organism and other energies and effects are referred to
other bodies, there is no leverage, no purchase, with which
to regulate the course of experience. The abstraction of
certain qualities of things as due to human acts and states
is the pou sto of ability in control. There can be no doubt
that the long period of human arrest at a low level of
culture was largely the result of failure to select the human
being and his acts as a special kind of object, having his
own characteristic activities that condition specifiable
consequences.
In this sense, the recognition of "subjects" as centres of
experience together with the development of "subjectiv-
ism" marks a great advance. It is equivalent to the emer-
gence of agencies equipped with special powers of observa-
tion and experiment, and with emotions and desires that
are efficacious for production of chosen modifications of
nature. For otherwise the agencies are submerged in
nature and produce qualities of things which must be
accepted and submitted to. It is no mere play on words
to say that recognition of subjective minds having a special
equipment of psychological abilities is a necessary factor
in subjecting the energies of nature to use as instrumen-
talities for ends.
Out of the indefinite number of possible illustrations of
the consequences of reflective analysis yielding personal
14 EXPERIENCE AND NATURE
or "subjective" minds we cite one case. It concerns the
influence of habitual beliefs and expectations in their social
generation upon what is experienced. The things of pri-
mary experience are so arresting and engrossing that we
tend to accept them just as they are the flat earth, the
march of the sun from east to west and its sinking under
the earth. Current beliefs in morals, religion and politics
similarly reflect the social conditions which present them-
selves. Only analysis shows that the ways in which we
believe and expect have a tremendous affect upon what we
believe and expect. We have discovered at last that these
ways are set, almost abjectly so, by social factors, by
tradition and the influence of education. Thus we discover
that we believe many things not because the things are so,
but because we have become habituated through the weight
of authority, by imitation, prestige, instruction, the uncon-
scious effect of language, etc. We learn, in short, that
qualities which we attribute to objects ought to be imputed
to our own ways of experiencing them, and that these in
turn are due to the force of intercourse and custom. This
discovery marks an emancipation; it purifies and remakes
the objects of our direct or primary experience. The power
of custom and tradition in scientific as well as in moral
beliefs never suffered a serious check until analysis re-
vealed the effect of personal ways of believing upon things
believed, and the extent to which these ways are unwit-
tingly fixed by social custom and tradition. In spite of the
acute and penetrating powers of observation among the
Greeks, their "science" is a monument of the extent to
which the effects of acquired social habits as well as of
organic constitution were attributed directly to natural
events. The de-personalizing and de-socializing of ?ome
objects, to be henceforth the objects of physical science,
PHILOSOPHIC METHOD IS
was a necessary precondition of ability to regulate experi-
ence by directing the attitudes and objects that enter into
it.
This great emancipation was coincident with the rise of
"individualism," which was in effect identical with the
reflective discovery of the part played in experience by
concrete selves, with their ways of acting, thinking and
desiring. The results would have been all to the good if
they had been interpreted by empirical method. For this
would have kept the eye of thinkers constantly upon the
origin of the "subjective" out of primary experience, and
then directed it to the function of discriminating what is
usable in the management of experienced objects. But
for lack of such a method, because of isolation from em-
pirical origin and instrumental use, the results of psy-
chological inquiry were conceived to form a separate and
isolated mental world in and of itself, self-sufficient and
self-enclosed. Since the psychological movement neces-
sarily coincided with that which set up physical objects as
correspondingly complete and self-enclosed, there resulted
that dualism of mind and matter, of a physical and a
psychical world, which from the day of Descartes to the
present dominates the formulation of philosophical
problems.
With the dualism we are not here concerned, beyond
pointing out that it is the inevitable result, logically, of the
abandoning of acknowledgment of the primacy and ulti-
macy of gross experience primary as it is given in an un-
controlled form, ultimate as it is given in a more regulated
and significant form a form made possible by the methods
and results of reflective experience. But what we are
directly concerned with at this stage of discussion is the
result of the discovery of subjective objects upon phi-
16 EXPERIENCE AND NATURE
losophy in creation of wholesale subjectivism. The out-
come was, that while in actual life the discovery of personal
attitudes and their consequences was a great liberating in-
strument, psychology became for philosophy, as Santayana
has well put it, "malicious." That is, mental attitudes,
ways of experiencing, were treated as self-sufficient and
complete in themselves, as that which is primarily given,
the sole original and therefore indubitable data. Thus the
traits of genuine primary experience, in which natural
things are the determining factors in production of all
change, were regarded either as not-given dubious things
that could be reached only b>? endowing the only certain
thing, the mental, with some miraculous power, or else were
denied all existence save as complexes of mental states, of
impressions, sensations, feelings. 1
One illustration out of the multitude available follows.
It is taken almost at random, because it is both simple
and typical. To illustrate the nature of experience, what
experience really is, an author writes: "When I look at a
chair, I say I experience it. But what I actually experi-
ence is only a very few of the elements that go to make
up a chair, namely the color that belongs to the chair
under these particular conditions of light, the shape which
the chair displays when viewed from this angle, etc." Two
points are involved in any such statement. One is that
"experience" is reduced to the traits connected with the
1 Because of this identification of the mental as the sole "given" in a
primary, original way, appeal to experience by a philosopher is treated
by many as necessarily committing one to subjectivism. It accounts for
the alleged antithesis between nature and experience mentioned in the
opening paragraph. It has become so deeply engrained that the em-
pirical method employed in this volume has been taken by critics to be
simply a re-statement of a purely subjective philosophy, although in
fact it is wholly contrary to such a philosophy.
PHILOSOPHIC METHOD 17
act of experiencing, in this case the act of seeing. Certain
patches of color, for example, assume a certain shape or
form in connection with qualities connected with the mus-
cular strains and adjustments of seeing. These qualities,
which define the act of seeing when it is made an object
of reflective inquiry, over against what is seen, thus become
the chair itself for immediate or direct experience. Log-
ically, the chair disappears and is replaced by certain
qualities of sense attending the act of vision. There is no
longer any other object, much less the chair which was
bought, that is placed in a room and that is used to sit in,
etc. If we ever get back to this total chair, it will not be
the chair of direct experience, of use and enjoyment, a
thing with its own independent origin, history and career;
it will be only a complex of directly "given" sense qualities
as a core, plus a surrounding cluster of other qualities
revived imaginatively as "ideas."
The other point is that, even in such a brief statement as
that just quoted, there is compelled recognition of an
object of experience which is infinitely other and more
than what is asserted to be alone experienced. There is
the chair which is looked at; the chair displaying certain
colors, the light in which they are displayed; the angle of
vision implying reference to an organism that possesses an
optical apparatus. Reference to these things is compul-
sory, because otherwise there would be no meaning as-
signable to the sense qualities which are, nevertheless,
affirmed to be the sole data experienced. It would be hard
to find a more complete recognition, although an unavowed
one, of the fact that in reality the account given concerns
only. a selected portion of the actual experience, namely
that part which defines the act of experiencing, to the
18 EXPERIENCE AND NATURE
deliberate omission, for the purpose of the inquiry in hand,
of what is experienced.
The instance cited is typical of all "subjectivism" as a
philosophic position. Reflective analysis of one element in
actual experience is undertaken; its result is then taken
to be primary; as a consequence the subject-matter of
actual experience from which the analytic result was de-
rived is rendered dubious and problematic, although it is
assumed at every step of the analysis. Genuine empirical
method sets out from the actual subject-matter of primary
experience, recognizes that reflection discriminates a new
factor in it, the act of seeing, makes an object of that, and
then uses that new object, the organic response to light, to
regulate, when needed, further experiences of the subject-
matter already contained in primary experience.
The topics just dealt with, segregation of physical and
mental objects, will receive extended attention in the body
of this volume. 1 As respects method, however, it is per-
tinent at this point to summarize our results. Reference to
the primacy and ultimacy of the material of ordinary ex-
perience protects us, in the first place, from creating arti-
ficial problems which deflect the energy and attention of
philosophers from the real problems that arise out of
actual subject-matter. In the second place, it provides a
check or test for the conclusions of philosophic inquiry; it
is a constant reminder that we must replace them, as
secondary reflective products, in the experience out of
which they arose, so that they may be confirmed or modi-
fied by the new order and clarity they introduce into it, and
the new significantly experienced objects for which they
furnish a method. In the third place, in seeing how they
thus function in further experiences, the philosophigal re-
1 Chapters IV and VI.
PHILOSOPHIC METHOD 19
suits themselves acquire empirical value; they are what
they contribute to the common experience of man, instead
of being curiosities to be deposited, with appropriate labels,
in a metaphysical museum.
There is another important result for philosophy of the
use of empirical method which, when it is developed, intro-
duces our next topic. Philosophy, like all forms of reflec-
tive analysis, takes us away, for the time being, from
the things had in primary experience as they directly act
and are acted upon, used and enjoyed. Now the standing
temptation of philosophy, as its course abundantly demon-
strates, is to regard the results of reflection as having, in
and of themselves, a reality superior to that of the material
of any other mode of experience. The commonest assump-
tion of philosophies, common even to philosophies very
different from one another, is the assumption of the iden-
tity of objects of knowledge and ultimately real objects.
The assumption is so deep that it is usually not expressed ;
it is taken for granted as something so fundamental that
it does not need to be stated. A technical example of the
view is found in the contention of the Cartesian school
including Spinoza that emotion as well as sense is but
confused thought which when it becomes clear and definite
or reaches its goal is cognition. That esthetic and moral
experience reveal traits of real things as truly as does intel-
lectual experience, that poetry may have a metaphysical
import as well as science, is rarely affirmed, and when it is
asserted, the statement is likely to be meant in some
mystical or esoteric sense rather than in a straightforward
everyday sense.
Suppose however that we start with no presuppositions
save that what is experienced, since it is a manifestation of
nature, may, and indeed, must be used as testimony of the
20 EXPERIENCE AND NATURE
characteristics of natural events. Upon this basis, reverie
and desire are pertinent for a philosophic theory of the true
nature of things; the possibilities present in imagination
that are not found in observation, are something to be
taken into account. The features of objects reached by
scientific or reflective experiencing are important, but so
are all the phenomena of magic, myth, politics, painting,
and penitentiaries. The phenomena of social life are as
relevant to the problem of the relation of the individual
and universal as are those of logic; the existence in political
organization of boundaries and barriers, of centralization,
of interaction across boundaries, of expansion and absorp-
tion, will be quite as important for metaphysical theories
of the discrete and the continuous as is anything derived
from chemical analysis. The existence of ignorance as
well as of wisdom, of error and even insanity as well as
of truth will be taken into account.
That is to say, nature is construed in such a way that all
these things, since they are actual, are naturally possible;
they are not explained away into mere "appearance" in
contrast with reality. Illusions are illusions, but the occur-
rence of illusions is not an illusion, but a genuine reality.
What is really "in" experience extends much further than
that which at any time is known. From the standpoint of
knowledge, objects must be distinct; their traits must be
explicit; the vague and unrevealed is a limitation. Hence
whenever the habit of identifying reality with the object of
knowledge as such prevails, the obscure and vague are
explained away. It is important for philosophic theory
to be aware that the distinct and evident are prized and
why they are. But it is equally important to note that the
dark and twilight abound. For in any object of primary
experience there are always potentialities which are not
PHILOSOPHIC METHOD 21
explicit; any object that is overt is charged with possible
consequences that are hidden; the most overt act has fac-
tors which are not explicit. Strain thought as far as we
may and not all consequences can be foreseen or made an
express or known part of reflection and decision. In the
face of such empirical facts, the assumption that nature in
itself is all of the same kind, all distinct, explicit and evi-
dent, having no hidden possibilities, no novelties or ob-
scurities, is possible only on the basis of a philosophy which
at some point draws an arbitrary line between nature and
experience.
In the assertion (implied here) that the great vice of
philosophy is an arbitrary "intellectualism," there is no
slight cast upon intelligence and reason. By "intellectual-
ism" as an indictment is meant the theory that all experi-
encing is a mode of knowing, and that all subject-matter,
all nature, is, in principle, to be reduced and transformed
till it is defined in terms identical with the characteristics
presented by refined objects of science as such. The as-
sumption of "intellectualism" goes contrary to the facts
of what is primarily experienced. For things are objects
to be treated, used, acted upon and with, enjoyed and
endured, even more than things to be known. They are
things had before they are things cognized.
The isolation of traits characteristic of objects known,
and then defined as the sole ultimate realities, accounts
for the denial to nature of the characters which make
things lovable and contemptible, beautiful and ugly, ador-
able and awful. It accounts for the belief that nature is an
indifferent, dead mechanism; it explains why characteris-
tics that are the valuable and valued traits of objects in
actual experience are thought to create a fundamentally
troublesome philosophical problem. Recognition of their
22 EXPERIENCE AND NATURE
genuine and primary reality does not signify that no
thought and knowledge enter in when things are loved,
desired and striven for; it signifies that the former are
subordinate, so that the genuine problem is how and why,
to what effect, things thus experienced are transformed into
objects in which cognized traits are supreme and affectional
and volitional traits incidental and subsidiary.
"Intellectualism" as a sovereign method of philosophy
is so foreign to the facts of primary experience that it not
only compels recourse to non-empirical method, but it
ends in making knowledge, conceived as ubiquitous, itself
inexplicable. If we start from primary experience, occur-
ring as it does chiefly in modes of action and undergoing,
it is easy to see what knowledge contributes namely, the
possibility of intelligent administration of the elements of
doing and suffering. We are about something, and it is
well to know what we are about, as the common phrase
has it. To be intelligent in action and in suffering (enjoy-
ment too) yields satisfaction even when conditions cannot
be controlled. But when there is possibility of control,
knowledge is the sole agency of its realization. Given this
element of knowledge in primary experience, it is not diffi-
cult to understand how it may develop from a subdued and
subsidiary factor into a dominant character. Doing and
suffering, experimenting and putting ourselves in the way
of having our sense and nervous system acted upon in ways
that yield material for reflection, may reverse the original
situation in which knowing and thinking were subservient
to action-undergoing. And when we trace the genesis of
knowing along this line, we also see that knowledge has a
function and office in bettering and enriching the subject-
matters of crude experience. We are prepared to under-
PHILOSOPHIC METHOD 23
stand what we are about on a grander scale, and to under-
stand what happens even when we seem to be the hapless
puppets of uncontrollable fate. But knowledge that is
ubiquitous, all-inclusive and all-monopolizing, ceases to
have meaning in losing all context; that it does not appear
to do so when made supreme and self-sufficient is because
it is literally impossible to exclude that context of non-
cognitive but experienced subject-matter which gives what
is known its import.
While this matter is dealt with at some length in further
chapters of this volume, there is one point worth mention-
ing here. When intellectual experience and its material
are taken to be primary, the cord that binds experience
and nature is cut. That the physiological organism with
its structures, whether in man or in the lower animals, is
concerned with making adaptations and uses of material
in the interest of maintenance of the life-process, cannot
be denied. The brain and nervous system are primarily
organs of action-undergoing; biologically, it can be asserted
without contravention that primary experience is of a cor-
responding type. Hence, unless there is breach of historic
and natural continuity, cognitive experience must originate
within that of a non-cognitive sort. And unless we start
from knowing as a factor in action and undergoing we are
inevitably committed to the intrusion of an extra-natural,
if not a supernatural, agency and principle. That pro-
fessed non-supernaturalists so readily endow the organism
with powers that have no basis in natural events is a fact
so peculiar that it would be inexplicable were it not for the
inertia of the traditional schools. Otherwise it would be
evident that the only way to maintain the doctrine of
natural continuity is to recognize the secondary and de-
rived character aspects of experience of the intellectual or
24 EXPERIENCE AND NATURE
cognitive. But so deeply grounded is the opposite position
in the entire philosophic tradition, that it is probably not
surprising that philosophers are loath to admit a fact which
when admitted compels an extensive reconstruction in
form and content.
We have spoken of the difference which acceptance of
empirical method in philosophy makes in the problem of
subject-object and in that of the alleged all-inclusiveness of
cognitive experience. 1 There is an intimate connection
between these two problems. When real objects are iden-
tified, point for point, with knowledge-objects, all affec-
tional and volitional objects are inevitably excluded from
the "real" world, and are compelled to find refuge in the
privacy of an experiencing subject or mind. Thus the
notion of the ubiquity of all comprehensive cognitive ex-
perience results by a necessary logic in setting up a hard
and fast wall between the experiencing subject and that
nature which is experienced. The self becomes not merely
a pilgrim but an unnaturalized and unnaturalizable alien in
the world. The only way to avoid a sharp separation
between the mind which is the centre of the processes of
experiencing and the natural world which is experienced is
to acknowledge that all modes of experiencing are ways in
which some genuine traits of nature come to manifest
realization.
The favoring of cognitive objects and their characteris-
1 To avoid misapprehension, it may be well to add a statement on the
latter point. It is not denied that any experienced subject-matter what-
ever may become an object of reflection and cognitive inspection. But
the emphasis is upon "become"; the cognitive never is all-inclusive: that is,
when the material of a prior non-cognitive experience is the object of
knowledge, it and the act of knowing are themselves included within a
new and and wider non-cognitive experience and this situation can never
be transcended. It is only when the temporal character of experienced
things is forgotten that the idea of the total "transcendence" of knowledge
is asserted.
PHILOSOPHIC METHOD 25
tics at the expense of traits that excite desire, command
action and produce passion, is a special instance of a
principle of selective emphasis which introduces partiality
and partisanship into philosophy. Selective emphasis, with
accompanying omission and rejection, is the heart-beat of
mental life. To object to the operation is to discard all
thinking. But in ordinary matters and in scientific in-
quiries, we always retain the sense that the material chosen
is selected for a purpose; there is no idea of denying what
is left out, for what is omitted is merely that which is not
relevant to the particular problem and purpose in hand.
But in philosophies, this limiting condition is often
wholly ignored. It is not noted and remembered that the
favored subject-matter is chosen for a purpose and that
what is left out is just as real and important in its own
characteristic context. It tends to be assumed that because
qualities that figure in poetical discourse and those that
are central in friendship do not figure in scientific inquiry,
they have no reality, at least not the kind of unquestionable
reality attributed to the mathematical, mechanical or mag-
neto-electric properties that constitute matter. It is natural
to men to take that which is of chief value to them at the
time as the real. Reality and superior value are equated.
In ordinary experience this fact does no particular harm;
it is at once compensated for by turning to other things
which since they also present value are equally real. But
philosophy often exhibits a cataleptic rigidity in attach-
ment to that phase of the total objects of experience which
has become especially dear to a philosopher. // is real at
all hazards and only it; other things are real only in some
secondary and Pickwickian sense.
For example, certainty, assurance, is immensely valuable
in a world as full of uncertainty and peril as that in which
26 EXPERIENCE AND NATURE
we live. As a result whatever is capable of certainty is
assumed to constitute ultimate Being, and everything else
is said to be merely phenomenal, or, in extreme cases, illu-
sory. The arbitrary character of the "reality" that
emerges is seen in the fact that very different objects are
selected by different philosophers. These may be mathe-
matical entities, states of consciousness, or sense data.
That is, whatever strikes a philosopher from the angle of
the particular problem that presses on him as being self-
evident and hence completely assured, is selected by him
to constitute reality. The honorable and dignified have
ranked with the mundanely certain in determining philo-
sophic definitions of the real. Scholasticism considered
that the True and the Good, along with Unity, were the
marks of Being as such. In the face of a problem, thought
always seeks to unify things otherwise fragmentary and
discrepant. Deliberately action strives to attain the good;
knowledge is reached when truth is grasped. Then the
goals of our efforts, the things that afford satisfaction and
peace under conditions of tension and unrest, are converted
into that which alone is ultimate real Being. Ulterior func-
tions are treated as original properties.
Another aspect of the same erection of objects of selec-
tive preference into exclusive realities is seen in the addic-
tion of philosophers to what is simple, their love for "ele-
ments." Gross experience is loaded with the tangled and
complex; hence philosophy hurries away from it to search
out something so simple that the mind can rest trustfully
in it, knowing that it has no surprises in store, that it will
not spring anything to make trouble, that it will stay put,
having no potentialities in reserve. There is again the
predilection for mathematical objects; there is Spinoza
with his assurance that a true idea carries truth intrinsic
PHILOSOPHIC METHOD 27
in its bosom; Locke with his "simple idea"; Hume with
his "impression"; the English neo-realist with his ultimate
atomic data; the American neo-realist with his ready-made
essences.
Another striking example of the fallacy of selective em-
phasis is found in the hypnotic influence exercised by the
conception of the eternal. The permanent enables us to
rest, it gives peace; the variable, the changing, is a con-
stant challenge. Where things change something is hang-
ing over us. It is a threat of trouble. Even when change
is marked by hope of better things to come, that hope tends
to project its object as something to stay once for all when
it arrives. Moreover we can deal with the variable and
precarious only by means of the stable and constant; "in-
variants" for the time being are as much a necessity in
practice for bringing something to pass as they are in
mathematical functions. The permanent answers genuine
emotional, practical and intellectual requirements. But the
demand and the response which meets it are empirically
always found in a special context; they arise because of a
particular need and in order to effect specifiable conse-
quences. Philosophy, thinking at large, allows itself to
be diverted into absurd search for an intellectual philoso-
pher's stone of absolutely wholesale generalizations, thus
isolating that which is permanent in a function and for a
purpose, and converting it into the intrinsically eternal,
conceived either (as Aristotle conceived it) as that which
is the same at all times, or as that which is indifferent to
time, out of time.
This bias toward treating objects selected because of
their value in some special context as the "real," in a
superior and invidious sense, testifies to an empirical fact
of importance. Philosophical simplifications are due to
28 EXPERIENCE AND NATURE
choice, and choice marks an interest moral in the broad
sense of concern for what is good. Our constant and un-
escapable concern is with prosperity and adversity, success
and failure, achievement and frustration, good and bad.
Since we are creatures with lives to live, and find ourselves
within an uncertain environment, we are constructed to
note and judge in terms of bearing upon weal and woe
upon value. Acknowledgment of this fact is a very dif-
ferent thing, however, from the transformation effected by
philosophers of the traits they find good (simplicity, cer-
tainty, nobility, permanence, etc.) into fixed traits of real
Being. The former presents something to be accom-
plished, to be brought about by the actions in which choice
is manifested and made genuine. The latter ignores the
need of action to effect the better and to prove the honesty
of choice; it converts what is desired into antecedent and
final features of a reality which is supposed to need only
logical warrant in order to be contemplatively enjoyed as
true Being.
For reflection the eventual is always better or worse
than the given. But since it would also be better if the
eventual good were now given, the philosopher, belonging
by status to a leisure class relieved from the urgent neces-
sity of dealing with conditions, converts the eventual into
some kind of Being, something which is, even if it does not
exist. Permanence, real essence, totality, order, unity, ra-
tionality, the tmum, verum et bomem of the classic tradi-
tion, are eulogistic predicates. When we find such terms
used to describe the foundations and proper conclusions
of a philosophic system, there is ground for suspecting
that an artificial simplification of existence has been per-
formed. Reflection determining preference for an eventual
PHILOSOPHIC METHOD 29
good has dialectically wrought a miracle of transubstan-
tiation.
Selective emphasis, choice, is inevitable whenever reflec-
tion occurs. This is not an evil. Deception comes only
when the presence and operation of choice is concealed,
disguised, denied. Empirical method finds and points to
the operation of choice as it does to any other event. Thus
it protects us from conversion of eventual functions into
antecedent existence: a conversion that may be said to be
the philosophic fallacy, whether it be performed in behalf
of mathematical subsistences, esthetic essences, the purely
physical order of nature, or God. The present writer does
not profess any greater candor of intent than animates
fellow philosophers. But the pursuance of an empirical
method, is, he submits, the only way to secure execution of
candid intent. Whatever enters into choice, determining
its need and giving it guidance, an empirical method
frankly indicates what it is for; and the fact of choice,
with its workings and consequences, an empirical method
points out with equal openness.
The adoption of an empirical method is no guarantee
that all the things relevant to any particular conclusion
will actually be found, or that when found they will be
correctly shown and communicated. But empirical method
points out when and where and how things of a designated
description have been arrived at. It places before others
a map of the road that has been travelled; they may ac-
cordingly, if they will, re- travel the road to inspect the
landscape for themselves. Thus the findings of one may
be rectified and extended by the findings of others, with
as much assurance as is humanly possible of confirmation,
extension and rectification. The adoption of empirical
method thus procures for philosophic reflection something
30 EXPERIENCE AND NATURE
of that cooperative tendency toward consensus which
marks inquiry in the natural sciences. The scientific in-
vestigator convinces others not by the plausibility of his
definitions and the cogency of his dialectic, but by placing
before them the specified course of searchings, doings and
arrivals, in consequence of which certain things have been
found. His appeal is for others to traverse a similar
course, so as to see how what they find corresponds with
his report.
Honest empirical method will state when and where and
why the act of selection took place, and thus enable others
to repeat it and test its worth. Selective choice, denoted as
an empirical event, reveals the basis and bearing of intel-
lectual simplifications; they then cease to be of such a self-
enclosed nature as to be affairs only of opinion and argu-
ment, admitting no alternatives save complete acceptance
or rejection. Choice that is disguised or denied is the
source of those astounding differences of philosophic belief
that startle the beginner and that become the plaything of
the expert. Choice that is avowed is an experiment to be
tried on its merits and tested by its results. Under all the
captions that are called immediate knowledge, or self-suf-
ficient certitude of belief, whether logical, esthetic or epis-
temological, there is something selected for a purpose, and
hence not simple, not self-evident and not intrinsically
eulogizable. State the purpose so that it may be re-experi-
enced, and its value and the pertinency of selection under-
taken in its behalf may be tested. The purport of thinking,
scientific and philosophic, is not to eliminate choice but to
render it less arbitrary and more significant. It loses its
arbitrary character when its quality and consequences are
such as to commend themselves to the reflection of others
after they have betaken themselves to the situations indi-
PHILOSOPHIC METHOD 31
cated; it becomes significant when reason for the choice is
found to be weighty and its consequences momentous.
When choice is avowed, others can repeat the course of
the experience; it is an experiment to be tried, not an auto-
matic safety device.
This particular affair is referred to here not so much as
matter of doctrine as to afford an illustration of the nature
of empirical method. Truth or falsity depends upon what
men find when they warily perform the experiment of ob-
serving reflective events. An empirical finding is refuted
not by denial that one finds things to be thus and so, but by
giving directions for a course of experience that results in
finding its opposite to be the case. To convince of error
as well as to lead to truth is to assist another to see and
find something which he hitherto has failed to find and
recognize. All of the wit and subtlety of reflection and
logic find scope in the elaboration and conveying of direc-
tions that intelligibly point out a course to be followed.
Every system of philosophy presents the consequences of
some such experiment. As experiments, each has contrib-
uted something of worth to our observation of the events
and qualities of experienceable objects. Some harsh criti-
cisms of traditional philosophy have already been sug-
gested; others will doubtless follow. But the criticism is
not directed at the experiments; it is aimed at the denial
to them by the philosophic tradition of selective experi-
mental quality, a denial which has isolated them from their
actual context and function, and has thereby converted
potential illuminations into arbitrary assertions.
This discussion of empirical method has had a double
content. On one hand, it has tried to make clear, from the
analogy of empirical method in scientific inquiry, what the
method signifies (and does not signify) for philosophy.
32 EXPERIENCE AND NATURE
Such a discussion would, however, have little definite im-
port unless the difference that is made in philosophy by the
adoption of empirical method is pointed out. For that rea-
son, we have considered some typical ways and important
places in which traditional philosophies have gone astray
through failure to connect their reflective results with the
affairs of every-day primary experience. Three sources of
large fallacies have been mentioned, each containing within
itself many more sub-varieties than have been hinted at.
The three are the complete separation of subject and ob-
ject, (of what is experienced from how it is experi-
enced) ; the exaggeration of the features of known objects
at the expense of the qualities of objects of enjoyment and
trouble, friendship and human association, art and indus-
try; and the exclusive isolation of the results of various
types of selective simplification which are undertaken for
diverse unavowed purposes.
It does not follow that the products of these philosophies
which have taken the wrong, because non-empirical,
method are of no value or little worth for a philosophy that
pursues a strictly empirical method. The contrary is the
case, for no philosopher can get away from experience even
if he wants to. The most fantastic views ever entertained
by superstitious people had some basis in experienced fact;
they can be explained by one who knows enough about
them and about the conditions under which they were
formed. And philosophers have been not more but less
superstitious than their fellows; they have been, as a class,
unusually reflective and inquiring. If some of their prod-
ucts have been fantasies, it was not because they did not,
even unwittingly, start from empirical method; it was not
wholly because they substituted unchecked imagination for
thought. No, the trouble has been that they have failed
PHILOSOPHIC METHOD 33
to note the empirical needs that generate their problems,
and have failed to return the refined products back to the
context of actual experience, there to receive their check,
inherit their full content of meaning, and give illumination
and guidance in the immediate perplexities which origi-
nally occasioned reflection.
The chapters which follow make no pretence, accord-
ingly, of starting to philosophize afresh as if there were no
philosophies already in existence, or as if their conclusions
were empirically worthless. Rather the subsequent discus-
sions rely, perhaps excessively so, upon the main results of
great philosophic systems, endeavoring to point out their
elements of strength and of weakness when their conclu-
sions are employed (as the refined objects of all reflection
must be employed) as guides back to the subject-matter of
crude, everyday experience.
Our primary experience as it comes is of little value for
purposes of analysis and control, crammed as it is with
things that need analysis and control. The very existence
of reflection is proof of its deficiencies. Just as ancient
astronomy and physics were of little scientific worth, be-
cause, owing to the lack of apparatus and techniques of
experimental analysis, they had to take the things of pri-
mary observation at their face value, so "common-sense"
philosophy usually repeats current conventionalities. What
is averred to be implicit reliance upon what is given in
common experience is likely to be merely an appeal to
prejudice to gain support for some fanaticism or defence
for some relic of conservative tradition which is beginning
to be questioned.
The trouble, then, with the conclusions of philosophy is
not in the least that they are results of reflection and
theorizing. It is rather that philosophers have borrowed
34 EXPERIENCE AND NATURE
from various sources the conclusions of special analyses,
particularly of some ruling science of the day, and im-
ported them direct into philosophy, with no check by
either the empirical objects from which they arose or
those to which the conclusions in question point. Thus
Plato trafficked with the Pythagoreans and imported
mathematical concepts; Descartes and Spinoza took over
the presuppositions of geometrical reasoning; Locke im-
ported into the theory of mind the Newtonian physical cor-
puscles, converting them into given "simple ideas"; Hegel
borrowed and generalized without limit the rising historical
method of his day; contemporary English philosophy has
imported from mathematics the notion of primitive in-
definable propositions, and given them a content from
Locke's simple ideas, which had in the meantime become
part of the stock in trade of psychological science.
Well, why not, as long as what is borrowed has a sound
scientific status? Because in scientific inquiry, refined
methods justify themselves by opening up new fields of
subject-matter for exploration; they create new techniques
of observation and experimentation. Thus when the
Michelson-Moley experiment disclosed, as a matter of
gross experience, facts which did not agree with the results
of accepted physical laws, physicists did not think for a
moment of denying the validity of what was found in
that experience, even though it rendered questionable an
elaborate intellectual apparatus and system. The coin-
cidence of the bands of the interferometer was accepted at
its face value in spite of its incompatibility with Newtonian
physics. Because scientific inquirers accepted it at its face
value they at once set to work to reconstruct their theories;
they questioned their reflective premisses, not the full
"reality" of what they saw. This task of re-adjustment
PHILOSOPHIC METHOD 35
compelled not only new reasonings and calculations in the
development of a more comprehensive theory, but opened
up new ways of inquiry into experienced subject-matter.
Not for a moment did they think of explaining away the
features of an object in gross experience because it was not
in logical harmony with theory as philosophers have so
often done. Had they done so, they would have stultified
science and shut themselves off from new problems and
new findings in subject-matter. In short, the material of
refined scientific method is continuous with that of the
actual world as it is concretely experienced.
But when philosophers transfer into their theories bodily
and as finalities the refined conclusions they borrow from
the sciences, whether logic, mathematics or physics, these
results are not employed to reveal new subject-matters and
illuminate old ones of gross experience; they are employed
to cast discredit on the latter and to generate new and ar-
tificial problems regarding the reality and validity of the
things of gross experience. Thus the discoveries of psy-
chologies taken out of their own empirical context are in
philosophy employed to cast doubt upon the reality of
things external to mind and to selves, things and properties
that are perhaps the most salient characteristics of ordi-
nary experience. Similarly, the discoveries and methods of
physical science, the concepts of mass, space, motion, have
been adopted wholesale in isolation by philosophers in such
a way as to make dubious and even incredible the reality
of the affections, purposes and enjoyments of concrete ex-
perience. The objects of mathematics, symbols of rela-
tions having no explicit reference to actual existence,
efficacious in the territory to which mathematical technique
applies, have been employed in philosophy to determine the
priority of essences to existence, and to create the insoluble
36 EXPERIENCE AND NATURE
problem of why pure essence ever descends into the tangles
and tortuosities of existence.
What empirical method exacts of philosophy is two
things: First, that refined methods and products be traced
back to their origin in primary experience, in all its hetero-
geneity and fullness ; so that the needs and problems out of
which they arise and which they have to satisfy be
acknowledged. Secondly, that the secondary methods and
conclusions be brought back to the things of ordinary expe-
rience, in all their coarseness and crudity, for verification.
In this way, the methods of analytic reflection yield mate-
rial which form the ingredients of a method of designation,
denotation, in philosophy. A scientific work in physics or
astronomy gives a record of calculations and deductions
that were derived from past observations and experiments.
But it is more than a record; it is also an indication, an
assignment, of further observations and experiments to be
performed. No scientific report would get a hearing if it
did not describe the apparatus by means of which experi-
ments were carried on and results obtained; not that ap-
paratus is worshipped, but because this procedure tells
other inquirers how they are to go to work to get results
which will agree or disagree in their experience with those
previously arrived at, and thus confirm, modify and rectify
the latter. The recorded scientific result is in effect a
designation of a method to be followed and a prediction of
what will be found when specified observations are set on
foot. That is all a philosophy can be or do. In the chap-
ters that follow I have undertaken a revision and recon-
struction of the conclusions, the reports, of a number of
historic philosophic systems, in order that they may be
usable methods by which one may go to his own experience,
and, discerning what is found by use of the method, come
PHILOSOPHIC METHOD 37
to understand better what is already within the common
experience of mankind.
There is a special service which the study of philosophy
may render. Empirically pursued it will not be a study of
philosophy but a study, by means of philosophy, of life-
experience. But this experience is already overlaid and
saturated with the products of the reflection of past genera-
tions and by-gone ages. It is filled with interpretations,
classifications, due to sophisticated thought, which have
become incorporated into what seems to be fresh, nai've
empirical material. It would take more wisdom than is
possessed by the wisest historic scholar to track all of these
absorbed borrowings to their original sources. If we may
for the moment call these materials prejudices (even if
they are true, as long as their source and authority is un-
known), then philosophy is a critique of prejudices. These
incorporated results of past reflection, welded into the
genuine materials of first-hand experience, may become or-
gans of enrichment if they are detected and reflected upon.
If they are not detected, they often obfuscate and distort.
Clarification and emancipation follow when they are de-
tected and cast out; and one great object of philosophy is
to accomplish this task.
An empirical philosophy is in any case a kind of intellec-
tual disrobing. We cannot permanently divest ourselves
of the intellectual habits we take on and wear when we
assimilate the culture of our own time and place. But
intelligent furthering of culture demands that we take some
of them off, that we inspect them critically to see what
they are made of and what wearing them does to us. We
cannot achieve recovery of primitive naivete. But there
is attainable a cultivated naivete of eye, ear and thought,
one that can be acquired only through the discipline of
38 EXPERIENCE AND NATURE
severe thought. If the chapters which follow contribute
to an artful innocence and simplicity they will have served
their purpose.
I am loath to conclude without reference to the larger
liberal humane value of philosophy when pursued with
empirical method. The most serious indictment to be
brought against non-empirical philosophies is that they
have cast a cloud over the things of ordinary experience.
They have not been content to rectify them. They have
discredited them at large. In casting aspersion upon the
things of everyday experience, the things of action and af-
fection and social intercourse, they have done something
worse than fail to give these affairs the intelligent direction
they so much need. It would not matter much if philos-
ophy had been reserved as a luxury of only a few thinkers.
We endure many luxuries. The serious matter is that
philosophies have denied that common experience is capa-
ble of developing from within itself methods which will
secure direction for itself and will create inherent stand-
ards of judgment and value. No one knows how many of
the evils and deficiencies that are pointed to as reasons for
flight from experience are themselves due to the disregard
of experience shown by those peculiarly reflective. To Waste
of time and energy, to disillusionment with life that at-
tends every deviation from concrete experience must be
added the tragic failure to realize the value that intelligent
search could reveal and mature among the things of ordi-
nary experience. I cannot calculate how much of current
cynicism, indifference and pessimism is due to these causes
in the deflection of intelligence they have brought about. It
has even become in many circles a sign of lack of sophisti-
cation to imagine that life is or can be a fountain of cheer
and happiness. Philosophies no more than religions can
PHILOSOPHIC METHOD 39
be acquitted of responsibility for bringing this result to
pass. The transcendental philosopher has probably done
more than the professed sensualist and materialist to ob-
scure the potentialities of daily experience for joy and for
self-regulation. If what is written in these pages has no
other result than creating and promoting a respect for
concrete human experience and its potentialities, I shall
be content.
CHAPTER TWO
EXISTENCE AS PRECARIOUS AND AS STABLE
It was suggested in the last chapter that experience has
Its equivalents in such affairs as history, life, culture.
Reference to these other affairs enables us to put to one
side the reminiscences which so readily give the word
experience a sectarian and provincial content. Accord-
ing to Tylor, culture is "that complex whole which in-
cludes knowledge, belief, art, morals, custom, and any
other capabilities acquired by a man as a member of
society." It is, in some sense, a whole, but it is a com-
plex, a diversified whole. It is differentiated into re-
ligion, magic, law, fine and useful art, science, philosophy,
language, domestic and political relations, etc Con-
sider the following words of an anthropologist and ask
if they do not fairly define the problem of philosophy,
although intended for another purpose. "Cultural real-
ity is never wholly deterministic nor yet wholly acciden-
tal, never wholly psychological nor yet wholly objective,
never wholly of yesterday nor yet wholly of today, but
combines all of these in its existential reality
A reconstructive synthesis re-establishes the synthetic
unity necessarily lost in the process of analytic dismem-
berment. " l I do not mean that philosophy is to be merged
in an anthropological view of culture. But in a different
context and by a different method, it has the task of
analytic dismemberment and synthetic reconstruction
of experience; the phenomena of culture as presented by
1 Golden weiscx.
EXISTENCE 41
the anthropologist provide, moreover, precious material
to aid the performance of this office, material more
pertinent to the task of philosophizing than that of
psychology isolated from a theory of culture.
A feature of existence which is emphasized by cultural
phenomena is the precarious and perilous. Sumner
refers to Grimm as authority for the statement that the
Germanic tribes had over a thousand distinct sayings,
proverbs and apothegms, concerning luck. Time is
brief, and this statement must stand instead of the dis-
course which the subject deserves. Man finds himself
living in an aleatory world; his existence involves, to put
it baldly, a gamble. The world is a scene of risk; it is
uncertain, unstable, uncannily unstable. Its dangers are
irregular, inconstant, not to be counted upon as to their
times and seasons. Although persistent, they are spora-
dic, episodic. It is darkest just before dawn; pride
goes before a fall; the moment of greatest prosperity is
the moment most charged with ill-omen, most opportune
for the evil eye. Plague, famine, failure of crops, disease,
death, defeat in battle, are always just around the corner,
and so are abundance, strength, victory, festival and song.
Luck is proverbially both good and bad in its distribu-
tions. The sacred and the accursed are potentialities
of the same situation; and there is no category of things
which has not embodied the sacred and accursed: per-
sons, words, places, times, directions in space, stones,
winds, animals, stars.
Anthropologists have shown incontrovertibly the part
played by the precarious aspect of the world in generating
religion with its ceremonies, rites, cults, myths, magic;
and it has shown the pervasive penetration of these af-
42 EXPERIENCE AND NATURE
fairs into morals, law, art, and industry. Beliefs and
dispositions connected with them are the background
out of which philosophy and secular morals slowly de-
veloped, as well as more slowly those late inventions,
art for art's sake, and business is business. Interesting
and instructive as is this fact, it is not the ramifications
which here concern us. We must not be diverted to
consider the consequences for philosophy, even for
doctrines reigning today, of facts concerning the origin of
philosophies. We confine ourselves to one outstanding
fact: the evidence that the world of empirical things
includes the uncertain, unpredictable, uncontrollable,
and hazardous.
It is an old saying that the gods were born of fear.
The saying is only too likely to strengthen a misconcep-
tion bred by confirmed subjective habits. We first
endow man in isolation with an instinct of fear and then
we imagine him irrationally ejecting that fear into the
environment, scattering broadcast as it were, the fruits
of his own purely personal limitations, and thereby
creating superstition. But fear, whether an instinct
or an acquisition, is a function of the environment. JNIan
fears because he exists in a fearful, an awful world.
The world is precarious andT perilous. It is as easily
accessible and striking evidence of this fact that primi-
tive experience is cited. The voice is that of early man;
but the hand is that of nature, the nature in which we
still live. It was not fear of gods that created the gods.
For if the life of early man is filled with expiations
and propitiations, if in his feasts and festivals what is
enjoyed is gratefully shared with his gods, it is not because
a belief in supernatural powers created a need for ex-
EXISTENCE 43
piatory, propitiatory and communal offerings. Every-
thing that man achieves and possesses is got by actions
that may involve him in other and obnoxious conse-
quences in addition to those wanted and enjoyed. His
acts are trespasses upon the domain of the unknown;
and hence atonement, if offered in season, may ward off
direful consequences that haunt even the moment of
prosperity or that most haunt that moment. While
unknown consequences flowing from the past dog the
present, the future is even more unknown and perilous;
the present by that fact is ominous. If unknown forces
that decide future destiny can be placated, the man
who will not study the methods of securing their favor
is incredibly flippant. In enjoyment of present food and
companionship, nature, tradition and social organization
have coSperated, thereby supplementing our own endeav-
ors so petty and so feeble without this extraneous rein-
forcement. Goods are by grace not of ourselves. He
is a dangerous churl who will not gratefully acknowledge
by means of free-will offerings the help that sustains
him.
These things are as true today as they were in the
days of early culture. It is not the facts which have
changed, but the methods of insurance, regulation and
acknowledgment. Herbert Spencer sometimes colored
his devotion to symbolic experiences with a fact of dire
experience. When he says that every fact has two
opposite sides, "the one its near or visible side and the
other its remote or invisible side/ 5 he expresses a per-
sistent trait of every object in experience. The visible
is set in the invisible; and in the end what is unseen
decides what happens in the seen; the tangible rests pre-
44 EXPERIENCE AND NATURE
cariously upon the untouched and ungrasped. The
contrast and the potential maladjustment of the im-
mediate, the conspicuous and focal phase of things, with
those indirect and hidden factors which determine the
origin and career of what is present, are indestructible
features of any and every experience. We may term the
way in which our ancestors dealt with the contrast super-
stitious, but the contrast is no superstition. It is a pri-
mary datum in any experience.
We have substituted sophistication for superstition, at
least measurably so. But the sophistication is often as
irrational and as much at the mercy of words as the
superstition it replaces. Our magical safeguard against
the uncertain character of the world is to deny the exis-
tence of chance, to mumble universal and necessary
law, the ubiquity of cause and effect, the uniformity of
nature, universal progress, and the inherent rationality
of the universe. These magic formulae borrow their
potency from conditions that are not magical. Through
science we have secured a degree of power of prediction
and of control; through tools, machinery and an ac-
companying technique we have made the world more
conformable to our needs, a more secure abode. We
have heaped up riches and means of comfort between
ourselves and the risks of the world. We have profes-
sionalized amusement as an agency of escape and for-
getfulness. But when all is said and done, the funda-
mentally hazardous character of the world is not seriously
modified, much less eliminated. Such an incident as the
last war and preparations for a future war remind us
that it is easy to overlook the extent to which, after all,
our attainments are only devices for blurring the dis-
EXISTENCE 45
agreeable recognition of a fact, instead of means of
altering the fact itself.
