III
Common-sense and natural science certainly tend to identify the objectively real with the existent in space and time. The physical universe is held to be palpably real in a way in which nothing not presented in sensuous terms can be. To most minds doubtless it is difficult to understand why Plato should have ascribed to the Ideas a higher degree of reality than that possessed by the particular objects of sense-perception, and still more difficult to understand his ascription of real existence to such Ideas as those of Beauty, Justice, and the Good. There is a certain apparent stability in a universe presented in "immediate" sense-perception—a universe with which we are in constant bodily intercourse—that seems not to belong to a mere order of relations which, if known in any sense, is not known to us through the senses. Moreover, knowledge of the physical world is felt to possess a higher degree of certainty than does any knowledge we can have of supposed economic or moral truth, or of economic or moral standards. Of such knowledge one is disposed to say, as Mr. Spencer does of metaphysics, that at the best it presupposes a long and elaborate inferential process which, as long, is likely to be faulty; whereas physical truth is immediate or else, when inference is involved in it, easy to be tested by appeal to immediate facts. Physical reality is a reality that can be seen and handled and felt as offering resistance, and this is evidence of objectivity of a sort not to be found in other spheres of knowledge for which the like claim is made.
The force of these impressions (and it would not be difficult to find stronger statements in the history of scientific and ethical nominalism) diminishes if one tries to determine in what consists that objectivity which they uncritically assume as given in sense-perception. For one must recognize that not all our possible modes of sense-experience are equally concerned in the presentation of this perceived objective world. Certain sensory "quales" are immediately referred to outward objects as belonging to them. Certain others are, in a way, "inward," either not more definitely localized at all or merely localized in the sense-organ which mediates them. Now, the reason for this difference cannot lie in the content of the various sense-qualities abstractly taken. A visual sensation, apart from the setting in which it occurs in common experience, can be no more objective in its reference—indeed, can have no more reference of any kind—than the least definite and instructive organic sensation. For the degree of distinctness with which one discriminates sense-qualities depends upon the number and importance of the interpretative associations which it is important from time to time to "connect" with them; or, conversely, the sense-qualities are not self-discriminating in virtue of an intrinsic objective reference or meaning which each possesses and which drives it apart from all the rest. Indeed, an intrinsic meaning, if a sensation could possess one, would not only be superfluous in the development of knowledge, but, as likely to be mistaken for the acquired or functional meaning, even seriously confusing.[116]
Now, it must be granted that, if the "simple idea of sensation" is without objective reference, no association with it of similarly abstract sensations can supply the lack. A "movement" sensation, or a tactual, having in itself no such meaning, cannot merely by being "associated" with a similarly meaningless visual sensation endow this latter with reference to an object. Objective reference is, in fact, not a sensuous thing; it is not a conscious "element," nor does it arise from any combination or fusion of such. It is neither in the association of ideas as a constituent member, nor does it belong to the association considered as a sequence of psychical states. Instead, in our present view, it belongs to or arises out of the activity through which and with reference to which associations are first of all established. It is an aspect or kind of reference or category under which any sense-quality or datum is apperceived when it is held apart from the stream of consciousness in order that it may receive new meaning as a stimulus; and a sensation functioning in such a "state of consciousness"[117] is a psychical phenomenon very different from the conscious element of "analytical" psychology. The extent to which it is true that the objective world of sense-perception is pre-eminently visual and tactual is then merely an evidence of the extent to which the exigencies of the life-process have required finer sense-discrimination for the sake of more refined reaction within these spheres as compared with others. Our conclusion, then, must be that the consciousness of objectivity is not as such sensuous, even as given in our perception of the material world. The world, as viewed from the standpoint of a particular, practical emergency, is an objective world, not in virtue of its having a "sensuous" or a "material" aspect as something existent per se, but because it is a world of stimuli in course of definition for the guidance of activity.[118]
