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THE INFLUENCE OF
DARWIN ON PHILOSOPHY
And Other Essays in Contemporary
Thought
BY
JOHN DEWEY
Profetsor of PMlotophy in Columbia Uhivtrtity
Q(s>- S -Q
NEW YORK
HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY
3
c.o-p.2.
COPYRIGHT, 1910,
BY
HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY
Published April, 1910
PBEFACE
AN elaborate preface to a philosophic work
usually impresses one as a last desperate effort on
the part of its author to convey what he feels
he has not quite managed to say in the body of
his book. Nevertheless, a collection of essays on
various topics written during a series of years
may perhaps find room for an independent word
to indicate the kind of unity they seem, to their
writer, to possess. Probably every one acquainted
with present philosophic thought found, with
some notable exceptions, in periodicals rather
than in books would term it a philosophy of
transition and reconstruction. Its various repre
sentatives agree in what they oppose the ortho
dox British empiricism of two generations ago and
the orthodox Neo-Kantian idealism of the last
generation rather than in what they proffer.
The essays of this volume belong, I suppose, to
what has come to be known (since the earlier of
them were written) as the pragmatic phase of the
newer movement. Now a recent German critic has
described pragmatism as, " Epistemologically,
nominalism ; psychologically, voluntarism ; cosmo-
logically^energism; metaphysically, agnosticism;
ethically Tmeliorism on the basis of the Bentham-
ffl
iv PREFACE
Mill utilitarianism." * It may be that pragmatism
will turn out to be all of this formidable array;
but even should it, the one who thus defines it has
hardly come within earshot of it. For whatever
else pragmatism is or is not, the pragmatic spirit
is primarily a revolt against that habit of mind
which disposes of anything whatever even so
humble an affair as a new method in Philosophy
by tucking it away, after this fashion, in the
pigeon holes of a filing cabinet. There are other
vital phases of contemporary transition and revi
sion; there are, for example, a new realism and
naturalistic idealism. When I recall that I find
myself more interested (even though their repre
sentatives might decline to reciprocate) in such
phases than in the systems marked by the labels
of our German critic, I am confirmed in a belief
that after all it is better to view pragmatism quite
vaguely as part and parcel of a general move
ment of intellectual reconstruction. For other
wise we seem to have no recourse save to define
pragmatism as does our German author in
terms of the very past systems against which it is
a reaction ; or, in escaping that alternative, to re
gard it as a fixed rival system making like claim to
1 The affair is even more portentous in the German with
its capital letters and series of muses: " Gewiss ist der
Pragmatismus erkenntnisstheoretisch Nominalismus, psy-
chologisch Voluntarismus, naturphilosophisch Energismus,
metaphysisch Agnosticismus, ethisch Meliorismus auf
Grundlage des Bentham-Millschen Utilitarismus."
PREFACE v
completeness and finality. And if, as I believe, one
of the marked traits of the pragmatic movement is
just the surrender of every such claim, how have
we furthered our understanding of pragmatism?
Classic philosophies have to be revised because
they must be squared up with the many social
and intellectual tendencies that have revealed
themselves since those philosophies matured. The
conquest of the sciences by the experimental
method of inquiry; the injection of evolutionary
ideas into the study of life ItncTsociety ; the ap-
plication of the historic methbdTto religions and
morals as well as to institutions; the creation of
the sciences of " origins " and of the cultural
development of mankind how can such intellec
tual changes occur and leave philosophy what it
was and where it was? Nor can philosophy re
main an indifferent spectator of the rise of what
may be termed the new individualism in art and
letters, with its naturalistic method applied in a
religious, almost mystic spirit to what is primi
tive, obscure, varied, inchoate, and growing in
nature and human character. The age of Darwin,
Helmholtz, Pasteur, Ibsen, Maeterlinck, Rodin, and
Henry James must feel some uneasiness until it
has liquidated its philosophic inheritance in cur
rent intellectual coin. And to accuse those who
are concerned in this transaction of ignorant con
tempt for the classic past of philosophy is to over-
vi PREFACE
look the inspiration the movement of translation
draws from the fact that the history of philosophy
has become only too well understood.
Any revision of customary notions with its
elimination instead of " solution " of many
traditionary problems cannot hope, however, for
any unity save that of tendency and operation.
Elaborate and imposing system, the regimenting
and uniforming of thoughts, are, at present, evi
dence that we are assisting at a stage performance
in which borrowed or hired figures are maneu
vering. Tentatively and piecemeal must the re
construction of our stock notions proceed. As a
contribution to such a revision, the present collec
tion of essays is submitted. With one or two
exceptions, their order is that of a reversed
chronology, the later essays coming first. The
facts regarding the conditions of their first ap
pearance are given in connection with each essay.
I wish to thank the Editors of the Philosophical
Review, of Mind, of the Hibbert Journal, of the
Journal of Philosophy, Psychology, and Scientific
Methods, and of the Popular Science Monthly,
and the Directors of the Press of Chicago and
Columbia Universities, respectively, for permission
to reprint such of the essays as appeared orig
inally under their several auspices.
JOHN DEWEY
COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY,
NEW YOEK CITY, March 1, 1910.
CONTENTS
PAGE
v THE INFLUENCE OF DARWINISM ON PHILOSOPHY 1
NATURE AND ITS GOOD: A CONVERSATION . . 20
INTELLIGENCE AND MORALS .... 46
THE EXPERIMENTAL THEORY OF KNOWLEDGE . 77
THE INTELLECTUALIST CRITERION FOR TRUTH . 112
\/ A SHORT CATECHISM CONCERNING TRUTH . 154
BELIEFS AND EXISTENCES 169
v EXPERIENCE AND OBJECTIVE IDEALISM . .198
v THE POSTULATE OF IMMEDIATE EMPIRICISM . 226
" CONSCIOUSNESS " AND EXPERIENCE . 242
s
THE SIGNIFICANCE OF THE PROBLEM OF KNOWL
EDGE . 271
THE INFLUENCE OF DARWINISM
ON PHILOSOPHY 1
fllHAT the publication of the "Origin of
A Species " marked an epoch in the develop
ment of the natural sciences is well known to the
layman. That the combination of the very words
origin and species embodied an intellectual revolt
and introduced a new intellectual temper is easily
overlooked by the expert. The conceptions that
- had reigned in the philosophy of nature and knowl
edge for two thousand years, the conceptions that
had become the familiar furniture of the mind,
rested on the assumption of the superiority of the
fixed and final; they rested upon treating change
and origin as signs of defect and unreality. In
laying hands upon the sacred ark of absolute
permanency, in treating the forms that had been
regarded as types of fixity and perfection as
1 A lecture in a course of public lectures on " Charles
Darwin and His Influence on Science," given at Columbia
University in the winter and spring of 1909. Reprinted
from the Popular Science Monthly for July, 1909.
2 DARWINISM AND PHILOSOPHY
originating and passing away, the " Origin of
Species " introduced a mode of thinking that in
the end was bound to transform the logic of
knowledge, and hence the treatment of morals,
politics, and religion.
No wonder, then, that the publication of Dar
win s book, a half century ago, precipitated a crisis.
The true nature of the controversy is easily con
cealed from us, however, by the theological clamor
that attended it. The vivid and popular features
of the anti-Darwinian row tended to leave the im
pression that the issue was between science on one
side and theology on the other. Such was not the
case the issue lay primarily within science itself,
as Darwin himself early recognized. The theolog
ical outcry he discounted from the start, hardly
noticing it save as it bore upon the " feelings of
his female relatives." But for two decades before
final publication he contemplated the possibility
of being put down by his scientific peers as a fool
or as crazy; and he set, as the measure of his
success, the degree in which he should affect three
men of science : Lyell in geology, Hooker in botany,
and Huxley in zoology.
Religious considerations lent fervor to the con
troversy, but they did not provoke it. Intellectu
ally, religious emotions are not creative but con
servative. They attach themselves readily to the
current view of the world and consecrate it. They
DARWINISM AND PHILOSOPHY S
steep and dye intellectual fabrics in the seething
vat of emotions ; they do not form their warp
and woof. There is not, I think, an instance of
any large idea about the world being independently
generated by religion. Although the ideas that
rose up like armed men against Darwinism owe4
their intensity to religious associations, their origin
and meaning are to be sought in science and philos
ophy, not in religion.
II
Few words in our language foreshorten intel
lectual history as much as does the word species.
The Greeks, in initiating the intellectual life of
Europe, were impressed by characteristic traits
of the life of plants and animals ; so impressed
indeed that they made these traits the key to
defining nature and to explaining mind and society.
lAnd truly, life is so wonderful that a seemingly
successful reading of its mystery might well lead
men to believe that the key to the secrets of
heaven and earth was in their hands J The Greek
rendering of this mystery, the Greek formulation
of the aim and standard of knowledge, was in the
course of time embodied in the word species, and it
controlled philosophy for two thousand years. To
understand the intellectual face-about expressed
in the phrase " Origin of Species," we must, then,
4 DARWINISM AND PHILOSOPHY
understand the long dominant idea against which it
is a protest.
Consider how men were impressed by the facts
of life. Their eyes fell upon certain things slight
in bulk, and frail in structure. To every appear
ance, these perceived things were inert and passive.
Suddenly, under certain circumstances, these
things henceforth known as seeds or eggs or
germs begin to change, to change rapidly in size,
form, and qualities. Rapid and extensive changes
occur, however, in many things as when wood is
touched by fire. But the changes in the living
thing are orderly ; they are cumulative ; they tend
constantly in one direction ; they do not, like other
changes, destroy or consume, or pass fruitless into
wandering flux ; they realize and fulfil. Each suc
cessive stage, no matter how unlike its predecessor,
preserves its net effect and also prepares the way
for a fuller activity on the part of its successor. In
living beings, changes do not happen as they seem
to happen elsewhere, any which way; the earlier
changes are regulated in view of later results.
This progressive organization does not cease till
there is achieved a true final term, a r\o? 9 a com
pleted, perfected end. This final form exercises
in turn a plenitude of functions, not the least note
worthy of which is production of germs like those
from which it took its own origin, germs capable
of the same cycle of self-fulfilling activity.
DARWINISM AND PHILOSOPHY 5
But the whole miraculous tale is not yet told.
The same drama is enacted to the same destiny
in countless myriads of individuals so sundered in
time, so severed in space, that they have no oppor
tunity for mutual consultation and no means of
interaction. As an old writer quaintly said,
" things of the same kind go through the same
formalities " celebrate, as it were, the same
ceremonial rites.
This formal activity which operates throughout
a series of changes and holds them to a single
course ; which subordinates their aimless flux to its
own perfect manifestation; which, leaping the
boundaries of space and time, keeps individuals
distant in space and remote in time to a uniform
type of structure and function: this principle
seemed to give insight into the very nature of
reality itself. To it Aristotle gave the name, eido$.
This term the scholastics translated as species.
The force of this term was deepened by its
application to everything in the universe that ob- *
serves order in flux and manifests constancy I
through change. From the casual drift of daily J
weather, through the uneven recurrence of seasons
and unequal return of seed time and harvest, up
to the majestic sweep of the heavens the image
of eternity in time and from this to the unchang
ing pure and contemplative intelligence beyond na
ture lies one unbroken fulfilment of ends. Nature
6 DARWINISM AND PHILOSOPHY
as a whole is a progressive realization of purpose
strictly comparable to the realization of purpose
in any single plant or animal.
The conception of eidoG, species, a fixed form
and final cause, was the central principle of knowl
edge as well as of nature. Upon it rested the
logic of science. Change as change is mere flux
and lapse; it insults intelligence. Genuinely to
know is to grasp a permanent end that realizes
itself through changes, holding them thereby with
in the metes and bounds of fixed truth. Completely
to know is to relate all special forms to their one
single end and good: pure contemplative intelli
gence. Since, however, the scene of nature which
directly confronts us is in change, nature as
directly and practically experienced does not sat
isfy the conditions of knowledge. Human ex
perience is in flux, and hence the instrumentalities
of sense-perception and of inference based upon
observation are condemned in advance. Science
is compelled to aim at realities lying behind and
beyond the processes of nature, and to carry on
its search for these realities by means of rational
forms transcending ordinary modes of perception
and inference.
There are, indeed, but two alternative courses.
We must either find the appropriate objects and
organs of knowledge in the mutual interactions
of changing things; or else, to escape the infec-
DARWINISM AND PHILOSOPHY 7
tion of change, we must seek them in some trans
cendent and supernal region. The human mind,
deliberately as it were, exhausted the logic of the
changeless, the final, and the transcendent, before
it essayed adventure on the pathless* wastes of
generation and transformation. We dispose all
~too easily of .the efforts of the schoolmen to in
terpret nature and mind in terms of real essences,
hidden forms, and occult faculties, forgetful of
the seriousness and dignity of the ideas that lay
behind. We dispose of them by laughing at the
famous gentleman who accounted for the fact that
opium put people to sleep on the ground it had a
dormitive faculty. But the doctrine, held in our
own day, that knowledge of the plant that yields
the poppy consists in referring the peculiarities
of an individual to a type, to a universal form,
a doctrine so firmly established that any other
method of knowing was conceived to be unphilo-
sophical and unscientific, is a survival of precisely
the same logic. This identity of conception in
the* scholastic and anti-Darwinian theory may well
suggest greater sympathy for what has become
unfamiliar as well as greater humility regarding
the further unfamiliarities that history has in
store.
Darwin was not, of course, the first to question
the classic philosophy of nature and of knowledge.
The beginnings of the revolution are in the phys-
8 DARWINISM AND PHILOSOPHY
ical science of the sixteenth and seventeenth cen-
\ turies. When Galileo said : " It is my opinion that
the earth is very noble and admirable by reason
of so many and so different alterations and gen
erations which are incessantly made therein," he
expressed the changed temper that was coming over
the world; the transfer of interest from the per
manent to the changing. When Descartes said:
" The nature of physical things is much more
easily conceived when they are beheld coming grad
ually into existence, than when they are only con
sidered as produced at once in a finished and per
fect state," the modern world became self-conscious
of the logic that was henceforth to control it, the
logic of which Darwin s " Origin of Species " is
the latest scientific achievement. Without .the
methods of Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo, and their
successors in astronomy, physics, and chemistry,
Darwin would have been helpless in the organic
sciences. But prior to Darwin the impact of the
new scientific method upon life, mind, and politics,
had been arrested, because between these ideal or
moral interests and the inorganic world intervened
the kingdom of plants and animals. The gates of
the garden of life were barred to the new ideas;
and only through this garden was there access
to mind and politics. The influence of Darwin
upon philosophy resides in his having conquered
the phenomena of life for the principle of transi-
AND PHILOSOPHY 9
T | tion^ and thereby freed the new logic for applica
tion to mind and morals and life. When he said
of species what Galileo had said of the earth,
e pur s( muove, he emancipated, once for all,
genetic and experimental ideas as an organon of
asking questions and looking for explanations.
L
m
The exact bearings upon philosophy of the
new logical outlook are, of course, as yet, un
certain and inchoate. We live in the twilight
of intellectual transition. One must add the rash
ness of the prophet to the stubbornness of the
partizan to venture a systematic exposition of
the influence upon philosophy of the Darwinian
method. - At best, we can but inquire as to its
general bearing the effect upon mental temper *
and complexion, upon that body of half-conscious,
half-instinctive intellectual aversions and prefer
ences which determine, after all, our more de
liberate intellectual enterprises. In this vague in
quiry there happens to exist as a kind of touch
stone a problem of long historic currency that
has also been much discussed in Darwinian literaV
ture. I refer to the old problem of design versus
chance, mind versus matter, as the causal explana
tion, first or final, of things.
As we have already seen, the classic notion of
10 DARWINISM AND PHILOSOPHY .
; /species carried with it the idea of purpose.)) In
all living forms, a specific type is present directing
the earlier stages of growth to the realization of
its own perfection. Since this purposive regula
tive principle is not visible to the senses, it follows
that it must be an ideal or rational force. Since,
however, the perfect form is gradually approxi
mated through the sensible changes, it also follows
that in and through a sensible realm a rational
ideal force is working out its own ultimate mani
festation. These inferences were extended to
nature: (a) She does nothing in vain; but all for
an ulte^ior_purpose. (b) Within natural sensible
events there is therefore contained a spiritual
causal Jorce, which as spiritual escapes perception,
but is apprehended by an enlightened reason.
(c) The manifestation of this principle brings
about a subordination of matter and sense to its
own realization, and this ultimate fulfilment is the
goal of nature and of man. The design argu
ment thus operated in two directions. Puxpose-N
fulness accounted for the intelligibility of nature 1
and the possibility of science, while the absolute/
or cosmic character of this purposefulness gave
sanction and worth to the moral and religious en- \.
deavors of man. Science was underpinned and
morals authorized by one and the same principle,
and their mutual agreement was eternally guaran-
leed.j
DARWINISM AND PHILOSOPHY 11
This philosophy remained, in spite of sceptical
and polemic outbursts, the official and the regnant
philosophy of Europe for over two thousand years.
The expulsion of fixed first and final causes from
, astronomy, physics, and chemistry had indeed given
the doctrine something of a shock. But, on the
other hand, increased acquaintance with the de
tails of plant and animal life operated as a coun
terbalance and perhaps even strengthened the
argument from design. The marvelous adapta
tions of organisms to their environment, of organs
to the organism, of unlike parts of a complex
organ like the eye to the organ itself ; the fore
shadowing by lower forms of the higher; the
preparation in earlier stages of growth for or
gans that only later had their functioning these
things were increasingly recognized with the prog
ress of botany, zoology, paleontology, and embry
ology- Together, they added such prestige to the
design argument that by the late eighteenth cen
tury it was, as approved by the sciences of or
ganic life, the central point of theistic and ideal-
is tic philosophy.
The Darwinian principle of natural selection
cut straight under this philosophy. If all organic
adaptations are due simply to constant variation
and the elimination of those variations which are
harmful in the struggle for existence that is
brought atout by excessive reproduction, there
i ~"~~~
12 DARWINISM AND PHILOSOPHY
is no call for a prior intelligent causal force to
plan and preordain them. Hostile critics charged
Darwin with materialism and with making chance
the cause of the universe.
Some naturalists, like Asa Gray, favored the
Darwinian principle and attempted to reconcile
it with design. Gray held to what may be called
,. design on the installment plan. If we conceive
the " stream of variations " to be itself intended,
we may suppose that each successive variation was
designed from the first to be selected. In that
case, variation, struggle, and selection simply de
fine the mechanism of " secondary causes " through
which the " first cause " acts ; and the doctrine
of design is none the worse off because we know
more of its modus operandi.
Darwin could not accept this mediating pro
posal. He admits or rather he asserts that it
is " impossible to conceive this immense and won
derful universe including man with his capacity
of looking far backwards and far into futurity
as the result of blind chance or necessity." - 1 But
nevertheless he holds that since variations are in
useless as well as useful directioilvand since the
latter are sifted out simply by the stress of the
conditions of struggle for existence, the design
argument as applied to living beings is unjustifi
able; and its lack of support there deprives it
"Life and Letters," Vol. I., p. 282; cf. 285.
DARWINISM AND PHILOSOPHY 13
of scientific value as applied to nature in general.
If the variations of the pigeon, which under arti
ficial selection give the pouter pigeon, are not pre
ordained for the sake of the breeder, by what logic
do we argue that variations resulting in natural
species are pre-designed? *
IV
So much for some of the more obvious facts
of the discussion of design versus chance, as causal
principles of nature and of life as a whole. We
brought up this discussion, you recall, as a crucial
instance. What does our touchstone indicate as
to the bearing of Darwinian ideas upon philoso
phy ? In the first place, the new logic outlaws,
flanks, dismisses what you will one type of
problems and substitutes for it another type.
Philosophy forswears inquiry after absolute origins
and absolute finalities in order to explore specific
values and the specific conditions that generate
them.
Darwin concluded that the impossibility^ of
assigning the world to chance as a whole and to
design in its parts indicated the insolubility of
the question. Two radically different reasons,
lu Life and Letters," Vol. II., pp. 146, 170, 245; Vol. I.,
pp. 283*84. See also the closing portion of his " Variation*
of Animals and Plants under Domestication."
14 DARWINISM AND PHILOSOPHY
however, may be given as to why a problem is
insoluble. One reason is that the problem is too
high for intelligence ; the other is that the question
in its very asking makes assumptions that render
the question meaningless. The latter alternative
is unerringly pointed to in the celebrated case
of design versus chance. Once admit that the sole
verifiable or fruitful object of knowledge is the
particular set of changes that generate the object
of study together with the consequences that then
flow from it, and no intelligible question can be
asked about what, by assumption, lies outside.
To assert as is often asserted that specific
-values of particular truth, social bonds and forms
of beauty, if they can be shown to be generated
by concretely knowable conditions, are meaningless
and in vain; to assert that they are justified only
when they and their particular causes and effects
have all at once been gathered up into some in
clusive first cause and some exhaustive final goal,
is intellectual atavism. Such argumentation is re
version to the logic that explained the extinction
of fire by water through the formal essence of
aqueousness and the quenching of thirst by water
through the final cause of aqueousness. Whether
used in the case of the special event or that of
life as a whole, such logic only abstracts some
aspect of the existing course of events in order
to reduplicate it as a petrified eternal principle
DARWINISM AND PHILOSOPHY 15
by which to explain the very changes of which it
is the formalization.
When Henry Sidgwick casually remarked in a
letter that as he grew older his interestjn what
or who made the world was altered into interest
in what kind of a world it is anyway, his voicing
of a common experience of our own day illustrates
also the nature of that intellectual transformation
effected by the Darwinian logic. Interest shifts
from the wholesale essence back of special changes
to the question of how special changes serve and
defeat concrete purposes; shifts from an intelli
gence that shaped things once for all to Jbhe
particular intelligences which things are even now
shaping ; shifts from an ultimate goal of good to
the direct increments of justice and happiness
that intelligent administration of existent condi
tions may beget and that present carelessness or
stupidity will destroy or forego.
In the second place, the classic type of logic
inevitably set philosophy upon proving that life
must have certain qualities and values no matter
how experience presents the matter because of
some remote cause and eventual goal. The duty
of wholesale justification inevitably accompanies all
thinking that makes the meaning of special occur
rences depend upon something that once and for
all lies behind them. The habit of derogating
from present meanings and uses prevents pur look-
16 DARWINISM AND PHILOSOPHY
ing the facts of experience in the face ; it prevents
serious acknowledgment of the evils they present
and serious concern with the goods they promise
but do not as yet fulfil. It turns thought to the
business of finding a wholesale transcendent remedy
for the one and guarantee for the other. One
is reminded of the way many moralists and theo
logians greeted Herbert Spencer s recognition of
an unknowable energy from which welled up the
phenomenal physical processes without and the
conscious operations within. Merely because
Spencer labeled his unknowable energy " God,"
this faded piece of metaphysical goods was greeted
as an important and grateful concession to the
reality of the spiritual realm. Were it not for
the deep hold of the habit of seeking justification
for ideal values in the remote and transcendent,
surely this reference of them to an unknowable
absolute would be despised in comparison with the
demonstrations of experience that knowable ener-
are daily generating about us precious values.
The displacing of this wholesale type of philos
ophy will doubtless not arrive by sheer logical dis
proof, but rather by growing recognition of its
futility. Were it a thousand times true that
opium produces sleep because of its dormitive en
ergy, yet the inducing of sleep in the tired, and the
recovery to waking life of the poisoned, would not
be thereby one least step forwarded. And were
DARWINISM AND PHILOSOPHY 17
it a thousand times dialectically demonstrated that
life as a whole is regulated by a transcendent prin
ciple to a final inclusive goal, none the less truth
and error, health and disease, good and evil, hope
and fear in the concrete, would remain just what
and where they now are. To improve our edu-
cation, to ameliorate our manners, to advance our-
politics, we must have recourse to specific condi-j
tions of generation.
.-. Finally, the new logic introduces responsibility
into the intellectual life. To idealize and ration
alize the universe at large is after all a confession
of inability to master the courses of things that
specifically concern us. As long as mankind suf
fered from this impotency, it naturally shifted a
burden of responsibility that it could not carry
over to the more competent shoulders of the trans
cendent cause. But if insight into specific con
ditions of value and into specific consequences of
ideas is possible, philosophy must in time become \ 6
a method of locating and interpreting the more
serious of the conflicts that occur in life, and a ^ ;
method of projecting ways for dealing with them:
a method of moral and political diagnosis and
4. CP w-jw-^-.-wiv..!,} SJ
prognosis.
The claim to formulate a priori the legisla
tive constitution of the universe is by its nature
a claim that may lead to elaborate dialectic de
velopments. But it is also one that removes
18 DARWINISM AND PHILOSOPHY
H
these very conclusions from subjection to experi- I
mental test, for, by defmition, these results make no
differences in the detailed course of events. But
a philosophy that humbles its pretensions to the
work of projecting hypotheses for the education
and conduct of mind, individual and social, is
thereby subjected to test by the way in which the
ideas it propounds work out in practice. In hav
ing modesty forced upon it, philosophy also ac
quires responsibility.
Doubtless I seem to have violated the implied
promise of my earlier remarks and to have turned
both prophet and partizan. But in anticipating
the direction of the transformations in philosophy
to be wrought by the Darwinian genetic and ex
perimental logic, I do not profess to speak for
any save those who yield themselves consciously
or unconsciously to this logic. No one can fairly
deny that at present there are twojeffects of the
Darwinian mode of thinking. On the one hand, \
there Are "making many sincere and vital
to revise our traditional philosophic conceptions
in accordance with its demands. On the other
hand, there is as definitely a recrudescence of
absolutistic philosophies; an assertion of a type
of philosophic knowing distinct from that of the
sciences, one which opens to us another kind of
reality from that to which the sciences give ac
cess ; an appeal through experience to something
DARWINISM AND PHILOSOPHY 19
that essentially goes beyond experience. This re
action affects popular creeds and religious move
ments as well as technical philosophies. The very
conquest of the biological sciences by the new ideas
has led many to proclaim an explicit and rigid
separation of philosophy from science.
Old ideas give way slowly; for they are more
than abstract logical forms and categories. They
are habits, predispositions, deeply engrained atti
tudes of aversion and preference. Moreover, the
conviction persists though history shows it to be
a hallucination that all the questions that the
human mind has asked are questions that can be
answered in terms of the alternatives that the ques
tions themselves present. But in fact intellectual
progress usually occurs through sheer abandonment
of questions together with both of the alternatives
they assume an abandonment that results from
their decreasing vitality and a change of urgent
interest. We do not solve them : we get over them.
Old questions are solved by disappearing, evapo
rating, while new questions corresponding to the
changed attitude of endeavor and preference take
their place. Doubtless the greatest dissolvent in
contemporary thought of old questions, the great
est precipitant of new methods, new intentions, new,
problems, is- the. one effecte4 f by the scientific revo-
lutio^ that found its climax in the " Origin of ;
Species."
NATURE AND ITS GOOD:
A CONVERSATION 1
A GROUP of people are scattered near one
another, on the sands of an ocean beach;
wraps, baskets, etc., testify to a day s outing.
Above the hum of the varied conversations are
heard the mock sobs of one of the party.
Various voices. What s the matter, Eaton ?
Eaton. Matter enough. I was watching a.
beautiful wave ; its lines were perfect ; at its crest,
the light glinting through its infinitely varied and
delicate curves of foam made a picture more rav
ishing than any dream. * And now it has gone ; it
will never come back. So I weep.
Grimes. That s right, Eaton ; give it to them.
Of course well-fed and well-read persons with
their possessions of wealth and of knowledge both
gained at the expense of others finally get bored ;
then they wax sentimental over their boredom and
are worried about " Nature " and its relation to
life. Not everybody takes it out that way, of
course ; some take motor cars and champagne for
that tired feeling. But the rest those who aren t
1 Reprinted from the Hibbert Journal, Vol. VII., No. 4,
July, 1909.
20
NATURE S GOOD: A CONVERSATION 21
in that class financially, or who consider themselves
too refined for that kind of relief seek a new
sensation in speculating why that brute old world
out there will not stand for what you call spiritual
and ideal values for short, your egotisms.
The fact is that the whole discussion is only a
symptom of the leisure class disease. If you had
to work to the limit and beyond, to keep soul and
body together, and, more than that, to keep alive
the soul of your family in its body, you would
know the difference between your artificial prob
lems and the genuine problem of life. Your philo
sophic problems about the relation of " the uni
verse to moral and spiritual good " exist only in
the sentimej^alism that generates them. The gen
uine question is why social arrangements will not
permit the amply sufficient body of natural re
sources to sustain all men and women in security
and decent comfort, with a margin for the culti
vation of their human instincts of sociability, love
of knowledge and of art.
As I read Plato, philosophy began with some
sense of its essentially political basis and mission
a recognition that its problems were those of the
organization of a just social order. But it soon
got lost in dreams of another world ; and even those
of you philosophers who pride yourselves on being
so advanced that you no longer believe in " an
other world," are still living and thinking with
22 NATURE S GOOD: A CONVERSATION
reference to it. You may not call it supernatural ;
but when you talk about a realm of spiritual or
ideal values in general, and ask about its relation
to Nature in general, you have only changed the
labels on the bottles, not the contents in them.
Forjvhat makes anything transcendental that is,
in commoiLjaiigiiage^supernatural is simply andT
only alp^fn^s^fr^nL^^a^ctical_affairs -which af-
Talr s injhejr ..ultimate analysis are the business of
makinga living.
Eaton. Yes ; Grimes has about hit off the point
of my little parable in one of its aspects at least.
In matters of daily life you say a man is " off,"
more or less insane, when he deliberately goes on
looking for a certain kind of result from condi
tions which he has already found to be such that
they cannot possibly yield it. If he keeps on look
ing, and then goes about mourning because stage
money won t buy beefsteaks, or because he can
not keep himself warm by burning the sea-sands
here, you dismiss him as a fool or a hysteric. If
you would condescend to reason with him at all, you
would tell him to look for the conditions that will
yield the results ; tooccupy himself with some of
the countless, goods of Jife for which, by intelli
gently directed search, _adequate means may be
found.
Well, before lunch, Moore was reiterating the
old tale. " Modern science has completely trans-
NATURE S GOOD: A CONVERSATION 23
formed our conceptions oj[Nature. JDfc hasjs tripped
the universelmre not only of all the moral values
which it woreflilike to antique pagan and to our
medieval ancestors, but also of any regard, any
preference,jrgr_sjiiclL_y_aiues J They are mere inci
dents, transitory accidents, in her everlasting re
distribution of matter in motion ; like the rise and
fall of the wave I lament, or like a single musical
note that a screeching, rumbling railway train
might happen to emit." This is a one-sided view ;
but suppose it were all so, what is the moral?
Surely, to change our standpoint, our angle of
vision ; to stop looking for results among condi
tions that we know will not yield them ; to turn our
gaze tojthe^^oods, the values that exist actually
and indubitably in_exerience ; and consider by
what natural conditions these particular values
majnblTstrengthened and. widened. _
Insist, if you please, that Nature as a whole
does not stand for good as a whole. Then, in
heaven s name, just because good is both so plural
(so " numerous ") and so partial, bend your ener
gies of intelligence and of effort to selecting the
specific "plural arid partial natural conditions which
wilt at least render~vKlueyha1nye ~3o"Kave more
secure and more extensive. Any other course is
the way~oTlnadness ; it is the way of the spoilt
child who cries at the seashore because the waves
do not stand still, and who cries even more f ranti-
24 NATURE S GOOD: A CONVERSATION
cally in the mountains because the hills do not melt
and flow.
But no. Moore and his school will not have it
so : we must " go back of the returns." All this
science, after all, is a mode of knowledge. Ex
amine knowledge itself and find it implies a com
plete all-inclusive intelligence; and then find (by
taking another tack) that intelligence involves
sentiency, feeling, and also will. Hence your very
physical science, if you will only criticise it, ex
amine it, shows that its object, mechanical nature,
is itself an included and superseded element in an
all-embracing spiritual and ideal whole. And there
you are.
Well, I do not now insist that all this is mere
dialectic prestidigitation. No ; accept it ; let it go
at its face value. But what of it? Is any value
more concretely and securely in life than it was
before? Does this perfect intelligence enable us
to correct one single mis-step, one paltry error,
here and now? Does this perfect all-inclusive
goodness serve to heal one disease? Does it rectify
one trangression ? Does it even give the slightest
inkling of how to go to work at any of these
things? No; it just tells you: Never mind, for
they are already eternally corrected, eternally
healed in the eternal consciousness which alone is
really Real. Stop: there is one evil, one pain,
which the doctrine mitigates the hysteric senti-
NATURE S GOOD: A CONVERSATION 25
mentalism which is troubled because the universe
as a whole does not sustain good as a whole. But
that is the only thing it alters. The " pathetic
fallacy " of Ruskin magnified to the wth power is
the motif of modern idealism.
Moore. Certainly nobody will accuse Eaton of
tender-mindedness except in his logic, which, as
certainly, is not tough-minded. His excitement,
however, convinces me that he has at least an ink
ling that he is begging the question ; and like the
true pragmatist that he is, is trying to prevent
by action (to wit, his flood of speech) his false
logic from becoming articulate to him. The ques
tion being whether the values we seem to appre
hend, the purposes we entertain, the goods we pos
sess, are anything more than transitory waves,
Eaton meets it by saying : " Oh, of course, they
are waves; but don t think about that just sit
down hard on the wave or get another wave to but
tress it with ! " No wonder he recommends action
instead of thinking! Men have tried this method
before, as a counsel of desperation or as cynical
pessimism. But it remained for contemporary
pragmatism to label the drowning of sorrow in the
intoxication of thoughtless action, the highest
achievement of philosophic method, and to preach
wilful restlessness as a doctrine of hope and illu
mination. Meantime, I prefer to be tender-minded
in my attitude toward Reality, and to make
26 NATURE S GOOD: A CONVERSATION
that attitude more reasonable by a tough-minded
logic.
Eaton. I am willing to be quiet long enough
for you to translate your metaphor into logic, and
show how I have begged the question.
Moore. It is plain enough. You bid us turn
to the cultivation, the nurture, of certain values
in human life. But the question is whether these
are or are not values. And that is a question of
their relation to the Universe to Reality. If
Reality substantiates them, then indeed they are
values; if it mocks and flouts them as it surely
does if what mechanical science calls Nature be
ultimate and absolute then they are not values.
You and your kind are really the sentimentalists,
because you are sheer subjectivists. You say : Ac
cept the dream as real ; do not question about it ;
add a little iridescence to its fog and extend it
till it obscure even more of Reality than it natu
rally does, and all is well ! I say : Perhaps the
dream is no dream but an intimation of the
solidest and most ultimate of all realities; and a
thorough examination of what the positivist, the
materialist, accepts as solid, namely, science, re
veals as its own aim, standard, and presupposi
tion that Reality is one all-exhaustive spiritual
Being.
Eaton. This is about the way I thought my
begging of the question would turn out. You in-
NATURE S GOOD: A CONVERSATION 27
sist upon translating my position into terms of
your own ; I am not then surprised to hear that it
would be a begging of the question for you to hold
my views. My point is precisely that it is only
as long as you take the position that some Reality
beyond some metaphysical or transcendental real
ity is necessary to substantiate empirical values
that you can even discuss whether the latter are
genuine or illusions. Drop the presupposition that
you read into everything I say, the idea that the
reality of things as they are is dependent upon some
thing beyond and behind, and the facts of the case
just stare you in the eyes: Goods are, a multitude
of them but, unfortunately, evils also are; and
all grades, pretty much, of both. Not the con
trast and relation of experience in toto to some
thing beyond experience drives men to religion and
then to philosophy; but the contrast within ex
perience of the better and the worse, and the con
sequent problem of how to substantiate the former
and reduce the latter. Until you set up the no
tion of a transcendental reality at large, you can
not even raise the question of whether goods and
evils are, or only seem to be. The trouble and the
joy, the good and the evil, is that they are; the
hope is that they may be regulated, guided, in
creased in one direction and minimized in another.
Instead of neglecting thought, we (I mean the
pragmatists ) exalt it, because we say that intelli-
28 NATURE S GOOD: A CONVERSATION
gent discrimination of means and ends is the sole
final resource in this problem of all problems, the
control of the factors of good and ill in life. We
say, indeed, not merely that that is what intelli
gence does, but rather what it is.
Historically, it is quite possible to show how
under certain social conditions this human and
practical problem of the relation of good and in
telligence generated the notion of the transcen
dental good and the pure reason. As Grimes re
minded us, Plato
Moore. Yes, and Protagoras don t forget
him; for unfortunately we know both the origin
and the consequences of your doctrine that being
and seeming are the same. We know quite well
that pure empiricism leads to the identification
of being and seeming, and that is just why every
deeply moral and religious soul from the time of
Plato and Aristotle to the present has insisted upon
a transcendent reality.
Eaton. Personally I don t need an absolute to
enable me to distinguish between, say, the good
of kindness and the evil of slander, or the good of
health and the evil of valetudinarianism. In ex
perience, things bear their own specific characters.
Nor has the absolute idealist as yet answered the
question of how the absolute reality enables him
to distinguish between being and seeming in one
single concrete case. The trouble is that for him
NATURE S GOOD: A CONVERSATION 29
all Being is on the other side of experience, and all
experience is seeming.
Grimes. I think I heard you mention history.
I wish both of you would drop dialectics and go
to history. You would find history to be a strug
gle for existence for bread, for a roof, for pro
tected and nourished offspring. You would find
history a picture of the masses always going
under just missing in the struggle, because
others have captured the control of natural re
sources, which in themselves, if not as benign as
the eighteenth century imagined, are at least abun
dantly ample for the needs of all. But because of
the monopolization of Nature by a few persons,
most men and women only stick their heads above
the welter just enough to catch a glimpse of better
things, then to be shoved down and under. The
only problem of the relation of Nature to human
good which is real is the economic problem of the
exploitation of natural resources in the equal in
terests of all, instead of in the unequal interests
of a class. The problem you two men are discuss
ing has no existence and never had any outside
of the heads of a few metaphysicians. The latter
would never have amounted to anything, would
never have had any career at all, had not shrewd
monopolists or tyrants (with the skill that charac
terizes them) have seen that these speculations
about reality and a transcendental world could be
SO NATURE S GOOD: A CONVERSATION
distilled into opiates and distributed among the
masses to make them less rebellious. That, if you
would know, Eaton, is the real historic origin of
the ideal world beyond. When you realize that,
you will perceive that the pragmatists are only
half-way over. You will see that practical ques
tions are practical, and are not to be solved merely
by having a theory about theory different from
the traditional one which is all your pragmatism
comes to.
Moore. If you mean that your own crass Phi
listinism is all that pragmatism comes to, I fancy
you are about right. Forget that the only end of
action is to bring about an approximation to the
complete inclusive consciousness ; make, as the
pragmatists do, consciousness a means to action,
and one form of external activity is just as good as
another. Art, religion, all the generous reaches
of science which do not show up immediately in
the factory these things become meaningless, and
all that remains is that hard and dry satisfaction
of economic wants which is Grimes s ideal.
Grimes. An ideal which exists, by the way, only
in your imagination. I know of no more convinc
ing proof of the futile irrelevancy of idealism than
the damning way in which it narrows the content
of actual daily life in the minds of those who up
hold idealism. I sometimes think I am the only
true idealist. If the conditions of an equitable and
NATURE S GOOD: A CONVERSATION 31
ample physical existence for all were once secured,
I, for one, have no fears as to the bloom and harvest
of art and science, and all the " higher " things of
leisure. Life is interesting enough for me; give
it a show for all.
Arthur. I find myself in a peculiar position in
respect to this discussion. An analysis of what
is involved in this peculiarity may throw some light
on the points at issue, for I have to believe that
analysis and definition of what exists is the essen
tial matter both in resolution of doubts and in
steps at reform. For brevity, not from conceit,
I will put the peculiarity to which I refer in a
personal form. I do not believe for a moment in
some different Reality beyond and behind Nature.
I do not believe that a manipulation of the logical
implications of science can give results which are
to be put in the place of those which Science herself
yields in her direct application. I accept Nature
as something which is, not seems, and Science as
her faithful transcript. Yet because I believe
these things, not in spite of them, I believe in the
existence of purpose and of good. How Eaton can
believe that fulfilment and the increasing realiza^
tioji"jif_purpo&e_Gari exist in human consciousness
unless theyLfixsiLejdstjnT the w^rTr^ich^snrevealed
in that consciousness, islaij^
Moore can believe that a manipulation of the
method of knowledge can yield considerations of a
32 NATURE S GOOD: A CONVERSATION
totally different order from those directly obtained
by use of the method. If purpose and fulfilment
exist as natural goods, then, and only then, can
consciousness itself be a fulfilment of Nature, and
be also a natural good. Any other view is inex
plicable to sound thinking save, historically, as a
product of modern political individualism and lit
erary romanticism which have combined to produce
that idealistic philosophy according to which the
mind in knowing the universe creates it.
The view that purpose and realization are pro
foundly natural, and that consciousness or, if
you will, experience is itself a culmination and
climax of Nature, is not a new view. Formulated
by Aristotle, it has always persisted wherever the
traditions of sound thinking have not been ob
scured by romanticism. The modern scientific doc-
trine of evolution confirmsTimd spieciSs the meta
physical insight of Aristotle. This doctrine sets
forth in detailjmd_in verified detail, as a genuine
characteristic^ of existence, the tendency toward
cumulative results, the definite trend of things to-
wafd^clHmlnation and achievement. It describes
, in terms "of and by right
of its own subject-matter (not as an addition of
subsequent reflection), differences of value and im
portance differences, moreover, that exercise se
lective influence upon the course of things, that is
to say, genuinely determine the events that occur.
NATURE S GOOD: A CONVERSATION 33
It tells us that consciousness itself is such a cumu
lative and culminating natural event. Hence it is
relevant to the world in which it dwells, and its
determinations of value are not arbitrary, not obi
ter dicta, but descriptions of Nature herself.
Recall the words of Spencer which Moore quoted
this morning : " There is no pleasure in the con
sciousness of being an infinitesimal bubble on a
globe that is infinitesimal compared with the total
ity of things. Those on whom the unpitying rush
of changes inflicts sufferings which are often with
out remedy, find no consolation in the thought that
they are at the mercy of blind forces, which cause
indifferently now the destruction of a sun and now
the death of an animalcule. Contemplation of a
universe which is without conceivable beginning or
end and without intelligible purpose, yields no satis
faction." I am naive enough to believe that the
only question is whether the object of our " con
sciousness," of our " thought," of our " contempla
tion," is or is not as the quotation states it to be.
If the statement be correct, pragmatism, like sub
jectivism (of which I suspect it is only a variation,
putting emphasis upon will instead of idea), is an
invitation to close our eyes to what is, in order to
encourage the delusion that things are other than
they are. But the case is not so desperate. Speak
ing dogmatically, the account given of the uni
verse is just not true. And the doctrine of evo-
NATURE S GOOD: A CONVERSATION
fution of which Spencer professedly made so much
the evidence. A universe describable in evolu-
;ionary terms is a universe which shows, not indeed
lesign, but tendency and purpose; which exhibits
ichievement, not indeed of a single end, but of a
mltiplicity of natural goods at whose apex is con
sciousness. No account of the universe in terms
lerely of the redistribution of matter in motion is
Complete, no matter how true as far as it goes, for
[it ignores the cardinal fact that the character of
matter in motion and of its redistribution is such
as cumulatively to achieve ends to effect the
world of values we know. Deny this and you deny
evolution; admit it and you admit purpose in the
only objective that is, the only intelligible sense
of that term. I do not say that in addition to the
mechanism there are other ideal causes or factors
which intervene. I only insist that the whole story
be told, that the character of the mechanism be
noted namely, that it is such as to produce and
sustain good in a multiplicity of forms. Mechan
ism is the mechanism of achieving results. To ig
nore this is to refuse to open our eyes to the total
aspects of existence.
Among these multiple natural goods, I repeat, is
consciousness itself. One of the ends in which Na
ture genuinely terminates is just awareness of it
self of its processes and ends. For note the im
plication as to why consciousness is a natural good :
NATURE S GOOD: A CONVERSATION 35
not because it is cut off and exists in isolation, nor
yet because we may, pragmatically, cut off and
cultivate certain values which have no existence be
yond it ; but because it is good that things should
be known in their own characters. And this view
carries with it a precious result : to know things as
they are is to know them as culminating in con
sciousness ; it is to know that the universe genuinely
achieves and maintains its own self-manifestation.