What has been said sounds pessimistic. But the con-
cern is not with morals but with metaphysics, with, that
is to say, the nature of the existential world in which we
live. It would have been as easy and more comfortable
to emphasize good luck, grace, unexpected and unwon
joys, those unsought for happenings which we so signi-
ficantly call happiness. We might have appealed to good
fortune as evidence of this important trait of hazard in
nature. Comedy is as genuine as tragedy. But it is
traditional that comedy strikes a more superficial note
than tragedy. And there is an even better reason for
appealing to misfortunes and mistakes as evidence of the
precarious nature of the world. The problem of evil
is a well recognized problem, while we rarely or never
hear of a problem of good. Goods we take for granted;
they are as they should be; they are natural and proper.
The good is a recognition of our deserts. When we pull
out a plum we treat it as evidence of the real order of
cause and effect in the world. For this reason it is diffi-
cult for the goods of existence to furnish as convincing
evidence of the uncertain character of nature as do evils.
It is the latter we term accidents, not the former, even
when their adventitious character is as certain.
What of it all, it may be asked? In the sense in which
an assertion is true that uncontrolled distribution of
good and evil is evidence of the precarious, uncertain
nature of existence, it is a truism, and no problem is
forwarded by its reiteration. But it is submitted that
just this predicament of the inextricable mixture of
stability and uncertainty gives rise to philosophy, and
46 EXPERIENCE AND NATURE
that it is reflected in all its recurrent problems and issues.
If classic philosophy says so much about unity and so
little about unreconciled diversity, so much about the
eternal and permanent, and so little about change (save
as something to be resolved into combinations of the
permanent), so much about necessity and so little about
contingency, so much about the comprehending universal
and so little about the recalcitrant particular, it may
well be because the ambiguousness and ambivalence of
reality are actually so pervasive. Since these things
form the problem, solution is more apparent (although
not more actual), in the degree in which whatever of
stability and assurance the world presents is fastened
upon and asserted.
Upon their surface, the reports of the world which
form our different philosophies are various to the point
of stark contrariness. They range from spiritualism
to materialism, from absolutism to relativistic pheno-
menalism, from transcendentalism to positivism, from
rationalism to sensationalism, from idealism to realism,
from subjectivism, to bald objectivism, from Platonic
realism to nominalism. The array of contradictions is so
imposing as to suggest to sceptics that the mind of man
has tackled an impossible job, or that philosophers have
abandoned themselves to vagary. These radical op-
positions in philosophers suggest however another con-
sideration. They suggest that all their different philos-
ophies have a common premise, and that their diversity
is due to acceptance of a common premise. Variant
philosophies may be looked at as different ways of sup-
plying recipes for denying to the universe the character
of contingency which it possesses so integrally that its
EXISTENCE 4T
denial leaves the reflecting mind without a clew, and
puts subsequent philosophising at the mercy of tempera-
ment, interest and local surroundings.
Quarrels among conflicting types of philosophy are
thus family quarrels. They go on within the limits of a
too domestic circle, and can be settled only by venturing
further afield, and out of doors. Concerned with im-
puting complete, finished and sure character to the
world of real existence, even if things have to be broken
into two disconnected pieces in order to accomplish the
result, the character desiderated can plausibly be found
in reason or in mechanism; in rational conceptions like
those of mathematics, or brute things like sensory data;
in atoms or in essences; in consciousness or in a physical
externality which forces and overrides consciousness.
As against this common identification of reality with
what is sure, regular and finished, experience in unsophis-
ticated forms gives evidence of a different world and
points to a different metaphysics. We live in a world
which is an impressive and irresistible mixture of suf-
ficiencies, tight completenesses, order, recurrences which
make possible prediction and control, and singularities,
ambiguities, uncertain possibilities, processes going on to
consequences as yet indeterminate. They are mixed
not mechanically but vitally like the wheat and tares of
the parable. We may recognize them separately but we
cannot divide them, for unlike wheat and tares they
grow from the same root. Qualities have defects as neces-
sary conditions of their excellencies; the instrumentalities
of truth are the causes of error; change gives meaning to
permanence and recurrence makes novelty possible. A
world that was wholly risky would be a world in which
48 EXPERIENCE AND NATURE
adventure is impossible, and only a living world can in-
clude death. Such facts have been celebrated by think-
ers like Heracleitus and Laotze; they have been greeted
by theologians as furnishing occasions for exercise of
divine grace; they have been elaborately formulated by
various schools under a principle of relativity, so de-
fined as to become itself final and absolute. They have
rarely been frankly recognized as fundamentally signifi-
cant for the formation of a naturalistic metaphysics.
Aristotle perhaps came the nearest to a start in that
direction. But his thought did not go far on the road,
though it may be used to suggest the road which he
failed to take. Aristotle acknowledges contingency,
but he never surrenders his bias in favor of the fixed,
certain and finished. His whole theory of forms and
ends is a theory of the superiority in Being of rounded-
out fixities. His physics is a fixation of ranks or grades
of necessity and contingency so sorted that necessity
measures dignity and equals degree of reality, while con-
tingency and change measure degrees of deficiency of
Being. The empirical impact and sting of the mixture
of universality and singularity and chance is evaded by
parcelling out the regions of space so that they have
their natural abode in different portions of nature. His
logic is one of definition and classification, so that its
task is completed when changing and contingent things
are distinguished from the necessary, universal and fixed,
by attribution to inferior species of things. Chance ap-
pears in thought not as a calculus of probabilities in pre-
dicting the observable occurrence of any and every
event, but as marking an inferior type of syllogism.
Things that move are intrinsically different from things
EXISTENCE 49
that exhibit eternal regularity. Change is honestly
recognized as a genuine feature of some things, but the
point of the recognition is avoided by imputing altera-
tion to inherent deficiency of Being over against com-
plete Being which never changes. Changing things be-
long to a purgatorial realm, where they wander aimlessly
until redeemed by love of finality of form, the acquisi-
tion of which lifts them to a paradise of self-sufficient
Being. With slight exaggeration, it may be said that
the thoroughgoing way in which Aristotle defined, dis-
tinguished and classified rest and movement, the finished
and the incomplete, the actual and potential, did more
to fix tradition, the genteel tradition one is tempted to
add, which identifies the fixed and regular with reality
of Being and the changing and hazardous with deficiency
of Being than ever was accomplished by those who took
the shorter path of asserting that change is illusory.
His philosophy was closer to empirical facts than most
modern philosophies, in that it was neither monistic nor
dualistic but openly pluralistic. His plurals fall however,
within a grammatical system, to each portion of which
a corresponding cosmic status is allotted. Thus his
pluralism solved the problem of how to have your cake
and eat it too, for a classified and hierarchically ordered
set of pluralities, of variants, has none of the sting of the
miscellaneous and uncoordinated plurals of our actual
world. In this classificatory scheme of separation he has
been followed, though perhaps unwittingly, by many
philosophers of different import. Thus Kant assigns all
that is manifold and chaotic to one realm, that of sense,
and all that is uniform and regular to that of reason. A
single and all embracing dialectic problem of the com-
SO EXPERIENCE AND NATURE
bination of sense and thought is thereby substituted for
the concrete problems that arise through the mixed and
varied union in existence of the variable and the con-
stant, the necessary and that which proceeds uncertainly.
The device is characteristic of a conversion such as
has already been commented upon of a moral insight
to be made good in action into an antecedent meta-
physics of existence or a general theory of knowledge.
The striving to make stability of meaning prevail over the
instability of events is the main task of intelligent human
effort. But when the function is dropped from the
province of art and treated as a property of given things,
whether cosmological or logical, effort is rendered use-
less, and a premium is put upon the accidental good-
fortune of a class that happens to be furnished by the
toil of another class with products that give to life its
dignity and leisurely stability.
The argument is not forgetful that there are, from
Heracleitus to Bergson, philosophies, metaphysics, of
change. One is grateful to them for keeping alive a
sense of what classic, orthodox philosophies have whisked
out of sight. But the philosophies of flux also indicate
the intensity of the craving for the sure and fixed. They
have deified change by making it universal, regular, sure.
To say this is not, I hope, verbal by-play. Consider the
wholly eulogistic fashion in which Hegel and Bergson,
and the professedly evolutionary philosophers of becom-
ing, have taken change. With Hegel becoming is a
rational process which defines logic although a new and
strange logic, and an absolute, although new and strange,
God. With Spencer, evolution is but the transitional
process of attaining a fixed and universal equilibrium of
EXISTENCE SI
harmonious adjustment With Bergson, change is the
creative operation of God, or is God one is not quite
sure which. The change of change is not only cosmic
pyrotechnics, but is a process of divine, spiritual, energy.
We are here in the presence of prescription, not descrip-
tion. Romanticism is an evangel in the garb of meta-
physics. It sidesteps the painful, toilsome labor of
understanding and of control which change sets us, by
glorifying it for its own sake. Flux is made something
to revere, something profoundly akin to what is best
within ourselves, will and creative energy. It is not, as
it is in experience, a call to effort, a challenge to investi-
gation, a potential doom of disaster and death.
If we follow classical terminology, philosophy is love
of wisdom, while metaphysics is cognizance of the generic
traits of existence. In this sense of metaphysics, incom-
pleteness and precariousness is a trait that must be
given footing of the same rank as the finished and fixed.
Love of wisdom is concerned with finding its implica-
tions for the conduct of life, in devotion to what is good.
On the cognitive side, the issue is largely that of measure,
of the ratio one bears to others in the situations of life.
On the practical side, it is a question of the use to be
made of each, of turning each to best account. Man is
naturally philosophic, rather than metaphysical or coldJy
scientific, noting and describing. Concerned with pru-
dence if not with what is honorifically called wisdom,
man naturally prizes knowledge only for the sake of its
bearing upon success and failure in attaining goods and
avoiding evils. This is a fact of our structure and
nothing is gained by recommending it as an ideal truth,
and equally nothing is gained by attributing to intellect
52 EXPERIENCE AND NATURE
aui intrinsic relationship to pure truth for its own sake
or bare fact on its own account. The first method en-
courages dogma, and the second expresses a myth. The
love of knowledge for its own sake is an ideal of morals;
it is an integral condition of the wisdom that rightly
conceives and effectually pursues the good. For wisdom
as to ends depends upon acquaintance with conditions
and means, and unless the acquaintance is adequate and
fair, wisdom becomes a sublimated folly of self-deception.
Denial of an inherent relation of mind to truth or fact
for its own sake, apart from insight into what the fact or
truth exacts of us in behavior and imposes upon us in
joy and suffering; and simultaneous affirmation that
devotion to fact, to truth, is a necessary moral demand,
involve no inconsistency. Denial relates to natural
events as independent of choice and endeavor; affirma-
tion relates to choice and action. But choice and the
reflective effort involved in it are themselves such con-
tingent events and so bound up with the precarious un-
certainty of other events, that philosophers have too
readily assumed that metaphysics, and science of fact
and truth, are themselves wisdom, thinking thus to
avoid the necessity of either exercising or recognizing
choice. The consequence is that conversion of un-
avowed morals or wisdom into cosmology, and into a
metaphysics of nature, which was termed in the last
chapter the philosophic fallacy. It supplies the for-
mula of the technique by which thinkers have relegated
the uncertain and unfinished to an invidious state of
unreal being, while they have systematically exalted the
assured and complete to the rank of true Being.
EXISTENCE II
Upon the side of wisdom, as human brings Interested
in good and bad things in their connection with human
conduct, thinkers are concerned to mitigate the instability
of life, to introduce moderation, temper and economy,
and when worst comes to worst to suggest consola-
tions and compensations. They are concerned with
rendering more stable good things, and more unstable
bad things; they are interested in how changes may be
turned to account in the consequences to which they
contribute. The facts of the ungoing, unfinished and
ambiguously potential world give point and poignancy
to the search for absolutes and finalities. Then when
philosophers have hit in reflection upon a thing which is
stably good in quality and hence worthy of persistent
and continued choice, they hesitate, and withdraw from
the effort and struggle that choice demands: namely,
from the effort to give it some such stability in observed
existence as it possesses in quality when thought of.
Thus it becomes a refuge, an asylum for contemplation,
or a theme for dialectical elaboration, instead of an ideal
to inspire and guide conduct.
Since thinkers claim to be concerned with knowledge
of existence, rather than with imagination, they have to
make good the pretention to knowledge. Hence they
transmute the imaginative perception of the stably good
object into a definition and description of true reality
in contrast with lower and specious existence, which,
being precarious and incomplete, alone involves us in the
necessity of choice and active struggle. Thus they
remove from actual existence the very traits which
generate philosophic reflection and which give point and
bearing to its conclusions. In briefest formula, "reality"
14 EXPERIENCE AND NATURE
becomes what we wish existence to be, after we have
analyzed its defects and decided upon what would re-
move them; "reality" is what existence would be if our
reasonably justified preferences were so completely es-
tablished in nature as to exhaust and define its entire
being and thereby render search and struggle unneces-
sary. What is left over, (and since trouble, struggle,
conflict, and error still empirically exist, somethin ; is
left over) being excluded by definition from full reality
is assigned to a grade or order of being which is asserted
to be metaphysically inferior; an order variously called
appearance, illusion, mortal mind, or the merely em-
pirical, against what really and truly is. Then the prob-
lem of metaphysics alters: instead of being a detection
and description of the generic traits of existence, it be-
comes an endeavor to adjust or reconcile to each other
two separate realms of being. Empirically we have
just what we started with: the mixture of the precarious
and problematic with the assured and complete. But
a classificatory device, based on desire and elaborated in
reflective imagination, has been introduced by which the
two traits are torn apart, one of them being labelled
reality and the other appearance. The genuinely moral
problem of mitigating and regulating the troublesome
factor by active employment of the stable factor then
drops out of sight. The dialectic problem of logical
reconciliation of two notions has taken its place.
The most widespread of these classificatory devices,
the one of greatest popular appeal, is that which divides
existence into the supernatural and the natural. Men
may fear the gods but it is axiomatic that the gods have
nothing to fear. They lead a life of untroubled serenity,
EXISTENCE SS
the Jffe that pleases them. There is a long story between
the primitive forms of this division of objects of experi-
ence and the dialectical imputation to the divine of
omnipotence, omniscience, eternity and infinity, in con-
trast with the attribution to man and experienced nature
of finitude, weakness, limitation, struggle and change.
But in the make-up of human psychology the later
history is implicit in the early crude division. One
realm is the home of assured appropriation and posses-
sion; the other of striving, transiency and frustration*
How many persons are there today who conceive that
they have disposed of ignorance, struggle and disappoint-
ment by pointing to man's "finite" nature as if finitude
signifies anything else but an abstract classificatory
naming of certain concrete and discriminable traits of
nature itself traits of nature which generate ignorance,
arbitrary appearance and disappearance, failure and
striving. It pleases man to substitute the dialectic
exercise of showing how the "finite" can exist with or
within the "infinite" for the problem of dealing with the
contingent, thinking to solve the problem by distin-
guishing and naming its factors. Failure of the exercise
s certain, but the failure can be flourished as one more
>roof of the finitude of man's intellect, and the need-
essness because impotency of endeavor of "finite"
:reatures to attack ignorance and oppressive fatalities.
Wisdom then consists in administration of the temporal,
anite and human in its relation to the eternal and in-
inite, by means of dogma and cult, rather than in regula-
tion of the events of life by understanding of actual
conditions.
56 EXPERIENCE AND NATURE
It does not demand great ingenuity to detect the
inversion here. The starting point is precisely the
existing mixture of the regular and dependable and the
unsettled and uncertain. There are a multitude of
recipes for obtaining a vicarious possession of the stable
and final without getting involved in the labor and pain
of intellectual effort attending regulation of the condi-
tions upon which these fruits depend.
This situation is worthy of remark as an exemplifica-
tion of how easy it is to arrive at a description of exis-
tence via a theory of wisdom, of reflective insight into
goods. It has a direct bearing upon a metaphysical
doctrine which is not popular, like the division into the
supernatural, and natural, but which is learned and
technical. The philosopher may have little esteem for
the crude forms assumed by the popular metaphysics of
earth and heaven, of God, nature, and man. But the
philosopher has often proceeded in a manner analogous
to that which resulted in this popular metaphysics;
some of the most cherished metaphysical distinctions
seem to be but learned counterparts, dependent upon
an elaborate intellectual technique, for these rough, crude
notions of supernatural and natural, divine and human,
in popular belief. I refer to such things as the Platonic
division into ideal archetypes and physical events; the
Aristotelian division into form which is actuality and
matter which is potential, when that is understood as a
distinction of ranks of reality ; the noumenal things, things-
in-themselves of Kant in contrast with natural objects
as phenomenal; the distinction, current among content
porary absolute idealists, of reality and appearance.
EXISTENCE 57
The division however is not confined to philosophers
with leanings toward spiritualistic philosophies. There
is some evidence that Plato got the term Idea, as a name
for essential form, from Democritus. Whether this be
the case or no, the Idea of Democritus, though having a
radically diverse structure from the Platonic Idea, had
the same function of designating a finished, complete,
stable, wholly unprecarious reality. Both philosophers
craved solidity and both found it; corresponding to the
Platonic phenomenal flux are the Democritean things
as they are in custom or ordinary experience: corre-
sponding to the ideal archetypes are substantial indi-
visible atoms. Corresponding, again to the Platonic
theory of Ideas is the modern theory of mathematical
structures which are alone independently real, while
the empirical impressions and suggestions to which they
give rise is the counterpart of his realm of phenomena.
Apart from the materialistic and spirtualistic schools,
there is the Spinozistic division into attributes and modes;
the old division of essence and existence, and its modern
counterpart subsistence and existence. It is impossible
to force Mr. Bertrand Russell into any one of the pigeon-
holes of the cabinet of conventional philosophic schools.
But moral, or philosophical, motivation is obvious in his
metaphysics when he says that mathematics takes us
"into the region of absolute necessity, to which not only
the actual world but every possible world must conform.' 1
Indeed with his usual lucidity, he says, mathematics
"finds a habitation eternally standing, where our ideals
are fully satisfied and our best hopes are not thwarted. 11
When he adds that contemplation of such objects is the
"chief means of overcoming the terrible sent* of knpo-
58 EXPERIENCE AND NATURE
tence,of weakness, of exile amid hostile power, which Is too
apt to result from acknowledging the all but omnipotence
of alien forces," the presence of moral origin is explicit.
No modern thinker has pointed out so persuasively as
Santayana that "every phase of the ideal world emanates
from the natural," that "sense, art, religion, society
express nature exuberantly." And yet unless one reads
him wrong, he then confounds his would-be disciples and
confuses his critics by holding that nature is truly pre-
sented only in an esthetic contemplation of essences
reached by physical science, an envisagement reached
through a dialectic which "is a transubstantiation of
matter, a passage from existence to eternity." This
passage moreover is so utter that there is no road back.
The stable ideal meanings which are the fruit of nature-
are forbidden, in the degree in which they are its highest
and truest fruits, from dropping seeds in nature to its
further fructification.
The perception of genetic continuity between the
dynamic flux of nature and an eternity of static ideal
forms thus terminate in a sharp division, in reiteration of
the old tradition. Perhaps it is a caricature to say that
the ultimate of reason is held to be ability to behold
nature as a complete mechanism which generates and
sustains the beholding of the mechanism, but the carica-
ture is not wilful. If the separation of contingency and
necessity is abandoned, what is there to exclude a belief
that science, while it is grasp of the regular and stable
mechanism of nature, is also an organ of regulating and
enriching, through its own expansion, the more exu-
berant and irregular expressions of nature in human
intercourse, the arts, religion, industry, and politics?
EXISTENCE 59
To follow out the latter suggestion would take us to
a theme reserved for later consideration. We are here
concerned with the fact that it is the intricate mixture of
the stable and the precarious, the fixed and the unpredicta-
bly novel, the assured and the uncertain, in existence
which sets mankind upon that love of wisdom which
forms philosophy. Yet too commonly, although in a
great variety of technical modes, the result of the search
is converted into a metaphysics which denies or conceals
from acknowledgment the very characters of existence
which initiated it, and which give significance to its
conclusions. The form assumed by the denial is, most
frequently, that striking division into a superior true
realm of being and lower illusory, insignificant or pheno-
menal realm which characterizes metaphysical systems
as unlike as those of Plato and Democritus, St. Thomas
and Spinoza, Aristotle and Kant, Descartes and Comte,
Haeckel and Mrs. Eddy.
The same jumble of acknowledgment and denial
attends the conception of Absolute Experience: as if any
experience could be more absolutely experience than
that which marks the life of humanity. This conception
constitutes the most recent device for first admitting and
then denying the combinedly stable and unstable nature
of the world. Its plaintive recognition of our experience
as finite and temporal, as full of error, conflict and con-
tradiction, is an acknowledgment of the precarious un-
certainty of the objects and connections that constitute
nature as it emerges in history. Human experience
however has also the pathetic longing for truth, beauty
and order. There is more than the longing: there are
moments of achievement. Experience exhibits ability
60 EXPERIENCE AND NATURE
to possess harmonious objects. It evinces an ability,
within limits, to safeguard the excellent objects and
to deflect and reduce the obnoxious ones. The concept
of an absolute experience which is only and always
perfect and good, first explicates these desirable implica-
tions of things of actual experience, and then asserts that
they alone are real. The experienced occurrences which
give poignancy and pertinency to the longing for a better
world, the experimental endeavors and plans which make
possible actual betterments within the objects of actual
experience, are thus swept out of real Being into a limbo
of appearances.
The notion of Absolute Experience thus serves as a
symbol of two facts. One is the ineradicable union in
nature of the relatively stable and the relatively con-
tingent. The division of the movement and leadings of
things which are experienced into two parts, such that
one set constitutes and defines absolute and eternal
experience, while the other set constitutes and defines
finite experience, tells us nothing about absolute experi-
ence. It tells us a good deal about experience as it
exists: namely, that it is such as to involve permanent
and general objects of reference as well as temporally
changing events; the possibility of truth as well as error;
conclusive objects and goods as well as things whose
purport and nature is determinable only in an indeter-
minat$ future. Nothing is gained except the delights
of a dialectic problem in labelling one assortment ab-
solute experience and the other finite experience. Since
the appeal of the adherents of the philosophy of absolute
and phenomenal experience is to a logical criterion,
namely, to the implication in every judgment, however
EXISTENCE 61
erroneous, of a standard of consistency which excludes
any possibility of contradictoriness, the inherent logical
contradictions in the doctrine itself are worth noting.
In the first place, the contents as well as the form of
ultimate Absolute Experience are derived from and
based upon the features of actual experience, the very
experience which is then relegated to unreality by the
supreme reality derived from its unreality. It is "real"
just long enough to afford a spring-board into ultimate
reality and to afford a hint of the essential contents of the
latter and then it obligingly dissolves into mere appear-
ance. If we start from the standpoint of the Absolute
Experience thus reached, the contradiction is repeated
from its side. Although absolute, eternal, all-compre-
hensive, and pervasively integrated into a whole so
logically perfect that no separate patterns, to say nothing
of seams and holes, can exist in it, it proceeds to play
a tragic joke upon itself for there is nothing else to be
fooled by appearing in a queer combination of rags and
glittering gew-gaws, in the garb of the temporal, partial
and conflicting things, mental as well as physical, of
ordinary experience. I do not cite these dialectic con-
tradictions as having an inherent importance. But the
fact that a doctrine which avowedly takes logical con-
sistence for its method and criterion, whose adherents
are noteworthy for dialectic acumen in specific issues,
should terminate in such thoroughgoing contradictions
may be cited as evidence that after all the doctrine is
merely engaged in an arbitrary sorting out of characters
of things which in nature are always present in conjunc-
tion and interpenetratioru
2 EXPERIENCE AND NATURE
The union of the hazardous and the stable, of the in-
complete and the recurrent, is the condition of all ex-
perienced satisfaction as truly as of our predicaments
and problems. While it is the source of ignorance, error
and failure of expectation, it is the source of the delight
which fulfillments bring. For if there were nothing in
the way, if there were no deviations and resistances,
fulfillment would be at once, and in so being would ful-
fill nothing, but merely be. It would not be in connec-
tion with desire or satisfaction. Moreover when a
fulfillment comes and is pronounced good, it is judged
good, distinguished and asserted, simply because it is in
jeopardy, because it occurs amid indifferent and diver-
gent things. Because of this mixture of the regular
and that which cuts across stability, a good object once
experienced acquires ideal quality and attracts demand
and effort to itself. A particular ideal may be an illusion,
but having ideals is no illusion. It embodies features of
existence. Although imagination is often fantastic it is
also an organ of nature; for it is the appropriate phase
of indeterminate events moving toward eventualities
that are now but possibilities. A purely stable world
permits of no illusions, but neither is it clothed with ideals.
It just exists. To be good is to be better than; and there
can be no better except where there is shock and
discord combined with enough assured order to make
attainment of harmony possible. Better objects when
brought into existence are existent not ideal; they retain
ideal quality only retrospectively as commemorative of
issue from prior conflict and prospectively, in contrast
with forces which make for their destruction. Water
that slakes thirst, or a conclusion that solves a problem
EXISTENCE 63
have ideal character as longes thirst or problem persists
in a way which qualifies the result. But water that is
not a satisfaction of need has no more ideal quality than
water running through pipes into a reservoir; a solution
ceases to be a solution and becomes a bare incident of
existence when its antecedent generating conditions of
doubt, ambiguity and search are lost from its context.
While the precarious nature of existence is indeed the
source of all trouble, it is also an indispensable condition of
ideality, becoming a sufficient condition when conjoined
with the regular and assured.
We long, amid a troubled world, for perfect being. We
forget that what gives meaning to the notion of perfection
is the events that create longing, and that, apart from
them, a "perfect' ' world would mean just an unchanging
brute existential thing. The ideal significance of esthetic
objects is no exception to this principle. Their satisfying
quality, their power to compose while they arouse, is not
dependent upon definite prior desire and effort as is the
case with the ideally satisfying quality of practical and
scientific objects. It is part of their peculiar satisfying
quality to be gratuitous, not purchased by endeavor. The
contrast to other things of this detachment from toil and
labor in a world where most realizations have to be bought,
as well as the contrast to trouble and uncertainty, give
esthetic objects their peculiar traits. If all things came
to us in the way our esthetic objects do, none of them
would be a source of esthetic delight.
Some phases of recent philosophy have made much of
need, desire and satisfaction. Critics have frequently
held that the outcome is only recurrence to an older sub-
jective empiricism, though with substitution of affections
64 EXPERIENCE AND NATURE
and volitional states for cognitive sensory states. But
need and desire are exponents of natural being. They are,
if we use Aristotelian phraseology, actualizations of its
contingencies and incompletenesses; as such nature itself
is wistful and pathetic, turbulent and passionate. Were
it not, the existence of wants would be a miracle. In a
world where everything is complete, nothing requires any-
thing else for its completion. A world in which events
can be carried to a finish only through the coinciding
assistance of other transitory events, is already necessi-
tous, a world of begging as well as of beggarly elements.
If human experience is to express and reflect this world,
it must be marked by needs; in becoming aware of the
needful and needed quality of things it must project satis-
factions or completions. For irrespective of whether a
satisfaction is conscious, a satisfaction or non-satisfac-
tion is an objective thing with objective conditions. It
means fulfillment of the demands of objective factors.
Happiness may mark an awareness of such satisfaction,
and it may be its culminating form. But satisfaction is
not subjective, private or personal: it is conditioned by
objective partialities and defections and made real by
objective situations and completions.
By the same logic, necessity implies the precarious and
contingent. A world that was all necessity would not
be a world of necessity; it would just be. For in its being,
nothing would be necessary for anything else. But
where some things are indigent, other things are necessary
if demands are to be met. The common failure to note the
fact that a world of complete being would be a world
in which necessity is meaningless is due to a rapid shift
from one universe of discourse to another. First we
EXISTENCE 65
postulate a whole of Being; then we shift to a part; now
since a "part" is logically dependent as such in its exis-
tence and its properties, it is necessitated by other parts.
But we have unwittingly introduced contingency in the
very fact of marking off something as just a part. If
the logical implications of the original notion are held to
firmly, a part is already a part-of-a-whole. Its being
what it is, is not necessitated by the whole or by other
parts: its being what it is, is just a name for the whole
being what it is. Whole and parts alike are but names for
existence there as just what it is. But wherever we can
say if so-and-so, then something else, there is necessity,
because partialities are implied which are not just parts-
of-a-whole. A world of "ifs" is alone a world of "musts"
the "ifs" express real differences; the "musts" real con-
nections. The stable and recurrent is needed for the ful-
fillment of the possible; the doubtful can be settled only
through its adaptation to stable objects. The necessary
is always necessary for, not necessary in and of itself; it is
conditioned by the contingent, although itself a condition
of the full determination of the latter.
One of the most striking phases of the history of
philosophic thought is the recurrent grouping together
of unity, permanence (or "the eternal"), completeness
and rational thought, while upon another side full multi-
plicity, change and the temporal, the partial, defective,
sense and desire. This division is obviously but another
case of violent separation of the precarious and unsettled
from the regular and determinate. One aspect of it
however, is worthy of particular attention: the connection
of thought and unity. Empirically, all reflection set*
out from the problematic and confused. Its aim is to
66 EXPERIENCE AND NATURE
clarify and ascertain. When thinking is successful, Its
career closes in transforming the disordered into the
orderly, the mixed-up into the distinguished or placed, the
unclear and ambiguous into the defined and unequivocal,
the disconnected into the systematized. It is empirically
assured that the goal of thinking does not remain a mere
ideal, but is attained often enough so as to render reasona-
ble additional efforts to achieve it.
In these facts we have, I think, the empirical basis of
the philosophic doctrines which assert that reality is really
and truly a rational system, a coherent whole of relations
that cannot be conceived otherwise than in terms of in-
tellect. Reflective inquiry moves in each particular case
from differences toward unity; from indeterminate and
ambiguous position to clear determination, from confusion
and disorder to system. When thought in a given case
has reached its goal of organized totality, of definite rela-
tions of distinctly placed elements, its object is the ac-
cepted starting point, the defined subject matter, of further
experiences; antecedent and outgrown conditions of dark-
ness and of unreconciled differences are dismissed as a
transitory state of ignorance and inadequate apprehen-
sions. Retain connection of the goal with the thinking
by which it is reached, and then identify it with true
reality in contrast with the merely phenomenal, and the
outline of the logic of rational and "objective" idealisms
is before us. Thought like Being, has two forms, one
real; the other phenomenal. It is compelled to take on
reflective form, it involves doubt, inquiry and hypothesis,
because it sets out from a subject-matter conditioned by
sense, a fact which proves that thought, intellect, is not
pure in man, but restricted by an animal organism that
EXISTENCE 67
fe but one part Hnked with other parts, of nature. But
the conclusion of reflection affords us a pattern and
guarantee of thought which is constitutive; one with the
system of objective reality. Such in outline is the pro-
cedure of all ontological logics.
A philosophy which accepts the denotative or empirical
method accepts at full value the fact that reflective think-
ing transforms confusion, ambiguity and discrepancy into
illumination, definiteness and consistency. But it also
points to the contextual situation in which thinking occurs.
It notes that the starting point is the actually problematic,
and that the problematic phase resides in some actual
and specifiable situation.
It notes that the means of converting the dubious into
the assured, and the incomplete into the determinate, is
use of assured and established things, which are just as
empirical and as indicative of the nature of experienced
things as is the uncertain. It thus notes that thinking is
no different in kind from the use of natural materials and
energies, say fire and tools, to refine, re-order, and shape
other natural materials, say ore. In both cases, there are
matters which as they stand are unsatisfactory and
there are also adequate agencies for dealing with them
and connecting them. At no point or place is there any
jump outside empirical, natural objects and their rela-
tions. Thought and reason are not specific powers.
They consist of the procedures intentionally employed in
the application to each other of the unsatisfactorily con-
fused and indeterminate on one side and the regular and
stable on the other. Generalizing from such observa-
tions, empirical philosophy perceives that thinking is a
continuous process of temporal re-organization within one
66 EXPERIENCE AND NATURE
and the same world of experienced things, not a jump from
the latter world into one of objects constituted once for
all by thought. It discovers thereby the empirical basis
of rational idealism, and the point at which it empirically
goes astray. Idealism fails to take into account the
specified or concrete character of the uncertain situation
in which thought occurs; it fails to note the empirically
concrete nature of the subject-matter, acts, and tools by
which determination and consistency are reached; it
fails to note that the conclusive eventual objects having
the latter properties are themselves as many as the
situations dealt with. The conversion of the logic of
reflection into an ontology of rational being is thus due to
arbitrary conversion of an eventual natural function of
unification into a causal antecedent reality; this in turn
is due to the tendency of the imagination working under
the influence of emotion to carry unification from an
actual, objective and experimental enterprise, limited to
particular situations where it is needed, into an un-
restricted, wholesale movement which ends in an all-
absorbing dream.
The occurrence of reflection is crucial for dualistic
metaphysics as well as for idealistic ontologies. Re-
flection occurs only in situations qualified by uncertainty,
alternatives, questioning, search, hypotheses, tentative
trials or experiments which test the worth of thinking. A
naturalistic metaphysics is bound to consider reflection
as itself a natural event occurring within nature because of
traits of the latter. It is bound to inference from the em-
pirical traits of thinking in precisely the same way as the
sciences make inferences from the happening of suns,
radio-activity, thunder-storms or any other natural event.
EXISTENCE 69
Traits of reflection are as truly indicative or evidential of
the traits of other things as are the traits of these
events. A theory of the nature of the occurrence and
career of a sun reached by denial of the obvious traits of
the sun, or by denial that these traits are so connected with
the traits of other natural events that they can be used
as evidence concerning the nature of these other things,
would hardly possess scientific standing. Yet philoso-
phers, and strangely enough philosophers who call them-
selves realists, have constantly held that the traits which
are characteristic of thinking, namely, uncertainty, am-
biguity, alternatives, inquiring, search, selection, ex-
perimental reshaping of external conditions, do not pos-
sess the same existential character as do the objects of
valid knowledge. They have denied that these traits are
evidential of the character of the world within which
thinking occurs. They have not, as realists, asserted that
these traits are mere appearances; but they have often
asserted and implied that such things are only personal or
psychological in contrast with a world of objective nature.
But the interests of empirical and denotative method and
of naturalistic metaphysics wholly coincide. The world
must actually be such as to generate ignorance and in-
quiry; doubt and hypothesis, trial and temporal con-
clusions; the latter being such that they develop out of
existences which while wholly "real" are not as satis-
factory, as good, or as significant, as those into which
they are eventually re-organized. The ultimate evidence
of genuine hazard, contingency, irregularity and indeter-
minateness in nature is thus found in the occurrence
of thinking. The traits of natural existence which
generate the fears and adorations of superstitious bar-
70 EXPERIENCE AND NATURE
barians generate the scientific procedures of disciplined
civilization. The superiority of the latter does not con-
sist in the fact that they are based on "real" existence,
while the former depend wholly upon a human nature
different from nature in general. It consists in the fact
that scientific inquiries reach objects which are better,
because reached by method which controls them and
which adds greater control to life itself, method which
mitigates accident, turns contingency to account, and
releases thought and other forms of endeavor.
The conjunction of problematic and determinate
characters in nature renders every existence, as well as
every idea and human act, an experiment in fact, even
though not in design. To be intelligently experimental
is but to be conscious of this intersection of natural
conditions so as to profit by it instead of being at its
mercy. The Christian idea of this world and this life as
a probation is a kind of distorted recognition of the
situation; distorted because it applied wholesale to one
stretch of existence in contrast with another, regarded as
original and final. But in truth anything which can
exist at any place and at any time occurs subject to tests
imposed upon it by surroundings, which are only in part
compatible and reinforcing. These surroundings test
its strength and measure its endurance. As we can dis-
course of change only in terms of velocity and accelera-
tion which involve relations to other things, so assertion
of the permanent and enduring is comparative. The
stablest thing we can speak of is not free from conditions
set to it by other things. That even the solid earth
mountains, the emblems of constancy, appear and dis-
appear like the clouds is an old theme of moralists and
EXISTENCE M
poets. The fixed and unchanged being erf the Demo-
critean atom is now reported by inquirers to possess some
of the traits of his non-being, and to embody a temporary
equilibrium in the economy of nature's compromises and
adjustments. A thing may endure secula seculorum and
yet not be everlasting; it will crumble before the gnawing
tooth of time, as it exceeds a certain measure. Eve*y
existence is an event.
This fact is nothing at which to repine and nothing tc
gloat over. It is something to be noted and used. If it
is discomfiting when applied to good things, to our friends,
possessions and precious selves, it is consoling also tc
know that no evil endures forever; that the longest lane
turns sometime, and that the memory of loss of nearest
and dearest grows dim in time. The eventful charactei
of all existences is no reason for consigning them to the
realm of mere appearance any more than it is a reason f 01
idealizing flux into a deity. The important thing is
measure, relation, ratio, knowledge of the comparative
tempos of change. In mathematics some variables are
constants in some problems; so it is in nature and life.
The rate of change of some things is so slow, or is so
rhythmic, that these changes have all the advantages of
stability in dealing with more transitory and irregular
happenings if we know enough. Indeed, if any one
thing that concerns us is subject to change, it is fortunate
that all other things change. A thing "absolutely"
stable and unchangeable would be out of the range of the
principle of action and reaction, of resistance and leverage
as well as of friction. Here it would have no applicabil-
ity, no potentiality of use as measure and control of
other events. To designate the slower and the regular
71 EXPERIENCE AND NATURE
rhythmic events structure, and more rapid and irregular
ones process, is sound practical sense. It expresses the
function of one in respect to the other.
But spiritualistic idealism and materialism alike treat
this relational and functional distinction as something
fixed and absolute. One doctrine finds structure in a
framework of ideal forms, the other finds it in matter,
They agree in supposing that structure has some super-
lative reality. This supposition is another form taken
by preference for the stable over the precarious and un-
completed. The fact is that all structure is structure of
something; anything defined as structure is a character
of events, not something intrinsic and per se. A set of
traits is called structure, because of its limiting function
in relation to other traits of events. A house has a
structure; in comparison with the disintegration and
collapse that would occur without its presence, this struc-
ture is fixed. Yet it is not something external to which
the changes involved in building and using the house have
to submit. It is rather an arrangement of changing
events such that properties which change slowly, limit and
direct a series of quick changes and give them an order
which they do not otherwise possess. Structure is con-
stancy of means, of things used for consequences, not of
things taken by themselves or absolutely. Structure is
what makes construction possible and cannot be dis-
covered or defined except in some realized construction,
construction being, of course, an evident order of changes.
The isolation of structure from the changes whose stable
ordering it is, renders it mysterious something that is
metaphysical in the popular sense of the word, a kind of
ghostly queerness.
EXISTENCE Tl
The "matter" of materialists and the "spirit" of
idealists is a creature similar to the constitution of the
United States in the minds of unimaginative persons*
Obviously the real constitution is certain basic relation-
ships among the activities of the citizens of the country;
it is a property or phase of these processes, so connected
with them as to influence their rate and direction of change.
But by literalists it is often conceived of as something
external to them; in itself fixed, a rigid framework to which
all changes must accommodate themselves. Similarly
what we call matter is that character of natural events
which is so tied up with changes that are sufficiently rapid
to be perceptible as to give the latter a characteristic
rhythmic order, the causal sequence. It is no cause or
source of events or processes; no absolute monarch; no
principle of explanation; no substance behind or under-
lying changes save in that sense of substance in which a
man well fortified with this world's goods, and hence
able to maintain himself through vicissitudes of surround-
ings, is a man of substance. The name designates a
character in operation, not an entity.
That structure, whether of the kind called material or
of the kind summed up in the word mental, is stable or
permanent relationally and in its office, may be shown in
another way. There is no action without reaction; there
is no exclusively one-way exercise of conditioning power,
no mode of regulation that operates wholly from above to
below or from within outwards or from without inwards.
Whatever influences the changes of other things is itself
changed. The idea of an activity proceeding only in
one direction, of an unmoved mover, is a survival of
Greek physic*. It has been banished from science, but
W EXPERIENCE AND NATURE
remains to haunt philosophy. The vague and myster!o
properties assigned to mind and matter, the very con-
ceptions of mind and matter in traditional thought, are
ghosts walking underground. The notion of matter ac-
tually found in the practice of science has nothing in com-
mon with the matter of materialists and almost every-
body is still a materialist as to matter, to which he merely
adds a second rigid structure which he calls mind. The
matter of science is a character of natural events and
changes as they change; their character of regular and
stable order.
Natural events are so complex and varied that there
is nothing surprising in their possession of different
characterizations, characters so different that they can
be easily treated as opposites.
Nothing but unfamiliarity stands in the way of thinking
of both mind and matter as different characters of natural
events, in which matter expresses their sequential order,
and mind the order of their meanings in their logical
connections and dependencies. Processes may be event-
ful for functions which taken in abstract separation are at
opposite poles, just as physiological processes eventuate
in both anabolic and katabolic functions. The idea that
matter and mind are two sides or "aspects" of the same
things, like the convex and the concave in a curve, is
literally unthinkable.
A curve is an intelligible object and concave and convex
are defined in terms of this object; they are indeed but
names for properties involved in its meaning. We do
not start with convexity and concavity as two independent
things and then set up an unknown tertium quid to unite
two disparate things. In spite of the literal absurdity of
EXISTENCE 75
the comparison, it may be understood however in a way
which conveys an inkling of the truth. That to which
both mind and matter belong is the complex of events
that constitute nature. This becomes a mysterious
tertium quid, incapable of designation, only when mind
and matter are taken to be static structures instead of
functional characters. It is a plausible prediction that
if there were an interdict placed for a generation upon
the use of mind, matter, consciousness as nouns, and we
were obliged to employ adjectives and adverbs, conscious
and consciously, mental and mentally, material and
physically, we should find many of our problems much
simplified.
We have selected only a few of the variety of the
illustrations that might be used in support of the idea that
the significant problems and issues of life and philosophy
concern the rate and mode of the conjunction of the pre-
carious and the assured, the incomplete and the finished, the
repetitious and the varying, the safe and sane and the haz-
ardous. If we trust to the evidence of experienced things,
these traits, and the modes and tempos of their inter-
action with each other, are fundamental features of
natural existence. The experience of their various conse-
quences, according as they are relatively isolated, unhap-
pily or happily combined, is evidence that wisdom, and
hence that love of wisdom which is philosophy, is concerned
with choice and administration of their proportioned union.
Structure and process, substance and accident, matter and
energy, permanence and flux, one and many, continuity
and discreteness, order and progress, law and liberty,
uniformity and growth, tradition and innovation, rational
will and impelling desires, proof and discovery, the
76 EXPERIENCE AND NATURE
actual and the possible, are names given to various
phases of their conjunction, and the issue of living de-
pends upon the art with which these things are adjusted
to each other.
While metaphysics may stop short with noting and
registering these traits, man is not contemplatively de-
tached from them. They involve him in his perplexities
and troubles, and are the source of his joys and achieve-
ments. The situation is not indifferent to man, because
it forms man as a desiring, striving, thinking, feeling
creature. It is not egotism that leads man from contem-
plative registration of these traits to interest in managing
them, to intelligence and purposive art. Interest, think-
ing, planning, striving, consummation and frustration
are a drama enacted by these forces and conditions. A
particular choice may be arbitrary; this is only to say
that it does not approve itself to reflection. But choice
is not arbitrary, not in a universe like this one, a world
which is not finished and which has not consistently made
up its mind where it is going and what it is going to do.