It will be well to give further positive exposition of the meaning of the view thus stated. To return once more to our fundamental psychological conception, knowledge is essentially relevant to the solution of particular problems of more or less urgency and of various kinds and figures in the solution of such problems as the assemblage of consciously recognized symbols or stimuli by which various actions are suggested. The object as known is therefore not the same as the object as apprehended in other possible modes of being conscious of it. The workman who is actually using his tool in shaping his material, or the warrior who is actually using his weapon in the thick of combat, is, if conscious of these objects at all (and doubtless he may be conscious of them at such times), not conscious of them as objects—as the one might be, for example, in adjusting the tool for a particular kind of use, and the other in giving a keen edge to his blade. Under these latter circumstances the tool or weapon is an object, and its observed condition, viewed in the light of a purpose of using the object in a certain way, is regarded as properly suggesting certain changes or improvements. And likewise will the tool or the weapon have an objective character in the agent's apprehension in the moment of identifying and selecting it from among a number of others, or even in the act of reaching for it, especially if it is inconveniently placed. But in the act of freely using one's objective means the category of the objective plays no part in consciousness, because at such times there is no judgment respecting the means—because there is no sufficient occasion for the isolation of certain conscious elements from the rest of the stream of conscious experience to be defined as stimuli to certain needed responses. Such isolation will not normally take place so long as the reactions suggested by the conscious contents involved in the experience are fully adequate to the situation. Objects are not normally held apart as such from the stream of consciousness in which they are presented and recognized as possessing qualities warranting certain modes of conduct, excepting as it has become necessary to the attainment of the agent's purposes to modify or reconstruct his activity.[119]
Are things, then, apprehended as objective in virtue of the agent's attitude toward them, or is the agent's attitude in a typical case grounded upon an antecedent determination of the objectivity of the things in question? We must answer, in the first place, that there can be no such antecedent determination. We may, it is true, speak of believing, on the evidence of sight or touch, that a certain object is really present before us. But neither sight nor touch possesses in itself, as a particular sense-quality, any objective meaning. If touch is par excellence the sense of the objective and the appeal to touch the test of objectivity, this can only be because touch is the sense most closely and intimately connected in our experience with action. After any interval of hesitation and judgment, action begins with contact with and manipulation of the physical means which have been under investigation. Not only is touch the proximate stimulus and guide to manipulation, but all relevant knowledge which has been gained in any judgment-process, through the other senses, and especially through sight, must ultimately be reducible to terms of touch or other contact sense. The alleged tactual evidence of objectivity is, then, rather a confirmation than a difficulty for our present view. In short, we must dismiss as impossible the hypothesis that there can be a consciousness of objectivity which is not dependent upon and an expression of primary antecedent tendencies toward motor response to the presented stimulus. It is our attitude toward the prospective stimulus that mediates the consciousness of an object standing over against us.
So far, indeed, is it from being true that objectivity is a matter for special determination antecedently to action that by common testimony the conviction of objectivity comes to us quite irresistibly. The object forces itself upon us, as we say, and "whether we will or no" we must recognize its presence there before us and its independence of any choice of ours or of our knowledge. In the cautious manipulation of an instrument, in the laborious shaping of some refractory material, in the performance of any delicate or difficult task, one's sense of the objectivity of the thing with which one works is as obtrusive as remorse or grief, and as little to be shaken off. We shall revert to this suggested analogy at a later stage in our discussion.
We are now in a position to define more precisely the nature of the conditions in which the sense of objectivity emerges, and this will bring us to the point at which the objective import of our economic and ethical judgments can profitably be discussed. We have said that the world of the physical is objective, not in virtue of the sensuous terms in which it is presented, but because it is a world of stimuli for the guidance of human conduct. Under what circumstances, then, are we conscious of stimuli in their capacity of guides or incentives or grounds of conduct? And the answer must be that stimuli are interpreted as such, and so take on the character of objectivity, when their precise character as stimuli is still in doubt, and they must therefore receive further definition.