A final word as to the bearing of this view upon
Grimes s position. To conceive of human history
as a scene of struggle of classes for domination, a
struggle caused by love of power or greed for gain,
is the very mythology of the emotions. What we
call history is largely non-human, but so far as it
is human, it is dominated by intelligence: history
is _the^history^ of iacj^asing jcoinsciousness. Not
that intelligence is actually sovereign in life, but
that at least it is sovereign over stupidity, error,
and ignorance. The acknowledgment of things as
they are that is the causal source of every step
in progress. Our present system of industry is not
the product of greed or tyrannic lust of power,
but of physical science giving the mastery over the
mechanism of Nature s energy. If the existing
system is ever displaced, it will be displaced not
by good intentions and vague sentiments, but by a
more extensive insight into Nature s secrets.
Modern sentimentalism is revolted at the frank
36 NATURE S GOOD: A CONVERSATION
naturalism of Aristotle in saying that some are
slaves by nature and others free by nature. But
let socialism come to-morrow and somebody not
V 1 anybody, but somebody will be managing its ma
chinery and somebody else will be managed by the
machinery. I do not wonder that my socialistic
friends always imagine themselves active in the first
capacity perhaps by way of compensation for
doing all of the imagining and none of the executive
management at present. But those who are man
aged, who are controlled, deserve at least a mo
ment s attention. Would you not at once agree
that if there is any justice at all in these positions
of relative inferiority and superiority, it is because
those who are capable by insight deserve to rule,
and those who are incapable on account of igno
rance, deserve to be ruled ? If so, how do you dif
fer, save verbally, from Aristotle?
Or do you think that all that men want in order
to be men is to have their bellies filled, with assur
ance of constant plenty and without too much ante
cedent labor? >fo4 believe _jne > _..Gcrimes, men--dr
men, and hence their_asjpjratiim_js_fpr the-4iyine
even when they know it not ; their desire is for the
ruling element, for intelligence. Till they achieve
that~They~will still be discontented, rebellious, un
ruly and hence ruled shuffle your social cards
as much as you may.
Grimes (after shrugging his shoulders contempt-
NATURE S GOOD: A CONVERSATION 37
uously, finally says): There is one thing I like
about Arthur: he is frank. He comes out with
what you in all your hearts really believe theory,
supreme and sublime. All is to the good in this
best of all possible worlds, if only some one be
defining and classifying and syllogizing, accord
ing to the lines already laid down. Aristotle s God
of pure intelligence (as he well knew) was the
glorification of leisure ; and Arthur s point of view,
if Arthur but knew it, is as much the intellectual
snobbery of a leisure class economy, as the luxury
and display he condemns are its material snobbery.
There is really nothing more to be said.
Moore. To get back into the game which
Grimes despises. Doesn t Arthur practically say
that the universe is good because it culminates in
intelligence, and that intelligence is good because
it perceives that the universe culminates in itself?
And, on this theory, are ignorance and error,
and consequent evil, any less genuine achieve
ments of Nature than intelligence and good?
And on what basis does he call by the titles of
achievement and end that which at best is an
infinitesimally fragmentary and transitory epi
sode? I said Eaton begged the question. Arthur
seems to regard it as proof of a superior intelli
gence ( one which realistically takes things as they
are) to beg the question. What is this Nature,
this universe in whiclTevil is as stubborn a fact as
38 NATURE S GOOD: A CONVERSATION
good, in which good is constantly destroyed by the
very power that produces it, in which there re
sides a temporary bird of passage consciousness
doomed to ultimate extinction what is such a Na
ture (all that Arthur offers us) save the problem,
the contradiction originally in question? A com
placent optimism may gloss over its intrinsic self-
contradictions, but a more serious mind is forced to
go behind and beyond this scene to a permanent
good which includes and transcends goods defeated
and hopes suborned. Not because idealists have
refused to note the facts as they are, but precisely
because Nature is, on its face, such a scene as
Arthur describes, idealists have always held that it
is but Appearance, and have attempted to mount
through it to Reality.
Stair. I had not thought to say anything. My
attitude is so different from that of any one of
you that it seemed unnecessary to inject another
varying opinion where already disagreement reigns.
But when Arthur was speaking, I felt that perhaps
this disagreement exists precisely because the solv
ent word had not been uttered. For, at bottom,
all of you agree with Arthur, and that is the cause
of your disagreement with him and one another.
You have agreed to make reason, intellect in some
sense, the final umpire. But reason, intellect, is
the principle of analysis, of division, of discord.
When I appeal to feeling as the ultimate organ
NATURE S GOOD: A CONVERSATION 39
of unity, and hence of truth, you smile courteously ;
say or think mysticism; and the case for you
is dismissed. Words like feeling, sensation, imme
diate appreciation, self-communication of Being,
I must indeed use when I try to tell the truth I see.
But I well know how inadequate the words are.
And why? Because language is the chosen tool
of intelligence, and hence inevitably bewrayeth the
truth it would convey. But remember that words
are but symbols, and that intelligence must dwell
in the realm of symbols, and you realize a way out.
These words, sensation, feeling, etc., as I utter
them are but invitations to woo you to put your
selves into the one attitude that reveals truth
an attitude of direct vision.
The beatific vision? Yes, and No. No, if you
mean something rare, extreme, almost abnormal.
Yes, if you mean the commonest and most convinc
ing, the only convincing self-impartation of the ul
timate good in the scale of goods; the vision of
blessedness in God. For this doctrine is empirical ;
mysticism is the heart of all positive empiricism,
of all empiricism which is not more interested in
denying rationalism than in asserting itself. The
mystical experience marks every man s realization
of the supremacy of good, and hence measures the
distance that separates him from pure materialism.
And since the unmitigated materialist is the rarest
of creatures, and the man with faith in an unseen
40 NATURE S GOOD: A CONVERSATION
good the commonest, every man is a mystic and
the most so in his best moments.
What an idle contradiction that Moore and Ar
thur should try to adduce proofs of the supremacy
of ideal values in the universe ! The sole possible
proof is the proof that actually exists the direct
unhindered realization of those values. For each
value brings with it of necessity its own depth of
being. Let the pride of intellect and the pride of
will cease their clamor, and in the silences Being
speaks its own final word, not an argument or ex
ternal ground of belief, but the self-impartation of
itself to the soul. Who are the prophets and
teachers of the ages? Those who have been ac
cessible at the greatest depths to these communica
tions.
Grimes. I suppose that poverty and possibly
disease are specially competent ministers to the
spiritual vision ? The moral is obvious. Economic
changes are purely irrelevant, because purely ma
terial and external. Indeed, upon the whole, ef
forts at reform are undesirable, for they distract
attention from the fact that the final thing, the
vision of good, is totally disconnected from ex
ternal circumstance. I do not say, Stair, you per
sonally believe this ; but is not such a quietism the
logical conclusion of all mysticism?
Stair. This is not so true as to say that in your
efforts at reform you are really inspired by the
NATURE S GOOD: A CONVERSATION 41
divine vision of justice; and filat this mystic vision
and not the mere increase of quantity of eatables
and drinkables is your animating; mot-ve.
Grimes. Well, to my mind this wh^>le affair of
mystical values and experiences comes down to a
simple straight-away proposition. The submerged
masses do not occupy themselves with such ques
tions as those you are discussing. They haven t
the time even to consider ^h ether they want to
consider them. Nor does tie occasional free citi
zen who even now exists a ^sporadic reminder and
prophecy of ultimate democracy bother himself
about the relation of the cosmos to value. Why?
Not from mystic insight ptfiy more than from meta
physical proof ; but beca/iise he has so many other
interests that are worth while. His friends, his
vocation and avocations, his books, his music, his
club these things engage him and they reward
him. To multiply such men with such interests
that is the genuine problem, I repeat; and it is a
problem to be solved onl$ r through an economic and
material redistribution.
Eaton. Gladly, Sta?ir, do all of us absolve our
selves from the responsibility of having to create
the goods that life r call it God or Nature or
Chance provides. Rut we cannot, if we would,
absolve ourselves from responsibility for maintain
ing and extending i:hese goods when they have
happened. To find fit very wonderful as Arthur
42 NATURE S: GOOD: A CONVERSATION
does that intelligence perceives values as they are
is trivial, for it is only an elaborate way of saying
that they h; ,ve happened. To invite us, ceasing
struggle and effort., to commune with Being through
the moments of insight and joy that life provides,
is to bid us to self-indulgence to enjoyment at
the expense of those upon whom the burden of con
ducting life s affairs falls. For even the mystics
still need to eat and drink, be clothed and housed,
and somebody must do these unmystic things. And
to ignore others in the interest of our own perfec
tion is not conducive to genuine unity of Being.
Intelligence is, indeed, as you say, discrimina
tion, distinction. But why? Because we have to
act in order to keep secure amid the moving flux
of circumstance, some slight but precious good that
Nature has bestowed ; and because, in order to act
successfully, we must act after conscious selection
after discrimination o.f means and ends. Of
course, all goods arrive, as; Arthur says, as natural
results, but so do all bads, and all grades of good
and bad. To label the results that occur culmina
tions, achievements, and then argue to a quasi-
moral constitution of Nature because she effects
such results, is to employ a logic which applies to
the life-cycle of the germ th,at, in achieving itself,
kills man with malaria, as wejll as to the process of
human life that in reaching its fullness cuts short
the germ-fulfilment. It is putting the cart before
NATURE S GOOD: A CONVERSATION 43
the horse to say that because Nature is so consti
tuted as to produce results of all types of value,
therefore Nature is actuated by regard for differ
ences of value, ^{ature, till it produces a being
who strives and wno thinks in order that he may
strive more effectively, does not know whether it
cares more for justice or for cruelty, more for the
ravenous wolf -like competition of the struggle for
existence, or for the improvements incidentally in
troduced through that struggle. Literally it-4ias
noniind ofits_jiwji^ Nor would the mere intro
duction oT a consciousness that pictured indiffer
ently the scene out of which consciousness devel
oped, add one iota of reason for attributing eulo-
gistically to Nature regard for value. But when
the sentient organism, having experienced natural
values, good and bad, begins to select, to prefer,
and to make battle for its preference ; and in order
thafiFlnay make the most gallant fight possible
picks out and gathers together in perception
and thought what_is_ faynrable tn its aims and
whlit^61>Tire,^h^ has at last
acMeTecTsignificant regard for good. And this is
the stie-4hin^^i^tHe birth of intelligence. For
thetoMmglm end in view and the selecting and or
ganizing out of the natural flux, on the basis of
this end, conditions that are means, is intelligence.
Not, then, when Nature produces health or effi
ciency or complexity does Nature exhibit regard
44 NATURE S GOOD: A CONVERSATION
for value, but only when it produces a living organ
ism that has settled preferences and endeavors.
The mere happening of complexity, health, adjust
ment, is all that Nature effects, as rightly called
accident as purpose. But when Nature pro
duces an intelligence ah, then, indeed Nature has
achieved something. Not, however, because this in
telligence impartially pictures the nature which
has produced it, but because in human conscious
ness Nature becomes genuinely partial. Because
in consciousness an end is preferred, is selected for
maintenajice ju andjbeca.nsp intelligence pictures not
in
conditions and obstacles of_the^ Continued mainte-
njmce ofjbhe^sejected good. For in an experience
where values are demonstrably precarious, an in
telligence that is not a principle of emphasis and
valuation (an intelligence which defines, describes,
and classifies merely for the sake of knowledge,) is
a principle of stupidity and catastrophe.
As for Grimes, it is indeed true that problems
are solved only where they arise namely, in ac
tion, in the adjustments of behavior. But, for
good or for evil, they can be solved there only with
method ; and ultimately method is intelligence, and
intelligence is method. The larger, the more hu
man, the less technical the problem of practice, the
more open-eyed and wide-viewing must be the cor
responding method. I do not say that all things
NATURE S GOOD: A CONVERSATION 45
that have been called philosophy participate in this
method ; I do say Jiowever.Jbhat a cathgHcjtnd^ f ar-
sighted theory of the Adjustment of the conflicting
factors of life is whatever- it be c ailed philoso
phy. And unless technical philosophy is to go the
way of dogmatic theology, it must loyally identify
itself with such a view of its own aim and destiny.
INTELLIGENCE AND MORALS 1
"XT* XCEPT the blind forces of nature," said
* * Sir Henry Maine, " nothing moves in this
wj^cjLwhrch is jaot Greek in its origin." And if
we ask why this is so, the response comes that the
Greek discovered the business of man to be pursuit
of good, and intelligence to be central in this quest.
The utmost to be said in praise of Plato and Aris
totle is not that they invented excellent moral the
ories, but that they rose to the opportunity which
the spectacle of Greek life afforded. For Athens
presented an all but complete microcosm for the
study of the interaction of social organization and
individual character. A public life of rich diver
sity in concentrated and intense splendor trained
the civic sense. Strife of faction and the rapid
oscillations of types of polity provided the occasion
for intellectual inquiry and analysis. The careers
of dramatic personalities, habits of discussion, ease
of legislative change, facilities for personal ambi-
1 A public lecture delivered at Columbia University in
March, 1908, under the title of "Ethics," in a series of
lectures on "Science, Philosophy, and Art." Reprinted
from a monograph published by the Columbia University
Press.
46
INTELLIGENCE AND MORALS 47
tions, distraction by personal rivalries, fixed atten
tion upon the elements of character, and upon con
sideration of the effect of individual character on
social vitality and stability. Happy exemption
from ecclesiastic preoccupations, susceptibility to
natural harmony, and natural piety conspired with
j( frank and open observation to acknowledgment of
the role played by natural conditions. Social in
stability and shock made equally pertinent and ob
vious the remark that only intelligence can confirm
the values that natural conditions generate, and
that intelligence is itself nurtured and matured
only in a free and stable society.
In Plato the , resultant analysis of the mutual
implications of the individual, the sorcial and the
natural, converged in the ideas that morals and
- philosophy are one : namely, a love of that wisdom
which is the source of secure and social good ; that
mathematics and the natural sciences focused upon
^the problem of the perception of the good furnish
the materials of moral science; that logic is the
method of the pregnant organization of social con-
~ ditions with respect to good ; that politics and psy
chology are sciences of one and the same human
nature, taken first in the large and then in the
little. So far that large and expansive vision of
Plato.
But projection of a better life must be based
upon reflection of the life already lived. The in-
48 INTELLIGENCE AND MORALS
evitable limitations of the Greek city-state were in
evitably wrought into the texture of moral theory.
The business of thought was to furnish a sub
stitute for customs which were then relaxing from
the pressure of contact and intercourse without
and the friction of strife within. Reason was to
take the place of custom as a guide of life ; but it
was to furnish rules as final, as unalterable as those
of custom. In short, the thinkers were fascinated
by the afterglow of custom. They took for their
own ideal the distillation from custom of its essence
ends and laws which should be rigid and invari
able. Thus Morals was set upon the track which
it dared not leave for nigh twenty-five hundred
years : search for the final good, and for the single
moral force.
Aristotle s assertions that the state exists by na
ture, and that in the state alone does the individual
achieve independence and completeness of life, are
indeed pregnant sayings. But as uttered by Aris
totle they meant that, in an isolated state, the
Greek city-state, set a garlanded island in the
waste sea fr of barbaroi, a community indifferent
when not hostile to all other social groupings, in
dividuals attain their full end. In a social unity
which signified social contraction, contempt, and
antagonism, in a social order which despised inter
course and glorified war, is realized the life of
excellence !
INTELLIGENCE AND MORALS 49
There is likewise a profound saying of Aristotle s
that the individual who otherwise than by accident
is not a member of a state is either a brute or a
god. But it is generally forgotten that elsewhere
Aristotle identified the highest excellence, the chief
virtue, with pure thought, and identifying this with
the divine, isolated it in lonely grandeur from the
life of society. That man, so far as in him lay,
should be godlike, meant that he should be non-
social, because supra-civic. Plato the idealist had
shared the belief that reason is the divine ; but he
was also a reformer and a radical and he would
have those who attained rational insight descend
again into the civic cave, and in its obscurity labor
patiently for the enlightenment of its blear-eyed
inhabitants. Aristotle, the conservative and the
definer of what is, gloried in the exaltation of in
telligence in man above civic excellence and social
need ; and thereby isolated the life of truest knowl
edge from contact with social experience and from
responsibility for discrimination of values in the
course of life.
Moral theory, however, accepted from social cus
tom more than its cataleptic rigidity, its exclusive
area of common good, and its unfructified and irre
sponsible reason. The city-state was a superficial
layer of cultured citizens, cultured through a par
ticipation in affairs made possible by relief from
economic pursuits, superimposed upon the dense
50 INTELLIGENCE AND MORALS
mass of serfs, artizans, and laborers. For this di
vision, moral philosophy made itself spiritual spon
sor, and thus took it up into its own being. Plato
wrestled valiantly with the class problem; but his
outcome was the necessity of decisive demarcation,
after education, of the masses in whom reason was
asleep and appetite much awake, from the few who
were fit to rule because alertly wise. The most
generously imaginative soul of all philosophy could
not far outrun the institutional practices of his
people and his times. This might have warned his
successors of the danger of deserting the sober
path of a critical discernment of the better and the
worse within contemporary life for the more ex
citing adventure of a final determination of abso
lute good and evil. It might have taught the prob-
< ability that some brute residuum or unrationalized
social habit would be erected into an apotheosis of
pure reason. But the lesson was not learned.
Aristotle promptly yielded to the besetting sin of
all philosophers, the idealization of the existent : he
declared that the class distinctions of superiority
and inferiority as between man and woman, master
and slave, liberal-minded and base mechanic, exist
and are justified by nature a nature which aims
at embodied reason.
What, finally, is this Nature to which the philos
ophy of society and the individual so bound itself?
It is the nature which figures in Greek customs.
INTELLIGENCE AND MORALS 51
and myth; the nature resplendent and adorned
which confronts us in Greek poetry and art: the
animism of savage man purged of grossness and
generalized by unerring esthetic taste into beauty
and system. The myths had told of the loves and
hates, the caprices and desertions of the gods,
and behind them all, inevitable Fate. Philosophy
translated these tales into formulae of the brute
fluctuation of rapacious change held in bounds
by the final and supreme end: the rational good.
v The animism of the popular mind died to reappear
as cosmology.
Repeatedly in this course we have heard of sci
ences which began as parts of philosophy and
which gradually won their independence. Another
statement of the same history is that both science
? and philosophy began in subjection to mythological
animism. Both began with acceptance of a nature
whose irregularities displayed the meaningless vari-
, ability of foolish wants held within the limits of
order and uniformity by an underlying movement
toward a final and stable purpose. And when
the sciences gradually assumed the task of reduc
ing irregular caprice to regular conjunction, phi
losophy bravely took upon itself the task of sub
stantiating, under the caption of a spiritual view
of the universe, the animistic survival. Doubtless
Socrates brought philosophy to earth ; but his in
junction to man to know himself was incredibly
52 INTELLIGENCE AND MORALS
compromised in its execution by the fact that later
philosophers submerged man in the world to which
philosophy was brought: a world which was the
heavy and sunken center of hierarchic heavens lo
cated in their purity and refinement as remotely as
possible from the gross and muddy vesture of
earth.
The various limitations of Greek custom, its
hostile indifference to all outside the narrow city-
state, its assumption of fixed divisions of wise and
blind among men, its inability socially to utilize
science, its subordination of human intention to
cosmic aim all of these things were worked into
moral theory. Philosophy had no active hand in
producing the condition of barbarism in Europe
from the fifth to the fifteenth centuries. By an
unwitting irony which would have shocked none
so much as the lucid moralists of Athens, their
philosophic idealization, under captions of Nature
and Reason, of the inherent limitations of Athenian
society and Greek science, furnished the intellectual
tools for defining, standardizing, and justifying all
the fundamental clefts and antagonisms of feudal
ism. When practical conditions are not frozen in
men s imagination into crystalline truths, they are
naturally fluid. They come and go. But when
intelligence fixes fluctuating circumstances into
final ideals, petrifaction is likely to occur; and
philosophy gratuitously took upon itself the re-
INTELLIGENCE AND MORALS 53
sponsibility for justifying the worst defects of
barbarian Europe by showing their necessary con
nection with divine reason.
The division of mankind into the two camps of
the redeemed and the condemned had not needed
philosophy to produce it. But the Greek cleavage
of men into separate kinds on the basis of their
position within or without the city-state was used
to rationalize this harsh intolerance. The hier
archic organization of feudalism, within church
and state, of those possessed of sacred rule and
those whose sole excellence was obedience, did not
require moral theory to generate or explain it.
But it took philosophy to furnish the intellectual
tools by which such chance episodes were emblaz
oned upon the cosmic heavens as a grandiose
spiritual achievement. No ; it is all too easy to
explain bitter intolerance and desire for domina
tion. Stubborn as they are, it was only when
Greek moral theory had put underneath them the
distinction between the irrational and the rational,
between divine truth and good and corrupt and
weak human appetite, that intolerance on system
and earthly domination for the sake of eternal
excellence were philosophically sanctioned. The
healtli and welfare of the body and the securing
for all of a sure and a prosperous Jivelilipod
were not matters for which medieval conditions fos
tered care in any case. But moral philosophy
54 INTELLIGENCE AND MORALS
was prevailed upon to damn the body on principle,
and to relegate to insignificance as merely mun
dane and temporal the problem of a just industrial
order. Circumstances of the times bore with suffi
cient hardness upon successful scientific investiga
tion ; but philosophy added the conviction that in
any case truth is so supernal that it must be super-
naturally revealed, and so important that it must
be authoritatively imparted and enforced. Intelli
gence was diverted from the critical consideration
of the natural sources and social consequences
of better and worse into the channel of meta
physical subtleties and systems, acceptance of
which was made essential to participation in the
social order and in rational excellence. Philosophy
bound the once erect form of human endeavor and
progress to the chariot wheels of cosmology and
theology.
Since the Renaissance, moral philosophy has re
peatedly reverted to the Greek ideal of natural ex
cellence realized in social life, under the fostering
care of intelligence in action. The return, how
ever, has taken place under the influence of demo
cratic polity, commercial expansion, and scientific
reorganization. It has been a liberation more than
a reversion. This combined return and emancipa
tion, having transformed our practice of life in the
last four centuries, will not be content till it has
written itself clear in our theory of that practice.
INTELLIGENCE AND MORALS 55
Whether the consequent revolution in moral philos
ophy be termed pragmatism or be given the hap
pier title of the applied and experimental habit of
mind is of little account. What is of moment is
that intelligence has descended from its lonely iso
lation at the remote edge of things, whence it
operated as unmoved mover and ultimate good, to
y take its seat in the moving affairs of men. Theory
may therefore become responsible to the practices
that have generated it; the good be connected
with nature, but with nature naturally, not meta
physically, conceived, and social life be cherished
in behalf of its own immediate possibilities, not on
the ground of its remote connections with a cosmic
reason and an absolute end.
There is a notion, more familiar than correct,
that Greek thought sacrificed the individual to the
state. None has ever known better than the Greek
that the individual comes to himself and to his
own only in association with others. But Greek
thought subjected, as we have seen, both state and
individual to an external cosmic order ; and thereby
it inevitably restricted the free use in doubt, in
quiry, and experimentation, of the human intelli
gence. The anima libera, the free mind of the
sixteenth century, of Galileo and his successors,
was the counterpart of the disintegration of cos
mology and its animistic teleology. The lecturer
on political economy reminded us that his subject
56 INTELLIGENCE AND MORALS
began, in the Middle Ages, as a branch of ethics,
though, as he hastened to show, it soon got into
better association. Well, the same company was
once kept by all the sciences, mathematical and
physical as well as social. According to all ac
counts it was the integrity of the number one and
the rectitude of the square that attracted the
attention of Pythagoras to arithmetic and geom
etry as promising fields of study. Astronomy was
the projected picture book of a cosmic object les
son in morals, Dante s transcript of which is none
the less literal because poetic. If physics alone re
mained outside the moral fold, while noble essences
redeemed chemistry, occult forces blessed physi
ology, and the immaterial soul exalted psychology,
physics is the exception that proves the rule: mat
ter was so inherently immoral that no high-minded
science would demean itself by contact with it.
If we do not join with many in lamenting the
stripping from nature of those idealistic properties
in which animism survived, if we do not mourn the
secession of the sciences from ethics, it is because
the abandonment by intelligence of a fixed and
static moral end was the necessary precondition of
a free and progressive science of both things and
morals ; because the emancipation of the sciences
from ready made, remote, and abstract values was
necessary to make the sciences available for creat
ing and maintaining more and specific values here
INTELLIGENCE AND MORALS 57
and now. The divine comedy of modern medicine
and hygiene is one of the human epics yet to be
written ; but when composed it may prove no un
worthy companion of the medieval epic of other
worldly beatific visions. The great ideas of the
eighteenth century, that expansive epoch of moral
perception which ranks in illumination and fervor
along with classic Greek thought, the great ideas
of the indefinitely continuous progress of humanity
and of the power and significance of freed intelli
gence, were borne by a single mother experi>
mental inquiry.
The growth of industry and commerce is at once
cause and effect of the growth in science. Democ-
ritus and other ancients conceived the mechanical
theory of the universe. The notion was not only
blank and repellent, because it ignored the rich
social material which Plato and Aristotle had or
ganized into their rival idealistic views ; but it was
scientifically sterile, a piece of dialectics. Con
tempt for machines as the accouterments of de-
spised mechanics kept the mechanical conception
aloof from these specific and controllable experi
ences which alone could fructify it. This concep
tion, then, like the idealistic, was translated into a
speculative cosmology and thrown like a vast net
around the universe at large, as if to keep it from
coming to pieces. It is from respect for the lever,
the pulley, and the screw that modern experimental
58 INTELLIGENCE AND MORALS
and mathematical mechanics derives itself. Mo
tion, traced through the workings of a machine,
was followed out into natural events and studied
just as motion, not as a poor yet necessary device
for realizing final causes. So studied, it was found
to be available for new machines and new applica
tions, which in creating new ends also promoted new
wants, and thereby stimulated new activities, new
discoveries, and new inventions. The recognition
that natural energy can be systematically applied,
through experimental observation, to the satisfac
tion and multiplication of concrete wants is doubt
less the greatest single discovery ever imported
into the life of man save perhaps the discovery of
language. Science, borrowing from industry, re
paid the debt with interest, and has made the con
trol of natural forces for the aims of life so in
evitable that for the first time man is relieved from
overhanging fear, with its wolflike scramble to pos
sess and accumulate, and is freed to consider the
more gracious question of securing to all an ample
and liberal life. The industrial life had been con
demned by Greek exaltation of abstract thought
and by Greek contempt for labor, as representing
i the brute struggle of carnal appetite for its own
satiety. The industrial movement, offspring of
science, restored it to its central position in morals.
When Adam Smith made economic activity the
moving spring of man s unremitting effort, from
INTELLIGENCE AND MORALS 59
the cradle to the grave, to better his own lot, he
recorded this change. And when he made sympa
thy the central spring in man s conscious moral en
deavor, he reported the effect which the increasing
intercourse of men, due primarily to commerce, had
in breaking down suspicion and jealousy and in
liberating man s kindlier impulses.
Democracy, the crucial expression of modern
life, is not so much an addition to the scientific
and industrial tendencies as it is the perception of
their social or spiritual meaning. Democracy is
an absurdity where faith in the individual as in
dividual is impossible; and this faith is impossible
when intelligence is regarded as a cosmic power,
not an adjustment and application of individual
tendencies. It is also impossible when appetites
and desires are conceived to be the dominant factor
in the constitution of most men s characters, and
when appetite and desire are conceived to be mani
festations of the disorderly and unruly principle of
nature. To put the intellectual center of gravity
in the objective cosmos, outside of men s own ex
periments and tests, and then to invite the applica
tion of individual intelligence to the determination
of society, is to invite chaos. To hold that want
is mere negative flux and hence requires external
fixation by reason, and then to invite the wants to
give free play to themselves in social construction
and intercourse, is to call down anarchy. Democ-
60 INTELLIGENCE AND MORALS
racy is estimable only through the changed con
ception of intelligence, that forms modern science,
and of want, that forms modern industry. It is
essentially a changed psychology. The substitu
tion, for a priori truth and deduction, of fluent
doubt and inquiry meant trust in human nature
in the concrete ; in individual honesty, curiosity,
and sympathy. The substitution of moving com
merce for fixed custom meant a view of wants as
the dynamics of social progress, not as the pathol
ogy of private greed. The nineteenth century in
deed turned sour on that somewhat complacent op
timism in which the eighteenth century rested: the
ideas that the intelligent self-love of individuals
would conduce to social cohesion, and competition
among individuals usher in the kingdom of social
welfare. But the conception of a social harmony
of interests in which the achievement by each in
dividual of his own freedom should contribute to
a like perfecting of the powers of all, through a
fraternally organized society, is the permanent
contribution of the industrial movement to morals
even though so far it be but the contribution
of a problem.
Intellectually speaking, the centuries since the
fourteenth are the true middle ages. They mark
the transitional period of mental habit, as the so-
called medieval period represents the petrifaction,
under changed outward conditions, of Greek ideas.
INTELLIGENCE AND MORALS 61
The conscious articulation of genuinely modern
tendencies has yet to come, and till it comes the
* ethic of our own life must remain undescribed.
But the system of morals which has come nearest
f to the reflection of the movements of science, de
mocracy, and commerce, is doubtless the utilitarian.
Scientific, after the modern mode, it certainly
would be. Newton s influence dyes deep the moral
thought of the eighteenth century. The arrange
ments of the solar system had been described in
terms of a homogeneous matter and motion, worked
by two opposed and compensating forces : all be
cause a method of analysis, of generalization by
analogy, and of mathematical deduction back to
new empirical details had been followed. The im
agination of the eighteenth century was a New
tonian imagination; and this no less in social
than in physical matters. Hume proclaims that
morals is about to become an experimental science.
Just as, almost in our own day, Mill s interest in a
method for social science led him to reformulate
the logic of experimental inquiry, so all the great
men of the Enlightenment were in search for the
organon of morals which should repeat the physical
triumphs of Newton. Bentham notes that physics
has had its Bacon and Newton; that morals has
had its Bacon in Helvetius, but still awaits its
Newton ; and he leaves us in no doubt that at the
moment of writing he was ready, modestly but
62 INTELLIGENCE AND MORALS
firmly, to fill the waiting niche with its missing
figure.
The industrial movement furnished the concrete
imagery for this ethical renovation. The utili
tarians borrowed from Adam Smith the notion that
through industrial exchange in a free society the
individual pursuing his own good is led, under the
guidance of the " invisible hand," to promote the
general good more effectually than if he had set
out to do it. This idea was dressed out in the
atomistic psychology which Hartley built out from
Locke and was returned at usurious rates to later
economists.
From the great French writers who had sought
to justify and promote democratic individualism,
came the conception that, since it is perverted
political institutions which deprave individuals and
bring them into hostility, nation against nation,
class against class, individual against individual,
the great political problem is such a reform of law
and legislation, civil and criminal, of administra
tion, and of education as will force the individual
to find his own interests in pursuits conducing to
the welfare of others.
Tremendously effective as a tool of criticism, op
erative in abolition and elimination, utilitarianism
failed to measure up to the constructive needs of
the time. Its theoretical equalization of the good
of each with that of every other was practically
INTELLIGENCE AND MORALS 63
perverted by its excessive interest in the middle
and manufacturing classes. Its speculative defect
of an atomistic psychology combined with this
narrowness of vision to make light of the construc
tive work that needs to be done by the state, before
all can have, otherwise than in name, an equal
chance to count in the common good. Thus the
age-long subordination of economics to politics was
revenged in the submerging of both politics and
ethics in a narrow theory of economic profit; and
utilitarianism, in its orthodox descendants, prof
fered the disjointed pieces of a mechanism, with a
monotonous reiteration that looked at aright they
form a beautifully harmonious organism.
Prevision, and to some extent experience, of this
failure, conjoined with differing social traditions
and ambitions, evoked German idealism, the trans
cendental morals of Kant and his successors. Ger
man thought strove to preserve the traditions
which bound culture to the past, while revising
these traditions to render them capable of meeting
novel conditions. It found weapons at hand in the
conceptions borrowed by Roman law from Stoic
philosophy, and in the conceptions by which Prot
estant humanism had re-edited scholastic Catholi
cism. Grotius had made the idea of natural law,
natural right and obligation, the central idea of
German morals, as thoroughly as Locke had made
the individual desire for liberty and happiness the
64 INTELLIGENCE AND MORALS
focus of English and then of French speculation.
Materialized idealism is the happy monstrosity in
which the popular demand for vivid imagery is
most easily reconciled with the equally strong de
mand for supremacy of moral values ; and the com
plete idealistic materialism of Stoicism has always
given its ideas a practical influence out of all pro
portion to their theoretical vogue as a system.
To the Protestant, that is the German, humanist,
Natural Law, the bond of harmonious reason in
nature, the spring of social intercourse among
men, the inward light of individual conscience,
united Cicero, St. Paul, and Luther in blessed
union ; gave a rational, not superrational basis for
morals, and provided room for social legislation
which at the same time could easily be held back
from too ruthless application to dominant class in
terests.
Kant saw the mass of empirical and hence irrele
vant detail that had found refuge within this lib
eral and diffusive reason. He saw that the idea of
reason could be made self-consistent only by strip
ping it naked of these empirical accretions. He
then provided, in his critiques, a somewhat cum
brous moving van for transferring the resultant
pure or naked reason out of nature and the ob
jective world, and for locating it in new quarters,
with a new stock of goods and new customers. The
new quarters were particular subjects, individuals ;
INTELLIGENCE AND MORALS 65
the stock of goods were the forms of perception and
the functions of thought by which empirical flux is
woven into durable fabrics ; the new customers were
a society of individuals in which all are ends in them
selves. There ought to be an injunction issued
that Kant s saying about Hume s awakening of
him should not be quoted save in connection with
his other saying that Rousseau brought him to him
self, in teaching him that the philosopher is of less
account than the laborer in the fields unless he con
tributes to human freedom. But none the less, the
new tenant, the universal reason, and the old home
stead, the empirical tumultuous individual, could
not get on together. Reason became a mere voice
which, having nothing in particular to say, said
Law, Duty, in general, leaving to the existing
social order of the Prussia of Frederick the Great
the congenial task of declaring just what was ob
ligatory in the concrete. The marriage of free
dom and authority was thus celebrated with the
understanding that sentimental primacy went to
the former and practical control to the latter.
The effort to force a universal reason that had
been used to the broad domains of the cosmos into
the cramped confines of individuality conceived as
merely " empirical," a highly particularized crea
ture of sense, could have but one result : an explo
sion. The products of that explosion constitute
the Post-Kantian philosophies. It was the work of
66 INTELLIGENCE AND MORALS
Hegel to attempt to fill in the empty reason of
Kant with the concrete contents of history. The
voice sounded like the voice of Aristotle, Thomas
of Aquino, and Spinoza translated into Swabian
German ; but the hands were as the hands of Mon
tesquieu, Herder, Condorcet, and the rising his
torical school. The outcome was the assertion that
history is reason, and reason is history: the actual
is rational, the rational is the actual. It gave the
pleasant appearance (which Hegel did not strenu
ously discourage) of being specifically an idealiza
tion of the Prussian nation, and incidentally a sys
tematized apologetic for the universe at large.
But in intellectual and practical effect, it lifted the
idea of process above that of fixed origins and fixed
ends, and presented the social and moral order, as
well as the intellectual, as a scene of becoming, and
it located reason somewhere within the struggles of
life.
Unstable equilibrium, rapid fermentation, and a
succession of explosive reports are thus the chief
notes of modern ethics. Scepticism and tradition
alism, empiricism and rationalism, crude natural
isms and all-embracing idealisms, flourish side by
side all the more flourish, one suspects, because
side by side. Spencer exults because natural science
reveals that a rapid transit system of evolution is
carrying us automatically to the goal of perfect
man in perfect society; and his English idealistic
INTELLIGENCE AND MORALS 67
contemporary, Green, is so disturbed by the re
moval from nature of its moral qualities, that he
tries to show that this makes no difference, since na
ture in any case is constituted and known through
a spiritual principle which is as permanent as na
ture is changing 1 . An Amiel genteelly laments the
decadence of the inner life, while his neighbor Nietz
sche brandishes in rude ecstasy the banner of brute
survival as a happy omen of the final victory of
nobility of mind. The reasonable conclusion from
such a scene is that there is taking place a trans
formation of attitude towards moral theory rather
than mere propagation of varieties among theories.
The classic theories all agreed in one regard. They
all alike assumed the existence of the end, the sum-
mum bonum, the final goal; and of the separate
moral force that moves to that goal. Moralists
have disputed as to whether the end is an aggre
gate of pleasurable state of consciousness, enjoy
ment of the divine essence, acknowledgment of the
law of duty, or conformity to environment. So they
have disputed as to the path by which the final
goal is to be reached: fear or benevolence? rever
ence for pure law or pity for others? self-love or
altruism? But these very controversies implied
that there was but the one end and the one
means.
The transformation in attitude, to which I re
ferred, is the growing belief that the proper busi-
68 INTELLIGENCE AND MORALS
ness of intelligence is discrimination of multiple
and present goods and of the varied immediate
means of their realization; not search for the one
remote aim. The progress of biology has accus
tomed our minds to the notion that intelligence is
not an outside power presiding supremely but stat
ically over the desires and efforts of man, but
is a method of adjustment of capacities and con
ditions within specific situations. History, as the
i lecturer on that subject told us, has discovered it
self in the idea of process. The genetic standpoint
makes us aware that the systems of the past are
neither fraudulent impostures nor absolute revela
tions ; but are the products of political, economic,
and scientific conditions whose change carries with
it change of theoretical formulations. The recog
nition that intelligence is properly an organ of ad
justment in difficult situations makes us aware that
past theories were of value so far as they helped
carry to an issue the social perplexities from which
they emerged. But the chief impact of the evo
lutionary method is upon the present. Theory
having learned what it cannot do, is made respon
sible for the better performance of what needs to
be done, and what only a broadly equipped intelli
gence can undertake: study of the conditions out
of which come the obstacles and the resources of
adequate life, and developing and testing the ideas
that, as working hypotheses, may be used to dimin-
INTELLIGENCE AND MORALS 69
ish the causes of evil and to buttress and ex
pand the sources of good. This program is indeed
vague, but only unfamiliarity with it could lead
one to the conclusion that it is less vague than the
idea that there is a single moral ideal and a single
moral motive force.
From this point of view there is no separate body
of moral rules ; no separate system of motive pow
ers; no separate subject-matter of moral knowl
edge, and hence no such thing as an isolated ethical
science. If the business of morals is not to specu
late upon man s final end and upon an ultimate
standard of right, it is to utilize physiology, an
thropology, and psychology to discover all that
can be discovered of man, his organic powers and
propensities. If its business is not to search for
the one separate moral motive, it is to converge all
the instrumentalities of the social arts, of law, edu
cation, economics, and political science upon the
construction of intelligent methods of improving
the common lot.
If we still wish to make our peace with the past,
and to sum up the plural and changing goods of
life in a single word, doubtless the term happiness
is the one most apt. But we should again ex
change free morals for sterile metaphysics, if we
imagine that " happiness " is any less unique than
the individuals who experience it ; any less complex
than the constitution of their capacities, or any less
70 INTELLIGENCE AND MORALS
variable than the objects upon which their capaci
ties are directed.
To many timid, albeit sincere, souls of an earlier
century, the decay of the doctrine that all true
and worthful science is knowledge of final causes
seemed fraught with danger to science and to mor
als. The rival conception of a wide open universe,
a universe without bounds in time or space, without
final limits of origin or destiny, a universe with the
lid off, was a menace. We now face in moral sci
ence a similar crisis and like opportunity, as well
as share in a like dreadful suspense. The abolition
of a fixed and final goal and causal force in nature
did not, as matter of fact, render rational convic
tion less important or less attainable. It was ac
companied by the provision of a technique of per
sistent and detailed inquiry in all special fields of
fact, a technique which led to the detection of un
suspected forces and the revelation of undreamed
of uses. In like fashion we may anticipate that
the abolition of the final goal and the single motive
power and the separate and infallible faculty in
morals, will quicken inquiry into the diversity of
specific goods of experience, fix attention upon
fheir conditions, and bring to light values now dim
and obscure. The change may relieve men from
responsibility for what they cannot do, but it will
promote thoughtful consideration of what they
may do and the definition of responsibility for what
INTELLIGENCE AND MORALS 71
they do amiss because of failure to think straight
and carefully. Absolute goods will fall into the
background, but the question of making more sure
and extensive the share of all men in natural and
social goods will be urgent, a problem not to be
escaped nor evaded.
Morals, philosophy, returns to its first love ; love
of the wisdom that is nurse, as nature is mother,
of good. But it returns to the Socratic principle
equipped with a multitude of special methods of in
quiry and testing; with an organized mass of
knowledge, and with control of the arrangements
by which industry, law, and education may concen
trate upon the problem of the participation by all
men and women, up to their capacity of absorption,
in all attained values. Morals may then well leave
to poetry and to art, the task (so unartistically
performed by philosophy since Plato) of gathering
together and rounding out, into one abiding pic
ture, the separate and special goods of life. It
may leave this task with the assurance that the re
sultant synthesis will not depict any final and all-
inclusive good, but will add just one more specific
good to the enjoyable excellencies of life.
Humorous irony shines through most of the
harsh glances turned towards the idea of an ex
perimental basis and career for morals. Some
shiver in the fear that morals will be plunged into
anarchic confusion a view well expressed by a
72 INTELLIGENCE AND MORALS
recent writer in the saying that if the a priori and
transcendental basis of morals be abandoned " we
shall have merely the same certainty that now ex
ists in physics and chemistry " ! Elsewhere lurks
the apprehension that the progress of scientific
method will deliver the purposive freedom of man
bound hand and foot to the fatal decrees of iron
necessity, called natural law. The notion that
/ laws govern and forces rule is an animistic sur
vival. It is a product of reading nature in terms
of politics in order to turn around and then read
politics in the light of supposed sanctions of na
ture. This idea passed from medieval theology
into the science of Newton, to whom the universe
was the dominion of a sovereign whose laws were
the laws of nature. From Newton it passed into
the deism of the eighteenth century, whence it mi
grated into the philosophy of the Enlightenment,
to make its last stand in Spencer s philosophy of
the fixed environment and the static goal.
No, nature is not an unchangeable order, un
winding itself majestically from the reel of law
under the control of deified forces. It is an in
definite congeries of changes. Laws are not gov
ernmental regulations which limit change, but are
convenient formulations of selected portions of
change followed through a longer or shorter period
of time, and then registered in statistical forms
that are amenable to mathematical manipulation.
INTELLIGENCE AND MORALS 73
That this device of shorthand symbolization pres
ages the subjection of man s intelligent effort to
fixity of law and environment is interesting as a
culture survival, but is not important for moral
theory. Savage and child delight in creating
bogeys from which, their origin and structure be
ing conveniently concealed, interesting thrills and
shudders may be had. Civilized man in the nine
teenth century outdid these bugaboos in his image
of a fixed universe hung on a cast-iron framework
of fixed, necessary, and universal laws. Knowl
edge of nature does not mean subjection to predes
tination, but insight into courses of change; an
insight which is formulated in " laws," that is,
methods of subsequent procedure.
Knowledge of the process and conditions of phys
ical and social change through experimental science
and genetic history has one result with a double
name : increasejaf control, and increase o^responsi-
bility ; increase of powerjtojiirect natural^change,
and increase of responsibility for its equitable direc
tion toward fuller good. Theory located within
progressive practice instead of reigning statically
supreme over it, means practice itself made respon
sible to intelligence; to intelligence which relent
lessly scrutinizes the consequences of every prac
tice, and which exacts liability by an equally re
lentless publicity. As long as morals occupies it
self with mere ideals, forces and conditions as they
74, INTELLIGENCE AND MORALS
are will be good enough for " practical " men,
since they are then left free to their own devices
in turning these to their own account. As long as
moralists plume themselves upon possession of the
domain of the categorical imperative with its bare
precepts, men of executive habits will always be at
their elbows to regulate the concrete social condi
tions through which the form of law gets its actual
filling of specific injunctions. When freedom is
conceived to be transcendental, the coercive re
straint of immediate necessity will lay its harsh
hand upon the mass of men.