Or, if we call it arbitrary, the arbitrariness is not ours but
that of existence itself. And to call existence arbitrary
or by any moral name, whether disparaging or honorific,
is to patronize nature. To assume an attitude of con-
descension toward existence is perhaps a natural human
compensation for the straits of life. But it is an ulti-
mate source of the covert, uncandid and cheap in philos-
ophy. This compensatory disposition it is which forgets
that reflection exists to guide choice and effort. Hence
its love of wisdom is but an unlaborious transformation
of existence by dialectic, instead of an opening and en-
larging of the ways of nature in man. A true wisdom,
EXISTENCE 77
devoted to the latter task, discovers in thoughtful ob-
servation and experiment the method of administering the
unfinished processes of existence so that frail goods shall
be substantiated, secure goods be extended, and the pre-
carious promises of good that haunt experienced things
be more liberally fulfilled.
CHAPTER THREE
NATURE, ENDS AND HISTORIES
Human experience in the large, in its coarse and con-
spicuous features, has for one of its most striking features
preoccupation with direct enjoyment, feasting and festivi-
ties; ornamentation, dance, song, dramatic pantomime,
telling yarns and enacting stories. In comparison with
intellectual and moral endeavor, this trait of experience
has hardly received the attention from philosophers that
it demands. Even philosophers who have conceived that
pleasure is the sole motive of man and the attainment of
happiness his whole aim, have given a curiously sober,
drab, account of the working of pleasure and the search
for happiness. Consider the utilitarians how they toiled,
spun and wove, but who never saw man arrayed in joy as
the lilies of the field. Happiness was to them a matter of
calculation and effort, of industry guided by mathematical
book-keeping. The history of man shows however that
man takes his enjoyment neat, and at as short range as
possible.
Direct appropriations and satisfactions were prior to
anything but the most elementary and exigent prudence,
just as the useful arts preceded the sciences. The body
is decked before it is clothed. While homes are still
hovels, temples and palaces are embellished. Luxuries
prevail over necessities except when necessities can be
festally celebrated. Men make a game of their fishing
and hunting, and turn to the periodic and disciplinary
labor of agriculture only when inferiors, women and slaves,
NATURE, ENDS AND HISTORIES 79
cannot be had to do the work. Useful labor is, whenever
possible, transformed by ceremonial and ritual accompani-
ments, subordinated to art that yields immediate enjoy-
ment; otherwise it is attended to under the compulsion
of circumstance during abbreviated surrenders of leisure.
For leisure permits of festivity, in revery, ceremonies and
conversation. The pressure of necessity is, however,
never wholly lost, and the sense of it led men, as if with
uneasy conscience at their respite from work, to impute
practical efficacy to play and rites, endowing them with
power to coerce events and to purchase the favor of rulers
of events.
But it is possible to magnify the place of magical exer-
cise and superstitious legend. The primary interest lies
in staging the show and enjoying the spectacle, in giving
play to the ineradicable interest in stories which illustrate
the contingencies of existence combined with happier
endings for emergencies than surrounding conditions often
permit. It was not conscience that kept men loyal to
cults and rites, and faithful to tribal myths. So far as it
was not routine, it was enjoyment of the drama of life
without the latter's liabilities that kept piety from decay.
Interest in rites as means of influencing the course of
things, and the cognitive or explanation office of myths
were hardly more than an embroidery, repeating in pleas-
ant form the pattern which inexpugnable necessities
imposed upon practice. When rite and myth are sponta-
neous rehearsal of the impact and career of practical
needs and doings, they must also seem to have practical
force. The political significance of July Fourth, 1776, is
perhaps renewed by the juvenile celebrations of Independ-
ence Day, but this effect hardly accounts for the fervor of
80 EXPERIENCE AND NATURE
the celebration. Any excuse serves for a holiday and the
more the holiday is decked out with things that contrast
with the pressure of workaday life while re-enacting its
form, the more a holiday it is. The more unrestrained
the play of fancy the greater the contrast. The super-
natural has more thrills than the natural, the customary;
holidays and holy-days are indistinguishable. Death is an
occasion for a wake, and mourning is acclaimed with a
board of funeral meats.
Reflected upon, this phase of experience manifests
objects which are final. The attitude involved in their
appreciation is esthetic. The operations entering into
their production is fine art, distinguished from useful art.
It is dangerous however to give names, especially in
discourse that is far aloof from the things named direct
enjoyment of the interplay of the contingent and the effec-
tive, purged of practical risks and penalties. Esthetic,
fine art, appreciation, drama have an eulogistic flavor.
We hesitate to call the penny-dreadful of fiction artistic,
so we call it debased fiction or a travesty on art. Most
sources of direct enjoyment for the masses are not art to
the cultivated, but perverted art, an unworthy indulgence.
Thus we miss the point. A passion of anger, a dream,
relaxation of the limbs after effort, swapping of jokes,
horse-play, beating of drums, blowing of tin whistles,
explosion of firecrackers and walking on stilts, have the
same quality of immediate and absorbing finality that is
possessed by things and acts dignified by the title of es-
thetic. For man is more preoccupied with enhancing life
than with bare living; so that a sense of living when it
attends labor and utility is borrowed not intrinsic, having
been generated in those periods of relief when activity waa
dramatic.
NATURE, ENDS AND HISTORIES 81
To say these things is only to say that man is naturally
more interested in consummations than he is in prepara-
tions; and that consummations have first to be hit upon
spontaneously and accidentally as the baby gets food
and all of us are wanned by the sun before they can be
objects of foresight, invention and industry. Conscious-
ness so far as it is not dull ache and torpid comfort is a
thing of the imagination. The extensions and trans-
formations of existence generated in imagination may
come at last to attend work so as to make it significant and
agreeable. But when men are first at the height of busi-
ness, they are too busy to engage either in fancy or reflective
inquiry. At the outset the hunt was enjoyed in the feast,
or in the calm moments of shaping spears t bows and arrows.
Only later was the content of these experiences carried
over into hunting itself, so that even its dangers might be
savored. Labor, through its structure and order, lends
play its pattern and plot; play then returns the loan with
interest to work, in giving it a sense of beginning, sequence
and climax. As long as imagined objects are satisfying^
the logic of drama, of suspense, thrill and success, domi-
nates the logic of objective events. Cosmogonies are
mythological not because savages indulge in defective
scientific explanations, but because objects of imagination
are consummatory in the degree in which they exuber-
antly escape from the pressure of natural surroundings,
even when they re-enact its crises. The congenial is
first form of the consistent.
As Goldenweiser says, if supernaturalism prevails in
early culture it is largely because, "the phantasmagoria of
supernaturalism is esthetically attractive, it has beauty of
thought and form and of movement, it abounds in delight-
2 EXPERIENCE AND NATURE
ful samples of logical coherence, and is full of fascination
for the creator, the systematizer and the beholder." And
it is safe to add, that the esthetic character of logical
coherence rather than its tested coherence with fact is
that which yields the delight. Again speaking of the place
of ceremonialism in early culture, Goldenweiser well char-
acterizes it as a kind of "psychic incandescence;" because
of its presence, there is "no cooling of the ever glowing
mass (the conglomerate of customs) no flagging of the
emotions, no sinking of the cultural associations to the
more precarious level of purely ideational connections."
Modern psychiatry as well as anthropology have dem-
onstrated the enormous r61e of symbolism in human
experience. The word symbolism, however, is a product
of reflection upon direct phenomena, not a description of
what happens when so-called symbols are potent. For
the feature which characterizes symbolism is precisely
that the thing which later reflection calls a symbol is not
a symbol, but a direct vehicle, a concrete embodiment, a
vital incarnation. To find its counterpart we should
betake ourselves not to signal flags which convey informa-
tion, ideas and direction, but to a national flag in moments
of intense emotional stir of a devout patriot. Symbolism
in this sense dominates not only all early art and cult but
social organization as well. Rites, designs, patterns are
afl charged with a significance which we may call mystic,
but which is immediate and direct to those who have
and celebrate them. Be the origin of the totem what it
may, it is not a cold, intellectual sign of a social organiza-
tion; it is that organization made present and visible, a
centre of emotionally charged behavior. It is not other-
wise with the symbolism uncovered in dreams and
NATURE, ENDS AND HISTORIES 83
neurotic states by psychological analysis. Such symbols
are not indicative or intellectual signs; they axe condensed
substitutes of actual things and events, which embody
actual things with more direct and enchanced import than
do the things themselves with their distractions, imposi-
tion, and irrelevances. Meanings are intellectually dis-
torted and depressed, but immediately they are height-
ened and concentrated.
Jesperson speaks of the origin of language in similar
terms. He says that many linguistic philosophers appear
to "imagine our primitive ancestors after their own image
as serious and well meaning men, endowed with a large
share of common sense They leave you
with the impression that these first framers of speech
were sedate citizens with a strong interest in the purely
business and matter of fact aspects of life." But Jasper-
son finds that the prosaic side of early culture was capable
only " of calling forth short monosyllabic interjections;
they are the most immutable portion* of language, and
remain now at essentially the same standpoint as thou-
sands of years ago." He concludes that the "genesis of
language is found .... in the poetic side of life;
the source of speech is not gloomy seriousness, but merry
play and youthful hilarity." And no one would deny, I
suppose that literature rather than business and science
has developed and fixed our present linguistic resources.
It would be difficult to find a fact more significant of the
traits of nature, more instructive for a naturalistic meta-
physics of existence, than this cleavage of the things of
human experience into actual but hard objects, and
'enjoyed but imagined objects. One might think that
philosophers in their search for some datum^that possesses
84 EXPERIENCE AND NATURE
properties that put it beyond doubt, might have directed
their attention to this direct phase of experience, in which
objects are not a matter of sensations, ideas, beliefs or
knowledge, but are something had and enjoyed. All
that "self-evidence" can intelligibly mean is obviousness
of presence; commonplaces like human interest in the
things of sport and celebration are the most conspicuously
obvious of all. In comparison, the "self-evident" things
of philosophers are recondite and technical.
The other most self-evident thing in experience is use-
ful labor and its coercive necessity. As direct apprecia-
tive enjoyment exhibits things in their consummatory
phase, labor manifests things in their connections of
things with one another, in efficiency, productivity, fur-
thering, hindering, generating, destroying. From the
standpoint of enjoyment a thing is what it directly does
for us. From that of labor a thing is what it will do to
other things the only way in which a tool or an obstacle
can be defined. Extraordinary and subtle reasons have
been assigned for belief in the principle of causation.
Labor and the use of tools seem, however, to be a sufficient
empirical reason: indeed, to be the only empirical events
that can be specifically pointed to in this connection.
They are more adequate grounds for acceptance of belief
in causality than are the regular sequences of nature or
than a category of reason, or the alleged fact of will. The
first thinker who proclaimed that every event is effect of
something and cause of something else, that every partic-
ular existence is both conditioned and condition, merely
put into words the procedure of the workman, converting
a mode of practice into a formula. External regularity
is familiar, customary, taken for granted, not thought of ,
NATURE, ENDS AND HISTORIES 85
embodied in thoughtless routine. Regularity, orderly
sequence, in productive labor presents itself to thought as
a controlling principle. Industrial arts are the type-
forms of experience that bring to light the sequential
connections of things with one another.
In contrast, the enjoyment (with which suffering is to
be classed) of things is a declaration that natural exist-
ences are not mere passage ways to another passage way,
and so on ad infinitum. Thinkers interested in esthetic
experience are wont to point out the absurdity of the idea
that things are good or valuable only for something else;
they dwell on the fact vouchsafed by esthetic appreciation
that there are things that have their goodness or value in
themselves, which are not cherished for the sake of any-
thing else. These philosophers usually confine this obser-
vation however to human affairs isolated from nature,
which they interpret exclusively in terms of labor, or
causal connections. But in every event there is some-
thing obdurate, self-sufficient, wholly immediate, neither
a relation nor an element in a relational whole, but termi-
nal and exclusive. Here, as in so many other matters,
materialists and idealists agree in an underlying meta-
physics which ignores in behalf of relations and relational
systems, those irreducible, infinitely plural, undefinable
and indescribable qualities which a thing must have in
order to be, and in order to be capable of becoming the
subject of relations and a theme of discourse. Immediacy
of existence is ineffable. But there is nothing mystical
about such ineff ability ; it expresses the fact that of direct
existence it is futile to say anything to one's self and
impossible to say anything to another. Discourse can
but intimate connections which if followed out may lead
86 EXPERIENCE AND NATURE
one to have an existence. Things in their immediacy are
unknown and unknowable, not because they are remote
or behind some impenetrable veil of sensation of ideas,
but because knowledge has no concern with them. For
knowledge is a memorandum of conditions of their appear-
ance, concerned, that is, with sequences, coexistences,
relations. Immediate things may be pointed to by words,
but not described or defined. Description when it occurs
is but a part of a circuitous method of pointing or denot-
ing; index to a starting point and road which if taken
may lead to a direct and ineffable presence. To the em-
pirical thinker, immediate enjoyment and suffering are the
conclusive exhibition and evidence that nature has its
finalities as well as its relationships.
Many modern thinkers, influenced by the notion that
knowledge is the only mode of experience that grasps
things, assuming the ubiquity of cognition, and noting
that immediacy or qualitative existence has no place in
authentic science, have asserted that qualities are always
and only states of consciousness. It is a reasonable belief
that there would be no such thing as "consciousness" if
events did not have a phase of brute and unconditioned
"isness," of being just what they irreducibly are. Con-
sciousness as sensation, image and emotion is thus a par-
ticular case of immediacy occurring under complicated
conditions. And also without immediate qualities those
relations with which science deals, would have no footing
in existence and thought would have nothing beyond itself
to chew upon or dig into. Without a basis in qualitative
events, the characteristic subject-matter of knowledge
would be algebraic ghosts, relations that do not relate.
To dispose of things in which relations terminate by call-
NATURE, ENDS AND HISTORIES 87
Ing them elements, is to discourse within a relational
and logical scheme. Only if elements are more than just
elements in a whole, only if they have something qualita-
tively their own, can a relational system be prevented
from complete collapse.
The Greeks were more naive than we are. Their
thinkers were as much dominated by the esthetic charac-
ters of experienced objects as modern thinkers are by
their scientific and economic (or relational) traits. Con-
sequently they had no difficulty in recognizing the im-
portance of qualities and of things inherently closed or
final. They thought of mind as a realization of natural
existence or a participation in it. Thus they were saved
from the epistemological problem of how things and mind,
defined antithetically, can have anything to do with each
other. If existence in its immediacies could speak it
would proclaim, "I may have relatives but I am not
related." In esthetic objects, that is in all immediately
enjoyed and suffered things, in things directly possessed,
they thus speak for themselves; Greek thinkers heard
their voice.
Unfortunately however, these thinkers were not con-
tent to speak as artists, of whom they had a low opinion.
Since they were thinkers, aiming at truth or knowledge,
they put art on a lower plane than science; and the only
enjoyment they found worth serious attention was that
of objects of thought. In consequence they formulated
a doctrine in which the esthetic and the rational are con-
fused on principle, and they bequeathed the confusion
as an intellectual tradition to their successors. Aristotle
spoke more truly than he was aware when he said that
philosophy began in leisure "when almost all the neces-
88 EXPERIENCE AND NATURE
saries and things that make for comfort and recreation
were present." For it was philosophic, rather than scien-
tific "knowledge" which thus began. Philosophy was a
telling of the story of nature after the style of all congenial
stories, a story with a plot and climax, given such coher-
ent properties as would render it congenial to minds
demanding that objects satisfy logical canons.
Objects are certainly none the worse for having wonder
and admiration for their inspiration and art for their
medium. But these objects are distorted when their
affiliation with the epic, temple and drama is denied, and
there is claimed for them a rational and cosmic status
independent of piety, drama and story. In the classic
philosophy of Greece the picture of the world that was
constructed on an artistic model proferred itself as being
the result of intellectual study. A story composed in the
interests of a refined type of enjoyment, ordered by the
needs of consistency in discourse, or dialectic, became
cosmology and metaphysics. Its authors took toward
art and rite much the same sort of superior attitude that
the modern esthete takes to vulgar forms of esthetic
satisfaction. A claim for superiority in subject matter
and mode of artistic treatment was indeed legitimate;
but a claim was made for difference in kind. Art was an
embellished imitation of the everyday or empirical affairs
of life in their natural setting; philosophy was science, an
envisagement of realities behind all copies, all phenomena;
or a grasp of essences within them forming their valid
substance. The delight attending the insight was attrib-
uted to the final intrinsic dignity of the cosmic objects
perceived by reason, instead of being frankly recognized
to be due to a selection and arrangement of things
with a view to enhancement of tranquil enjoyment
NATURE, ENDS AND HISTORIES 89
Devotion to rites, stories and revery springs on its
magical side from practical desire to control the contin-
gent; but in larger measure it embodies the happiness that
attends the sense of successful issue from the uncertainly
hazardous. Imagination is primarily dramatic, rather
than lyric, whether it takes the form of the play enacted
on the stage, of the told story or silent soliloquy. The
constant presence of instability and trouble gives depth
and poignancy to the situations in which are pictured their
subordination to final issues possessed of calm and cer-
tainty. To re-enact the vicissitudes, crises and tragedies
of life under conditions that deprive them of their overt
dangers, is the natural rdle of "consciousness," which is
tamed to respect actualities only when circumstance
enforces the adoption of the method of labor, a discipline
that is fortunate if it retain some of the liberation
from immediate exigencies which characterizes dramatic
imagination.
Modern critics of esthetics have criticized the concep-
tion of Plato and Aristotle that art is imitation. But in
its original statement, this conception was a description
of the observed facts of drama, music and epic rather than
theoretical interpretation. For these thinkers were not
so stupid as to hold that art is an imitation of inert things;
they held that it was a mimesis of the critical and climatic
behavior of natural forces within human career and des-
tiny. Such a reproduction is naturally in a new and
liberal medium; it permits idealization, but the idealiza-
tion is of natural events. It is self-sufficing, an end in
itself, while the events seem to exist only to render the
perfection of an idealized reproduction possible and per-
tinent. Resort to esthetic objects is the spontaneous
90 EXPERIENCE AND NATURE
human escape and consolation in a trying and difficult
world. A world that consisted entirely of stable objects
directly presented and possessed would have no esthetic
qualities ; it would just be, and would lack power to satisfy
and to inspire. Objects are actually esthetic when they
turn hazard and defeat to an issue which is above and
beyond trouble and vicissitude. Festal celebration and
consummatory delights belong only in a world that knows
risk and hardship.
Greek philosophy as well as Greek art is a memorial of
the joy in what is finished, when it is found amid a world
of unrest, struggle, and uncertainty in what, since it is
ended, does not commit us to the uncertain hazards of
what is still going on. Without such experiences as those
of Greek art it is hardly conceivable that the craving
for the passage of change into rest, of the contingent,
mixed and wandering into the composed and total, would
have found a model after which to design a universe like
the cosmos of Platonic and Aristotelian tradition. Form
was the first and last word of philosophy because it had
been that of art; form is change arrested in a prerogative
object. It conveys a sense of the imperishable and time-
less, although the material in which it is exemplified is
subject to decay and contingency. It thus conveys an
intimation of potentialities completely actualized in a
happier realm, where events are not events, but are
arrested and brought to a close in an eternal self-sustain-
ing activity. Such a realm is intrinsically one of secure
and self-possessed meaning. It consists of objects of
immediate enjoyment hypostasized into transcendent
reality. Such was the conversion of Greek esthetic con-
templation effected by Greek reflection.
NATURE, ENDS AND HISTORIES W
The technical structure of the resulting metaphysics is
familiar. The cosmically real is one with the finished,
the perfect, or wholly done. Even with Aristotle, a
coldly defining theory, called metaphysics, of the traits
of Being, becomes a theology, or science of ultimate and
eternal reality to which only ecstatic predicates are at-
tributable. It consists of pure forms, self-sufficient, self-
enclosed and self-sustaining; self-movement or life at
eternal full-tide. Forms are ideal, and the ideal is the
rational apprehended by reason. The material for this
point of view was found empirically in what is consum-
matory and final; and the dominion exercised by art in
Greek culture fostered and enhanced attention to objects
of this immediately enjoyed kind. To the spectator,
artistic objects are given; they need only to be envisaged;
Greek reflection, carried on by a leisure class in the inter-
est of liberalizing leisure, was preeminently that of the
spectator, not that of the participator in processes of pro-
duction. Labor, production, did not seem to create form,
it dealt with matter or changing things so as to furnish an
occasion for incarnation of antecedent forms in matter.
To artisans form is alien, unperceived and unenjoyed;
absorbed in laboring with material, they live in a world of
change and matter, even when their labors have an end in
manifestation of form. Plato was so troubled by the
consequences of this ignorance of form on the part of all
who live in the world of practice, industrial and political,
that he elaborated a plan by which their activities might
be regulated by those who, above labor and entanglement
in change and practice, provide in laws forms to shape the
habits of those who work. Aristotle escaped the dilemma
by putting nature above art, and endowing nature with
92 EXPERIENCE AND NATURE
skilled purpose that for the most part achieves ends or
completions. Thus the rdle of the human artisan whether
in industry or politics became relatively negligible, and
the miscarriages of human art a matter of relative
insignificance.
The Aristotelian conception of four-fold "causation"
is openly borrowed from the arts, which for the artisan
are utilitarian and menial, and are "fine" or liberal only
for the cultivated spectator who is possessed of leisure
that is, is relieved from the necessity of partaking labo-
riously in change and matter. Nature is an artist that
works from within instead of from without. Hence all
change, or matter, is potentiality for finished objects.
Like other artists, nature first possesses the forms which
it afterwards embodies. When arts follow fixed models,
whether in making shoes, houses, or dramas, and when the
element of individual invention in design is condemned as
caprice, forms and ends are necessarily external to the
individual worker. They preceded any particular realiza-
tion. Design and plan are anonymous and universal,
and carry with them no suggestion of a designing, purpo-
sive mind. Models are objectively given and have only
to be observed and followed. Thus there was no diffi-
culty, such as one may feel to-day, in ascribing definite
and regulative forms to the changes of nature, which are
actualized in objects that are finalities, closures of change.
The actualization in an organic body of the forms that are
found in things constitutes mind as the end of nature.
Their immediate possession and celebration constitutes
consciousness, as far as the idea of consciousness is found
in Greek thought.
NATURE. ENDS AND HISTORIES 93
This doctrine was not an arbitrary speculation; it
flowed naturally from the fact that Greek thinkers were
fortunate to find ready-made to hand and eye a realm of
esthetic objects with traits of order and proportion, form
and finality. The arts were pursued upon the basis of
a fund of realized, objective and impersonal designs and
plans, which were prior to individual devising and execu-
tion rather than products of individual purpose and inven-
tion. The philosophers did not create out of their own
speculations, the idea of materials subdued to the accept-
ance and manifestation of objective forms. They found
the fact in the art of their period, translating it into an
intellectual formula. Philosophers were not the authors
of an identification of objects informed with ideal order
and proportion with a final and arresting outcome of proc-
esses of antecedent change. That identification was at
least implicit in the operation of artisans. Nor were the
philosophers the originators of the idea that mental appro-
priation of some objects is intrinsically a state of elevated
satisfaction. That fact was given to them in the esthetic
culture of their civilization. What the philosophers
are responsible for is a peculiar one-sided interpretation
of these empirical facts, an interpretation, however, which
has its roots in features, although less admirable ones, of
Greek culture.
For the Greek community was marked by a sharp
separation of servile workers and free men of leisure,
which meant a division between acquaintance with
matters of fact and contemplative appreciation, be-
tween unintelligent practice and unpractical intelli-
gence, between affairs of change and efficiency or instru-
mentality and of rest and enclosure finality. Exper-
94 EXPERIENCE AND NATURE
ience afforded therefore no model for a conception of
experimental inquiry and of reflection efficacious in action.
In consequence, the sole notability, intelligibility, of
nature was conceived to reside in objects that were ends,
since they set limits to change. Changing things were
not capable of being known on the basis of relationship
to one another, but only on the basis of their relationship
to objects beyond change, because marking its limit, and
immediately precious. The terminal objects lent changing
objects the properties which made them knowable; such
stability of character as they possessed was derived
from the form of the end-objects toward which they
moved. Hence an inherent appetition or nisus toward
these terminal and static objects was attributed to them.
The whole scheme of cosmic change was a vehicle for
attaining ends possessed of properties which caused them
to be objects of attraction of all lesser things, rendering
the latter uneasy and restless until they attained the end-
object which constitutes their real nature. Thus an
immediate contemplative possession and enjoyment of
objects, dialectically ordered, was interpreted as defining
both true knowledge and the highest end and good of
nature. A doctrine of morals, of what is better in reflec-
tive choice, was thus converted into a metaphysics and
science of Being, the moral aspect being disguised to the
modern mind by the fact that the highest good was
conceived esthetically, instead of in the social terms which
upon the whole dominate modern theories of morality.
The doctrine that objects as ends are the proper objects
of science, because they are the ultimate forms of real
being, met its doom in the scientific revolution of the
seventeenth century. Essences and forms were attacked
NATURE, ENDS AND HISTORIES 95
as occult; "final causes" were either wholly denied or
relegated to a divine realm too high for human knowledge.
The doctrine of natural ends was displaced by a doctrine
of designs, ends-in-view, conscious aims constructed and
entertained in individual minds independent of nature.
Descartes, Spinoza and Kant are upon this matter at
least in agreement with Bacon, Hume and Helvetius.
The imputation to natural events of cosmic appetition
towards ends, the notion that their changes were to be
understood as efforts to reach a natural state of rest and
perfection, were indicated as the chief source of sterility
and fantasy in science; the syllogistic logic connected
with the doctrine was discarded as verbal, polemical, and
at its best irrelevant to the subtle operations of nature;
purpose and contingency were alike relegated to the purely
human and personal; nature was evacuated of qualities
and became a homogeneous mass differentiated by differ-
ences of homogeneous motion in a homogeneous space.
Mechanical relations, which Greek thought had rejected
as equivalent to the chaotic reign of pure accident, be-
came the head corner-stone of the conception of law, of
uniformity and order. If ends were recognized at all,
it was only under the caption of design, and design was
defined as conscious aim rather than as objective order
and architechtonic form. Wherever the influence of
modern physics penetrated, the classic theory became
remote, faded, factitious, with its assertion that natural
changes are inherent movements toward objects which
are their fulfillments or perfections, so that the latter are
true objects of knowledge, supplying the forms or charac-
ters under which alone changes may be known. With
the decay of this doctrine, departed also belief in cosmic
96 EXPERIENCE AND NATURE
qualitative differences and kinds, so that of necessity
quality and immediacy had no recourse, expelled from ob-
jective nature, save to take refuge in personal consciousness.
Is this reversal of classic theories of existence inevitable?
Must belief in ends involved in nature itself be sur-
rendered, or be asserted only by means of a roundabout
examination of the nature of knowledge which starting
from conscious intent to know, finally infers that the uni-
verse is a vast, non-natural fulfillment of a conscious
intent? Or is there an ingredient of truth in ancient meta-
physics which may be extracted and re-afl&rmed? Empiri-
cally, the existence of objects of direct grasp, possession,
use and enjoyment cannot be denied. Empirically, things
are poignant, tragic, beautiful, humorous, settled, dis-
turbed, comfortable, annoying, barren, harsh, consoling,
splendid, fearful; are such immediately and in their own
right and behalf. If we take advantage of the word
esthetic in a wider sense than that of application to the
beautiful and ugly, esthetic quality, immediate, final
or self-enclosed, indubitably characterizes natural situa-
tions as they empirically occur. These traits stand in
themselves on precisely the same level as colors, sounds,
qualities of contact, taste and smell. Any criterion that
finds the latter to be ultimate and "hard" data will,
impartially applied, come to the same conclusion about
the former. Any quality as such is final; it is at once
initial and terminal; just what it is as it exists. It
may be referred to other things, it may be treated as an
effect or as a sign. But this involves an extraneous
extension and use. It takes us beyond quality in its
immediate qualitativeness. If experienced things are
valid evidence, then nature in having qualities within
NATURE, ENDS AND HISTORIES 97
itself has what in the literal sense must be called ends,
terminals, arrests, enclosures.
It is dangerous to venture at all upon the use of the
word "ends" in connection with existential processes.
Apologetic and theological controversies cluster about
it and affect its signification. Barring this connotation,
the word has an almost inexpugnable honorific flavor, so
that to assert that nature is characterized by ends, the
most conspicuous of which is the life of mind, seems
like engaging in an eulogistic, rather than an empirical
account of nature. Something much more neutral than
any such implication is, however, meant. We con-
stantly talk about things coming or drawing to a close;
getting ended, finished, done with, over with. It is a
commonplace that no thing lasts forever. We may be
glad or we may be sorry but that is wholly a matter of the
kind of history which is being ended. We may conceive
the end, the close, as due to fulfillment, perfect attain-
ment, to satiety, or to exhaustion, to dissolution, to some-
thing having run down or given out. Being an end may
be indifferently an ecstatic culmination, a matter-of-fact
consummation, or a deplorable tragedy. Which of these
things a closing or terminal object is, has nothing to do with
the property of being an end.
The genuine implications of natural ends may be
brought out by considering beginnings instead of endings.
To insist that nature is an affair of beginnings is to assert
that there is no one single and all-at-once beginning of
everything. It is but another way of saying that nature
is an affair of affairs, wherein each one, no matter how
linked up it may be with others, has its own quality. It
does not imply that every beginning marks an advance or
98 EXPERIENCE AND NATURE
improvement; as we sadly know accidents, diseases, ware,
lies and errors, begin. Clearly the fact and idea of begin-
ning is neutral, not eulogistic; temporal, not absolute.
And since wherever one thing begins something else ends,
what is true of beginnings is true of endings. Popular
fiction and drama shows the bias of human nature in
favor of happy endings, but by being fiction and drama
they show with even greater assurance that unhappy
endings are natural events.
To minds inured to the eulogistic connotation of ends,
such a neutral interpretation of the meaning of ends as
has just been set forth may seem to make the doctrine of
ends a matter of indifference. If ends are only endings or
closings of temporal episodes, why bother to call attention
to ends at all, to say nothing of framing a theory of ends
and dignifying it with the name of natural teleology?
In the degree, however, in which the mind is weaned from
partisan and ego-centric interest, acknowledgement of
nature as a scene of incessant beginnings and endings,
presents itself as the source of philosophic enlightenment.
It enables thought to apprehend causal mechanisms and
temporal finalities as phases of the same natural processes,
instead of as competitors where the gain of one is the loss
of the other. Mechanism is the order involved in an
historic occurrence, capable of definition in terms of the
order which various histories sustain to each other.
Thus it is the instrumentality of control of any particular
termination since a sequential order involves the last
term.
The traditional conception of natural ends was to the
effect that nature does nothing in vain; the accepted
meaning of this phrase was that every change is for the
NATURE, ENDS AND HISTORIES 99
sake of something which does not change, occurring in its
behalf. Thus the mind started with a ready-made list
of good things or perfections which it was the business of
nature to accomplish. Such a view may verbally distin-
guish between something called efficient causation and
something else called final causation. But in effect the
distinction is only between the causality of the master
who contents himself with uttering an order and the
efficacy of the servant who actually engages in the physical
work of execution. It is only a way of attributing ulti-
mate causality to what is ideal and mental the directive
order of the master , while emancipating it from the
supposed degradation of physical labor in carrying it out,
as well as avoiding the difficulties of inserting an immaterial
cause within the material realm. But in a legitimate ac-
count of ends as endings, all directional order resides in
the sequential order. This no more occurs for the sake
of the end than a mountain exists for the sake of the peak
which is its end. A musical phrase has a certain close,
but the earlier portion does not therefore exist for the sake
of the close as if it were something which is done away with
when the close is reached. And so a man is not an adult
until after he has been a boy, but childhood does not exist
for the sake of maturity.
By the nature of the case, causality, however it be
defined, consists in the sequential order itself, and not in a
last term which as such is irrelevant to causality, although
it may, of course be, in addition, an initial term in another
sequential order. The view held or implied by some
"mechanists", which treats an initial term as if it had an
inherent generative force which it somehow emits and
bestows upon its successors, is all of a piece with the view
100 EXPERIENCE AND NATURE
held by ideologists which implies that an end brings
about its own antecedents. Both isolate an event from
the history in which it belongs and in which it has its
character. Both make a factitiously isolated position in
a temporal order a mark of true reality, one theory select-
ing initial place and the other final place. But in fact
causality is another name for the sequential order itself;
and since this is an order of a history having a begin-
ning and end, there is nothing more absurd than setting
causality over against either initiation or finality.
The same considerations permit a naturalistic inter-
pretation of the ideas of dynamic and static. Every end
is as such static; this statement is but a truism; chang-
ing into something else, a thing is obviously transitive,
not final. Yet the thing which is a close of one history is
always the beginning of another, and in this capacity the
thing in question is transitive or dynamic. This state-
ment also is tautology, for dynamic does not mean pos-
sessed of "force" or capable of emitting it so as to stir up
other things and set them in motion; it means simply
change in a connected series of events. The traditional
view of force points necessarily to something transcen-
dental, because outside of events, whether called God or
Will or The Unknowable. So the traditional view of the
static points to something fixed and rigid, incapable of
change, and therefore also outside the course of things and
consequently non-empirical. Empirically, however, there
is a history which is a succession of histories, and in which
any event is at once both beginning of one course and
close of another ; is both transitive and static. The phrase
constantly in our mouths, "state of affairs" is accurately
descriptive, although it makes sheer nonsense in both
NATURE, ENDS AND HISTORIES 101
the traditional spiritual and mechanistic theories. There
are no changes that do not enter into an affair, Res,
and there is no affair that is not bounded and thereby
marked off as a state or condition. When a state ol
affairs is perceived, the perceiving-of-a-state-of-affairs is
a further state of affairs. Its subject-matter is a thing in
the idiomatic sense of thing, r es, whether a solar-system,
a stellar constellation, or an atom, a diversified and more
or less loosely interconnection of events, falling within
boundaries sufficiently definite to be capable of being
approximately traced. Such is the unbiased evidence of
experience in gross, and such in effect is the conclusion of
recent physics as far as a layman can see. For this rea-
son, and not because of any unique properties of a sepa-
rate kind of existence, called psychic or mental, every
situation or field of consciousness is marked by initiation,
direction or intent, and consequence or import. What is
unique is not these traits, but the property of awareness
or perception. Because of this property, the initial stage
is capable of being judged in the light of its probable
course and consequence. There is anticipation. Each
successive event being a stage in a serial process is both
expectant and commemorative. What is more precisely
pertinent to our present theme, the terminal outcome
when anticipated (as it is when a moving cause of affairs
is perceived) becomes an end-in-view, an aim, purpose,
a prediction usable as a plan in shaping the course of
events. In classic Greek thought, the perception of ends
was simply an esthetic contemplation of the forms of ob-
jects in which natural processes were completed. In most
modern thought, it is an arbitrary creation of private
mental operations guided by personal desire, the theoreti-
102 EXPERIENCE AND NATURE
cal alternative being that they are finite copies of the
fulfilled intentions of an infinite mind. In empirical fact,
they are projections of possible consequences; they are
ends-in-view. The in-viewness of ends is as much con-
ditioned by antecedent natural conditions as is percep-
tion of contemporary objects external to the organism, trees
and stones, or whatever. That is, natural processes must
have actually terminated in specifiable consequences,
which give those processes definition and character, before
ends can be mentally entertained and be the objects of
striving desire. In so far, we must side with Greek
thought. But empirical ends-in-view are distinguished
in two important respects from ends as they are conceived
in classic thought. They are not objects of contemplative
possession and use, but are intellectual and regulative
means, degenerating into reminiscences or dreams unless
they are employed as plans within the state of affairs.
And when they are attained, the objects which they inform
are conclusions and fulfillments, only as these objects are
the consequence of prior reflection, deliberate choice and
directed effort are they fulfillments, conclusions, comple-
tions, perfections. A natural end which occurs without
the intervention of human art is a terminus, a de facto
boundary, but it is not entitled to any such honorific
status of completions and realizations as classic meta-
physics assigned them.
When we regard conscious experience, that is to say,
the object and qualities characteristic of conscious life, as a
natural end, we are bound to regard all objects impartially
as distinctive ends in the Aristotelian sense. We cannot
pick or choose; when we do pick and choose we are obvi-
ously dealing with practical ends with objects and quali-
NATURE, ENDS AND HISTORIES 103
ties that are deemed worthy of selection by reflective,
deliberate choice. These "ends" are not the less natural,
if we have an eye to the continuity of experienced objects
with other natural occurrences, but they are not ends
without the intervention of a special affair, reflective sur-
vey and choice. But popular thought, in accord with
the Greek tradition, picks and chooses among all ends
those which it likes and honors, at the same time ignoring
and implicitly denying the act of choice. Like those who
regard a happy escape from a catastrophe as a providen-
tial intervention, neglecting all who have not escaped,
popular teleology regards good objects as natural ends,
bad objects and qualities being regarded as mere acci-
dents or incidents, regrettable mechanical excess or defect.
Popular teleology like Greek metaphysics, has accord-
ingly been apologetic, justificatory of the beneficence of
nature; it has been optimistic in a complacent way.
Primitive man like naive common sense imputes ter-
minating qualities to nature in which it follows a
sound realistic metaphysics. But it also imputes to them
the property of causal determination, an imputation
rejected by science. Rejection by science does not prove
these qualities to be mere "subjective" or "private"
appearances; it only shows that they are termini, closings
of serial events. Events that achieve and possess them
are linked, mediatory, transitive, indicative, and the
proper material of knowledge. From the standpoint of
causal sequence, or the order with which science is con-
cerned, qualities are superfluous, irrelevant and immater-
ial. We could never predict their occurrence from the
fullest acquaintance with the properties that form the
objects of knowledge as such.
104 EXPERIENCE AND NATURE
From the standpoint of the latter, the relational orders,
ends are abrupt and interruptive. Hence to a philosophy
that takes the subject-matter of knowledge to be exclusive
and exhaustive as so much of modern philosophy has
done they form a most perplexing problem, a mystery.
For with extrusive and superfluous status they combine
the property of being permeating and absorbing. They
alone, as we say, are of interest, and they are the cause of
taking interest in other things. For living creatures they
form the natural platform for regarding other things.
They are the basis, directly and indirectly, erf active
response to things. As compared with them, other things
are obstacles and means of procuring and avoiding the
occurrence of situations having them. When the word
"consciousness" is as it often is used for a short name
for the sum total of such immediate qualities as actually
present themselves, it is the end or terminus of natural
events. As such it is also gratuitous, superfluous and
inexplicable when reality is defined in terms of the rela-
tional objects of science.
By "ends" we also mean ends-in-view, aims, things
viewed after deliberation as worthy of attainment and as
evocative of effort. They are formed from objects taken
in their immediate and terminal qualities; objects once
having occurred as endings, but which are not now in
existence and which are not likely to come into existence
save by an action which modifies surroundings. Classic
metaphysics is a confused union of these two sense of ends,
the primarily natural and the secondarily natural, or
practical, moral. Each meaning is intelligible, grounded,
legitimate in itself. But their mixture is one of the Great
Bads of philosophy. For it treats as natural ends apart
NATURE, ENDS AND HISTORIES 105
from reflection just those objects that axe worthy and
excellent to reflective choice. Popular teleology has ui*-
knowingly followed the leadings that controlled Greek
thought; spiritualistic quasi- theological metaphysics has
consciously adopted the latter's point of view.
The features of this confused metaphysics are: First,
elimination from the status of natural ends of all objects
that are evil and troublesome; Secondly, the grading of
objects selected to constitute natural ends into a fixed,
unchangeable hierarchical order. Objects that possess
and import qualities of struggle, suffering and defeat are
regarded not as ends, but as frustrations of ends, as
accidental and inexplicable deviations. Theology has
resorted to an act of original sin to make their occurrence
explicable, Greek metaphysics resorted to the presence in
nature of a recalcitrant, obdurate, factor. To this pro-
vincially exclusive view of natural termini, popular tele-
ology adds a ranking of objects according to which some
are more completely ends than others, until there is
reached an object which is only end, never eventful and
temporal the end. The hierarchy is explicit in Greek
thought: first, and lowest are vegetative ends, normal
growth Mid reproduction; second in rank, come animal
ends, locomotion and sensibility; third in rank, are ideal
and rational ends, of which the highest is blissful contem-
plative possession in thought of all the forms of nature.
In this gradation, each lower rank while an end is also
means or preformed condition of higher ends. Empiri-
cal things, things of useful arts, belonging to the second
class but, affected by an adventitious mixture of thought,
are ultimately instrumentalities potential for the life of
pure rational possession of ideal objects. Modern teleo-
106 EXPERIENCE AND NATURE
logics axe much less succinct and definite, they agree how-
ever in the notion of rows of inferior ends which prepare
for and culminate in something which is the end.
Such a classificatory enterprise is naturally consoling
to those who enjoy a privileged status, whether as philoso-
phers, as saints or scholars, and who wish to justify their
special status. But its consoling apologetics should not
blind us to the fact that to think of objects as more or less
ends is nonsense. They either have immediate and termi-
nal quality ; or they do not: quality as such is absolute not
comparative. A thing may be of some shade of blue when
compared with some quality that is wanted and striven
for; but its blue is not itself more or less blue nor than
blueness, and so with the quality of being terminal and
absorbing. Objects may be more or less absorptive and
arresting and thus possess degrees of intensity with
respect to finality. But this difference of intensity is not,
save as subject to reflective choice, a distinction in rank
or class of finality. It applies to different toothaches as
well as to different objects of thought; but it does not
apply, inherently, to the difference between a tooth-ache
and an ideal object save that a thing like a toothache
is often possessed of greater intensity of finality. If we
follow the clew of the latter fact, we shall probably
conclude that search for pure and unalloyed finality
carries us to inarticulate sensation and overwhelming pas-
sion. For such affairs are the best instances of thipgs
that are complete in themselves with no outleadings.
If then rational essences or meanings are better objects
of contemplation than are seizures by sensory and pas-
sionate objects, it is not because the former are fulfill-
ments of higher or more "real" antecedent processes.
NATURE, ENDS AND HISTORIES 107
They are not graded on the basis of being lesser or greater
actualizations. It is because they present themselves to
reflective appraisal as more worthy to be striven for.
And this rational character implies that the things which
have the better qualities possess also transitiveness, in-
strumentality, as well as immediacy and finality. They
are potential and productive. They lead somewhere, per-
haps to other affairs having qualities to be envisaged and
deeply meditated. If dialectic were not so esthetically
enjoyable to some, it would never have played the role it
has played in liberating man from the dominion of sensa-
tion and impulse. This shows that the esthetic object
may be useful and an useful one esthetic, or that imme-
diacy and efficacy 1 though distinguishable qualities are
not disjoined existentially . But it is no reason for making
contemplative knowledge or any other particular affair the
highest of all natural ends. Whether the given or the
deliberately constructed is a better or higher end is not a
question of intrinsic quality, but a matter of reflectively
determined judgment. It is conceivable that just because
certain objects are immediately good, that which secures
and extends their occurrence may itself become for reflec-
tive choice a supreme immediate good.
1 To avoid misapprehension it should perhaps be explicitly stated the
term "efficacy" employed here and elsewhere, does not imply an interpre-
tation in terms of the old theory of something engaged in emitting force.
It is used purely denotatively; it designates empirical position in a course
of affairs having a specifiable ending; its meaning is defined not by any
theory, but by such affairs as that to get a fire, a match is applied and
that it is applied not to a stone but to paper or shavings. The words
agency, instrumentality, causal condition, which appear frequently b
t these pages are to be similarly translated.
M EXPERIENCE AND NATURE
History is full ot ingratitude. All existences are some-
thing more than products; they have qualities of their
own and assert independent life. There is something of
King Lear's daughters in all offspring. This ingratitude
is reproachable only when it turns to deny its ancestry.
