Things, Relations, and Quantities
As I write, the way is paved for me by Professor Cohen (Journ. of Phil., Psy., and Sci. Meth., Vol. XI, No. 23, Nov. 5, 1914, pp. 623-24), who outlines a theory of relations closely allied to that which I have in mind. Professor Cohen writes: "Like the distinction between primary and secondary qualities, the distinction between qualities and relations seems to me a shifting one because the 'nature' of a thing changes as the thing shifts from one context to another.... To Professors Montague and Lovejoy the 'thing' is like an old-fashioned landowner and the qualities are its immemorial private possessions. A thing may enter into commercial relations with others, but these relations are extrinsic. It never parts with its patrimony. To me, the 'nature' of a thing seems not to be so private or fixed. It may consist entirely of bonds, stocks, franchises, and other ways in which public credit or the right to certain transactions is represented.... At any rate, relations or transactions may be regarded as wider or more primary than qualities or possessions. The latter may be defined as internal relations, that is, relations within the system that constitutes the 'thing.' The nature of a thing contains an essence, i.e., a group of characteristics which, in any given system or context, remain invariant, so that if these are changed the things drop out of our system ... but the same thing may present different essences in different contexts. As a thing shifts from one context to another, it acquires new relations and drops old ones, and in all transformations there is a change or readjustment of the line between the internal relations which constitute the essence and the external relations which are outside the inner circle...."
Before continuing, however, I wish to make certain interpretations of these statements for which, of course, Professor Cohen is not responsible, and with which he would not be wholly in agreement. My general attitude will be shown by the first comment. Concepts are only means of denoting fragments of experience directly or indirectly given. If we then try to speak of a "nature of a thing" two interpretations of this expression are possible. The "thing" as such is only a bit of reality which some motive, that without undue extension of the term can be called practical, has led us to treat as more or less isolable from the rest of reality. Its nature, then, may consist of either its relations to other practically isolated realities or things, its actual effective value in its environment (and hence shift with the environment as Professor Cohen points out), or may consist of its essence, the "relations within the system," considered from the point of view of the potentialities implied by these for various environments. In the first sense the nature may easily change with change in environment, but if it changes in the second sense, as Professor Cohen remarks, it "drops out of our system." This I should interpret as meaning that we no longer have that thing, but some other thing selected from reality by a different purpose and point of view. I should not say with Professor Cohen that "the same thing may present different essences in different contexts." Every reality is more than one thing—man is an aggregate of atoms, a living being, an animal, and a thinker, and all of these are different things in essence, although having certain common characteristics. All attribution of "thingship" is abstraction, and all particular things may be said to participate in higher, i.e., more abstract, levels of thingship. Hence the effort to retain a thingship through a changing of essence seems to me but the echo of the motive that has so long deduced ontological monism from the logical fact that to conceive any two things is at least to throw them into a common universe of discourse. Consequently I should part company from Professor Cohen on this one point (which is perhaps largely a matter of definition, though here not unimportant) and distinguish merely the nature of a thing as actual and as potential. Of these the former alone changes with the environment, while the latter changes only as the thing ceases to be by passing into some other thing. In other words, if the example does not do violence to Professor Cohen's thought, I can quite understand this paper as a stimulator of criticism, or as a means of kindling a fire. Professor Cohen would, I suspect, take this to mean that the same thing—this paper—must be looked upon as having two different essences in two different contexts, for "the same thing may possess two different essences in different contexts," whereas I should prefer to interpret the situation as meaning that there are before me three (and as many more as may be) different things having three different essences: first, the paper as a physical object having a considerable number of definite properties; second, written words, which are undoubtedly in one sense mere structural modifications of the physical object paper (i.e., coloring on it by ink, etc.), but whose reality for my purpose lies in the power of evoking ideas acquired by things as symbols (things, indeed, but things whose essence lies in the effects they produce upon a reader rather than in their physical character); and third, the chemical and combustion producing properties of the paper. Now it is simpler for me to consider the situation as one in which three things have a common point in thingship, i.e., an abstract element in common, than to think of "a thing" shifting contexts and thereby changing its essence.