In the end, men do what they can do. They
refrain from doing what they cannot do. They
do what their own specific powers in conjunction
with the limitations and resources of the environ
ment permit. The effective control of their powers
^ is not through precepts, but through the regula
tion of their conditions. If this regulation is to
be not merely physical or coercive, but moral, it
, must consist of the intelligent selection and de
termination of the environments in which we act;
and in an intelligent exaction of responsibility for
the use of men s powers. Theorists inquire after
the " motive " to morality, to virtue and the good,
under such circumstances. What then, one won
ders, is their conception of the make-up of human
nature and of its relation to virtue and to good
ness? The pessimism that dictates such a ques-
INTELLIGENCE AND MORALS 75
tion, if it be justified, precludes any consideration
of morals.
The diversion of intelligence from discrimina
tion of plural and concrete goods, from noting
their conditions and obstacles, and from devis
ing methods for holding men responsible for their
concrete use of powers and conditions, has done
V more than brute love of power to establish in
equality and injustice among men. It has done
more, because it has confirmed with social sanc
tions the principle of feudal domination. All
men require moral sanctions in their conduct: the
consent of their kind. Not getting it otherwise,
they go insane to feign it. No man ever lived
with the exclusive approval of his own conscience.
Hence the vacuum left in practical matters by the
remote irrelevancy of transcendental morals has to
be filled in somehow. It is filled in. It is filled in
with class-codes, class-standards, class-approvals
with codes which recommend the practices and
habits already current in a given circle, set, calling,
profession, trade, industry, club, or gang. These
class-codes always lean back upon and support
themselves by the professed ideal code. This latter
meets them more than half-way. Being in its pre
tense a theory for regulating practice, it must dem
onstrate its practicability. It is uneasy in isolation,
and travels hastily to meet with compromise and
accommodation the actual situation in all its brute
76 INTELLIGENCE AND MORALS
unrationality. Where the pressure is greatest
in the habitual practice of the political and eco
nomic chieftains there it accommodates the most.
Class-codes of morals are sanctions, under the
caption of ideals, of uncriticised customs ; they are
recommendations, under the head of duties, of what
the members of the class are already most given
to doing. If there are to obtain more equable and
comprehensive principles of action, exacting a
more impartial exercise of natural power and re
source in the interests of a common good, members
of a class must no longer rest content in responsi
bility to a class whose traditions constitute its
conscience, but be made responsible to a society
whose conscience is its free and effectively organ
ized intelligence.
In such a conscience alone will the Socratic in
junction to man to know himself be fulfilled.
THE EXPERIMENTAL THEORY OF
KNOWLEDGE *
IT should be possible to discern and describe a
knowing as one identifies any object, concern,
or event. It must have its own marks; it must
offer characteristic features as much so as a
thunder-storm, the constitution of a State, or a
leopard. In the search for this affair, we are first
of all desirous for something which is for itself,
contemporaneously with its occurrence, a cognition,
not something called knowledge by another and
from without whether this other be logician,
psychologist, or epistemologist. The " knowl
edge " may turn out false, and hence no knowl
edge; but this is an after-affair; it may prove
to be rich in fruitage of wisdom, but if this
outcome be only wisdom after the event, it
does not concern us. What we want is just some
thing which takes itself as knowledge, rightly or
wrongly.
1 Reprinted, with considerable change in the arrange
ment and in the matter of the latter portion, from Mind,
Vol. XV., N.S., July, 1906.
77
78 THE EXPERIMENTAL THEORY
This means a specific case, a sample. Yet in
stances are proverbially dangerous so naively
and graciously may they beg the questions at issue.
Our recourse is to an example so simple, so much
on its face as to be as innocent as may be of as
sumptions. This case we shall gradually compli
cate, mindful at each step to state just what new
elements are introduced. Let us suppose a smell,
just a floating odor. This odor may be anchored
by supposing that it moves to action; it starts
changes that end in picking and enjoying a rose.
This description is intended to apply to the course
of events witnessed and recounted from without.
What sort of a course must it be to constitute a
knowledge, or to have somewhere within its career
that which deserves this title? The smell, im
primis, is there; the movements that it excites are
there ; the final plucking and gratification are ex
perienced. But, let us say, the smell is not the
smell of the rose; the resulting change of the or
ganism is not a sense of walking and reaching ; the
delicious finale is not the fulfilment of the move
ment, and, through that, of the original smell ; " is
not," in each case meaning is " not experienced as "
such. We may take, in short, these experiences in
a brutely serial fashion. The smell, S, is replaced
(and displaced) by a felt movement, K, this is re-
THE EXPERIMENTAL THEORY 79
placed by the gratification, G. Viewed from with
out, as we are now regarding it, there is S-K-G.
But from within, for itself, it is now S, now
K, now G, and so on to the end of the chapter.
Nowhere is there looking before and after;
memory and anticipation are not born. Such
an experience neither is, in whole or in part,
a knowledge, nor does it exercise a cognitive
function.
Here, however, we may be halted. If there is
anything present in " consciousness " at all, we
may be told (at least we constantly are so told)
there must be knowledge of it as present present,
at all events, in " consciousness." There is, so it
is argued, knowledge at least of a simple appre
hensive type, knowledge of the acquaintance order,
knowledge that, even though not knowledge what.
The smell, it is admitted, does not know about any
thing else, nor is anything known about the smell
(the same thing, perhaps) ; but the smell is known,
either by itself, or by the mind, or by some sub
ject, some unwinking, unremitting eye. No, we
must reply ; there is no apprehension without some
(however slight) context; no acquaintance which
is not either recognition or expectation. Ac
quaintance is presence honored with an escort;
presence is introduced as familiar, or an associate
springs up to greet it. Acquaintance always im
plies a little friendliness ; a trace of re-knowing, of
80 THE EXPERIMENTAL THEORY
anticipatory welcome or dread of the trait to fol
low.
This claim cannot be dismissed as trivial. If
valid, it carries with it the distance between being
and knowing: and the recognition of an element of
mediation, that is, of art, in all knowledge. This
disparity, this transcendence, is not something
which holds of our knowledge, of finite knowledge,
just marking the gap between our type of con
sciousness and some other with which we may con
trast it after the manner of the agnostic or the
transcendentalist (who hold so much property in
joint ownership!), but exists because knowing is
knowing, that way of bringing things to bear upon
things which we call reflection a manipulation of
things experienced in the light one of another.
" Feeling," I read in a recent article, " feeling
is immediately acquainted with its own quality,
with its own subjective being." 1 How and whence
this duplication in the inwards of feeling into feel-
1 1 must remind the reader again of a point already sug
gested. It is the identification of presence in consciousness
(With knowledge as such that leads to setting up a mind
(ego, subject) which has the peculiar property of knowing
(only so often it knows wrong!), or else that leads to
supplying " sensations " with the peculiar property of sur
veying their own entrails. Given the correct feeling that
knowledge involves relationship, there being, by supposition,
no other thing to which the thing in consciousness is related,
it is forthwith related to a soul substance, or to its ghostly
offspring, a "subject," or to "consciousness" itself.
THE EXPERIMENTAL THEORY 81
ing the knower and feeling the known ? into feeling
as being and feeling as acquaintance? Let us
frankly deny such monsters. Feeling is its own
,, -quality; is its own specific (whence and why, once
more, subjective?) being. If this statement be
dogmatism, it is at least worth insistent declara
tion, were it only by way of counter-irritant to that
other dogmatism which asserts that being in " con
sciousness " is always presence for or in knowledge.
So let us repeat once more, that to be a smell (or
anything else) is one thing, to be known as smell,
. another ; to be a " feeling " one thing, to be known
as a " feeling " another. 1 The first is thinghood ;
existence indubitable, direct; in this way all things
are that are in " consciousness " at all. 2 The
second is reflected being, things indicating and call
ing for other things something offering the possi
bility of truth and hence of falsity. The first is
1 Let us further recall that this theory requires either that
things present shall already be psychical things (feelings,
sensations, etc.), in order to be assimilated to the knowing
mind, subject to consciousness; or else translates genuinely
naive realism into the miracle of a mind that gets out
side itself to lay its ghostly hands upon the things of an
external world.
2 This means that things may be present as known, just as
they be present as hard or soft, agreeable or disgusting,
hoped for or dreaded. The mediacy, or the art of interven
tion, which characterizes knowledge, indicates precisely the
way in which known things as known are immediately
present,
82 THE EXPERIMENTAL THEORY
genuine immediacy; the second is (in the instance
discussed) a pseudo-immediacy, which in the same
breath that it proclaims its immediacy smuggles in
another term ( and one which is unexperienced both
in itself and in its relation) the subject or " con
sciousness," to which the immediate is related. 1
But we need not remain with dogmatic asser
tions. To be acquainted with a thing or with a
person has a definite empirical meaning; we have
only to call to mind what it is to be genuinely and
empirically acquainted, to have done forever with
this uncanny presence which, though bare and sim
ple presence, is yet known, and thus is clothed
upon and complicated. To be acquainted with a
thing is to be assured (from the standpoint of the
experience itself) that it is of such and such a
character; that it will behave, if given an oppor
tunity, in such and such a way ; that the obviously
and flagrantly present trait is associated with fel
low traits that will show themselves, if the lead
ings of the present trait are followed out. To be
1 If Hume had had a tithe of the interest in the flux of
perceptions and in habit principles of continuity and of
organization which he had in distinct and isolated exist
ences, he might have saved us both from German Erkennt-
nisstheorie, and from that modern miracle play, the psychol
ogy of elements of consciousness, that under the aegis of
science, does not hesitate to have psychical elements com
pound and breed, and in their agile intangibility put to
shame the performances of their less acrobatic cousins,
physical atoms,
THE EXPERIMENTAL THEORY 83
acquainted is to anticipate to some extent, on the
basis of prior experience. I am, say, barely ac
quainted with Mr. Smith : then I have no extended
body of associated qualities along with those palpa
bly present, but at least some one suggested trait
occurs ; his nose, his tone of voice, the place where
I saw him, his calling in life, an interesting anec
dote about him, etc. To be acquainted is to know
what a thing is like in some particular. If one is
acquainted with the smell of a flower it means that
the smell is not just smell, but reminds one of
some other experienced thing which stands in con
tinuity with the smell. There is thus supplied a
condition of control over or purchase upon what
is present, the possibility of translating it into
terms of some other trait not now sensibly present.
Let us return to our example. Let us suppose
that S is not just displaced by K and then by G.
Let us suppose it persists ; and persists not as an
unchanged S alongside K and G, nor yet as fused
with them into a new further quale J. For in such
events, we have only the type already considered
and rejected. For an observer the new quale might
be more complex, or fuller of meaning, than the
original S, K, or G, but might not be experienced
as complex. We might thus suppose a composite
photograph which should suggest nothing of the
complexity of its origin and structure. In this
case we should have simply another picture.
84 THE EXPERIMENTAL THEORY
But we may also suppose that the blur of the
photograph suggests the superimposition of pic
tures and something of their character. Then we
get another, and for our problem, much more fruit
ful kind of persistence. We will imagine that the
final G assumes this form: Gratification-terminat-
ing-movement-induced-by-smell. The smell is
still present; it has persisted. It is not present in
its original form, but is represented with a quality,
an office, that of having excited activity and thereby
terminating its career in a certain quale of grati
fication. It is not S, but 2 ; that is S with an
increment of meaning due to maintenance and ful
filment through a process. S is no longer just
smell, but smell which has excited and thereby se
cured.
Here we have a cognitive, but not a cognitional
thing. In saying that the smell is finally experi
enced as meaning gratification (through interven
ing handling, seeing, etc. ) and meaning it not in a
hapless way, but in a fashion which operates to
effect what is meant, we retrospectively attribute
intellectual force and function to the smell and
this is what is signified by " cognitive." Yet the
smell is not cognitional, because it did not know
ingly intend to mean this ; but is found, after the
event, to have meant it. Nor again is the final
experience, the 2 or transformed S, a knowledge.
Here again the statement may be challenged.
THE EXPERIMENTAL THEORY 85
Those who agree with the denial that bare presence
of a quale in "consciousness" constitutes acquaint
ance and simple apprehension, may now turn
against us, saying that experience of fulfilment of
meaning is just what we mean by knowledge, and
this is just what the 2 of our illustration is. The
point is fundamental. As the smell at first was
presence or being, less than knowing, so the fulfil
ment is an experience that is more than knowing.
Seeing and handling the flower, enjoying the full
meaning of the smell as the odor of just this
beautiful thing, is not knowledge because it is more
than knowledge.
As this may seem dogmatic, let us suppose that
the fulfilment, the realization, experience, is a
knowledge. Then how shall it be distinguished
* from and yet classed with other things called knowl
edge, viz., reflective, discursive cognitions? Such
knowledges are what they are precisely because they
are not fulfilments, but intentions, aims, schemes,
symbols of overt fulfilment. Knowledge, perceptual
and conceptual, of a hunting dog is prerequisite in
order that I may really hunt with the hounds. The
hunting in turn may increase my knowledge of dogs
and their ways. But the knowledge of the dog, qua
knowledge, remains characteristically marked off
from the use of that knowledge in the fulfilment
experience, the hunt. The hunt is a realization of
knowledge; it alone, if you please, verifies, vali-
86 THE EXPERIMENTAL THEORY
dates, knowledge, or supplies tests of truth. The
prior knowledge of the dog, was, if you wish,
hypothetical, lacking in assurance or categorical
certainty. The hunting, the fulfilling, realizing
experience alone gives knowledge, because it alone
completely assures ; makes faith good in works.
Now there is and can be no objection to this
definition of knowledge, provided it is consistently
adhered to. One has as much right to identify
knowledge with complete assurance, as I have to
identify it with anything else. Considerable justi
fication in the common use of language, in common
sense, may be found for defining knowledge as com
plete assurance. But even upon this definition, the
fulfilling experience is not, as such, complete assur
ance, and hence not a knowledge. Assurance, cog
nitive validation, and guaranteeship, follow from
it, but are not coincident with its occurrence. It
* gives, but is not, assurance. The concrete con
struction of a story, the manipulation of a machine,
the hunting with the dogs, is not, so far as it is
fulfilment, a confirmation of meanings previously
entertained as cognitional; that is, is not contem
poraneously experienced as such. To think of
prior schemes, symbols, meanings, as fulfilled in a
subsequent experience, is reflectively to present
in their relations to one another both the mean
ings and the experiences in which they are, as
a matter of fact, embodied. This reflective at-
THE EXPERIMENTAL THEORY 87
titude cannot be identical with the fulfilment ex
perience itself; it occurs only in retrospect when
the worth of the meanings, or cognitive ideas, is
critically inspected in the light of their fulfilment ;
or it occurs as an interruption of the fulfilling
experience. The hunter stops his hunting as
a fulfilment to reflect that he made a mistake
in his idea of his dog, or again, that his dog
is everything he thought he was that his notion
of him is confirmed. Or, the man stops the actual
construction of his machine and turns back upon
his plan in correction or in admiring estimate of its
value. The fulfilling experience is not of itself
knowledge, then, even if we identify knowledge
with fulness of assurance or guarantee. More
over it gives, affords, assurance only in reference
to a situation which we have not yet considered. 1
Before the category of confirmation or refuta
tion can be introduced, there must be something
which means to mean something and which there
fore can be guaranteed or nullified by the issue
and this is precisely what we have not as yet found.
We must return to our instance and introduce a
further complication. Let us suppose that the
smell quale recurs at a later date, and that it
recurs neither as the original S nor yet as the
1 In other words, the situation as described is not to be
confused with the case of hunting on purpose to test an idea
regarding the dog.
88 THE EXPERIMENTAL THEORY
final 2 9 but as an S which is fated or charged
with the sense of the possibility of a fulfilment like
unto 2. The S that recurs is aware of some
thing else which it means, which it intends to effect
through an operation incited by it and without
which its own presence is abortive, and, so to say,
unjustified, senseless. Now we have an experience
which is cognitional, not merely cognitive; which
is contemporaneously aware of meaning something
beyond itself, instead of having this meaning as
cribed by another at a later period. The odor
knows the rose; the rose is known by the odor; and
the import of each term is constituted by the re
lationship m which it stands to the other. That
is, the import of the smell is the indicating and
demanding relation which it sustains to the enjoy
ment of the rose as its fulfilling experience; while
this enjoyment is just the content or definition
of what the smell consciously meant, i.e., meant
to mean. Both the thing meaning and the thing
meant are elements in the same situation. Both
are present, but both are not present in the same
way. In fact, one is present as-wotf-present-in-
the-same-way-in-wnich-the-other-is. It is present
as something to be rendered present in the same
way through the intervention of an operation.
We must not balk at a purely verbal difficulty.
It suggests a verbal inconsistency to speak of a
thing present-as-absent. But all ideal contents,
THE EXPERIMENTAL THEORY 89
all aims (that is, things aimed at) are present in
just such fashion. Things can be presented as
absent, just as they can be presented as hard or
soft, black or white, six inches or fifty rods away
from the body. The assumption that an ideal
content must be either totally absent, or else
present in just the same fashion as it will be
when it is realized, is not only dogmatic, but self-
contradictory. The only way in which an ideal
content can be experienced at all is to be presented
as not-present-in-the-same-way in which something
else is present, the latter kind of presence afford
ing the standard or type of satisfactory presence.
When present in the same way it ceases to be an
ideal content. Not a contrast of bare existence
over against non-existence, or of present conscious
ness over against reality out of present conscious
ness, but of a satisfactory with an unsatisfactory
1 mode of presence makes the difference between the
" really " and the " ideally " present.
In terms of our illustration, handling and en
joying the rose are present, but they are not
present in the same way that the smell is present.
Th?^ are present as going to be there in the
same way, through an operation which the smell
stands sponsor for. The situation is inherently
an uneasy one one in which everything hangs
upon the performance of the operation indicated;
upon the adequacy of movement as a connecting
THE EXPERIMENTAL THEORY
link, or real adjustment of the thing meaning and
the thing meant. Generalizing from the instance,
we get the following definition : An experience is a
knowledge, if in its quale there is an experienced
distinction and connection of two elements of the
following sort: one means or intends the presence
of the other in the same fashion m which itself is
already present, while the other is that which, while
not present in the same fashion, must become so
present if the meaning or intention of its com
panion or yoke-fellow is to be fulfilled through the
operation it sets up.
II
We now return briefly to the question of knowl
edge as acquaintance, and at greater length to
that of knowledge as assurance, or as fulfilment
which confirms and validates. With the recurrence
of the odor as meaning something beyond itself,
there is apprehension, knowledge that. One may
now say I know what a rose smells like; or I know
what this smell is like ; I am acquainted with the
rose s agreeable odor. In short, on the basis of a
present quality, the odor anticipates and forestalls
some further trait.
We have also the conditions of knowledge of the
confirmation and refutation type. In the working
out of the situation just described, in the trans-
THE EXPERIMENTAL THEORY 91
formation, self-indicated and self-demanded, of the
tensional into a harmonious or satisfactory situa
tion, fulfilment or disappointment results. The
odor either does or does not fulfil itself in the rose.
The smell as intention is borne out by the facts,
or is nullified. As has already been pointed out,
the subsequent experience of the fulfilment type is
not primarily a confirmation or refutation. Its
import is too vital, too urgent to be reduced in
itself just to the value of testing an intention or
meaning. 1 But it gets in reflection just such veri-
ficatory significance. If the smell s intention is
unfulfilled, the discrepancy may throw one back,
in reflection, upon the original situation. Inter
esting developments then occur. The smell meant
a rose; and yet it did not (so it turns out) mean
a rose ; it meant another flower, or something, one
can t just tell what. Clearly there is something
*Dr. Moore, in an essay in "Contributions to Logical
Theory " has brought out clearly, on the basis of a criticism
of the theory of meaning and fulfilment advanced in
Royce s " World and Individual," the full consequences of
this distinction. I quote one sentence (p. 350) : " Surely there
is a pretty discernible difference between experience as a
purposive idea, and the experience which fulfils this purpose.
To call them both * ideas is at least confusing." The text
above simply adds that there is also a discernible and im
portant difference between experiences which, de facto, are
purposing and fulfilling (that is, are seen to be such ab
extra), and those which meant to be such, and are found to
Jbe what they meant.
92 THE EXPERIMENTAL THEORY
else which enters in ; something else beyond the odor
as it was first experienced determined the validity
of its meaning. Here then, perhaps, we have a
transcendental, as distinct from an experimental
reference? Only if this something else makes no
difference, or no detectable difference, in the smell
itself. If the utmost observation and reflection
can find no difference in the smell quales that fail
and those that succeed in executing their inten
tions, then there is an outside controlling and dis
turbing factor, which, since it is outside of the sit
uation, can never be utilized in knowledge, and
hence can never be employed in any concrete test
ing or verifying. In this case, knowing depends
upon an extra-experimental or transcendental fac
tor. But this very transcendental quality makes
both confirmation and refutation, correction, criti
cism, of the pretensions or meanings of things,
impossible. For the conceptions of truth and
error, we must, upon the transcendental basis, sub
stitute those of accidental success or failure.
Sometimes the intention chances upon one, some
times upon another. Why or how, the gods only
know and they only if to them the extra-experi
mental factor is not extra-experimental, but makes
a concrete difference in the concrete smell. But
fortunately the situation is not one to be thus de
scribed. The factor that determines the success
or failure, does institute a difference in the thing
THE EXPERIMENTAL THEORY 93
which means the object, and this difference is de
tectable, once attention, through failure, has been
called to the need of its discovery. At the very
least, it makes this difference : the smell is infected
with an element of uncertainty of meaning and
this as a part of the thing experienced, not for
an observer. This additional awareness at least
brings about an additional wariness. Meaning is
more critical, and operation more cautious.
But we need not stop here. Attention may be
fully directed to the subject of smells. Smells may
become the object of knowledge. They may take,
pro tempore, 1 the place which the rose formerly
occupied. One may, that is, observe the cases in
which odors mean other things than just roses, may
voluntarily produce new cases for the sake of
further inspection, and thus account for the
cases where meanings had been falsified in the
issue; discriminate more carefully the peculiari
ties of those meanings which the event verified, and
thus safeguard and bulwark to some extent the
employing of similar meanings in the future. Su
perficially, it may then seem as if odors were
treated after the fashion of Locke s simple ideas,
1 The association of science and philosophy with leisure,
with a certain economic surplus, is not accidental. It is
practically worth while to postpone practice; to substitute
theorizing, to develop a new and fascinating mode of prac
tice. But it is the excess achievement of practice which
makes this postponement and substitution possible.
94> THE EXPERIMENTAL THEORY
or Hume s " distinct ideas which are separate
existences." Smells apparently assume an inde
pendent, isolated status during this period of in
vestigation. " Sensations," as the laboratory psy
chologist and the analytic psychologist generally
studies them, are examples of just such detached
things. But egregious error results if we forget
that this seeming isolation and detachment is the
outcome of a deliberate scientific device that it is
simply a part of the scientific technique of an in
quiry directed upon securing tested conclusions.
Just and only because odors (or any group of
qualities) are parts of a connected world are
they signs of things beyond themselves ; and only
because they are signs is it profitable and necessary
to study them as if they were complete, self-en
closed entities.
In the reflective determination of things with
reference to their specifically meaning other things,
experiences of fulfilment, disappointment, and go
ing astray inevitably play an important and recur
rent role. They also are realistic facts, related in
realistic ways to the things that intend to mean
other things and to the things intended. When
these fulfilments and refusals are reflected upon in
the determinate relations in which they stand to
their relevant meanings, they obtain a quality which
is quite lacking to them in their immediate occur
rence as just fulfilments or disappointments; viz.,
THE EXPERIMENTAL THEORY 95
the property of affording assurance and correction
of confirming and refuting. Truth and falsity
are not properties of any experience or thing, in
and of itself or in its first intention ; but of things
where the problem of assurance consciously enters
in. Truth and falsity present themselves as sig
nificant facts only m situations m which specific
meanings and their already experienced fulfilments
and non-fulfilments are intentionally compared and
contrasted with reference to the question of the
worth, as to reliability of meaning, of the given
meaning or class of meanmgs. Like knowledge
itself, truth is an experienced relation of things,
and it has no meaning outside of such relation, 1 any
more than such adjectives as comfortable applied
to a lodging, correct applied to speech, persuasive
applied to an orator, etc., have worth apart from
the specific things to which they are applied. It
would be a great gain for logic and epistemology,
if we were always to translate the noun " truth "
back into the adjective " true," and this back into
the adverb " truly " ; at least, if we were to do so
until we have familiarized ourselves thoroughly
1 It is the failure to grasp the coupling of truth of mean-
* ing with a specific promise, undertaking, or intention ex
pressed by a thing which underlies, so far as I can see,
the criticisms passed upon the experimental or pragmatic
view of the truth. It is the same failure which is re
sponsible for the wholly at large view of truth which char
acterizes the absolutists.
96 THE EXPERIMENTAL THEORY
with the fact that " truth " is an abstract noun,
summarizing a quality presented by specific affairs
in their own specific contents.
Ill
I have attempted, in the foregoing pages, a de
scription of the function of knowledge in its own
terms and on its merits a description which in
intention is realistic, if by realistic we are content
to mean naturalistic, a description undertaken on
the basis of what Mr. Santayana has well called
" following the lead of the subject-matter." Un
fortunately at the present time all such undertak
ings contend with a serious extraneous obstacle.
Accomplishing the undertaking has difficulties
enough of its own to reckon with ; and first attempts
are sure to be imperfect, if not radically wrong.
But at present the attempts are not, for the most
part, even listened to on their own account, they
are not examined and criticised as naturalistic at
tempts. They are compared with undertakings of
a wholly different nature, with an epistemological
theory of knowledge, and the assumptions of this
extraneous theory are taken as a ready-made stand
ard by which to test their validity. Literally of
course, " epistemology " means only theory of
knowledge; the term might therefore have been
employed simply as a synonym for a descriptive
THE EXPERIMENTAL THEORY 97
logic; for a theory that takes knowledge as it
finds it and attempts to give the same kind of an
account of it that would be given of any other natu
ral function or occurrence. But the mere mention
of what might have been only accentuates what is.
The things that pass for epistemology all assume
that knowledge is not a natural function or event,
but a mystery.
Epistemology starts from the assumption that
certain conditions lie back of knowledge. The
mystery would be great enough if knowledge were
constituted by non-natural conditions back of
knowledge, but the mystery is increased by the fact
that the conditions are defined so as to be incom
patible with knowledge. Hence the primary
problem of epistemology is : How is knowledge
uberhaupt, knowledge at large, possible? Because
of the incompatibility between the concrete occur
rence and function of knowledge and the conditions
back of it to which it must conform, a second
problem arises : How is knowledge in general,
knowledge uberhaupt, valid? Hence the complete
divorce in contemporary thought between epis
temology as theory of knowledge and logic as an
account of the specific ways in which particular
beliefs that are better than other alternative beliefs
regarding the same matters are formed; and also
the complete divorce between a naturalistic, a bio
logical and social psychology, setting forth how
98 THE EXPERIMENTAL THEORY
the function of knowledge is evolved out of other
natural activities, and epistemology as an account
of how knowledge is possible anyhow.
It is out of the question to set forth in this place
in detail the contrast between transcendental epis
temology and an experimental theory of knowl
edge. It may assist the understanding of the lat
ter, however, if I point out, baldly and briefly, how,
out of the distinctively empirical situation, there
arise those assumptions which make knowledge a
mystery, and hence a topic for a peculiar branch
of philosophizing.
As just pointed out, epistemology makes the
possibility of knowledge a problem, because it
assumes back of knowledge conditions incompatible
with the obvious traits of knowledge as it em
pirically exists. These assumptions are that the
organ or instrument of knowledge is not a natural
object, but some ready-made state of mind or con
sciousness, something purely " subjective," a pecu
liar kind of existence which lives, moves, and has
its being in a realm different from things to be
known; and that the ultimate goal and content
of knowledge is a fixed, ready-made thing which
has no organic connections with the origin, pur
pose, and growth of the attempt to know it, some
kind of Ding-an-sich or absolute, extra-empirical
"Reality." "
(1) It is not difficult to see at what point in
THE EXPERIMENTAL THEORY 99
the development of natural knowledge, or the signi
fying of one thing by another, there arises the
notion of the knowing medium as something rad
ically different in the order of existence from the
thing to be known. It arises subsequent to the re-
- peated experience of non-fulfilment, of frustration
and disappointment. The odor did not after all
mean the rose ; it meant something quite different ;
and yet its indicative function was exercised so
forcibly that we could not help or at least did
not help believing in the existence of the rose.
This is a familiar and typical kind of experience,
one which very early leads to the recognition that
" things are not what they seem." There are
two contrasted methods of dealing with this recog
nition: one is the method indicated above (p. 93).
We go more thoroughly, patiently, and carefully
into the facts of the case. We employ all sorts
of methods, invented for the purpose, of examin
ing the things that are signs and the things that
are signified, and we experimentally produce vari
ous situations, in order that we may tell what smells
mean roses when roses are meant, what it is about
the smell and the rose that led us into error; and
that we may be able to discriminate those cases in
which a suspended conclusion is all that circum
stances admit. We simply do the best we can to
regulate our system of signs so that they become as
instructive as possible, utilizing for this purpose
100 THE EXPERIMENTAL THEORY
(as indicated above) all possible experiences of
success and of failure, and deliberately instituting
cases which will throw light on the specific em
pirical causes of success and failure.
Now it so happens that when the facts of error
were consciously generalized and formulated,
namely in Greek thought, such a technique of spe
cific inquiry and rectification did not exist in fact,
it hardly could come into existence until after error
had been seized upon as constituting a funda
mental anomaly. Hence the method just outlined
of dealing with the situation was impossible. We
can imagine disconsolate ghosts willing to postpone
any professed solution of the difficulty till subse
quent generations have thrown more light on the
question itself; we can hardly imagine passionate
human beings exercising such reserve. At all
events, Greek thought provided what seemed a sat
isfactory way out: there are two orders of ex
istence, one permanent and complete, the noumenal
region, to which alone the characteristic of Being
is properly applicable, the other transitory, phe
nomenal, sensible, a region of non-Being, or at
least of mere Coming-to-be, a region in which Be
ing is hopelessly mixed with non-Being, with the
unreal. The former alone is the domain of knowl
edge, of truth ; the latter is the territory of opinion,
confusion, and error. In short, the contrast with-
m experience of the cases in which things sue-
THE EXPERIMENTAL THEORY 101
cessfully and unsuccessfully maintained and exe
cuted the meanings of other things was erected into
a wholesale difference of status in the intrinsic
characters of the things involved in the two types
of cases.
With the beginnings of modern thought, the
region of the " unreal," the source of opinion and
error, was located exclusively in the individual.
The object was all real and all satisfactory, but
the " subject " could approach the object only
through his own subjective states, his " sensa
tions " and " ideas." The Greek conception of
two orders of existence was retained, but instead
of the two orders characterizing the " universe "
itself, one was the universe, the other was the
individual mind trying to know that universe.
This scheme would obviously easily account for
error and hallucination ; but how could knowledge,
truth, ever come about such a basis? The Greek
problem of the possibility of error became
the modern problem of the possibility of knowl
edge.
Putting the matter in terms that are inde
pendent of history, experiences of failure, disap
pointment, non-fulfilment of the function of mean
ing and contention may lead the individual to the
path of science to more careful and extensive
investigation of the things themselves, with a view
to detecting specific sources of error, and guard-
102 THE EXPERIMENTAL THEORY
ing against them, and regulating, so far as
possible, the conditions under which objects are
bearers of meanings beyond themselves. But im
patient of such slow and tentative methods (which
insure not infallibility but increased probability of
valid conclusions), by reason of disappointment
a person may turn epistemologist. He may then
take the discrepancy, the failure of the smell to
execute its own intended meaning, as a wholesale,
rather than as a specific fact: as evidence of a
contrast in general between things meaning and
things meant, instead of as evidence of the need
of a more cautious and thorough inspection of
odors and execution of operations indicated by
them. One may then say: Woe is me; smells are
only my smells, subjective states existing in an
order of being made out of consciousness, while
roses exist in another order made out of a radically
different sort of stuff; or, odors are made out of
" finite " consciousness as their stuff, while the real
things, the objects which fulfil them, are made out
of an " infinite " consciousness as their material.
Hence some purely metaphysical tie has to be called
in to bring them into connection with each other.
And yet this tie does not concern knowledge; it
does not make the meaning of one odor any more
correct than that of another, nor enable us to
discriminate relative degrees of correctness. As
a principle of control, this transcendental connec-
THE EXPERIMENTAL THEORY 103
tion is related to all alike, and hence condemns and
justifies all alike. 1
It is interesting to note that the transcenden-
talist almost invariably first falls into the psycho
logical fallacy ; and then having himself taken the
psychologist s attitude (the attitude which is in
terested in meanings as themselves self-inclosed
" ideas ") accuses the empiricist whom he criticises
of having confused mere psychological existence
with logical validity. That is, he begins by sup
posing that the smell of our illustration (and all
the cognitional objects for which this is used as a
1 The belief in the metaphysical transcendence of the ob
ject of knowledge seems to have its real origin in an
empirical transcendence of a very specific and describable
sort. The thing meaning is one thing; the thing meant is
- another thing, and is (as already pointed out) a thing pre
sented as not given in the same way as is the thing which
means. It is something to be so given. No amount of care
ful and thorough inspection of the indicating and signifying
things can remove or annihilate this gap. The probability
t of correct meaning may be increased in varying degrees
and this is what we mean by control. But final certi
tude can never be reached except experimentally except by
performing the operations indicated and discovering whether
or no the intended meaning is fulfilled in propria persona.
In this experimental sense, truth or the object of any given
meaning is always beyond or outside of the cognitional thing
that means it. Error as well as truth is a necessary
function of knowing. But the non-empirical account of
this transcendent (or beyond) relationship puts all the
error in one place (our knowledge), and all the truth in
another (absolute consciousness or else a thing-in-itself).
104 THE EXPERIMENTAL THEORY
symbol) is a purely mental or psychical state,
so that the question of logical reference or inten
tion is the problem of how the merely mental can
" know " the extra-mental. But from a strictly
empirical point of view, the smell which knows is
no more merely mental than is the rose known.
We may, if we please, say that the smell when
involving conscious meaning or intention is " men
tal," but this term " mental " does not denote some
separate type of existence existence as a state of
consciousness. It denotes only the fact that the
smell, a real and non-psychical object, now exer
cises an intellectual function. This new property
involves, as James has pointed out, an additive
relation a new property possessed by a non-
mental object, when that object, occurring in
a new context, assumes a further office and
use. 1 To be " in the mind " means to be in a
situation in which the function of intending is
directly concerned. 2 Will not some one who be
lieves that the knowing experience is ab origine a
strictly " mental " thing, explain how, as matter
of fact, it does get a specific, extra-mental refer
ence, capable of being tested, confirmed, or re-
1 Compare his essay, " Does Consciousness Exist ? " in
the Journal of Philosophy, Psychology, and Scientific
Methods, Vol. I., p. 480.
2 Compare the essay on the "Problem of Consciousness,"
by Professor Woodbridge, in the Garman Memorial Volume,
entitled " Studies in Philosophy and Psychology."
THE EXPERIMENTAL THEORY 105
futed? Or, if he believes that viewing it as
merely mental expresses only the form it takes
for psychological analysis, will he not explain
why he so persistently attributes the inherently
" mental " characterization of it to the empiricist
whom he criticises? An object becomes meaning
when used empirically in a certain way ; and, under
certain circumstances, the exact character and
worth of this meaning becomes an object of solici
tude. But the transcendental epistemologist with
his purely psychical " meanings " and his purely
extra-empirical " truths " assumes a Deus ex Ma-
china whose mechanism is preserved a secret. And
as if to add to the arbitrary character of his as
sumption, he has to admit that the transcendental
a priori faculty by which mental states get ob
jective reference does not in the least help us to
discriminate, in the concrete, between an objective
reference that is false and one that is valid.
(2) The counterpart assumption to that of pure
aboriginal " mental states " is, of course, that of
an Absolute Reality, fixed and complete in itself,
of which our " mental states " are bare transitory
hints, their true meaning and their transcendent
goal being the Truth in rerum natura. If the
organ and medium of knowing is a self-inclosed
order of existence different in kind from the Object
to be known, then that Object must stand out there
in complete aloofness from the concrete purpose
106 THE EXPERIMENTAL THEORY
and procedure of knowing it. But if we go back to
the knowing as a natural occurrence, capable of
description, we find that just as a smell does not
mean Rose in general (or anything else at large),
, but means a specific group of qualities whose ex-
k perience is intended and anticipated, so the func
tion of knowing is always expressed in connections
between a given experience and a specific possible
wanted experience. The " rose " that is meant in a
particular situation is the rose of that situation.
When this experience is consummated, it is achieved
as the fulfilment of the conditions in which just
that intention was entertained not as the fulfil
ment of a faculty of knowledge or a meaning in
general. Subsequent meanings and subsequent ful
filments may increase, may enrich the consummat
ing experience; the object or content of the rose
as known may be other and fuller next time and
so on. But we have no right to set up " a rose "
at large or in general as the object of the knowing
odor; the object of a knowledge is always strictly
correlative to that particular thing which means it.
It is not something which can be put in a wholesale
way over against that which cognitively refers to
it, as when the epistemologist puts the " real " rose
(object) over against a merely phenomenal or em
pirical rose which this smell happens to mean. As
the meaning gets more complex, fuller, more finely
discriminated, the object which realizes or fulfils
THE EXPERIMENTAL THEORY 107
the meaning grows similarly in quality. But we
cannot set up a rose, an object of fullest, complete,
and exhaustive content as that which is really
meant by any and every odor of a rose, whether
it consciously meant to mean it or not. The test
of the cognitional rectitude of the odor lies in the
specific object which it sets out to secure. This
is the meaning of the statement that the import of
each term is found in its relationship to the other.
It applies to object meant as well as to the mean
ing. Fulfilment, completion are always relative
terms. Hence the criterion of the truth or falsity
of the meaning, of the adequacy, of the cognitional
thing lies within the relationships of the situation
and not without. The thing that means another
by means of an intervening operation either suc
ceeds or fails in accomplishing the operation in
dicated, while this operation either gives or fails
to give the object meant. Hence the truth or
falsity of the original cognitional object.
IV
From this excursion, I return in conclusion to a
brief general characterization of those situations
in which we are aware that things mean other
things and are so critically aware of it that, in
order to increase the probability of fulfilment and
to decrease the chance of frustration, all possible
108 THE EXPERIMENTAL THEORY
pains are taken to regulate the meanings that at
tach to things. These situations define that type
of knowing which we call scientific. There are
things that claim to mean other experiences; in
which the trait of meaning other objects is not dis
covered ab extra, and after the event, but is part of
the thing itself. This trait of the thing is as real
istic, as specific, as any other of its traits. It is,
therefore, as open to inspection and determination
as to its nature, as is any other trait. Moreover,
since it is upon this trait that assurance (as distinct
from accident) of fulfilment depends, an especial
interest, an absorbing interest, attaches to its de
termination. Hence the scientific type of knowl
edge and its growing domination over other sorts.
We employ meanings in all intentional construc
tions of experience in all anticipations, whether
artistic, utilitarian or technological, social or
moral. The success of the anticipation is found
to depend upon the character of the meaning.
Hence the stress upon a right determination of
these meanings. Since they are the instruments
upon which fulfilment depends so far as that is
controlled or other than accidental, they become
themselves objects of surpassing interest. For all
persons at some times, and for one class of persons
(scientists) at almost all times, the determination
of the meanings employed in the control of ful
filments (of acting upon meanings) is central.
THE EXPERIMENTAL THEORY 109
The experimental or pragmatic theory of knowl
edge explains the dominating importance of sci
ence; it does not depreciate it or explain it away.
Possibly pragmatic writers are to blame for the
tendency of their critics to assume that the practice
they have in mind is utilitarian in some narrow
sense, referring to some preconceived and inferior
use though I cannot recall any evidence for this
admission. But what the pragmatic theory has in
mind is precisely the fact that all the affairs of
life which need regulation all values of all types
depend upon utilizations of meanings. Action
is not to be limited to anything less than the carry
ing out of ideas, than the execution, whether stren
uous or easeful, of meanings. Hence the surpass
ing importance which comes to attach to the care
ful, impartial construction of the meanings, and to
their constant survey and resurvey with reference
to their value as evidenced by experiences of ful
filment and deviation.
That truth denotes truths, that is, specific veri
fications, combinations of meanings and outcomes
reflectively viewed, is, one may say, the central
point of the experimental theory. Truth, in gen
eral or in the abstract, is a just name for an ex
perienced relation among the things of experience :
that sort of relation in which intents are retro
spectively viewed from the standpoint of the ful 1
filment which they secure through their own natural
110 THE EXPERIMENTAL THEORY
operation or incitement. Thus the experimental
theory explains directly and simply the absolutistic
tendency to translate concrete true things into the
general relationship, Truth, and then to hyposta-
tize this abstraction into identity with real being,
Truth per se and in se, of which all transitory
things and events that is, all experienced realities
are only shadowy futile approximations. This
type of relationship is central for man s will, for
man s conscious endeavor. To select, to conserve,
to extend, to propagate those meanings which the
course of events has generated, to note their pecu
liarities, to be in advance on the alert for them, to
search for them anxiously, to substitute them for
meanings that eat up our energy in vain, defines
the aim of rational effort and the goal of legitimate
ambition. The absolutistic theory is the transfer
of this moral or voluntary law of selective action
into a quasi-physical (that is, metaphysical) law
of indiscriminate being. Identify metaphysical be
ing with significant excellent being that is, with
those relationships of things which, in our moments
of deepest insight and largest survey, we would
continue and reproduce and the experimentalist,
rather than the absolutist, is he who has a right
to proclaim the supremacy of Truth, and the su
periority of the life devoted to Truth for its own
sake over that of " mere " activity. But to read
back into an order of things which exists without
THE EXPERIMENTAL THEORY 111
the participation of our reflection and aim, the
quality which defines the purpose of our thought
and endeavor is at one and the same stroke to
mythologize reality and to deprive the life of
thoughtful endeavor of its ground for being.
THE INTELLECTUALIST CRITERION
FOR TRUTH *
A MONG the influences that have worked in
**- contemporary philosophy towards disinte
gration of intellectualism of the epistemological
type, and towards the substitution of a philosophy
of experience, the work of Mr. Bradley must be
seriously counted. One has, for example, only to
compare his metaphysics with the two fundamental
contentions of T. H. Green, namely, that reality
is a single, eternal, and all-inclusive system of
relations, and that this system of relations is one
in kind with that process of relating which consti
tutes our thinking, to be instantly aware of a
changed atmosphere. Much of Bradley s writings
is a sustained and deliberate polemic against in
tellectualism of the Neo-Kantian type. When,
however, we find conjoined to this criticism an
1 Reprinted, with many changes, from an article in Mind,
Vol. XVI., N.S., July 1907. Although the changes have
been made to render the article less technical, it still re
mains, I fear, too technical to be intelligible to those not
familiar with recent discussions of logical theory.
113
THE INTELLECTUALIST CRITERION 113
equally sustained contention that the philosophic
conception of reality must be based on an exclu
sively intellectual criterion, a criterion belonging
to and confined to theory, we have a situation that
is thought-provoking. The situation grows in in
terest when it is remembered that there is a general
and growing tendency among those who appeal in
philosophy to a strictly intellectualistic method of
defining " reality," to insist that the reality reached
by this method has a super-intellectual content:
that intellectual, affectional, and volitional fea
tures are all joined and fused in " ultimate " real
ity. The curious character of the situation is that
Reality is an " absolute experience " of which the
intellectual is simply one partial and transmuted
moment. Yet this reality is attained unto, in philo
sophic method, by exclusive emphasis upon the in
tellectual aspect of present experience and by sys
tematic exclusion of exactly the emotional, volitional
features which with respect to content are insisted
upon ! Under such circumstances the cynically-
minded are moved to wonder whether this tremen
dous insistence upon one factor in present ex
perience at the expense of others, is not because
this is the only way to maintain the notion of
" Absolute Experience," and to prevent it from col
lapsing into ordinary every-day experience. This
paradox is not peculiar to Mr. Bradley. Looking
at the Neo-Kantian movement in the broad in its
114 THE INTELLECTUALIST CRITERION
modern form, one might almost say that its prom
inent feature is its insistence upon reaching a
" Reality " that includes extra-intellectual fac
tors and phases, traits that are ideal in a moral
and emotional sense, by an exclusive recognition of
the function of knowledge in its isolation.