That Plato and Aristotle should have borrowed from the
communal objects of the fine arts, from ceremonies, wor-
ship and the consummatory objects of Greek culture,
and should have idealized their borrowings into new
objects of art is something to be thankful for. That, after
having enforced the loan, they spurned the things from
which they derived their models and criteria is not so
admirable. This lack of piety concealed from them the
poetic and religious character of their own constructions,
and established in the classic Western philosophic tradi-
tion the notions that immediate grasp and incorporation
of objects is knowledge; that things are placed in graded
reality in accordance with their capacity to afford a cul-
tivated mind such a grasp or beholding; and that the order
of reality in Being is coincident with a predetermined rank
of Ends.
If we recognize that all qualities directly had in con-
scious experience apart from use made of them, testify to
nature's characterization by immediacy and finality, there
is ground for unsophisticated recognition of use and enjoy-
ment of things as natural, as belonging to the things as
well as to us. Things are beautiful and ugly, lovely and
hateful, dull and illuminated, attractive and repulsive.
Stir and thrill in us is as much theirs as is length,
breadth, and thickness. Even the utility of things, their
capacity to be employed as means and agencies, is first of
all not a relation, but a quality possessed, immediately
NATURE, ENDS AND HISTORIES IW
possessed, it is as esthetic as any other quality. If labor
transforms an orderly sequence into a means of attaining
ends, this not only converts a casual ending into a ful-
fillment, but it also gives labor an immediate quality of
finality and consummation. Art, even fine art, is long,
as well as a joy.
From the standpoint of control and utilization, the
tendency to assign superior reality to causes is explicable.
A "cause" is not merely an antecedent; it is that anteced-
ent which if manipulated regulates the occurrence of the
consequent. This is why the sun rather than night is the
causal condition of day. Knowing that consequences
will take care of themselves if conditions can be had and
managed, an ineradicable natural pragmatism indulges in
a cheap and short conversion, and conceives the cause as
intrinsically more primary and necessary. This practical
tendency is increased by the fact that time is a softener
and dignifier; present troubles lose their acuteness when
they are no longer present. Old times are proverbially the
good old times, and history begins with a Garden of
Paradise or a Golden Age. Good, being congenial, is held
to be normal; and what is suffered is a deviation, creating
the problem of evil. Thus the earlier gets moral dignity
as well as practical superiority. But in existence, or meta-
physically, cause and effect are on the same level; they
are portions of one and the same historic process, each
having immediate or esthetic quality and each having
efficacy, or serial connection. Since existence is historic
it can be known or understood only as each portion is
distinguished and related. For knowledge "cause" and
"effect" alike have a partial and truncated being. It is as
'much a part of the real being of atoms that they give rise
110 EXPERIENCE AND NATURE
in time, under increasing complication of relationships,
to qualities of blue and sweet, pain and beauty, as that
they have at a cross-section of time extension, mass, or
weight.
The problem is neither psychological nor epistemologi-
cal. It is metaphysical or existential. It is whether
existence consists of events, or is possessed of temporal
quality, characterized by beginning, process and ending.
If so, the affair of later and earlier, however important it is
for particular practical matters, is indifferent to a theory
of valuation of existence. It is as arbitrary to assign
complete reality to atoms at the expense of mind and
conscious experience as it is to make a rigid separation
between here and there in space. Distinction is genuine
and for some purpose necessary. But it is not a dis-
tinction of kinds or degrees of reality. Space here is joined
to space there, and events then are joined to events now;
the reality is as much in the joining as in the distinction.
In order to control the course of events it is indispensable
to know their conditions. But to characterize the condi-
tions, it is necessary to have followed them to some term,
which is not fully followed till we arrive at something
enjoyed or suffered, had and used, in conscious experi-
ence. Vital and conscious events exhibit actualization
of properties that are not fully displayed in the simpler
relationships that are by definition termed physical.
Temporal quality is however not to be confused with
temporal order. Quality is quality, direct, immediate and
undefinable. Order is a matter of relation, of definition,
dating, placing and describing. It is discovered in reflec-
tion, not directly had and denoted as is temporal quality.
Temporal order is a matter of science; temporal quality
NATURE, ENDS AND HISTORIES 111
is an immediate trait of every occurrence whether in or
out of consciousness. Every event as such is passing
into other things, in such a way that a later occurrence is an
integral part of the character or nature of present exist-
ence. An "affair", Res, is always at issue whether it
concerns chemical change, the emergence of life, language,
mind or the episodes that compose human history. Each
comes from something else and each when it comes has its
own initial, unpredictable, immediate qualities, and its
own similar terminal qualities. The later is never just
resolved in to the earlier. What we call such resolution is
merely a statement of the order by means of which we
regulate the passage of an earlier into the later. We may
explain the traits of maturity by better knowledge of
childhood, but maturity is never just infancy plus.
It is not easy to distinguish between ends as de facto
endings, and ends as fulfillments, and at the same time to
bear in mind the connection of the latter with the former.
We respond so directly to some objects in experience with
intent to preserve and perpetuate them that it is diffi-
cult to keep the conception of a thing as terminus free
from the element of deliberate choice and endeavor; when
we think of it or discourse about it, we introduce connec-
tion. Since we turn away from trouble and suffering,
since these things are not the objects of choice and effort
save in avoidance, it seems forced to call them ends. To
name them such appears an impropriety of language. I
am quite willing to concede the linguistic point, provided
its implications are acknowledged and adhered to. For in
this case we are left, apart from a deliberately directed
course of events, only with objects immediately used,
enjoyed and suffered but having in themselves no claim
112 EXPERIENCE AND NATURE
to the title of ends. Health in this case is not in Itself an
end of any natural process; much less an end-in-itself.
It is an enjoyed good when it happens just as disease is a
suffered ill. Similarly, truth of belief and statement is an
affair that has the quality of good; but it is not an end just
because it is good; it becomes an end only when, because
of its goodness, it is actively sought for and reached as a
conclusion. On this basis, all ends are ends-in-view; they
are no longer ideal as characters of Being, as they were
when they were in Greek theory, but are the objects of
conscious intent. When achieved in existence they are
ends because they are then conclusions attained through
antecedent endeavor, just as a post is not a goal in itself, but
becomes a goal in relation to a runner and his race.
Either we must consistently stick to the equivalence of
ends with objectives of conscious endeavor, or admit that
all things directly possessed of irreducible and self-sufficing
quality, red and blue, pain, solidity, toughness, smoothness
and so on through the list, are natural ends.
There is however nothing self-evident, or even clear,
in the exclusive identification of ends with ends-in-view
and of the latter t with psychic states. The identification
isolates conscious life from objective nature. It was a
particular historic situation that effected the division.
Modern science made it clear that nature has no prefer-
ence for good things over bad things; its mills turnout any
kind of grist indifferently. If Greek thought had con-
tented itself with asserting that all immediacy of exist-
ence has a certain ultimacy and finality, a certain in-
commensurability and incommutability, if it had cited
conscious experience as a striking instance of the indiffer-
ence of natural processes to termini of good and evil,
NATURE, ENDS AND HISTORIES 113
modern science would have had no destructive impact
upon the doctrine of natural ends. It would rather have
added resourcefulness to this doctrine. In explicit dis-
covery of just the conditions antecedent to this good and
that bad, it puts in our hands means of regulating the
occurrence of things possessed of these qualities. But
discovery of the indifference of natural energies to the
production of good and bad endings, and the discovery of
the over lapping and intermixture of processes leading to
different outcomes, so completely overthrew the classic
doctrine of ends, that it seemed to abolish any and every
conception of natural ends. The logical result was to cut
off "consciousness/ 7 as the collectivity of immediate quali-
ties, from nature, and to create the dualism of physical
nature and mind which is the source of modern epistemo-
logical problems.
A reconsideration of the theory of natural termini, is
in historic sequel necessary to a correct envisagement of
the connection of conscious life with nature. "Con-
sciousness 7 ' in one of its many significations, is identi-
cal with direct apparition, obvious and vivid presence of
qualities and of meanings. Take these apparitions as
something else than emphatic characters of natural events
and physical events, and objects become themselves re-
mote and uncertain in existence arrived at only through
the mediation of consciousness. Moreover, while quality
is immediate and absolute, any particular quality is
notoriously unstable and transitory. Immediate objects
are the last word of evanescence. Consciousness, in the
sense just indicated, is flux in which nothing abides.
Persistence, "substance" is found only in some unap-
proachable things, which have to be invoked to supply
114 EXPERIENCE AND NATURE
this flux with a substratum and locus. Thus we arc con-
fronted with the perplexing riddles familiar in epistemo-
logical theory. It suffices at this time to note but one.
The realm of immediate qualities contains everything of
worth and significance. But it is uncertain, unstable and
precarious. The first consideration induces us to prize
consciousness supremely; the second leads us to deny
reality to it as compared with alleged underlying things
with their fixity and permanence. Since immediate quali-
ties come and go without inherent rhyme and reason,
since life is more unstable than inanimate things and
conscious life is even more evanescent than life physiologi-
cally considered, since the coming and going of immediate
qualities is susceptible of regulation only through the
medium of things out of consciousness, "consciousness 71
becomes an anomaly. "Matter" as a complex of indirect,
not immediately given, and in some sense unknowable,
things becomes alone real and solid.
If we discount practical bias toward the regular and
repeated, and hence toward "causes" as opposed to con-
sequences, all that is indicated by the transiency of
immediate qualitative affairs is that immediacy is imme-
diacy. By the nature of the case the occurrence of the
immediate is at the mercy of the sequential order. In the
case of the things which appeal to common-sense as sub-
stances, properties like mass and inertia, unchanged solid-
ity and extension, count most. Rate of change is slow;
and presents itself as a matter of attrition and accumula-
tion; spatial qualities which are static chiefly figure.
Time is of comparative indifference to the change of solid
substances; a million years is a day. But whatever de-
pends for its existence upon the interaction of a large
NATURE, ENDS AND HISTORIES 115
number of independent variables is in unstable equilib-
rium; its rate of change is rapid; successive qualities
have no obvious connection with one another; any shift
of any part may alter the whole pattern. Thug, while
light and water are "substances," a rainbow, depending
upon a highly specialized conjunction of light and vapor,
and being transient, is only a "phenomenon." Such im-
mediate qualities as red and blue, sweet and sour, tone,
the pleasant and unpleasant, depend upon an extraordin-
ary variety and complexity of conditioning events; hence
they are evanescent. They are never exactly redupli-
cated, because the exact combination of events of which
they are termini does not precisely recur. Hence they
are even more "phenomenal" than a rainbow; they must
be hitched to substance as its "modes" to get standing in
"reality."
Thus the things that are most precious, that are final,
being just the things that are unstable and most easily
changing, seem to be different in kind from good, solid, old-
fashioned substance. Matter has turned out to be nothing
like as lumpy and chunky as unimaginative prejudice
conceived it to be. But as compared with the changes
of immediate qualities it seems in any case solid and sub-
stantial; a fact which accounts, I suppose, for the inser-
tion of an immaterial sort of substance, after the analogy
of matter-substance, underneath mental affairs. But
when it is recognized that the latter are eventual and
consummatory to highly complicated interactions of
natural events, their transiency becomes itself intelligible;
it is no ground of argument for a radical difference from
.the physical, the latter being also resolvable into a char-
acter of the course of events. While "consciousness" as
116 EXPERIENCE AND NATURE
the conspicuous and vivid presence of immediate qualities
and of meanings, is alone of direct worth, things not imme-
diately present, whose intrinsic qualities are not directly
had, are primary from the standpoint of control. For
just because the things that are directly had are both
precious and evanescent, the only thing that can be thought
of is the conditions under which they are had. The
common, pervasive and repeated is of superior rank from
the standpoint of safeguarding and buttressing the hav-
ing of terminal qualities. Directly we can do nothing
with the latter save have, enjoy and suffer them. So
reflection is concerned with the order which conditions,
prevents and secures their occurrence. The irony of
many historic systems of philosophy is that they have so
inverted the actualities of the case. The general, recur-
rent and extensive has been treated as the worthy and
superior kind of Being; the immediate, intensive, transi-
tory, and qualitatively individualized taken to be of im-
portance only when it is imputed to something ordinary,
which is all the universal can denotatively mean. In
truth, the universal and stable are important because
they are the instrumentalities, the efficacious conditions,
of the occurrence of the unique, unstable and passing.
The system which Aristotle bequeathed to the modern
world through Latin Christianity expresses the conse-
quences of taking the universal which is instrumental, as if
it were final. Actually, consummatory objects instead of
being a graded series of numerable and unalterable species
or kinds of existence ranked under still fewer genera, are
infinitely numerous, variable and individualized affairs.
Poets who have sung of despair in the midst of prosperity,
and of hope amid darkest gloom, have been the true
NATURE, ENDS AND HISTORIES 11T
metaphysicians of nature. The glory of the moment and
its tragedy will surely pass. The contingent, uncertain
and incomplete give depth and scope to consummatory
objects while things not directly had, things approach-
able only through reflective imagination and rational
constructions are the conditions of such regulation of their
occurrence as is feasible.
The richer and fuller are the terminal qualities of an
object the more precarious is the latter, because of its
dependence upon a greater diversity of events. At the
best, therefore, control is partial and experimental. AH
prediction is abstract and hypothetical. Given the sta-
bility of other events, and it follows that certain condi-
tions, selected in thought, determine the predictability
of the occurrence of say, red. But since the other con-
ditions do not remain unalterably put, what actually
occurs is never just what happens in thought; the thing of
mere redness does not happen, but some thing with just
this shade and tinge of red, in just this unduplicable con-
tent. Thus something unpredictable, spontaneous, unr-
formulable and ineffable is found in any terminal object.
Standardizations, formulae, generalizations, principles,
universals, have their place, but the place is that of being
instrumental to better approximation to what is unique
and unrepeatable.
We owe to Romanticism the celebration of this fact;
no fact apparently being fully discovered and communi-
cated save as it is too much celebrated. Aversion to
Romanticism as a system is quite justifiable; but even an
obnoxious system may hit upon a truth uaknown to
soberer schemes. Call the facts romantic or by some
sounding name, aod it still remains true that
18 EXPERIENCE AND NATURE
nmediate and terminal qualities (whether or not called
onsciousness) form an unpredictable and unformulable
low of immediate, shifting, impulsive, adventured finali-
ies, with respect to which the universal and regular
ibjects and principles celebrated in classic thought are
nstrumental.
Perhaps we may prudently close this chapter with a
eminder. To point out something as a fact is not the
ame thing as to commend or eulogize the fact. I am
tot saying that it is a fine and noble thing that whatever
5 immediately consummatory and precious should be
Iso evanescent and unique, never completely subject to
>rinciple and rule. A reporter is not necessarily to blame
or the state of thing that he reports. The fact hereby
eported is so unescapable and so obvious to a candid
empiricist that there is no occasion for either eulogy or
;ondemnation. The only question is what is going to be
lone about the various instances of it which compose our
ives, and give them humor and tragedy. The question
s urgent for reflection; it is urgent for the most practical
:>f acts in "getting a living/' where the need to do some-
thing is constantly imperative. Materials used in reflec-
tion change even more rapidly than materials employed
in meeting hunger and thirst. Their metabolism is at a
quicker pace. Genuinely to think of a thing is to think of
implications that are no sooner thought of than we are
tiurried on to their implications. There is no rest for the
thinker, save in the process of thinking. Possibly it is
for this reason that reflection upon the whole has been
identified in human culture with onerous labor, with the
sombre and melancholic. Reverie travels fast, but in
reverie the labor of making connections taut and con-
sistent is not involved. Only in circumstances as for-
NATURE, ENDS AND HISTORIES 119
tunatc as those of ancient Greece does effort to under-
stand become a rich and full delight, so that it may be
conceived of not only as an end of nature, but as its end of
ends, for the sake of which all else happens.
Participation in this consummatory activity has, how-
ever, been confined to a few. Since it wai conceived of
as an end given spontaneously or "naturally" to a few,
not as a practical and reflective conclusion to be achieved,
it was concluded that some men are servile by nature,
having as sole function to supply the materials which made
it possible for other men to indulge in pure theoretical
activity, without distraction by the need of making a
living. Thus the conception that thought is the final and
complete end of nature became a "rationalization" of an
existing division of classes in society. The division of
men into the thoughtless and the inquiring was taken to
be the intrinsic work of nature; in effect it was identical
with the division between workers and those enjoying
leisure. Philosophers and scientific inquiries became the
utmost acme of nature's perfection, being the least de-
pendent upon outward acts and connections.
In a sense, this occurrence of thought and leisurely
insight was natural; it happened in the course of natural
processes. It was "given." Like any finality it had to
be hit upon, achieved without premeditation before it
might become an object of reflective choice and endeavor.
But when it came to b reflected upon, its terms were mis-
conceived. The conception that contemplative thought
is the end in itself was at once a compensation for inability
to make reason effective in practice, and a means for per-
petuating a division of social classes. A local and tem-
poral polity of historical nature became a metaphysics
of everlasting being. Thought when it achieves truth
120 EXPERIENCE AND NATURE
may, indeed, be said to fulfill the regularities and universali-
ties of nature; to be their natural end. But its incarna-
tion as an end in some, not others, does not partake of
any universality. It is contingent, accidental ; its achieve-
ment is a rational fulfillment only when it is the product
of deliberate arts of politics and education.
Since nothing in nature is exclusively final, rationality
is always means as well as end. The doctrine of the uni-
versality and necessity of rational ends can be validated
only when those in whom the good is actualized employ
it as a means to modify conditions so that others may also
participate in it, and its universality exist in the course of
affairs. The more it is asserted that thought and under-
standing are "ends in themselves," the more imperative
is it that thought should discover why they are realized
only in a small and exclusive class. The ulterior problem
of thought is to make thought prevail in experience, not
just the results of thought by imposing them upon others,
but the active process of thinking. The ultimate contra-
diction in the classic and genteel tradition is that while
it made thought universal and necessary and the culmin-
ating good of nature, it was content to leave its distribu-
tion among men a thing of accident, dependent upon birth,
economic, and civil status. Consistent as well as hu-
mane thought will be aware of the hateful irony of a
philosophy which is indifferent to the conditions that
determine the occurrence of reason while it asserts the
ultimacy and universality of reason. In as far as quali-
ties of objects are found worthy of finality, the finding
must eventuate in arts. Only thereby will thinking
and knowing take their full place as events falling within
natural processes, not only in their origin but also in their
outcome*
CHAPTER FOUR
NATURE, MEANS AND KNOWLEDGE
No mythology is more familiar than that which tells
how labor is due to trespass of man upon divine preroga-
tives, an act that brought curse upon the earth and woe to
man. Because of this primeval rebellion against God, men
toil amid thorns to gain an uncertain livelihood, and
women bring forth children in pain. The tale is touch-
ing evidence that man finds it natural that nature should
support his activities, and unnatural that the burden of
continued and hard endeavor should be placed upon him.
Festivity is spontaneous; labor needs to be accounted
for. There is a long distance between the birth of the
old legend and the formulation of classic political economy;
but the doctrine of the latter that labor which is the
source of value signifies cost, onerous sacrifice of present
consummation to attainment of later good, expresses the
same human attitude.
Yet, in fact, it was not enjoyment of the apple but the
enforced penalty of labor that made man as the gods,
knowing good and evil instead of just having and enjoy-
ing them. The exacting conditions imposed by nature,
that have to be observed in order that work be carried
through to success, are the source of all noting and record-
ing of nature's doings. They supply the discipline that
chastens exuberant fancy into respect for the operation
of events, and that effect subjection of thought to a per-
tinent order of space and time. While leisure is the
mother of drama, sport and literary spell-binding, neces-
122 EXPERIENCE AND NATURE
sity is the mother of invention, discovery and consecutive
reflection. While at happy junctures the course of ex-
traordinary events may be bound or wheedled by en-
joyed rite and ceremony, only work places a conclusive
spell upon homely, everyday affairs. Spears, snares,
gins, traps, utensils, baskets and webs may have their
potency enhanced by adherence to ceremonial design, but
the design is never a complete substitute for conformity
to the efficacious resistances and adaptations of natural
materials. Acumen, shrewdness, inventiveness, accumu-
lation and transmission of information are products of
the necessity under which man labors to turn away from
absorption in direct having and enjoying, so as to con-
sider things in their active connections as means and as
signs. The same need converts immediate emotion
irrelevant to everything save its own thrill into ordered
interest in the movements and possibilities of natural
events. Everything is done to bedeck utilities, instru-
mentalities, with reminders of consummatory events so as
to lessen their burden, but useful arts in return supply
ceremonial arts with their materials, appliances and
patterns.
Tools, means, agencies are the characteristic thing in
industry; such a statement is tautology. By its nature
technology is concerned with things and acts in their in-
strumentalities, not in their immediacies. Objects and
events figure in work not as fulfillments, realizations, but
in behalf of other things of which they are means and
predictive signs. A tool is a particular thing, but it is
more than a particular thing, since it is a thing in which
a connection, a sequential bond of nature is embodied.
It possesses an objective relation as its own defining prop-
JNATUKJb;, MJbAJNb AJNJJ KINIUW.LJbJUU^
erty. Its perception as well as its actual use takes the
mind to other things. The spear suggests the feast not
directly but through the medium of other external things,
such as the game and the hunt, to which the sight of the
weapon transports imagination. Man's bias towards him-
self easily leads him to think of a tool solely in relation
to himself, to his hand and eyes, but its primary relation-
ship is toward other external things, as the hammer to the
nail, and the plow to the soil. Only through this objective
bond does it sustain relation to man himself and his activi-
ties. A tool denotes a perception and acknowledgment of
sequential bonds in nature.
Classic philosophy was conceived in wonder, born in
leisure and bred in consummatory contemplation. Hence
it noted the distinction between objects consummatory or
final in the fine arts and instrumental and operative in the
industrial. It then employed the distinction to interpret
nature in terms of a dialectical physics. Useful arts are
possible because things have observable efficiencies; but
they are necessary because of lack, privation, imperfec-
tion, Non-being. This deficiency is manifest in sensation
and appetite; the very transitiveness of materials which
renders them capable of transformation into serviceable
forms is evidence that they too lack fullness of Being.
Things have potentialities or are instrumental because
they are not Being, but rather Being in process of be-
coming. They lend themselves to operative connections
that fulfill them because they are not themselves Real in
an adequate sense. This point of view protected Greek
thought from that modern onesidedness which conceives
tools as mere subjective conveniences. But the safe-
guard was at the expense of the introduction into nature
114 EXPERIENCE AND NATURE
of a split in Being itself, its division into some things
which are inherently defective, changing, relational,
and other things which are inherently perfect, permanent,
self-possessed. Other dualisms such as that between
sensuous appetite and rational thought, between the
particular and universal, between the mechanical and the
telic, between experience and science, between matter
and mind, are but the reflections of this primary meta-
physical dualism.
The counterpart of the conversion of esthetic objects
into objects of science, into the one, true and good, was
the conversion of operative and transitive objects into
things which betray absence of full Being. This absence
causes their changing instability which is, none the less,
after the model of materials of the useful arts, potentially
useful for ends beyond themselves. The social division
into a laboring class and a leisure class, between industry
and esthetic contemplation, became a metaphysical
division into things which are mere means and things
which are ends. Means are menial, subservient,
slavish; and ends liberal and final; things as means
testify to inherent defect, to dependence, while ends
testify to independent and intrinsically self-sufficing be-
ing. Hence the former can never be known in themselves
but only in their subordination to objects that are final,
while the latter can be known in and through themselves
by self-enclosed reason. Thus the identification of
knowledge with esthetic contemplation and the exclusion
from science of trial, work, manipulation and adminis-
tration of things, comes full circle.
The ingratitude displayed by thinkers to artists who
by creation of harmoniously composed objects supplied
NATURE, MEANS AND KNOWLEDGE 125
idealistic philosophy with empirical models of their
ultimately real objects, was shown in even greater
measure to artisans. The accumulated results of the ob-
servations and procedures of farmers, navigators, build-
ers furnished matter-of-fact information about natural
events, and also supplied the pattern of logical and meta-
physical subordination of change to directly possessed
and enjoyed fulfillments. While thinkers condemned
the industrial class and despised labor, they borrowed
from them the facts and the conceptions that gave form
and substance to their own theories. For apart from
processes of art there was no basis for introducing the
idea of fulfillment, realization, into the notion of end nor
for interpreting antecedent operations as potentialities.
Yet we should not in turn exhibit ingratitude. For if
Greek thinkers did not achieve science, they achieved the
idea of science. This accomplishment was beyond the
reach of artist and artisan. For no matter how solid the
content of their own observations and beliefs about
natural events, that content was bound down to occasions
of origin and use. The relations they recognized were
of local areas in time and place. Subject-matter under-
went a certain distortion when it was lifted out of this
context, and placed in a realm of eternal forms. But the
idea of knowledge was thereby liberated, and the scheme
of logical relationships among existences held up as an
ideal of inquiry. Thinking was uncovered as an enter-
prize having its own objects and procedures; and the
discovery of thought as method of methods in all arts
added a new dimension to all subsequent experience. It
would be an academic matter to try to balance the credit
items due to the discovery of thought and of logic as a
126 EXPERIENCE AND NATURE
free enterprise, against the debit consequences resulting
from the hard and fast separation of the instrumental and
final.
A great change took place in Greek experience between
the time of Homer and Hesiod and the fifth century before
Christ. The earlier period evinces a gloomy temper of
life. The sense of the sovereignty of fortune, largely ill-
fortune, is prevalent. The temper is shown by such
quotations as the following: "Thus the gods have de-
cided for unhappy mortals that men should live in misery
while they themselves live free from suffering." "A
thousand woes traverse the abode of man; the earth is
gorged with them and the sea filled; day and night bring
grief. They come in silence for prudent Zeus has taken
away their voice." "Men favored by Hecate have no
need for knowledge, memory or effort to achieve success;
she acts alone without the assistance of her favorites.' 1
Divination of the intent of unseen powers and pious
sacrifice are man's only resource, but this is of no avail.
Reckon no man happy till after his death. The gods
have indeed bestowed arts on man to ameliorate his
hard lot, but their issue is uncertain. The ends rests
with the gods and with fate who rules even the gods, a
fate to be neither bribed with offerings nor yet compelled
by knowledge and art.
By the days of the Sophists and their great Athenian
successors there is marked change in mood. The con-
ditions then existed that have occasioned the myth of Greek
serenity. The Sophists taught that man could largely
control the fortunes of life by mastery of the arts. No
one has exceeded Plato in awareness of present ills. But
since they are due to ignorance and opinion, they are
NATURE, MEANS AND KNOWLEDGE 127
remediable, he holds, by adequate knowledge. Philos-
ophy should terminate in an art of social control. The
great rival of Plato taught that fortune "is a fantom
which men have invented to excuse their own imprudence.
Fortune does not easily resist thought and for the most
part an instructed and far-seeing soul will attain its goal. 71
In short arts based on knowledge cooperate with nature
and render it amenable to human happiness. The gods
recede into twilight. Divination has a powerful com-
petitor. Worship becomes moral. Medicine, war, and
the crafts desert the temple and the altar of the patron-
god of the guild, as inventions, tools, techniques of action
and works multiply.
This period of confident expansion did not endure. It
soon gave way; it was succeeded by what Gilbert Murray
has so well named the failure of nerve, and a return to the
supernatural, philosophy changing from a supreme art
into a way of access to the supernatural. Yet the episode
even if brief is more than historically significant. It
manifests another way open to man in the midst of an
uncertain, incomplete and precarious universe; another
way, that is, in addition to that of celebrating such
moments of respite and festal joy as occur in the troubled
life of man. Through instrumental arts, arts of control
based on study of nature, objects which are fulfilling and
good, may be multiplied and rendered secure. This road
after almost two millenia of obscuration and desertion was
refound and retaken; its rediscovery marks what we call
the modern era. Consideration of the significance of
science as a resource in a world of mixed uncertainty,
peril, and of uniformity, stability, furnishes us with the
theme of this chapter of experience.
128 EXPERIENCE AND NATURE
That the sciences were born of the arts, the physical
sciences of the crafts and technologies of healing, naviga-
tion, war and the working of wood, metals, leather, flax
and wool; the mental sciences of the arts of political
management, is I suppose, an admitted fact. The dis-
tinctively intellectual attitude which marks scientific
inquiry was generated in efforts at controlling persons
and things so that consequences, issues, outcomes would
be more stable and assured. The first step away from
oppression by immediate things and events was taken
when man employed tools and appliances, for manipulat-
ing things so as to render them contributory to desired
objects. In responding to things not in their immediate
qualities but for the sake of ulterior results, immediate
qualities are dimmed, while those features which are
signs, indices of something else, are distinguished. A
thing is more significantly what it makes possible than
what it immediately is. The very conception of cogni-
tive meaning, intellectual significance, is that things in
their immediacy are subordinated to what they portend
and give evidence of. An intellectual sign denotes that
a thing is not taken immediately but is referred to some-
thing that may come in consequence of it. Intellectual
meanings may themselves be appropriated, enjoyed and
appreciated; but the character of intellectual meaning is
instrumental. Fortunate for us is it that tools and their
using can be directly enjoyed; otherwise all work would
be drudgery. But this additiv^ fact does not alter the
definition of a tool; it remains a thing used as an agency
for some concluding event.
The first groping steps in defining spatial and tem-
poral qualities, in transforming purely immediate quali-
NATURE, MEANS AND KNOWLEDGE 1
ties of local things into generic relationships, were taken
through the arts. The finger, the foot, the unit of walk-
ing were used to measure space; measurements of weight
originated in the arts of commercial exchange and manu-
facture. Geometry, beginning as agricultural art, further
emancipated space from being a localized quality of im-
mediate extensity. But the radically different ways of
conceiving geometry found in ancient and in modern
science is evidence of the slowness of the process of
emancipation of even geometrical forms from direct or
esthetic traits. In Greek astronomy the intrinsic quali-
ties of figures always dominated their instrumental sig-
nificance in inquiry; they were forms to which phenomena
had to conform instead of means of indirect measure-
ments. Hardly till our own day did spatial relations
get emancipated from esthetic and moral qualities, and
become wholly intellectual and relational, abstracted
from immediate qualifications, and thereby generalized
to their limit.
Anything approaching a history of the growth of recog-
nition of things in their intellectual or instrumental phase
is far beyond our present scope. We can only point
out some of its net results. In principle the step is taken
whenever objects are so reduced from their status of
complete objects as to be treated as signs or indications
of other objects. Enter upon this road and the time is
sure to come when the appropriate object-of-knowledge
is stripped of all that is immediate and qualitative, of
all that is final, self-s'ufiicient. Then it becomes an
anatomized epitome of just and only those traits which
are of indicative or instrumental import. Abstraction
is not a psychological incident; k is a following to its
130 EXPERIENCE AND NATURE
logical conclusion of interest in those phases of natural
existence which are dependable and fruitful signs of other
things; which are means of prediction by formulation in
term* implying other terms. Self-evidence ceases to be
a characteristic trait of the fundamental objects of either
sensory or noetic objects. Primary propositions are
statements of objects in terms which procure the simplest
and completest forming and checking of other proposi-
tions. Many systems of axioms and postulates are pos-
sible, the more the merrier, since new propositions as
consequences axe thus brought to light. Genuine science
is impossible as long as the object esteemed for its own in-
trinsic qualities is taken as the object of knowledge. Its
completeness, its immanent meaning, defeats its use as
indicating and implying.
Said William James, "Many were the ideal prototypes
of rational order: teleological and esthetic tics between
things .... as well as logical and mathematical
relations. The most promising of these things at first
were of course the richer ones, the more sentimental
ones. The baldest and least promising were mathe-
matical ones; but the history of the latter's application
is a history of steadily advancing successes, while that
of the sentimentally richer ones is one of relative sterility
and failure. Take those aspects of phenomena which
interest you as a human being most .... and
barren are all your results. Call the things of nature as
much as you like by sentimental moral and esthetic
names, no natural consequences follow from the naming.
. . . . But when you give the things mathemati-
cal and mechanical names and call them so many solids
in just such positions, describing just such paths with
NATURE, MEANS AND KNOWLEDGE 131
Just such velocities, all is changed Your
"things" realize the consequences of the names by which
you classed them." 1
A fair interpretation of theee pregnant sentences is
that as long as objects are viewed telically, as long as the
objects of the truest knowledge, the most real forms of
being, are thought of as ends, science does not advance.
Objects are possessed and appreciated, but they are not
known. To know, means that men have become willing
to turn away from precious possessions; willing to let
drop what they own, however precious, in behalf of a
grasp of objects which they do not as yet own. Multi-
plied and secure ends depend upon letting go existent
ends, reducing them to indicative and implying means,
The great historic obstacle to science was unwillingness to
make the surrender, lest moral, esthetic and religious
objects suffer. To large groups of persons, the bald and
dry objects of natural science are still objects of fear.
The mechanical or mathematical-logical object presents
itself as a rival of the ideal and final object. Then
philosophy becomes a device for conserving "the spiritual
values of the universe'' by devices of interpretation which
converts the material and mechanical into mind. By
means of a dialectic of the implications of the possibility
of knowledge, the physical is transformed into something
mental, psychic as if psychic existence were sure to be
inherently more ideal than the physical.
The net result of the new scientific method was con-
ception of nature as a mathematical-mechanical object.
If modern philosophy, reflecting the tendencies of the
1 James, Principles of Psychology, Vol. II, pp. 605-06.
132 EXPERIENCE AND NATURE
new science, abolished final causes from nature, it was
because concern with qualitative ends, already existing
objects of possession and enjoyment, blocked inquiry,
discovery and control, and ended in barren dialectical
disputes about definitions and classifications. A candid
mind can hardly deny that sensory qualities, colors,
moist and dry, hard and soft, light and heavy are genuine
natural ends. In them the potentialities of the body are
broughtinto functioning, while the activity of the body thus
achieved brings in turn to completion potentialities in
nature outside of the body. Nevertheless the theory that
final objects are the appropriate objects of knowledge,
in assimilating knowledge to esthetic contemplation had
fatal consequences for science. All natural phenomena
had to be known in terms of qualities. Hot and cold,
wet and dry, up and down, light and heavy were things
to know with and by. They were essential forms, active
principles of nature. But Galileo and his scientific and
philosophical followers (like Descartes and Hobbes)
reversed the method by asserting that these sensory
forms are things to be known, challenges to inquiry, prob-
lems, not solutions nor terms of solution. The assertion
was a general one; it necessitated search for objects of
knowledge. Dependable material with which to know
was found in a different realm of being; in spatial
relations, positions, masses, mathematically defined,
and in motion as change of space having direction and
velocity. Qualities were no longer things to do with;
they were things already done, effects, requiring to be
known by statement and description in mathematical
and mechanical relations. The only world which de-
fines and describes and explains was a world of masses
in motion, arranged in a system of Cartesian coordinate*
NATURE, MEANS AND KNOWLEDGE 1SJ
When we view experientially this change, what oc-
curs is the kind of thing that happens in the useful
arts when natural objects, like crude ores, are treated as
materials for getting something else. Their character
ceases to lie in their immediate qualities, in just what they
are and as directly enjoyed. Their character is now
representative; some pure metal, iron, copper, etc. is
their essence, which may be extracted as their "true"
nature, their "reality." To get at this reality many
existent constituents have to be got rid of. From the
standpoint of the object, pure metal, these things to be
eliminated are "false/' irrelevant and obstructive. They
stand in the way, and in the existent thing those qualities
are alone significant which indicate the ulterior objective
and which offer means for attaining it.
Modern science represents a generalized recognition
and adoption of the point of view of the useful arts, for it
proceeds by employment of a similar operative technique
of manipulation and reduction. Physical science would
be impossible without the appliances and procedures of
separation and combinations of the industrial arts. In
useful arts, the consequence is increase of power, multipli-
cation of ends appropriated and enjoyed, and an en-
larged and varied flexibility and economy in means used
to achieve ends. Metal can be put to thousands of
uses, while the crude ore can only be beheld for whatever
esthetic qualities it happens to present, or be hurled
bodily at game or an enemy. Reduction of natural
existences to the status of means thus presents nothing in-
herently adverse to possessed and appreciated ends, but
rather renders the latter a more secure and extensive
affair.
134 EXPERIENCE AND NATURE
Why then has it been so often assumed in modern
philosophy that the advance of physical science has
created a serious metaphysical problem; namely, that
of the relation of a mechanical world as the object of
knowledge to ends; the reconciliation of antithetical
worlds of description and appreciation? In empirical
fact, the advance of mechanistic science has multiplied
and diversified ends; has increased wants and satisfac-
tions, and has multiplied and diversified the means of
attaining them. Why the problem? There are two his-
torical empirical reasons to be given in answer. In the
first place, the Aristotelian metaphysics of potentiality
and actuality, of objects consummatory of natural proc-
esses, was intricately entangled with an astronomy and
physics which had become incredible. It was also en-
tangled with doctrines and institutions in politics and
economics which were fast getting out of relationship
to current social needs. The simplest recourse was to
treat the classic tradition as the Jonah of science and
throw it bodily overboard. The method was imperious
and impatient, but it served a need. By a single act it
relieved scientific inquiries of notions that were hamper-
ing, even paralyzing investigation into nature and that
were limiting new practices by outworn sanctions.
By itself alone, however, this cause would hardly have
created more than a passing historic episode. The reason
that rendered the abandonment of any theory of natural
ends something more than a gesture of impatient haste
lies in the persistence of the classic theory of knowledge.
Greek thought regarded possession, contemplation, as the
essence of science, and thought of the latter as such a
complete possession of reality as incorporates it with
NATURE, MEANS AND KNOWLEDGE 135
mind. The notion of knowledge as immediate posses-
sion of Being was retained when knowing as an actual
affair radically altered. Even when science had come
to include a method of experimental search and finding, it
was still defined as insight into, grasp of, real being as
such, in comparison with which other modes of experience
are imperfect, confused and perverted. Hence a serious
problem. If the proper object of science is a mathe-
matico-mechanical world (as the achievements of science
have proved to be the case) and if the object of science
defines the true and perfect reality (as the perpetuation
of the classic tradition asserted), then how can the objects
of love, appreciation whether sensory or ideal and de-
votion be included within true reality?
Efforts to answer this question constitute a large part
of the technical content of modern metaphysical thought.
Given the premises, its import covers almost every
thing from the problem of freedom, ideals and ideas to
the relation of the physical and the mental. With re-
spect to the latter, there is the causal problem of their
existential relation; and there is the cognitive problem
of how one order of existence cast refer to the other in
such a way as to know it. We are not concerned here
with the voluminous literature and various (controversial
and controverted) points of view that have emerged. It is
pertinent, however, to recall the source of the problems;
and to register the statement that without the underlying
dubious assumption, we are not called upon to find solu-
tions; they cease to be perplexities as soon as certain pre-
mises are surrendered. The premise which concerns us
here is that science is grasp of reality in its final self-
sufficing form. If the proper object of knowledge has the
136 EXPERIENCE AND NATURE
character appropriate to the subject matter of the useful
arts, the problem in question evaporates. The objects
of science, like the direct objects of the arts, are an order
of relations which serve as tools to effect immediate
havings and beings. Goods, objects with qualities of
fulfillment are the natural fruition of the discovery and
employment of means, when the connection of ends
with a sequential order is determined. Immediate em-
pirical things are just what they always were: endings of
natural histories. Physical science does not set up
another and rival realm of antithetical existence; it reveals
the state or order upon which the occurrence of im-
mediate and final qualities depends. It adds to casual
having of ends an ability to regulate the date, place and
manner of their emergence. Fundamentally, the as-
sertion that this condition of ordered relationships is
mathematic, mechanical, is tautology; that is, the meaning
of anything which is such that perception and use of it
enables us to regulate consequences or attain terminal
qualities is a mathematical, mechanical or if you please
logical order. If we did not discover those which we
have found, we should have to find another, if deliberate
planning and execution are to occur.
If science be perfect grasp, or envisagement of being,
and if science terminate with a mathematico-mechanical
world, then,' in the second place, we have upon our hands
the problems of reality and appearance. In ancient
thought, the problem occurred in a simple form. There
were higher and lower forms of knowledge; but all stages
of knowledge were alike realizations of some level of
Being, so that appearance in contrast with reality meant
only a lower degree of Being, being imperfect or not fully
NATURE, MEANS AND KNOWLEDGE 137
actualized. In modern science, with its homogenous
natural world, this contrast of perfect and defective Be-
ing is meaningless. It is a question of knowledge or
error, not of differences of cognitive grasp in one to one
correspondence with different levels of Being. In the
ancient view, sensation and opinion are good forms of
knowledge in their place; what they know, their place,
is just an inferior grade of Being. To the modern mind,
they are not knowledge of anything unless they are
brought to agree with the deliverances of science. Is
matter an appearance of mind as true reality? Or is the
mental only an appearance of the physical as the final
reality? Or are both of them appearances of some still
more ultimate reality?
Such questions are as necessary as they are unanswer-
able, given the premise which defines knowledge as direct
grasp and tnvisagement. They vanish if the proper
objects of science are nature in its instrumental characters.
Any immediate object then becomes for inquiry, as some-
thing to be known, an appearance. To call it "appearance"
denotes a functional status, not a kind of existence. Any
quality in its immediacy is doubly an appearance. In
the first place it appears; it is evident, conspicuous, out-
standing, it is, to recur to language already used, had. A
thing appears in the sense in which a bright object ap-
pears in a dark room, while other things remain obscure,
hidden. The affair is one of physical and physiological
limits of vision and audition, etc. We see islands floating
as it were upon the sea; we call them islands because of
their apparent lack of continuity with the medium that
immediately surrounds them. But they are projections
of the very earth upon which we walk; the connecting
138 EXPERIENCE AND NATURE
links do not ordinarily appear; they are there, but are
not had. The difference between the appearing and the
imappearing is of immense practical and theoretical
import, imposing upon us need for inference, which
would not exist if things appeared to us in their full
connections, instead of with sharply demarcated outlines
due to limits of perceptibility. But the ground of the
difference is as physical as that between solid, liquid and
gas. The endings of organic events, seeing, hearing, etc.
are for the time being, or immediately, endings of the
history of all natural events. To re-establish a connec-
tion of histories within a longer course of events and a
more inclusive state of affairs, requires delving, probing,
and extension by artifice beyond the apparent. To link
the things which are immediately and apparitionally had
with one another by means of what is not immediately
apparent and thus to create new historic successions with
new initiations and new endings depends in turn upon the
system of mathematical-mechanical systems which form
the proper objects of science as such.
The empirical basis of the distinction between the
apparent and the non-apparent thus lies in the need for
inference. When we take the outstandingly evident as
evidence, its status is subordinate to that of unperceived
things. For the nonce, it is a way of establishing some-
thing more fundamental than it is itself with respect to
the object of inquiry. If we conceive of the world of
immediately apparent things as an emergence of peaks of
mountains which are submerged except as to their peaks
or endings, and as a world of initial climbings whose
subsequent career emerges above the surface only here
and there and by fits and starts; and if v/e give attention
NATURE, MEANS AND KNOWLEDGE 139
to the fact that any ability of control whatever depends
upon ability to unite these disparate appearances into a
serial history, and then give due attention to the fact that
connection into a consecutive history can be effected only
by means of a scheme of constant relationships (a con-
dition met by the mathematical-logical-mechanical ob-
jects of physics), we shall have no difficulty in seeing
why it is that the immediate things from which we start
lend themselves to interpretation as signs or appearances
of the objects of physics; while we also recognize that
it is only with respect to the function of instituting con-
nection that the objects of physics can be said to be more
"real." In the total situation in which they function,
they are means to weaving together otherwise discon-
nected beginnings and endings into a consecutive history.
Underlying "reality" and surface "appearance" in this
connection have a meaning fixed by the function of inquiry,
not an intrinsic metaphysical meaning.
To treat therefore the object of science which in effect
is the object of physics as a complete and self-sufficient
object, the end of knowing, is to burden ourselves with
an unnecessary and insoluble problem. It commits us
on one side to a realm of immediately apparent things, the
socalled perceptual order which is an order only by cour-
tesy, and on the other to a realm of inferred and logically
constructed real objects. These two realms are rivals of
each other. If knowledge is possession or grasp, then
there are two incompatible kinds of knowledge, one sensi-
ble, the other rational. Which is the genuine article and
which the counterfeit? If we say sensible knowledge is
the genuine, then we are committed to phenomenalism
of a somewhat chaotic kind, unless we follow Berkeley and
invoke deity to hold the immediate things together.