For example, a man pursued by a wild beast must find some means of escape or defense, and, seeing a tree which he may climb or a stone which he may hurl, will inspect these as well as may be with reference to their fitness for the intended purpose. It is at just such moments as these, then, that physical things become things for knowledge and take on their stubbornly objective character—that is to say, when they are essentially problematic. Now, in order that any physical thing may be thus problematic and so possess objective character for knowledge, it must (1) be in part understood, and so prompt certain more or less indiscriminate responses; and (2) be in part as yet not understood—in such wise that, while there are certain indefinite or unmeasured tendencies on the agent's part to respond to the object—climb the tree or hurl the stone—there is also a certain failure of complete unity in the co-ordination of these activities, a certain contradiction between different suggestions of conduct which different observed qualities of the tree or stone may give, and so hesitation and arrest of final action. The pursued man views the tree suspiciously before trusting himself to its doubtful strength, or weighs well the stone and tests its rough edges before pausing to throw it. Thus, to state the matter negatively, there are two possible situations in which the sense of objectivity, if it emerge into consciousness at all, cannot long continue. An object—-as, for example, some strange shrub or flower—which, in the case we are supposing, may attract the pursued wayfarer's notice, may awaken no responses relevant to the emergency in which the agent finds himself; and it will therefore forthwith lapse from consciousness. Or, on the other hand, the object, as the tree or stone, may rightly or wrongly seem to the agent so completely satisfactory, or, rather, in effect may be so, as instantly to prompt the action which otherwise would come, if at all, only after a period of more or less prolonged attention. In neither of these cases, then, is there a problematic object. In the one the thing in question is wholly apart from any present interest, and therefore lapses. In the other case the thing seen is comprehended on the instant with reference to its general use and merges immediately into the main stream of the agent's consciousness without having been an object of express attention. In neither case, therefore, is there hesitation with reference to the thing in question—any conflict between inconsiderate positive responses prompted by certain features of the object and inhibitions due to recognition of its shortcomings. In a word, in neither case is there any judgment or possibility of judgment, and hence no sense of objectivity. We can have consciousness of an object, in the strict sense of the term, only when some part or general aspect of the total situation confronting an agent excites or seems to warrant responses which must be held in check for further determination. In terms of consciousness, an object is always an object of attention—that is, an object which is under process of development and reconstruction with reference to an end.
An inhibited impulse to react in a more or less definite way to a stimulus is, then, the adequate condition of the emergence in consciousness of the sense of objectivity. So long as an activity is proceeding without check or interruption, and no conflict develops between motor responses prompted by different parts or aspects of the situation, the agent's consciousness will not present the distinction of Objective and Subjective. The mode of being conscious which accompanies free and harmonious activity of this sort may be exemplified by such experiences as æsthetic appreciation, sensuous enjoyment, acquiescent absorption in pleasurable emotion, or even intellectual processes of the mechanical sort, such as easy computation or the solution of simple algebraic problems—processes in which no more serious difficulty is encountered than suffices to stimulate a moderate degree of interest. If, however, reverting to the illustration, our present need for a stone calls for some property which the stone we have seized appears to lack, consciousness must pass over into the reflective or attentive phase. The stone will now figure as an object possessing certain qualities which render it in a general way relevant to the emergency before us. A needed quality is missing, and this defect must hold in check all the imminent responses until discovery of the missing quality can set them free. In a word, the stone as known to us has assumed the station of subject in a judgment-process, and our effort is, if possible, to assign to it a new predicate relevant to our present situation. Psychologically speaking, the stone is an object, a stimulus to which we are endeavoring to find warrant for responding in some new or reconstructed way.
In this process we must assume, then, first of all, an interest on the agent's part in the situation as a whole, which in the first place, in terms of the illustration, makes the pursued one note the tree or stone—which might otherwise have escaped his notice as completely as any passing cloud or falling leaf—and suggests what particular qualities or adaptabilities should be looked for in it. Given this interest in "making something" out of the total situation as explaining the recognition of the stone and the impulse to seize and hurl it, we find the sense of the stone's objectivity emerging just in the arrest of the undiscriminating impulse. The stone must have a certain meaning as a stimulus first of all, but it must be a meaning not yet quite defined and certain of acceptance. The stone will be an object only if, and so long as, the undiscriminating impulses suggested by these elements of meaning are held in check in order that they may be ordered, supplemented, or made more definite. It is, then, the essence of the present contention that physical things are objective in our experience in virtue of their recognized inadequacy as means or incentives of action—an inadequacy which, in turn, is felt as such in so far as we are seeking to use them as means or grounds of conduct, or to avail ourselves of them as conditions, in coping with the general situation from which our attention has abstracted them.
From this analysis of the conditions of the consciousness of objectivity we must now proceed to inquire whether in the typical ethical and economic situations, as they have been described, essentially these same conditions are present.