Such being the case, an examination of Mr.
Bradley s method and criterion may have far-
reaching implications. First, let us set before
ourselves the general points of Mr. Bradley s in
dictment of intellectualism. 1 Knowledge or judg
ment works by means of thought ; it is predication
of idea (meaning) of existence as its subject. Its
final aim is to effect a complete union or harmony
of existence and meaning. But it is fore-doomed
to failure, for in realizing its end it must employ
means which contradict its own purpose. This
inherent incapacity lurks in judgment with respect
to subject, predicate, and copula. The predicate
or meaning necessary to complete the reality pre
sented in the subject can be referred to the latter
and united with it only by being itself alienated
from existence. It heals the wounds or deficiencies
of its own subject (and in the end all deficiencies
are to the modern idealist discrepancies) only on
condition of inflicting another wound, only by
sundering meaning from a prior union with exist-
*I follow chiefly Chapter XV. of "Appearance and
Reality "the chapter on " Thought and Reality."
THE INTELLECTUALIST CRITERION 115
ence in some other phase. This latter existence,
therefore, is always left out in the cold. It is as
if we wanted to get all the cloth in the world into
one garment and our only way of accomplishing
this were to tear off a portion from one piece of
goods in order to patch it on to another.
The subject of the judgment, moreover, as well
as the predicate, stands in the way of judgment
fulfilling its own task. It has " sensuous infini
tude " and it has " immediacy," but these two
traits contradict each other. The details of the
subject always go beyond itself, being indefinitely
related to something beyond. " In its given con-
, tent it has relations which do not terminate within
that content" (ibid., p. 176), while in its imme
diacy it presents an undivided union of existence
and meaning. No subject can be mere existence
any more than it can be mere meaning. It is al
ways existent or embodied meaning. As such it
claims individuality or the character of a single
subsistent whole. But this indispensable claim is
inconsistent with its ragged-edged character, its
indefinite external reference, which is indispensable
to it as subject that it may require and receive
further meaning from predication.
With respect to the copula the following quo
tation from the " Principles " of Logic (p. 10)
may serve : " Judgment proper is the act which
refers the ideal content (recognized as such) to the
116 THE INTELLECTUALIST CRITERION
reality beyond the act." In other words, judg
ment as act (and it is the act which is expressed
in the copula) must always fall outside of
the content of knowledge as such; yet since this
act certainly falls within reality, it would have to
be recognized and stated by any knowledge pre
tending to competency with respect to reality as a
whole. These considerations, stated in this way,
are highly technical and presuppose a knowledge
not merely of Mr. Bradley s own logic, but also of
the logical analysis of knowledge initiated by Kant
and carried on by Herbart, Lotze, and others.
Their main import may, however, be stated in
comparatively non-technical form. Human ex
perience is full of discrepancies. Were experience
purely a matter of brute existence (such as we some
times imagine the animals experience to be) it
would be totally lacking in meaning and there
would be no problems, no thinking, no occasion for
thinking, and hence no philosophy. On the other
hand, if experience were a complete, tight- j ointed
union of existence and meaning, there would be
no dissatisfaction, no problems, no cause for efforts
to patch up defects and contradictions. Existences,
things, would embody all the meanings that they
suggest; while abstract meanings, values that are
merely ideal, that are projected or thought of
but not fulfilled, would be totally unheard of. But
our experience stands in marked contrast to both
THE INTELLECTUALIST CRITERION 117
these types of experience. It is neither an affair
of meaningless existence nor of existence self-lumi
nous with fulfilled meaning. All things that we
experience have some meaning, but that meaning
is always so partially embodied in things that we
cannot rest in them. They point beyond them
selves; they indicate meanings which they do not
fulfil; they suggest values which they fail to em
body, and when we go to other things for the
fruition of what is denied, we either find the same
situation of division over again, or we find even
more positive disappointment and frustration we
find contrary meanings set up. Now all thinking
grows out of this discrepancy between existence
and the meaning which it partially embodies and
partially refuses, which it suggests but declines to
express. Yet thinking, the mode of bringing ex
istence and meaning into harmony with each other,
always works by selection, by abstraction; it sets
up and projects meanings which are ideal only,
footless, in the air, matters of thought only, not of
sentiency or immediate existence. It emphasizes
the ideal of a completed union of existence and
meaning, but is helpless to effect it. And this
helplessness (according to Mr. Bradley) is not due
to external pressure but to the very structure of
thought itself.
From every point of view knowledge operates
under conditions, (and these not externally imposed
118 THE INTELLECTUALIST CRITERION
but inherent in its own nature as judgment,) that
render it incapable of realizing its aim of complete
union of existence and meaning. Granted the
argument, and it is difficult to imagine a more
serious indictment against the pretensions of phi
losophy to reach " Reality " via the exclusive path
of knowledge.
The presence of contradiction is Mr. Bradley s
criterion for " appearance," just as its absence
is his criterion for " reality." It thus goes with
out saying that knowledge and truth which we can
attain are matters of appearance. Contradiction
between existence and meaning is its last word.
This is not merely a logical deduction from Mr.
Bradley s position, but is expressly stated by him.
" Thus the truth belongs to existence, but it does
not as such exist. . . . Truth shows a dis
section but never an actual life " (" Appearance
and Reality," p. 167). Again, " every truth is
appearance since in it we have divorce of quality
from being" (ibid., p. 187). "Even absolute
truth seems in the end to turn out erroneous.
. . . Internal discrepancy belongs irremovably
to truth s proper character. . . . Truth is
one aspect of experience and is therefore made im
perfect and limited by what it fails to include "
{ibid. 9 pp. 544-545). Nothing could be more
explicit as to the inherently contradictory char
acter of truth, both as an ideal and as an accom-
THE INTELLECTUALIST CRITERION 119
plished fact; nothing more positive as to the un
reality or appearance-character of truth. We
cannot, on Mr. Bradley s method, stop here. Not
only is knowledge working as it does through
thought which is always partial, selective, abstrac
tive doomed to failure in accomplishing its task,
but the existence of the contradiction between the
suggestion of meanings by existence and this reali
zation in existence is itself due to thought.
Speaking of thought he says : " The relational
form is a compromise on which thought stands and
which it develops." And all the particular anti
nomies which he discusses are interpreted as having
their basis in the category of relation (ibid.,
p. 180). In his section on Appearance he goes
through various aspects and distinctions of the
world, such as primary and secondary qualities,
substance and its properties, relation and qualita
tive elements, space and time, motion and change,
causation, etc., pointing out irreconcilable discrep
ancies in them. He does not, in a generalized way,
expressly refer them to any common source or root.
But it seems a fair inference that the relational
character of thought is at the bottom of the whole
trouble: so that we have in the cases mentioned
precisely the same situation in concrete which
is set forth in abstracto in the discussion of
thought. The contradictions brought up are in
every case resolved into the fundamental discrep-
120 THE INTELLECTUALIST CRITERION
ancy supposed to exist between relations and ele
ments related. In each case there is the ideal of
a final unity in which relations and elements as
such disappear, while in every case the nature of
relation is such as to prevent the desired con
summation. In at least one place, it is expressly
declared that it is the knowledge function which is
responsible for the degradation of reality to ap
pearance. " We do not suggest that the thing
always itself is an appearance. We mean its
character is such that it becomes one as soon as
we judge it. And this character we have seen
throughout our work, is ideality. Appearance
consists in the looseness of content from existence.
. . . And we have found that everywhere
throughout the world such ideality prevails "
(ibid., p. 486, italics not in the original). It
is not then strictly true that the divorce of mean
ing and existence instigates thought; rather
thought is the unruly member that creates the
divorce and then engages in the task (in which it
is self-condemned to failure) of trying to establish
the unity which it has gratuitously destroyed.
Thinking, self-consciousness, is disease of the nai ve
unity of thoughtless experience.
On the one hand there is a systematic discredit
ing of the ultimate claims of the knowledge func
tion, and this not from external physiological or
psychological reasons such as are sometimes alleged
THE INTELLECTUALIST CRITERION 121
against its capacity, but on the basis of its own
interior logic. But on the other hand, a strictly
logical criterion is deliberately adopted and em
ployed as the fundamental and final criterion for
the philosophic conception of reality. Long fa
miliarity has not dulled my astonishment at finding
exactly the same set of considerations which in
the earlier"portion of the book are employed to
condemn things as experienced by us to the region
of Appearance, employed in the latter portion of
the book to afford a triumphant demonstration of
the existence and character of Absolute Reality.
The argument I take up first on its formal side,
and then with reference to material considerations. 1
The positive conception of Reality is reached
by the conception that " ultimate reality must be ,
such that it does not contradict itself; here is an
absolute criterion. And it is proved absolute by
the fact that either in endeavoring to deny it or
even in attempting to doubt it, we tacitly assume
its validity" (ibid., pp. 136-137). That is to
say, when one sets out to think one must avoid self-
contradiction ; this avoidance, or, put positively,
the attainment of consistency, harmony, is the basic
law of all thinking. Since in thinking we set out
to attain reality, it follows that reality itself
must be self-consistent, and that its self-consistency
1 The crux of the argument is contained in Chapters XIII.
and XIV., on the " General Nature of Reality."
122 THE INTELLECTUALIST CRITERION
determines the law of thought. Or, as Mr. Brad
ley again puts the matter, " In order to think at
all you must subject yourself to the standard, a
standard which implies an absolute knowledge of
reality ; and while you doubt this, you accept it,
and obey, while you rebel" (ibid., p. 153).
The absolute knowledge referred to is, of course,
the knowledge of the thoroughly self-consistent,
non-contradictory character of reality. Every
reader of Mr. Bradley s book knows how he goes
on from this point to supply positive content to
reality ; to give an outline sketch of the characters
it must possess and the way in which it must possess
them in order to maintain its thoroughly self-
consistent character. It is, however, only the
strictly formal aspect of the matter that I am
here concerned with.
On this side we reach, I think, the heart of the
matter by asking, in reference to the first quota
tion : Absolute for what? Surely absolute for the
process under consideration, that is absolute for
thought. But the significance of this absolute for
thought is, one may say, " absolutely " (since we
are here confessedly in the realm just of thought)
determined by the nature of thought itself. Now
this nature has been already referred by considera
tions " belonging irremovably to truth s proper
character," to the world of appearance and of in
ternal discrepancy. Yes, one may say (speaking
THE INTELLECTUAL1ST CRITERION 123
formally), the criterion of thought is absolute
that is to say absolute or final for thought; but
how can one imagine that this in any way alters
the essential nature and value of thought? If
knowledge works by thought, and thought institutes
appearance over against reality, any further fact
about thought such as a statement of its criterion
falls wholly within the limits of this situation.
It is comical to suppose that a special trait of
thought can be employed to alter the fundamental
and essential nature of thought. The criterion of
thought must be infected by the nature of thought,
instead of being a redeeming angel which at a
critical juncture transforms the fragile creature,
thought, into an ambassador with power plenipo
tentiary to the court of the Absolute.
There really seems to be ground for supposing
that the whole argument turns on an ambiguity
in the use of the word " absolute." Keeping
strictly within the limits of the argument, it means
nothing more than that thinking has a certain
principle, a law of its own ; that it has an appro
priate mode of procedure which must not be vio
lated. It means, in short, whatever is finally con
trolling for the thought-function. But Mr. Brad
ley immediately takes the word to mean absolute
in the sense of describing a reality which by its very
nature is totally contradistinguished from appear
ance that is to say, from the realm of thought.
124 THE INTELLECTUALIST CRITERION
Upon the ambiguity of a word, the systematic in
dictment of intellectualism becomes the corner
stone of a systematically intellectualistic method of
conceiving reality!
Mr. Bradley has himself recognized the seeming
contradiction between his indictment of thought
and his use of the criterion of thought as the ex
clusive path to a philosophic notion of the real.
In dealing with it, he (to my mind) comes within
an ace of stating a truer doctrine, and also ex
hibits even more clearly the weakness of his own
position. He goes so far as to put the follow
ing words into the mouth of an objector, and to
accept their general import : " All axioms, as a
matter of fact, are practical . . . for none of
them in the end can amount to more than the im
pulse to behave in a certain way. And they can
not express more than this impulse, together with
the impossibility of satisfaction unless it is com
plied with" (p. 151). After accepting this (p.
152) he goes on to say: "Take for example the
law of avoiding contradiction. When two elements
will not remain quietly together, but collide and
struggle, we cannot rest satisfied with that state.
Our impulse is to alter it and, on the theoretical
side, to bring the content to such shape that the
variety remains peaceably in one. And this in
ability to rest otherwise and this tendency to alter
in a certain way and direction is, when reflected
THE INTELLECTUALIST CRITERION 125
upon and made explicit, our axiom and our in
tellectual standard " (p. 152 ; italics mine).
The retort is obvious: if the intellectual cri
terion, the principle of non-contradiction on which
his whole Absolute Reality rests, is itself a prac
tical principle, then surely the ultimate criterion
for regulating intellectual undertakings is prac
tical. To this obvious answer Mr. Bradley makes
reply as follows : " You may call the intellect, if
you like, a mere tendency to a movement, but you
must remember that it is a movement of a very
special kind. . . . Thinking is the attempt
to satisfy a special impulse, and the attempt im
plies an assumption about reality. . . . But
why, it may be objected, is this assumption better
than what holds for practice? Why is the theo
retical to be superior to the practical end ? I have
never said that this is so, only here, that is, in meta
physics, I must be allowed to reply, we are acting
theoretically. . . . The theoretical standard
within theory must surely be absolute " (p. 153.
The italics again are mine; compare with the quo
tation this, from p. 485 : " Our attitude, however,
in metaphysics must be theoretical." So, also, p.
154, " Since metaphysics is mere theory and since
theory from its nature must be made by the intel
lect, it is here the intellect alone which is to be
satisfied ").
Grant that intellect is a special movement or
126 THE INTELLECTUALIST CRITERION
mode of practice; grant that we are not merely
acting (are we ever merely acting?) but are " spe
cially occupied and therefore subject to special con
ditions," and the problem remains what special kind
of activity is thinking? what is its experienced
differentia from other kinds ? what is its commerce
with them? When the problem is what special kind
of an activity is thinking and of what nature is the
consistency which is its criterion, somehow we do
not get forward by being told that thinking is a
special mode of practice and that its criterion is
consistency. The unquestioned presupposition of
Mr. Bradley is that thinking is such a wholly sep
arate activity (the " intellect alone " which has to
be satisfied), that to give it autonomy is to say
that it, and its criterion, have nothing to do with
other activities ; that it is " independent " as to
criterion, in a way which excludes interdependence
in function and outcome. Unless the term " spe
cial " be interpreted to mean isolated, to say that
thinking is a special mode of activity no more nulli
fies the proposition that it arises in a practical con
test and operates for practical ends, than to say
that blacksmithing is a special activity, negates its
being one connected mode of industrial activity.
His underlying presupposition of the separate
character of thought comes out in the passage last
quoted. " Our impulse," he says, " is to alter the
conflicting situation and, on the theoretical side,
THE INTELLECTUALIST CRITERION 127
to bring its contents into peaceable unity." If
one substitutes for the word " on " the word
" through," one gets a conception of theory and
of tnTriking that does justice to the autonomy
of the operation and yet so connects it with other
activities as to give it a serious business, real pur
pose, and concrete responsibility and hence testi-
bility. From this point of view the theoretical
activity is simply the form that certain practical
activities take after colliding, as the most effective
and fruitful way of securing their own harmoniza
tion. The collision is not theoretical ; the issue in
" peaceable unity " is not theoretical. But theory
names the type of activity by which the trans
formation from war to peace is most amply and
securely effected. 1
Admit, however, the force of Mr. Bradley s
contention on its own terms and see how futile is
*The same point comes out in Mr. Bradley s treatment
of the way in which the practical demand for the good or
satisfaction is to be taken account of in a philosophical con
ception of the nature of reality. He admits that it conies
in; but holds that it enters not directly, but because if left
outside it indirectly introduces a feature of "discontent"
on the intellectual side (see p. 155). This, as an argument
for the supremacy of the isolated theoretical standard, loses
all its force if we cease to conceive of intellect as from
the start an independent function, and realize that intel
lectual discontent is the practical conflict becoming deliber
ately aware of itself as the most effective means of its own
rectification.
128 THE INTELLECTUALIST CRITERION
the result. It is quite true, as Mr. Bradley says
(p. 153), that if a man sits down to play the meta
physical game, he must abide by the rules of think
ing; but if thinking be already, with respect to
reality, an idle and futile game, simply abiding
by the rules does not give additional value to its
stakes. Grant the premises as to the character
of thought, and the assertion of the final character
of the theoretical standard within metaphysics
since metaphysics is a form of theory is a warn
ing against metaphysics. If the intellect involves
self-contradiction, it is either impossible that it
should be satisfied, or else self-contradiction is its
satisfaction.
ck./r 4* via^ f ^f-r
u
Let us, however, turn from Mr. Bradley s formal
proof that the criterion of philosophic truth must
be exclusively a canon of formal thought. Let
us ignore the contradiction involved in first making
the work of thought to be the producing of
appearance and then making the law of this
thought the law of an Absolute Reality. What
about the intellectualist criterion ? The intellectu-
alism of Mr. Bradley s philosophy is represented
in the statement that it is " the theoretical stand
ard which guarantees that reality is a self-consist
ent system " (p. 148). But how can the fact that
THE INTELLECTUALIST CRITERION 129
the criterion of thinking is consistency be employed
to determine the nature of the consistency of its
object? Consistency in one sense, consistency of
reasoning with itself, we know; but what is the
nature of the consistency of reality which this con
sistency necessitates? Thinking without doubt
must be logical; but does it follow from this that
the reality about which one thinks, and about which
one must think consistently if one is to think to any
purpose, must itself be already logical? The pivot
of the argument is, of course, the old ontological
argument, stripped of all theological irrelevancies
and reduced to its fighting weight as a metaphys
ical proposition. Those who question this basic
principle of intellectualism will, of course, question
it here. They will urge that, instead of the con
sistency of " reality " resting on the basis of
consistency in the reasoning process the latter de
rives its meaning from the material consistency at
which it aims. They will say that the definition
of the nature of the consistency which is the end
of thinking and which prescribes its technique is
to be reached from inquiry into such questions as
these: What sort of an activity in the concrete is
thinking? what are the specific conditions which it
has to fulfil? what is its use; its relevancy; its
purport in present concrete experiences? The
more it is insisted that the theoretical standard
consistency is final within theory, the more ger-
130 THE INTELLECTUALIST CRITERION
mane and the more urgent is the question: What
then in the concrete is theory? and of what nature
iff. the material consistency which is the test of its
formal consistency? *
Take the instance of a man who wishes to deny
the criterion of self-consistency in thinking. Is
he refuted by pointing to the " fact " that eternal
reality is eternally self-consistent? Would not his
obvious answer to such a mode of refutation be:
"What of it? What is the relevancy of that
proposition to my procedure in thinking here and
now? Doubtless absolute reality may be a great
number of things, possibly very sublime and pre
cious things ; but what I am concerned with is a
particular job of thinking, and until you show me
the intermediate terms which link that job to the
asserted self-consistent character of absolute real
ity, I fail to see what difference this doubtless
1 This suggests that many of the stock arguments against
pragmatism fail to take its contention seriously enough.
They proceed from the assumption that it is an account
of truth which leaves untouched current notions of the
nature of intelligence. But the essential point of prag
matism is that it bases its changed account of truth on a
changed conception of the nature of intelligence, both as
to its objective and its method. Now this different account
of intelligence may be wrong, but controversy which leaves
standing the conventionally current theories about thought
and merely discusses " truth " will not go far. Since truth
is the adequate fulfilment of the function of intelligence, the
question turns on the nature of the latter.
THE INTELLECTUALIST CRITERION 131
wholly amiable trait of reality has to make in what
I am here and now concerned with. You might as
well quote any other irrelevant fact, such as the
height of the Empress of China." We take an
other tack in dealing with the man in question.
We call his attention to his specific aim in the situ
ation with reference to which he is thinking, and
point out the conditions that have to be observed
if that aim is to fulfil itself. We show that if he
does not observe the conditions imposed by his aim
his thinking will go on so wildly as to defeat it
self. It is to consistency of means with the end
of the concrete activity that we appeal. " Try
thinking," we tell such a man, " experiment with
it, taking pains sometimes to have your reasonings
consistent with one another, and at other times
deliberately introducing inconsistencies ; then see
what you get in the two cases and how the result
reached is related to your purpose in thinking."
We point out that since that purpose is to reach a
settled conclusion, that purpose will be defeated un
less the steps of reasoning are kept consistent with
one another. We do not appeal from the mere con
sistency of the reasoning process the intellectual
aspect of the matter to an absolute self-con
sistent reality; but we appeal from the material
character of the end to be reached to the type of
the formal procedure necessary to accomplish it.
With all our heart, then, the standard of think-
132 THE INTELLECTUALIST CRITERION
ing is absolute (that is final) within thinking.
But what is thinking? The standard of black-
smithing must be absolute within blacksmithing,
but what is blacksmithing? No prejudice pre
vents acknowledging that blacksmithing is one
practical activity existing as a distinct and rele
vant member of a like system of activities : that it
is because men use horses to transport persons and
goods that horses need to be shod. The ultimate
criterion of blacksmithing is producing a good
shoe, but the nature of a good shoe is fixed,
not by blacksmithing, but by the activities in
which horses are used. The end is ultimate (abso
lute) for the operation, but this very finality is
evidence that the operation is not absolute and
self-inclosed, but is related and responsible. Why
must the fact that the end of thinking is ultimate
for thought stand on any different footing?
Let us then, by way of experiment, follow this
suggestion. Let us assume that among real objects
in their values and significances, real oppositions
and incompatibilities exist; that these conflicts are
both troublesome in themselves, and the source of
all manner of further difficulties so much so that
they may be suspected of being the source of all
man s woe, of all encroachment upon and destruc
tion of value, of good. Suppose that thinking
is, not accidentally but essentially, a way, and the
only way that proves adequate, of dealing with
THE 1NTELLECTUALIST CRITERION 133
these predicaments that being " in a hole," in
difficulty, is the fundamental " predicament " of in
telligence. Suppose when effort is made in a brute
way to remove these oppositions and to secure an
arrangement of things which means satisfaction,
fulfilment, happiness, that the method of brute at
tack, of trying directly to force warrings into
peace fails; suppose then an effort to effect the
transformation by an indirect method by inquiry
into the disordered state of affairs and by framing
views, conceptions, of what the situation would be
like were it reduced to harmonious order. Finally,
suppose that upon this basis a plan of action
is worked out, and that this plan, when carried into
overt effect, succeeds infinitely better than the
brute method of attack in bringing about the de
sired consummation. Suppose again this indirec
tion of activity is precisely what we mean by think
ing. Would it not hold that harmony is the end
and the test of thinking? that observations are per
tinent and ideas correct just in so far as, overtly
acted upon, they succeed in removing the unde
sirable, the inconsistent.
But, it is said, the very process of thinking makes
a certain assumption regarding the nature of real
ity, viz., that reality is self-consistent. This state
ment puts the end for the beginning. The assump
tion is not that " reality " is self-consistent, but
that by thinking it may, for some special purpose,
134 THE INTELLECTUALIST CRITERION
or as respects some concrete problem, attain
greater consistency. Why should the assump
tion regarding " reality " be other than that
specific realities with which thought is concerned
are capable of receiving harmonization? To say
that thought must assume, in order to go on, that
reality already possesses harmony is to say that
thought must begin by contradicting its own direct
data, and by assuming that its concrete aim is vain
and illusory. Why put upon thought the onus of
introducing discrepancies into reality in order just
to give itself exercise in the gymnastic of removing
them? The assumption that concrete thinking
makes about " reality " is that things just as they
exist may acquire through activity, guided by
thinking, a certain character which it is excellent
for them to possess ; and may acquire it more lib
erally and effectively than by other methods.
One might as well say that the blacksmith could
not think to any effect concerning iron, without a
Platonic archetypal horseshoe, laid up in the
heavens. His thinking also makes an assumption
about present, given reality, viz., that this piece
of iron, through the exercise of intelligently di
rected activity, may be shaped into a satisfactory
horseshoe. The assumption is practical: the as
sumption that a specific thing may take on in a
specific way a specific needed value. The test,
moreover, of this assumption is practical; it con-
THE INTELLECTUALIST CRITERION 135
sists in acting upon it to see if it will do what
it pretends it can do, namely, guide activities to
the required result. The assumption about reality
is not something in addition to the idea, which an
idea already in existence makes ; some assumption
about the possibility of a change in the state of
things as experienced is the idea and its test or
criterion is whether this possible change can be
effected when the idea is acted upon in good
faith.
In any case, how much simpler the case becomes
when we stick by the empirical facts. According
to them there is no wholesale discrepancy of ex
istence and meaning ; there is simply a " loosen
ing " of the two when objects do not fulfil our
plans and meet our desires; or when we project
inventions and cannot find immediately the means
for their realization. The " collisions " are neither
physical, metaphysical, nor logical ; they are moral
and practical. They exist between an aim and
the means of its execution. Consequently the
object of thinking is not to effect some wholesale
and " Absolute " reconciliation of meaning and
existence, but to make a specific adjustment of
things to our purposes and of our purposes to
things at just the crucial point of the crisis. Mak
ing the utmost concessions to Mr. Bradley s ac
count of the discrepancy of meaning and existence
in our experience, to his statement of the relation
136 THE INTELLECTUALIST CRITERION
of this to the function of judgment (as involving
namely an explicit statement at once of the actual
sundering and the ideal union) and to his account
of consistency as the goal and standard, there is
still not a detail of the account that is not met
amply and with infinitely more empirical warrant
by the conception that the " collision " in which
thinking starts and the " consistency " in which it
terminates are practical and human.
This brings us explicitly to the question of
truth, " truth " being confessedly the end and
standard of thinking. I confess to being much
at a loss to realize just what the intellectualists
conceive to be the relation of truth to ideas on one
side and to " reality " on the other. My difficulty
occurs, I think, because they describe so little in
analytical detail; in writing of truth they seem
rather to be under a strong emotional influence
as if they were victims of an uncritical pragma
tism which leaves much of their thought to be
guessed at. The implication of their discussions
assigns three distinct values to the term " truth."
On the one hand, truth is something which char
acterizes ideas, theories, hypotheses, beliefs, judg
ments, propositions, assertions, etc., anything
whatsoever involving intellectual statement. From
THE INTELLECTUALIST CRITERION 137
this standpoint a criterion of truth means the test
of the worth of the intellectual intent, import, or
claim of any intellectual statement as intellectual.
This is an intelligible sense of the term truth. In
the second place, it seems to be assumed that a
certain kind of reality is already, apart from ideas
or meanings, Truth, and that this Truth is the
criterion of that lower and more unworthy kind
of truth that may be possessed or aimed at by
ideas. But we do not stop here. The conception
^that all truth must have a criterion haunts the
intellectualist, so that the reality, which, as con
trasted with ideas, is taken to be The Truth (and
the criterion of their truth) is treated as if it itself
had to have support and warrant from some other
Reality, lying back of it, which is its criterion.
This, then, gives the third type of truth, The
Absolute Truth. (Just why this process should
not go on indefinitely is not clear, but the neces
sity of infinite regress may be emotionally pre
vented by always referring to this last type of
truth as Absolute). Now this scheme may be
" true," but it is not self-explanatory or even
easily apprehensible. In just what sense, truth is
( 1 ) that to which ideas as ideas lay claim and yet
is (2) Reality which as reality is the criterion of
truth of ideas, and yet again is (3) a Reality
which completely annuls and transcends all refer
ence to ideas, is not in the least clear to me: nor,
158 THE INTELLECTUALIST CRITERION
till better informed, shall I believe it to be clear
to any one.
In his more strictly logical discussions, Mr.
Bradley sets out from the notion that truth refers
to intellectual statements and positions as such.
But the Truth soon becomes a sort of transcen
dent essence on its own account. The identifica
tion of reality and truth on page 146 may be a
mere casual phrase, but the distinction drawn be
tween validity and absolute truth (p. 362), and the
discussion of Degrees of Truth and Reality, in
volve assumptions of an identity of truth and
reality. Truth in this sense turns out to be the
criterion for the truth, the truth, that is, of ideas.
But, again (p. 545), a distinction is made between
" Finite Truth," that is, a view of reality which
would completely satisfy intelligence as such, and
" Absolute Truth," which is obtained only by
passing beyond intelligence only when intelligence
as such is absorbed in some Absolute in which it
loses its distinctive character.
It would advance the state of discussion, I am
sure, if there were more explicit statements regard
ing the relations of " true idea," " truth," " the
criterion of truth " and " reality," to one an
other. A more explicit exposition also of the view
that is held concerning the relation of verification
and truth could hardly fail to be of value. .Not
infrequently the intellectualist admits that the
THE INTELLECTUALIST CRITERION 139
process of verification is experimental, consisting
in setting on foot various activities that express
the intent of the idea and confirm or refute it ac
cording to the changes effected. This seems to
mean that truth is simply the tested or verified
belief as such. But then a curious reservation is
introduced; the experimental process finds, it is
said, that an idea is true, while the error of the
pragmatist is to take the process by which truth
is found as one by which it is made. The claim
of " making truth " is treated as blasphemy
against the very notion of truth : such are the con
sequences of venturing to translate the Latin
" verification " into the English " making true."
If we face the bogie thus called up, it will be
found that the horror is largely sentimental. Sup
pose we stick to the notion that truth is a char
acter which belongs to a meaning so far as tested
through action that carries it to successful comple
tion. In this case, to make an idea true is to
modify and transform it until it reaches this suc
cessful outcome : until it initiates a mode of response
which in its issue realizes its claim to be the method
of harmonizing the discrepancies of a given situa
tion. The meaning is remade by constantly acting
upon it, and by introducing into its content such
characters as are indicated by any resulting fail
ures to secure harmony. From this point of view,
verification and truth are two names for the same
140 THE INTELLECTUALIST CRITERION
thing. We call it " verification " when we regard
it as process ; when the development of the idea is
strung out and exposed to view in all that makes
it true. We call it " truth " when we take it as
product, as process telescoped and condensed.
Suppose the idea to be an invention, say of the
telephone. In this case, is not the verification of
the idea and the construction of the device which
carries out its intent one and the same? In this
case, does the truth of the idea mean anything
else than that the issue proves the idea can be
carried into effect? There are certain intellectu-
alists who are not of the absolutist type; who do
not believe that all of men s aims, designs, projects,
that have to do with action, whether industrial,
social, or moral in scope, have been from all
eternity registered as already accomplished in real
ity. How do such persons dispose of this prob
lem of the truth of practical ideas?
Is not the truth of such ideas an affair of mak
ing them true by constructing, through appropri
ate behavior, a condition that satisfies the re
quirements of the case? If, in this case, truth
means the effective capacity of the idea " to make
good," what is there in the logic of the case to
forbid the application of analogous considerations
to any idea?
I hear a noise in the street. It suggests as its
meaning a street-car. To test this idea I go to
THE INTELLECTUALIST CRITERION 141
the window and through listening and looking in
tently the listening and the looking being modes
of behavior organize into a single situation ele
ments of existence and meaning which were previ
ously disconnected. In this way an idea is made
true; that which was a proposal or hypothesis is
no longer merely a propounding or a guess. If I
had not reacted in a way appropriate to the idea
it would have remained a mere idea; at most a
candidate for truth that, unless acted upon upon
the spot, would always have remained a theory.
Now in such a case where the end to be accom
plished is the discovery of a certain order of facts
would the intellectualist claim that apart from
the forming and entertaining of some interpreta
tion, the category of truth has either existence or
meaning? Will he claim that without an original
practical uneasiness introducing a practical aim of
inquiry there must have been, whether or no, an
idea? Must the world for some purely intellectual
reason be intellectually reduplicated? Could not
that occurrence which I now identify as a noisy
street-car have retained, so far as pure intelligence
is concerned, its unidentified status of being mere
physical alteration in a vast unidentified complex
of matter-in-motion ? Was there any intellectual
necessity that compelled the event to arouse just
this judgment, that it meant a street-car? Was
there any physical or metaphysical necessity?
142 THE INTELLECTUALIST CRITERION
Was there any necessity save a need of characteriz
ing it for some purpose of our own? And why
should we be mealy-mouthed about calling this
need practical? If the necessity which led to the
formation and development of an intellectual judg
ment was purely objective (whether physical or
metaphysical) why should not the thing have also to
be characterized in countless millions of other ways ;
for example, as to its distance from some crater in
the moon, or its effect upon the circulation of my
blood, or upon my irascible neighbor s temper, or
bearing upon the Monroe Doctrine? In short, do
not intellectual positions and statements mean new
and significant events in the treatment of things?
It is perhaps dangerous to attempt to follow
the inner workings of the processes by which truth
is first identified with some superior type of Real
ity, and then this Truth is taken as the criterion
of the truth of ideas ; while all the time it is held
that truth is something already possessed by ideas
as purely intellectual. But there seems to be some
ground for believing that this identification is due
to a twofold confusion, one having to do with ideas,
and the other with things. As to the first point:
After an idea is made true, we naturally say, in
retrospect, " it was true all the time." Now this
truism is quite innocuous as a truism, being just a
restatement of the fact that the idea has, as matter
of fact, worked successfully. But it may be re-
THE INTELLECTUALIST CRITERION U3
garded not as a truism but as furnishing some ad
ditional knowledge ; as if it were, indeed, the dawn
ing of a revelation regarding truth. Then it is
said that the idea worked or was verified because
it was already inherently, just as idea, the truth;
the pragmatist, so it is said, making the error
of supposing that it is true because it works. If
one remembers that what the experimentalist means
is that the effective working of an idea and its
truth are one and the same thing this working
being neither the cause nor the evidence of truth
but its nature it is hard to see the point of this
statement. A man under peculiarly precarious
circumstances has been rescued from drowning. A
by-stander remarks that now he is a saved man.
" Yes," replies some one, " but he was a saved man
all the time, and the process of rescuing, while it
gives evidence of that fact, does not constitute it."
Now even such a statement as pure tautology,
as characterizing the entire process in terms of its
issue, is objectionable only in the fact that, like
all tautology, it seems to say something but does
not. But if it be regarded as revealing the earlier
condition of affairs, apart from the active process
by which it was carried to a happy conclusion, such
a statement would be monstrously false ; and would
declare its falsity in the fact that, if acted upon,
the man would have been left to drown. In like
fashion, to say, after the event, that a given idea
144 THE INTELLECTUALIST CRITERION
was true all the time, is to lose sight of what makes
an idea an idea, its hypothetical character; and
thereby deliberately to transform it into brute
dogma something to which no canon of verifica
tion can ever be applied. The intellectualist al
most always treats the pragmatic account as if it
were, from the standpoint of the pragmatist as well
as from his own, a denial of the existence of truth,
while it is nothing but a statement of its nature.
When the intellectualist realizes this, he will, I hope,
ask himself : What, then, on the pragmatic basis is
meant by the proposition that an idea is true all
the time? If the statement that an idea was true
all the time has no meaning except that the idea
was one which as matter of fact succeeded through
action in achieving its intent, mere reiteration that
the idea was true all the time or it could not have
succeeded, does not take us far. 1
1 Such a statement as, for example, Mr. Bradley s (Mind,
Vol. XIII., No. 51, N.S., p. 3, article on "Truth and
Practice ") " The idea works . . . but is able to work
because I have chosen the right idea" surely loses any
argumentative force it may seem to have, when it is recalled
that, upon the theory argued against, ability to work and
Tightness are one and the same thing. If the wording is
changed to read "The idea is able to work because I have
chosen an idea which is able to work" the question-
begging character of the implied criticism is evident. The
change of phraseology also may suggest the crucial and
pregnant question: How does any one know that an idea
is able to work excepting by setting it at work?
THE INTELLECTUALIST CRITERION 145
Oil the side of things, reality is identified with
truth; then on the principle that two things
that are equal to the same thing are equal to
each other, truth as idea and truth as reality are
taken to be one and the same thing. Wherever
there is an improved or tested idea, an idea which
has made good, there is a concrete existence in the
way of a completed or harmonized situation. The
same activity which proves the idea constructs an
inherently satisfied situation out of an inherently
dissentient one, for it is precisely the capacity
of the idea as an aim and method of action to
determine such transformation that is the cri
terion of its truth. Now unless all the elements
in the situation are held steadily in view, the specific
way in which the harmonized reality affords the
criterion of truth (namely, through its function
of being the last term of a process of active de
termination ) is lost from sight ; and the achieved
existence in its merely existent character, apart
from its practical or fulfilment character, is treated
as The Truth. But when the reality is thus sepa
rated from, the process by which it is achieved,
when it is taken just as given, it is neither truth
nor a criterion of truth. It is a state of facts like
any other. The achieved telephone is a criterion
of the validity of a certain prior idea in so far
as it is the fulfilment of activities that embody
the nature of that idea, but just as telephone, as *
146 THE INTELLECTUALIST CRITERION
a machine actually in existence, it is no more truth
nor criterion of truth than is a crack in the wall
or a cobble-stone on the street.
The intervening term that mediates and com
pletes the confusion of truth with ideas on one
hand and " reality " on the other, is, I think, the
fact that ideas after they have been tested in action
are employed in the development and grounding of
further beliefs. There are cases in which an idea
ceases to exist as idea as soon as it is made true;
this is so as matter of fact and it is impossible to
conceive any reason why it should not be so in point
of theory. Such is the case, I take it, with a large
part possibly the major portion of the ideas
that mediate the smaller and transient crises of
daily practice. I cannot imagine the situation in
which the truth to which I have referred above
the verification of a certain idea about a certain
noise would ever function again as truth save
as I have given it a function in this paper by using
it as a corroboration of a certain theory. Such
ideas mostly cease, giving way to a matter-of-
fact status : say, the perception of the noisy street
car. One at the time may say " My idea re
garding that noise was a true idea " ; or one may
not even go so far as that, he may just stop with
the eventual perception. But the tested idea need
not ever recur as a factor of proof in any other
problem, Such, however, is conspicuously not
THE INTELLECTUALIST CRITERION 147
th%.._case with our scientific ideas. In its first
value, the idea or hypothesis of gravitation en
tertained by Newton, stood, when verified, on
exactly the same level as the hypothesis regard
ing the noise in the street. Theoretically, that
truth might have been so isolated that its truth
character would disappear from thought as
soon as a certain factual condition was ascer
tained. But practically quite the opposite has
happened. The idea operates in many other in
quiries, and operates no longer as mere idea, but
as proved idea. Such truths get an " eternal "
status one irrespective of application just now
anoThere, because there are so many nows and heres
in which they are useful. Just as to say an idea
was true all the time is a way of saying in retro
spect that it has come out in a certain fashion,
so to say that an idea is " eternally true " is to
indicate prospective modes of application which
are indefinitely anticipated. Its meaning, there
fore, is strictly pragmatic. It does not indicate
a property inherent in the idea as intellectualized
existence, but denotes a property of use and
employment. Always at hand when needed is
a good enough eternal for reasonably minded
persons.
14> THE INTELLECTU4I/IST CRITERION
IV
I have gone from the very general considerations
which occupied us in the earlier portions of this
article to matters which relatively at least are
specific. I conclude with a summary in the hope
that it may bind together the earlier and the later
parts of this paper.
1. The condition which antecedes and provokes
any particular exercise of reflective knowing is al
ways one of discrepancy, struggle, " collision."
This condition is practical, for it involves the habits
and interests of the organism, an agent. This
does not mean that the struggle is merely personal,
or subjective, or psychological. The agent or
individual is one factor in the situation not the
situation something subsisting in the individual.
The individual has to be identified in the situation,
before any situation can be referred as in psy
chology to the individual. But the discrepancy
calls out and controls reflective knowing only as
the fortunes of an agent are implicated in the
crisis. Certain elements stand out as obstacles, as
interferences, as deficiencies in short as unsatis
factory and as requiring something for their com
pletion. Other elements stand out as wanted as
required, as a satisfaction which does not exist.
This clash (an accompaniment of all desire) be
tween the given and the wanted, between the pres-
THE INTELLECTUALIST CRITERION 149
ent and the absent, is at once the root and the
type of that peculiar paradoxical relation between
existence and meaning which Bradley insists upon
as the essence of judgment. It is not irrational
in the sense that we are dealing with appearance
wholesale, but it is non-rational an evidence that
we are dealing with a practical affair.
& ""The intellectual or reflective and logical is a
statement of this conflict: an attempt to describe
and define it. It is, as it were, the practical clash
held off at arm s length for inspection and in
vestigation. In this way brute blind reaction
against the unsatisfactoriness of the situation is
suspended. Action is turned into the channel of
observing, of inferring, of reasoning, or defining
means and end. It is this change in the quality
of activity, from directly overt, to indirect, or in
quiring with view to stating, that constitutes the
specific nature of reflective practice to which Mr.
Bradley calls attention. The discovery of the na
ture of the conflict supplies materials for the fact
or existence side of the judgment. The concep
tion or projection of the object in which the con
flict would be terminated furnishes material for
the meaning side of the judgment. It is ideal
because anticipatory, just as the fact side is
existential, because reminiscent or recording.
Hence the two are necessarily both distin
guished from and yet referred to each other: only
150 THE INTELLECTUALIST CRITERION
through location of a problem can a solution be
conceived ; only in reference to the intent of finding
a solution can the elements of a problem be
selected and interpreted. ,In origin and in destiny,
this correlative determination of existence and
meaning is tentative and experimental. The aim
of the subject of the judgment is not to include all
possible reality, but to select those elements of a
reality that are useful in locating the source and
nature of the difficulty in hand. The aim of the
predicate is not to bunch all possible meaning and
refer it in one final act indiscriminately to all ex
istence, but to state the standpoint and method
through which the difficulty of the particular situa
tion may most effectively be dealt with. The selec
tion of what is relevant to the characterization of
the problem and the projection of the method of
dealing with it are theoretic, hypothetic, intel
lectual: that is, they are tentative ways of view
ing the matter for the sake of guiding, economiz
ing, and freeing the activities through which it may
really be dealt with.
3. The criterion of the worth of the idea is thus
the capacity of the idea (as a definition of the end
or outcome in terms of what is likely to be service
able as a method) to operate in fulfilling the object
for the sake of which it was projected. Capacity
of operation in this fashion is the test, measure, or
criterion of truth. Hence the criterion is practi-
THE INTELLECTUALIST CRITERION 151
cal in the most overt sense of that term. We
may, if we choose, regard the object in which the
idea terminates through its use in guiding action,
as the criterion; but if we so choose, it is at our
peril that we forget that this object serves as
criterion in its capacity of fulfilment and not as
sheer objective existence.
4. Difficulties overlap ; problems recur which re
semble each other in the kind of treatment they
demand for solution. Various modes of activity
with their respective ends, going on at some time
more or less independently, get organized into
single comprehensive systems of behavior. The so
lution of one problem is found to create difficulties
elsewhere; or the truth that is made in the solu
tion of one problem is found to afford an effective
method of dealing with questions arising appar
ently from unallied sources. Thus certain tested
ideas in performing a constant or recurrent func
tion secure a certain permanent status. The pro
spective use of such truths, the satisfaction that
we anticipate in their employ, the assurance of
control that we feel in their possession, becomes
relatively much more important than the circum
stances under which they were first made true. In
becoming permanent resources, such tested ideas
get a generalized energy of position. They are
truths in general, truths " in themselves " or in the
abstract, truths to which positive value is assigned
152 THE INTELLECTUALIST CRITERION
on their own account. Such truths are the " eter
nal truths " of current discussion. They naturally
and properly add to their intellectual and to their
practical worth a certain esthetic quality. They
are interesting- to contemplate, and their con
templation arouses emotions of admiration and
reverence. To make these emotions the basis of
assigning peculiar inherent sanctity to them apart
from their warrant in use, is simply to give way
to that mood which in primitive man is the cause
of attributing magical efficacy to physical things.
Esthetically such truths are more than instrumen
talities. But to ignore both the instrumental and
the esthetic aspect, and to ascribe values due to an
instrumental and esthetic character to some in
terior and a priori constitution of truth is to make
fetishes of them.