But now my divergence from Professor Cohen becomes more marked. He continues with the following example (p. 622): "Our neighbor M. is tall, modest, cheerful, and we understand a banker. His tallness, modesty, cheerfulness, and the fact that he is a banker we usually regard as his qualities; the fact that he is our neighbor is a relation which he seems to bear to us. He may move his residence, cease to be our neighbor, and yet remain the same person with the same qualities. If, however, I become his tailor, his tallness becomes translated into certain relations of measurement; if I become his social companion, his modesty means that he will stand in certain social relations with me, etc." In other words, we are illustrating the doctrine that "qualities are reducible to relations" (cf. p. 623). This doctrine I cannot quite accept without modification, for I cannot tell what it means. Without any presuppositions as to subjectivity or consciousness (cf. p. 623, (a).) there are in the world as I know it certain colored objects—let the expression be taken naïvely to avoid idealistico-realistic discussion which is here irrelevant. Now it is as unintelligible to me that the red flowers and green leaves of the geraniums before my windows should be reducible to mere relations in any existential sense, as it would be to ask for the square root of their odor, though of course it is quite intelligible that the physical theory and predictions concerning green and red surfaces (or odors) should be stated in terms of atomic distances and ether vibrations of specific lengths. The scientific conception is, after all, nothing more than an indication of how to take hold of things and manipulate them to get foreseen results, and its entities are real things only in the sense that they are the practically effective keynotes of the complex reality. Accordingly, instead of reducing qualities to relations, it seems to me a much more intelligible view to consider relations as abstract ways of taking qualities in general, as qualities thought of in their function of bridging a gap or making a transition between two bits of reality that have previously been taken as separate things. Indeed, it is just because things are not ontologically independent beings (but rather selections from genuinely concatenated existence) that relations become important as indications of the practical significance of qualitative continuities which have been neglected in the prior isolation of the thing. Thus, instead of an existential world that is "a network of relations whose intersections are called terms" (p. 622), I find more intelligible a qualitatively heterogeneous reality that can be variously partitioned into things, and that can he abstractly replaced by systems of terms and relations that are adequate to symbolize their effective nature in particular respects. There is a tendency for certain attributes to maintain their concreteness (qualitativeness) in things, and for others to suggest the connection of things with other things, and so to emphasize a more abstract aspect of experience. Thus then arises a temporary and practical distinction that tends to be taken as opposition between qualities and relations. As spatial and temporal characteristics possess their chief practical value in the connection of things, so they, like Professor Cohen's neighbor-character, are ordinarily assumed abstractly as mere relations, while shapes, colors, etc., and Professor Cohen's "modesty, tallness, cheerfulness," may be thought of more easily without emphasis on other things and so tend to be accepted in their concreteness as qualities, but how slender is the dividing-line Professor Cohen's easy translation of these things into relations makes clear.
Taken purely intellectualistically, there would be first a fiction of separation in what is really already continuous and then another fiction to bridge the gap thus made. This would, of course, be the falsification against which Bergson inveighs. But this interpretation is to misunderstand the nature of abstraction. Abstraction does not substitute an unreal for a real, but selects from reality a genuine characteristic of it which is adequate for a particular purpose. Thus to conceive time as a succession of moments is not to falsify time, but to select from processes going on in time a characteristic of them through which predictions can be made, which may be verified and turned into an instrument for the control of life or environment. A similar misunderstanding of abstraction, coupled with a fuller appreciation than Bergson evinces of the value of its results, has led to the neo-realistic insistence on turning abstractions into existent entities of which the real world is taken to be an organized composite aggregate.
The practice of turning qualities into merely conscious entities has done much to obscure the status of scientific knowing, for it has left mere quantity as the only real character of the actual world. But once take a realistic standpoint, and quantity is no more real than quality. For primitive man, the qualitative aspect of reality is probably the first to which he gives heed, and it is only through efforts to get along with the world in its qualitative character that its quantitative side is forced upon the attention. Then so-called "exact" science is born, but it does not follow that qualities henceforth become insignificant. They are still the basis of all relations, even of those that are most directly construed as quantitative. Quality and quantity are only different aspects of the world which the status of our practical life leads us to take separately or abstractly. "Thing" is no less an abstraction, in which we disregard certain continuities with the rest of the world because we are so constituted that the demands of living make it expedient to do so. Things once given, further abstractions become possible, among which are those leading to mathematical thinking, in which higher abstractions are made, guided always by the "generating problem" (cf. Karl Schmidt, Jour. of Phil., Psy., and Sci. Meth., Vol. X, No. 3, 1913, pp. 64-75).