In the ethical situation, according to our statement, the subject of the judgment (the object of attention) is the new end which has just been presented in imagination, and we have now to see that the agent's attitude toward this end is for our present purpose essentially the same as toward a physical object which is under scrutiny. For just as the physical object is such for consciousness because it is partly relevant (whether in the way of furthering or of hindering) to the agent's purpose, but as yet partly not understood from this point of view, so the imaged end may likewise be ambiguous. The agent's moral purpose may be the (very likely mythical) primitive one of which we read in "associational" discussions of the moral consciousness—that of avoiding punishment. It may be that of "imitative," sympathetic obedience to authority—a sentiment whose fundamental importance for ethical psychology has long remained without due recognition.[120] It may be loyalty to an ideal of conscience, or yet again a purpose of enlargement and development of personality. But on either supposition the compatibility of the end with the prevailing standard or principle of decision may be a matter of doubt and so call for judgment. The problem will, of course, be a problem in the full logical sense as involving judgment of the type described in our discussion of the ethical situation only when the attitudes of obedience to authority and to fixed ideals have been outgrown; but, on the other hand, as might be shown, it is just the inevitable increasing use of judgment with reference to these formulations of the moral life which gradually undermines them and, by a kind of "internal dialectic" of the moral consciousness, brings the agent to recognition as well as to more perfect practice of a logical or deliberative method.
The end, then, is, in the typical ethical situation, an object which one must determine by analysis and reconstruction as a means or condition of moral "integrity" and progress. It is, accordingly, in the second place, an object upon whose determination a definite activity of the agent is regarded by him as depending. Just as in the physical judgment-process the object is set off over against the self and regarded as a given thing which, when once completely defined, will prompt certain movements of the body, so here the contemplated act is an object which, when fully defined in all its relevant psychological and sociological bearings, will prompt a definite act of rejection or acceptance by the self. Now, it might be shown, as we believe, that the complete psychological and sociological definition of the course of conduct is in truth the full explanation of the choice; there is no separate reaction of the moral self to which the course of conduct is, as defined, an external stimulus. So also in the sphere of physical judgment complete definition passes over into action—or the appreciative mode of consciousness which accompanies action—without breach of continuity. But within the judgment-process in all its forms there is in the agent's apprehension this characteristic feature of apparent separation between the subject as an objective thing presently to be known and used or responded to, and the predicate as a response yet to be perfected in details, but at the right time, when one has proper warrant, to be set free. It is not our purpose here to speak of metaphysical interpretations or misinterpretations of this functional distinction; but only to argue from the presence of the distinction in the ethical type of judgment as in the physical as genuine an objectivity for the ethical type as can be ascribed to the other. The ethical judgment is objective in the sense that in it an object—an imaged mode of conduct taken as such—is presented for development to a degree of adequacy at which one can accept it or reject it as a mode of conduct. The ethical predicates Right and Wrong, Good and Bad, each pair representing a particular standpoint, as we shall later see, signify this accepting or rejecting movement of the self, this "act of will," of which, as an act in due time to be performed, the agent is more or less acutely conscious in the course of moral judgment.
In the economic situation also, as above described, there is present the requisite condition of the consciousness of objectivity. Here, as in the ethical situation, an object is presented which one must redetermine, and toward which one must presently act in a way likewise to be determined in detail in judgment. We shall defer until a later stage discussion of the reason why this subject of the economic judgment is the means in the activity that is in progress. We are not yet ready to show that the means must be the center of attention under the conditions which have been specified. Here we need only note the fact of common experience that economic judgment does center upon the means, and show that in this fact is given the objective status of the means in the judgment-process; for the economic problem is essentially that of withdrawing a portion, a "marginal increment," of the means from some use or set of uses to which they are at present set apart, and applying it to the new end that has come to seem, on ethical grounds at least, desirable; and we may regard this diversion as the essentially economic act which, in the agent's apprehension during judgment, is contingent upon the determination of the means. The object as economic is accordingly the means, or a marginal portion of the means, which is to be thus diverted (or, so to speak, exposed to the likelihood of such diversion), and its determination must be of such a nature as to show the economic urgency, or at least the permissibility, of this diversion. Into this determination, manifestly, the results of much auxiliary inquiry into physical properties of the means must enter—such properties, for example, as have to do with its technological fitness for its present use as compared with possible substitutes, and its adaptability for the new use proposed. Taking the word in the broad sense of object of thought, it is always an object in space and time to which the economic judgment assigns an economic value; and it is true here (just the same is true, mutatis mutandis, of the psychological and sociological determinations necessary to the fixation of ethical value) that the economically motivated physical determination of the objective means from the standpoint of the emergency in hand is the full "causal" explanation of the economic act. It must, however, be carefully observed that this physical determination is in the typical case altogether incidental, from the agent's standpoint, to the assignment of an economic character or value to the means—a value which will at the close of the judgment come to conscious recognition. As we shall see, the process is directed throughout by reference to economic principles and standards, and what shall be an adequate determination in the case depends upon the precision with which these are formulated and the strenuousness with which they are applied. In a word, the economic judgment assigns to the physical object, as known at the outset, a new non-physical character. Throughout the judgment-process this character is gaining in distinctness, and at the end it is accepted as the Value of the means, as warrant for the diversion of them to the new use which has been decided on.[121]
We have now to consider whether in the actual ethical and economic experience of men there is any direct evidence confirming the conclusions which our logical analysis of the respective situations would appear to require. Can any phases of the total experience of working out a satisfactory course of conduct in these typical emergencies be appealed to as actually showing at least some tacit recognition that these types of judgment present each one an order of reality or an aspect of the one reality?