We may not exaggerate the permanence and
stability of such truths with respect to their re
curring and prospective use. It is only relatively
that they are unchanging. When applied to new
cases, used as resources for coping with new diffi
culties, the oldest of truths are to some extent
remade. Indeed it is only through such applica
tion and such remaking that truths retain their
freshness and vitality. Otherwise they are rele
gated to faint reminiscences of an antique tradi
tion. Even the truth that two and two make four
has gained a new meaning, has had its truth in
THE INTELLECTUALIST CRITERION 153
some degree remade, in the development of the
modern theory of number. If we put ourselves in
the attitude of a scientific inquirer in asking what
is the meaning of truth per se, there spring up
before us those ideas which are actively employed
in the mastery of new fields, in the organization
of new materials. This is the essential difference
between truth and dogma; between the living and
the dead and decaying. Above all, it is in the
region of moral truth that this perception stands
out. Moral truths that are not recreated in appli
cation to the urgencies of the passing hour, no mat
ter how true in the place and time of their origin,
are pernicious and misleading, i.e., false. And it
is perhaps through emphasizing this fact, embodied
in one form or another in every system of morals
and in every religion of moral import, that one
most readily realizes the character of truth.
A SHORT CATECHISM CONCERNING
TRUTH *
I am desirous, respected teacher, of
forming an independent judgment concern
ing the novel theory of truth that you are said
to profess. My eagerness is whetted because the
theory as expounded to me by my old teacher,
Professor Purus Intellectus, so obviously contra
venes common sense, science, and philosophy that I
do not understand how it can be advanced in good
faith by any reasonable man.
Teacher. As you are already somewhat ac
quainted with the theory (or at least with what
it purports to be), perhaps if you will set forth in
order your objections, it will appear that the
theory that you are acquainted with is not ad
vanced by any reasonable persons, and that by
understanding the theory as it is you will also be
led to embrace it.
Pupil: Objection One. Pragmatism makes
truth a subjective affair, namely the satisfaction
afforded individuals by ideas, while everybody
*A paper read in the spring of 1909 before the Philo
sophical Club of Smith College and not previously published.
154
A CATECHISM CONCERNING TRUTH 155
knows that the truth of ideas depends upon their
relation to things.
Teacher: Reply. If I were to reply that I
hold to existences independent of ideas, existences
prior to, synchronous with, and subsequent to ideas,
that might seem to you to express only my personal
opinion and to have no logical connection with
pragmatism. So I beg to remind you that, ac-v
cording to pragmatism, ideas (judgments and
reasonings being included for convenience in this
term) are attitudes of response taken toward ex
tra-ideal, extra-mental things. Instinct and habit *
express, for instance, modes of response, but modes
inadequate for a progressive being, or for adapta
tion to an environment presenting novel and un-
mastered features. Under such conditions, ideas
are their surrogates. The origin of an idea is thus
in some empirical, extra-mental situation which
provokes ideas as modes of response, while their
meaning is found in the modifications the " differ
ences " they make in this extra-mental situation.
Their validity is in turn measured by their capac
ity to effect the transformation they intend.
Origin, content, and value all alike are extra-
ideational. The satisfaction upon which the
pragmatist dwells is just the better adjustment of
living beings to their environment effected by
transformations of the environment through form
ing and applying ideas.
156 A CATECHISM CONCERNING TRUTH
Pupil: Objection Two. But, as I understand
it and as you have yourself confessed in your lan
guage, these external things, while they may be
external to the particular idea in question, are em
pirical; they are just other experiences and so
mental after all. You hold, I have been informed,
that truth is an experienced relation, instead of
a relation between experience and what transcends
it ; why then be mealy-mouthed (pardon my eager
ness if it leads me astray) in admitting that the
whole business is intra-mental?
Teacher: Reply. Your objection combines and
confuses two things. To disentangle them is to
answer the objection. (1) The notion of trans
cendence has a double meaning; first, it denotes
that which lies inherently and essentially beyond
experience. It is interesting to note that the op
ponents of pragmatism have been forced by the
exigencies of their hostility to resuscitate a doc
trine supposedly dead: the doctrine of unexperi-
enceable, unknowable " Things in Themselves."
And as if this were not enough, they identify Truth
with relationship to this unknowable. Thereby
in behalf of the notion of Truth in general, they
land in scepticism with reference to the possibility
of any truth in particular. The pragmatist Is
bound to deny such transcendence. (2) That he is
thereby landed in pure subjectivism or the reduc
tion of every existence to the purely mental, follows
A CATECHISM CONCERNING TRUTH 157
only if experience means only mental states. The
critic appears to hold the Humian doctrine that
experience is made up of states of mind, of sensa
tions and ideas. It is then for him to decide how,
on his basis, he escapes subjective idealism, or
" mentalism." The pragmatist starts from a much
more commonplace notion of experience, that of
the plain man who never dreams that to experience
a thing is first to destroy the thing and then to
substitute a mental state for it. More particu
larly, the pragmatist has insisted that experience *
is a matter of functions and habits, of active ad
justments and re-adjustments, of co-ordinations
and activities, rather than of states of conscious
ness. To criticise the pragmatist by reading into
him exactly the notion of experience that he denies
and replaces, may be psychological and unregener-
ately " pragmatic," but it is hardly " intellectual."
Pupil: Objection Three. You remind me, curi
ously enough, of a contention of my old instructor
to the effect that the pragmatist, when criticised,
always shifts his ground. To avoid solipsism and
subjectivism, he falls back on things independent
of ideas, adducing them in order to pass upon the
truth or falsity of the latter. But thereby he only
covertly recognizes the intellectualistic standard.
Thus he swings unevenly between a denial of sci
ence and a clamorous reiteration, in new phrase
ology* of what all philosophers hold.
158 A CATECHISM CONCERNING TRUTH
Teacher: Reply. Your words have indeed a
familiar sound. Apparently, the average intel-
lectualist has got so accustomed to taking truth
as a Relation at Large, without specification or
analysis, that any attempt at a concrete statement
of just what the relationship is appears to be a
denial of the relation itself; in which case, he in
terprets an occasional reminder from the prag-
matist that the latter is, after all, attempting to
specify the nature of the relation, to be a sur
render of the pragmatist s own case, since it ad
mits after all that there is some relation !
However that may be, the pragmatist holds that
the relation in question is one of correspondence
between existence and thought; but he holds that
correspondence instead of being an ultimate and
unanalyzable mystery, to be defined by iteration,
is precisely a matter of cor-respondence in its
plain, familiar sense. A condition of dubious and
conflicting tendencies calls out thinking as a method
of handling it. This condition produces its own
appropriate consequences, bearing its own fruits
of weal and woe. The thoughts, the estimates,
intents, and projects it calls out, just because
they are attitudes of response and of attempted
adjustment (not mere " states of consciousness "),
produce their effects also. The kind of interlock
ing, of inter adjustment that then occurs between
these two sorts of consequences constitutes the
A CATECHISM CONCERNING TRUTH 159
correspondence that makes truth, just as failure to
respond to each other, to work together, consti
tutes mistake and error mishandling and wan
dering. This account may, of course, be wrong
may involve a maladjustment of consequences
but the error in the account, if it exists, must be
specific and empirical, and cannot be located by
general epistemological accusations.
Pupil: Objection Four. Well, even admitting
this version of pragmatism, you cannot deny it
still contravenes common sense ; for, according to
you, the correspondence that constitutes truth does
not exist till after ideas have worked, while common
sense perceives and knows that it is the antecedent
agreement of the ideas with reality that enables
them to work. If you make the truth of the ex
istence of a Carboniferous age, or the landing of
Columbus in 149#, depend upon a future working
of an idea about them, you commit yourself to the
most fantastic of philosophies.
Teacher: Reply. May I recall to your atten
tion the accusation of " shifting ground " when
hard pressed? The intellectualist began, if I re
member correctly, with conceiving truth as a re
lation of thought and existence ; has he not, in your
last objection, substituted for this conception an
identification of the bare existence or event with
truth? Which does he mean? How will he have
it? The existence of the Carboniferous age, the
160 A CATECHISM CONCERNING TRUTH
discovery of America by Columbus are not truths ;
they are events. Some conviction, some belief,
some judgment with reference to them is necessary
to introduce the category of truth and falsity.
And since the conviction, the judgment, is as mat
ter of fact subsequent to the event, how can its
truth consist in the kind of blank, wholesale rela
tionship the intellectualist contends for? How
can the present belief jump out of its present
skin, dive into the past, and land upon just the
one event (that as past is gone forever) which, by
definition, constitutes its truth? I do not wonder
the intellectualist has much to say about " trans
cendence " when he comes to dealing with the truth
of judgments about the past; but why does he
not tell us how we manage to know when one
thought lands straight on the devoted head of
something past and gone, while another thought
comes down on the wrong thing in the past?
Pupil. Well, of course, knowledge of the past
is very mysterious, but how is the pragmatist
any better off?
Teacher. The reply to that may be inferred
from what has already been said. The past event
has left effects, consequences, that are present
and that will continue in the future. Our belief
about it, if genuine, must also modify action in
some way and so have objective effects. If these
two sets of effects interlock harmoniously, then the
A CATECHISM CONCERNING TRUTH 161
judgment is true. If perchance the past event
had no discoverable consequences or our thought of
it can work out to no assignable difference any
where, then there is no possibility of genuine judg
ment.
Pupil. You have, perhaps, anticipated my next
objection, which was that upon the pragmatic
theory (by which truth is constituted by future
consequences) there are no truths about what is
past and gone, since in respect to that ideas can
make no difference. For, I suppose, you would
say that the difference made is in the effects that
continue, since ideas may work out to facilitate or
to confuse our relations to these effects. Never
theless, I am not quite satisfied. For when I say
it is true that it rained yesterday, surely the
object of my judgment is something past, not
future, while pragmatism makes all objects of
judgment future.
Teacher: Reply. You confuse the content of
a judgment with the reference of that content.
The content of any idea about yesterday s rain
certainly involves past time, but the distinctive
or characteristic aim of judgment is none the
less to give this content a future reference and
function.
Pupil: Objection Five. But your argument re
quires an absurd identification of truth and veri
fication. To verify ideas is to find out that they
162 A CATECHISM CONCERNING TRUTH
were already true; or possessed of the truth rela
tion prior to its discovery in verification. But the
pragmatist holds that the act of finding out that
ideas are true creates the thing that is found.
In short, you confuse the psychology of finding
out with the reality found out.
Teacher: Reply. Many intellectualists have
now gone so far as to admit that verification is
the testing of a judgment by the consequence it
imports, the difference it makes its working. But
they still deny any organic connection between the
" antecedent " truth property of ideas and the
verification (or " making true ") process. Surely
they admit either too much or too little, (i) If
an idea about a past event is already true because
of some mysterious static correspondence that
it possesses to that past event, how in the world
can its truth be proved by the future consequences
of that idea? Why is it that the intellectualist
has not produced any positive theory about the
relation of verification to his notion of truth?
(ii) Moreover, if verification consists in the ex
perimental working out of a belief, the intellectu
alist thereby admits that his own theory of truth
can be known to be true only as it is verified by its
workings. But if the theory that truth is a ready-
made static property of judgments is true, how
in the world can it be verified by making any spe
cific differences in the course of events? Every-
A CATECHISM CONCERNING TRUTH 163
where we have to proceed as if the pragmatic
theory were the right one. (iii) If he admits
that the pragmatic theory of verification is true,
what meaning remains to the statement that the
idea had the truth property in advance? Why,
simply that it had the property of ability to work
an ability revealed by its actual working. How
can a given fact be an objection to the pragmatic
theory when that fact has a definitely assignable
meaning on the pragmatic theory, while upon the
anti-pragmatic theory it just has to be accepted
as an ultimate, unanalyzable fact?
As to your remark about verification being
merely psychological, I have something to say.
Colleagues of mine are steadily at work in various
laboratories on various researches, forming
hypotheses, experimenting, testing, corroborating,
refuting, modifying ideas. One of them, for ex
ample, recently put an immense pendulum in place
in order to repeat and test Foucault s experiment
with reference to the earth s rotation. Do you re
gard such verification processes as merely psycho
logical?
Pupil. I don t know. Why do you ask?
Teacher. Because if the objector means that
such experimental provings are merely psycholog
ical, he has of course relegated to the merely psy
chological (wherever that may be) all the tech
nique of all the physical sciences a rather high
164 A CATECHISM CONCERNING TRUTH
price to pay for the confutation of the pragma-
tist. The intellectualist is thus in the dilemma
either of conceding to the pragmatist the whole
sphere of concrete scientific logic or else of himself
regarding all science as merely subjective? Which
horn does he choose?
Pupil: Objection Six. I noticed a moment
ago that you spoke of the pragmatic theory of
truth being true. Surely the pragmatist does not
live up to his reputation of having a sense of
humor when he claims assent to his theory on the
ground that it is true. What is this but to admit
intellectualism ?
Teacher: Reply. My son, we are evidently
nearing the end. Naturally, the pragmatist claims
his theory to be true in the pragmatic sense of
truth: it works, it clears up difficulties, removes
obscurities, puts individuals into more experi
mental, less dogmatic, and less arbitrarily sceptical
relations to life; aligns philosophic with scientific
method; does away with self-made problems of
epistemology ; clarifies and reorganizes logical the
ory, etc. He is quite content to have the truth
of his theory consist in its working in these various
ways, and to leave to the intellectualist the proud
possession of a static, unanalyzable, unverifiable,
unworking property.
Pupil: Objection Seven. Nevertheless, the prag
matist is always appealing to the judgments of
A CATECHISM CONCERNING TRUTH 165
others to corroborate his own judgment. Surely
this admits the principle of a judgment that is
correct, true, in se.
Teacher: Reply. The pragmatist says that
judgment is pragmatic, i.e., originated under con
ditions of need for a survey and statement, and
tested by efficiency in meeting this need. And
then you think you have refuted him by saying
that any appeal to judgment is intellectualistic !
Such begging of the question convinces me that
the radical difficulty of the intellectualist is that
he conceives of the pragmatist as beginning with
a theory of truth, when in reality the latter begins
with a theory about judgments and meanings of
which the theory of truth is a corollary.
Pupil: Objection Eight. Nevertheless, you are
endeavoring to convert your opponent to a certain
theory. Surely that is an intellectual undertak
ing, and in theory (at least) the theoretical cri
terion, as Mr. Bradley has well said, must be
supreme.
Teacher: Reply. A little reflection will convince
you that you are going around in the same old
circle. Since men have to act together, since the
individual subsists in social bonds and activities,
to convert another to a certain way of looking
at things is to make social ties and functions better
adapted, more prosperous in their workings. Only
if the pragmatist held the wtellectualist s position,
166 A CATECHISM CONCERNING TRUTH
would he appeal to other than what is ultimately
a practical need and a practical criterion in en
deavoring to convert others.
Pupil: Objection Nine. Still the pragmatic
criterion, being satisfactory working, is purely
personal and subjective. Whatever works so as
to please me is true. Either this is your result (in
which case your reference to social relations only
denotes at bottom a number of purely subjectivistic
satisfactions) or else you unconsciously assume an
intellectual department of our nature that has
to be satisfied ; and whose satisfaction is truth.
Thereby you admit the intellectualistic criterion.
Teacher: Reply. We seem to have got back
to our starting-point, the nature of satisfaction.
The intellectualist seems to think that because the
pragmatist insists upon the factor of human want,
purpose, and realization in the making and testing
of judgments, the impersonal factor is therefore
denied. But what the pragmatist does is to insist
that the human factor must work itself out in
co-operation with the environmental factor, and
that their co-adaptation is both " correspondence "
and " satisfaction." As long as the human factor
is ignored and denied, or is regarded as merely
psychological (whatever, once more, that means),
this human factor will assert itself in irresponsible
ways. So long as, particularly in philosophy, a
flagrantly unchastened pragmatism reigns, we
A CATECHISM CONCERNING TRUTH 167
shall find, as at present, the most ambitious intel-
lectualistic systems accepted simply because of the
personal comfort they yield those who contrive
and accept them. Once recognize the human fac
tor, and pragmatism is at hand to insist that the
believer must accept the full consequences of his
beliefs, and that his beliefs must be tried out,
through acting upon them, to discover what is
their meaning or consequence. Till so tested, he
insists that beliefs, no matter how noble and seem
ingly edifying, are dogmas, not truths. Till the
testing has been worked out very completely and
patiently, he holds his beliefs as but provisional,
as working hypotheses, as methods : and he recog
nizes the probability that, as additional modes of
testing develop, more and more so-called truths
will be relegated to the category of working hypo
theses till the dogmatic mind is crowded out and
starved out. At present, the ignoring by philos
ophers of the part played by personal education,
temperament, and preference in their philosophies
is the chief source of pretentiousness and insin
cerity in their systems, and is the ground of the
popular disregard for them.
Pupil. What you say calls to mind something
of Chesterton s that I read recently : " I agree with
the pragmatists that apparent objective truth is
not the whole matter ; that there is an authoritative
need to believe the things that are necessary to
168 A CATECHISM CONCERNING TRUTH
the human mind. But I say that one of those
necessities precisely is a belief in objective truth.
Pragmatism is a matter of human needs and one
of the first of human needs is to be something more
than a pragmatist." You would say, if I under
stand you aright, that to fall back upon a sup
posed necessity of the " human mind " to believe
in certain absolute truths, is to evade a proper
demand for testing the human mind and all its
works.
Teacher. My son, I am glad to leave the last
word with you. This enfant terrible of intellectu-
alism has revealed that the chief objection of abso
lutists to the pragmatic doctrine of the personal
(or "subjective") factor in belief is that the
pragmatist has spilled the personal milk in the
absolutist s cocoanut.
BELIEFS AND EXISTENCES
BELIEFS look both ways, towards persons and
toward things. They are the original Mr.
Facing-both-ways. They form or judge justify
or condemn the agents who entertain them and
who insist upon them. They are of things whose
immediate meanings form their content. To be
lieve is to ascribe value, impute meaning, assign
import. The collection and interaction of these
appraisals and assessments is the world of the
common man, that is, of man as an individual
and not as a professional being or class specimen.
Thus things are characters, not mere entities ; they
1 Read as the Presidential Address at the fifth annual
meeting of the American Philosophical Association, at Cam
bridge, December 28, 1905, and reprinted with verbal re
visions from the Philosophical Review, Vol. XV., March,
1906. The substitution of the word "Existences" for the
word " Realities " (in the original title) is due to a sub
sequent recognition on my part that the eulogistic historic
associations with the word " Reality " (against which the
paper was a protest) infected the interpretation of the
paper itself, so that the use of some more colorless word
was desirable.
169
170 BELIEFS AND EXISTENCES
behave and respond and provoke. In the behavior
that exemplifies and tests their character, they
help and hinder; disturb and pacify; resist and
comply; are dismal and mirthful, orderly and
deformed, queer and commonplace ; they agree and
disagree; are better and worse.
Thus the human world, whether or no it have
core and axis, has presence and transfiguration.
It means here and now, not in some transcendent
sphere. It moves, of itself, to varied incremental
meaning, not to some far off event, whether divine
or diabolic. Such movement constitutes conduct,
for conduct is the working out of the commitments
of belief. That believed better is held to, asserted,
affirmed, acted upon. The moments of its crucial
fulfilment are the natural " transcendentals " ; the
decisive, the critical, standards of further estima
tion, selection, and rejection. That believed worse
is fled, resisted, transformed into an instrument for
the better. Characters, in being condensations of
belief, are thus at once the reminders and the
prognostications of weal and woe ; they concrete
and they regulate the terms of effective apprehen
sion and appropriation of things. This general
regulative function is what we mean in calling
them characters, forms.
For beliefs, made in the course of existence,
reciprocate by making existence still farther, by
developing it. Beliefs are not made by existence
BELIEFS AND EXISTENCES 171
in a mechanical or logical or psychological sense.
" Reality " naturally instigates belief. It ap
praises itself and through this self-appraisal man
ages its affairs. As things are surcharged valua
tions, so " consciousness " means ways of believing
and disbelieving. It is interpretation ; not merely
existence aware of itself as fact, but existence dis
cerning, judging itself, approving and disapprov
ing.
This double outlook and connection of belief, its
implication, on one side, with beings who suffer
and endeavor, and, its complication on the other,
with the meanings and worths of things, is its glory
or its unpardonable sin. We cannot keep con
nection on one side and throw it away on the
other. We cannot preserve significance and de
cline the personal attitude in which it is inscribed
and operative, any more than we can succeed in
making things " states " of a " consciousness "
whose business is to be an interpretation of things.
Beliefs are personal affairs, and personal affairs
are adventures, and adventures are, if you please,
shady. But equally discredited, then, is the uni
verse of meanings. For the world has meaning
as somebody s, somebody s at a juncture, taken for
better or worse, and you shall not have completed
your metaphysics till you have told whose world
is meant and how and what for in what bias and
to what effect. Here is a cake that is had only
172 BELIEFS AND EXISTENCES
by eating it, just as there is digestion only for
life as well as by life.
So far the standpoint of the common man.
But the professional man, the philosopher, has been
largely occupied in a systematic effort to discredit
the standpoint of the common man, that is, to
disable belief as an ultimately valid principle. Phi
losophy is shocked at the frank, almost brutal,
evocation of beliefs by and in natural existence,
like witches out of a desert heath at a mode of
production which is neither logical, nor physical,
nor psychological, but just natural, empirical.
For modern philosophy is, as every college senior
recites, epistemology ; and epistemology, as per
haps our books and lectures sometimes forget to tell
the senior, has absorbed Stoic dogma. Passionless
imperturbability, absolute detachment, complete
subjection to a ready-made and finished reality
physical it may be, mental it may be, logical it may
be is its professed ideal. Forswearing the reality
of affection, and the gallantry of adventure, the
genuineness of the incomplete, the tentative, it has
taken an oath of allegiance to Reality, objective,
universal, complete ; made perhaps of atoms, per
haps of sensations, perhaps of logical meanings.
This ready-made reality, already including every
thing, must of course swallow and absorb belief,
must produce it psychologically, mechanically, or
logically, according to its own nature ; must in any
MLIEFS AND EXISTENCES m
case, instead of acquiring aid and support from
belief, resolve it into one of its own preordained
creatures, making a desert and calling it harmony,
unity, totality. 1
Philosophy has dreamed the dream of a knowl
edge which is other than the propitious outgrowth
of beliefs that shall develop aforetime their ul
terior implications in order to recast them, to
rectify their errors, cultivate their waste places,
heal their diseases, fortify their feeblenesses: the
? dream of a knowledge that has to do with objects
having no nature save to be known.
Not that their philosophers have admitted the
concrete readability of their scheme. On the
1 Since writing the above I have read the following words
of a candidly unsympathetic friend of philosophy: "Neither
philosophy nor science can institute man s relation to the
universe, because such reciprocity must have existed before
any kind of science or philosophy can begin; since each
investigates phenomena by means of the intellect, and in
dependent of the position and feeling of the investigator;
whereas the relation of man to the universe is denned, not
by the intellect alone, but by his sensilive perception aided
by all his spiritual powers. However much one may assure
and instruct a man that all real existence is an idea, that
matter is made up of atoms, that the essence of life is cor-
porality or will, that heat, light, movement, electricity, are
different manifestations of one and the same energy, one
cannot thereby explain to a being with pains, pleasures,
hopes, and fears his position in the universe." Tolstoi, essay
on " Religion and Morality," in " Essays, Letters, and Mis
cellanies."
174 BELIEFS AND EXISTENCES
contrary, the assertion of the absolute " Reality "
of what is empirically unrealizable is a part of the
scheme; the ideal of a universe of pure, cogni-
tional objects, fixed elements in fixed relations.
Sensationalist and idealist, positivist and trans-
cendentalist, materialist and spiritualist, defining
this object in as many differing ways as they have
different conceptions of the ideal and method of
knowledge, are at one in their devotion to an iden
tification of Reality with something that connects
monopolistically with passionless knowledge, belief
purged of all personal reference, origin, and out
look. 1
What is to be said of this attempt to sever the
cord which naturally binds together personal atti
tudes and the meaning of things? This much at
least : the effort to extract meanings, values, from
the beliefs that ascribe them, and to give the
former absolute metaphysical validity while the
latter are sent to wander as scapegoats in the wil-
1 Hegel may be excepted from this statement. The habit
of interpreting Hegel as a Neo-Kantian, a Kantian en
larged and purified, is a purely Anglo-American habit.
This is no place to enter into the intricacies of Hegelian
exegesis, but the subordination of both logical meaning and
of mechanical existence to Oeist } to life in its own develop
ing movement, would seem to stand out in any unbiased
view of Hegel. At all events, I wish to recognize my own
personal debt to Hegel for the view set forth in this paper,
without, of course, implying that it represents Hegel s own
intention.
BELIEFS AND EXISTENCES 175
derness of mere phenomena, is an attempt, which,
as long as " our interest s on the dangerous edge
of things," will attract an admiring, even if sus
picious, audience. Moreover, we may admit that
the attempt to catch the universe of immediate
experience, of action and passion, coming and
going, to damn it in its present body in order ex
pressly to glorify its spirit to all eternity, to vali
date the meaning of beliefs by discrediting their
natural existence, to attribute absolute worth to
the intent of human convictions just because of
the absolute worthlessness of their content that
the performance of this feat of virtuosity has
developed philosophy to its present wondrous, if
formidable, technique.
But can we claim more than a succes (Testime?
Consider again the nature of the effort. The
world of immediate meanings, of the world em
pirically sustained in beliefs, is to be sorted out
into two portions, metaphysically discontinuous,
one of which shall alone be good and true " Real
ity," the fit material of passionless, beliefless knowl
edge ; while the other part, that which is excluded,
shall be referred exclusively to belief and treated
as mere appearance, purely subjective, impressions
or effects in consciousness, or as that ludicrously
abject modern discovery an epiphenomenon.
And this division into the real and the unreal is
accomplished by the very individual whom his own
176 BELIEFS AND EXISTENCES
" absolute " results reduce to phenomenality, in
terms of the very immediate experience which is
infected with worthlessness, and on the basis of
preference, of selection that are declared to be
unreal ! Can the thing be done ?
Anyway, the snubbed and excluded factor may
always reassert itself. The very pushing it out
of " Reality " may but add to its potential energy,
and invoke a more violent recoil. When affections
and aversions, with the beliefs in which they record
themselves and the efforts they exact, are re
duced to epiphenomena, dancing an idle attendance
upon a reality complete without them, to which
they vainly strive to accommodate themselves by
mirroring, then may the emotions flagrantly burst
forth with the claim that, as a friend of mine puts
it, reason is only a fig leaf for their nakedness.
When one man says that need, uncertainty, choice,
novelty, and strife have no place in Reality, which
is made up wholly of established things behaving
by foregone rules, then may another man be pro
voked to reply that all such fixities, whether named
atoms or God, whether they be fixtures of a sensa
tional, a positivistic, or an idealistic system, have
existence and import only in the problems, needs,
struggles, and instrumentalities of conscious
agents and patients. For home rule may be found
in the unwritten efficacious constitution of ex
perience.
BELIEFS AND EXISTENCES 177
That contemporaneously we are in the presence
of such a reaction is apparent. Let us, in pursuit
of our topic, inquire how it came about and why
it takes the form that it takes. This considera
tion may not only occupy the hour, but may help
diagram some future parallelogram of forces.
The account calls for some sketching (1) of the
historical tendencies which have shaped the situa
tion in which a Stoic theory of knowledge claims
metaj "rysical monopoly, and (2) of the tendencies
that have furnished the despised principle of be
lief opportunity and means of reassertion.
II
Imagination readily travels to a period when a
gospel of intense, and, one may say, deliberate
passionate disturbance appeared to be conquering
the Stoic ideal of passionless reason ; when the de
mand for individual assertion by faith against the
established, embodied objective order was seem
ingly subduing the idea of the total subordination
of the individual to the universal. By what course
of events came about the dramatic reversal, in
which an ethically conquered Stoicism became the
conqueror, epistemologically, of Christianity?
How are our imaginations haunted by the idea
of what might have happened if Christianity had
178 BELIEFS AND EXISTENCES
found ready to its hand intellectual formula
tions corresponding to its practical proclama
tions !
That the ultimate principle of conduct is affec-
tional and volitional ; that God is love ; that access
to the principle is by faith, a personal attitude;
that belief, surpassing logical basis and warrant,
works out through its own operation its own ful
filling evidence: such was the implied moral meta-
physic of Christianity. But this implication needed
to become a theory, a theology, a formulation;
and in this need, it found no recourse save to
philosophies that had identified true existence with
the proper object of logical reason. For, in
Greek thought, after the valuable meanings, the
meanings of industry and art that appealed to sus
tained and serious choice, had given birth and
status to reflective reason, reason denied its an
cestry of organized endeavor, and proclaimed itself
in its function of self-conscious logical thought to
be the author and warrant of all genuine things.
Yet how nearly Christianity had found prepared
for it the needed means of its own intellectual
statement ! We recall Aristotle s account of moral
knowing, and his definition of man. Man as man,
he tells us, is a principle that may be termed
either desiring thought or thinking desire. Not
as pure intelligence does man know, but as an
organization of desires effected through reflection
BELIEFS AND EXISTENCES 179
upon their own conditions and consequences. What
if Aristotle had only assimilated his idea of theo
retical to his notion of practical knowledge ! Be
cause practical thinking was so human, Aristotle
rejected it in favor of pure, passionless cognition,
something superhuman. Thinking desire is ex
perimental, is tentative, not absolute. It looks to
the future and to the past for help in the future.
It is contingent, not necessary. It doubly relates
to the individual: to the individual thing as ex
perienced by an individual agent; not to the uni
versal. Hence desire is a sure sign of defect, of
privation, of non-being, and seeks surcease in
something which knows it not. Hence desiring
reason culminating in beliefs relating to imperfect
existence, stands forever in contrast with passion
less reason functioning in pure knowledge, logic
ally complete, of perfect being.
I need not remind you how through Neo-Platon-
ism, St. Augustine, and the Scholastic renaissance,
these conceptions became imbedded in Christian
philosophy ; and what a reversal occurred of the
original practical principle of Christianity. Be
lief is henceforth important because it is the mere
antecedent in a finite and fallen world, a temporal
and phenomenal world infected with non-being, of
true knowledge to be achieved only in a world
of completed Being. Desire is but the self-con
sciousness of defect striving to its own termination
180 BELIEFS AND EXISTENCES
in perfect possession, through perfect knowledge of
perfect being. I need not remind you that the
prima facie subordination of reason to authority,
of knowledge to faith, in the medieval code, is, after
all, but the logical result of the doctrine that man
as man (since only reasoning desire) is merely
phenomenal; and has his reality in God, who as
God is the complete union of rational insight and
being the term of man s desire, and the fulfilment
of his feeble attempts at knowing. Authority,
" faith " as it then had to be conceived, meant just
that this Being comes externally to the aid of man,
otherwise hopelessly doomed to misery in long
drawn out error and non-being, and disciplines
him till, in the next world under more favoring
auspices, he may have his desires stilled in good,
and his faith may yield to knowledge: for we
forget that the doctrine of immortality was not an
appendage, but an integral part of the theory that
since knowledge is the true function of man, happi
ness is attained only in knowledge, which itself
exists only in achievement of perfect Being or God.
For my part, I can but think that medieval
absolutism, with its provision for authoritative
supernatural assistance in this world and assertion
of supernatural realization in the next, was more
logical, as well as more humane, than the modern
absolutism, that, with the same logical premises,
bids man find adequate consolation and support in
BELIEFS AND EXISTENCES 181
the fact that, after all, his strivings are already
eternally fulfilled, his errors already eternally
transcended, his partial beliefs already eternally
comprehended.
The modern age is marked by a refusal to be
satisfied with the postponement of the exercise and
function of reason to another and supernatural
sphere, and by a resolve to practise itself upon its
present object, nature, with all the joys thereunto
appertaining. The pure intelligence of Aristotle,
thought thinking itself, expresses itself as free
inquiry directed upon the present conditions of its
own most effective exercise. The principle of the
inherent relation of thought to being was pre
served intact, but its practical locus was moved
down from the next world to this. Spinoza s
" God or Nature " is the logical outcome ; as is also
his strict correlation of the attribute of matter with
the attribute of thought; while his combination
of thorough distrust of passion and faith with
complete faith in reason and all-absorbing passion
for knowledge is so classic an embodiment of the
whole modern contradiction that it may awaken ad
miration where less thorough-paced formulations
call out irritation.
In the practical devotion of present intelligence
to its present object, nature, science was born,
and also its philosophical counterpart, the theory
of knowledge. Epistemology only generalized in
182 BELIEFS AND EXISTENCES
its loose, although narrow and technical way, the
question practically urgent in Europe: How is
science possible? How can intelligence actively
and directly get at its object?
Meantime, through Protestantism the values,
the meanings formerly characterizing the next life
(the opportunity for full perception of perfect
being), were carried over into present-day emo
tions and responses.
The dualism between faith authoritatively sup
ported as the principle of this life, and knowledge
supernaturally realized as the principle of the next,
was transmuted into the dualism between intelli
gence now and here occupied with natural things,
and the affections and accompanying beliefs, now
and here realizing spiritual worths. For a time
this dualism operated as a convenient division of
labor. Intelligence, freed from responsibility for
and preoccupation with supernatural truths, could
occupy itself the more fully and efficiently with the
world that now is ; while the affections, charged
with the values evoked in the medieval discipline,
entered into the present enjoyment of the delecta
tions previously reserved for the saints. Direct
ness took the place of systematic intermediation ;
the present of the future ; the individual s emo
tional consciousness of the supernatural institu
tion. Between science and faith, thus conceived, a
bargain was struck. Hands off; each to his own,
BELIEFS AND EXISTENCES 183
was the compact ; the natural world to intelligence,
the moral, the spiritual world to belief. This
(natural) world for knowledge; that (supernatu
ral) world for belief. Thus the antithesis, unex
pressed, ignored, within experience, between belief
and knowledge, between the purely objective values
of thought and the personal values of passion and
volition, was more fundamental, more determining,
than the opposition, explicit and harassing, within
knowledge, between subject and object, mind and
matter.
This latent antagonism worked out into the
open. In scientific detail, knowledge encroached
upon the historic traditions and opinions with
which the moral and religious life had identified
itself. It made history to be as natural, as much
its spoil, as physical nature. It turned itself upon
man, and proceeded remorselessly to account for
his emotions, his volitions, his opinions. Knowl
edge, in its general theory, as philosophy, went
the same way. It was pre-committed to the old
notion: the absolutely real is the object of knowl
edge, and hence is something universal and im
personal. So, whether by the road of sensational
ism or rationalism, by the path of mechanicalism or
objective idealism, it came about that concrete
selves, specific feeling and willing beings, were
relegated with the beliefs in which they declare
themselves to the "phenomenal."
184 BELIEFS AND EXISTENCES
III
So much for the situation against which some
contemporary tendencies are a deliberate protest.
What of the positive conditions that give us
not mere protest, like the unreasoning revolt of
heart against head found at all epochs, but some
thing articulate and constructive? The field is
only too large, and I shall limit myself to the
evolution of the knowledge standpoint itself. I
shall suggest, first, that the progress of intelligence
directed upon natural materials has evolved a pro
cedure of knowledge that renders untenable the
inherited conception of knowledge; and, secondly,
that this result is reinforced by the specific results
of some of the special sciences.
1. First, then, the very use of the knowledge
standpoint, the very expression of the knowledge
preoccupation, has produced methods and tests
that, when formulated, intimate a radically differ
ent conception of knowledge, and of its relation to
existence and belief, than the orthodox one.
The one thing that stands out is that thinking
is inquiry, and that knowledge as science is the
outcome of systematically directed inquiry. For
a time it was natural enough that inquiry should
be interpreted in the old sense, as just change of
subjective attitudes and opinions to make them
square up with a " reality " that is already there
BELIEFS AND EXISTENCES 185
in ready-made, fixed, and finished form. The
rationalist had one notion of the reality, i.e., that it
was of the nature of laws, genera, or an ordered
system, and so thought of concepts, axioms, etc.,
as the indicated modes of representation. The
empiricist, holding reality to be a lot of little dis
crete particular lumps, thought of disjointed sen
sations as its appropriate counterpart. But
both alike were thorough conformists. If " real
ity " is already and completely given, and if knowl
edge is just submissive acceptance, then, of course,
inquiry is only a subjective change in the human
" mind " or in " consciousness," these being sub
jective and "unreal."
But the very development of the sciences served
to reveal a peculiar and intolerable paradox.
Epistemology, having condemned inquiry once for
all to the region of subjectivity in an invidious
sense, finds itself in flat opposition in principle and
in detail to the assumption and to the results of the
sciences. Epistemology is bound to deny to the
results of the special sciences in detail any ulterior
objectivity just because they always are in a proc
ess of inquiry in solution. While a man may not
be halted at being told that his mental activities,
since his, are not genuinely real, many men will
draw violently back at being told that all the dis
coveries, conclusions, explanations, and theories of
the sciences share the same fate, being the products
186 BELIEFS AND EXISTENCES
of a discredited mind. And, in general, epistemol-
ogy, in relegating human thinking as inquiry to a
merely phenomenal region, makes concrete approx
imation and conformity to objectivity hopeless.
Even if it did square itself up to and by " reality "
it never could be sure of it. The ancient myth of
Tantalus and his effort to drink the water before
him seems to be ingeniously prophetic of modern
epistemology. The thirstier, the needier of truth
the human mind, and the intenser the efforts put
forth to slake itself in the ocean of being just
beyond the edge of consciousness, the more surely
the living waters of truth recede !
When such self-confessed sterility is joined with
consistent derogation of all the special results of
the special sciences, some one is sure to raise the cry
of " dog in the manger," or of " sour grapes." A
revision of the theory of thinking, of inquiry, would
seem to be inevitable ; a revision which should cease
trying to construe knowledge as an attempted ap
proximation to a reproduction of reality under con
ditions that condemn it in advance to failure ; a
revision which should start frankly from the fact
of thinking as inquiring, and purely external re
alities as terms in inquiries, and which should con
strue validity, objectivity, truth, and the test and
system of truths, on the basis of what they actu
ally mean and do within inquiry.
Such a standpoint promises ample revenge for
BELIEFS AND EXISTENCES 187
the long damnation and longer neglect to which
the principle of belief has been subjected. The
whole procedure of thinking as developed in those
extensive and intensive inquiries that constitute
the sciences, is but rendering into a systematic
technique, into an art deliberately and delightfully
pursued, the rougher and cruder means by which
practical human beings have in all ages worked
out the implications of their beliefs, tested them,
and endeavored in the interests of economy, effi
ciency, and freedom, to render them coherent with
one another. Belief, sheer, direct, unmitigated
belief, reappears as the working hypothesis ;
action that at once develops and tests belief re
appears in experimentation, deduction, demon
stration ; while the machinery of universals, axioms,
a priori truths, etc., becomes a systematization of
the way in which men have always worked out, in
anticipation of overt action, the implications of
their beliefs, with a view to revising them, in the
interests of obviating unfavorable, and securing
welcome consequences. Observation, with its ma
chinery of sensations, measurements, etc., is the
resurrection of the way in which agents have always
faced and tried to define the problems that face
them ; truth is the union of abstract postulated
meanings and of concrete brute facts in a way
that circumvents the latter by judging them from
a new standpoint, while it tests concepts by using
188 BELIEFS AND EXISTENCES
them as methods in the same active experience.
It all comes to experience personally conducted
and personally consummated.
Let consciousness of these facts dawn a little
more brightly over the horizon of epistemological
prejudices, and it will be seen that nothing pre
vents admitting the genuineness both of thinking
activities and of their characteristic results, ex
cept the notion that belief itself is not a genuine
ingredient of existence a notion which itself is not
only a belief, but a belief which, unlike the convic
tions of the common man and the hypotheses of
science, finds its proud proof in the fact that it
does not demean itself so unworthily as to work.
Once believe that beliefs themselves are as
" real " as anything else can ever be, and we have
a world in which uncertainty, doubtfulness, really
inhere ; and in which personal attitudes and re
sponses are real both in their own distinctive ex
istence, and as the only ways in which an as yet
undetermined factor of reality takes on shape,
meaning, value, truth. If " to wilful men the in
juries that they themselves procure, must be their
schoolmasters " and all beliefs are wilful then
by the same token the propitious evolutions of
meaning, which wilful men secure to an expectant
universe, must be their compensation and their
justification. In a doubtful and needy universe
elements must be beggarly, and the development
BELIEFS AND EXISTENCES 189
of personal beliefs into experimentally executed
systems of actions, is the organized bureau of
philanthropy which confers upon a travailing uni
verse the meaning for which it cries out. The
apostrophe of the poet is above all to man the
thinker, the inquirer, the knower:
O Dreamer! O Desirer, goer down
Unto untraveled seas in untried ships,
O crusher of the unimagined grape,
On unconceived lips.
2. Biology, psychology, and the social sciences
proffer an imposing body of concrete facts that
also point to the rehabilitation of belief to the
interpretation of knowledge as a human and prac
tical outgrowth of belief, not to belief as the state
to which knowledge is condemned in a merely finite
and phenomenal world. I need not, as I cannot,
here summarize the psychological revision which
the notions of sensation, perception, conception,
cognition in general have undergone, all to one in
tent. " Motor " is writ large on their face. The
testimony of biology is unambiguous to the effect
that the organic instruments of the whole intel
lectual life, the sense-organs and brain and their
connections, have been developed on a definitely
practical basis and for practical aims, for the
purpose of such control over conditions as will
sustain and vary the meanings of life. The his-
100 BELIEFS AND EXISTENCES
toric sciences are equally explicit in their evidence
that knowledge as a system of information and
instruction is a cooperative social achievement,
at all times socially toned, sustained, and directed ;
and that logical thinking is a reweaving through
individual activity of this social fabric at such
points as are indicated by prevailing needs and
aims.
This bulky and coherent body of testimony is
not, of course, of itself philosophy. But it sup
plies, at all events, facts that have scientific back
ing, and that are as worthy of regard as the facts
pertinent to any science. At the present time these
facts seem to have some peculiar claim just be
cause they present traits largely ignored in prior
philosophic formulations, while those belonging to
mathematics and physics have so largely wrought
their sweet will on systems. Again, it would seem
as if in philosophies built deliberately upon the
knowledge principle, any body of known facts
should not have to clamor for sympathetic atten
tion.
Such being the case, the reasons for ruling
psychology and sociology and allied sciences out of
competency to give philosophic testimony have
more significance than the bare denial of juris
diction. They are evidences of the deep-rooted
preconception that whatever concerns a particular
conscious agent, a wanting, struggling, satisfied
BELIEFS AND EXISTENCES 191
and dissatisfied being, must of course be only " phe
nomenal " in import.
This aversion is the more suggestive when the
professed idealist appears as the special champion
of the virginity of pure knowledge. The idealist,
so content with the notion that consciousness de
termines reality, provided it be done once for all,
at a jump and in lump, is so uneasy in presence
of the idea that empirical conscious beings genu
inely determine existences now and here! One is
reminded of the story told, I think, by Spencer.
Some committee had organized and contended,
through a long series of parliaments, for the
passage of a measure. At last one of their meet
ings was interrupted with news of success. Con
sternation was the result. What was to become
of the occupation of the committee? So, one asks,
what is to become of idealism at large, of the
wholesale unspecifiable determination of " reality "
by or in " consciousness," if specific conscious be
ings, John Smiths, and Susan Smiths (to say noth
ing of their animal relations), beings with bowels
and brains, are found to exercise influence upon
the character and existence of reals?
One would be almost justified in construing
idealism as a Pickwickian scheme, so willing is it to
idealize the principle of intelligence at the expense
of its specific undertakings, were it not that this
reluctance is the necessary outcome of the Stoic
192 BELIEFS AND EXISTENCES
basis and tenor of idealism its preoccupation
with logical contents and relations in abstraction
from their situs and function in conscious living
beings.
IV
I have suggested to you the naive conception of
the relation of beliefs to realities : that beliefs are
themselves real without discount, manifesting their
reality in the usual proper way, namely, by modify
ing and shaping the reality of other things, so that
they connect the bias, the preferences and affec
tions, the needs and endeavors of personal lives
with the values, the characters ascribed to things :
the latter thus becoming worthy of human ac
quaintance and responsive to human intercourse.