140 EXPERIENCE AND NATURE
If we say rational knowledge is the genuine article,
then true reality becomes the reality of materialism or of
logical realism or of objective idealism, according to
training and temperament. To follow the clues of ex-
perience is to see that the socalled sensible world is a
world of immediate beginnings and endings; not at all
an affair of cases of knowledge but a succession of qualita-
tive events; while the socalled conceptual order is recog-
nized to be the proper object of science, since it constitutes
the scheme of constant relationships by means of which
spare, scattered and casual events are bound together into
a connected history. These emergent immediate events
remain the beginning and the end of knowledge; but
since their occurrence is one with their being sensibly,
affectionally and appreciatively had, they are not them-
selves things known. That the qualities and characters
of these immediate apparitions are tremendously modified
when they are linked together by 'physical objects'
that is, by means of the mathematical-mechanical ob-
jects of physics is a fact of the same nature as that a
steel watch-spring is a modification of crude iron ore.
The objects of physics subsist precisely in order to bring
about this transformation to change, that is, casual
endings into fulfillments and conclusions of an ordered
series, with the development of meaning therein involved.
Practically all epistemological discussion depends upon
a sudden and unavowed shift to and fro from the
universe of having to the universe of discourse. At the
outset, ordinary empirical affairs, chairs, tables, stones,
sticks, etc., are called physical objects which is obviously
a term of theoretical interpretation when it so applied,
carrying within itself a complete metaphysical commit*
NATURE, MEANS AND KNOWLEDGE 141
ment. Then physical objects are defined as the objects
of physics, which is, I suppose, the only correct mode of
designation. But such objects are clearly very different
things from the plants, lamps, chairs, thunder and light-
ning, rocks etc. that were first called physical objects.
So another transformation phantasmagoria in the tab-
leau is staged. The original "physical things/' ordinary
empirical objects, not being the objects of physics, are
not physical at all but mental. Then comes the grand
dissolving climax in which objects of physics are shown
as themselves hanging from empirical objects now dressed
up as mental, and hence as themselves mental.
Everything now being mental, and the term having
lost its original contrasting or differential meaning, a
new and different series of transformation scenes is
exhibited. Immediate empirical things are resolved into
hard sensory data, which are called the genuine physical
things, while the objects of physical science are treated as
are logical constructions; all that remains to constitute
mental existence is images and feelings. It is not neces-
sary to mention other permutations and combinations,
familiar to the student of theories of the possibility of
knowledge. The samples mentioned are illustrations of
the sort of thing which happens when the having of
immediate objects, whether sensible, affectional or ap-
preciatoral, is treated as a mode of knowledge.
If objects which are colored, sonorous, tactile, gusta-
tory, loved, hated, enjoyed, admired, which are attrac-
tive and repulsive, exciting, indifferent and depressive,
in all their infinitely numerous modes, are beginnings and
endings of complex natural affairs, and if physical ob-
jects (defined as objects of physical science) are consti-
142 EXPERIENCE AND NATURE
tuted by a mathematical-mechanical order; then physical
objects instead of involving us in the predicament of
having to choose between opposing claimants to reality,
have precisely the characters which they should have in
order to serve effectively as means for securing and
avoiding immediate objects. Four of these characters
may be noted. First, immediate things come and go;
events in the way of direct seeing, hearing, touching,
liking, enjoying, and the rest of them are in rapid change;
the subject-matter of each has a certain uniqueness, un-
repeatedness. Spatial- temporal orders, capable of mathe-
matical formulation are, by contrast, constant. They
present stability, recurrence at its maximum, raised to the
highest degree. Qualitative affairs like red and blue,
although in themselves unlike, are subject to comparison
in terms of objects of physics; on the basis of connection
with orders of sequence, a qualitative spectrum or scale
becomes a scheme of numerable variations of a common
unit.
The second character of objects of science follows from
this feature. The possibility of regulating the occur-
rence of any event depends upon the possibility of in-
stituting substitutions. By means of the latter, a thing
which is within grasp is used to stand for another thing
which is not immediately had, or which is beyond control.
The technique of equations and other functions charac-
teristic of modern science is, taken generically, a method
of thoroughgoing substitutions. It is a system of ex-
change and mutual conversion carried to its limit. 1 The
* The modern mathematical conception of infinity as correspondence
of part and whole appears to represent this function in its generalized
form*
NATURE, MEANS AND KNOWLEDGE 14J
cognitive result is the homogeneous natural world of
modern science, in its contrast with the qualitatively
heterogeneous world of ancient science; the latter being
made up of things different in inherent kinds and in
qualities of movement, such up and down, lateral and
circular, and heterogeneous according to periods of time,
such as earlier and later. These become amenable to
transformations in virtue of reciprocal substitutions.
In the third place, objects of knowledge as means ex-
plain the importance attached to elements, or numerically
discrete units. Control of beginnings and ends by means
is possible only when the individual, the unique, is treated
as a composite of parts, made by sequential differentiations
and integrations. 1 In its own integrity an immediate thing
just exists as it exists; it stays or it passes; it is enjoyed or
suffered. That is all that can be said. But when it is
treated as the outcome of a complex convergence or co-
incidence of a large number of elementary independent
variables, points, moments, numerical units, particles
of mass and energy or more elementary space-times,
(which in spite of their independence are capable of one
to one correspondence with one another) the situation
changes. The simples or elements are in effect the last
pivots upon which regulation of conditions, turns; last,
that is to say, as far as present appliances permit.
8 Leibniz, whose monadism is the first philosophical manifestation of
this notion, and the prototype of analytic realism, or theory of external
relations, asserted the existence of monads on the ground that every
composite implies elements. Surely. But he omitted to note that
metaphysically the case was begged as soon as an affair, no matter
how elaborate in structure, is regarded as being composite. To be a com-
posite is one thing; to be capable of reduction to a composite by certain
measures, is another thing.
144 EXPERIENCE AND NATURE
Preoccupation with elementary units is as marked in
logic, biology, and psychology, as in physics and chemis-
try. Sometimes it seems to have resulted in taking
merely dialectical entities for actual unitary elements;
but that is not logically necessary. Such an outcome
signifies only that the right units were not found. Serious
objection holds when the instrumental character of the
elements is forgotten; and they are treated as independent,
ultimate; when they are treated as metaphysical finalities,
insoluble epistemological problems result. Whatever are
designated as elements, whether logical, mathematical,
physical or mental, depend especially upon the existence
of immediate, qualitatively integral objects. Search for
elements starts with such empirical objects already pos-
sessed. Sensory data, whether they are designated
psychic or physical, are thus not starting points; they
are the products of analysis. Denial of the primary
reality of immediate empirical objects logically terminates
in an abrogation of the reality of elements; for sensory
data, or sensa and sensibilia, are the residua of analysis of
these primary things. Moreover every step of analysis
depends upon continual reference to these empirical
objects. Drop them from mental view for a moment
and any clew in search for elements is lost. Unless macro-
scopic things are recognized, cells, electrons, logical ele-
ments become meaningless. The latter have meaning only
as elements of. Since, for example, only propositions have
implications, a proposition cannot be a mere conjunc-
tion of terms; terms having no implications, a proposi-
tion so formed would have no significance. Terms must
have a significance and since that they have only in a
proposition, they depend upon some prior unity. In
NATURE, MEANS AND KNOWLEDGE 145
similar fashion, a purely unitary physical clement would
have no efficacy; it could not act or be acted upon.
We quote from a psychiatric writer speaking of his
own field, in dealing with a particular matter on its own
merits. With reference to one stage in the development
of the theory of mental disorders, Dr. Adolph Meyer
said that "there was a quest for elements of mind and
their immec v ate correlation with the latest discoveries in
the structure of the brain. The centre theory and the
cell and neuronic theory seemed obligatory standpoints.
Today we h- ,vc become shy of such a one-sided not suffi-
ciently functional materialism There is always
a place for elements, but there is certainly also a place
for the large momentous facts of human life just as we
find it The psychopathologist had to learn to
do more than the so-called "elementalist," who always
goes back to the elements and smallest units and then
is apt to shirk the responsibility of making an attempt
to solve the concrete problems of greater complexity.
The psychiatrist has to study individuals and groups as
wholes, as complex units, as the "you" or "he" or "she"
or "they" we have to work with. We recognize that
throughout nature we have to face the general principle
of unit-formation, and the fact that new units need not
be a mere sum of the component parts, but can be an
actually new entity not wholly predictable from the
component parts and known only through actual ex-
perience with the specific product." 4
Lastly, the instrumental nature of objects of knowl-
edge accounts for the central position of laws, relations.
4 Adolph Me/of, A Psychiatric Milestone, p. 32. P. 38.
146 EXPERIENCE AND NATURE
These are the formulations of the regularities upon which
intellectual and other regulation of things as immediate
apparitions depends. Variability of elements in mathe-
matical science is specious; elements vary independently
of one another, but not independently of a rdation to
others, the relation or law being the constancy among
variations. It is a truism that mathematics is the
method by which elements can be stated as terms in con-
stant relations, and be subjected to equations and other
functions of transformation and substitution. An ele-
ment is appropriately represented by a mathematical
variable; for since any variable falls within some equa-
tion, it is treated as a constant function of other varia-
bles. The shift from variability to constancy is repeated
as often as is needed. It is thus only pro forma that the
variable is variable. It is not variable in the sense in
which unique individualized existences are variable.
The inevitable consequence is the subjection of individ-
uals or unique modes of variation to external relations,
to laws of uniformity; that is to say, the elimination of
individuality. Bear in mind the instrumental nature of
the relation of elements, and this abrogation of individ-
uality merely means a temporary neglect an abstracted
gaze in behalf of attending to conditions under which
individualities present themselves. Convert the ob-
jects of knowledge into real things by themselves, and
individuals become anomalous or unreal; they are not
individualized for science but are instances, cases, speci-
mens, of some generical relation or law.
The difficulty under which morals labor in this case is
evident. They can be "saved" only by the supposition of
another kind of Being from that with which natural
NATURE, MEANS AND KNOWLEDGE 147
sciences are concerned. History and anthropology are
implicated in a similar predicament. The former has
for subject-matter not only individual persons but un-
duplicated situations and events. The attempt to es-
cape the dilemma by recourse to uniform and unilinear
laws of sequence or "evolution" is inept; it contradicts
the premises assumed, and is not borne out by facts.
Contemporary anthropologists have made clear the
historical nature of the phenomena with which they deal.
Cultures are in many respects individual or unique, and
their manifestations are "explained" by correlations
with one another and by borrowings due to chance con-
tacts. The chief, even if not sole, law of their changes
is that of transmission from other individualized cultures.
It is no wonder that Historismus has become the pre-
occupying problem of a whole school of thinkers, many of
whom now hold that the only attitude which can be taken
toward historic situations and characters is non-intellect-
ual, being esthetic appreciation, or sympathetic artistic re-
habilitation. The theory which identifies knowledge
with the beholding or grasp of self-sufficient objects
reaches an impasse where it comes to deal with histori-
cal science in contrast with physics. Windelband justly
draws the conclusion that Being and knowledge compel
"antmomianism," certain problems inevitably force them-
selves upon us, but all efforts at solution are hopeless. 6
* "It remains an unsolved problem why timeless reality needs realiza-
tion in the temporal course of the event or why it tolerates in itself an
event in the temporal course of which there is something that differs from
its own nature. We do not understand why that which is also has never-
theless to happen; and still less why something different happens from
that which is in itself without time."
Introduction to Philosophy, English translation, p. 299.
148 EXPERIENCE AND NATURE
Empirically, individualized objects, unique affair*,
exist. But they are evanescent, unstable. They trem-
ble on the verge of disappearance as soon as they appear.
Useful arts prove that, within limits, neglect of their
uniqueness and attention to what is common, recurrent,
irrelevant to time, procures and perpetuates the happen-
ing of some of these unique things. Timeless laws, taken
by themselves, like all universals, express dialectic intent,
not any matter of fact existence. But their ultimate
implication is application; they are methods, and when
applied as methods they regulate the precarious flow of
unique situations. Objects of natural science are not
metaphysical rivals of historical events; they are means
of directing the latter. Events change; one individual
gives place to another. But individually qualified things
have some qualities which are pervasive, common, stable.
They are out of time in the sense that a particular tem-
poral quality is irrelevant to them. If anybody feels
relieved by calling them eternal, let them be called eternal.
But let not "eternal" be then conceived as a kind of
absolute perduring existence or Being. It denotes just
what it denotes: irrelevance to existence in its temporal
quality. These non-temporal, mathematical or logical
qualities are capable of abstraction, and of conversion
into relations, into temporal, numerical and spatial
order. 6 As such they are dialectical, non-existential.
* For a convincing discussion see Brown's essay, Intelligence and
Mathematics, in the volume, Creative Intelligence, especially the section
entitled Things, Relations, and Quantities. "Instead of reducing quali-
ties to relations, it seems to me a much more intelligible view to conceive
relations as abstmct ways of taking qualities in general, as qualities
thought of in their function of bridging a gap or making a transition be-
tween two bits of reality that have previously been taken as separate
NATURE, MEANS AND KNOWLEDGE 149
But also as such they are tools, instrumentalities applica-
ble historic events to help regulate their course.
This entire discussion has but a single point. It aims
to show that the problems which constitute modern
epistemology with its rival, materialistic, spiritualistic,
dualistic doctrines, and rival realistic, idealistic, represen-
tational theories; and rival doctrines of relation of mind
and matter occasionalism, pre-established harmony, para-
lellism, panpsychism, etc., have a single origin in the
dogma which denies temporal quality to reality as such,
Such a theory is bound to regard things which are causally
explanatory as superior to results and outcomes; for
the temporal dependence of the latter cannot be dis-
guised, while "causes" can be plausibly converted into
independent beings, or laws, or other non-temporal forms.
As has been pointed out, this denial of change to true
Being had its source in bias in favor of objects of con-
templative enjoyment, together with a theory that such
objects are the adequate subject-matter of science.
The bias is spontaneous and legitimate. The accom-
panying theory of knowledge and reality is a distortion.
The legitimate implication of the preference for worthy
objects of appreciation is the necessity of art, or control of
the sequential order upon which they depend; a neces-
sity which carries with it the further implication that this
order, which is to be discovered by inquiry and confirmed
by experimental action, is the proper object of knowledge.
things." P. 159. Thus "terms, (elements) and relations are both (p.
160) abstract replacements of qualitatively heterogeneous realities of
such a sort as "to symbolize their effective nature in particular respect."
The word "effective" brings out the agreement of the text with this point
of view, for which I am much indebted to Dr. Brown.
ISO EXPERIENCE AND NATURE
Such a recognition would, however, have conceded the
dependence of the contemplative functions of the leisure
class upon the appliances and technique of artisans
among whom all artists were included. And since in
olden time the practice of the arts was largely routine, fixed
by custom and ready-made patterns, such a recognition
would have carried with it the need of transforming the
arts themselves, if the occurrence of ends was to be a
real fulfillment, a realization, and not a contingent
accident. The introduction of inventive thought into
the arts and the civil emancipation of the industrial class
at last made the transformation possible.
When the appliances of a technology that had grown
more deliberate were adopted in inquiry, and the lens,
pendulum, magnetic needle, lever were used as tools of
knowing, and their functions were treated as models to
follow in interpreting physical phenomena, science ceased
to be identified with appreciative contemplation of
noble and ideal objects, was freed from subjection to
esthetic perfections, and became an affair of time and
history intelligently managed. Ends were in conse-
quence no longer determined by physical accident and
social traditions. Anything whatsoever for which means
could be found was an end to be averted or to be secured.
Liberation from a fixed scheme of ends made modern science
possible. In large affairs, practice precedes the possi-
bility of observation and formulation; the results of prac-
tice must accumulate before mind has anything to ob-
serve. There is little cause for wonder therefore that
long after the objects of science had become instrumental-
ities rather than things in their own rights, the old theory
persisted, and philosophy spent much of its effort in the
NATURE, MEANS AND KNOWLEDGE 151
effort to reconcile the traditional theory of knowledge as
immediate possession with the terms and conclusions of
the new method of practice.
It is characteristic of the inevitable moral pre-poeses-
sion of philosophy, together witt the subjective turn erf
modern thought, that many critics take an "instrumental"
theory of knowledge to signify that the value of knowing
is instrumental to the knower. This is a matter which
is as it may be in particular cases; but certainly in many
cases the pursuit of science is sport, carried on, like other
sports, for its own satisfaction. But "instrumentalism"
is a theory not about personal disposition and satisfaction
in knowing, but about the proper objects of science, what
is "proper" being defined in terms of physics.
The distinction between tools (or things in their ob-
jectivities) and fulfilled products of the use of tools ac-
counts for the distinction between known objects on one
side and objects of appreciation and affection on the other.
But the distinction primarily concerns objects themselves;
only secondarily does it apply to attitudes, dispositions,
motivations. Making and using tools may be intrinsically
delightful. Prior to the introduction of machinery for
quantitative production and sale of commodities for profit,
utensils were themselves usually works of art, esthetically
satisfying. This fact does not however define them as
utensils; it does not confer upon them their characteristic
property. In like manner, the pursuit of knowledge is
often an immediately delightful event; its attained pro-
ducts possess esthetic qualities of proportion, order, and
symmetry. But these qualities do not mark off or define
the characteristic and appropriate objects of science.
The character of the object is like that of a tool, say a
152 EXPERIENCE AND NATURE
lever; it is an order of determination of sequential changes
terminating in a foreseen consequence.
We are brought to the question of method. In ancient
science the essence of science was demonstration; the life
blood of modern science is discovery. In the former,
reflective inquiry existed for the sake of attaining a
stable subject-matter; in the latter systematized know-
ledge exists in practice for the sake of stimulating, guid-
ing and checking further inquiries. In ancient science,
"learning" belonged in the realm of inferior being, of
becoming, change; it was transitive, and ceased in the
actualization of final and fixed objects. It was thought
of after the analogy of master and disciple; the former
was already in possession of the truth, and the learner
merely appropriated what already is there in the store
house of the master. In modern science, learning is
finding out what nobody has previously known. It is a
transaction in which nature is teacher, and in which the
teacher comes to knowledge and truth only through the
learning of the inquiring student.
Characteristic differences in logic thus accompany the
change from "knowledge" whose subject-matter is final
affairs to knowledge dealing with instrumental objects.
Where the objects of knowledge are taken to be final,
perfect, complete, metaphysical fulfillments of nature,
proper method consists in definition and classification;
learning closes with demonstration of the rational neces-
sity of definitions and classifications. Demonstration
is an exhibition of the everlasting, universal, final and
fixed nature of objects. Investigation denoted merely
the accumulation of material with which to fill in gaps in an
antecedent ready-made hierarchy of species. Discovery
NATURE, MEANS AND KNOWLEDGE 153
was merely the perception that some particular material
hitherto unclassified by the learner came under a universal
form already known. The universal is already known be-
cause given to thought ; and theparticular is already known,
because given to perception; learning merely brings these
two given forms into connection, so that what is "dis-
co vered" is the subsumption of particular under its
universal.
Apart from their theories, or in spite of them, the
Greeks were possessed by a lively curiosity, and their prac-
tice was better than their logic. In the medieval Christian
period, the logic was taken literally. Revelation, scrip-
tures, church fathers and other authentic sources, in-
creased the number of given universal truths, and also
of given particular facts and events. The master-teacher
was God, who taught not through the dim instrumentality
of rational thought alone, but directly through official
representatives. The form of apprehension of truth
remained the demonstrative syllogism; the store of uni-
versal truths was supplemented by the gracious gift of
revelation, and the resources of the minor premise ex-
tended by divinely established historic facts. Truth
was given to reason and faith ; and the part of the human
mind was to humble itself to hearken, accept and obey.
The scheme was logically complete; it carried out under
new circumstances the old idea that the highest end and
good of man is knowledge of true Being, and that such
knowledge in the degree of its possession effects an as-
similation of the mind to the reality known. It added to
old theoretical premises such institutions and practices
as were practically required to give them effect, so that the
humblest of human creatures might at least start on the
154 EXPERIENCE AND NATURE
road to that knowledge the possession of which Is
tion and bliss. In comparison, most modern theories
are an inconsistent mixture; dialectically the modernist
is easy prey to the traditionalist; he carries so many of
the conceptions of the latter in his intellectual outfit that
he is readily confuted. It is his practice not his theory
that gets him ahead. His professed logic is still largely
that of antecedent truths, demonstration and certitude;
his practice is doubting, forming hypotheses, conduct-
ing experiments. When he surrenders antecedent truths
of reason it is usually only to accept antecedent truths of
sensation. Thus John Stuart Mill con reives of an inductive
logic in which certain canons shall bear exactly the same
relation to inquiry into fact that the rules of the syllogism
bore to classic "deductive" proof or dialectic. He recog-
nizes that science is a matter of inference, but he is as cer-
tain as was Aristotle that inference rests upon certain
truths which are immediately possessed, differing only
about the organ through which they come into our pos-
session.
But in the practice of science, knowledge is an affair of
making sure, not of grasping antecedently given sureties.
What is already known, what is accepted as truth, is of
immense importance; inquiry could not proceed a step
without it. But it is held subject to use, and is at the
mercy of the discoveries which it makes possible. It has
to be adjusted to the latter and not the latter to it. When
things are defined as instruments, their value and validity
reside in what proceeds from them; consequences not
antecedents supply meaning and verity. Truths al-
ready possessed may have practical or moral certainty,
but logically they never lose a hypothetic quality. They
NATURE, MEANS AND KNOWLEDGE 155
are true if: if certain other things eventually present
themselves; and when these latter things occur they in
turn suggest further possibilities; the operation of doubt-
inquiry-finding recurs. Although science is concerned
in practice with the contingent and its method is
that of making hypotheses which are then tried out in
actual experimental change of physical conditions, its
traditional formulation persists in terms of necessary and
fixed objects. Hence all kinds of incoherences occur.
The more stubbornly the traditional formulation is clung
to, the more serious become these inconsistencies.
Leonardo virtually announced the birth of the method
of modern science when he said that true knowledge be-
gins with opinion. The saying involves a revolution;
no other statement could be so shocking to the traditional
logic. Not that opinion as such is anything more than
opinion or an unconfirmed and unwarranted surmise;
but that such surmises may be used; when employed as
hypotheses they induce experimentation. They then
become fore-runners of truth, and mind is released from
captivity to antecedent beliefs. Opinion, in the classic
conception, was concerned with what was inherently
contingent and variable as to possibility and probabil-
ity, in contrast with knowledge concerned with the
inherently necessary and everlasting. It therefore was as
ultimate and unquestionable in its proper sphere as science
was in its place. But opinion as a venture, as an **it
seems to me probable," is an occasion of new observa-
tions, an instigator of research, an indispensable organ in
deliberate discovery. Taken in this fashion, opinion was
the source of new histories, the beginning of operations
that terminated in new conclusions. Its worth lay
156 EXPERIENCE AND NATURE
neither in itself nor in a peculiar realm of objects to
which it was applied, but in the direction of inquiries
which it set agoing. It was a starting point, and like
any beginning of any history was altered and displaced
in the history of which it was the initiation.
Sometimes discovery is treated as a proof of the op-
posite of which it actually shows. It is viewed as evi-
dence that the object of knowledge is already there in
full-fledged being and that we just run across it; we un-
cover it as treasure-hunters find a chest of buried gold.
That there is existence antecedent to search and dis-
covery is of course admitted; but it is denied that as such,
as other than the conclusion of the historical event of
inquiry in its connection with other histories, it is already
the object of knowledge. The Norsemen are said to
have discovered America. But in what sense? They
landed on its shores after a stormy voyage; there was
discovery in the sense of hitting upon a land hitherto
untrod by Europeans. But unless the newly found and
seen object was used to modify old beliefs, to change the
sense of the old map of the earth, there was no discovery
in any pregnant intellectual sense, any more than mere
stumbling over a chair in the dark is discovery till used
as basis of inference which connects the stumbling with a
body of meanings. Discovery of America involved in-
sertion of the newly touched land in a map of the globe.
This insertion, moreover, was not merely additive, but
transformative of a prior picture of the world as to its
surfaces and their arrangements. It may be replied that
it was not the world which was changed but only the map.
To which there is the obvious retort that after all the
map is part of the world, not something outside it, and
NATURE, MEANS AND KNOWLEDGE 157
that its meaning and bearings are so important that a
change in the map involves other and still more impor-
tant objective changes.
It was not simply states of consciousness or ideas inside
the heads of men that were altered when America was
actually discovered; the modification was one in the
public meaning of the world in which men publicly act
To cut off this meaning from the world is to leave us in
a situation where it makes no difference what change
takes place in the world; one wave more or less in a
puddle is of no account. Changing the meaning of the
world effected an existential change. The map of the
world is something more than a piece of linen hung on a
wall. A new world does not appear without profound
transformations in the old one; a discovered America
was a factor interacting with Europe and Asia to produce
consequences previously impossible. A potential object of
further exploration and discoveries now existed in Europe
itself; a source of gold; an opportunity for adventure; an
outlet for crowded and depressed populations, an abode
for exiles and the discounted, an appeal to energy and
invention: in short, an agency of new events and fruitions
at home as well as abroad. In some degree, every genuine
discovery creates some such transformation of both the
meanings and the existences of nature.
Modern idealistic theories of knowledge have dis-
played some sense of the method and objective of science.
They have apprehended the fact that the object of know-
ledge implies that the found rather than the given is the
proper subject matter of science. Recognizing the
part played by intelligence in this finding, they have
framed a theory of the constitutive operation of mind
158 EXPERIENCE AND NATURE
in the determination of real objects. But idealism,
while it has had an intimation of the constructively in-
strumental office of intelligence, has mistranslated the
discovery. Following the old tradition, in its exclusive
identification of the object of knowledge with reality,
equating truth and Being, it was forced to take the
work of thought absolutely and wholesale, instead of
relatively and in detail. That is, it took re-constitution
to be constitution; re-construction to be construction.
Accepting the premise of the equivalence of Reality with
the attained object of knowledge, idealism had no way of
noting that thought is intermediary between some em-
pirical objects and others. Hence an office of transforma-
tion was converted into an act of original and final
creation. A conversion of actual immediate objects into
better, into more secure and significant, objects was
treated as a movement from merely apparent and pheno-
mental Being to the truly Real. In short, idealism is
guilty of neglect that thought and knowledge are
histories.
To call action of thought in constituting objects direct
is the same as to say that it is miraculous. For it is not
thought as idealism defines thought which exercises the
reconstructive function. Only action, interaction, can
change or remake objects. The analogy of the skilled
artist still holds. His intelligence is a factor in forming
new objects which mark a fulfillment. But this is be-
cause intelligence is incarnate in overt action, using
things as means to affect other things. 'Thought,"
reason, intelligence, whatever word we choose to use,
is existentially an adjective (or better an adverb), not
a noun. It is disposition of activity, a quality of that
NATURE, MEANS AND KNOWLEDGE 159
conduct which foresees consequences of existing events,
and which uses what is foreseen as a plan and method
of administering affairs.
This theory, explicitly about thought as a condition
of science, is actually a theory about nature. It involves
attribution to nature of three defining characteristics.
In the first place, it is implied that some natural events
are endings whether enjoyed or obnoxious, which occur,
apart from reflective choice and art, only casually, without
control. In the second place, it implies that events,
being events and not rigid and lumpy substances, are
ongoing and hence as such unfinished, incomplete, in-
determinate. Consequently they possess a possibility
of being so managed and steered that ends may become
fulfilments not just termini, conclusions not just closings.
Suspense, doubt, hypotheses, experiment with alterna-
tives are exponents of this phase of nature. In the third
place, regulation of ongoing and incomplete processes in
behalf of selected consequences, implies that there are
orders of sequence and coexistence involved ; these orders
or relations when ascertained are intellectual means
which enable us to use events as concrete means of di-
recting the course of affairs to forecast conclusions.
The belief that these orders of relation, which are the
appropriate object of science, are therefore the sole
ultimately "real" objects is the source of that assertion
of a symmetrical dovetailed and completed universe
made by both traditional materialism and idealism. The
belief is due to neglect of the fact that such relations are
always relations of ongoing affairs characterized by be-
ginnings and endings which mark them off into unstable
individuals. Yet this neglected factor is empirically so
160 EXPERIENCE AND NATURE
pervasive and conspicuous that it has to be acknowledged
in some form; it is usually acknowledged in a back-
handed way and one which confuses subsequent re-
flection by attributing all qualities inconsistent with
nature thus defined to "finite" mind, in order to account
for ignorance, doubt, error and the need of inference and
inquiry.
If nature is as finished as these schools have defined
it to be, there is no room or occasion in it for such a
mind; it and the traits it is said to possess are literally
supernatural or at least extra-natural.
A realist may deny this particular hypothesis that,
cxistentially, mind designates an instrumental method of
directing natural changes. But he cannot do so in virtue
of his realism; the question at issue is what the real is. If
natural existence is qualitatively individualized or genu-
inely plural, as well as repetitious, and if things have both
temporal quality and recurrence or uniformity, then
the more realistic knowledge is, the more fully it will
reflect and exemplify these traits. Science seizes upon
whatever is so uniform as to make the changes of nature
rhythmic, and hence predictable. But the contingencies
of nature make discovery of these uniformities with
a view to prediction needed and possible. Without
the uniformities, science would be impossible. But if
they alone existed, thought and knowledge would be
impossible and meaningless. The incomplete and un-
certain gives point and application to ascertainment
of regular relations and orders. These relations in them-
selves are hypothetical, and when isolated from applica-
tion are subject-matter of mathematics (in a non-exis-
tential sense). Hence the ultimate objects of science
are guided processes of change*
NATURE, MEANS AND KNOWLEDGE 161
Sometimes the use of the word "truth" is confined to
designating a logical property of propositions; but if we
extend its significance to designate character of existen-
tial reference, this is the meaning of truth: processes of
change so directed that they achieve an intended con-
summation. Instrumentalities are actually such only in
operation; when they operate, an end in- view is in process
of actualization. The means is fully a means only
in its end. The instrumental objects of science are
completely themselves only as they direct the changes
of nature toward a fulfilling object. Thus it may be
said intelligibly and not as mere tautology that the end
of science is knowledge, implying that knowledge is more
than science, being its fruit.
Knowledge is a word of various meanings. Etymologi-
cally, "science" may signify tested and authentic in-
stance of knowledge. But knowledge has also a mean-
ing more liberal and more humane. It signifies events
understood, events so discriminately penetrated by
thought that mind is literally at home in them. It means
comprehension, or inclusive reasonable agreement. What
is sometimes termed "applied" science, may then be more
truly science than is what is conventionally called pure
science. For it is directly concerned with not just
instrumentalities, but instrumentalities at work in ef-
fecting modifications of existence in behalf of conclusions
that are reflectively preferred. Thus conceived the char-
acteristic subject-matter of knowledge consists of fulfilling
objects, which as fulfillments are connected with a history
to which they give character. Thus conceived, knowledge
exists in engineering, medicine and the social arts more
adequately than it does in mathematics, and physics.
162 EXPERIENCE AND NATURE
Thus conceived, history and anthropology are scientific
in a sense in which bodies of information that stop short
with general formulae are not.
"Application" is a hard word for many to accept. It
suggests some extraneous tool ready-made and complete,
which is then put to uses that are external to its nature,
To call the arts applications of science is then to introduce
something foreign to the sciences which the latter irrel-
evantly and accidentally serve. Since the application
is in human use, convenience, enjoyment and improve-
ment, this view of application as something external and
arbitrary reflects and strengthens the theories which
detach man from nature, which, in the language of
philosophy, oppose subject and object. But if we free
ourselves from preconceptions, application of "science"
means application in, not application to. Application
in something signifies a more extensive interaction of
natural events with one another, an elimination of dis-
tance and obstacles; provision of opportunities for in-
teractions that reveal potentialities previously hidden
and that bring into existence new histories with new initia-
tions and endings. Engineering, medicine, social arts
realize relationships that were unrealized in actual exist-
ences. Surely in their new context the latter are under-
stood or known as they are not in isolation. Prejudice
against the abstract, as something remote and technical,
is often irrational; but there is sense in the conviction
that in the abstract there is something lacking which
should be recovered. The serious objection to "applied"
science lies in limitation of the application, as to private
profit and class advantage.
NATURE, MEANS AND KNOWLEDGE 163
"Pure" science is of necessity relational and abstract:
it fulfills its meaning and gains full truth when included
within a course of concrete events. The proposition
that "pure" science is non-existential is a tacit admission
that only "applied" science is existential. Something
else than history and anthropology lose all scientific
standing when standards of "purity" are set up as ulti-
mate; namely, all science of existential events. There is
superstitious awe reflected in the current estimate of
science. If we could free ourselves from a somewhat
abject emotion, it would be clear enough that what
makes any proposition scientific is its power to yield un-
derstanding, insight, intellectual at-homeness, in connec-
tion with any existential state of affairs, by filling events
with coherent and tested meanings. The case of history
is typical and basic. Upon the current view, it is a
waste of time to discuss whether there can be such a
thing as a science of history. History and science
are by definition at opposite poles. And yet if all natural
existences are histories, divorce between history and the
logical mathematical schemes which are the appropriate
objects of pure science, terminates in the conclusion
that of existences there is no science, no adequate
knowledge. Aside from mathematics, all knowledge is
historic; chemistry, geology, physiology, as well as anthro-
pology and those human events to which, arrogantly, we
usually restrict the title of history. Only as science is
seen to be fulfilled and brought to itself in intelligent
management of historical processes in their continuity
can man be envisaged as within nature, and not as
a supernatural extrapolation. Just because nature is
what it is, history is capable of being more truly known
164 EXPERIENCE AND NATURE
understood, intellectually realized than are mathe-
matical and physical objects. Do what we can, there
always remains something recondite and remote in the
latter, until they are restored in the course of affairs
from which they have been sequestrated. While the
humanizing of science contributes to the life of humanity,
it is even more required in behalf of science, in order that
it may be intelligible, simple and clear ; in order that it may
have that correspondence with reality which true knowl-
edge claims for itself.
One can understand the sentiment that animates the
bias of scientific inquirers against the idea that all science
is ultimately applied. It is justified in the sense in which
it is intended; for it is directed against two conceptions
which are harmful, but which, also, are irrelevant to the
position here taken. One of these conceptions is that the
concern or personal motive of the inquirer should be
in each particular inquiry some specific practical applica-
tion. This is just as it happens to be. Doubtless many
important scientific discoveries have been thus instigated,
but that is an incident of human history rather than of
scientific inquiry as such. And upon the whole, or if this
animating interest were to become general, the undoubted
effect is limitation of inquiry and thereby in the end of
the field of application. It marks a recurrence to the
dogma of fixed predetermined ends, while emancipation
from the influence of this dogma has been the chief
service rendered modern scientific methods.
The evil thus effected is increased by the second notion,
namely, that application is identical with "commercialized"
use. It is an incident of human history, and a rather
appalling incident, that applied science has been so largely
NATURE, MEANS ANT> KNOWLEDGE KSS
made an equivalent of uee for private and economic
class purposes and privileges. When inquiry is narrowed
by such motivation or interest, the consequence is in so
far disastrous both to science and to human life. But
this limitation does not spring from nor attach to the
conception of "application" which has been just presented.
It springs from defects and perversions of morality as that
is embodied in institutions and their effects upon personal
disposition. It may be questioned whether the notion
that science is pure in the sense of being concerned ex-
clusively with a realm of objects detached from human
concerns has not conspired to reinforce this moral de-
ficiency. For in effect it has established another class-
interest , that of intellectualists and aloof specialists. And
it is of the nature of any class-interest to generate and con-
firm other class-interests, since division and isolation in a
world of continuities are always reciprocal. The institu-
tion of an interest labelled ideal and idealistic in isolation
tends of necessity to evoke and strengthen other interests
lacking ideal quality. The genuine interests of "pure"
science are served only by broadening the idea of appli-
cation to include all phases of liberation and enrichment
of human experience.
CHAPTER FIV1
NATURE, COMMUNICATION AND MEANING
Of all affairs, communication is the most wonderful.
That things should be able to pass from the plane of exter-
nal pushing and pulling to that of revealing themselves
to man, and thereby to themselves; and that the fruit of
communication should be participation, sharing, is a
wonder by the side of which transubstantiation pales.
When communication occurs, all natural events are sub-
ject to reconsideration and revision; they are re-adapted
to meet the requirements of conversation, whether it be
public discourse or that preliminary discourse termed
thinking. Events turn into objects, things with a mean-
ing. They may be referred to when they do not exist,
and thus be operative among things distant in space and
time, through vicarious presence in a new medium. Brute
efficiencies and inarticulate consummations as soon as
they can be spoken of are liberated from local and acci-
dental contexts, and are eager for naturalization in any
non-insulated, communicating, part of the world. Events
when once they are named lead an independent and double
life. In addition to their original existence, they are
subject to ideal experimentation: their meanings may be
infinitely combined and re-arranged in imagination, and
the outcome of this inner experimentation which is
thought may issue forth in interaction with crude or
raw events. Meanings having been deflected from the
rapid and roaring stream of events into a calm and tra-
versible canal, rejoin the main stream, and color, temper
NATURE AND COMMUNICATION 167
and compose its course. Where communication exists,
things in acquiring meaning, thereby acquire represen-
tatives, surrogates, signs and implicates, which are infi-
nitely more amenable to management, more permanent
and more accommodating, than events in their first estate.
By this fashion, qualitative immediacies cease to be
dumbly rapturous, a possession that is obsessive and an
incorporation that involves submergence : conditions found
in sensations and passions. They become capable of
survey, contemplation, and ideal or logical elaboration;
when something can be said of qualities they are purveyors
of instruction. Learning and teaching come into being,
and there is no event which may not yield information.
A directly enjoyed thing adds to itself meaning, and en-
joyment is thereby idealized. Even the dumb pang of
an ache achieves a significant existence when it can be
designated and descanted upon; it ceases to be merely
oppressive and becomes important; it gains importance,
because it becomes representative; it has the dignity of an
office.
In view of these increments and transformations, it is
not surprising that meanings, under the name of forms
and essences, have often been hailed as modes of Being
beyond and above spatial and temporal existence, invul-
nerable to vicissitude; nor that thought as their posses-
sion has been treated as a non-natural spiritual energy,
disjoined from all that is empirical. Yet there is a
natural bridge that joins the gap between existence and
essence; namely communication, language, discourse.
Failure to acknowledge the presence and operation of
natural interaction in the form of communication creates
the gulf between existence and essence, and that gulf is
factitious and gratuitous.
168 EXPERIENCE AND NATURE
The slight respect paid to larger and more pervasive
kinds of empirical objects by philosophers, even by pro-
fessed empiricists, is apparent in the fact that while they
have discoursed so fluently about many topics they have
discoursed little about discourse itself. Anthropologists,
philologists and psychologists have said most that has
been said about saying. Nevertheless it is a fact of such
distinction that its occurrence changed dumb creatures
as we so significantly call them into thinking and know-
ing animals and created the realm of meanings. Speak-
ing from the standpoint of anthropology Franz Boas says:
"The two outer traits in which the distinction between the
minds of animals and man finds expression are the exist-
ence of organized articulate speech in man and the use of
utensils of varied application." 1 It is antecedently prob-
able that sole external marks of difference are more than
external; that they have intimate connection with such
intrinsic differences as religion, art and science, industry
and politics. "Utensils" were discussed in the last chap-
ter, in connection with the useful arts and knowledge,
and their indispensable relation with science pointed out.
But at every point appliances and application, uten-
sils and uses, are bound up with directions, suggestions
and records made possible by speech; what has been said
about the role of tools is subject to a condition supplied
by language, the tool of tools.
Upon the whole, professed transcendentalists have
been more aware than have professed empiricists of the
fact that language makes the difference between brute and
man. The trouble is that they have lacked naturalistic
conception of its origin and status. Logos has been cor-
1 The Miad of Primitive Man, p. 98,
NATURE AND COMMUNICATION 169
rectly identified with mind; but logos and hence mind was
conceived supernaturally. Logic was thereby supposed
to have its basis in what is beyond human conduct and
relationships, and in consequence the separation of the
physical and the rational, the actual and the ideal,
received its traditional formulation.
In protest against this view empirical thinkers have
rarely ventured in discussion of language beyond refer-
ence to some peculiarity of brain structure, or to some
psychic peculiarity, such as tendency to "outer expres-
sion" of "inner" states. Social interaction and institu-
tions have been treated as products of a ready-made
specific physical or mental endowment of a self-sufficing
individual, wherein language acts as a mechanical go-
between to convey observations and ideas that have prior
and independent existence. Speech is thus regarded as
a practical convenience but not of fundamental intellec-
tual significance. It consists of "mere words," sounds,
that happen to be associated with perceptions, senti-
ments and thoughts which are complete prior to language.
Language thus, "expresses" thought as a pipe conducts
water, and with even less transforming function than is
exhibited when a wine-press "expresses" the juice of
grapes. The office of signs in creating reflection, fore-
sight and recollection is passed by. In consequence, the
occurrence of ideas becomes a mysterious parallel addi-
tion to physical occurrences, with no community and no
bridge from one to the other.
It is safe to say that psychic events, such as are anything
more than reactions of a creature susceptible to pain and
diffuse comfort, have language for one of their conditions.
It is altogether likely that the "ideas" which Hume found
170 EXPERIENCE AND NATURE
in constant flux whenever he looked within himself were a
succession of words silently uttered. Primary to these
events there was, of course, a substratum of organic
psycho-physical actions. But what made the latter
identifiable objects, events with a perceptible character,
was their concretion in discourse. When the introspec-
tionist thinks he has withdrawn into a wholly private
realm of events disparate in kind from other events, made
out of mental stuff, he is only turning his attention to his
own soliloquy. And soliloquy is the product and reflex
of converse with others; social communication not an
effect of soliloquy. If we had not talked with others and
they with us, we should never talk to and with ourselves.
Because of converse, social give and take, various organic
attitudes become an assemblage of persons engaged in con-
verse, conferring with one another, exchanging distinc-
tive experiences, listening to one another, over-hearing
unwelcome remarks, accusing and excusing. Through
speech a person dramatically identifies himself with poten-
tial acts and deeds; he plays many rdles, not in successive
stages of life but in a contemporaneously enacted drama.
Thus mind emerges.
It is significant of the differences between Greek and
modern experience, that when their respective philoso-
phers discovered discourse, they gave such different ac-
counts of it. The moderns made of it a world separate
from spatial and material existences, a separate and
private world made of sensations, images, sentiments.
The Greeks were more nearly aware that it was discourse
they had discovered. But they took the structure of dis-
course for the structure of things, instead of for the forma
which things assume under the pressure and opportunity
NATURE AND COMMUNICATION 171
of social cooperation and exchange. They overlooked the
fact that meanings as objects of thought are entitled to be
called complete and ultimate only because they are not
original but are a happy outcome of a complex history.
They made them primitive and independent forms of
things, intrinsically regulative of processes of becoming.
They took a work of social art to be nature independent
of man. They overlooked the fact that the import of
logical and rational essences is the consequence of social
interactions, of companionship, mutual assistance, direc-
tion and concerted action in fighting, festivity, and
work. Hence they conceived of ideal meanings as the
ultimate framework of events, in which a system of sub-
stances and properties corresponded to subjects and
predicates of the uttered proposition. Things conformed
naturally and exactly to parts of speech, some being
inherently subject-matter of nouns, proper and common;
others of verbs, of which some expressed self-activity,
while others designated adjectival and adverbial changes
to which things are exposed on account of their own
defects; some being external relations in which substances
stand to one another, and subject-matter of prepositions.
The resulting theory of substances, essential properties,
accidental qualities and relations, and the identification
of Being, (by means of the copula "is") with the tenses of
the verb, (so that the highest Being was, is now, and ever
shall be, in contrast to existence now and then, occasional,
wholly past, merely just now, or possibly at some pas-
sing time in the future) controlled the whole scheme of
physics and metaphysics, which formed the philosophic
tradition of Europe. It was a natural consequence of
the insight that things, meanings, and words correspond.
172 EXPERIENCE AND NATURE
The insight was perverted by the notion that the
correspondence of things and meanings is prior to
discourse and social intercourse. Hence, every true
affirmation was an assertion of the fixed belonging to one
another of two objects in nature; while every true denial
was an assertion of intrinsic exclusion of one object by
another. The consequence was belief in ideal essences,
individually complete, and yet connected in a system of
necessary subordinations and dependencies. Dialectic of
their relationships, definition, classification, division in
arranging essences, constituted scientific truth about the
inmost constituents of nature. Thus a discovery which
is the greatest single discovery of man, putting man in
potential possession of liberation and of order, became the
source of an artificial physics of nature, the basis of a
science, philosophy and theology in which the universe
was an incarnate grammatical order constructed after the
model of discourse.
The modern discovery of inner experience, of a realm
of purely personal events that are always at the indivi-
dual's command, and that are his exclusively as well as
inexpensively for refuge, consolation and thrill is also a
great and liberating discovery. It implies a new worth
and sense of dignity in human individuality, a sense that
an individual is not a mere property of nature, set in place
according to a scheme independent of him, as an article
is put in its place in a cabinet, but that he adds something,
that he marks a contribution. It is the counterpart of
what distinguishes modern science, experimental, hypo-
thetical; a logic of discovery having therefore oppor-
tunity for individual temperament, ingenuity, invention,
It is the counterpart of modern politics, art, religion
NATURE AND COMMUNICATION ITS
and industry where individuality is given room and
movement, in contrast to the ancient scheme of ex-
perience, which held individuals tightly within a given
order subordinated to its structure and patterns. But
here also distortion entered in. Failure to recognize that
this world of inner experience is dependent upon an
extension of language which is a social product and
operation led to the subjectivistic, solipsistic and egotis-
tic strain in modern thought. If the classic thinkers
created a cosmos after the model of dialectic, giving ra-
tional distinctions power to constitute and regulate,
modern thinkers composed nature after the model of
personal soliloquizing.
Language considered as an experienced event enables
us to interpret what really happened when rational dis-
course and logic were discovered by the ancients, and
when 'inner' experience and its interest were discovered
by moderns. Language is a natural function of human
association; and its consequences react upon other events,
physical and human, giving them meaning or significance.
Events that are objects or significant exist in a context
where they acquire new ways of operation and new prop-
erties. Words are spoken of as coins and money. Now
gold, silver, and instrumentalities of credit are first of all,
prior to being money, physical things with their own im-
mediate and final qualities. But as money they are sub-
stitutes, representations, and surrogates, which embody
relationships. As a substitute, money not merely facili-
tates exchange of such commodities as existed prior to its
use, but it revolutionizes as well production and consump-
tion of all commodities, because it brings into being new
transactions, forming new histories and affairs. Ex-
174 EXPERIENCE AND NATURE
change is not an event that can be isolated. It marks
the emergence of production and consumption into a new
medium and context wherein they acquire new properties.
Language is similarly not a mere agency for economiz-
ing energy in the interaction of human beings. It is a
release and amplification of energies that enter into it,
conferring upon them the added quality of meaning. The
quality of meaning thus introduced is extended and trans-
ferred, actually and potentially, from sounds, gestures
and marks, to all other things in nature. Natural events
become messages to be enjoyed and administered, pre-
cisely as are song, fiction, oratory, the giving of advice
and instruction. Thus events come to possess characters ;
they are demarcated, and noted. For character is gen-
eral and distinguished.
When events have communicable meaning, they have
marks, notations, and are capable of con-notation and
de-notation. They are more than mere occurrences;
they have implications. Hence inference and reasoning
are possible; these operations are reading the message of
things, which things utter because they are involved in
human associations. When Aristotle drew a distinction
between sensible things that are more noted known
to us and rational things that are more noted known
in themselves, he was actually drawing a distinction
between things that operate in a local, restricted universe
of discourse, and things whose marks are such that
they readily enter into indefinitely extensive and varied
discourse.
The interaction of human beings, namely, association,
is not different in origin from other modes of interaction.
There is a peculiar absurdity in the question of how indi-
NATURE AND COMMUNICATION 175
victuals become social, if the question is taken literally.
Human beings illustrate the same traits of both immediate
uniqueness and connection, relationship, as do other
things. No more in their case than in that of atoms and
physical masses is immediacy the whole of existence and
therefore an obstacle to being acted upon by and effect-
ing other things. Everything that exists in as far as it is
known and knowable is in interaction with other things.
It is associated, as well as solitary, single. The catching
up of human individuals into association is thus no new
and unprecedented fact; it is a manifestation of a com-
monplace of existence. Significance resides not in the
bare fact of association, therefore, but in the consequences
that flow from the distinctive patterns of human associa-
tion. There is, again, nothing new or unprecedented in
the fact that assemblage of things confers upon the
assembly and its constituents, new properties by means
of unlocking energies hitherto pent in. The significant
consideration is that assemblage of organic human beings
transforms sequence and coexistence into participation.
Gestures and cries are not primarily expressive and
communicative. They are modes of organic behavior as
much as are locomotion, seizing and crunching. Lan-
guage, signs and significance, come into existence not by
intent and mind but by over-flow, by-products, in ges-
tures and sound. The story of language is the story of
the use made of these occurrences; a use that is eventual,
as well as eventful. Those rival accounts of the origin of
language that go by the nicknames of bow-wow, pooh-
pooh, and ding-dong theories are not in fact theories of
the origin of language. They are accounts, of some
plausibility, of how and why certain sounds rather than
176 EXPERIENCE AND NATURE
others were selected to signify objects, acts and situations.
If the mere existence of sounds of these kinds constituted
language, lower animals might well converse more subtly
and fluently than man. But they became language
only when used within a context of mutual assistance and
direction. The latter are alone of prime importance in
considering the transformation of organic gestures and
cries into names, things with significance, or the origin of
language.
Observable facts of animal experience furnish us with
our starting point. "Animals respond to certain stimuli
.... by the contraction of certain muscles whose
functioning is of no direct consequence to the animal itself,
but affects other animals by stimulating them to act.
. . . . Let us call this class the signaling reflexes.
A few, but very diversified examples of the signaling
reflexes, are the lighting of a fire-fly, the squeezing out of a
black liquid from the ink bladder of a cuttle-fish, the crow-
ing of a rooster .... the spreading of its tail by
a peacock. These reflex activities affect other animals
by stimulating them If no other animals
are present, or these other animals fail to respond by
their own reflexes, the former reflex actions are completely
wasted." 2
Sub-human animals thus behave in ways which have no
direct consequences of utility to the behaving animal, but
which call out certain characteristic responses, sexual,
protective, food-finding (as with the cluck of a hen to her
chicks), in other animals. In some cases, the act evoked
'Max Meyer, The Psychology Of The Other One, 1922, p. 195; a
statement of behavioristic psychology that has hardly received the atten-
tion it intrinsically deserves.
NATURE AND COMMUNICATION 177
in other animals has in turn an important consequence
for the first agent. A sexual act or a combined protective
act against danger is furthered. In other cases, the con-
sequences turn out useful to the species, to a numerically
indeterminate group including individuals not yet born.
Signaling acts evidently form the basic material of lan-
guage. Similar activities occur without intent in man;
thus a babe's scream attracts the attention of an adult
and evokes a response useful to the infant, although the
cry itself is an organic overflow having no intent. So too
a man's posture and facial changes may indicate to
another things which the man himself would like to con-
ceal, so that he "gives himself away." "Expression,"
or signs, communication of meaning, exists in such cases
for the observer, not for the agent.
While signaling acts are a material condition of language
they are not language nor yet are they its sufficient
condition. Only from an external standpoint, is the
original action even a signal; the response of other animals
to it is not to a sign, but, by some preformed mechanism,
to a direct stimulus. By habit, by conditioned reflex,
hens run to the farmer when he makes a clucking noise,
or when they hear the rattle of grain in a pan. When
the farmer raises his arms to throw the grain they scatter
and fly, to return only when the movement ceases. They
act as if alarmed; his movement is thus not a sign of food;
it is a stimulus that evokes flight. But a human infant
learns to discount such movements; to become interested
in them as events preparatory to a desired consummation;
he learns to treat them as signs of an ulterior event so
that his response is to their meaning. He treats them as
means to consequences. The hen's activity is ego-cen-
178 EXPERIENCE AND NATURE
trie; that of the human being is participative. The latter
puts himself at the standpoint of a situation in which two
parties share. This is the essential peculiarity of lan-
guage, or signs.
A requests B to bring him something, to which A points,
say a flower. There is an original mechanism by which
B may react to A's movement in pointing. But natively
such a reaction is to the movement, not to the pointing,
not to the object pointed out. But B learns that the
movement is a pointing; he responds to it not in itself,
but as an index of something else. His response is trans-
ferred from A'% direct movement to the object to which A
points. Thus he does not merely execute the natural
acts of looking or grasping which the movement might
instigate on its own account. The motion of A attracts
his gaze to the thing pointed to; then, instead of just
transferring his response from A's movement to the
native reaction he might make to the thing as stimulus, he
responds in a way which is a function of A'& relationship,
actual and potential, to the thing. The characteristic
thing about 5's understanding of A's movement and
sounds is that he responds to the thing from the stand-
point of A. He perceives the thing as it may function in
,4's experience, instead of just ego-centrically. Similarly,
A in making the request conceives the thing not only in
its direct relationship to himself, but as a thing capable
of being grasped and handled by B. He sees the thing
as it may function in B'& experience. Such is the essence
and import of communication, signs and meaning. Some-
thing is literally made common in at least two different
centres of behavior. To understand is to anticipate
together, it is to make a or osa-iref erence which, when acted
NATURE AND COMMUNICATION 179
upon, brings about a partaking in a common, inclusive,
undertaking.
Stated in greater detail; B upon hearing A, makes a
preparatory reaction of his eyes, hands and legs in view of
the consummatory act of A's possession; he engages in
the act of grasping, carrying and tendering the flower to
A. At the same time, A makes a preparatory response
to U's consummatory act, that of carrying and proffering
the flower. Thus neither the sounds uttered by A, his
gesture of pointing, nor the sight of the thing pointed to,
is the occasion and stimulus of JS's act; the stimulus is
B's anticipatory share in the consummation of a trans-
action in which both participate. The heart of language
is not "expression" of something antecedent, much less
expression of antecedent thought. It is communication;
the establishment of cooperation in an activity in which
there are partners, and in which the activity of each is
modified and regulated by partnership. To fail to under-
stand is to fail to come into agreement in action; to mis-
understand is to set up action at cross purposes. Take
speech as behavioristically as you will, including the elimi-
nation of all private mental states, and it remains true
that it is markedly distinguished from the signaling acts
of animals. Meaning is not indeed a psychic existence;
it is primarily a property of behavior, and secondarily a
property of objects. But the behavior of which it is a
quality is a distinctive behavior; cooperative, in that
response to another's act involves contemporaneous
response to a thing as entering into the other's behavior,
and this upon both sides. It is difficult to state the
exact physiological mechanism which is involved. But
about the fact there ii no doubt It constitutes the in-
180 EXPERIENCE AND NATURE
telligibility of acts and things. Possession of the capacity
to engage in such activity is intelligence. Intelligence
and meaning are natural consequences of the peculiar form
which interaction sometimes assumes in the case of human
beings.
Primarily meaning is intent and intent is not personal
in a private and exclusive sense. A proposes the consum-
matory possession of the flower through the medium or
means of B J $ action; B proposes to cooperate or act
adversely in the fulfillment of ^4's proposal. Secondar-
ily, meaning is the acquisition of significance by things in
their status in making possible and fulfilling shared
cooperation. In the first place, it is the motion and
sounds of A which have meaning, or are signs. Similarly
the movements of B, while they immediate to him, are
signs to A of B's cooperation or refusal. But secondarily
the thing pointed out by A to B gains meaning. It
ceases to be just what it brutely is at the moment, and is
responded to in its potentiality, as a means to remoter
consequences. The flower pointed to for example, is
portable; but apart from language portability is a brute
contingency waiting for its actualization upon circum-
stance. But when A counts upon the understanding
and cooperation of J3, and B responds to the intent of A,
the flower is contemporaneously portable though not
now actually in movement. Its potentiality, or con-
ditioning of consequences, is an immediately recognized
and possessed trait; the flower means portability instead
of simply being portable. Animism, the attribution of
desire and intent to inanimate things, is no mysterious
projection of psychical traits; it is a misinterpretation of
a natural fact, namely, that significant things are things
NATURE AND COMMUNICATION 181
actually implicated in situations of shared or social pur-
pose and execution.
The logic of animism is simple. Since words act upon
things indirectly, or as signs, and since words express the
significant consequences of things, (the traits for the sake
of which they are used), why should not words act also
directly upon things to release their latent powers? Since
we "call" things by their names, why should they not
answer? And if they assist us as our friends do when ap-
pealed to, is not this proof they are animated by friendly
intent; or if they frustrate us, proof that they are filled
with the same traits which inspirit our enemies? "Anim-
ism" is thus the consequence of a direct transfer of proper-
ties of a social situation to an immediate relationship of
natural things to a person. Its legitimate and constant
form is poetry, in which things and events are given voice
and directly communicate with us.
If we consider the form or scheme of the situation in
which meaning and understanding occur, we find an
involved simultaneous presence and cross-reference of
immediacy and efficiency, overt actuality and potentiality,
the consummatory and the instrumental. A in making
the request of B, at the same time makes the incipient
and preparatory response of receiving the thing at the
hands of B; he performs in readiness the consummatory
act. B's understanding of the meaning of what A says,
instead of being a mere reaction to sound, is an anticipa-
tion of a consequence, while it is also an immediate activ-
ity of eyes, legs, and hands in getting and giving the flower
to A. The flower is the thing which it immediately is,
and it also is means of a conclusion. All of this is directly
involved in the existence of intelligible speech. No such
182 EXPERIENCE AND NATURE
simultaneous presence of finality and agency, is possible
in things as purely physical in abstraction, that is, of po-
tential presence in a situation of communication. Since
we have discovered that all things have a phase of poten-
tial communicability, that is, that any conceivable thing
may enter into discourse, the retrospective imputation of
meanings and logical relationships to bare things is
natural; it does no harm, save when the imputation is
dogmatic and literal. What a physical event imme-
diately is, and what it can do or its relationship are dis-
tinct and incommensurable. But when an event has
meaning, its potential consequences become its integral
and funded feature. When the potential consequences
are important and repeated, they form the very nature
and essence of a thing, its defining, identifying, and dis-
tinguishing form. To recognize the thing is to grasp its
definition. Thus we become capable of perceiving things
instead of merely feeling and having them. To perceive
is to acknowledge unattained possibilities; it is to refer the
present to consequences, apparition to issue, and thereby
to behave in deference to the connections of events. As
an attitude, perception or awareness is predictive expec-
tancy, wariness. Since potential consequences also mark
the thing itself, and form its nature, the event thus marked
becomes an object of contemplation; as meaning, future
consequences already belong to the thing. The act of
striving to bring them existentially into the world may
be commuted into esthetic enjoyed possession of form.
Essence, as has been intimated, is but a pronounced
instance of meaning; to be partial, and to assign a meaning
to a thing as the meaning is but to evince human subjec-
tion to bias. Since consequences differ also in their con-
NATURE AND COMMUNICATION 183
sequence and hence importance, practical good sense may
attach to this one-sided partiality, for the meaning seized
upon as essence may designate extensive and recurrent
consequences. Thus is explained the seeming paradox
of the distinction and connection of essence and exist-
ence. Essence is never existence, and yet it is the essence,
the distilled import, of existence; the significant thing
about it, its intellectual voucher, the means of inference
and extensive transfer, and object of esthetic intuition.
In it, feeling and understanding are one; the meaning of a
thing is the sense it makes.
Since the consequences which are liked have an empha-
tic quality, it is not surprising that many consequences,
even though recognized to be inevitable, are regarded as if
they were accidental and alien. Thus the very essence
of a thing is identified with those consummatory conse-
quences which the thing has when conditions are
felicitous. Thus the essence, one, immutable and con-
stitutive, which makes the thing what it is, emerges from
the various meanings which vary with varying condi-
tions and transitory intents. When essence is then
thought to contain existence as the perfect includes the
imperfect, it is because a legitimate, practical measure of
reality in terms of importance is illegitimately altered
into a theoretical measure.
Discourse itself is both instrumental and consummatory.
Communication is an exchange which procures something
wanted; it involves a claim, appeal, order, direction or
request, which realizes want at less cost than personal
labor exacts, since it procures the cooperative assistance
of others. Communication is also an immediate enhance-
ment of life, enjoyed for its own sake. The dance is
184 EXPERIENCE AND NATURB
accompanied by song and becomes the drama; scenes of
danger and victory are most fully savored when they are
told. Greeting becomes a ceremonial with its prescribed
rites. Language is always a form of action and in its
instrumental use is always a means of concerted action
for an end, while at the same time it finds in itself all the
goods of its possible consequences. For there is no mode
of action as fulfilling and as rewarding as is concerted con-
sensus of action. It brings with it the sense of sharing
and merging in a whole. Forms of language are un-
rivalled in ability to create this sense, at first with direct
participation on the part of an audience; and then, as
literary forms develop, through imaginative identifi-
cation. Greek thinkers had distinguished patterns in
Greek literary art of consummatory uses of speech, and
the meanings that were discovered to be indispensable to
communication were treated as final and ultimate in
nature itself. Essences were hypostatized into original
and constitutive forms of all existence.
The idea put forth about the connection of meaning
with language is not to be confused with traditional
nominalism. It does not imply that meaning and
essence are adventitious and arbitrary. The defect of
nominalism lies in its virtual denial of interaction and
association. It regarded the word not as a mode of social
action with which to realize the ends of association, but
as an expression of a ready-made, exclusively individual,
mental state; sensation, image or feeling, which, being an
existence, is necessarily particular. For the sound, gesture,
or written mark which is involved in language is a particu-
lar existence. But as such it is not a word; and it does
not become a word by declaring a mental existence; it be-
NATURE AND COMMUNICATION 18S
comes a word by gaining meaning; and it gains meaning
when its use stablish.es a genuine community of action.
Interaction, operative relationship, is as much a fact
about events as are particularity and immediacy. Lan-
guage and its consequences are characters taken on by
natural interaction and natural conjunction in specified
conditions of organization. Nominalism ignores organiza-
tion, and thus makes nonsense of meanings.
Language is specifically a mode of interaction of at
least two beings, a speaker and a hearer; it presupposes an
organized group to which these creatures belong, and from
whom they have acquired their habits of speech. It is
therefore a relationship, not a particularity. This con-
sideration alone condemns traditional nominalism. The
meaning of signs moreover always includes something
common as between persons and an object. When we
attribute meaning to the speaker as his intent, we take for
granted another person who is to share in the execution of
the intent, and also something, independent of the persons
concerned, through which the intent is to be realized.
Persons and thing must alike serve as means in a common i
shared consequence. This community of partaking is
meaning.
The invention and use of tools have played a large part
in consolidating meanings, because a tool is a thing used
as means to consequences, instead of being taken directly
and physically. It is intrinsically relational, anticipa-
tory, predictive. Without reference to the absent, or
"transcendence/ 7 nothing is a tool. The most convinc-
ing evidence that animals do not "think" is found in the
fact is that they have no tools, but depend upon their own
relatively-fixed bodily structures to effect results.
186 EXPERIENCE AND NATURE
Because of such dependence they have no way of
tinguishing the immediate existence of anything from its
potential efficiencies; no way of projecting its conse-
quences to define a nature or essence. Anything whatever
used as a tool exhibits distinction and identification.
Fire existentially burns; while fire which is employed
in order to cook and keep warm, especially after other
things, like rubbing sticks together, are used as means to
generate it, is an existence having meaning and potential
essence. The presence of inflammation and terror or
discomfort is no longer the whole story; an occurrence is
nov an object; and while it is absurd to hold (as idealism
virtually does) that the meaning of an existence is the
real substance of the existence, it is equally absurd not to
recognize the full transformative imnort of what has
happened.
As to be a tool, or to be used as means ior consequences,
is to have and to endow with meaning, language, being
the tool of tools, is the cherishing mother of all signifi-
cance. For other instrumentalities and agencies, the
things usually thought of as appliances, agencies and
furnishings, can originate and develop only in social
groups made possible by language. Things become tools
ceremonially and institutionally. The notoriously con-
ventionalized and traditional character of primitive uten-
sils and their attendant symbolizations demonstrate
this fact. Moreover, tools and artifices of agency are
always found in connection with some division of labor
which depends upon some device of communication* The
statement can be proved in a more theoretical way. Im-
mediacy as such is transient to the point of evanescence,
and its flux has to be fixed by some easily recoverable
NATURE AND COMMUNICATION 187
and recurrent act within control of the organism, like
gesture and spoken sounds, before things can be inten-
tionally utilized. A creature might accidentally warm
itself by a fire or use a stick to stir the ground in a way
which furthered the growth of food-plants. But the
effect of comfort ceases with the fire, existentially; a
stick even though once used as a lever would revert to the
status of being just a stick, unless the relationship between
it and its consequence were distinguished and retained.
Only language, or some form of artificial signs, serves to
register the relationship and make it fruitful in other
contexts of particular existence. Spears, urns, baskets,
snares may have originated accidentally in some con-
summatory consequence of natural events. But only
repetition through concerted action accounts for their
becoming institutionalized as tools, and this concert of
action depends upon the use of memoranda and com-
munication. To make another aware of the possibility
of a use or objective relationship is to perpetuate what
is otherwise an incident as an agency ; communication is
a condition of consciousness.
Thus every meaning is generic or universal. It is
something common between speaker, hearer and the
thing to which speech refers. It is universal also as a
means of generalization. For a meaning is a method of
action, a way of using things as means to a shared con-
summation, and method is general, though the things to
which it is applied are particular. The meaning, for
example, of portability is something in which two persons
and an object share. But portability after it is once
apprehended becomes a way of treating other things;
it is extended widely. Whenever this is a chance, it is
188 EXPERIENCE AND NATURE
applied; application ceases only when a thing refuses to
be treated in this way. And even then refusal may be
only a challenge to develop the meaning of portability
until the thing can be transported. Meanings are rules
for using and interpreting things; interpretation being al-
ways an imputation of potentiality for some consequence.
It would be difficult to imagine any doctrine more
absurd than the theory that general ideas or meanings
arise by the comparison of a number of particulars,
eventuating in the recognition of something common
to them all. Such a comparison may be employed to
check a suggested widened application of a rule. But
generalization is carried spontaneously as far as it will
plausibly go; usually much further than it will actually
go. A newly acquired meaning is forced upon everything
that does not obviously resist its application, as a child
uses a new word whenever he gets a chance or as he plays
with a new toy. Meanings are self-moving to new cases*
In the end, conditions force a chastening of this spontane-
ous tendency. The scope and limits of application are
ascertained experimentally in the process of application.
The history of science, to say nothing of popular beliefs,
is sufficient indication of the difficulty found in submit-
ting this irrational generalizing tendency to the disci-
pline of experience. To call it a priori is to express a
fact; but to impute the a priori character of the generaliz-
ing force of meanings to reason is to invert the facts.
Rationality is acquired when the tendency becomes cir-
cumspect, based upon observation and tested by deliber-
ate experiment.
Meaning is objective as well as universal. Originat-
ing as a concerted or combined method of using or enjoy-
NATURE AND COMMUNICATION 189
ing things, it indicates a possible interaction, not a thing
in separate singleness. A meaning may not of course
have the particular objectivity which is imputed to it, as
whistling does not actually portend wind, nor the cere-
monial sprinkling of water indicate rain. But such magi-
cal imputations of external reference testify to the objec-
tivity of meaning as such. Meanings are naturally the
meaning of something or other; difficulty lies in discrimi-
nating the right thing. It requires the discipline of
ordered and deliberate experimentation to teach us that
some meanings delightful or horrendous as they are, are
meanings communally developed in the process of com-
munal festivity and control, and do not represent the
polities, and ways and means of nature apart from social
arts. Scientific meanings were superadded to esthetic and
affectional meanings when objects instead of being defined
in terms of their consequences in social interactions and
discussion were defined in terms of their consequences
with respect to one another. This discrimination per-
mitted esthetic and affective objects to be freed from
magical imputations, which were due to attributing to
them in rerum natura the consequences they had in the
transmitted culture of the group.
Yet the truth of classic philosophy in assigning objec-
tivity to meanings, essences, ideas remains unassailable.
It is heresy to conceive meanings to be private, a property
of ghostly psychic existences. Berkeley with all his nom-
inalism, saw that "ideas," though particular in existence,
are general in function and office. His attribution of the
ideas which are efficacious in conduct to an order estab-
lished by God, while evincing lack of perception of their
naturalistic origin in communication or communal inter-
190 EXPERIENCE AND NATU1US
action, manifests a sounder sense of the objectivity of
meanings than has been shown by those who eliminated
his theology while retaining his psychology. The incon-
sistency of the sensationalists who, stopping short of
extreme scepticism, postulate that some associations of
ideas correspond to conjunctions among things is also
reluctantly extorted evidence of how intimation of the
objectivity of ideas haunts the mind in spite of theory to
the contrary.
Meanings are objective because they are modes of
natural interaction; such an interaction, although primar-
ily between organic beings, as includes things and energies
external to living creatures. The regulative force of
legal meanings affords a convenient illustration. A traf-
fic policeman holds up his hand or blows a whistle. His
act operates as a signal to direct movements. But it is
more than an episodic stimulus. It embodies a rule of
social action. Its proximate meaning is its near-by con-
sequences in coordination of movements of persons and
vehicles; its ulterior and permanent meaning essence
is its consequence in the way of security of social move-
ments. Failure to observe the signal subjects a person to
arrest, fine or imprisonment. The essence embodied in
the policeman'* whistle is not an occult reality super-
imposed upon a sensuous or physical flux and imparting
form to it; a mysterioua subsistence somehow housed
within a psychical event. It* essence is the rule, com-
prehensive and persisting, the standardized habit, of social
interaction, and for the sake of which the whistle
is used. The pattern, archetype, that forms the essence
of the whistle as a particular noise is an orderly
arrangement of the movements of persons, and vehicles
NATURE AND COMMUNICATION 191
established by social agreement as its consequence. This
meaning is independent of the psychical landscape, the
sensations and imagery, of the policeman and others
concerned. But it is not on that account a timeless
spiritual ghost nor pale logical subsistence divorced from
events.
The case is the same with the essence of any non-human
event, like gravity, or virtue, or vertebrate. Some con-
sequences of the interaction of things concern us; the
consequences are not merely physical; they enter finally
into human action and destiny. Fire burns and the burn-
ing is of moment. It enters experience; it is fascinating
to watch swirling flames; it is important to avoid its
dangers and to utilize its beneficial potencies. When we
name an event, calling it fire, we speak proleptically; we
do not name an immediate event; that is impossible.
We employ a term of discourse; we invoke a meaning,
namely, the potential consequences of the existence. The
ultimate meaning of the noise made by the traffic officer
is the total consequent system of social behavior, in which
individuals are subjected, by means of noise, to social
coordination; its proximate meaning is a coordination of
the movements of persons and vehicles in the neighbor-
hood and directly affected. Similarly the ultimate mean-
ing, or essence, denominated fire, is the consequences of
certain natural events within the scheme of human activi-
ties, in the experience of social intercourse, the hearth and
domestic altar, shared comfort, working of metals, rapid
transit, and other such affairs. " Scientifically/' we ignore
these ulterior meanings. And quite properly; for when a
sequential order of changes is determined, the final mean-
ing in immediate enjoyments and appreciations is capable
of control*
192 EXPERIENCE AND NATURE
While classic thought, and its survival in later idealisms,
assumed that the ulterior human meanings, meanings of
direct association in discourse, are forms of nature apart
from their place in discourse, modern thought is given
to marking a sharp separation between meanings deter-
mined in terms of the causal relationship of things and
meanings in terms of human association. Consequently,
it treats the latter as negligible or as purely private, not
the meanings of natural events at all. It identifies the
proximate meanings with the only valid meanings, and
abstract relations become an idol. To pass over in science
the human meanings of the consequences of natural
interactions is legitimate; indeed it is indispensable. To
ascertain and state meanings in abstraction from social
or shared situations is the only way in which the latter can
be intelligently modified, extended and varied. Mathe-
matical symbols have least connection with distinctively
human situations and consequences; and the finding of
such terms, free from esthetic and moral significance, is a
necessary part of the technique. Indeed, such elimina-
tion of ulterior meanings supplies perhaps the best pos-
sible empirical definition of mathematical relations.
They are meanings without direct reference to human
behavior. Thus an essence becomes wholly "intellectual"
or scientific, devoid of consummatory implication; it ex-
presses the purely instrumental without reference to the
objects to which the events in question are instrumental.
It then becomes the starting point of reflection that may
terminate in ends or consequences in human suffering and
enjoyment not previously experienced. Abstraction from
any particular consequence (which is the same thing as
taking instrumentality generally), opens the way to new
uses and consequences.
NATURE AND COMMUNICATION 193
This is what happens when the meaning of the traffic
officer's signal is detached from its own context, and taken
up into, say, written and published language, a topic of
independent consideration by experts or by civic admini-
strators. In being placed in a context of other meanings,
(theoretically and scientifically discussed), it is liberated
from the contingencies of its prior use. The outcome may
be the invention of a new and improved system of sema-
phores which exercise regulation of human interaction
more effectively. Deliberate abstraction, however, from
all ulterior human use and consequence is hardly likely to
occur in the case of discourse about a signal system. In
physical science, the abstraction or liberation is complete.
Things are defined by means of symbols that convey only
their consequences with respect to one another. 'Water'
in ordinary experience designates an essence of something
which has familiar bearings and uses in human life, drink
and cleansing and the extinguishing of fire. But H S O
gets away from these connections, and embodies in its
essence only instrumental efficiency in respect to things
independent of human affairs.
The counterpart of classic thought which took ends, en-
joyments, uses, not simply as genuine termini of natural
events (which they are), but as the essence and form of
things independent of human experience, is a modern
philosophy which makes reality purely mechanical and
which regards the consequences of things in human experi-
ence as accidental or phenomenal by-products. In truth,
abstraction from human experience is but a liberation from
familiar and specific enjoyments, it provides means for
detecting hitherto untried consequences, for invention,
for the creation of new wants, and new modes of good and
4 EXPERIENCE AND NATURE
evil. In any sense in which the conception of essence is
legitimate, these human consequences are the essence of
natural events. Water still has the meanings of water of
everyday experience when it becomes the essence H 2 0, or
else HjO would be totally meaningless, a mere sound, not
an intelligible name.
Meaning, fixed as essence in a term of discourse, may be
imaginatively administered and manipulated, experi-
mented with. Just as we overtly manipulate things,
making new separations and combinations, thereby intro-
ducing tilings into new contexts and environments, so we
bring together logical universals in discourse, where they
copulate and breed new meanings. There is nothing
surprising in the fact that dialectic (or deduction, as it is
termed by moderns) generates new objects; that, in Kan-
tian language, it is "synthetic," instead of merely explicat-
ing what is already had. All discourse, oral or written,
which is more than a routine unrolling of vocal habits,
says things that surprise the one that says them, often
indeed more than they surprise any one else. System-
atic logical discourse, or ratiocination, is the same sort of
thing conducted according to stricter rules. Even under
the condition of rigid rules the emergence of new mean-
ings is much more similar to what happens in genial con-
versation than is conventionally supposed. Rules of logi-
cal order and consistency appertain to economy and
efficiency of combination and separation in generating
new meanings; not to meanings as such. They are rules
of a certain kind of experimentation. In trying new
combinations of meanings, satisfactory consequences of
new meanings are hit upon; then they may be arranged in
a system. The expert in thought is one who has skill in
NATURE AND COMMUNICATION 195
making experiments to introduce an old meaning into
different situations and who has a sensitive ear for detect-
ing resultant harmonies and discords. The most "deduc-
tive" thought in actual occurrence is a series of trials,
observations and selections. In one sense of the ambigu-
ous word intuition, it is a "series of intuitions/' and logic
is ex post facto, expressing a wit that formulates econom-
ically the congruities and incongruities that have mani-
fested themselves. Any "syllogism" which is such ab
initio is performed better by a machine that manipulates
symbols automatically than by any "thinker."
This capacity of essences to enter readily into any
number of new combinations, and thereby generate fur-
ther meanings more profound and far reaching than those
from which they sprang, gives them a semblance of inde-
pendent life and career, a semblance which is responsible
for their elevation by some thinkers into a realm sepa-
rate from that of existence and superior to it. Consider
the interpretations that have been based upon such
essences as four, plus, the square root of minus one.
These are at once so manipulable and so fertile in conse-
quences when conjoined with others that thinkers who
are primarily interested in their performances treat them
not as significant terms of discourse, but as an order of
entities independent of human invention and use. The
fact that we can watch them and register what happens
when they come together, and that the things that happen
are as independent of our volition and expectation as are
the discoveries of a geographic exploration, is taken as
evidence that they constitute entities having subsistent
Being independently not only of us but of all natural
events whatever*
196 EXPERIENCE AND NATURE
Alternatives are too narrowly conceived. Because
meanings and essences are not states of mind, because they
are as independent of immediate sensation and imagery as
are physical things, and because nevertheless they are
not physical things, it is assumed that they are a peculiar
kind of thing, termed metaphysical, or "logical" in a
style which separates logic from nature. But there are
many other things which are neither physical nor psychi-
cal existences, and which are demonstrably dependent
upon human association and interaction. Such things
function moreover in liberating and regulating subsequent
human intercourse; their essence is their contribution
to making that intercourse more significant and
more immediately rewarding. Take the sort of thing
exemplified in the regulation of traffic. The sound
of a whistle is a particular existential event numerically
separate, with its own peculiar spatial temporal position.
This may not be said of the rule or method of social co-
operative interaction which it manifests and makes effec-
tive. A continuous way of organized action is not a par-
ticular, and hence is not a physical or psychical existence.
Yet the consequences of using the method of adjust-
ing movements, so that they do not interfere with one
another, have both a physical and a mental phase.
Physically, there is modification of the changes in space
which would otherwise occur. Mentally, there are en-
joyments and annoyances which would not otherwise
happen. But no one of these incidents nor all of them put
together form the essence or ulterior meaning of the sound
of the whistle; they are qualifications of a more secure
concert of human activity which, as a consequence of a
legal order incarnate in the whistling, forms its signifi-
cance.
NATURE AND COMMUNICATION 197
Discussion of meaning and essence has reached such an
Impasse and is barbed with such entanglements, that it is
further worth while to suggest consideration of legal enti-
ties as indicative of escape from the disjunction of essence
from existence. What is a Corporation, a Franchise?
A corporation is neither a mental state nor a particular
physical event in space and time. Yet it is an objective
reality, not an ideal Realm of Being. It is an objective
reality which has multitudinous physical and mental
consequences. It is something to be studied as we study
electrons; it exhibits as does the latter unexpected proper-
ties, and when introduced into new situations behaves
with new reactions. It is something which may be con-
ducted, facilitated and obstructed, precisely as may be a
river. Nevertheless it would not exist nor have any
meaning and potency apart from an interaction of human
beings with one another, an interaction in which external
things are implicated. As legal essence, or concerted
method of regulated interaction, corporation has its own
and its developing career.
Again juridical rule implies jurisdiction; a particular
body of persons within a certain territory to whom it
applies. The legal significance of an act depends upon
where it takes place. Yet an act is an interaction, a trans-
action, not isolated, self-sufficient. The initial stage of
an act and the terminating consequences which, between
them, determine its meaning, may be far apart in place
as well as in time. Where then is the act? What is its
locus? The readiest reply is in terms of the beginning of
the act. The act was performed where the agent bodily
was at the time of its occurrence. Suppose, however,
that before discovery, the agent in a criminal transaction
198 EXPERIENCE AND NATURE
changes his abode and resides within another jurisdiction.
The need of security leads to the generation, in its union
with the conception of jurisdiction, of a new conception
or essence, that of extradition, of comity of jurisdictions.
New procedures with corresponding new technical con-
cepts or meanings then develop by means of which a
person charged with crime may be requisitioned and
removed. The concept of jurisdiction in combination
with that of security, justke, etc., deductively generates
other concepts.
The process does not stop here. An agent implies a
patient. Suppose a person in New York State shoots a
bullet across the New Jersey line, and kills some one in
that State ; or sends poisoned candy by mail to some one
in California who dies from eating it. Where is the crime
committed? The guilty person is not within the jurisdic-
tion of the State where the death resulted; hence, his
crime by definition, was not committed in that State.
But since the death did not occur where he was bodily
present at the time, no crime occurred in that jurisdiction,
locus being defined in terms of the abode of the agent.
The essence, extradition, does not apply because there is
no crime for which to extradite him. In short, because of
the accepted meaning of jurisdiction, no crime has been
committed anywhere. Such an outcome is evidently pre-
judicial to the integrity and security of human associa-
tion and intercourse. Thus the element of transaction in
an act is noted; an act initiated within a given jurisdic-
tion becomes a crime when its obnoxious consequences
occur outside. The locus of the act now extends all the
way from New York to California. Thus two iadepend-
NATURE AND COMMUNICATION 199
eat particular events capable of direct observation, to-
gether with a connection between them which is inferred,
not directly observable, are now included in so simple
a meaning as that of the locus of an act. In the tradi-
tional language of philosophy, the essence is now ideal or
rational, non-sensible. Furthermore a system of legal
meanings is developed by modifying different ones with
a view to consistency or logical order. Thus the meanings
get more independent of the events that led up to them;
they may be taught and expounded as a logical system,
whose nortions are deductively connected with one
anothei
In civil cases, however, the concept of locus even as
thus extended fails to take care of all the consequences
which are found to require regulation, by attachment of
rights and liabilities to certain classes of acts. A trans-
action may concern goods or funds which operate in a
jurisdiction different to that of either of the parties
directly concerned in i t . Its consequences include persons
living in a third jurisdiction. The ultimate result is a
tendency in some case to reverse the earlier and more
immediately physical (or spatially limited) concept of
jurisdiction with respect to place. Jurisdiction comes to
mean "power to deal legally" with a certain specific
affair, rather than an "area within which action has
occurred": that is, area is defined by power to act, which
in turn is determined with respect to consequences found
desirable, while originally a concept of fixed area had been
employed to fix power of legal action. If it be asked,
"where" a transaction is located, the only possible answer,
on the basis of legal procedure, appears in many cases to
200 EXPERIENCE AND NATURE
be that it is located wherever it has consequences which
it is deemed socially important to regulate. 1
Juridical institutions everywhere embody essences
which are as objective and coercive with respect to opin-
ions, emotions and sensations of individuals as are physi-
cal objects; essences which are general, capable of inde-
pendent examination; of fruitful connection with one
another; and of extension to concrete phenomena not
previously related to them. At the same time the origin
and nature of such meanings can be empirically described
by reference to social interactions and their consequences.
They are means of regulating consequences, through
establishing a present cross-reference to one another of
the diverse acts of interacting agents. If we bear in
mind the capacity to transfer such a regulative method
to new and previously unconnected universes of discourse,
there is nothing astonishing in the fact that a stain may
mean an anatomical structure, a change in the size of a
mercury column changes in atmospheric pressure and
thus probable rain. There is nothing astonishing there-
fore in the fact that meanings expressed in symbols are
capable of yielding a vast and growing system of mathe-
matics. An essence which is a method of procedure can
be linked to other methods of procedure so as to yield
1 In this respect the actual tendency of law (though not always its
doctrinal formulations) is further advanced than are views current among
philosophers. Compare the discussions as to "where" an illusion is; oar
what is the locus of past experience, and "where" unrealized possibilities
exist. Some writers find satisfaction in locating them "in" the mind,
although they also deny that mind is spatial. Then, realizing that the
psychical existence "in" which these affairs are located is itself a present
particular existence, they find it necessary to place an "essence" or
meaning within the skin of the psychical state.
NATURE AND COMMUNICATION 201
new methods; to bring about a revision of old methods, and
form a systematic and ordered whole all without refer-
ence to any application of any method to any particular
set of concrete existences, and in complete abstraction
from any particular consequences which the methods or
logical universals are to regulate. For mathematics, they
are as much independent objects as is the material with
which a zoologist deals. Comparison with machines like
a self-binding reaper or a telephone system is useful.
Machines are evolved in human experience, not prior to
it or independently of it. But they are objective and
compelling with respect to present particular physical and
psychical processes; they are general methods of reaching
consequences; they are interactions of previously exist-
ing physical existences. Moreover, they depend for
their efficacy upon other and independent natural exist-
ences; they produce consequences only when used in
connection with other existences which limit and test
their operation. When machines have attained a certain
stage of development, engineers may devote themselves
to the construction of new machines and to improve-
ments in old machines without specific reference to con-
crete uses and applications. That is, inventors are
guided by the inherent logic of existing machines, by
observation of the consistency of relationships which parts
of the machine bear to one another and to the pattern of
the entire machine. An invention may thus result from
purely mathematical calculations. Nevertheless the
machine is still a machine, an instrumental device for
regulating interactions with reference to consequences.
When the "concept 1 ' of a machine, its meaning or
essence embodied in a symbol, deductively generates plans
202 EXPERIENCE AND NATURE
of new machines, essence is fruitful because it was first
devised for a purpose. Its subsequent success or failure
in fulfilling its purpose, in delivering the desired con-
sequences, together with reflection upon the reason there-
fore, supply a basis for revising, extending, and modifying
the essence in question; thus it has a career and conse-
quence of its own. If we follow the lead of empirically
verifiable cases, it would then appear that mathematical
and moral essences may be dialectically fruitful, because
like other machines they have been constructed for the
purpose of securing certain consequences with the
minimum of waste and the maximum of economy and
efficiency .
Communication is consummatory as well as instru-
mental. It is a means of establishing cooperation,
domination and order. Shared experience is the greatest
of human goods. In communication, such conjunction
and contact as is characteristic of animals become en-
dearments capable of infinite idealization; they become
symbols of the very culmination of nature. That God
is love is a more worthy idealization than that the divine is
power. Since love at its best brings illumination and
wisdom, this meaning is as worthy as that the divine is
truth. Various phases of participation by one in
another's joy, sorrows, sentiments and purposes, are dis-
tinguished by the scope and depth of the objects that are
held in common, from a momentary caress to continued
insight and loyality. When a psychologist like Bain
reduced the "tender emotions" to sensations of contact he
indicated a natural organic basis. But he failed to con-
nect even organic contact with its vital function, assimi-
lation and fruitful union; while (what is of greater import)
NATURE AND COMMUNICATION 203
he failed to note the transformation that this biological
function undergoes when its consequences, being noted,
become an objective meaning incorporated as its essence
in a natural physiological occurrence.
If scientific discourse is instrumental in function, it
also is capable of becoming an enjoyed object to those
concerned in it. Upon the whole, human history shows
that thinking in being abstract, remote and technical has
been laborious; or at least that the process of attaining
such thinking has been rendered painful to most by social
circumstances. In view of the importance of such activ-
ity and its objects, it is a priceless gain when it becomes an
intrinsic delight. Few would philosophize if philosophic
discourse did not have its own inhering fascination. Yet
it is not the satisfactoriness of the activity which defines
science or philosophy; the definition comes from the
structure and function of subject-matter. To say that
knowledge as the fruit of intellectual discourse is an end
in itself is to say what is esthetically and morally true for
some persons, but it conveys nothing about the structure
of knowledge; and it does not even hint that its objects
are not instrumental. These are questions that can be
decided only by an examination of the things in question.
Impartial and disinterested thinking, discourse in terms of
scrutinized, tested, and related meanings, is a fine art.