This was followed by a sketch of the history of
thought, indicating how beliefs and all they in
sinuate were subjected to preconceived notions of
knowledge and of " reality " as a monopolistic pos
session of pure intellect. Then I traced some of
the motifs that make for reconsideration of the
supposed uniquely exclusive relation of logical
knowledge and " reality " ; motifs that make for a
less invidiously superior attitude towards the con
victions of the common man.
In concluding, I want to say a word or two to
mitigate for escape is impossible some misun-
BELIEFS AND EXISTENCES 193
derstandings. And, to begin with, while possible
doubts inevitably troop with actual beliefs, the doc
trine in question is not particularly sceptical. The
radical empiricist, the humanist, the pragmatist,
label him as you will, believes not in fewer but in
more " realities " than the orthodox philosophers
warrant. He is not concerned, for example, in
discrediting objective realities and logical or uni
versal thinking; he is interested in such a reinter-
pretation of the sort of " reality " which these
things possess as will accredit, without deprecia
tion, concrete empirical conscious centers of action
and passion.
My second remark is to the opposite effect. The
intent is not especially credulous, although it starts
from and ends with the radical credulity of all
knowledge. To suppose that because the sciences
are ultimately instrumental to human beliefs, we
are therefore to be careless of the most exact possi
ble use of extensive and systematic scientific
methods, is like supposing that because a watch is
made to tell present time, and not to be an exem
plar of transcendent, absolute time, watches might
as well be made of cheap stuffs, casually wrought
and clumsily put together. It is the task of telling
present time, with all its urgent implications, that
brings home, steadies, and enlarges the responsi
bility for the best possible use of intelligence, the
instrument.
194 BELIEFS AND EXISTENCES
For one, I have no interest in the old, old scheme
of derogating from the worth of knowledge in
order to give an uncontrolled field for some special
beliefs to run riot in, be these beliefs even faith
in immortality, in some special sort of a Deity,
or in some particular brand of freedom. Any one
of our beliefs is subject to criticism, revision, and
even ultimate elimination through the development
of its own implications by intelligently directed
action. Because reason is a scheme of working out
the meanings of convictions in terms of one an
other and of the consequences they import in
further experience, convictions are the more, not
the less, amenable and responsible to the full exer
cise of reason. 1
Thus we are put on the road to that most de-
1 There will of course come in time with the development
of tMs point of view an organon of beliefs. The signs of
a genuine as against a simulated belief will be studied;
belief as a vital personal reaction will be discriminated from
habitual, incorporate, unquestioned (because unconsciously
exercised) traditions of social classes and professions. In
his " Will to Believe " Professor James has already laid
down two traits of genuine belief (viz., " forced option,"
and acceptance of responsibility for results) which are
almost always ignored in criticisms (really caricatures) of
his position. In the light of such an organon, one might
come to doubt whether belief in, say, immortality (as dis
tinct from hope on one side and a sort of intellectual bal
ance of probability of opinion on the other) can genuinely
exist at all.
BELIEFS AND EXISTENCES 195
sirable thing, the union of acknowledgment of
moral powers and demands with thoroughgoing
naturalism. No one really wants to lame man s
practical nature; it is the supposed exigencies of
natural science that force the hand. No one
really bears a grudge against naturalism for the
sake of obscurantism. It is the need of some sacred
reservation for moral interests that coerces. We
all want to be as naturalistic as we can be. But
the " can be " is the rub. If we set out with a
fixed dualism of belief and knowledge, then the
uneasy fear that the natural sciences are going to
encroach and destroy " spiritual values " haunts
us. So we build them a citadel and fortify it ;
that is, we isolate, professionalize, and thereby
weaken beliefs. But if beliefs are the most natu-
ral, and in that sense, the most metaphysical of
all things, and if knowledge is an organized tech
nique for working out their implications and in
terrelations, for directing their formation and em
ploy, how^ unnecessary , how petty the fear and the
caution. Because freedom of belief is ours, free
thought may exercise itself; the freer the thought
the more sure the emancipation of belief. Hug
some special belief and one fears knowledge; be
lieve in belief and one loves and cleaves to knowl
edge.
We have here, too, the possibility of a common
understanding, in thought, in language, in outlook,
196 BELIEFS AND EXISTENCES
of the philosopher and the common man. What
would not the philosopher give, did he not have
to part with some of his common humanity in order
to join a class? Does he not always, when chal
lenged, justify himself with the contention that all
men naturally philosophize, and that he but does
in a conscious and orderly way what leads to
harm when done in an indiscriminate and irreg
ular way ? If philosophy be at once a natural his
tory and a logic an art of beliefs, then its tech
nical justification is at one with its human justi
fication. The natural attitude of man, said Emer
son, is believing ; " the philosopher, after some
struggle, having only reasons for believing." Let
the struggle then enlighten and enlarge beliefs ;
let the reasons kindle and engender new beliefs.
Finally, it is not a solution, but a problem which
is presented. As philosophers, our disagreements
as to conclusions are trivial compared with our dis
agreement as to problems. To see the problem
another sees, in the same perspective and at the
same angle that amounts to something. Agree
ment in solutions is in comparison perfunctory.
To experience the same problem another feels
that perhaps is agreement. In a world where dis
tinctions are as invidious as comparisons are odi
ous, and where intellect works only by comparison
and distinction, pray what is one to do?
But beliefs are personal matters, and the person,
BELIEFS AND EXISTENCES 197
we may still believe, is social. To be a man is to
be thinking desire ; and the agreement of desires is
not in oneness of intellectual conclusion, but in the
sympathies of passion and the concords of action :
and yet significant union in affection and be
havior may depend upon a consensus in thought
that is secured only by discrimination and com
parison.
EXPERIENCE AND OBJECTIVE
IDEALISM *
TDEALISM as a philosophic system stands in
- such a delicate relation to experience as to in
vite attention. In its subjective form, or sensa
tionalism, it claims to be the last word of empiri-
cism. In its objective, or rational form, it claims
to make good the deficiencies of the subjective type,
by emphasizing the work of thought that supplies p-
the factors of objectivity and universality lacking
in sensationalism. With reference to experience
a$ it now is, such idealism is half opposed to em
piricism and half committed to it, antagonistic,
so far as existing experience is regarded as tainted
with a sensational character; favorable, so far as
this experience is even now prophetic of some final,,
all-comprehensive, or absolute experience, which
in truth is one with reality.
That this combination of opposition to present
experience with devotion to the cause of experience
1 Reprinted, with slight verbal changes, from the Philo
sophical Review, Vol. XV. (1906).
198
EXPERIENCE AND IDEALISM 199
in the abstract leaves objective idealism in a posi
tion of unstable equilibrium from which it can find
release only by euthanasia in a thorough-going
empiricism seems evident. Some of the reasons for
this belief may be readily approached by a sum
mary sketch of three historic episodes in which have
emerged important conceptions of experience and
its relation to reason. The first takes us to classic
Greek thought. Here experience means the preser
vation, through memory, of the net result of a mul
tiplicity of particular doings and sufferings; a
preservation that affords positive skill in main
taining further practice, and promise of success in|
new emergencies. The craft of the carpenter, the
art of the physician are standing examples of its
nature. It differs from instinct and blind routine
or servile practice because there is some knowledge
of materials, methods, and aims, in their adjust-
ment to one another. Yet the marks of its passive,
habitual origin are indelibly stamped upon it. On
the knowledge side it can never aspire beyond opin
ion, and if true opinion be achieved, it is only by
happy chance. On the active side it is limited to
the accomplishment of a special work or a particu
lar product, following some unjustified, because
assumed, method. Thus it contrasts with the true
knowledge of reason, which is direct apprehension,
self-revealing and self-validating, of an eternal
and harmonious content. The regions in which
200 EXPERIENCE AND IDEALISM
experience and reason respectively hold sway are
thus explained. Experience has to do with pro
duction, which, in turn, is relative to decay. It
deals with generation, becoming, not with finality,
being. Hence it is infected with the trait of rela
tive non-being, of mere imitativeness ; hence its
multiplicity, its logical inadequacy, its relativity
to a standard and end beyond itself. Reason, per
contra, has to do with meaning, with significance
(ideas, forms), that is eternal and ultimate. Since
the meaning of anything is the worth, the good,
the end of that thing, experience presents us with
partial and tentative efforts to achieve the em
bodiment of purpose, under conditions that doom
the attempt to inconclusiveness. It has, how
ever, its meed of reality in the degree in which
its results participate in meaning, the good,
reason.
From this classic period, then, comes the an
tithesis of experience as the historically achieved
embodiments of meaning, partial, multiple, inse
cure, to reason as the source, author, and con
tainer of meanmg, permanent, assured, unified.
Idealism means ideality, experience means brute
and broken facts. That things exist because of
and for the sake of meaning, and that experience
gives us meaning in a servile, interrupted, and
inherently deficient way such is the standpoint.
Experience gives us meaning in process of be-
EXPERIENCE AND IDEALISM 201
coming; special and isolated instances in which it
htippens, temporally, to appear, rather than mean
ing pure, undefiled, independent. Experience pre
sents purpose, the good, struggling against obsta
cles, "involved in matter."
Just how much the vogue of modern neo-Kan-
tian idealism, professedly built upon a strictly epis-
temological instead of upon a cosmological basis,
is due, in days of a declining theology, to a vague
sense that affirming the function of reason in the
constitution of a knowable world (which in its own
constitution as logically knowable may be, morally
and spiritually, anything you please), carries with
it an assurance of the superior reality of the good
and the beautiful as well as of the " true," it would
be hard to say. Certainly unction seems to have
descended upon epistemology, in apostolic succes
sion, from classic idealism ; so that neo-Kantianism
is rarely without a tone of edification, as if feeling
itself the patron of man s spiritual interests in/
contrast to the supposed crudeness and insensitive-
ness of naturalism and empiricism. At all events,
we find here one element in our problem: Ex
perience considered as the summary of past epi
sodic adventures and happenings in relation to ful
filled and adequately expressed meaning.
The second historic event centers about the con
troversy of innate ideas, or pure concepts. The
issue is between empiricism and rationalism as the-
202 EXPERIENCE AND IDEALISM
cries of the origin and validation of scientific
knowledge. The empiricist is he who feels that
the chief obstacle which prevents scientific method
from making way is the belief in pure thoughts,
not derived from particular observations and hence
not responsible to the course of experience. His
objection to the "high a priori road" is that it
introduces in irresponsible fashion a mode of pre
sumed knowledge which may be used at any turn
to stand sponsor for mere tradition and prejudice,
and thus to nullify the results of science resting
upon and verified by observable facts. Experi
ence thus comes to mean, to use the words of
Peirce, " that which is forced upon a man s recog
nition will-he, nill-he, and shapes his thoughts to
something quite different from what they natur
ally would have taken." 1 The same definition is
found in James, in his chapter on Necessary
Truths : " Experience means experience of some
thing foreign supposed to impress us whether
spontaneously or in consequence of our own ex
ertions and acts." 2 As Peirce points out, this
notion of experience as the foreign element that
forces the hand of thought and controls its
efficacy, goes back to Locke. Experience is " ob
servation employed either about external sensible
objects, or about the internal operations of our
1 C. S. Peirce, Monist, Vol. XVI., p. 150.
* Psychology, Vol. II., p. 618.
EXPERIENCE AND IDEALISM 203
minds " * as furnishing in short all the valid data
and tests of thinking and knowledge. This meaning,
thinks Peirce, should be accepted " as a landmark
which it would be a crime to disturb or displace."
The contention of idealism, here bound up with
rationalism, is that perception and observation
cannot guarantee knowledge in its honorific sense <
(science) ; that the peculiar differentia of scientific
knowledge is a constancy, a universality, and neces
sity that contrast at every point with perceptual
data, and that indispensably require the function
of conception. 2 In short, qualitative transforma
tion of facts (data of perception), not their me- ,
chanical subtraction and recombination, is the dif
ference between scientific and perceptual knowl
edge. Here the problem which emerges is, of
course, the significance of perception and of con
ception in respect to experience. 3
1 " Essay concerning Human Understanding," Book II.,
Chapter II., 2. Locke doubtless derived this notion from
Bacon.
3 It is hardly necessary to refer to the stress placed upon
mathematics, as well as upon fundamental propositions in
logic, ethics, and cosmology.
1 Of course there are internal historic connections between
experience as effective "memory," and experience as "ob-*-
servation." But the motivation and stress, the problem, has
quite shifted. It may be remarked that Hobbes still writes
under the influence of the Aristotelian conception. " Ex
perience is nothing but Memory " ("Elements of Philosophy,"
Part I., Chapter I., 2), and hence is opposed to science.
204 EXPERIENCE AND IDEALISM
The third episode reverses in a curious man
ner (which confuses present discussion) the notion
of experience as a foreign, alien, coercive material.
It regards experience as a fortuitous association,
by merely psychic connections, of individualistic
states of consciousness. This is due to the Humian
development of Locke. The "objects " and " op
erations," which to Locke were just given and
secured in observation, become shifting complexes
of subjective sensations and ideas, whose apparent
permanency is due to discoverable illusions. This,
of course, is the empiricism which made Kant so
uneasily toss in his dogmatic slumbers (a tossing
that he took for an awakening) ; and which, by re
action, called out the conception of thought as a
function operating both to elevate perceptual
data to scientific status, and also to confer ob
jective status, or knowable character, upon even
sensational data and their associative combina
tions. 1 Here emerges the third element in our
problem: The function of thought as furnishing
1 There are, of course, anticipations of Hume in Locke.
But to regard Lockeian experience as equivalent to Humian
is to pervert history. Locke, as he was to himself and to
the century succeeding him, was not a sub j ectivist, but in the
main a common sense obj ectivist. It was this that gave him
his historic influence. But so completely has the Hume-
Kant controversy dominated recent thinking that it is con
stantly projected backward. Within a few weeks I have
seen three articles, all insisting that the meaning of the
EXPERIENCE AND IDEALISM 205
objectivity to any experience that claims cognitive
reference or capacity.
Summing up the matter, idealism stands forth
with its assertion of thought or reason as (1) the
sponsor for all significance, ideality, purpose, in
experience, the author of the good and the beauti
ful as well as the true; (2) the power, located in
pure conceptions, required to elevate perceptive or
observational material to the plane of science ; and
(3) the constitution that gives objectivity, even
the semblance of order, system, connection, mutual
reference, to sensory data that without its assist
ance are mere subjective flux.
term experience must be subjective, and stating or implying
that those who take the term objectively are subverters of
established usage! But a casual study of the dictionary
will reveal that experience has always meant " what is ex
perienced," observation as a source of knowledge, as well as
the act, fact, or mode of experiencing. In the Oxford Dic
tionary, the (obsolete) sense of " experimental testing," of
actual " observation of facts and events," and " the fact of
being consciously affected by an act " have almost con
temporaneous datings, viz., 1384, 1377, and 1382 respectively.
A usage almost more objective than the second, the Baconian
use, is "what has been experienced; the events that have
taken place within the knowledge of an individual, a com
munity, mankind at large, either during a particular period
or generally." This dates back to 1607. Let us have no
more captious criticisms and plaints based on ignorance of
linguistic usage. [This pious wish has not been met. J. D.,
1909.J
206 EXPERIENCE AND IDEALISM
II
I begin the discussion with the last-named func
tion. Thought is here conceived as a priori, not
in the sense of particular innate ideas, but of a
function that constitutes the very possibility of,
any objective experience, any experience involving
reference beyond its own mere subjective happen
ing. I shall try to show that idealism is con
demned to move back and forth between two in
consistent interpretations of this a priori thought.
It is taken to mean both the organized, the regu
lated, the informed, established character of ex
perience, an order immanent and constitutional;
and an agency which organizes, regulates, forms*
synthesizes, a power operative and constructive.
And the oscillation between and confusion of these
two diverse senses is necessary to Neo-Kantian
idealism.
When Kant compared his work in philosophy to
that of the men who introduced construction into
geometry, and experimentation into physics and
chemistry, the point of his remarks depends upon
taking the a priori worth of thought in a regula
tive, directive, controlling sense, thought as con-~
sciously, intentionally, making an experience differ
ent in a determinate sense and manner. But the
point of his answer to Hume consists in taking the
a priori in the other sense, as something which
EXPERIENCE AND IDEALISM 207
is already immanent in any experience, and which
accordingly makes no determinate difference to any
one experience as compared with any other, or with
any past or future form of itself. The concept is
treated first as that which makes an experience
actually different, controlling its evolution towards
consistency, coherency, and objective reliability;
then, it is treated as that which has already effected
the organization of any and every experience that
comes to recognition at all. The fallacy from
which he never emerges consists in vibrating be
tween the definition of a concept as a rule of con- _
structive synthesis in a differential sense, and the
definition of it as a static endowment lurking in
* mind," and giving automatically a hard and fixed
law for the determination of every experienced
object. The a priori conceptions of Kant as im
manent fall, like the rain, upon the just and the
unjust; upon error, opinion, and hallucination.
But Kant slides into these a priori functions the
preferential values exercised by empirical reflect
ive thought. The concept of triangle, taken geo
metrically, means doubtless a determinate method
of construing space elements; but to Kant it also
means something that exists in the mind prior to
all such geometrical constructions and that un
consciously lays down the law not only for their
conscious elaboration, but also for any space per
ception, even for that which takes a rectangle to
208 EXPERIENCE AND IDEALISM
be a triangle. The first of the meanings is intelli
gible, and marks a definite contribution to the logic
of science. But it is not "objective idealism";
it is a contribution to a revised empiricism. The
second is a dark saying.
That organization of some sort exists in every
experience I make no doubt. That isolation, dis
crepancy, the fragmentary, the incompatible, are
brought to recognition and to logical function only
with reference to some prior existential mode of
organization seems clear. And it seems equally
clear that reflection goes on with profit only be
cause the materials with which it deals have al
ready some degree of organization, or exemplify
various relationships. As against Hume, or even
Locke, we may be duly grateful to Kant for en
forcing acknowledgment of these facts. But the
acknowledgment means simply an improved and
revised empiricism.
For, be it noted, this organization, first, is not
the work of reason or thought, unless " reason " be
stretched beyond all identification; and, secondly,
it has no sacrosanct or finally valid and worth-
f ul character. ( 1 ) Experience always carries with
it and within it certain systematized arrangements,
certain classifications (using the term without in-
tellectualistic prejudice), coexistent and serial. If
we attribute these to " thought " then the structure
of the brain of a Mozart which hears and combines
EXPERIENCE AND IDEALISM 209
sounds in certain groupings, the psycho-physical
visual habit of the Greek, the locomotor apparatus
of the human body in the laying-out and plotting
of space is " thought." Social institutions, es
tablished political customs, effect and perpetuate
modes of reaction and of perception that compel
a certain grouping of objects, elements, and values.
A national constitution brings about a definite
arrangement of the factors of human action which
holds even physical things together in certain
determinate orders. Every (Successful economic
process, with its elaborate divisions and adjust
ments of labor, of materials and instruments, is
just such an objective organization. Now it is one
thing to say that thought has played a part in
the origin and development of such organizations, *
and continues to have a role in their judicious em
ployment and application ; it is another to say that
these organizations are thought, or are its ex- i
elusive product. Thought that functions in these
ways is distinctively reflective thought, thought as
practical, volitional, deliberately exercised for spe
cific aims thought as an act, an art of skilled
mediation. As reflective thought, its end is to
terminate its own first and experimental forms, and
to secure an organization which, while it may evoke
new reflective thinking, puts an end to the think
ing that secured the organization. As organiza
tions, as established, effectively controlling ar-
210 EXPERIENCE AND IDEALISM
rangements of objects in experience, their mark
is that they are not thoughts, but habits, customs
of action. 1
Moreover, such reflective thought as does inter
vene in the formation and maintenance of these
practical organizations harks back to prior prac
tical organizations, biological and social in nature.
It serves to valuate organizations already existent
as biological functions and instincts, while, as itself
a biological activity, it redirects them to new con
ditions and results. Recognize, for example, that
a geometric concept is a practical locomotor
function of arranging stimuli in reference to main
tenance of life activities brought into consciousness,
and then serving as a center of reorganization of
such activities to freer, more varied flexible and
valuable forms ; recognize this, and we have the
truth of the Kantian idea, without its excrescences
and miracles. The concept is the practical activ
ity doing consciously and artfully what it had
aforetime done blindly and aimlessly, and thereby
not only doing it better but opening up a freer
world of significant activities. Thought as such a
reorganization of natural functions does naturally
* t
1 The relationship of organization and thought is precisely
that which we find psychologically typified by the rhythmic
functions of habit and attention, attention being always,
ab quo, a sign of the failure of habit, and, ad quern, a recon
structive modification of habit.
EXPERIENCE AND IDEALISM 211
what Kantian forms and schematizations do only
supernaturally. In a word, the constructive or
organizing activity of " thought " does not inhere
in thought as a transcendental function, a form or
mode of some supra-empirical ego, mind, or con
sciousness, but in thought as itself vital activity.
And in any case we have passed to the idea of
thought as reflectively reconstructive and direc
tive, and away from the notion of thought as
immanently constitutional and organizational.
To make this passage and yet to ignore its
existence and import is essential to objective
idealism.
(2) No final or ultimate validity attaches to
these original arrangements and institutionaliza-
tions in any case. Their value is teleological and
experimental, not fixedly ontological. " Law and
order " are good things, but not when they become
rigidity, and create mechanical uniformity or rou
tine. Prejudice is the acme of the a priori. Of
the a priori in this sense we may say what is always
to be said of habits and institutions : They are good
servants, but harsh and futile masters. Organi
zation as already effected is always in danger of
becoming a mortmain; it may be a way of sacri
ficing novelty, flexibility, freedom, creation to
static standards. The curious inefficiency of ideal
ism at this point is evident in the fact that genuine
thought, empirical reflective thought, is required
EXPERIENCE AND IDEALISM
precisely for the purpose of re-forming established
and set formations.
In short, (a) a priori character is no exclusive
function of thought. Every biological function,
every motor attitude, every vital impulse as the
carrying vehicle of experience is thus apriority
regulative in prospective reference; what we call
apperception, expectation, anticipation, desire, de
mand, choice, are pregnant with this constitu
tive and organizing power. (6) In so far as
" thought " does exercise such reorganizing power,
it is because thought is itself still a vital function.
(c) Objective idealism depends not only upon ig
noring the existence and capacity of vital func
tions, but upon a profound confusion of the con
stitutional a priori, the unconsciously dominant,
with empirically reflective thought. In the sense
in which the a priori is worth while as an attribute
of thought, thought cannot be what the objective
idealist defines it as being. Plain, ordinary, every
day empirical reflections, operating as centers of
inquiry, of suggestion, of experimentation, exer
cise the valuable function of regulation, in an
auspicious direction, of subsequent experiences.
The categories of accomplished systematization
cover alike the just and the unjust, the false and
the true, while (unlike God s rain) they exercise
no specific or differential activity of stimulation
and control. Error and inefficiency, as well as
EXPERIENCE AND IDEALISM 213
value and energy, are embodied in our objective
institutional classifications. As a special favor,
will not the objective idealist show how, in some
one single instance, his immanent " reason " makes
any difference as respects the detection and elimi
nation of error, or gives even the slightest assist
ance in discovering and validating the truly worth-
ful? This practical work, the life blood of in
telligence in everyday life and in critical science, is
done by the despised and rejected matter of con-~
crete empirical contexts and functions. General
izing the issue: If the immanent organization be
ascribed to thought, why should its work be such
as to demand continuous correction and revision?
If specific reflective thought, as empirical, be sub
ject to all the limitations supposed to inhere in
experience as such, how can it assume the burden
of making good, of supplementing, reconstruct
ing, and developing meanings? The logic of the
case seems to be that Neo-Kantian idealism gets
its status against empiricism by first accepting
the Humian idea of experience, while the express
import of its positive contribution is to show the
non-existence (not merely the cognitive invalidity)
of anything describable as mere states of subjective
consciousness. Thus in the end it tends to destroy
itself and to make way for a more adequate em
piricism.
214 EXPERIENCE AND IDEALISM
III
In the above discussion, I have unavoidably an
ticipated the second problem: the relation of con
ceptual thought to perceptual data. A distinct
aspect still remains, however. Perception, as well
as apriority, is a term harboring a fundamental
ambiguity. It may mean (1) a distinct type of
activity, predominantly practical in character,
though carrying at its heart important cognitive
and esthetic qualities; or () a distinctively cog-
nitional experience, the function of observation as
explicitly logical a factor in science qua science.
In the first sense, as recent functional empiricism
(working in harmony with psychology, but not
itself peculiarly psychological) has abundantly
shown, perception is primarily an act of adjust
ment of organism and environment, differing from
a mere reflex or instinctive adaptation in that, in
order to compensate for the failure of the instinc
tive adjustment, it requires an objective or dis
criminative presentation of conditions of action:
the negative conditions or obstacles, and the posi
tive conditions or means and resources. 1 This, of
1 Compare, for example, Dr. Stuart s paper in the " Studies
in Logical Theory," pp. 253-256. I may here remark that I
remain totally unable to see how the interpretation of ob
jectivity to mean controlling conditions of action (nega
tive and positive as above) derogates at all from its naive
EXPERIENCE AND IDEALISM 215
course, is its cognitive phase. In so far as the
material thus presented not only serves as a direct
cue to further successful activity (successful in
the overcoming of obstacles to the maintenance of
the function entered upon) but presents auxiliary
collateral objects and qualities that give addi
tional range and depth of meaning to the activity
of adjustment, perceiving is esthetic as well as
intellectual. 1
Now such perception cannot be made antithetical
to thought, for it may itself be surcharged with
any amount of imaginatively supplied and reflect
ively sustained ideal factors such as are needed
to determine and select relevant stimuli and to
suggest and develop an appropriate plan and
course of behavior. The amount of such saturat
ing intellectual material depends upon the com
plexity and maturity of the behaving agent. Such
perception, moreover, is strictly teleological, since
it arises from an experienced need and functions to
fulfil the purpose indicated by this need. The
cognitipnal content is, indeed, carried by affec-!
tional and intentional contexts.
objectivity, or how it connotes cognitive subjectivity, or is
in any way incompatible with a common-sense realistic
theory of perception.
1 For this suggested interpretation of the esthetic as sur
prising, or unintended, gratuitous collateral reinforcement,
gee Gordon, "Psychology of Meaning."
216 EXPERIENCE AND IDEALISM
Then we have perception as scientific observa
tion. This involves the deliberate, artful exclu
sion of affectional and purposive factors as exer
cising mayhap a vitiating influence upon the cog
nitive or objective content; or, more strictly speak
ing, a transformation of the more ordinary or
" natural " emotional and purposive concomitants,
into what Bain calls " neutral " emotion, and a
purpose of finding out what the present conditions
of the problem are. (The practical feature is not
thus denied or eliminated, but the overweening in
fluence of a present dominating end is avoided, so
that change of the character of the end may be
effected, if found desirable.) Here observation
may be opposed to thought, in the sense that exact
and minute description may be set over against
interpretation, explanation, theorizing, and infer
ence. In the wider sense of thought as equaling
reflective process, the work of observation and de
scription forms a constituent division of labor
within thought. The impersonal demarcation and
accurate registration of what is objectively there
or present occurs for the sake (a) of eliminating
meaning which is habitually but uncritically re
ferred, and (b) of getting a basis for a meaning
(at first purely inferential or hypothetical) that
may be consistently referred; and that (c), rest
ing upon examination and not upon mere a priori
custom, may weather the strain of subsequent ex-
EXPERIENCE AND IDEALISM 217
periences. But in so far as thought is identified
with the conceptual phase as such of the entire .
logical function, observation is, of course, set over
against thought: deliberately, purposely, and art
fully so.
It is not uncommon to hear it said that the
Lockeian movement was all well enough for psy
chology, but went astray because it invaded the
field of logic. If we mean by psychology a natu
ral history of what at any time passes for knowl
edge, and by logic conscious control in the direc
tion of grounded assurance, this remark appears
to reverse the truth. As a natural history of
knowledge in the sense of opinion and belief,
Locke s account of discrete, simple ideas or mean
ings, which are compounded and then distributed,
does palpable violence to the facts. But every
line of Locke shows that he was interested in knowl
edge in its honorific sense controlled certainty,
or, where this is not feasible, measured probability.
And to logic as an account of the way in which
we by art build up a tested assurance, a rational
ized conviction, Locke makes an important positive
contribution. The pity is that he inclined to
take it for the whole of the logic of science, 1 not
seeing that it was but a correlative division of
1 This, however, is not strictly true, since Locke goes far to
supply the means of his own correction in his account of the
" workmanship of the understanding."
218 EXPERIENCE AND IDEALISM
labor to the work of hypotheses or inference ; and
that he tended to identify it with a natural his
tory or psychology. The latter tendency exposed
Locke to the Humian interpretation, and perma
nently sidetracked the positive contribution of his
theory to logic, while it led to that confusion of
an untrue psychology with a logic valid within
limits, of which Mill is the standard example.
In analytic observation, it is a positive object
to strip off all inferential meaning so far as may
be to reduce the facts as nearly as may be to
derationalized data, in order to make possible a
new and better rationalization. In and because of
this process, the perceptual data approach the
limit of a disconnected manifold, of the brutely
given, of the merely sensibly present; while mean
ing stands out as a searched for principle of uni
fication and explanation, that is, as a thought, a
concept, an hypothesis. The extent to which this
is carried depends wholly upon the character of
the specific situation and problem; but, speaking
generally, or of limiting tendencies, one may say
it is carried to mere observation, pure brute de
scription, on the one side, and to mere thought,
that is hypothetical inference, on the other.
So far as Lock ignored this instrumental char
acter of observation, he naturally evoked and
strengthened rationalistic idealism ; he called forth
its assertion of the need of reason, of concepts, of
EXPERIENCE AND IDEALISM
universals, to constitute knowledge in its eulogistic
sense. But two contrary errors do not make a
truth, although they suggest and determine the
nature of some relevant truth. This truth is the
empirical origin, in a determinate type of situa
tion, of the contrast of observation and concep
tion; the empirical relevancy and the empirical
worth of this contrast in controlling the character
of subsequent experiences. To suppose that per
ception as it concretely exists, either in the early
experiences of the animal, the race, or the in
dividual, or in its later refined and expanded ex
periences, is identical with the sharply analyzed,
objectively discriminated and internally disinte
grated elements of scientific observation, is a per
version of experience; a perversion for which, in
deed, professed empiricists set the example, but
which idealism must perpetuate if it is not to find
its end in an improved, functional empiricism. 1
IV
We come now to the consideration of the third
element in our problem; ideality, important and
1 Plato, especially in his " Theaetetus," seems to have
begun the procedure of blasting the good name of per
ceptive experience by identifying a late and instrumental
distinction, having to do with logical control, with all ex
perience whatsoever.
220 EXPERIENCE AND IDEALISM
normative value, in relation to experience ; the an
tithesis of experience as a tentative, fragmentary,
and ineffectual embodiment of meaning over
against the perfect, eternal system of meanings
which experience suggests even in nullifying and
mutilating.
That from the memory standpoint experience
presents itself as a multiplicity of episodic events
with just enough continuity among them to sug
gest principles true " on the whole " or usually,
but without furnishing instruction as to their ex
act range and bearing, seems obvious enough.
Why should it not? The motive which leads to
reflection on past experience could be satisfied in
no other way. Continuities, connecting links, dy
namic transitions drop out because, for the pur
pose of the recollection, they would be hindrances
if now repeated ; or because they are now available
only when themselves objectified in definite terms
and thus given a quasi independent, a quasi atom
istic standing of their own. This is the only alter
native to what the psychologists term " total rem
iniscence," which, so far as total, leave us with
an elephant on our hands. Unless we are going
to have a wholesale revivification of the past, giv
ing us just another embarrassing present experi
ence, illusory because irrelevant, memory must
work by retail by summoning distinct cases,
events, sequences, precedents. Dis-membering is
EXPERIENCE AND IDEALISM 221
a positively necessary part of re-membering. But
the resulting disjecta membra are in no sense
experience as it was or is ; they are simply elements
held apart, and yet tentatively implicated together,
in present experience for the sake of its most favor
able evolution ; evolution in the direction of the
most excellent meaning or value conceived. If the
remembering is efficacious and pertinent, it reveals
the possibilities of the present ; that is to say, it
clarifies the transitive, transforming character
that belongs inherently to the present. The dis
membering of the vital present into the discon
nected past is correlative to an anticipation, an
idealization of the future.
Moreover, the contingent character of the prin
ciple or rule that emerges from a survey of cases,
instances, as distinct from a fixed or necessary
character, secures just what is wanted in the ex
igency of a prospective idealization, or refinement
of excellence. It is just this character that
secures flexibility and variety of outlook, that
makes possible a consideration of alternatives and
an attempt to select and to execute the more
worthy among them. The fixed or necessary law
would mean a future like the past a dead, an
unidealized future. It is exasperating to imagine
how completely different would have been Aris
totle s valuation of " experience " with respect to
its contingency, if he had but once employed the
222 EXPERIENCE AND IDEALISM
function of developing and perfecting value, in
stead of the function of knowing an unalterable
object, as the standard by which to estimate and
measure intelligence.
The one constant trait of experience from its
crudest to its most mature forms is that its jcon-
tents undergo change of meaning, and of meaning
in the sense of excellence, value. Every experi
ence is in-course, 1 in course of becoming worse or
better as to its contents, or in course of conscious
endeavor to sustain some satisfactory level of
value against encroachment or lapse. In this ef
fort, both precedent, the reduction of the present
idealization, the anticipation of the possible,
though doubtful, future, emerge. Without ideal
ization, that is, without conception of the favor
able issue that the present, defined in terms of
precedents, may portend in its transition, the
recollection of precedents, arid the formulation of
tentative rules is nonsense. But without the identi
fication of the present in terms of elements sug
gested by the past, without recognition, the ideal,
1 Compare James, " Continuous transition is one sort of
conjunctive relation; and to be a radical empiricist means to
hold fast to this conjunctive relation of all others, for this
is the strategic point, the position through which, if a hole
be made, all the corruptions of dialectics and all the meta
physical fictions pour into our philosophy." Journal of
Philosophy, Psychology, and Scientific Methods, Vol. I., p.
536.
EXPERIENCE AND IDEALISM 223
the value projected as end, remains inert, helpless,
sentimental, without means of realization. Re
sembling cases and anticipation, memory and ideal
ization, are the corresponding terms in which a
present experience has its transitive force analyzed
into reciprocally pertinent means and ends.
That an experience will change in content and
value is the one thing certain. How it will change
is the one thing naturally uncertain. Hence the
import of the art of reflection and invention. Con
trol of the character of the change in the direcfion
of the worthful is the common business of theory
and practice. Here is the province of the episodic
recollection of past history and of the idealized
foresight of possibilities. The irrelevancy of an
objective idealism lies in the fact that it totally
ignores the position and function of ideality in
sustained and serious endeavor. Were values auto
matically injected and kept in the world of ex
perience by any force not reflected in human mem
ories and projects, it would make no difference
whether this force were a Spencerian environment
or an Absolute Reason. Did purpose ride in a
cosmic automobile toward a predestined goal, it
would not cease to be physical and mechanical in
quality because labeled Divine Idea, or Perfect
Reason. The moral would be " let us eat, drink,
and be merry," for to-morrow or if not this to
morrow, then upon some to-morrow, unaffected by
224, EXPERIENCE AND IDEALISM
our empirical memories, reflections, inventions,
and idealizations the cosmic automobile arrives.
Spirituality, ideality, meaning as purpose, would
be the last things to present themselves if objective
idealism were true. Values cannot be both ideal
and given, and their " given " character is em
phasized, not transformed, when they are called
eternal and absolute. But natural values become
ideal the moment their maintenance is dependent
upon the intentional activities of an empirical
agent. To suppose that values are ideal because
they are so eternally given is the contradiction in
which objective idealism has intrenched itself. Ob
jective ontological teleology spells machinery. Re
flective and volitional, experimental teleology alone
spells ideality. 1 Objective, rationalistic idealism
breaks upon the fact that it can have no intermedi
ary between a brutally achieved embodiment of
meaning (physical in character or else of that pecu
liar quasi-physical character which goes generally
by the name of metaphysical) and a total opposition
of the given and the ideal, connoting their mutual
indifference and incapacity. An empiricism that
acknowledges the transitive character of experi
ence, and that acknowledges the possible control
1 One of the not least of the many merits of Santayana s
"Life of Reason" is the consistency and vigor with which
is upheld the doctrine that significant idealism means ideal
ization.
EXPERIENCE AND IDEALISM 225
\6f the character of the transition by means of
intelligent effort, has abundant opportunity to
celebrate in productive art, genial morals, and
impartial inquiry the grace and the severity of
the ideal.
THE POSTULATE OF IMMEDIATE
EMPIRICISM l
THE criticisms made upon that vital but still
unformed movement variously termed radical
empiricism, pragmatism, humanism, functionalism,
according as one or another aspect of it is upper
most, have left me with a conviction that the
fundamental difference is not so much in matters
overtly discussed as in a presupposition that re
mains tacit : a presupposition as to what experience
is and means. To do my little part in clearing
up the confusion, I shall try to make my own
presupposition explicit. The object of this paper
is, then, to set forth what I understand to be the
postulate and the criterion of immediate empiri-
1 Reprinted, with very slight change, from the Journal of
Philosophy, Psychology, and Scientific Methods, Vol. II., No.
15, July, 1905.
2 All labels are, of course, obnoxious and misleading. I
hope, however, the term will be taken by the reader in the
sense in which it is forthwith explained, and not in some
more usual and familiar sense. Empiricism, as herein used,
is as antipodal to sensationalistic empiricism, as it is to
transcendentalism, and for the same reason. Both of these
systems fall back on something which is defined in non-
THE POSTULATE OF EMPIRICISM 227
Immediate empiricism postulates that things
anything, everything, in the ordinary or non
technical use of the term " thing " are what they
are experienced as. Hence, if one wishes to de
scribe anything truly, his task is to tell what it is
experienced as being. If it is a horse that is to
be described, or the equus that is to be defined,
then must the horse-trader, or the jockey, or the
timid family man who wants a " safe driver," or
the zoologist or the paleontologist tell us what the
horse is which is experienced. If these accounts
turn out different in some respects, as well as con
gruous in others, this is no reason for assuming
the content of one to be exclusively " real," and
that of others to be " phenomenal " ; for each ac
count of what is experienced will manifest that it is
the account of the horse-dealer, or of the zoologist,
and hence will give the conditions requisite
for understanding the differences as well as the
agreements of the various accounts. And the
principle varies not a whit if we bring in the psy
chologist s horse, the logician s horse, or the meta
physician s horse.
directly-experienced terms in order to justify that which is
directly experienced. Hence I have criticised such empiri
cism (Philosophical Review, Vol. XI., No. 4, p. 364) as es
sentially absolutistic in character; and also ("Studies in
Logical Theory," pp. 30, 58) as an attempt to build up ex
perience in terms of certain methodological checks and cues
of attaining certainty.
228 THE POSTULATE OF EMPIRICISM
In each case, the nub of the question is, what
sort of experience is denoted or indicated: a con
crete and determinate experience, varying, when it
varies, in specific real elements, and agreeing, when
it agrees, in specific real elements, so that we have
a contrast, not between a Reality, and various
approximations to, or phenomenal representations
of Reality, but between different reals of experi
ence. Arid the reader is begged to bear in mind
that from this standpoint, when " an experience "
or " some sort of experience " is referred to, " some
thing " or " some sort of thing " is always
meant.
Now, this statement that things are what they
are experienced to be is usually translated into
the statement that things (or, ultimately, Reality,
Being) are only and just what they are known to
be or that things are, or Reality is, what it is for
a conscious knower ^whether the knower be con
ceived primarily as a perceiver or as a thinker be
ing a further, and secondary, question. This is
the root-paralogism of all idealisms, whether sub
jective or objective, psychological or epistemolog-
ical. By our postulate, things are what they are
experienced to be ; and, unless knowing is the sole
and only genuine mode of experiencing, it is falla
cious to say that Reality is just and exclusively
what it is or would be to an all-competent all-
knower; or even that it is, relatively and piece-
THE POSTULATE OF EMPIRICISM 229
meal, what it is to a finite and partial knower. Or,
put more positively, knowing is one mode of ex
periencing, and the primary philosophic demand
(from the standpoint of immediatism) is to find out:
what sort of an experience knowing is or, con
cretely how things are experienced when they are
experienced as known things^ By concretely is
meant, obviously enough (among other things),
such an account of the experience of things as
known that will bring out the characteristic traits
and distinctions they possess as things of a know
ing experience, as compared with things/experi-
enced esthetically, or morally, or economically, or
technologically. To assume that, because from
the standpoint of the knowledge experience things
are what they are known to be, therefore, meta
physically, absolutely, without qualification, every
thing in its reality ( as distinct from its " appear
ance," or phenomenal occurrence) is what a knower
would find it to be, is, from the immediatist s stand- (
point, if not the root of all philosophic evil, at
least one of its main roots. For this leaves out
1 1 hope the reader will not therefore assume that from
the empiricist s standpoint knowledge is of small worth
or import. On the contrary, from the empiricist s stand
point it has all the worth which it is concretely experienced
as possessing which is simply tremendous. But the exact
nature of this worth is a thing to be found out in describing
what we mean by experiencing objects as known the actual
differences made or found in experience.
230 THE POSTULATE OF EMPIRICISM
I of account what the knowledge standpoint is itself
1 experienced as.
/ \- 1 start and am flustered by a noise heard. Em
pirically, that noise is fearsome; it really is, not
merely phenomenally or subjectively so. That is
what it is experienced as being. But, when I ex-
- perience the noise as a known thing, I find it to
be innocent of harm. It is the tapping of a shade
against the window, owing to movements of the
wind. The experience has changed ; that is, the
thing experienced has changed not that an un
reality has given place to a reality, nor that
some transcendental (unexperienced) Reality has
changed, 1 not that truth has changed, but just
and only the concrete reality experienced has
changed. I now feel ashamed of my fright ; and
the noise as fearsome is changed to noise as a wind-
curtain fact, and hence practically indifferent to
my welfare. This is a change of experienced ex
istence effected through the medium of cognition.
1 Since the non-empiricist believes in things-in-themselves
(which he may term " atoms," " sensations," transcendental
unities, a priori concepts, an absolute experience, or what
ever), and since he finds that the empiricist makes much of
change (as he must, since change is continuously experi
enced) he assumes that the empiricist means his own non-
empirical Realities are in continual flux, and he naturally
shudders at having his divinities so violently treated. But,
once recognize that the empiricist doesn t have any such
Realities at all, and the entire problem of the relation of
change to reality takes a very different aspect.
THE POSTULATE OF EMPIRICISM 231
The content of the latter experience cognitively re
garded is doubtless truer than the content of the
earlier ; but it is in no sense more real. To call it
truer, moreover, must, from the empirical stand
point, mean a concrete difference in actual things
experienced. 1 Again, in many cases, only in retro
spect is the prior experience cognitionally regarded
at all. In such cases, it is only in regard to con
trasted content m a subsequent experience that
the determination " truer " has force.
Perhaps some reader may now object that as
matter of fact the entire experience is cognitive,
but that the earlier parts of it are only imperfectly
so, resulting in a phenomenon that is not real;
while the latter part, being a more complete cog
nition, results in what is relatively, at least, more
real. 2 In short, a critic may say that, when I was
1 It would lead us aside from the point to try to tell
just what is the nature of the experienced difference we call
truth. Professor James s recen^ articles may well be con
sulted. The point to bear in mind here is just what sort
of a thing the empiricist must mean by true, or truer (the
noun Truth is, of course, a generic name for all cases of
"Trues"). The adequacy of any particular account is not
a matter to be settled by general reasoning, but by finding
out what sort of an experience the truth-experience actually
is.
2 I say " relatively," because the transcendentalist still
holds that finally the cognition is imperfect, giving us only
some symbol or phenomenon of Reality (which is only in
the Absolute or in some Thing-in-Itself) otherwise the
232 THE POSTULATE OF EMPIRICISM
frightened by the noise, I knew I was frightened;
otherwise there would have been no experience at
all. At this point, it is necessary to make a dis
tinction so simple and yet so all-fundamental that
I am afraid the reader will be inclined to pooh-
pooh it away as a mere verbal distinction. But
to see that to the empiricist this distinction is not
verbal, but genuine, is the precondition of any un
derstanding of him. The immediatist must, by his
postulate, ask what is the fright experienced as.