But it is an art as yet open to comparatively few. Let-
ters, poetry, song, the drama, fiction, history, biography,
engaging in rites and ceremonies hallowed by time and
rich with the sense of the countless multitudes that share
in them, are also modes of discourse that, detached from
immediate instrumental consequences of assistance and
cooperative action, are ends for most persons. In them
204 EXPERIENCE AND NATURE
discourse is both instrumental and final. No person
remains unchanged and has the same future efficiencies,
who shares in situations made possible by communication.
Subsequent consequences may be good or bad, but they
are there. The part of wisdom is not to deny the causal
fact because of the intrinsic value of the immediate experi-
ence. It is to make the immediately satisfactory object
the object which will also be most fertile.
The saying of Matthew Arnold that poetry is a criti-
cism of life sounds harsh to the ears of some persons of
strong esthetic bent; it seems to give poetry a moral and
instrumental function. But while poetry is not a criti-
cism of life in intent, it is in effect, and so is all art. For
art fixes those standards of enjoyment and appreciation
with which other things are compared; it selects the ob-
jects of future desires; it stimulates effort. This is true of
the objects in which a particular person finds his immediate
or esthetic values, and it is true of collective man. The
level and style of the arts of literature, poetry, ceremony,
amusement, and recreation which obtain in a community,
furnishing the staple objects of enjoyment in that
community, do more than all else to determine the cur-
rent direction of ideas and endeavors in the community.
They supply the meanings in terms of which life is judged,
esteemed, and criticized. For an outside spectator, they
supply material for a critical evaluation of the life led by
that community.
Communication is uniquely instrumental and uni-
qudiy final. It is instrumental as liberating us from the
otherwise overwhelming pressure of events and enabling
us to live in a world of things that have meaning. It is
final as a sharing in the objects and arts precious to a com-
NATURE AND COMMUNICATION 205
munity, a sharing whereby meanings are enhanced, deep-
ened and solidified in the sense of communion. Because
of its characteristic agency and finality, communication
and its congenial objects are objects ultimately worthy
of awe, admiration, and loyal appreciation. They are
worthy as means, because they are the only means that
make life rich and varied in meanings. They are worthy
as ends, because in such ends man is lifted from his imme-
diate isolation and shares in a communion of meanings.
Here, as in so many other things, the great evil lies in
separating instrumental and final functions. Intelli-
gence is partial and specialized, because communication
and participation are limited, sectarian, provincial, con-
fined to class, party, professional group. By the same
token, our enjoyment of ends is luxurious and corrupting
for some; brutal, trivial, harsh for others; exclusion from
the life of free and full communication excluding both
alike from full possession of meanings of the things that
enter experience. When the instrumental and final func-
tions of communication live together in experience, there
exists an intelligence which is the method and reward of
the common life, and a society worthy to command affec-
tion, admiration, and loyalty. 4
4 Since the above was originally written I have found the following by
Dr. Malinowski in Ogden and Richards, The Meaning of Meaning: "A
word, signifying an important utensil, is used in action, not to comment
on its nature or reflect on its properties, but to make it appear, be handed
over to the speaker, or to direct another man to its proper use. The
meaning of the thing is made up of experiences of its active uses and not
of intellectual contemplation A word means to a native the
proper use of the thing for which it stands, exactly as an implement
means something when it can be handled and means nothing when no
active experience is at hand. Similarly a verb, a word for an action, re-
906 EXPERIENCE AND NATURE
ceives its meaning through active participation in this action. A word is
used when it can produce an action, and not to describe one, still less
to translate thoughts." (Pp. 488-9.) I know of no statement about
language that brings out with the same clearness and appreciation of the
force of the fact that language is primarily a mode of action used for the
sake of influencing the conduct of others in connection with the speaker.
As he says "The manner in which I am using language now, in writing
these words, the manner in which the author of a book or a papyrus or
hewn inscription has to use it, is a very far-fetched and derivative func-
tion of language. In its primitive uses, language functions as a link in
concerted human activity, as a piece of human behavior." (P. 474.)
He shows that to understand the meaning of savage language, we have to
be able to re-instate the whole social context which alone supplies the
meaning. While he lists narrative and ceremonial speech as well as
active, he shows that the same principle permeates them. "When
incidents are told or discussed among a group of listeners, there is, first,
the situation of that moment made up of the respective social, intellectual
and emotional attitudes of those present. Within this situation, the
narrative creates new bonds and sentiments by the emotional appeal
of the words. In every case, narrative speech is primarily a mode of
social action rather than a mere reflection of thought." (P. 475.) Then
there is the use of language "in free, aimless, social intercourse." "In
discussing the function of speech in mere sociabilities, we come to one of
the bed rock aspects of human nature in society. There is in all human
beings the well-known tendency to congregate, to be together, to enjoy
each other's company Taciturnity means not only un-
friendliness but directly a bad character. The breaking of silence, the
communion of words, is the first act to establish links of fellowship."
(Pp. 476-7.) Here speech has both the instrumental use of re-assurance
and the consummatory good of enhanced sense of membership in a
congenial whole. Thus communication is not only a means to common
ends but is the sense of comraimity, communion actualized. Nothing
more important for philosophers to hearken to has been written than Dr.
Malinowski's conclusion: "Language is little influenced by thought, but
Thought on the contrary having to borrow from action its tool that is
language is largely influenced thereby. To sum up we can say that the
fundamental grammatical categories, universal to all human languages,
can be understood only with reference to the pragmatic Weltanschauung
of primitive man and that, through the use of language, the barbarous
primitive categories must have deeply influenced the later philosophies
NATURE AND COMMUNICATION Mf
of man.** (P. 498.) He goes on to show its influence in framing cate-
gories of (nouns) substance, of action centering around (verbs) objects,
and spatial relations prepositions. And he doses with an expreai
warning against " the old realist fallacy that a word vouches for, or coo-
tains, the reality of its meaning. The migration of roots into improper
places has given to the imaginary reality of hypostatized meaning a
special solidity of its own. For since early experience warrants the sub-
stantival existence of anything found within the category of crude
substance, of Protousia, and subsequent linguistic shifts introduce there
such roots as "going", "rest", "motion", etc., the obvious inference k
that such abstract entities or ideas live in a world of their own." (P.
509.) Here we have the source of the classic hypostatizing of essence
which is described in the text as due to isolating important meanings of
things from their context in human interaction.
CHAPTER SIX
NATURE, MIND AND THE SUBJECT
Personality, selfhood, subjectivity are eventual func-
tions that emerge with complexly organized interactions,
organic and social. Personal individuality has its basis
and conditions in simpler events. Plants and non-human
animals act as if they were concerned that their activity,
their characteristic receptivity and response, should
maintain itself. Even atoms and molecules show a
selective bias in their indifferencies, affinities and repul-
sions when exposed to other events. With respect to
some things they are hungry to the point of greediness;
in the presence of others they are sluggish and cold. It
is not surprising that naive science imputed appetition
to their own consummatory outcome to all natural
processes, and that Spinoza identified inertia and momen-
tum with inherent tendency on the part of things to con-
serve themselves in being, and achieve such perfection as
belongs to them. In a genuine although not psychic
sense, natural beings exhibit preference and centeredness.
In regard to the nature of the individual, as in so many
other respects, classic and modern philosophies have
pursued opposite paths. In Greek reflection, love of per-
fection, or self-completion, was attributed to Being. The
state of self-sufficiency excluding deficiency constituted
the individual, significant change being thought of as
the coming into being of such a whole. In consequence,
in view of the obvious instability of particular existences
such as moderns usually term individuals, a species im-
NATURE, MIND AND SUBJECT 209
mutable in time and having form was the true individual.
What moderns call individuals were particulars, tran-
sient, partial, and imperfect specimens of the true in-
dividual. Mankind as species is more truly an indi-
vidual than was this or that man. Although Aristotle
criticized his master for giving Being to the genus or
universal separate from particulars, he never doubted
that the species was a real entity, a metaphysical or exis-
tential whole including and characterizing all particulars.
A type-form had no separate being; but, being embodied
in particulars, it made them an intrinsically unified and
marked out class, which as a class was ungenerated and
indestructible, perfect and complete.
Modern science has made the conception strange.
Yet it was a natural interpretation of things found in
ordinary experience. The immediate qualitative dif-
ferences of things cannot be recognized without noting
that things possessed of these qualitative traits fall into
kinds, or families. That the family is more lasting, im-
portant, and real than any of its members; that the
family confers upon its constituents their standing and
character, so that those who have no family are outcasts
and wanderers, represents a notable situation in most
forms of human culture. In such a cultural scheme, those
peculiar differences that constitute for us personal in-
dividuality are only accidental variations from the family
type, the form which marks a kind enables a particular
person to be placed, known, identified. The modern
habit of using self, "I," mind, and spirit interchangeably
is inconceivable when family and commune are solid
realities. To the Greeks, a kind was an organized
system in which an ideal form unites varying particulars
210 EXPERIENCE AND NATURE
into a genuine whole, and gives to them distinctive and
recognizable character. The presence in things of the
generic form renders them knowable. Mind is but
the ordered system of all the characters which constitute
kinds, differing among men, differing according to dif-
ferences of organic constitutions. Upon such a view,
subjectivity, individuality of mind marks an anomaly;
a failure of realization of objective forms cm the part of the
indwelling family to impress itself adequately, owing to
stubborn resisting material constitution. What is prized
and exalted by moderns as individual was just the defect
which is the source of ignorance, opinion, and error.
Such a marked difference in the estimate of the status
of individuality is proof of difference in the empirical
content of ancient and modern culture. In primitive
cultures, experience is dominated by what a contemporary
French school has called categories of participation and
incorporation. Life and being belong in a significant
sense to the tribe and family; particular creatures are
only members of a consolidated whole. This state of
social affairs formed the pattern in accord with which all
natural events were construed. One need not endorse
all the details of the theories of this French school or
even accept its general principles, in order to recognize
a predominantly collectivistic character in early culture,
and to perceive its influence upon early beliefs and modes
of thought. An individual was a member of a group-
whole; in this membership were almost exhausted his
accomplishments and possibilities. From birth, he was
a subject for assimilation and incorporation of group
traditions and customs; his personal measure was the
extent in which he became their vehicle. Private belief
NATURE, MIND AND SUBJECT 211
and invention, were a deviation, a dangerous eccentricity,
signs of disloyal disposition. The private was an equiva-
lent of the illicit; and all innovations and departures
from custom are illicit: witness the fact that children
have to be educated and inducted into tradition and
custom. This need of education, moreover, and of main-
tenance of tradition against deviation serve to bring
otherwise unconscious customs to mind, and to render
consciousness of them acute and emotional. 1 Thereby,
customs are more than mere overt ways of action; tradi-
tion is more than external imitation and reproduction of
what obtains in outward behavior. Custom is Nomos,
lord and king of all, of emotions, beliefs, opinions, thoughts
as well as deeds.
Yet mind in an individualized mode has occasionally
some constructive operation. Every invention, every
improvement in art, technological, military and political,
has its genesis in the observation and ingenuity of a
particular innovator. All utensils, traps, tools, weapons,
stories, prove that some one exercised at sometime ini-
tiative in deviating from customary models and standards.
Accident played its part; but some one had to observe
and utilize the accidental change before a new tool and
custom emerged. Men were not wholly and merely
subdued to the demands of custom, even when innova-
tions were looked upon as threats to the welfare of the
group, defiances of its gods.
As Goldenweiser has said: "Whether it is a pot,
basket or blanket that is being manufactured, or the soil
1 See Boas, Hie Mind of Primitive Man. Chapter VIII of this book
seems to me to supply what is sound in the view of the French school
Haded to, free from its exaggerat
212 EXPERIENCE AND NATURB
that is being tilled, or an animal that is being hunted or
fought in all of these situations man faces an individual,
technical task. In all of these directions there is room
for the development and exhibition of skill. In industry
and the chase, in a sea-faring expedition and a war raid,
things can be done well and less well There
is opportunity for comparison of individual efforts, there
is rivalry." 1 As a fruit of this rivalry of individuals,
pace-making occurs; those who excel set a standard for
others to come up to; they furnish models of technique
to be adopted by others, till gradually or suddenly they
initiate a new custom. Even in cultures most committed
to reproduction, there is always occurring gome creative
production, through specific variations, that is, through
individuals. Thus, while negatively individuality means
something to be subdued, positively it denotes the source
of change in institutions and customs. While the
negative side is most conscious and most asserted, the
positive phase is there and is taken advantage of, even
though by stealth and under cover. Upon the whole
the imagination and effort of individual technicians and
artists were submerged; in idea, the doctrine of fixed
wholes with their fixed patterns prevailed. We may well
follow the further statements of Dr. Goldenweiser.
"When tradition is a matter of the spoken word, the
advantage is all on the side of age. The elder is in the
saddle;" because he is the most experienced man and the
one who best embodies the net experience of the group.
The group is small enough to be homogeneous; innova-
tions are conspicuous and focus resentment; customary
activities are moreover enmeshed in ceremonialism and
have supernatural sanctions; variations when once they
Early Civilization, pp. 407-8.
NATURE, MIND AND SUBJECT 213
arc adopted become automatic group habits; they endure
not as ideas or because of insight into principles, but as
"motor habits which represent nothing but knowledge
and technical experience rendered mechanical through
habituation;" individual "consciousness and ratiocination
quickly are incorporated in objective results which are
handed down while the thinking perishes; inventions
become part of the technical equipment of behavior,
not of thought and understanding. " Under such cir-
cumstances, individual variations of thought remain
private reveries or are soon translated into objective
established institutions through gradual accumulation
of imperceptible variations. The exceptional character
of creative individuality is reflected in attribution of the
origin of the arts, industrial and political, to gods and
semi-divine heroes.
Thus the artist and artisan merely observe, as has been
noted in another connection, ready-made models and
patterns, and unquestioningly follow procedures ante-
cedently established. Patterns and methods are ac-
cepted as belonging to the objective nature of things;
there is next to no sense of any connection between
them and personal desire and thought; to introduce such
a connection would evince a dangerously subversive
spirit. The point of view therein displayed is so far
from that which animates modern psychology and
philosophy that it is not easily recoverable; yet we do not
have even today to go far to find a like notion regulative
of action and belief. The mechanic who follows blue-
prints and a procedure dictated by his machine in the
production of standardized commodities would, if he
were both articulate and uncognizant of inventions by
214 EXPERIENCE AND NATURE
others, say the same thing. Legal formalities consciously
adopt similar realistic conceptions in politics and morals,
and find the exhibition of the spirit which they take for
granted in science and industry to be anarchistic and
destructive in less technical fields. Standards and pat-
terns seem to them to be given in the nature of things;
the intervention of initiative and invention, of individual-
ity, are counted contrary to reason as well as to sincerity
and loyalty.
When experience is of this sort, an individual worker
or demiurge has only to observe and conform. He is
but a case to be subsumed in a fixed whole as far as may
be; what is left over is merely quantitative and accidental.
Plato found in the arts exemplifications of fixed arche-
types governing particular processes of change through
imparting to them measure and proportion; hence changes
as far as knowable were subject in advance to the dialectic
of geometry. As in the Philebus, measure comes first;
then comes the measured, the symmetrical and beautiful;
conscious mind and wisdom are in the third rank as
observation of measure and the measured antecedently
established. In similar fashion, Aristotle could draw
his account of the four fundamental affairs of nature from
analysis of the procedure of artisan, with no suspicion
that he was thereby subjecting his metaphysics to an
anthropomorphic rendering of nature; setting up the
cumulative deposit of individual variations of insight
and skill as the measure of nature. It is inept to charge
these thinkers with hypostatizing psychical states and
processes. Since their own experience exhibited sub-
ordination of individualized mind to objects, operations,
patterns and ends that were preeetablished and presented
NATURE, MIND AND SUBJECT 215
ready made and complete, their metaphysic and logic
were in so far a faithful report of what they found.
Greek philosophy converted not psychological condi-
tions but positive institutional affairs into cosmic realities.
The idea that generalization, purposes, etc., are individual
mental processes did not originate until experience had
registered such a change that the functions of individual-
ized mind were productive of objective achievements and
hence capable of external observation.
When this happened, an extraordinary revolution oc-
curred. The conception of the individual changed com-
pletely. No longer was the individual something com-
plete, perfect, finished, an organized whole of parts
united by the impress of a comprehensive form. What
was prized as individuality was now something moving,
changing, discrete, and above all initiating instead of
(inal. As long as deviation of particulars from estab-
lished order meant disorder, the metaphysics and logic
of subordination of parts to the form of a pre-formed
whole was reasonable. Mind as individualized could be
recognized in other than a pejorative sense only when
its variations were social, utilized in generating greater
-ocial security and fullness of life. This was possible
only when social relationships were heterogeneous and
expansive, when demand for initiative, invention and
variation exceeded that for adherence and conformity.
It is noteworthy that even Plato with all his zeal for a
fixed organized whole could not imagine its coming into
being save through the effort of some happily constituted
and fortunately placed individual. Social heterogeneity
alone does not promote a functioning of variations for
socially desirable consequences, and thereby constitute
J16 EXPERIENCE AND NATURE
individuality as something objective and socially acknowl-
edged. It may signify only a break up of pious ad-
herence to a cumulative and conserved outcome of prior
history. But let there be a situation in which the tradi-
tion of order and unity is still vital while the actual state
of affairs is one of variation and conflict, and there is a
situation in which dependence must perforce be placed on
individuality. Even though its office be conceived at
first as merely restorative, a return to an earlier and
better state of affairs, as Italians thinkers would return
to Greco-Roman culture and the early protestant to
primitive Christianity, yet the operation of individuals
rather than that of collective tradition is the hope and
reliance. Under such circumstances, particularized cen-
tres of initiation and energy are prized because being
emancipated from the net work of current forces, they
are free to direct change to new objective consequences.
Individualism in modern life has been understood in
diverse ways. To those retaining the classic tradition,
it is a revolt of undisciplined barbarians, reverting to the
spontaneous petulant egotism of childhood; in another
version of this underlying idea, it is rebellion of unre-
generate human nature against divine authority, es-
tablished among men for their salvation. To still
others, it is emancipation, the achieving of voluntary
maturity; courageous independence in throwing off all
external yokes and bondages, in asserting that every
human being is an end in himself; in effect a transfer to
each conscious unit of honorific predicates previously
reserved for the class, species, universal. In any case,
an individual is no longer just a particular, a part without
meaning save in an inclusive whole, but is a subject,
elf, a distinctive centre of desire, thinking and aspiration.
NATURE, MIND AND SUBJECT 217
An adherent of empirical denotative method can hardly
accept either the view which regards subjective mind as
an aberration or that which makes it an independent
creative source. Empirically, it is an agency of novel
reconstruction of a preexisting order. Criticism of the
history of political theory during the formation of modern
European states may bring out the difference between
such a view and that of both classic universalism and
extreme modern subjectivism. The older theory had
asserted that the state exists by nature. The modern
declared that it existed by means of agreements between
individuals who willed the institution of civil order. We
may imagine reformers of the seventeenth century saying
that the states they found about them did indeed exist
by nature that was precisely what was the matter with
them. Because they were natural products, they were
products of force, chance, fraud, tyranny. Hence they
were naturally the scene of war, foreign and domestic, of
servitudes and inequities, of intrigue and harsh coercion
one huge historical accident. A just and good state
would be one brought into existence by voluntary con-
vention; by promises exchanged and obligations mutually
undertaken. A good state exists not by nature but by
the contriving activities of individual selves in behalf
of the satisfaction of their needs. It implies art, not
nature; a clear perception by individuals of what they
want and of the conditions through which their wants
can be satisfied. In detail, thinkers divided into opposite
schools. Some held that by nature individuals are non-
social, becoming social when subjected to discipline by
artificial and instituted law to which they are naturally
adverse. Others attributed to the natural individual
218 EXPERIENCE AND NATURE
some degree of friendly and genial inclination. Both
schools agreed that just political order, legitimate
authority and subordination, is a product of voluntary
conjunction of individuals naturally exempt from the
universal of civil law.
The truth of which the social compact was a symbol
is that social institutions as they exist can be bettered
only through the deliberate interventions of those who
free their minds from the standards of the order which
obtains. The underlying fact was the perception of the
possibility of a change, a change for the better, in social
organization. The fact that the intent of the percep-
tion was veiled and distorted by the myth of an aboriginal
single and one-for-all decisive meeting of wills is instruc-
tive as an aberration, but the myth should not disguise
the intent and consequence. Social conditions were
altered so that there were both need and opportunity for
inventive and planning activities, initiated by innovating
thought, and carried to conclusion only as the initiating
mind secured the sympathetic assent of other individuals.
I say individual minds, not just individuals with minds.
The difference between the two ideas is radical. There
is an easy way by which thinkers avoid the necessity of
facing a genuine problem. It starts with a self, whether
bodily or spiritual being immaterial for present purposes,
and then endows or identifies that self with mind, a formal
capacity of apprehension, devising and belief. On the
basis of this assumption, any mind is open to entertain
any thought or belief whatever. There is here no prob-
lem involved of breaking loose from the weight of tradi-
tion and custom, of initiating observations and reflections,
forming designs and plans, undertaking experiments on
NATURE, MIND AND SUBJECT 2
the basis of hypotheses, diverging from accepted doc-
trines and traditions. Or when it is observed that this
departure occurs infrequently and is not easy, some vague
reference to genius and originality disposes of the ques-
tion. But the whole history of science, art and morals
proves that the mind that appears in individuals is not
as such individual mind. The former is in itself a system
of belief, recognitions, and ignorances, of acceptances and
rejections, of expectancies and appraisals of meanings
which have been instituted under the influence of custom
and tradition.
It is not easy to break away from current and estab-
lished classifications and interpretations of the world.
The difficulty in this respect, however, is eased by the
notion that after all it is only error that the mind needs
to cut loose from, and that it can do this by direct appeal
to nature, by applying pure observation and reflection to
pure objects. This notion of course is fiction; objects
of knowledge are not given to us defined, classified, and
labeled, ready for labels and pigeon-holes. We bring
to the simplest observation a complex apparatus of
habits, of accepted meanings and techniques. Otherwise
observation is the blankest of stares, and the natural ob-
ject is a tale told by an idiot, full only of sound and fury.
In the case of social objects and patterns, institutions
and arrangements, we have not the benefit of the mitigat-
ing fiction of direct correction by appeal of transparent
mind to the court of nature. There is a contrast be-
tween physical objects and objects as they are believed
to be, even though what they are believed to be is an
unescapable medium in observing what they are. Where
is such a contrast to be found in the case of existing social
220 EXPERIENCE AND NATURE
institutions and standards? The contrast is not, as It
seems to be in the case of knowledge of physical existence,
between a belief which is defective or false and an exist-
ence which is real; it is between an existence which is
actual, and a belief, desire and aspiration for something
which is better but non-existent.
Such facts exemplify the difference between a bodily or
a psychic self with a mind and mind as individual. Either
the better social object is sheer illusion, or else individual
thought and desire denote a distinctive and unique
mode of existence, an object held in solution, undergoing
transformation, to emerge finally as an established and
public object. Reference to imagination is pertinent.
But the reference is too frequently used to disguise and
avoid recognition of the essential fact and the problems
involved in it. Imagination as mere reverie is one
thing, a natural and additive event, complete in itself,
a terminal object rich and cpnsoling, or trivial and silly,
as may be. Imagination which terminates in a modifi-
cation of the objective order, in the institution of a new
object is other than a merely added occurrence. It
involves a dissolution of old objects and a forming of
new ones in a medium which, since it is beyond the old
object and not yet in a new one, can properly be termed
subjective.
The point in placing emphasis upon the role of in-
dividual desire and thought in social life has in part been
indicated. It shows the genuinely intermediate position
of subjective mind: it proves it to be a mode of natural
existence in which objects undergo directed reconstitu-
tion. Reference to the place of individual thought in
political theory and practice has another value. Unless
NATURE, MIND AND SUBJECT 221
subjective intents and thoughts are to terminate in
picturesque Utopias or dogmas irrelevant to constructive
action, they are subject to objective requirements and
tests. Even in the crudest form of the contract theory,
men had to do something. They had at least to meet
together, come to agreement, give guarantees, and govern
their subsequent conduct by agreements reached, or else
suffer a tangible penalty. Thinking and desiring, no
matter how subjective, are a preliminary, tentative and
inchoate mode of action. They are "overt" behavior of
a communicated and public form in process of construc-
tion, and behavior involves change of objects which tests
the meanings animating behavior.
There is a peculiar intrinsic privacy and incommunica-
bility attending the preparatory intermediate stage.
When an old essence or meaning is in process of dissolution
and a new one has not taken shape even as a hypothetical
scheme, the intervening existence is too fluid and formless
for publication, even to one's self. Its very existence is
ceaseless transformation. Limits from which and to
which are objective, generic, stateable; not so that which
occurs between these limits. This process of flux and
ineffability is intrinsic to any thought which is subjective
and private. It marks "consciousness" as bare event. It
is absurd to call a recognition or a conception subjective
or mental because it takes place through a physically or
socially numerically distinct existence; by this logic a
house disappears from the spatial and material world
when it becomes my house; even a physical movement
would then be subjective when referred to particles.
Recognition of an object, conception of a meaning may
be mine rather than yours; yours rather than his, at a par-
222 EXPERIENCE AND NATURE
ticular moment; but this fact is about me or you, not
about the object and essence perceived and conceived.
Acknowledgment of this fact is compatible however with
the conviction that after all there would be no objects to
be perceived, no meanings to be conceived, if at some
period of time uniquely individualized events had not
intervened. There is a difference in kind between the
thought which manipulates received objects and essences
to derive new ones from their relations and implications,
and the thought which generates a new method of observ-
ing and classifying them. It is like the difference between
readjusting the parts of a wagon to make ft more efficient,
and the invention of the steam locomotive. One is
formal and additive; the other is qualitative and transfor-
mative. He knows little who supposes that freedom of
thought is ensured by relaxation of conventions, censor-
ships and intolerant dogmas. The relaxation supplies
opportunity. But while it is a necessary it is not a
sufficient condition. Freedom of thought denotes free-
dom of thinking; specific doubting, inquiring, suspense,
creating and cultivating of tentative hypotheses, trials or
experimentings that are unguaranteed and that involve
risks of waste, loss, and error. Let us admit the case of
the conservative; if we once start thinking no one can
guarantee where we shall come out, except that many
objects, ends and institutions are surely doomed. Every
thinker puts some portion of an apparently stable world
in peril and no one can wholly predict what will emerge in
its place.
In approaching the exaggerations of individual mind
found in modern philosophy which go by the name of
subjectivism and a large part of what is termed idealism,
NATURE, MIND AND SUBJECT 223
we may profitably recur to ancient thought. The ques-
tion of the relation of the objective and subjective did not
present itself under that name. The problem of the rela-
tion of the "natural" and the "positive" covered at least
part of the same ground, and in a way closer to experience
than does the course taken by much modern philosophy.
The "positive" was a term used to cover everything of
distinctively human institution, in languages, customs,
manners, codes, laws, governments. The issue was
whether nature was a norm for these arrangements or
whether they were something to which nature should
submit. The classic answer was in the former sense.
But there were those who regarded nature as raw, crude,
wild, and who thought of man and his doings as the stand-
ard and measure of nature.
The former conception, under theological sanctions and
interpretations, was adopted into the medieval concep-
tion of natural law, and made absolutely controlling in
morals and politics, wherever not supplemented by reve
lation, which after all was revelation of a higher nature.
To put the problem in terms of the connection between
nature and institutions has an advantage over the isola-
tion of the ego by modern philosophy. It acknowledged
the social factor. Even when the origin of the positive
was sought in the will, in the decrees and enactments oi
particular persons, the latter were thought of as possessing
a, socially representative office, as heroes, lawgivers, not
sts isolated individual minds.
The complete subordination of the positive to natural
[aw in the medieval version of the classic theory involved
modern thought in a peculiar embarrassment when inter
est in humanity as distinct from divinity revived. The
224 EXPERIENCE AND NATURE
institutions which men wished to modify, for which they
wished to substitute others or to which they wished to
add others of a secular sort, were bound up with divinity,
with authoritative natural and revealed law. It was not
possible to put institutions as such in contrast to nature,
for by accepted theory existing institutions were in the
main expressions of the law of nature. The resource
which offered itself was to place the mind of the individual
as such in contrast to both nature and institutions. This
historic fact, reinforced with the conspicuous assertion
of medievalism that the individual soul is the ulti-
mate end and ultimate subject of salvation or damnation,
affords, it seems to me, the background and source of the
isolation of the ego, the thinking self, in all philosophy
influenced by either the new science or Protestantism.
Descartes as well as Berkeley uses "self " as an equivalent
of "mind," and does so spontaneously, as a matter of
course, without attempt at argument and justification.
If the given science of nature and given positive institu-
tions expressed arbitrary prejudice, unintelligent custom
and chance episodes, where could or should mind be
found except in the independent and self-initiated activi-
ties of individuals? Wholesale revolt against tradition
led to the illusion of equally wholesale isolation of mind as
something wholly individual. Revolting and reforming
thinkers like Descartes little noted how much of tradition
they repeated and perpetuated in their very protests and
reforms.
An adequate recognition of the empirical historical
causes of the exaggeration of the ego in modern philoso-
phy, due to its isolation from social customs, and these
from the physical world, makes, it seems to me, criticism
NATURE, MIND AND SUBJECT 221
of the forms which it has assumed almost unnecessary.
Thinkers may start out with a naive assumption of minds
connected with separate individuals. But developments
soon show the inadequacy of such "minds" to carry the
burden of science and objective institutions, like the
family and state. The consequence was revealed to be
sceptical, disintegrative, malicious. A transcendental
supra-empirical self, making human, or "finite/' selves
its medium of manifestation, was the logical recourse.
Such a conception is an inevitable conclusion, when the
value of liberation and utilization of individual capacity in
science, art, industry, and politics is a demonstrated em-
pirical fact; and when at the same time, individuality
instead of being conceived as historic, intermediate,
temporally relative and instrumental, is conceived of as
original, eternal and absolute. When concrete recon-
structions of natural and social objects are thought of as a
single and constitutive act, they inevitably become super-
natural or transcendental. When the movement ter-
minates, as in the later philosophy of Josiah Royce, with a
"community of selves," the circle has returned to the empi-
rical fact with which it might properly have started out;
but the intervening insertion of a transcendent ego re-
mains as a plague. It isolates the community of selves
from natural existence and in order to get nature again
in connection with mind, is compelled to reduce it to a
system of volitions, feelings and thoughts.
It remains to mention another historic factor which
helps account for the vogue of subjectivism in art and
literature, through which it found its way more or less
into common belief. Comte several times recurs to the
idea that idiocy represents an excess of objectivism, a
226 EXPERIENCE AND NATURE
subordination of feelings and impressions to objects as
given, while madness marks an excess of subjectivism.
Still more significant is his added remark, that madness
has to be construed historically and sociologically. Under
primitive conditions all the larger ideas about nature are
reveries constructed in the interest of emotions. Myths
were fancies, but they were not insanities because they
were the only reply to the challenge of nature which ex-
isting instrumentalities permitted. Assertion of similar
ideas today is insanity, because available intellectual
resources and agencies make possible and require radically
different adjustments. To entertain and believe fancies
which once were spontaneous and general is today a sign
of failure, of mental disequilibration. Inability to employ
the methods of forming and checking beliefs which are
available at a given time, whatever be the source of that
inability, constitutes a disorientation. These considera
tions are not introduced to make the offensive insinuation
that philosophic subjectivism is a mode of insanity,
and philosophic realism a mode of idiocy. The purpose is to
suggest that while the tendency to re very, to intellectual
somnambulism, is universal, the use made of revery which
may roughly stand for the subjective element in mind
depends upon contemporary conditions. In one situa-
tion fancy generates stories which are consistent with
desire and are attractive. These are connected with
ceremonies to which, in addition to their immediate good,
ex ternal efficiency is imputed . They become nuclei abou t
which observations and ideas continually gather; they are
centres of mental as well as emotional systematizations.
It is no wonder that myths long prevail. When the de-
velopment of industry and tested inquiry makes it evident
NATURE, MIND AND SUBJECT 227
that the actual world will not accept them nor stand for
them, their actuating springs remain in full force and the
river of revery still flows. It may find public or communi-
cated form in fiction recognized as such, in novel, drama
and poetry which are enjoyed, although their objects are
not believed in. Or they may remain private, and, with
the play of desires and affections that produce them, con-
stitute a new world enjoyed for its own sake the "inner
life/'
The popular factor in subjectivism, that which renders
philosophic subjectivism intelligible enough to prevent
its being regarded as mere vagary, seems to be a confused
union of two considerations. On the one hand there is the
recognition, enforced by the course of events, of the con-
structive power of mind as individual, its re-creative
function in objects of industry, art, and politics. On the
other hand there is the discovery and exploitation of the
inner life, a new, readily accessible and cheaply enjoyed
esthetic field. The tales that will not be believed when
they are told and that cannot be told in forms sufficiently
artistic to command the attention of others, may still be
told to one's self and afford relief, consolation and thrill.
Products of fancy that cannot, because of the advance of
knowledge, secure credence as reports of objective events,
are castles in the air, but these castles are impregnable
inner refuges.
The person who knows nothing of sensations or sensa,
as the psychologist and epistemologist talk about them, is
nevertheless aware that objects are other than bare
things to which beliefs must subject themselves. He is
aware that when things escape his power of control, they
still generate "impressions" which he can entertain in all
228 EXPERIENCE AND NATURE
sorts of enjoyable and annoying ways. If he is devoid of
ability to regulate conduct in actual employment of
objects, this world of impressions will be one in which he
loves to dwell. Its materials are pliable and exact no
responsibility. He may be utterly innocent of the reduc-
tion of objects by theorists into conjoined sensations and
images; the notion that his table consists largely of images
would be to him a wild vagary, contradictory of common-
sense. But he knows very well that the incidents of life
may produce fancies in him that are more exciting or more
soothing than the incidents themselves. When there is
neither the power to renounce revery nor to use it in any
objective embodiment, we have a condition in which soil
and atmosphere are prepared to find the spirit of subjec-
tive idealism congenial, even if the technical facts adduced
and the dialectic employed in its behalf are beyond reach.
Our statements, however, are one-sided, as far as the
full scope of the "inner life" is concerned. It is the home
of aspirations and ideals that are noble and that may in
time receive fulfillment as well as of figments and airy
nothings. It may be charged with infinite humor and
tragedy. It affords a realm in which king and court fool,
prince and pauper, meet as equals. It is subject-matter
for the philosopher as well as for the rebuffed and wistful.
Recall the contrast which Royce had drawn between the
dominant external Ism of the seventeenth century and the
spirit of the eighteenth. "It is no matter whether you
are a philosopher and write essays on 'The Principles of
Human Knowledge' or whether you are a heroine in an
eighteenth century novel, and write sentimental letters
to a friend; you are part of the same movement. The
spirit is dissatisfied with the mathematical order, and
NATURE, MIND AND SUBJECT 239
feels unfriendliness among the eternities of sevententb-
century thought. The spirit wants to be at home with
itself, well-friended in the comprehension of its inner
processes. It loves to be confidential in its heart out-
pourings, keen in its analysis, humane in its attitude
toward life."
We are given to referring the beginnings of subjectiv-
ism to Descartes, with his penset as the indubitable
certainty, or to Locke with his simple idea as immediate
object. Technically or with respect to later dialectical
developments, this reference is correct enough. But
historically it is wrong. Descartes' thought is the nous
of classic tradition forced inwards because physical
science had extruded it from its object. Its internality
is a logical necessity of the attempt to reconcile the new
science with the old tradition, not a thing intrinsically
important. Similarly Locke's simple idea is the classic
Idea, Form or Species dislodged from nature and com-
pelled to take refuge in mind. For Locke, it is coerced by
external existence and remains coercive for all subsequent
intellectual operations. The subjective as such is alien
to Locke's way of thinking; his whole bias is against it,
and in favor of what is grounded in nature being a
matter of relations already established. The"simpleidea"
is merely man's available point of contact with the objec-
tive order; and in this contact resides its whole import.
From the standpoint of "inner life" the simple idea
became however, a sensation, that is, a feeling, a state
of mind, an intrinsically interesting event having its own
significant career. If this were true of such a rudimen-
tary thing as blue or soft, how much more significantly it
holds of imagination and emotion* Inner reveries and
230 EXPERIENCE AND NATURE
enjoyments constitute freedom to the natural man.
Everywhere else is constraint, whether it be of study, of
science, family life, industry, or government. The road
to freedom by escape into the inner life is no modern dis-
covery; it was taken by savages, by the oppressed, by
children, long before it was formulated in philosophical
romanticism. The generalized awareness of the fact is
new however, and it added a new dimension to charac-
teristically modern experience. It created new forms of
art and new theories of esthetics, often promulgated by
literary artists who have nothing but contempt for philo-
sophical theories as such. Mr. Santayana is a thinker
whose intent and basis are at one with classic thought.
But if we note the importance assumed in his thinking
by the "inward landscape/' there is before us a measure
of the pervasive influence of the kind of experience that
was seized upon by Romanticism as the exclusive truth
of experience.
The function of individualized rnind in furthering experi-
ment and invention and the directed reconstruction of
events, together with the discovery that objects of senti-
ment and fancy, although rejected by the order of events
in space and time, may form the contents of an inner
and private realm, finds its legitimate outcome in the
conception of experiencing, and in the discrimination of
experiencing into a diversity of states and processes. To
the Greeks, experience was the outcome of accumulation
of practical acts, sufferings and perception gradually built
up into the skill of the carpenter, shoemaker, pilot, farmer,
general, and politician. There was nothing merely per-
sonal or subjective about it; it was a consolidation, effected
by nature, of particular natural occurrences into actualiza-
NATURE, MIND AND SUBJECT 231
tlon of the forms of such things as are thus and so usually,
now and then, upon the whole, but not necessarily and
always. Experience was adequate and final for this kind
of thing because it was as much their culminating actual-
ization as rational thought was the actualization of the
forms of things that are what they are necessarily. To
Aristotle, the copula was a true verb, always affected by
tense. Things which fully and completely are, have been,
will be, and now are exactly the same; their matter is
completely mastered by form. Concerning them we can
say "is 11 with demonstrative certainty: such things are
few, though supremely good, and are the objects of science.
Of other things we can only say that they have been and
are not at the present time, or that though not existing
at the present moment they may exist at some unspecified
future time. Of them we can say "is" only with a per-
haps or a probably, since they are subject to chance. In
them matter is not wholly subdued to form. Experience
is the actualization through an organic body of just these
affairs. Experience was not some person's ; it was nature's f
localized in a body as that body happened to exist by
nature.
As was remarked in the introductory chapter one can
hardly use the term "experience" in philosophical dis-
course, but a critic rises to inquire "Whose experience?"
The question is asked in adverse criticism. Its implica-
tion is that experience by its very nature is owned by some
one; and that the ownership is such in kind that every-
thing about experience is affected by a private and exclu-
sive quality. The implication is as absurd as it would be
to infer from the fact that houses are usually owned, are
mine and yours and his, that possessive reference so per-
232 EXPERIENCE AND NATURE
meates the properties of being a house that nothing intel-
ligible can be said about the latter. It is obvious, how-
ever, that a house can be owned only when it has existence
and properties independent of being owned. The quali-
ity of belonging to some one is not an all-absorbing maw
in which independent properties and relations disappear
to be digested into egohood. It is additive; it marks the
assumption of anew relationship, in consequence of which
the house, the common, ordinary, house, acquires new
properties. It is subject to taxes; the owner has the right
to exclude others from entering it; he enjoys certain
privileges and immunities with respect to it and is also
exposed to certain burdens and liabilities.
Substitute "experience" for "house," and no other word
need be changed. Experience when it happens has the
same dependence upon objective natural events, physical
and social, as has the occurrence of a house. It has its
own objective and definitive traits; these can be described
without reference to a self, precisely as a house is of brick,
has eight rooms, etc., irrespective of whom it belongs to,
Nevertheless, just as for some purposes and with respect
to some consequences, it is all important to note the added
qualification of personal ownership of real property, so
with "experience." In first instance and intent, k is
not exact nor relevant to say "1 experience" or "I think."
"It" experiences or is experienced, "it" thinks or is
thought, is a juster phrase. Experience, a serial course
of affairs with their own characteristic properties and
relationships, occurs, happens, and is what it is. Among
and within these occurrences, not outside of them nor
underlying them, are those events which are denominated
selves. In some specifiable respects and for some specifi-
NATURE, MIND AND SUBJECT 233
able consequences, these selves, capable of objective de-
notation just as are sticks, stones, and stars, assume the
care and administration of certain objects and acts in
experience. Just as in the case of the house, this assump-
tion of ownership brings with it further liabilities and
assets, burdens and enjoyments.
To say in a significant way, "/ think, believe, desire,
instead of barely it is thought, believed, desired," is
to accept and affirm a responsibility and to put forth a
claim. It does not mean that the self is the source or
author of the thought and affection nor its exclusive seat*
It signifies that the self as a centred organization of ener-
gies identifies itself (in the sense of accepting their conse-
quences) with a belief or sentiment of independent and
external origination. The absurdity of any other concep-
tion appears upon examination of such affairs as are
designated by "I do not believe" or "I do not like;" in
them it is obvious that a relationship of incompatibility
between two distinct and denoted objects is contained.
Authorship and liability look in two different ways, one
to the past, the other to the future. Natural events
including social habits originate thoughts and feelings.
To say "/ think, hope and love" is to say in effect that
genesis is not the last word; instead of throwing the blame
or the credit for the belief, affection and expectation
upon nature, one's family, church, or state, one declares
one's self to be henceforth a partner. An adoptive act
is proclaimed in virtue of which one claims the benefit of
future goods and admits liability for future ills flow-
ing from the affair in question. Even in the most "indi-
vidualistic" society some properties remain communal;
and many things, like the bowels of the earth and the
234 EXPERIENCE AND NATURE
depths of the seas, are unowned by either group or per-
son- The cogent line of defense of the institution of
private property is that it promotes prudence, account-
ability, ingenuity and security, in the production and
administration of commodities and resources which exist
independently of the relationship of property. In like
fashion, not all thoughts and emotions are owned either
socially or personally; and either mode of appropriation
has to be justified on the basis of distinctive consequences.
Analytic reflection shows that the ordinary conception
of causation as a trait belonging to some one thing is th
Idea of responsibility read backward. The idea that some
one thing, or any two or three things, are the cause of an
occurrence is in effect an application of the idea of credit
or blame as in the Greek atria. There is nothing in
nature that belongs absolutely and exclusively to any-
thing else; belonging is always a matter of reference and
distributive assignment, justified in any particular case
as far as it works out well. Greek metaphysics and logic
are dominated by the idea of inherent belonging and ex-
clusion; another instance of naively reading the story of
nature in language appropriate to human association.
Modern science has liberated physical events from the
domination of the notions of intrinsic belonging and exclu-
sion, but it has retained the idea with exacerbated vigor
in the case of psychological events. The elimination of
the category from physics and its retention in psychology
has provided a seeming scientific basis for the division
between psychology and physics, and thereby for the
egotism of modern philosophy. Much subjectivism is
only a statement of the logical consequences of the doc-
trine sponsored by psychological "science" of the monop*
NATURE, MIND AND SUBJECT 235
olistic possession of mental phenomena by a self; or,
after the idea of an underlying spiritual substance became
shaky, of the doctrine that mental events as such con-
stitute all there is to selfhood. For the philosophical
implications of the latter idea, as far as privacy, monopoly
and exclusiveness of causation and belonging are con-
cerned, are similar to those of the older dogma when it
was applied to cosmic nature.
Enough, however, of negation. The positive conse-
quence is an understanding of the shift of emphasis from
the experienced, the objective subject-matter, the what, to
the experiencing, the method of its course, the how of its
changes. Such a shift occurs whenever the problem of
control of production of consequences arises. As long as
men are content to enjoy and suffer fire when it happens,
fire is just an objective entity which is what it is. That
it may be taken as a deity to be adored or propitiated,
is evidence that its "whatness" is all there is to it. But
when men come to the point of making fire, fire is not an
essence, but a mode of natural phenomena, an order in
change, a "how" of a historic sequence. The change
from immediate use in enjoyment and suffering is equiv-
alent to recognition of a method of procedure, and of the
alliance of insight into method with possibility of control.
The development of the conception of experiencing as
a distinctive operation is akin to the growth of the idea of
fire-making out of direct experiences with fire. Fire is
fire, inherently just what it is; but making fire is rela-
tional. It takes thought away from fire to the other
things that help and prevent its occurrence. So with
experience in the sense of things that are experienced;
they are what they are. But their occurrence as experi-
236 EXPERIENCE AND NATURE
enced things is ascertained to be dependent upon atti-
tudes and dispositions; the manner of their happening is
found to be affected by the habits of an organic individual.
Since myth and science concern the same objects in the
same natural world, sun, moon, and stars, the difference
between them cannot be determined exclusively on the
basis of these natural objects. A differential has to found
in distinctive ways of experiencing natural objects; it is
perceived that man is an emotional and imaginative as
well as an observing and reasoning creature, and that
different manners of experiencing affect the status of
subject-matter experienced. Capacity to distinguish be-
tween the sun and moon of science and these same things
as they figure in myth and cult depends upon capacity to
distinguish different attitudes and dispositions of the
subject; the heroes of legend and poetry are discrimi-
nated from historic characters when memory, imagina-
tion and idealizing emotion are taken into the reckoning.
Again, it is discovered that the good of some objects is
connected with one way of experiencing, namely appetite,
while the acquisition of goodness by other objects is
dependent upon the operation of reflection. In conse-
quence, the experienced objects are differentiated as to
their goodness, although good as an essence is unchanged.
The importance of modes of experiencing for control
of experienced objects may be illustrated from economic
theory. A study of various economic essences or con-
cepts is possible: definition, classification and dialectical
reference to one another of such meanings as value,
utility, rent, exchange, profit, wages, etc. There is also
possible a positivistic study of existential economic
regimes, resulting in description of their structures and
NATURE, MIND AND SUBJECT 237
operations. If the presence and operation of disposi-
tions and attitudes be neglected, these alternatives
exhaust the field of inquiry. Neither the study of
objective essences nor of objective existences is avail-
able, however, in problems of polity, in management of
economic events. When the "psychological" factor is
introduced, say, a study of the effects of certain ways
of experiencing, such as incentives, desires, fatigue,
monotony, habit, waste-motions, insecurity, prestige,
team work, fashion, esprit de corps, and a multitude of like
factors, the situation changes. Factors that are within
control are specified, and a fuller degree of deliberate
administration of events is made possible. The objectiv-
ity of events remains what it was, but the discovery of the
r61e of personal dispositions in conditioning their occur-
rence, enables us to interpret and connect them in new
ways, ways, which are susceptible of greater regulation
than were the other ways. Banks, stores, factories do
not become psychical when we ascertain the part played
in their genesis and operation by psychological factors ;
they remain as external to the organism and to a
particular mind as ever they were, things experienced as
are winds and stars. But we get a new leverage, intel-
lectual and practical, upon them when we can convert
description of ready-made events and dialectical relation
of ready-made notions into an account of a way of
occurrence. For a perceived mode of becoming is always
ready to be translated into a method of production and
direction.
Since modern natural science has been concerned with
discovery of conditions of production, to be employed as
means for consequences, the development erf interest in
238 EXPERIENCE AND NATURE
attitudes of individual subjects the psychological Inter-
est is but an extension of its regular business. Knowl-
edge of conditions of the occurrence of experienced objects
is not complete until we have included organic conditions
as well as extra-organic conditions. Knowledge of the
latter may account for a happening in the abstract but
not for the concrete or experienced happening. A general
knowledge of dispositions and attitudes renders us exactly
the same sort of intellectual and practical service as pos-
session of physical constants. The trouble lies in the
inadequacy of our present psychological knowledge. And
it is probably this deficiency, which renders such psycho-
logical knowledge as we possess unavailable for technologi-
cal control, which, joined to spontaneous interest in
"inner" life, has set off psychological subject-matter as a
separate world of existence, instead of a discovery of
attitudes and dispositions involved in the world of com-
mon experience. In truth, attitudes, dispositions and
their kin, while capable of being distinguished and made
concrete intellectual objects, are never separate existences.
They are always of, from, toward, situations and things.
They may be studied with a minimum of attention to the
things at and away from which they are directed. The
things with which they are concerned may for purposes of
inquiry be represented by a blank, a symbol to be specifi-
cally filled in as occasion demands. But except as ways
of seeking, turning from, appropriating, treating things,
they have no existence nor significance.
Every type of culture has experienced resistance and
frustration. These events are interpreted according to
the bias dominating a particular type of culture. To
the modern European mind they have been interpreted
NATURE, MIND AND SUBJECT 239
as results of the opposed existence of subject and object
as independent forms of Being. The notion is now so
established in tradition that to many thinkers it appears
to be a datum, not an interpretative classification. But
the East Indian has envisaged the same phenomena as
evidence of the contrast of an illusory world to which
corresponds domination by desires and a real world due
to emancipation from desires, attained through ascetic dis-
cipline and meditation. The Greeks interpreted the same
experience on the basis of the cosmic discrepancy of being
and becoming, form and matter, as the reluctance of
existence to become a complete and transparent medium
of meaning. Taken absolutely, the interpretation on the
basis of opposition of subject and object has no advan-
tage over the other doctrines; it is a local and provincial
interpretation. Taken inherently or absolutely, it has an
absurdity from which they are free; for subject and object
antithetically defined can have logically no transactions
with each other. Taken as a factor in the enterprise of
overcoming resistance and reducing the prospects of
frustration, statement in terms of distinction of subject
and object is intelligible, and is more valuable than the
other modes of statement. Object is, as Basil Gildersleeve
said, that which objects, that to which frustration is due.
But it is also the objective; the final and eventual con-
summation, an integrated secure independent state of
affairs. The subject is that which suffers, is subjected
and which endures resistance and frustration; it is also
that which attempts subjection of hostile conditions;
that which takes the immediate initiative in remaking the
situation as it stands. Subjective and objective dis-
tinguished as factors in a regulated effort at modification
240 EXPERIENCE AND NATURE
of the environing world have an intelligible meaning.
Subjectivism as an "ism" converts this historic, relative
and instrumental status and function into something
absolute and fixed; while pure "objectivism" is a doctrine
of fatalism.
To-day there is marked revival of objectivism, even of
externalism. The world of physical science is no longer
new and strange; to many it is now familiar; while many
of those to whom it is personally unfamiliar take it for
granted on authority. To a considerable extent its sub-
ject-matter is taking the place of the subject-matter of
older creeds as something given ready-made, demanding
unhesitating credence and passive acceptance. The doc-
trine of the opposition of subject and object in knowledge
is fading, becoming reminiscent; that sense of strain which
is lacking accompanied transition from one set of beliefs
to another very different set. Only in politics and eco-
nomics is the opposition of subject and institutional object
poignant. And even in these fields radical and conservative
increasingly appeal to objects which are collective, non-
individual. The conservative recurs to the objectivism
of established institutions, idealized into intrinsic stabil-
ity; the radical looks forward to the completed outcome of
an objective and necessary economic evolution. In spite
of the appeal to the catchwords of individualism, pri-
vate initiative, voluntary abstinence, personal industry
and effort, thereismore danger at present that the genuinely
creative effort of the individual will be lost than there is
of any return to earlier individualism. Everything makes
for the mass. When private property is talked about,
the product of individual labor is no longer meant;
but a legally buttressed institution. Capital is no longer
NATURE, MIND AND SUBJECT 241
the outcome of deliberate personal sacrifice, but is an insti-
tution of corporations and finance with massive political
and social ramifications. Appeals to secure action of a
certain sort may use the old words; but the fears and
hopes which are now aroused are not really connected
with freedom of individual thought and effort, but with
the objective foundations of society, established "law and
order."
This resort to an objectivism which ignores initiating
and re-organizing desire and imagination will in the end
only strengthen that other phase of subjectivism which
consists in escape to the enjoyment of inward landscape.
Men who are balked of a legitimate realization of their
subjectivity, men who are forced to confine innovating
need and projection of ideas to technical modes of indus-
trial and political life, and to specialized or "scientific"
fields of intellectual activity, will compensate by finding
release within their inner consciousness. There will be
one philosophy, a realistic one, for mathematics, physical
science and the established social order; another, and
opposed, philosophy for the affairs of personal life. The
objection to dualism is not just that it is a dualism, but
that it forces upon us antithetical, non-convertible princi-
ples of formulation and interpretation. If there is com-
plete split in nature and experience then of course no
ingenuity can explain it away; it must be accepted. But
in case no such sharp division actually exists, the evils of
supposing there is one are not confined to philosophical
theory. Consequences within philosophy as such are of
no great import. But philosophical dualism is but a
formulated recognition of an impass in life; an impotence
in interaction, inability to make effective transition, limi-
242 EXPERIENCE AND NATURE
tation of power to regulate and thereby to understand.
Capricious pragmatism based on exaltation of personal
desire; consolatory estheticism based on capacity for
wringing contemplative enjoyment from even the trage-
dies of the outward spectacle; refugee idealism based on
rendering thought omnipotent in the degree in which it is
ineffective in concrete affairs; these forms of subjectiv-
ism register an acceptance of whatever obstacles at
the time prevent the active participation of the self in
the ongoing course of events. Only when obstacles are
treated as challenges to remaking of personal desire and
thought, so that the latter integrate with the movement of
nature and by participation direct its consequences, are
opposition and duality rightly understood.
Existentially speaking, a human individual is distinc-
tive opacity of bias and preference conjoined with plastic-
ity and permeability of needs and likings. One trait tends
to isolation, discreteness; the other trait to connection,
continuity. This ambivalent character is rooted in nature,
whose events have their own distinctive indifferencies,
resistances, arbitrary closures and intolerances, and also
their peculiar openness, warm responsiveness, greedy
seekings and transforming unions. The conjunction in
nature of whimsical contingency and lawful uniformity
is the result of these two characters of events. They
persist upon the human plane, and as ultimate characters
are ineradicable. Boundaries, demarcations, abrupt, and
expansive over-reachings of boundaries impartially and
conjunctively mark every phase of human life.
The human individual in his opacity of bias is in so
far doomed to a blind solitariness. He hugs himself in
his isolation and fights against disclosure, the give and
NATURE, MIND AND SUBJECT 343
take of communication, as for the very integrity of
existence. Even communicable meanings are tinged with
color of the uncommunicated; there is a quality of reserve
in every publicity. Everything may be done with this
irreducible uniqueness except to get rid of it. The sense
of it may add a bitter loneliness to experience. It may
lead to restless insatiable throwing of the self into every
opportunity of external business and dissipation in order
to escape from it. It may be cherished, nurtured, devel-
oped into a cultivated consolatory detachment from the
affairs of life, ending in the delusion of the superiority of
the private inner life to all else, or in the illusion that one
can really succeed in emancipating himself in his pure
inwardness from connection with the world and society.
It may express itself in elaborated schemes of self-pity and
in bursts of defiant exclamation: Here I stand and
cannot otherwise. It may lead to unreasoned loyalty to
seemingly lost causes and forlorn hopes and events may
sometimes justify the faith.
Romanticism has made the best and the worst of the
discovery of the private and incommunicable. It has
converted a pervasive and inevitable color and temper of
experience into its substance. In conceiving that this
inexpugnable uniqueness, this ultimate singularity, ex-
hausts the self, it has created a vast and somnambulic ego-
tism out of the fact of subjectivity. For every existence
in addition to its qualitative and intrinsic boundaries
has affinities and active outreachings for connection and
intimate union. It is an energy of attraction, expansion
and supplementation. The ties and bonds of associated
life are spontaneous uncalculated manifestations of this
phase of human selfhood) at the union of hydrogen and
244 EXPERIENCE AND NATURE
oxygen is natural and unpremeditated. Sociability,
munication are just as immediate traits of the concrete
individual as is the privacy of the closet of consciousness.
To define one's self within closed limits, and then to try
out the self in expansive acts that inevitably result in an
eventual breaking down of the walled-in self, are equally
natural and inevitable acts. Here is the ultimate
"dialectic" of the universal and individual. One no
sooner establishes his private and subjective self than
he demands it be recognized and acknowledged by others,
even if he has to invent an imaginary audience or an
Absolute Self to satisfy the demand. And no person
taught by experience ever escapes the reflection that no
matter how much he does for himself, what endures is only
what is done for others: an observation however which is
most comforting when it takes the form of attributing
desire to serve others to act* which indulge the exclusive
self.
In some form or other, the dualism erected between
the ego and the world of things and persons represents
failure to attain solution of the problem set by this
ambiguous nature of the self. It is a formulated accept-
ance of oscillation between surrender to the external and
assertion of the inner. In science and in art, especially
in the art of intercourse, real solutions occur. Private
bias manages in them to manifest itself in innovations and
deviations, which reshape the world of objects and insti-
tutions, and which eventually facilitate communication
and understanding. Thereby the final and efficient, the
limiting and the expansive, attain a harmony which they
do not possess in other natural events.
MATURE, MWD AMD SUBJECT MS
Thus an individual existence has a double status and
import. There is the individual that belongs in a contin-
uous system of connected events which reinforce its
activities and which form a world in which k is at home,
consistently at one with its own preferences, satisfying its
requirements. Such an individual is in its world as a
member, extending as far as the moving equilibrium of
which it is a part lends support. It is a natural end, not
as an abrupt and immediate termination but as a fulfifl-
menL Then there is the individual that finds a gap
between its distinctive bias and the operations of the
things through which alone its need can be satisfied; it is
broken off, discrete, because it is at odds with its surround-
ings. It either surrenders, conforms, and for the sake of
peace becomes a parasitical subordinate, indulges in
egotistical solitude; or its activities set out to remake con-
ditions in accord with desire. In the latter process, intel-
ligence is born not mind which appropriates and enjoys
the whole of which it is a part, but mind as individualized,
initiating, adventuring, experimenting, dissolving. Its
possessed powers, its accomplished unions with the world,
are now reduced to uncertain agencies to be forged into
efficient instrumentalities in the stress and strain of
trial.
The individual, the self, centred in a settled world
which owns and sponsors it, and which in turn it owns and
enjoys, is finished, closed. Surrender of what is possessed,
disowning of what supports one in secure ease, is involved
in all inquiry and discovery; the latter implicate an
individual still to make, with all the risks implied therein.
For to arrive at new truth and vision is to alter. The old
self is put ofi and the new sell k only forming, aad the form
246 EXPERIENCE AND NATURE
it finally takes will depend upon the unforeseeable result of
an adventure. No one discovers a new world without for-
saking an old one; and no one discovers a new world who
exacts guarantee in advance for what it shall be, or who
puts the act of discovery under bonds with respect to what
the new world shall do to him when it comes into vision.
This is the truth in the exaggeration of subjectivism.
Only by identification with remaking the objects that
now obtain are we saved from complacent objectivism.
Those who do not fare forth and take the risks attendant
upon the formation of new objects and the growth of a
new self, are subjected perforce to inevitable change of
the settled and close world they have made their own.
Identification of thebiasandpreferenceof selfhood with the
process of intelligent remaking achieves an indestructible
union of the instrumental and the final. For this bias can
be satisfied no matter what the frustration of other desires
and endeavors.
That an individual, possessed of some mode and degree
of organized unity, participates in the genesis of every
experienced situation, whether it be an object or an
activity, is evident. That the way in which it is engaged
affects the quality of the situation experienced is evident.
That the way in which it is engaged has consequences that
modify not merely the environment but which react to
modify the active agent; that every form of life in the
higher organisms constantly conserves some consequences
of its prior experiences, is also evident. The constancy
and pervasiveness of the operative presence of the self as
a determining factor in all situations is the chief reason
why we give so little heed to it; it is more intimate and
omnipresent in experience than the air we breathe. Only
NATURE, MIND AND SUBJECT 247
fa pathological cases, in delusions and insanities and social
eccentricities, do we readily become aware of it; even in
such cases it required long discipline to force attentive
observation back upon the self. It is easier to attribute
such things to invasion and possession from without,
as by demons and devils. Yet till we understand opera-
tions of the self as the tool of tools, the means in all use of
means, specifying its differential activities in their distinc-
tive consequences in varying qualities of what is experi-
enced, science is incomplete and the use made of it is
at the mercy of an unknown factor, so that the ultimate
and important consequence is in so far a matter of accident.
Intentions and efforts bring forth the opposite of what was
intended and striven for, and the result is confusion and
catastrophe. Thus we are brought to a consideration of
the psycho-physical mechanism and functioning of indi-
vidual centres of action.
CHAPTER SEVEN
NATURE, LIFE AND BODY-MIND
A series of cultural experiences exhibits a series of <fi-
verging conceptions of the relation of mind to nature in
general and to the organic body in particular. Greek
experience included affairs that rewarded without want
and struggle the contemplation of free men; they enjoyed
a civic life full and rich with an equable adaptation to
natural surroundings. Such a life seemed to be upon the
whole for those in its full possession a gracious culmina-
tion of nature; the organic body was the medium through
which the culmination took place. Since any created
thing is subject to natural contingency, death was ix>t a
problem; a being who is generated shares while he may in
mind and eternal forms, and then piously merges with
the forces which generated him. But life does not always
exist in this happy equilibrium : it is onerous and devastat-
ing, civil life corrupt and harsh. Under such circum-
stances, a spirit which believes that it was created in the
image of a divine eternal spirit, in whose everlastingness
it properly shares, finds itself an alien and pilgrim in a
strange and fallen world. Its presence in that world
and its residence in a material body which is a part of that
world are an enigma. Again the scene shifts. Nature is
conceived to be wholly mechanical. The existence within
nature and as part of it of a body possessed of life, mani-
festing thought and enjoying consciousness is a mystery.
This series of experiences with their corresponding
philosophies display characteristic factors in the problem
NATURE, LIFE AND BODY-MIND Ml
of life and mind in relation to body. To the Greeks, al
life was psyche, for it was self-movement and only soul
moves itself. That there should be self-movement in a
world in which movement was also up-and-down, to-and-
fro, circular, was indeed interesting but not strange or
untoward. Evidence of the fact of self-movement is
directly had in perception; even plants exhibit it m a
degree and hence have soul, which although only vegeta-
tive is a natural condition of animal soul and rational
mind. Organic body occupies a distinctive position in
the hierarchy of being; it is the highest actuality of
nature's physical potentialities, and it is in turn the poten-
tiality of mind. Greek thought, as well as Greek religion,
Greek sculpture and recreation, is piously attentive to
the human body.
In Pauline Christianity and its successors, the body is
earthly, fleshly, lustful and passionate; spirit is Godlike,
everlasting ; flesh is corruptible ; spirit incorruptible. The
body was conceived in terms of a moral disparagement
colored by supernatural religion. Since the body is
material, the dyslogy extends to all that is material; the
metaphysical discount put upon matter by Plato and
Aristotle becomes in ascetic thought a moral and essential
discount. Sin roots in the will; but occasions for sin
come from the lusts of the body; appetites and desires
spring from the body, distract attention from spiritual
things; concupiscence, anger, pride, love of money and
luxury, worldly ambition, result. Technically, the frame-
work of Aristotelian thought is retained by the scholas-
tics; St. Thomas Aquinas repeats his formulae concern-
ing life and the body almost word for word. But actually
and substantially this formal relationship has been dis-
250 EXPERIENCE AND NATURE
torted and corrupted through the seduction of spirit by
flesh manifest in the fall of man and nature by Adam's sin.
Add to moral fear of the flesh, interest in resurrection into
the next world for external bliss or woe, and there is
present a fullfledged antithesis of spirit and matter. In
spite of this antithesis, however, they are conjoined in
the body of man. Spirit is simple, one, permanent and
indissoluble; matter is multiple, subject to change and
dissolution. The possibility of the conjunction of two
such opposite things formed a problem. But it would
have been a remote, technical problem of no interest save
to a few speculative thinkers, were it not given concrete-
ness by the notion of an immortality to be spent in bliss
or in woe unutterable, and the dependence of this ulti-
mate destiny upon a life in which lust of the flesh along
with the world of ambition and the devil of pride, was a
standing temptation to sin and thereby an occasion of
eternal damnation.
As long as the Aristotelian metaphysical doctrine
persisted that nature is an ordered series from
lower to higher of potentialities and actualizations, it
was possible to conceive of the organic body as normally
the highest term in a physical series and the lowest term
in a psychical series. It occupied just that intermediate
position where, in being the actualization of the poten-
tialities of physical qualities, body was also potentiality
for manifestation of their ideal actualities. Aside from
moral and religious questions, there was in medieval
thought no special problem attaching to the relation of
mind and body. It was just one case of the universal
principle of potentiality as the substrate of ideal actuality.
But when the time came when the moral and religious
NATURE, LIFE AND BODY-MIND 251
associations of spirit, soul, and body persisted in full
vigor, while the classic metaphysics of the potential and
actual fell into disrepute, the full burden of the question
of the relation of body, nature and man, of mind, spirit,
and matter, was concentrated in the particular problem
of the relation of the body and soul. When men ceased to
interpret and explain facts in terms of potentiality and
actuality, and resorted to that of causality, mind and
matter stood over against one another in stark unlike-
ness; there were no intermediates to shade gradually the
black of body into the white of spirit.
Moreover, both classic and medieval thought sup-
plied influential empirical impetus to the new conception
in spite of their theoretically divergent foundation. The
old distinction between vegetative, animal and rational
souls was, when applied to men, a formulation and justifi-
cation of class divisions in Greek society. Slaves and
mechanical artisans living on the nutritional, appetitive
level were for practical purposes symbolized by the body
as obstructions to ideal ends and as solicitations to acts
contrary to reason. The good citizen in peace and war
was symbolized by the soul proper, amenable to reason,
employing thought, but confining its operations after all
to mundane matters, infected with matter. Scientific
inquirers and philosophers alone exemplified pure reason,
operating with ideal forms for the sake of the latter.
The claim of this class for inherent superiority was sym-
bolized by notes, pure immaterial mind. In Hellenistic
thought, the three-fold distinction became that of body,
mind or soul and spirit; spirit being elevated above all
world affairs and acts, even moral concerns, having purely
"spiritual" (immaterial) and religious objects. This doc-
252 EXPERIENCE AND NATURE
trine fell in with the sharp separation made in Christianity
for practical moral purposes, between flesh and spirit, sin
and salvation, rebellion and obedience. Thus the abstract
and technical Cartesian dualism found prepared for it a
rich empirical field with which to blend, and one which
afforded its otherwise empty formalism concrete meaning
and substance.
The formalism and unreality of the problem remains,
however, in the theories which have been offered as its
"solutions." They range from the materialism of Hobbes,
the apparatus of soul, pineal glands, animal spirits of
Descartes, to interactionism, pre-established harmony,
occasionalism, parallelism, pan-psychic idealism, epi-
phenomenalism, and the Man vital a portentous array,
The diversity of solutions together with the dialectical
character of each doctrine which render it impregnable to
empirical attack, suggest that the trouble lies not so much
in the solutions, as in the factors which determine state-
ment of the problem. If this be so, the way out of the
snarl is a reconsideration of the conceptions in virtue of
which the problem exists. And these conceptions have
primarily nothing to do with mind-body; they have to
do with underlying metaphysical issues: the denial of
quality in general to natural events; the ignoring in par-
ticular of temporal quality and the dogma of the superior
reality of "causes."
Empirically speaking, the most obvious difference
between living and non-living things is that the activities
of the former are characterized by needs, by efforts which
are active demands to satisfy needs, and by satisfactions.
In making this statement, the terms need, effort and
satisfaction are primarily employed in a biological sense.
NATURE, LIFE AND BODY-MIND 253
By need is meant a condition of tensional distribution of
energies such that the body is in a condition of uneasy or
unstable equilibrium. By demand or effort is meant the
fact that this state is manifested in movements which
modify environing bodies in ways which react upon the
body, so that its characteristic pattern of active equilib-
rium is restored. By satisfaction is meant this recovery
of equilibrium pattern, consequent upon the changes of
environment due to interactions with the active demands
of the organism.
A plant needs water, carbon dioode; upon occasion it
needs to bear seeds. The need is neither an immaterial
psychic force superimposed upon matter, nor is it merely
a notional or conceptual distinction, introduced by
thought after comparison of two different states of the
organism, one of emptiness and one of repletion. It
denotes a concrete state of events: a condition of tension
in the distribution of energies such as involves pressure
from points of high potential to those of low potential
which in turn effects distinctive changes such that the
connection with the environment is altered, so that it
acts differently upon the environment and is exposed to
different influences from k. In this fact, taken by itself,
there is nothing which marks off the plant from the physi-
co-chemical activity of inanimate bodies. The latter
also are subject to conditions of disturbed inner equilib-
rium, which lead to activity in relation to surrounding
things, and which terminate after a cycle of changes a
terminus termed saturation, corresponding to satisfac-
tion in organic bodies.
The difference between the animate plant aad tbt
inanimate iron molecule is not that the former has &otnt-
254 EXPERIENCE AND NATURE
thing in addition to physico-chemical energy; it Hes in
the way in which physico-chemical energies are inter-
connected and operate, whence different consequences
mark inanimate and animate activity respectively. For
with animate bodies, recovery or restoration of the equilib-
rium pattern applies to the complex integrated course or
history. In inanimate bodies as such, "saturation"
occurs indifferently, not in such a way as to tend to main-
tain a temporal pattern of activity. The interactions of
the various constituent parts of a plant take place in such
ways as to tend to continue a characteristically organized
activity; they tend to utilize conserved consequences of
past activities so as to adapt subsequent changes to the
needs of the integral system to which they belong. Or-
ganization is a fact, though it is not an original organiz-
ing force. Iron as such exhibits characteristics of bias
or selective reactions, but it shows no bias in favor of
remaining simple iron; it had just as soon, so to speak,
become iron-oxide. It shows no tendency in its inter-
action with water to modify the interaction so that con-
sequences will perpetuate the characteristics of pure iron.
If it did, it would have the marks of a living body, and
would be called an organism. Iron as a genuine constit-
uent of an organized body acts so as to tend to maintain
the type of activity of the organism to which it belongs.
If we identify, as common speech does, the physical as
such with the inanimate we need another word to denote
the activity of organisms as such. Psycho-physical is
an appropriate term. Thus employed, "psycho-physical"
denotes the conjunctive presence in activity of need-
demand-satisfaction, in the sense in which these terms
have been defined. In the compound word, the prefix
NATURE, LIFE AND BODY-MIND 255
"psycho" denotes that physical activity has acquired
additional properties, those of ability to procure a pecu-
liar kind of interactive support of needs from surrounding
media. Psycho-physical does not denote an abrogation
of the physico-chemical; nor a peculiar mixture of some-
thing physical and something psychical (as a centaur is
half man and half horse); it denotes the possession of
certain qualities and efficacies not displayed by the
inanimate.
Thus conceived there is no problem of the relation of
physical and psychic. There are specifiable empirical
events marked by distinctive qualities and efficacies.
There is first of all, organization with all which is implied
thereby. The problem involved is one of definite factual
inquiry. Under exactly what conditions does organiza-
tion occur, and just what are its various modes and their
consequences? We may not be able to answer these
questions satisfactorily; but the difficulties are not
those of a philosophical mystery, but such as attend
any inquiry into highly complex affairs. Organization is
an empirical trait of some events, no matter how specula-
tive and dubious theories about it may be; especially no
matter how false are certain doctrines about it which have
had great vogue namely, those doctrines which have
construed it as evidence erf a special force or entity called
life or soul. Organization is so characteristic of the nature
of some events in their sequential linkages that no theory
about it can be as speculative or absurd as those which
ignore or deny its genuine existence. Denial is never
based on empirical evidence, but is a dialectical conclusion
from a preconception that whatever appears later in time
must be metaphysically unreal as compared with what is
256 EXPERIENCE AND NATUR1
found earlier, or from a preconception that since the com-
plex is controlled by means of the simpler, the latter is
more "real."
When ever the activities of the constituent parts of an
organized pattern of activity are of such a nature as to
conduce to the perpetuation of the patterned activity,
there exists the basis of sensitivity. Each "part" of an
organism is itself organized, and so of the "parts" of the
part. Hence its selective bias in interactions with environ-
ing things is exercised so as to maintain tisdf, while also
maintaining the whole of which it is a member. The
root-tips of a plant interact with chemical properties of
the soil in such ways as to serve organized life activity;
and in such ways as to exact from the rest of the organism
their own share of requisite nutrition. This pervasive
operative presence of the whole in the part and of the part
in the whole constitutes susceptibility the capacity of
feeling whether or no this potentiality be actualized in
plant-life. Responses are not merely selective, but are
discriminatory, in behalf of some results rather than others.
This discrimination is the essence of sensitivity. Thus
with organization, bias becomes interest, and satisfac-
tion a good or value and not a mere satiation of wants or
repletion of deficiencies.
However it may be with plants and lower animals, in
animals in which locomotion and distance-receptors exist,
sensitivity and interest are realized as feeling, even though
only as vague and massive uneasiness, comfort, vigor and
exhaustion. A sessile organism requires no premoni-
tions of what is to occur, nor cumulative embodiments of
what has occurred. An organism with locomotion is as
vitally connected with the remote as well as with the
1CATURE, LIFE AND BODY-MIND 2ST
nearby; when locomotor organs are accompanied by dis-
tance-receptors, response to the distant in space becomes
increasingly prepotent and equivalent in effect to response
to the future in time. A response toward what is distant
is in effect an expectation or prediction of a later contact.
Activities are differentiated into the preparatory, or antici-
patory, and the fulfilling or consummately. The resul-
tant is a peculiar tension in which each immediate prepara-
tory response is suffused with the consummately tone of
sex or food or security to which it contributes. Sensitiv-
ity, the capacity, is then actualized as feeling; suscepti-
bility to the useful and harmful in surroundings becomes
premonitory, an occasion of eventual consequences withm
life.
On the other hand, a consummation or satisfaction
carries with it the cofrtSmwttion, m affied and reinforcing
form, of preparatory or anticipatory activities. It is not
only a culmination out of them, but is an integrated cumu-
lation, a funded conservation of them. Comfort or dis-
comfort, fatigue or exhilaration, implicity sum up a his-
tory, and thereby unwittingly provide a means whereby,
(when other conditions become present) the past can be
unravelled and made explicit. For it is characteristic of
feeling that while it may exist in a formless condition, or
without configured distinctions, it IB capable of receiving
and bearing distinctions without end. With the multi-
plication of sensitive discriminatory reactions to different
energies of the environment (the differentiation of sense-
organs, extero-ceptors and proprio-ceptors) and with the
increase in scope and delicacy of movements (the develop-
ment of motor-organs, to which internal glandular organs
for effecting a requisite redistributuion of energy cor-
258 EXPERIENCE AND NATURE
respond), feelings vary more and more in quality and
intensity.
Complex and active animals have, therefore, feelings
which vary abundantly in quality, corresponding to dis-
tinctive directions and phases initiating, mediating, ful-
filling or frustrating of activities, bound up in distinc-
tive connections with environmental affairs. They have
them, but they do not know they have them. Activity
is psycho-physical, but not "mental," that is, not aware
of meanings. As life is a character of events in a peculiar
condition of organization, and "feeling" is a quality of
life-forms marked by complexly mobile and discriminat-
ing responses, so "mind" is an added property assumed by
a feeling creature, when it reaches that organized inter-
action with other living creatures which is language,
communication. Then the qualities of feeling become
significant of objective differences in external things and
of episodes past and to come. This state of things in
which qualitatively different feelings are not just had
but are significant of objective differences, is mind. Feel-
ings are no longer just felt. They have and they make
sense; record and prophesy.
That is to say, differences in qualities (feelings) of acts
when employed as indications of acts performed and to be
performed and as signs of their consequences, mean some-
thing. And they mean it directly; the meaning is had as
their own character. Feelings make sense; as immediate
meanings of events and objects, they are sensations, or,
more properly, sensa. Without language, the qualities
of organic action that are feelings are pains, pleasures,
odors, colors, noises, tones, only potentially and prolep-
tically. With language they are discriminated and iden-
NATURE, LIFE AND BODY-MIND 159
tffied. They are then "objectified;" they are immediate
traits of things. This "objectification" is not a miracu-
lous ejection from the organism or soul into external
things, nor an illusory attribution of psychical entities to
physical things. The qualities never were "in" the organ-
ism; they always were qualities of interactions in which
both extra-organic things and organisms partake. When
named, they enable identification and discrimination of
things to take place as means in a further course of inclu-
sive interaction. Hence they are as much qualities of
the things engaged as of the organism. For purposes of
control they may be referred specifically to either the
thing or to the organism or to a specified structure of the
organism. Thus color which turns out not to be a relia-
able sign of external events becomes a sign of, say, a
defect in visual apparatus. The notion that sensory
affections discriminate and identify themselves, apart
from discourse, as being colors and sounds, etc., and thus
ipso facto constitute certain elementary modes of knowl-
edge, even though it be only knowledge of their own
existence, is inherently so absurd that it would never
have occurred to any one to entertain it, were it not for
certain preconceptions about mind and knowledge. Sen-
tiency in itself is anoetic; it exists as any immediate qual-
ity exists, but nevertheless it is an indispensable means
of any noetic function.
For when, through language, sentience is taken up into
a system of signs, when for example a certain quality of
the active relationship of organism and environment is
named hunger, it is seen as an organic demand for an
extra-organic object. To term a quality "hunger," to
name it, is to refer to an object, to food, to that which
260 EXPERIENCE AND NATURE
will satisfy k, towasda which the active situation moves.
Similarly, to name another quality "red," k to direct an
interaction between an organism and a thing to some
object which fulfills the demand or need of the situation.
It requires but alight observation of mental growth of a
child to note that organically conditioned qualities, includ-
ing those special sense-organs, are discriminated only as
they are employed to designate objects; red, for instance,
as the property of a dress or toy. The difficulty in the
way of identifying the qualities at acts cooctitioned by
proprioceptor organs is notoriously enormous. They
just merge in the general situation. If they entered into
communication as shared means to social consequences
they would acquire the same objective di&tincti veness as
do qualities conditioned by the extero-ceptor organs. On
the other hand, the qualities of the latter are just shades
of the general tone of situations until they are used, in
language, M c nfnjrLnn or shared nv*fl?>s to common ends.
Then they are identified as traits of objects. The child
has to learn through social intercourse that certain quali-
ties of action mean greediness or anger or fear or rude-
ness; the case is not otherwise with those qualities which
are identified as red, musical tone, a foul odor. The
latter may have instigated nausea, and "red" may have
excited uneasiness (as blood makes some persons faint);
but discrimination of the nauseating object as foul odor,
and of the excitation as red occurs only when they are
designated as signs.
The qualities of situations in which organisms and sur-
rounding conditions interact, when discriminated, make
sense. Sense is distinct from feeling, for it has a recog-
nized reference; it is the qualitative characteristic of
NATURE, LIFE AND BODY-MIND
something, not just a submerged unidentified quality or
tone. Sense is also different from signification. The
latter involves use of a quality as a sign or index of some-
thing else, as when the red of a light signifies danger,
and the need of bringing a moving locomotive to a stop.
The sense of a thing, on the other hand, is an immediate
and immanent meaning; it is meaning which is itself
felt or directly had. When we are baffled by perplexing
conditions, and finally hit upon a clew, and everything
falls into place, the whole thing suddenly, as we say,
"makes sense." In such a situation, the clew has signifi-
cation in virtue of being an indication, a guide to inter-
pretation. But the meaning of the whole situation as
apprehended is sense. This idiomatic usage of the word
sense is much nearer the empirical facts than is the ordin-
ary restriction of the word in psychological literature to a
single simple recognized quality, like sweet or red: the
latter simply designates a case of minimum sense, delib-
erately limited for purposes of intellectual safety-first.
Whenever a situation has this double function of meaning,
namely signification and sense, mind, intellect is definitely
present.
The distinction between physical, psycho-physical, and
mental is thus one of levels of increasing complexity and
intimacy of interaction among natural events. The idea
that matter, life and mind represent separate kinds of
Being is a doctrine that springs, as so many philosophic
errors have sprung, from a substantiation of eventual
functions. The fallacy converts consequences of inter-
action of events into causes of the occurrence of these
consequences a reduplication which is significant as to
the importance of the functions, but which hopelessly con-
KJ2 EXPERIENCE AND NATURE
fuses understanding of them. "Matter," or the physical,
is a character of events when they occur at a certain level
of interaction. It is not itself an event or existence; the
notion that while "mind" denotes essence, "matter"
denotes existence is superstition. It is more than a
bare essence; for it is a property of a particular field of
interacting events. But as it figures in science it is as
much an essence, as is acceleration, or the square root of
minus one; which meanings also express derivative
characters of events in interaction. Consequently, while
the theory that life, feeling and thought are never inde-
pendent of physical events may be deemed materialism,
it may also be considered just the opposite. For it is rea-
sonable to believe that the most adequate definition of
the basic traits of natural existence can be had only when
its properties are most fully displayed a condition which
is met in the degree of the scope and intimacy of inter-
actions realized.
In any case, genuine objection to metaphysical material-
ism is neither moral nor esthetic. Historically speaking,
materialism and mechanistic metaphysics as distinct from
mechanistic science designate the doctrine that mat-
ter is the efficient cause of life and mind, and that "cause"
occupies a position superior in reality to that of "effect."
Both parts of this statement axe contrary to fact. As far
as the conception of causation is to be introduced at all,
not matter but the natural events having matter as a
character, "cause" life and mind. "Effects," since they
mark the release of potentialities, are more adequate
indications of the nature of nature than are just "causes."
Control of the occurrence of the complex depends upon
its analysis into the more elementary; the dependence of
NATURE, LIFE AND BODY-MIND 263
life, sentiency and mind upon "matter" is thus practical
or instrumental. Lesser, more external fields of interac-
tion are more manageable than are wider and more
intimate ones, and only through managing the former
can we direct the occurrence of the latter. Thus it is in
virtue of the character of events which is termed matter
that psycho-physical and intellectual affairs can be dif-
ferentially determined. Every discovery of concrete
dependence of life and mind upon physical events is there-
fore an addition to our resources. If life and mind had
no mechanism, education, deliberate modification, recti-
fication, prevention and constructive control would be
impossible. To damn "matter" because of honorific
interest in spirit is but another edition of the old habit of
eulogizing ends and disparaging the means on which they
depend.
This, then, is the significance of our introductory state-
ment that the "solution" of the problem of mind-body is
to be found in a revision of the preliminary assumptions
about existence which generate the problem. As we have
already noted, fruitful science of nature began when
inquirers neglected immediate qualities, the "sense" of
events, wet and dry, hot and cold, light and heavy, up and
down, in behalf of "primary," namely, signifying, quali-
ties, and when they treated the latter, although called
qualities, not as such but as relations. This device made
possible a totally different dialectical treatment. Classic
science operated in terms of properties already attached
to qualitative phenomena of sense and custom. Hence
it could only repeat these phenomena in a changed vocabu-
lary; the vocabulary of sensory forms and forces which
were, after all nothing but the already given meanings of
264 EXPERIENCE AND NATURE
things reduplicated. But the new dialectic was that of
mathematical equations and functions. It started from
meanings which ignored obvious characters or meanings of
phenomena; hence it could lead to radically new relation-
ships and generalizations new in kind, and not merely
in detail. No longer was the connection or classifica-
tion of one color simply with other colors, but with aH
events involving rhythmic rates of change. Thus events
hitherto disjoined were brought together under princi-
ples of inclusive formulation and prediction. Temporal
qualities were stated as spatial velocities; thereby mathe-
matical functions directly applicable to spatial positions,
directions and distances, made it possible to reduce
sequence of events into calculable terms. Neglect of
temporal qualities as such centered thought upon order
of succession, an order convertible into one of coexistence.
All this in effect is equivalent to seizing upon relations
of events as the proper objects of knowledge. The sur-
render of immediate qualities, sensory and significant, as
objects of science, and as proper forms of classification
and understanding, left in reality these immediate quali-
ties just as they were; since they are had there is no
need to know them. But, as we have had frequent occa/-
sion to notice, the traditional view that the object of
knowledge is reality par excellence led to the conclusion
that the proper object of science was pre-eminently meta-
physically real. Hence immediate qualities, being ex-
truded from the object of science, were left thereby hang-
ing loose from the "real" object. Since their existence
could not be denied, they were gathered together into a
psychic realm of being, set over against the object of
physics. Given this premise, all the problems regarding
NATURE, LIFE AND BODY-MIND 265
the relation of mind and matter, the psychic and the bod-
ily, necessarily follow. Change the metaphysical prem-
ise; restore, that is to say, immediate qualities to their
rightful position as qualities of inclusive situations, and
the problems in question cease to be epistemological prob-
lems. They become specifiable scientific problems: ques-
tions, that is to say, of how such and such an event hav-
ing such and such qualities actually occurs.
Greek science imputed efficacy to qualities like wet and
dry, hot and cold, heavy and light and to such qualita-
tive differences in movement as up and down, to and fro,
around and around. The world was formulated and
explained on the basis of the causal efficacy of these
qualities. The scientific revolution of the seventeenth
century took its departure from a denial of causal status
(and hence of significance for science) of these and all
other direct qualities. On account, however, of the con-
version of this fact about scientific procedure into a
denial of the existence of qualities outside of mind and
consciousness, psycho-physical and mental functions
became inexplicable anomalies, supernatural in the literal
sense of the word. The error of Greek science lay not
in assigning qualities to natural existence, but in miscon-
ceiving the locus of their efficacy. It attributed to
qualities apart from organic action efficiencies which
qualities possess only through the medium of an organized
activity of life and mind. When life and mind are recog-
nized to be characters of the highly complex and extensive
interaction of events, it is possible to give natural existen-
tial status to qualities, without falling into the mistake of
Greek science. Psycho-physical phenomena and higher
mental phenomena may be admitted in their full empiri-
266 EXPERIENCE AND NATURE
cal reality, without recourse to dualistic breach in historic,
existential continuity.
When knowing inanimate things, qualities as such may
be safely disregarded. They present themselves as inten-
sities and vector directions of movement capable of state-
ment in mathematical terms. Thus their immediate
individuality is got around; it is impertinent for science 3
concerned as the latter is with relationships. The most
that can be said about qualities in the inanimate field is
that they mark the limit of the contact of historical affairs,
being abrupt ends or termini, boundaries of beginning
and closing where a particular interaction ceases. They
are like a line of foam marking the impact of waves of
different directions of movement. They have to be
noted and accepted in order to delimit a field of inquiry,
but they do not enter into the inquiry as factors or terms.
In life and mind they play an active role. The delimi-
tation or individualization they constitute on this level
is not external to events. It is all one with the organiza-
tion which permeates them, and which in permeating
them, converts prior limitations of intensity and direc-
tion of energy into actual and intrinsic qualities, or sen-
tient differences. For in feeling a quality exists as quality,
and not merely as an abrupt, discrete, unique delimitation
of interaction. Red differs from green for purposes of
physical science as that which gives specific meaning to
two sets of numbers applied to vibrations, or to two differ-
ent placements of lines in a spectrum. The difference is
proleptically qualitative; it refers to a unique difference
of potentiality in the affairs under consideration. But as
far as calculation and prediction are concerned these dif-
ferences remain designable by non-qualitative indices of
NATURE, LIFE AND BODY-MIND
number and form. But in an organic creature sensitive
to light, these differences of potentiality may be realized
as differences in immediate sentiency. To say that they
are/eft, is to say that they come to independent and intrin-
sic existence on their own account. The proposition
does not mean that feeling has been extraneously super-
added to something else, or that a mode of extrinsic
cognitive access to a purely physical thing has entered
intrusively into a world of physical things. "Feeling"
is in general a name for the newly actualized quality
acquired by events previously occurring upon a physical
level, when these events come into more extensive and
delicate relationships of interaction. More specifically,
it is a name for the coining to existence of those ultimate
differences in affairs which mark them off from one
anot