Is what is actually experienced, I-know-I-am-
frightened, or I-am-f rightened ? I see absolutely
no reason for claiming that the experience must
be described by the former phrase. In all proba
bility (and all the empiricist logically needs is just
one case of this sort) the experience is simply and
just of fright-at-the-noise. Later one may (or
may not) have an experience describable as I-
know-I-am- (or-was) and improperly or properly,
frightened. But this is a different experience
that is, a different thing. And if the critic goes
on to urge that the person " really " must have
known that he was frightened, I can only point
out that the critic is shifting the venue. He may
be right, but, if so, it is only because the " really "
curtain-wind fact would have as much ontological reality as
the existence of the Absolute itself: a conclusion at which
the non-empiricist perhorresces, for no reason obvious to
me save that it would put an end to his transcendentalism.
THE POSTULATE OF EMPIRICISM 233
is something not concretely experienced (whose na
ture accordingly is the critic s business) ; and this
is to depart from the empiricist s point of view,
to attribute to him a postulate he expressly
repudiates.
The material point may come out more clearly
if I say that we must make a distinction between
a thing as cognitive, and one as cognized. 1 I
should define a cognitive experience as one that
has certain bearings or implications which induce,
and fulfil themselves in, a subsequent experience
in which the relevant thing is experienced as cog
nized, as a known object, and is thereby trans
formed, or reorganized. The fright-at-the-noise
in the case cited is obviously cognitive, in this sense.
By description, it induces an investigation or in
quiry in which both noise and fright are objectively
stated or presented the noise as a shade-wind
fact, the fright as an organic reaction to a sudden
acoustic stimulus, a reaction that under the given
circumstances was useless or even detrimental, a
maladaptation. Now, pretty much all of experi
ence is of this sort (the " is " meaning, of course,
is experienced as), and the empiricist is false to his
principle if he does not duly note this fact. 2 But
* In general, I think the distinction between -4ve and -ed
one of the most fundamental of philosophic distinctions, and
one of the most neglected. The same holds of -tion and -ing.
2 What is criticised, now as " geneticism " (if I may coin
234 THE POSTULATE OF EMPIRICISM
he is equally false to his principle if he permits
himself to be confused as to the concrete differences
in the two things experienced.
There are two little words through explication
of which the empiricist s position may be brought
out " as " and " that." We may express his
presupposition by saying that things are what they
are experienced as being; or that to give a just
account of anything is to tell what that thing is
experienced to be. By these words I want to in
dicate the absolute, final, irreducible, and inex
pugnable concrete quale which everything experi
enced not so much has as is. To grasp this aspect
of empiricism is to see what the empiricist means
by objectivity, by the element of control. Sup
pose we take, as a crucial case for the empiricist,
an out and out illusion, say of Zollner s lines.
These are experienced as convergent; they are
" truly " parallel. If things are what they are
experienced as being, how can the distinction be
drawn between illusion and the true state of the
case? There is no answer to this question except
by sticking to the fact that the experience of the
lines as divergent is a concrete qualitative thing or
that. It is that experience which it is, and no
the word) and now as "pragmatism" is, in its truth, just
the fact that the empiricist does take account of the ex
perienced " drift, occasion, and contexture " of things experi
enced to use Hobbes s phrase.
THE POSTULATE OF EMPIRICISM 235
other. And if the reader rebels at the iteration of
such obvious tautology, I can only reiterate that
the realization of the meaning of this tautology is
the key to the whole question of the objectivity of
, experience, as that stands to the empiricist. The
lines of that experience are divergent ; not merely
seem so. The question of truth is not as to
whether Being or Non-Being, Reality or mere
- Appearance, is experienced, but as to the worth of
a certain concretely experienced thing. The only
way of passing upon this question is by sticking
in the most uncompromising fashion to that ex
perience as real. That experience is that two
lines with certain cross-hatchings are apprehended
as convergent ; only by taking that experience as
real and as fully real, is there any basis for, or
way of going to, an experienced knowledge that
the lines are parallel. It is in the concrete thing
as experienced that all the grounds and clues to
its own intellectual or logical rectification are con
tained. It is because this thing, afterwards ad
judged false, is a concrete that, that it develops
into a corrected experience (that is, experience of
a corrected thing we reform things just as we
reform ourselves or a bad boy) whose full content
is not a whit more real, but which is true or truer. 1
1 Perhaps the point would be clearer if expressed in this
way: Except as subsequent estimates of worth are intro
duced, " real " means only existent. The eulogistic connota-
236 THE POSTULATE OF EMPIRICISM
If any experience, then a determinate experi
ence; and this determinateness is the only, and is
the adequate, principle of control, or " objectiv
ity." The experience may be of the vaguest sort.
I may not see anything which I can identify as a
familiar object a table, a chair, etc. It may be
dark ; I may have only the vaguest impression that
there is something which looks like a table. Or I
may be completely befogged and confused, as when
one rises quickly from sleep in a pitch-dark room.
But this vagueness, this doubtfulness, this confu
sion is the thing experienced, and, qua real, is as
" good " a reality as the self-luminous vision of
an Absolute. It is not just vagueness, doubtful
ness, confusion, at large or in general. It is this
vagueness, and no other ; absolutely unique, abso
lutely what it is. 1 Whatever gain in clearness, in
fullness, in triteness of content is experienced must
grow out of some element in the experience of this
experienced as what it is. To return to the illu
sion: If the experience of the lines as convergent
is illusory, it is because of some elements in the
tion that makes the term Reality equivalent to true or
genuine being has great pragmatic significance, but its con
fusion with reality as existence is the point aimed at in the
above paragraph.
1 One does not so easily escape medieval Realism as one
thinks. Either every experienced thing has its own deter
minateness, its own unsubstitutable, unredeemable reality, or
else "generals" are separate existences after all.
THE POSTULATE OF EMPIRICISM 237
thing as experienced, not because of something de
fined in terms of externality to this particular ex
perience. If the illusoriness can be detected, it is
because the thing experienced is real, having within
its experienced reality elements whose own mutual
tension effects its reconstruction. Taken con
cretely, the experience of convergent lines con
tains within itself the elements of the transforma
tion of its own content. It is this thing, and not
some separate truth, that clamors for its own
reform. There is, then, from the empiricist s point
of view, no need to search for some aboriginal that
to which all successive experiences are attached,
and which is somehow thereby undergoing continu
ous change. Experience is always of thats; and
the most comprehensive and inclusive experience
of the universe that the philosopher himself can
obtain is the experience of a characteristic that,
From the empiricist s point of view, this is as true
of the exhaustive and complete insight of a hypo
thetical all-knower as of the vague, blind experi
ence of the awakened sleeper. As reals, they stand
on the same level. As trues, the latter has by
\definition the better of it; but if this insight is in
any way the truth of the blind awakening, it is
because the latter has, in its own determinate quale,
elements of real continuity with the former; it is,
ex hypothesi t transformable through a series of
experienced reals without break of continuity, into
238 THE POSTULATE OF EMPIRICISM
the absolute thought-experience. There is no need
of logical manipulation to effect the transforma
tion, nor could any logical consideration effect it.
If effected at all it is just by immediate experiences,
each of which is just as real (no more, no less)
as either of the two terms between which they lie.
Such, at least, is the meaning of the empiricist s
contention. So, when he talks of experience, he
does not mean some grandiose, remote affair that
/ is cast like a net around a succession of fleeting
experiences; he does not mean an indefinite total,
comprehensive experience which somehow engirdles
an endless flux; he means that things are what
they are experienced to be, and that every experi
ence is some thing.
From the postulate of empiricism, then (or, what
is the same thing, from a general consideration of
the concept of experience), nothing can be deduced,
not a single philosophical proposition. 1 The reader
1 Excepting, of course, some negative ones. One could
say that certain views are certainly not true, because, by
hypothesis, they refer to nonentities, i.e., non-empiricals.
But even here the empiricist must go slowly. From his
own standpoint, even the most professedly transcendental
statements are, after all, real as experiences, and hence
negotiate some transaction with facts. For this reason, he
cannot, in theory, reject them in toto, but has to show con
cretely how they arose and how they are to be corrected.
In a word, his logical relationship to statements that pro
fess to relate to things-in-themselves, unknowables, inexperi
enced substances, etc., is precisely that of the psychologist
to the Zollner lines.
THE POSTULATE OF EMPIRICISM 239
may hence conclude that all this just comes to the
truism that experience is experience, or is what it is.
/If one attempts to draw conclusions from the bare
concept of experience, the reader is quite right.
But the real significance of the principle is that of
a method of philosophical analysis a method iden
tical in kind (but differing in problem and hence
in operation) with that of the scientist. If you
wish to find out what subjective, objective, phys
ical, mental, cosmic, psychic, cause, substance, pur
pose, activity, evil, being, quality any philo
sophic term, in short means, go to experience and
see what the thing is experienced as.
Such a method is not spectacular ; it permits of
no offhand demonstrations of God, freedom, im
mortality, nor of the exclusive reality of matter,
or ideas, or consciousness, etc. But it supplies a
way of telling what all these terms mean. It may
seem insignificant, or chillingly disappointing, but
only upon condition that it be not worked. Philo
sophic conceptions have, I believe, outlived their
usefulness considered as stimulants to emotion, or
as a species of sanctions ; and a larger, more fruit
ful and more valuable career awaits them consid
ered as specifically experienced meanings.
[NOTE: The reception of this essay proved that I was un
reasonably sanguine in thinking that the foot-note of warn
ing, appended to the title, would for fend radical mis
apprehension. I see now that it was unreasonable to expect \
that the word " immediate " in a philosophic writing could j
240 THE POSTULATE OF EMPIRICISM
/be generally understood to apply to anything except knowl
edge, even though the body of the essay is a protest
against such limitation. But I venture to repeat that the
essay is not a denial of the necessity of " mediation," or re
flection, in knowledge, but is an assertion that the inferential
factor must exist, or must occur, and that all existence is
direct and vital, so that philosophy can pass upon its nature
! as upon the nature of all of the rest of its subject-matter
. only by first ascertaining what it exists or occurs of.
I venture to repeat also another statement of the text:
I do not mean by "immediate experience" any aboriginal
stuff out of which things are evolved, but I use the term
to indicate the necessity of employing in philosophy the
direct descriptive method that has now made its way in
all the natural sciences, with such modifications, of course,
as the subject itself entails.
f There is nothing in the text to imply that things exist in
I experience atomically or in isolation. When it is said that a
thing as cognized is different from an earlier non-cognition-
ally experienced thing, the saying no more implies lack of
continuity between the things, than the obvious remark
that a seed is different from a flower or a leaf denies their
(continuity. The amount and kind of continuity or dis
creteness that exists is to be discovered by recurring to
what actually occurs in experience.
Finally, there is nothing in the text that denies the
existence of things temporally prior to human experiencing
of them. Indeed, I should think it fairly obvious that we
experience most things as temporally prior to our ex
periencing of them. The import of the article is to the
effect that we are not entitled to draw philosophic (as dis
tinct from scientific) conclusions as to the meaning of prior
temporal existence till we have ascertained what it is to
experience a thing as past. These four disclaimers cover,
I think, all the misapprehensions disclosed in the four or
five controversial articles (noted below) that the original
essay evoked. One of these articles (that of Professor
THE POSTULATE OF EMPIRICISM 241
Woodbridge), raised a point of fact, holding that cogni-
tional experience tells us, without alteration, just what the
things of other types of experience are, and in that sense
transcends other experiences. This is too fundamental an
issue to discuss in a note, and I content myself with re
marking that with respect to it, the bearing of the article
is that the issue must be settled by a careful descriptive
survey of things as experienced, to see whether modifica
tions do not occur in existences when they are experienced as
known; i.e., as true or false in character. The reader
interested in following up this discussion is referred to
the following articles: Vol. II. of the Journal of Philosophy,
Psychology, and Scientific Methods, two articles by Bake-
well, p. 520 and p. 687; one by Bode, p. 658; one by Wood-
bridge, p. 573; Vol. III. of the same Journal, by Leighton,
p. 174.]
"CONSCIOUSNESS" AND EXPERIENCE 1
EVERY science in its final standpoint and work
ing aims is controlled by conditions lying out
side itself conditions that subsist in the practi-,
cal life of the time. With no science is this as
obviously true as with psychology. Taken with
out nicety of analysis, no one would deny that psy
chology is specially occupied with the individual ;
that it wishes to find out those things that proceed
peculiarly from the individual, and the mode of
their connection with him. Now, the way in which
the individual is conceived, the value that is attrib
uted to him, the things in his make-up that arouse
interest, are not due at the outset to psychology.
The scientific view regards these matters in a re
flected, a borrowed, medium. They are revealed
in the light of social life. An autocratic, an
aristocratic, a democratic society propound such
different estimates of the worth and place of
individuality; they procure for the individual as
an individual such different sorts of experience;
1 Delivered as a public address before the Philosophic
Union of the University of California, with the title
" Psychology and Philosophic Method," May, 1899, and pub
lished in the University Chronicle for August, 1899. Re
printed, with slight verbal changes, mostly excisions,
343
CONSCIOUSNESS AND EXPERIENCE 243
they aim at arousing such different impulses and at
organizing them according to such different pur
poses, that the psychology arising in each must
show a different temper.
In this sense, psychology is a political science.
While the professed psychologist, in his conscious
procedure, may easily cut his subject-matter loose
from these practical ties and references, yet the
starting point and goal of his course are none the
less socially set. In this conviction I venture to
introduce to an audience that could hardly be
expected to be interested in the technique of psy
chology, a technical subject, hoping that the
human meaning may yet appear.
There is at present a strong, apparently a grow
ing tendency to conceive of psychology as an ac
count of the consciousness of the individual, con
sidered as something in and by itself; conscious
ness, the assumption virtually runs, being of such
an order that it may be analyzed, described, and
explained in terms of just itself. The statement,
as commonly made, is that psychology is an ac
count of consciousness, qua consciousness ; and the
phrase is supposed to limit psychology to a certain
definite sphere of fact that may receive adequate
discussion for scientific purposes, without troubling
itself with what lies outside. Now if this concep
tion be true, there is no intimate, no important
connection of psychology and philosophy at large.
244 CONSCIOUSNESS AND EXPERIENCE
That philosophy, whose range is comprehensive,
whose problems are catholic, should be held down
by a discipline whose voice is as partial as its
material is limited, is out of the range of intelli
gent discussion.
But there is another possibility. If the indi
vidual of whom psychology treats be, after all, a
social individual, any absolute setting off and
apart of a sphere of consciousness as, even for sci
entific purposes, self-sufficient, is condemned in ad
vance. All such limitation, and all inquiries,
descriptions, explanations that go with it, are only
preliminary. " Consciousness " is but a symbol,
an anatomy whose life is in natural and social
operations. To know the symbol, the psychical
letter, is important ; but its necessity lies not within
itself, but in the need of a language for reading
the things signified. If this view be correct, we
cannot be so sure that psychology is without large
philosophic significance. Whatever meaning the
individual has for the social life that he both in
corporates and animates, that meaning has psy
chology for philosophy.
This problem is too important and too large to
suffer attack in an evening s address. Yet I ven
ture to consider a portion of it, hoping that such
things as appear will be useful clues in enter
ing wider territory. We may ask what is the effect
upon psychology of considering its material as
CONSCIOUSNESS AND EXPERIENCE 245
something so distinct as to be capable of treatment
without involving larger issues. In this inquiry
we take as representative some such account of the
science as this: Psychology deals with conscious
ness " as such " in its various modes and processes.
It aims at an isolation of each such as will permit
accurate description: at statement of its place in
the serial order such as will enable us to state the
laws by which one calls another into being, or as
will give the natural history of its origin, matur
ing, and dissolution. It is both analytic and syn
thetic analytic in that it resolves each state into
its constituent elements; synthetic in that it dis
covers the processes by which these elements com
bine into complex wholes and series. It leaves
alone it shuts out questions concerning the
validity, the objective import of these modifica
tions : of their value in conveying truth, in effect
ing goodness, in constituting beauty. For it is
just with such questions of worth, of validity, that
philosophy has to do.
Some such view as this is held by the great
majority of working psychologists to-day. A va
riety of reasons have conspired to bring about
general acceptance. Such a view seems to enroll
one in the ranks of the scientific men rather than
of the metaphysicians and there are those who
distrust the metaphysicians. Others desire to take
problems piecemeal and in detail, avoiding that ex-
246 CONSCIOUSNESS AND EXPERIENCE
cursion into ultimates, into that never-ending pan
orama of new questions and new possibilities that
seems to be the fate of the philosopher. While no
temperate mind can do other than sympathize with
this view, it is hardly more than an expedient.
For, as Mr. James remarks, after disposing of the
question of free-will by relegating it to the domain
of the metaphysician : " Metaphysics means only
an unusually obstinate attempt to think clearly and
consistently " and clearness and consistency are
not things to be put off beyond a certain point.
When the metaphysician chimes in with this new
found modesty of the psychologist, so different
from the disposition of Locke and Hume and the
Mills, salving his metaphysical conscience with the
remark it hardly possesses the dignity of a con
viction that the partial sciences, just because they
are partial, are not expected to be coherent with
themselves nor with one another; when the meta
physician, I say, praises the psychologist for stick
ing to his last, we are reminded that another mo
tive is also at work. There is a half-conscious
irony in this abnegation of psychology. It is not
the first time that science has assumed the work
of Cinderella ; and, since Mr. Huxley has happily
reminded her, she is not altogether oblivious, in her
modesty, of a possible future check to the pride
of her haughty sister, and of a certain coronation
that shall mark her coming to her own.
CONSCIOUSNESS AND EXPERIENCE 247
But, be the reasons as they may, there is little
doubt of the fact. Almost all our working psy
chologists admit, nay, herald this limitation of
their work. I am not presumptuous enough to
set myself against this array. I too proclaim
myself of those who believe that psychology has to
do (at a certain point, that is) with " conscious
ness as such." But I do not believe that the limi
tation is final. Quite the contrary : if " conscious
ness " or " state of consciousness " be given in
telligible meaning, I believe that this conception is
the open gateway into the fair fields of philosophy.
For, note you, the phrase is an ambiguous one. It
may mean one thing to the metaphysician who
proclaims : Here finally we have psychology rec
ognizing her due metes and bounds, giving bonds
to trespass no more. It may mean quite another
thing to the psychologist in his work whatever
he may happen to say about it. It may be that
the psychologist deals with states of consciousness
as the significant, the analyzable and describable
form, to which he reduces the things he is study
ing. Not that they are that existence, but that
they are its indications, its clues, in shape for
handling by scientific methods. So, for example,
does the paleontologist work. Those curiously
shaped and marked forms to which he is devoted
are not life, nor are they the literal termini of his
endeavor; but through them as signs and records
248 CONSCIOUSNESS AND EXPERIENCE
he construes a life. And again, the painter-artist
might well say that he is concerned only with
colored paints as such. Yet none the less through
them as registers and indices, he reveals to us
the mysteries of sunny meadow, shady forest, and
twilight wave. These are the things-in-themselves
of which the oils on his palette are phenomena.
So the preoccupation of the psychologist with
states of consciousness may signify that they are
the media, the concrete conditions to which he
purposely reduces his material, in order, through
them, as methodological helps, to get at and under
stand that which is anything but a state of con
sciousness. To him, however, who insists upon the
fixed and final limitation of psychology, the state
of consciousness is not the shape some fact takes
from the exigency of investigation; it is literally
the full fact itself. It is not an intervening term ;
it bounds the horizon. Here, then, the issue de
fines itself. I conceive that states of conscious
ness (and I hope you will take the phrase broadly
enough to cover all the specific data of psy-4
chology) have no existence before the psychologist
begins to work. He brings them into existence.
I What we are really after is the process of ex
perience, the way in which it arises and behaves.
We want to know its course, its history, its laws.
We want to know its various typical forms; how
each originates; how it is related to others; the
CONSCIOUSNESS AND EXPERIENCE 249
part it plays in maintaining an inclusive, expand
ing, connected course of experience. Our problem
as psychologists is to learn its modus operandi, its
method.
The paleontologist is again summoned to our
aid. In a given district he finds a great number
and variety of footprints. From these he goes to
work to construct the structure and the life habits
of the animals that made them. The tracks exist
undoubtedly ; they are there ; but yet he deals with ,
them not as final existences but as signs, phe
nomena in the literal sense. Imagine the hearing
that the critic would receive who should inform the
paleontologist that he is transcending his field of
scientific activity; that his concern is with foot
prints as such, aiming to describe each, to analyze
it into its simplest forms, to compare the different
kinds with one another so as to detect common ele
ments, and finally, thereby, to discover the laws
of their arrangement in space !
Yet the immediate data are footprints, and foot
prints only. The paleontologist does in a way do
all these things that our imaginary critic is urging
upon him. The difference is not that he arbitrarily
lugs in other data; that he invents entities and
faculties that are not there. The difference is
in his standpoint. His interest is in the animals,
and the data are treated in whatever way seems
likely to serve this interest. So with the psycholo-
250 CONSCIOUSNESS AND EXPERIENCE
gist. He is continually and perforce occupied
with minute and empirical investigation of special
facts states of consciousness, if you please. But
these neither define nor exhaust his scientific prob
lem. They are his footprints, his clues through
which he places before himself the life-process he is
studying with the further difference that his foot
prints are not after all given to him, but are de
veloped by his investigation. 1
The supposition that these states are somehow
existent by themselves and in this existence provide
the psychologist with ready-made material is just ,
the supreme case of the " psychological fallacy " :
the confusion of experience as it is to the one ex
periencing with what the psychologist makes out
of it with his reflective analysis.
The psychologist begins with certain operations,
acts, functions as his data. If these fall out of
1 This is a fact not without its bearings upon the question
of the nature and value of introspection. The objection that
introspection " alters " the reality and hence is untrust
worthy, most writers dispose of by saying that, after all, it
need not alter the reality so very much not beyond repair
and that, moreover, memory assists in restoring the ruins.
It would be simpler to admit the fact: that the purpose
> of introspection is precisely to effect the right sort of altera
tion. If introspection should give us the original experi
ence again, we should just be living through the experience
over again in direct fashion; as psychologists we should not
be forwarded one bit. Reflection upon this obvious proposi
tion may bring to light various other matters worthy of note.
CONSCIOUSNESS AND EXPERIENCE 251
sight in the course of discussion, it is only because
having been taken for granted, they remain to
control the whole development of the inquiry, and
to afford the sterling medium of redemption. Acts
such as perceiving, remembering, intending, lov
ing give the points of departure; they alone are
concrete experiences. To understand these ex
periences, under what conditions they arise, and
what effects they produce, analysis into states of
consciousness occurs. And the modes of conscious
ness that are figured remain unarranged and un
important, save as they may be translated back
into acts.
To remember is to do something, as much as
to shoe a horse, or to cherish a keepsake. To pro
pose, to observe, to be kindly affectioned, are terms
of value, of practice, of operation; just as diges
tion, respiration, locomotion express functions, not
observable " objects." But there is an object
that may be described: lungs, stomach, leg-mus
cles, or whatever. Through the structure we pre
sent to ourselves the function ; it appears laid out
before us, spread forth in detail objectified in a
word. The anatomist who devotes himself to this
detail may, if he please (and he probably does
please to concentrate his devotion) ignore the
function : to discover what is there, to analyze, to
measure, to describe, gives him outlet enough.
But nevertheless it is the function that fixed the
252 CONSCIOUSNESS AND EXPERIENCE
point of departure, that prescribed the problem
and that set the limits, physical as well as intel
lectual, of subsequent investigation. Reference to
function makes the details discovered other than a
jumble of incoherent trivialities. One might as
well devote himself to the minute description of a
square yard of desert soil were it not for this trans
lation. States of consciousness are the morphol
ogy of certain functions. 1 What is true of anal
ysis, of description, is true equally of classifica
tion. Knowing, willing, feeling, name states of
consciousness not in terms of themselves, but in
terms of acts, attitudes, found in experience. 2
1 Thus to divorce " structure psychology " from " function
psychology " is to leave us without possibility of scientific
7 comprehension of function, while it deprives us of all
standard of reference in selecting, observing, and explaining
the structure.
2 The following answer may fairly be anticipated: "This
is true of the operations cited, but only because complex
processes have been selected. Such a term as knowing
does of course express a function involving a system of
intricate references. But, for that very reason, we go back
to the sensation which is the genuine type of the state
of consciousness as such, pure and unadulterate and un
sophisticated." The point is large for a footnote, but the
following considerations are instructive: (1) The same
psychologist will go on to inform us that sensations, as
we experience them, are networks of reference they are
perceptual, and more or less conceptual even. From which
it would appear that whatever else they are or are not,
the sensations, for which self -inclosed existence is claimed,
are not states of consciousness. And (2) we are told that
CONSCIOUSNESS AND EXPERIENCE 258
Explanation, even of an " empirical sort " is as
impossible as determination of a " state " and its
classification, when we rigidly confine ourselves to
modifications of consciousness as a self-existent.
Sensations are always defined, classified, and ex
plained by reference to conditions which, according
to the theory, are extraneous sense-organs and
stimuli. The whole physiological side assumes a
ludicrously anomalous aspect on this basis. 1
While experimentation is retained, and even made
much of, it is at the cost of logical coherence. To
experiment with reference to a bare state of con
sciousness is a performance of which one cannot
imagine the nature, to say nothing of doing it;
while to experiment with reference to acts and the
conditions of their occurrence is a natural and
straightforward undertaking. Such simple proc
esses as association are concretely inexplicable when
these are reached by scientific abstraction in order to ac
count for complex forms. From which it would appear
that they are hypothecated as products of interpretation
and for purposes of further interpretation. Only the delu-
pion that the more complex forms are just aggregates (in
stead of being acts, like seeing, hoping, etc.) prevents
recognition of the point in question that the "state of
consciousness" is an instrument of inquiry or method
ological appliance.
1 On the other hand, if what we are trying to get at is
just the course and procedure of experiencing, of course
any consideration that helps distinguish and make com
prehensible that process is thoroughly pertinent.
254 CONSCIOUSNESS AND EXPERIENCE
we assume states of consciousness as existences by
themselves. As recent psychology testifies, we
again have to resort to conditions that have no
place nor calling on the basis of the theory the
principle of habit, of neural action, or else some
connection in the object. 1
We have only to note that there are two oppos
ing schools in psychology to see in what an un
scientific status is the subject. We have only to
consider that these two schools are the result of
assuming states of consciousness as existences per
se to locate the source of the scientific scandal.
No matter what the topic, whether memory or
association or attention or effort, the same dual
isms present themselves, the same necessity of
choosing between two schools. One, lost in the dis
tinctions that it has developed, denies the func
tion because it can find objectively presented only
states of consciousness. So it abrogates the func
tion, regarding it as a mere aggregate of such
states, or as a purely external and factitious re-
1 It may avoid misunderstanding if I anticipate here
a subsequent remark: that my point is not in the least that
" states of consciousness " require some " synthetic unity "
or faculty of substantial mind to effect their association.
Quite the contrary ; for this theory also admits the " states
of consciousness " as existences in themselves also. My
contention is that the "state of consciousness" as such is !
always a methodological product, developed in the course
and for the purposes of psychological analysis.
CONSCIOUSNESS AND EXPERIENCE 255
lation between them. The other school, recogniz
ing that this procedure explains away rather than
explains, the values of experience, attempts to even
up by declaring that certain functions are them
selves immediately given data of consciousness, ex
isting side by side with the " states," but indefi
nitely transcending them in worth, and appre
hended by some higher organ. So against the
elementary contents and external associations of
the analytic school in psychology, we have the
complicated machinery of the intellectualist school,
with its pure self-consciousness as a source of ulti
mate truths, its hierarchy of intuitions, its ready-
made faculties. To be sure, these " spiritual fac
ulties " are now largely reduced to some one com
prehensive form Apperception, or Will, or Atten
tion, or whatever the fashionable term may be.
But the principle remains the same ; the assumption
of a function as a given existent, distinguishable
in itself and acting upon other existences as if
the functions digestion and vision were regarded
as separate from organic structures, somehow act
ing upon them from the outside so as to bring co
operation and harmony into them ! * This division
into psychological schools is as reasonable as would
be one of botanists into rootists and flowerists ; of
1 The " functions " are in truth ordinary everyday acts
and attitudes: seeing, smelling, talking, listening, remember
ing, hoping, loving, fearing.
256 CONSCIOUSNESS AND EXPERIENCE
those proclaiming the root to be the rudimentary
and essential structure, and those asserting that
since the function of seed-bearing is the main thing,
the flower is really the controlling " synthetic "
principle. Both sensationalist and intellectualist
suppose that psychology has some special sphere
of " reality " or of experience marked off for it
within which the data are just lying around, self-
existent and ready-made, to be picked up and
assorted as pebbles await the visitor on the beach.
Both alike fail to recognize that the psychologist
first has experience to deal with; the same experi
ence that the zoologist, geologist, chemist, mathe
matician, and historian deal with, and that what
characterizes his specialty is not some data or ex
istences which he may call uniquely his own ; but
the problem raised the problem of the course of
the acts that constitute experiencing.
Here psychology gets its revenge upon those who
would rule it out of possession of important philo
sophical bearing. As a matter of fact, the larger
part of the questions that are being discussed in
current epistemology and what is termed meta-
physic of logic and ethic arise out of (and are
hopelessly compromised by) this original assump
tion of " consciousness as such " in other words,
are provoked by the exact reason that is given
for denying to psychology any essential meaning
for epistemology and metaphysic. Such is the
CONSCIOUSNESS AND EXPERIENCE 257
irony of the situation. The epistemologist s prob
lem is, indeed, usually put as the question of how
the subject can so far "transcend" itself as to
get valid assurance of the objective world. The
very phraseology in which the problem is put re
veals the thoroughness of the psychologist s re
venge. Just and only because experience has been
reduced to " states of consciousness " as independ
ent existences, does the question of self-transcend
ence have any meaning. The entire epistemolog-
ical industry is one shall I say it ofa Sisyphean
nature. Mutatis mutandis, the same holds of the
metaphysic of logic, ethic, and esthetic. In each
case, the basic problem has come to be how a mere
state of consciousness can be the vehicle of a system
of truth, of an objectively valid good, of beauty
which is other than agreeable feeling. We may, in
deed, excuse the psychologist for not carrying on
the special inquiries that are the business of log
ical, ethical, and esthetical philosophy ; but can we
excuse ourselves for forcing his results into such
a shape as to make philosophic problems so arbi
trary that they are soluble only by arbitrarily
wrenching scientific facts?
Undoubtedly we are between two fires. In plac
ing upon psychology the responsibility of discov
ering the method of experience, as a sequence of
acts and passions, do we not destroy just that
limitation to concrete detail which now constitutes
258 CONSCIOUSNESS AND EXPERIENCE
it a science? Will not the psychologist be the
first to repudiate this attempt to mix him up in
matters philosophical? We need only to keep in
mind the specific facts involved in the term Course
or Process of Experience to avoid this danger.
The immediate preoccupation of the psychologist
is with very definite and empirical facts questions
like the limits of audition, of the origin of pitch,
of the structure and conditions of the musical scale,
etc. Just so the immediate affair of the geologist
is with particular rock-structures, of the botanist
with particular plants, and so on. But through
the collection, description, location, classification
of rocks the geologist is led to the splendid story
of world-forming. The limited, fixed, and sepa
rate piece of work is dissolved away in the fluent
and dynamic drama of the earth. So, the plant
leads with inevitableness to the whole process of
life and its evolution.
In form, the botanist still studies the genus,
the species, the plant hardly, indeed, that ; rather
the special parts, the structural elements, of the
plant. In reality, he studies life itself; the
structures are the indications, the signature
through which he renders transparent the mystery
of life growing in the changing world. It was
doubtless necessary for the botanist to go through
the Linnean period the period of engagement
with rigid detail and fixed classifications ; of tear-
CONSCIOUSNESS AND EXPERIENCE 259
ing apart and piecing together; of throwing all
emphasis upon peculiarities of number, size, and
appearance of matured structure; of regarding
change, growth, and function as external, more or
less interesting, attachments to form. Examina
tion of this period is instructive; there is much in
contemporary investigation and discussion that is
almost unpleasantly reminiscent in its suggestive-
ness. The psychologist should profit by the inter
vening history of science. The conception of evo
lution is not so much an additional law as it is a
face-about. The fixed structure, the separate
form, the isolated element, is henceforth at best a
mere stepping-stone to knowledge of process, and
when not at its best, marks the end of comprehen
sion, and betokens failure to grasp the problem.
With the change in standpoint from self-in
cluded existence to including process, from struc
tural unit of composition to controlling unity of
function, from changeless form to movement in
growth, the whole scheme of values is transformed.
Faculties are definite directions of development;
elements are products that are starting-points for
new processes ; bare facts are indices of change ;
static conditions are modes of accomplished ad
justment. Not that the concrete, empirical phe
nomenon loses in worth, much less that unverifiable
" metaphysical " entities are impertinently intro
duced; but that our aim is the discovery of a
260 CONSCIOUSNESS AND EXPERIENCE
process of actions in its adaptations to circum
stance. If we apply this evolutionary logic in
psychology, where shall we stop? Questions of
limits of stimuli in a given sense, say hearing, are
in reality questions of temporary arrests, adjust
ments marking the favorable equilibrium of the
whole organism ; they connect with the question of
the use of sensation in general and auditory sensa
tions in particular for life-habits; of the origin
and use of localized and distinguished perception;
and this, in turn, involves within itself the whole
question of space and time recognition; the signi
ficance of the thing-and-quality experience, and
so on. And when we are told that the question of
the origin of space experience has nothing at all
to do with the question of the nature and signifi
cance of the space experienced, the statement is
simply evidence that the one who makes it is still
at the static standpoint; he believes that things,
that relations, have existence and significance
apart from the particular conditions under which
they come into experience, and apart from the
special service rendered in those particular con
ditions.
Of course, I am far from saying that every psy
chologist must make the whole journey. Each in
dividual may contract, as he pleases, for any sec
tion or subsection he prefers ; and undoubtedly the
well-being of the science is advanced by such divi-
CONSCIOUSNESS AND EXPERIENCE 261
sion of labor. But psychology goes over the whole
ground from detecting every distinct act of ex
periencing, to seeing what need calls out the special
organ fitted to cope with the situation, and discov
ering the machinery through which it operates to
keep a-going the course of action.
But, I shall be told, the wall that divides psy
chology from philosophy cannot be so easily
treated as non-existent. Psychology is a matter
of natural history, even though it may be admitted
that it is the natural history of the course of ex
perience. But philosophy is a matter of values;
of the criticism and justification of certain validi
ties. One deals, it is said, with genesis, with con
ditions of temporal origin and transition ; the other
with analysis, with eternal constitution. I shall
have to repeat that just this rigid separation of
genesis and analysis seems to me a survival from a
pre-evolutionary, a pre-historic age. It indicates
not so much an assured barrier between philosophy
and psychology as the distance dividing philos
ophy from all science. For the lesson that
mathematicians first learned, that physics and
chemistry pondered over, in which the biological
disciplines were finally tutored, is that sure and
delicate analysis is possible only through the pa
tient study of conditions of origin and development.
The method of analysis in mathematics is the
method of construction. The experimental method
262 CONSCIOUSNESS AND EXPERIENCE
is the method of making, of following the history
of production; the term " cause " that has (when
taken as an existent entity) so hung on the heels
of science as to impede its progress, has universal
meaning when read as condition of appearance in
a process. And, as already intimated, the concep
tion of evolution is no more and no less the dis- < ^
covery of a general law of life than it is the gen
eralization of all scientific method. Everywhere
analysis that cannot proceed by examining the suc
cessive stages of its subject, from its beginning
up to its culmination, that cannot control this
examination by discovering the conditions under
which successive stages appear, is only prelimi
nary. It may further the invention of proper tools
of inquiry, it may help define problems, it may
serve to suggest valuable hypotheses. But as
science it breathes an air already tainted. There
is no way to sort out the results flowing from the
subject-matter itself from those introduced by the
assumptions and presumptions of our own reflec
tion. Not so with natural history when it is
worthy of its name. Here the analysis is the un
folding of the existence itself. Its distinctions are
not pigeon-holes of our convenience ; they are
stakes that mark the parting of the ways in the
process itself. Its classifications are not a grasp
at factors resisting further analysis; they are
the patient tracings of the paths pursued, Noth-
CONSCIOUSNESS AND EXPERIENCE 263
ing is more out of date than to suppose that
interest in genesis is interest in reducing higher
forms to cruder ones : it is interest in locating the
exact and objective conditions under which a
given fact appears, and in relation to which ac
cordingly it has its meaning. Nothing is more
naive than to suppose that in pursuing " natural
history " (term of scorn in which yet resides
the dignity of the world-drama) we simply learn
something of the temporal conditions under which
a given value appears, while its own eternal
essential quality remains as opaque as before. Na
ture knows no such divorce of quality and circum
stance. Things come when they are wanted and
as they are wanted; their quality is precisely the
response they give to the conditions that call for
them, while the furtherance they afford to the
movement of their whole is their meaning. The
severance of analysis and genesis, instead of serv
ing as a ready-made test by which to try out the
empirical, temporal events of psychology from the
rational abiding constitution of philosophy, is a
brand of philosophic dualism : the supposition
that values are externally obtruded and statically
set in irrelevant rubbish.
There are those who will admit that " states of
consciousness " are but the cross-sections of flow of
behavior, arrested for inspection, made in order
that we may reconstruct experience in its life-
264 CONSCIOUSNESS AND EXPERIENCE
history. Yet in the knowledge of the course and
method of our experience, they will hold that we
are far from the domain proper of philosophy.
Experience, they say, is just the historic achieve
ment of finite individuals; it tells the tale of ap
proach to the treasures of truth, of partial vic
tory, but larger defeat, in laying hold of the
treasure. But, they say, reality is not the path
to reality, and record of devious wanderings in the
path is hardly a safe account of the goal. Psychol
ogy, in other words, may tell us something of how
we mortals lay hold of the world of things and
truths ; of how we appropriate and assimilate its
contents ; and of how we react. It may trace the
issues of such approaches and apprehensions upon
the course of our own individual destinies. But it
cannot wisely ignore nor sanely deny the distinc
tion between these individual strivings and achieve
ments, and the " Reality " that subsists and sup
ports its own structure outside these finite futilities.
The processes by which we turn over The Reality
into terms of our fragmentary unconcluded, in
conclusive experiences are so extrinsic to the Real
ity itself as to have no revealing power with refer
ence to it. There is the ordo ad universum, the
subject of philosophy; there is the ordo ad irir
dividuum, the subject of psychology.
Some such assumption as this lies latent, I am
convinced, in all forswearings of the kinship of
CONSCIOUSNESS AND EXPERIENCE 265
psychology and philosophy. Two conceptions
hang together. The opinion that psychology is an
account only and finally of states of consciousness,
and therefore can throw no light upon the objects
with which philosophy deals, is twin to the doctrine
that the whole conscious life of the individual is
not organic to the world. The philosophic basis
and scope of this doctrine lie beyond examination
here. But even in passing one cannot avoid re
marking that the doctrine is almost never consist
ently held ; the doctrine logically carried out leads
so directly to intellectual and moral scepticism that
the theory usually prefers to work in the dark
background as a disposition and temper of thought
rather than to make a frank statement of itself.
Even in the half-hearted expositions of the process
of human experience as something merely annexed
to the reality of the universe, we are brought face
to face to the consideration with which we set out :
the dependence of theories of the individual upon
the position at a given time of the individual prac
tical and social. The doctrine of the acci
dental, futile, transitory significance of the indi
vidual s experience as compared with eternal real
ities ; the notion that at best the individual is simply
realizing for and in himself what already has fixed
completeness in itself is congruous only with a
certain intellectual and political scheme and must
modify itself as that shifts. When such re-
266 CONSCIOUSNESS AND EXPERIENCE
arrangement comes, our estimate of the nature
and importance of psychology will mirror the
change.
When man s command of the methods that con
trol action was precarious and disturbed; when
the tools that subject the world of things and
forces to use and operation were rare and clumsy,
it was unavoidable that the individual should sub
mit his perception and purpose blankly to the
blank reality beyond. Under such circumstances,
external authority must reign ; the belief that hu
man experience in itself is approximate, not in
trinsic, is inevitable. Under such circumstances,
reference to the individual, to the subject, is a re
sort only for explaining error, illusion, and uncer
tainty. The necessity of external control and ex
ternal redemption of experience reports itself in a
low valuation of the self, and of all the factors and
phases of experience that spring from the self.
That the psychology of medievalism should appear
only as a portion of its theology of sin and salva
tion is as obvious as that the psychology of the
Greeks should be a chapter of cosmology.
As against all this, the assertion is ventured
that psychology, supplying us with knowledge of
the behavior of experience, is a conception of de
mocracy. Its postulate is that since experience
fulfils itself in individuals, since it administers
itself through their instrumentality, the account of
CONSCIOUSNESS AND EXPERIENCE 267
the course and method of this achievement is a
significant and indispensable affair.
Democracy is possible only because of a change
in intellectual conditions. It implies tools for get
ting at truth in detail, and day by day, as we go
along. Only such possession justifies the surrender
of fixed, all-embracing principles to which, as uni-
versals, all particulars and individuals are subject
for valuation and regulation. Without such pos
session, it is only the courage of the fool that
would undertake the venture to which democracy
has committed itself the ordering of life in re
sponse to the needs of the moment in accordance
with the ascertained truth of the moment. Modern
life involves the deification of the here and the
now ; of the specific, the particular, the unique,
that which happens once and has no measure of
value save such as it brings with itself. Such dei
fication is monstrous fetishism, unless the deity be
there ; unless the universal lives, moves, and has its
being in experience as individualized. 1 This con-
is perhaps a suitable moment to allude to the ab
sence, in this discussion, of reference to what is some
times termed rational psychology the assumption of a
separate, substantialized ego, soul, or whatever, existing
side by side with particular experiences and " states of con
sciousness," acting upon them and acted upon by them. In
ignoring this and confining myself to the "states of con
sciousness " theory and the " natural history " theory, I
may appear not only to have unduly narrowed the concerns
258 CONSCIOUSNESS AND EXPERIENCE
viction of the value of the individualized finds its
further expression in psychology, which undertakes
to show how this individualization proceeds, and in
what aspect it presents itself.
Of course, such a conception means something
for philosophy as well as for psychology ; possibly
it involves for philosophy the larger measure of
transformation. It involves surrender of any claim
on the part of philosophy to be the sole source
of some truths and the exclusive guardian of some
at issue, but to have weakened my own point, as this doc
trine seems to offer a special vantage ground whence to
defend the close relationship of psychology and philosophy.
The " narrowing," if such it be, will have to pass from
limits of time and other matters. But the other point
I cannot concede. The independently existing soul restricts
and degrades individuality, making of it a separate thing
outside of the full flow of things, alien to things experi
enced and consequently in either mechanical or miraculous
relations to them. It is vitiated by just the quality already
objected to that psychology has a separate piece of reality
apportioned to it, instead of occupying itself with the
manifestation and operation of any and all existences in
reference to concrete action. From this point of view, the
" states of consciousness " attitude is a much more hopeful
and fruitful one. It ignores certain considerations, to be
sure; and when it turns its ignoring into denial, it leaves
us with curious hieroglyphics. But after all, there is a key;
these symbols can be read; they may be translated into
terms of the course of experience. When thus translated,
selfhood, individuality, is neither wiped out nor set up as a
miraculous and foreign entity; it is seen as the unity of
reference and function involved in all things when fully
experienced the pivot about which they turn.
CONSCIOUSNESS AND EXPERIENCE 269
values. It means that philosophy be a method;
not an assurance company, nor a knight errant.
It means an alignment with science. Philosophy
may not be sacrificed to the partial and superficial
clamor of that which sometimes officiously and pre
tentiously exhibits itself as Science. But there is
a sense in which philosophy must go to school to
the sciences; must have no data save such as it
receives at their hands ; and be hospitable to no
method of inquiry or reflection not akin to those in
daily use among the sciences. As long as it claims
for itself special territory of fact, or peculiar
modes of access to truth, so long must it occupy a
dubious position. Yet this claim it has to make
until psychology comes to its own. There is some
thing in experience, something in things, which the
physical and the biological sciences do not touch;
something, moreover, which is not just more ex
periences or more existences; but without which
their materials are inexperienced, unrealized. Such
sciences deal only with what might be experienced ;
with the content of experience, provided and as
sumed there be experience. It is psychology which
tells us how this possible experience loses its barely
hypothetical character, and is stamped with cate
gorical unquestioned experiencedness ; how, in a
word, it becomes here and now in some uniquely
individualized life. Here is the necessary transi
tion of science into philosophy; a passage that
270 CONSCIOUSNESS AND EXPERIENCE
carries the verified and solid body of the one into the
large and free form of the other.
[NOTE: I have let this paper stand much as written, though
(now conscious that much more is crowded into it than could
properly be presented in one paper. The drift of the ten
years from 99 to 09 has made, I venture to believe, for in
creased clearness in the main positions of the paper: The
revival of a naturalistic realism, the denial of the existence
of " consciousness," the development of functional and
dynamic psychology (accompanied by aversion to interpre
tation of functions as faculties of a soul-substance) all of
these tendencies are sympathetic with the aim of the paper.
There is another reason for letting it stand: the new func
tional and pragmatic empiricism proffered in this volume
has been constantly objected to on the ground that its con
ceptions of knowledge and verification lead only to sub
jectivism and solipsism. The paper may indicate that the
identification of experience with bare states of consciousness
represents the standpoint of the critic, not of the empiricism
criticised, and that it is for him, not for me, to fear the
subjective implications of such a position. The paper also
clearly raises the question as to how far the isolation of
" consciousness " from nature and social life, which charac
terizes the procedure of many psychologists of to-day, is
responsible for keeping alive quite unreal problems in phi
losophy.]
THE SIGNIFICANCE OF THE PROBLEM
OF KNOWLEDGE l
TT is now something over a century since Kant
1 called upon philosophers to cease their discus
sion regarding the nature of the world and the
principles of existence until they had arrived at
some conclusion regarding the nature of the know
ing process. But students of philosophy know
that Kant formulated the question " how knowl
edge is possible " rather than created it. As mat
ter of fact, reflective thought for two centuries
before Kant had been principally interested in just
this problem, although it had not generalized its
own interest. Kant brought to consciousness the
controlling motive. The discussion, both in Kant
himself and in his successors, often seems scholas
tic, lost in useless subtlety, scholastic argument,
and technical distinctions. Within the last decade
in particular there have been signs of a growing
weariness as to epistemology, and a tendency to
delivered before the Philosophical Club of the Univer
sity of Michigan, in the winter of 1897, and reprinted with
slight change from a monograph in the " University of Chi
cago Contributions to Philosophy," 1897.
271
272 THE PROBLEM OF KNOWLEDGE
turn away to more fertile fields. The interest
shows signs of exhaustion.
Students of philosophy will recognize what I
mean when I say that this growing conviction of
futility and consequent distaste are associated with
the outcome of the famous dictum of Kant, that
I perception without conception is blind, while con
ception without perception is empty. The whole
course of reflection since Kant s time has tended to
justify this remark. The sensationalist and the
rationalist have worked themselves out. Pretty
much all students are convinced that we can reduce
knowledge neither to a set of associated sensations,
nor yet to a purely rational system of relations of
rthought. Knowledge is judgment, and judgment
| requires both a material of sense perception and
an ordering, regulating principle, reason ; so much
seems certain, but we do not get any further.
Sensation and thought themselves seem to stand
out more rigidly opposed to each other in their
own natures than ever. Why both are necessary,
, and how two such opposed factors cooperate in
bringing about the unified result of science, be
comes more and more of a mystery. It is the
continual running up against this situation which
accounts for the flagging of interest and the desire
to direct energy where it will have more outcome.
This situation creates a condition favorable to
taking stock of the question as it stands; to in-
THE PROBLEM OF KNOWLEDGE 273
quiring what this interest, prolonged for over three
centuries, in the possibility and nature of knowl
edge, stands for; what the conviction as to the
necessity of the union of sensation and thought,
together with the inability to reach conclusions re
garding the nature of the union, signifies.
I propose then to raise this evening precisely
this question : What is the meaning of the problem
of knowledge? What is its meaning, not simply
for reflective philosophy or in terms of epistemol-
ogy itself, but what is its meaning in the historical
movement of humanity and as a part of a larger
and more comprehensive experience? My thesis
is perhaps sufficiently indicated in the mere taking
of this point of view. It implies that the abstract-
ness of the discussion of knowledge, its remoteness
from everyday experience, is one of form, rather
than of substance. It implies that the problem of
knowledge is not a problem that has its origin, its
value, or its destiny within itself. The problem is
one which social life, the organized practice of man
kind, has had to face. The seemingly technical and
abstruse discussion of the philosophers results from
the formulation and statement of the question.
I suggest that the problem of the possibility of
knowledge is but an aspect of the question of the
relation of knowing to acting, of theory to prac
tice. The distinctions which the philosophers raise,
the oppositions which they erect, the weary tread-
274 THE PROBLEM OF KNOWLEDGE
mill which they pursue between sensation and
thought, subject and object, mind and matter, are
not invented ad hoc, but are simply the concise re
ports and condensed formula of points of view and
practical conflicts having their source in the very
nature of modern life, conflicts which must be met
and solved if modern life is to go on its way un
troubled, with clear consciousness of what it is
about. As the philosopher has received his prob
lem from the world of action, so he must return
his account there for auditing and liquidation.
More especially, I suggest that the tendency of
all the points at issue to precipitate in the opposi
tion of sensationalism and rationalism is due to the
fact that sensation and reason stand for the two
i forces contending for mastery in social life : the
radical and the conservative. The reason that the
contest does not end, the reason for the necessity
of the combination of the two in the resultant state
ment, is that both factors are necessary in action;
one stands for stimulus, for initiative ; the other for
control, for direction.
I cannot hope, in the time at my command this
evening, to justify these wide and sweeping asser
tions regarding either the origin, the work, or the
final destiny of philosophic reflection. I simply
hope, by reference to some of the chief periods of
the development of philosophy, to illustrate to you
something of what I mean.
THE PROBLEM OF KNOWLEDGE 275
At the outset we take a long scope in our survey
and present to ourselves the epoch when philosophy
was still consciously, and not simply by implica
tion, human, when reflective thought had not devel
oped its own technique of method, and was in no
danger of being caught in its own machinery the
time of Socrates. What does the assertion of
Socrates that an unexamined life is not one fit to
be led by man; what does his injunction " Know
thyself " mean ? It means that the corporate
motives and guarantees of conduct are breaking
down. We have got away from the time when the
individual could both regulate and justify his
course of life by reference to the ideals incarnate
in the habits of the community of which he is a
member. The time of direct and therefore uncon
scious union with corporate life, finding therein
stimuli, codes, and values, has departed, The de
velopment of industry and commerce, of war and
politics, has brought face to face communities with
different aims and diverse habits ; the development
of myth and animism into crude but genuine scien
tific observation and imagination has transformed
the physical widening of the horizon, brought
about by commerce and intercourse, into an in
tellectual and moral expansion. The old supports
fail precisely at the time when they are most needed
before a widening and more complex scene of
action. Where, then, shall the agent of action
276 THE PROBLEM OF KNOWLEDGE
turn? The " Know thyself " of Socrates is the re
ply to the practical problem which confronted
Athens in his day. Investigation into the true
ends and worths of human life, sifting and test
ing of all competing ends, the discovery of a
method which should validate the genuine and
dismiss the spurious, had henceforth to do for
man what consolidated and incorporate custom
had hitherto presented as a free and precious
gift.
With Socrates the question is as direct and prac
tical as the question of making one s living or of
governing the state ; it is indeed the same question
put in its general form. It is a question that the
flute player, the cobbler, and the politician must
face no more and no less than the reflective philos
opher. The question is addressed by Socrates to
every individual and to every group with which he
comes in contact. Because the question is practi
cal it is individual and direct. It is a question
which every one must face and answer for himself,
just as in the Protestant scheme every individual
must face and solve for himself the question of his
final destiny.
Yet the very attitude of Socrates carried with it
the elements of its own destruction. Socrates could
only raise the question, or rather demand of every
individual that he raise it for himself. Of the
answer he declared himself to be as ignorant as
THE PROBLEM OF KNOWLEDGE 277
was any one. The result could be only a shifting
of the center of interest. If the question is so all-
important, and yet the wisest of all men must con
fess that he only knows his own ignorance as to its
answer, the inevitable point of further considera
tion is the discovery of a method which shall enable
the question to be answered. This is the signifi
cance of Plato. The problem is the absolutely in
evitable outgrowth of the Socratic position; and
yet it carried with it just as inevitably the separa
tion of philosopher from shoemaker and statesman,
and the relegation of theory to a position remote
for the time being from conduct.
If the Socratic command, " Know thyself," runs
against the dead wall of inability to conduct this
knowledge, some one must take upon himself the
discovery of how the requisite knowledge may be
obtained. A new profession is born, that of the
thinker. At this time the means, the discovery of
how the aims and worths of the self may be known
and measured, becomes, for this class, an end in
itself. Theory is ultimately to be applied to prac
tice ; but in the meantime the theory must be worked
out as theory or else no application. This repre
sents the peculiar equilibrium and the peculiar
point of contradiction in the Platonic system. All
philosophy is simply for the sake of the organiza
tion and regulation of social life ; and yet the phi
losophers must be a class by themselves, working
278 THE PROBLEM OF KNOWLEDGE
out their peculiar problems with their own partic
ular tools.
With Aristotle the attempted balance failed.
Social life is disintegrating beyond the point of
hope of a successful reorganization, and thinking
is becoming a fascinating pursuit for its own sake.
The world of practice is now the world of com
promise and of adjustment. It is relative to par
tial aims and finite agents. The sphere of abso
lute and enduring truth and value can be reached
only in and through thought. The one who acts
compromises himself with the animal desire that
inspires his action and with the alien material that
forms its stuff . In two short generations the
divorce of philosophy from life, the isolation of
reflective theory from practical conduct, has com
pleted itself. So great is the irony of history that
this sudden and effective outcome was the result
of the attempt to make thought the instrument of
action, and action the manifestation of truth
reached by thinking.
But this statement must not be taken too liter
ally. It is impossible that men should really sepa
rate their ideas from their acts. If we look ahead
a few centuries we find that the philosophy of
Plato and Aristotle has accomplished, in an in
direct and unconscious way, what perhaps it could
never have effected by the more immediate and
practical method of Socrates. Philosophy became
THE PROBLEM OF KNOWLEDGE 279
an organ of vision, an instrument of interpreta
tion; it furnished the medium through which the
world was seen and the course of life estimated.
Philosophy died as philosophy, to rise as the set
and bent of the human mind. Through a thousand
and devious and roundabout channels, the thoughts
of the philosophers filtered through the strata of
human consciousness and conduct. Through the
teachings of grammarians, rhetoricians, and a va
riety of educational schools, they were spread in
diluted form through the whole Roman Empire
and were again precipitated in the common forms
of speech. Through the earnestness of the moral
propaganda of the Stoics they became the working
rules of life for the more strenuous and earnest
spirits. Through the speculations of the Sceptics
and Epicureans they became the chief reliance and
consolation of a large number of highly cultured
individuals amid social turmoil and political dis
integration. All these influences and many more
finally summed themselves up in the two great
media through which Greek philosophy finally
fixed the intellectual horizon of man, determined
the values of its perspective, and meted out the
boundaries and divisions of the scene of human
action.
These two influences were the development of
Christian theology and moral theory, and the or
ganization of the system of Roman jurisprudence.
280 THE PROBLEM OF KNOWLEDGE
There is perhaps no more fascinating chapter in
the history of humanity than the slow and tortu
ous processes by which the ideas set in motion by
that Athenian citizen who faced death as serenely
as he conversed with a friend, finally became the
intellectually organizing centers of the two great
movements that bridge the span between ancient
civilization and modern. As the personal and im
mediate force and enthusiasm of the movement
initiated by Jesus began to grow fainter and the
commanding influence of his own personality com
menced to dim, the ideas of the world and of
life, of God and of man, elaborated in Greek
philosophy, served to transform moral enthusiasm
and personal devotion to the redemption of hu
manity, into a splendid and coherent view of the
universe ; a view that resisted all disintegrating in
fluences and gathered into itself the permanent
ideas and progressive ideals thus far developed in
the history of man.
We have only a faint idea of how this was ac
complished, or of the thoroughness of the work
done. We have perhaps even more inadequate
conceptions of the great organizing and central
izing work done by Greek thought in the political
sphere. When the military and administrative
genius of Rome brought the whole world in sub
jection to itself, the most pressing of practical
problems was to give unity of practical aim and
THE PROBLEM OF KNOWLEDGE 281
harmony of working machinery to the vast and
confused mass of local custom and tradition, re
ligious, social, economic, and intellectual, as well
as political. In this juncture the great adminis
trators and lawyers of Rome seized with avidity
upon the results of the intellectual analysis of so
cial and political relations elaborated in Greek
philosophy. Caring naught for these results in
their reflective and theoretical character, they saw
in them the possible instrument of introducing or-
*der into chaos and of transforming the confused
and conflicting medley of practice and opinion
into a harmonious social structure. Roman law,
that formed the ve rtebral column of civilization
.for a thousand years, and which articulated the
outer order of life as distinctly as Christianity
controlled the inner, was the outcome.
Thought was once more in unity with action,
philosophy had become the instrument of conduct.
Mr. Bosanquet makes the pregnant remark " that
the weakness of medieval science and philosophy
are connected rather with excess of practice than
with excess of theory. The subordination of phi
losophy to theology is a subordination of science to
a formulated conception of human welfare. Its
essence is present, not wherever there is metaphys
ics but wherever the spirit of truth is subordinated
to any preconceived practical intent." (" His
tory of Esthetics," p. 146.)
282 THE PROBLEM OF KNOWLEDGE
Once more the irony of history displays itself.
Thought has become practical, it has become the
regulator of individual conduct and social organi
zation, but at the expense of its own freedom and
power. The defining characteristic of medieval
ism in state and in church, in political and spiritual
I life, is that truth presents itself to the individual
only through the medium of organized authority.
There was a historical necessity on the external
as well as the internal side. We have not the re
motest way of imagining what the outcome would
finally have been if, at the time when the intellectual
structure of the Christian church and the legal
structure of the Roman Empire had got themselves
thoroughly organized, the barbarians had not made
their inroads and seized upon all this accumulated
and consolidated wealth as their own legitimate
prey. But this was what did happen. As a re
sult, truths originally developed by the freest
possible criticism and investigation became exter-
nal, and imposed themselves upon the mass of in
dividuals by the mere weight of authoritative
law. The external, transcendental, and super
natural character of spiritual truth and of social
control during the Middle Ages is naught but the
mirror, in consciousness, of the relation existing
between the eager, greedy, undisciplined horde of
barbarians on one side, and the concentrated
achievements of ancient civilization on the other.
THE PROBLEM OF KNOWLEDGE 283
There was no way out save that the keen barbarian
whet his appetite upon the rich banquet spread
before him. But there was equally no way out so
far as the continuity of civilization was concerned
save that the very fullness and richness of this
banquet set limits to the appetite, and finally, when
assimilated and digested, it be transformed into the
flesh and blood, the muscles and sinew of him who
sat at the feast. Thus the barbarian ceased to be
a barbarian and a new civilization arose.
But the time came when the work of absorption
was fairly complete. The northern barbarians
had eaten the food and drunk the wine of Grasco-
Roman civilization. The authoritative truth em
bodied in medieval state and church succeeded, in
principle, in disciplining the untrained masses.
Its very success issued its own death warrant. To
say that it had succeeded means that the new
people had finally eaten their way into the heart
of the ideas offered them, had got from them
what they wanted, and were henceforth prepared
to go their own way and make their own living.
Here a new rhythm of the movement of thought
and action begins to show itself.
The beginning of this change in the swing of
thought and action forms the transition from the
Middle Ages to the modern times. It is the epoch
of the Renaissance. The individual comes to a
new birth and asserts his own individuality and
284. THE PROBLEM OF KNOWLEDGE
demands his own rights in the way of feeling, do
ing, and knowing for himself. Science, art, re
ligion, political life, must all be made over on the
basis of recognizing the claims of the individual.
Pardon me these commonplaces, but they are
necessary to the course of the argument. By his
toric fallacy we often suppose, or imagine that we
suppose, that the individual had been present as a
possible center of action all through the Middle
Ages, but through some external and arbitrary in
terference had been weighted down by political and
intellectual despotism. All this inverts the true
order of the case. The very possibility of the
individual making such unlimited demands for him
self, claiming to be the legitimate center of all
action and standard for all organization, was de-
pendent, as I have already indicated, upon the in
tervening medievalism. Save as having passed
through this period of tremendous discipline, and
having gradually worked over into his own habits
and purposes the truths embodied in the church
and state that controlled his conduct, the individ
ual could be only a source of disorder and a dis
turber of civilization. The very maintenance of
the spiritual welfare of mankind was bound up in
the extent to which the claim of truth and reality
to be universal and objective, far above all indi
vidual feeling and thought, could make itself valid.
The logical realism and universalism of scholastic
THE PROBLEM OF KNOWLEDGE 285
philosophy simply reflect the actual subjection of
the individual to that associated and corporate life
which, in conserving the past, provided the princi
ple of control.
But the eager, hungry barbarian was there, im
plicated in this universalism. He must be active
in receiving and in absorbing the truth authorita
tively doled out to him. Even the most rigid forms
of medieval Christianity could not avoid postulat
ing the individual will as having a certain initiative
with reference to its own salvation. The impulses,
the appetite, the instinct of the individual were all
assumed in medieval morals, religion, and politics.
The imagined medieval tyranny took them for
granted as completely as does the modern herald
of liberty and equality. But the medieval civil
ization knew that the time had not come when
these appetites and impulses could be trusted to
work themselves out. They must be controlled by
the incorporate truths inherited from Athens and
Rome.
The very logic of the relationship, however, re
quired that the time come when the individual
makes his own the objective and universal truths.
He is now the incorporation of truth. He now has
the control as well as the stimulus of action within
himself. He is the standard and the end, as well
as the initiator and the effective force of execution.
Just because the authoritative truth of medieval-
286 THE PROBLEM OF KNOWLEDGE
isin has succeeded, has fulfilled its function, the
individual can begin to assert himself.
Contrast this critical period, finding its expres
sion equally in the art of the Renaissance, the re
vival of learning, the Protestant Reformation, and
political democracy, with Athens in the time of
Socrates. Then individuals felt their own social
life disintegrated, dissolving under their very feet.
The problem was how the value of that social life
was to be maintained against the external and in
ternal forces that were threatening it. The prob
lem was on the side neither of the individual nor of
progress ; save as the individual was seen to be an
intervening instrument in the reconstruction of the
social unity. But with the individual of the four
teenth century, it was not his own intimate com
munity life which was slipping away from him. It
was an alien and remote life which had finally be
come his own ; which had passed over into his own
inner being. The problem was not how a unity
of social life should be conserved, but what the in-
* dividual should do with the wealth of resources of
which he found himself the rightful heir and ad
ministrator. The problem looked out upon the
future, not back to the past. It was how to create
a new order, both of modes of individual conduct
and forms of social life that should be the appro
priate manifestations of the vigorous and richly
endowed individual.
THE PROBLEM OF KNOWLEDGE 287
Hence the conception of progress as a rul
ing idea ; the conception of the individual as
the source and standard of rights ; and the problem
of knowledge, were all born together. Given the
freed individual, who feels called upon to create a
new heaven and a new earth, and who feels himself
gifted with the power to perform the task to which
he is called: and the demand for science, for a
method of discovering and verifying truth, becomes
imperious. The individual is henceforth to supply
control, law, and not simply stimulation and initia
tion. What does this mean but that instead of
any longer receiving or assimilating truth, he is
now to search for and create it? Having no
longer the truth imposed by authority to rely upon,
there is no resource save to secure the authority
of truth. The possibility of getting at and utiliz
ing this truth becomes therefore the underlying
and conditioning problem of modern life. Strange
as it may sound, the question which was formulated
by Kant as that of the possibility of knowledge,
is the fundamental political problem of modern
life.
Science and metaphysics or philosophy, though
seeming often to be at war, with their respective
adherents often throwing jibes and slurs at each
other, are really the most intimate allies. The
philosophic movement is simply the coming to con
sciousness of this claim of the individual to be able
288 THE PROBLEM OF KNOWLEDGE
to discover and verify truth for himself, and
thereby not only to direct his own conduct, but to
become an influential and decisive factor in the or
ganization of life itself. Modern philosophy is the
formulation of this creed, both in general and in
its more specific implications. We often forget
that the technical problem " how knowledge is pos
sible," also means " how knowledge is possible " ;
how, that is, shall the individual be able to back
himself up by truth which has no authority save
that of its own intrinsic truthfulness. Science, on
the other hand, is simply this general faith or creed
asserting itself in detail; it is the practical faith
at work engaged in subjugating the foreign terri
tory of ignorance and falsehood step by step. If
the ultimate outcome depends upon this detailed
and concrete work, we must not forget that the
earnestness and courage, as well as the intelligence
and clearness with which the task has been under
taken, have depended largely upon the wider, even
if vaguer, operation of philosophy.
But the student of philosophy knows more than
that the problem of knowledge has been with in
creasing urgency and defmiteness the persistent
and comprehensive problem. So conscious is he of
the two opposed theories regarding the nature of
science, that he often forgets the underlying
bond of unity of which we have been speaking.
These two opposing schools are thosq which we
THE PROBLEM OF KNOWLEDGE 289
know as the sensationalist and the intellectualist,
the empiricist and the rationalist. Admitting that
the dominance of the question of the possibility
and nature of knowledge is at bottom a funda
mental question of practice and of social direc
tion, is this distinction anything more than the
clash of scholastic opinions, a rivalry of ideas
meaningless for conduct?
I think it is. Having made so many sweeping
assertions I must venture one more. Fanciful and
forced as it may seem, I would say that the sensa
tional and empirical schools represent in conscious
and reflective form the continuation of the princi
ple of the northern and barbarian side of medieval
life; while the intellectualist and the rationalist
stand for the conscious elaboration of the principle
involved in the Graeco-Roman tradition.
Once more, as I cannot hope to prove, let me
expand and illustrate. The sensationalist has
staked himself upon the possibility of explaining
and justifying knowledge by conceiving it as the
grouping and combination of the qualities directly
given us in sensation. The special reasons ad
vanced in support of this position are sufficiently
technical and remote. But the motive which has
kept the sensationalist at work, which animated
Hobbes and Locke, Hume and John Stuart Mill,
Voltaire and Diderot, was a human not a scholastic
one. It was the belief that only in sensation do
290 THE PROBLEM OF KNOWLEDGE
we get any personal contact with reality, and
f hence, any genuine guarantee of vital truth.
/ Thought is pale, and remote from the concrete
stuff of knowledge and experience. It only formu
lates and duplicates ; it only divides and recombines
that fullness of vivid reality got directly and at
first hand in sense experience. Reason, compared
with sense, is indirect, emasculate, and faded.
Moreover, reason and thought in their very
generality seem to lie beyond and outside the in
dividual. In this remoteness, when they claim any
final value, they violate the very first principle of
the modern consciousness. What is the distin
guishing characteristic of modern life, unless it be
precisely that the individual shall not simply get,
I and reason about, truth in the abstract, but shall
make it his own in the most intimate and personal
way? He has not only to know the truth in the
sense of knowing about it, but he must feel it.
What is sensation but the answer to this demand
for the most individual and intimate contact with
reality? Show me a sensationalist and I will show
you not only one who believes that he is on the
side of concreteness and definiteness, as against
washed-out abstractions and misty general no
tions : but also one who believes that he is identified
with the cause of the individual as distinct from
that of external authority. We have only to go
to our Locke and our Mill to see that opposition
THE PROBLEM OF KNOWLEDGE 291
to the innate and the a priori was felt to be oppo
sition to the deification of hereditary prejudice and
to the reception of ideas without examination or
criticism. Personal contact with reality through
sensation seemed to be the only safeguard from
opinions which, while masquerading in the guise of
absolute and eternal truth, were in reality but the
prejudices of the past become so ingrained as to
insist upon being standards of truth and action.
Positively as well as negatively, the sensational
ists have felt themselves to represent the side of
progress. In its supposed eternal character, a
general notion stands ready made, fixed forever,
without reference to time, without the possibility
of change or diversity. As distinct from this, the
sensation represents the never-failing eruption of
the new. It is the novel, the unexpected, that
which cannot be reasoned out in eternal formula,
but must be hit upon in the ever-changing flow of
our experience. It thus represents stimulation,
excitation, momentum onwards. It gives a con
stant protest against the assumption of any theory
or belief to possess finality; and it supplies the
ever-renewed presentation of material out of which
to build up new objects and new laws.
The sensationalist appears to have a good case.
He stands for vividness and definiteness against
abstraction ; for the engagement of the individual
in experience as against the remote and general
292 THE PROBLEM OF KNOWLEDGE
thought about experience; and for progress and
for variety against the eternal fixed monotony of
the concept. But what says the rationalist?
What value has experience, he inquires, if it is sim
ply a chaos of disintegrated and floating debris?
What is the worth of personality and individuality
when they are reduced to crudity of brute feeling
and sheer intensity of impulsive reaction? What
is there left in progress that we should desire it,
when it has become a mere unregulated flux of
transitory sensations, coming and going without
reasonable motivation or rational purpose?
Thus the intellectualist has endeavored to frame
/ the structure of knowledge as a well-ordered econ
omy, where reason is sovereign, where the perma
nent is the standard of reference for the changing,
and where the individual may always escape from
his own mere individuality and find support and
reinforcement in a system of relations that lies
outside of and yet gives validity to his own passing
states of consciousness. Thus the rationalists hold
that we must find in a universal intelligence a
source of truth and guarantee of value that is
sought in vain in the confused and flowing mass
of sensations.
The rationalist, in making the concept or gen
eral idea the all-important thing in knowledge, be
lieves himself to be asserting the interests of order
as against destructive caprice and the license of
THE PROBLEM OF KNOWLEDGE 293
momentary whim. He finds that his cause is
bound up with that of the discovery of truth as
the necessary instrument and method for action.
Only by reference to the general and the rational
can the individual find perspective, secure direc
tion for his appetites and impulses, and escape from
the uncontrolled and ruinous reactions of his own
immediate tendency.
The concept, once more, in its very generality,
in its elevation above the intensities and conflicts of
momentary passions and interests, is the conserver
of the experience of the past. It is the wisdom of
the past put into capitalized and funded form to
enable the individual to get away from the stress
and competition of the needs of the passing mo
ment. It marks the difference between barbarism
and civilization, between continuity and disintegra
tion, between the sequence of tradition that is the
necessity of intelligent thought and action, and
the random and confused excitation of the hour.
When we thus consider not the details of the
positions of the sensationalist and rationalist, but
the motives that have induced them to assume
these positions, we discover what is meant in saying
that the question is still a practical, a social one,
and that the two schools stand for certain one
sided factors of social life. If we have on one side
the demand for freedom, for personal initiation
into experience, for variety and progress, we have
294 THE PROBLEM OF KNOWLEDGE
on the other side the demand for general order,
for continuous and organized unity, for the con
servation of the dearly bought resources of the
past. This is what I mean by saying that the
sensationalist abstracts in conscious form the
position and tendency of the Germanic element in
modern civilization, the factor of appetite and im
pulse, of keen enjoyment and satisfaction, of stim
ulus and initiative. Just so the rationalist erects
into conscious abstraction the principle of the
Grseco-Roman world, that of control, of system,
of order and authority.
That the principles of freedom and order, of
past and future, or conservation and progress, of
incitement to action and control of that incitation,
are correlative, I shall not stop to argue. It may
be worth while, however, to point out that exactly
the same correlative and mutually implicating con
nection exists between sensationalism and rational
ism, considered as philosophical accounts of the
origin and nature of knowledge.
The strength of each school lies in the weakness
of its opponent. The more the sensationalist ap
pears to succeed in reducing knowledge to the as
sociations of sensation, the more he creates a de
mand for thought to introduce background and
relationship. The more consistent the sensational
ist, the more openly he reveals the sensation in its
own nakedness crying aloud for a clothing of
THE PROBLEM OF KNOWLEDGE 295
value and meaning which must be borrowed from
I reflective and rational interpretation. On the
other hand, the more reason and the system of
relations that make up the functioning of reason
< are magnified, the more is felt the need of sensa-
tion to bring reason into some fruitful contact
with the materials of experience. Reason must
have the stimulus of this contact in order to be
incited to its work and to get materials to operate
with. The cause, then, why neither school can
t come to rest in itself is precisely that each ab
stracts one essential factor of conduct.
This suggests, finally, that the next move in
philosophy is precisely to transfer attention from
the details of the position assumed, and the argu
ments used in these two schools, to the practical
motives that have unconsciously controlled the
discussion. The positions have been sufficiently
elaborated. Within the past one hundred years,
within especially the last generation, each has suc
ceeded in fully stating its case. The result, if we
remain at this point, is practically a deadlock.
Each can make out its case against the other. To
stop at such a point is a patent absurdity. If we
are to get out of the cul-de-sac it must be by bring
ing into consciousness the tacit reference to action
that all the time has been the controlling factor.
In a word, another great rhythmic movement is
seen to be approaching its end. The demand for
296 THE PROBLEM OF KNOWLEDGE
science and philosophy was the demand for truth
and a sure standard of truth which the new-born
individual might employ in his efforts to build up
a new world to afford free scope to the powers
stirring within him. The urgency and acuteness
of this demand caused, for the time being, the
transfer of attention from the nature of practice
to that of knowledge. The highly theoretical and
abstract character of modern epistemology, com
bined with the fact that this highly abstract and
theoretic problem has continuously engaged the
attention of thought for more than three centuries,
is, to my mind, proof positive that the question of
knowledge was for the time being the point in which
the question of practice centered, and through
which it must find outlet and solution.
We return, then, to our opening problem: the
meaning of the question of the possibility of knowl
edge raised by Kant a century ago, and of his
assertion that sensation without thought is blind,
thought without sensation empty. Once more I
recall to the student of philosophy how this asser
tion of Kant has haunted and determined the course
of philosophy in the intervening years how his
1 solution at once seems inevitable and unsatisfac
tory. It is inevitable in that no one can fairly
deny that both sense and reason are implicated in
every fruitful and significant statement of the
world; unconvincing because we are after all left
THE PROBLEM OF KNOWLEDGE 297
with these two opposed things still at war with
each other, plus the miracle of their final combina
tion.
When I say that the only way out is to place the
whole modern industry of epistemology in relation
to the conditions that gave it birth and the func
tion it has to fulfil, I mean that the unsatisfactory
character of the entire neo-Kantian movement lies
Iin its assumption that knowledge gives birth to it
self and is capable of affording its own justifica
tion. The solution that is always sought and
never found so long as we deal with knowledge as
a self-sufficing purveyor of reality, reveals itself
when we conceive of knowledge as a statement of
action, that statement being necessary, moreover,
to the successful ongoing of action.
The entire problem of medieval philosophy is
that of absorption, of assimilation. The result
was the creation of the individual. Hence the prob
lem of modern life is that of reconstruction, re
form, reorganization. The entire content of ex
perience needs to be passed through the alembic
of individual agency and realization. The indi
vidual is to be the bearer of civilization ; but this
involves a remaking of the civilization that he
bears. Thus we have the dual question : How can
the individual become the organ of corporate ac
tion? How can he make over the truth authorita
tively embodied in institutions of church and state
298 THE PROBLEM OF KNOWLEDGE
into frank, healthy, and direct expressions of the
simple act of free living? On the other hand, how
can civilization preserve its own integral value and
import when subordinated to the agency of the
individual instead of exercising supreme sway over
him?
The question of knowledge, of the discovery and
statement of truth, gives the answer to this ques
tion; and it alone gives the answer. Admitting
that the practical problem of modern life is the
maintenance of the moral values of civilization
through the medium of the insight and decision of
the individual, the problem is foredoomed to futile
failure save as the individual in performing his
task can work with a definite and controllable tool.
This tool is science. But this very fact, constitut
ing the dignity of science and measuring the im
portance of the philosophic theory of knowledge,
conferring upon them the religious value once at
taching to dogma and the disciplinary significance
once belonging to political rules, also sets their
limit. The servant is not above his master.
When a theory of knowledge forgets that its
value rests in solving the problem out of which it
has arisen, viz., that of securing a method of action ;
when it forgets that it has to work out the condi
tions under which the individual may freely direct
himself without loss to the historic values of civili
zation when it forgets these things it begins to
THE PROBLEM OF KNOWLEDGE 299
cumber the ground. It is a luxury, and hence a
social nuisance and disturber. Of course, in the
very nature of things, every means or instrument
I will for a while absorb attention so that it becomes
the end. Indeed it is the end when it is an indis
pensable condition of onward movement. But
when once the means have been worked out they
must operate as such. When the nature and
method of knowledge are fairly understood, then
interest must transfer itself from the possibility
of knowledge to the possibility of its application
to life.
The sensationalist has played his part in bring
ing to effective recognition the demand in valid
knowledge for individuality of experience, for per
sonal participation in materials of knowledge.
The rationalist has served his time in making it
clear once for all that valid knowledge requires
organization, and the operation of a relatively per
manent and general factor. The Kantian episte-
mologist has formulated the claims of both schools
in defining judgment as the relation of percep
tion and conception. But when it goes on to state
that this relation is itself knowledge, or can be found
in knowledge, it stultifies itself. Knowledge can
define the percept and elaborate the concept, but
their union can be found only in action. The ex
perimental method of modern science, its erection
into the ultimate mode of verification, is simply this
300 THE PROBLEM OF KNOWLEDGE
fact obtaining recognition. Only action can rec
oncile the old, the general, and the permanent with
the changing, the individual, and the new. It is
action as progress, as development, making over
the wealth of the past into capital with which to
do an enlarging and freer business, that alone can
find its way out of the cul-de-sac of the theory of
knowledge. Each of the older movements passed
away because of its own success, failed because it
did its work, died in accomplishing its purpose.
So also with the modern philosophy of knowledge ;
there must come a time when we have so much
knowledge in detail, and understand so well its
method in general, that it ceases to be a problem.
It becomes a tool. If the problem of knowledge
is not intrinsically meaningless and absurd it must
in course of time be solved. Then the dominating
interest becomes the use of knowledge; the condi
tions under which and ways in which it may be
most organically and effectively employed to direct
conduct.
Thus the Socratic period recurs ; but recurs with
the deepened meaning of the intervening weary
years of struggle, confusion, and conflict in the
growth of the recognition of the need of patient
and specific methods of interrogation. So, too, the
authoritative and institutional truth of scholasti
cism recurs, but recurs borne up upon the vigorous
and conscious shoulders of the freed individual who
THE PROBLEM OF KNOWLEDGE 361
is aware of his own intrinsic relations to truth,
and who glories in his ability to carry civilization
not merely to carry it, but to carry it on.
Thus another swing in the rhythm of theory and
practice begins.
How does this concern us as philosophers? For
the world it means that philosophy is henceforth
a method and not an original fountain head of
truth, nor an ultimate standard of reference. But
what is involved for philosophy itself in this
change? I make no claims to being a prophet,
but I venture one more and final unproved state
ment, believing, with all my heart, that it is justi
fied both by the moving logic of the situation, and
by the signs of the times. I refer to the growing
(transfer of interest from metaphysics and the the
ory of knowledge to psychology and social ethics
including in the latter term all the related concrete
social sciences, so far as they may give guidance
to conduct.
There are those who see in psychology only a
particular science which they are pleased to term
purely empirical (unless it happen to restate in
changed phraseology the metaphysics with which
they are familiar). They see in it only a more
or less incoherent mass of facts, interesting be
cause relating to human nature, but below the natu
ral sciences in point of certainty and definiteness,
as also far below pure philosophy as to con.pre-
THE PROBLEM OF KNOWLEDGE
hensiveness and ability to deal with fundamental
issues. But if I may be permitted to dramatize a
little the position of the psychologist, he can well
afford to continue patiently at work, unmindful
of the occasional supercilious sneers of the episte-
mologist. The cause of modern civilization stands
and falls with the ability of the individual to
serve as its agent and bearer. And psychology
is naught but the account of the way in which
individual life is thus progressively maintained
and reorganized. Psychology is the attempt to
state in detail the machinery of the individual
considered as the instrument and organ through
which social action operates. It is the answer
to Kant s demand for the formal phase of ex
perience how experience as such is constituted.
Just because the whole burden and stress, both
of conserving and advancing experience is more and
more thrown upon the individual, everything which
sheds light upon how the individual may weather
the stress and assume the burden is precious and
imperious.
Social ethics in inclusive sense is the correla
tive science. Dealing not with the form or mode
or machinery of action, it attempts rather to make
out its filling and make up the values that are
necessary to constitute an experience which is
worth while. The sociologist, like the psycholo
gist, often presents himself as a camp follower of
THE PROBLEM OF KNOWLEDGE 303
genuine science and philosophy, picking up scraps
here and there and piecing them together in some
what of an aimless fashion fortunate indeed, if
not vague and over-ambitious. Yet social ethics
represents the attempt to translate philosophy
from a general and therefore abstract method into
a working and specific method; it is the change
from inquiring into the nature of value in general
to inquiring as to the particular values that ought
to be realized in the life of every one, and as to the
conditions which render possible this realization.
There are those who will see in this conception of
the outcome of a four-hundred-year discussion con
cerning the nature and possibility of knowledge a
derogation from the high estate of philosophy.
There are others who will see in it a sign that phi
losophy, after wandering aimlessly hither and yon
in a wilderness without purpose or outcome, has
finally come to its senses has given up metaphys
ical absurdities and unverifiable speculations, and
become a purely positive science of phenomena.
But there are yet others who will see in this move
ment the fulfilment of its vocation, the clear con
sciousness of a function that it has always striven
to perform; and who will welcome it as a justifica
tion of the long centuries when it appeared to sit
apart, far from the common concerns of man,
busied with discourse of essence and cause, ab
sorbed in argument concerning subject and object,
THE PROBLEM OF KNOWLEDGE
reason and sensation. To such this outcome will
appear the inevitable sequel of the saying of Soc
rates that " an unexamined life is not one fit to
be led by man " ; and a better response to his in
junction "Know thyself."
THE END
INDEX
INDEX
Absolutism, 18, 25, 98, 102,
109-110, 121-123, 130-132;
Essay IV., 142-153, 176,
180-181
Acquaintance, and knowl
edge, 79-82
Action, and problem of
knowledge, Essay XI.,
271-304
A priori, 206-213, 292-294
Appearance, and reality, 26-
28, 118-121
Aristotle, referred to, 5, 32,
35, 37, 48, 50, 78, 221, 278
Assurance, 85-88
Awareness, 93
Behavior, and intelligence,
44
Belief, Essay VI., 169-197
Bosanquet, B., 281
Bradley, F. H., Essay IV.,
112-153
Change, its supposed un
reality, 1; in modern
science, 8-9; and law, 72;
and thought, 133; of
truth, 153; of experience,
222-224, 259-260
Christianity, metaphysic of,
178
Cognitive, 84-85, 230-233
Conflict, and thinking, 116-
117, 126-127, 132, 148-149
Consistency, as criterion,
128-136
Consciousness, as end of
nature, 34-35; is partial,
43; and knowledge, 79-
80, 102, 171; Essay X.,
242-270; non-existence of,
247-248
Correspondence, 158
Cosmology, and morals, 54
Custom, as background of
morals, 48, 52
Darwin, his influence on
philosophy, Essay I., 1-19;
quoted, 2, 12
Democracy, moral meaning
of, 59-60, 266-267
Descartes, 8
Design, see Teleology
Economic Struggle, 21, 29,
35, 41, 50
Economics, influences on
morals, 57-59
Empiricism, 200-202; Essay
IX., 226-241, 289-291
Epistemology, versus logic,
95-107, 172, 185, 201, 296-
298
Error, and becoming, 100
Evolution, of species, 1, 8;
and design, 12-13; and
teleology, 32-35; and in
telligence, 42-43
Experience, Essay VII.,
198-225
Experiment, and knowledge,
Essay IV., 77-111
307
308
INDEX
Feeling, 80-81
Final Cause, see Teleology
Functions, true data of
psychology, 250-255
Galileo, 8
Genesis, and value, 261-264
Good, is concrete and plural,
15-17, 23, 27; of Nature,
Essay II., 20-45; and evo
lution, 31-35, 43; and
mysticism, 39, 42; Greek
view of, 46-50; medieval
view of, 52-54; as fixed,
67
Gordon, K., 215 n.
Gray, Asa, on evolution and
design, 12
Happiness, nature of, 69
Hegel, 65, 174 n.
Hobbes, 203 n.
Hume, 82 n.; 204 n.
Idealism, 28, 38, 191, Essay
VII., 198-225, 228
Ideality, 89, 120, 219-225
Ideas, nature of, 134, 155;
their verification, 141 if.;
are hypothetical, 144, 150-
151, 187
Individual, 244, 265-68, 285,
297
Intellectualism, Essay IV.,
112-153, 159
Intelligence, is discrimina
tive, 39, 42, 75; :s the
good of nature, 44; and
Morals, Essay III., 46-76;
cosmic and "personal, 55,
59; as biological instru
ment, 68; indirection of
activity, 133, 149
Introspection, 250 n.
James, Wm., 104, 194 n., 202,
222 n., 246
Judgment, Bradley s theory
of, 114-117; of the past,
160-61, 165; Kant s theory
of, 272
Kant, 63-65, 206-213, 271
Knowledge, its proper ob
ject, 6, 10, 14; and nature,
41; and freedom, 73; The
Experimental Theory of,
Essay IV., 77-111; de
fined, 90; and inquiry,
184-189; Essay XL, prob
lem of, 271-304
Locke, 93, 202-204, 217-218
Maine, Sir Henry, quoted,
46
Meaning, and knowledge, 87-
90; and judgment, 116-
117, 200
Mechanism, 23, 34, 57
Memory, 220
Moore, A. W., 91 n.
Morals, Essay HI., 46-76
Mysticism, 38-40, 42
Naturalism, 195
Nature, teleology of, 10;
The Good of, Essay II,
20-45; animistic character
of, 51; change in, 72
Newton, influence of, 61, 72
Organization, of experience,
208-211
Perception, ambiguity of
term, 214-219
Philosophy, changes in, 14-
19; political nature of, 21;
denned 45; and science,
INDEX
309
51; and psychology, 189-
191; Essay X., 242-270
Plato, 21, 47, 49, 72, 219 n.,
278
Pragmatism, 25, 31, 33, 55,
95 n., 109, 130 n., 144; Es
say V., 154-168, 193
Psychical, 81 n., 104
Psychology, and philosophy,
Essay X., 242-270, 301
Rationalism, Essay XI., 271-
304
"Reality," 98, 105, 113, 129,
169 n., 172, 228, 264
Relation, and appearance,
119-120
Santayana, G., 96, 224 n.
Sciences, developed out of
morals, 56, and industry,
57-58; as mode of knowl
edge, 108; and philosophy,
268-270, 287
Sensation, 94, 262 n.
Sensationalism, Essay XI.,
271-304
Social Ethics, 302-304
Socrates, 51, 76, 275, 304
Species, equivalent to
scholastic form, 3-4; as
eternal and teleological, 4-
5; basis of knowledge, 6-7
Spencer, Herbert, 16, 33, 66
Spinoza, 181
Stoicism, 172, 279
Stuart, H. W., 214 n.
Subjective, 98, 155, 204 n.,
270
Teleology, of life, 4; of
nature, 10, 32; basis of
idealism, 11; concrete, 15,
22; and evolution, 32-35;
subjective, 223-224
Theory, 124-127
Thinking, practical charac
ter of, 124-127
Tolstoi, 173 n.
Transcendence, of knowl
edge, 103 n., 156-157
Transcendental, and super
natural, 22, 29, 282; view
of knowledge, 24, 27;
freedom, 74
Truth, criterion of, 92, 95,
107-111; Essay IV., 112-
153; absolute, 137; iden
tified with existence, 138,
145; eternal, 147, 152;
Essay V., 154-168; 230-
231, 237, 282
Utilitarianism, 62
Verification, making true,
139 if., 162-164
Woodbridge, F. J. E., 104 n.,
240 n.
COD.
Dewey, John
The influence of Darwin
on philosophy
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