In the first place, then, one must recognize that in the agent's own apprehension a judgment of value has something more than a purely subjective meaning. It is never offered, by one who has taken the trouble to work it out more or less laboriously and then to express it in terms which are certainly objective, as a mere announcement of de facto determination or a registration of arbitrary whim and caprice. One no more means to announce a groundless choice or a choice based upon pleasure felt in contemplation of the imaged end than in his judgments concerning the physical universe he means to affirm coexistences and sequences, agreements and disagreements, of "ideas" as psychical happenings. That there is an ethical or economic truth to which one can appeal in doubtful cases is, indeed, the tacit assumption in all criticism of another's deliberate conduct; the contrary assumption, that criticism is merely the opposition of one's own private prejudice or desire to the equally private prejudice or desire of another, would render all criticism and mutual discussion of ethical problems meaningless and futile in the plain man's apprehension as in the philosopher's. For the plain man has a spontaneous confidence in his knowledge of the material world which makes him look askance at any alleged analysis of his sense-perceptions and scientific judgments into "associations of ideas," and the same confidence, or something very like it, attaches to judgments of these other types. It may perhaps be easier (though the concession is a very doubtful one) to destroy a naïve confidence in the objectivity of moral truth than a like confidence in scientific knowledge, but it must be remembered that the plain man's sense of the urgency, at least of ethical problems, if not of economic, is commonly less acute than for the physical. In the plain man's experience serious moral problems are infrequent—problems of the true type, that is, which cannot be disposed of as mere cases of temptation; one must have attained a considerable capacity for sympathy and a considerable knowledge of social relations before either the recognition of such problems or proper understanding of their significance is possible. Moral and economic crises are not vividly presented in sensuous imagery excepting in minds of developed intelligence, experience, and imaginative power; and the judgments reached in coping with them do not, as a rule, obviously call for nicely measured, calculated, and adjusted bodily movements. The immediate act of executing an important economic judgment may be a very commonplace performance, like the dictation of a letter, and an ethical decision may, however great its importance for future overt conduct, be expressed by no immediate visible movements of the body. But this possible difference of impressiveness between physical and other types of judgments is from our present standpoint unessential; and indeed, after all, it cannot be denied that there are persons whose sense of moral obligation is quite as distinct and influential, and even sensuously vivid, as their conviction of the real existence of an external world. To the average man it certainly is clear that, as Dr. Martineau declares, "it is an inversion of moral truth to say ... that honour is higher than appetite because we feel it so; we feel it so because it is so. This 'is' we know to be not contingent on our apprehension, not to arise from our constitution of faculty, but to be a reality irrespective of us in adaptation to which our nature is constituted, and for the recognition of which the faculty is given."[122] And the impressiveness, to most minds, of likening the sublimity of the moral law to the visible splendor of the starry heavens would seem to suggest that the apprehension of moral truth is a mode of consciousness, in form at least, so far akin to sense-perception as to be capable of illustration and even reinforcement from that type of experience.
At this point we must revert to a suggestion which presented itself above in another connection, but which at the time could not be further developed. This was, in a word, that there is often a feeling of obtrusiveness in our appreciation of the objectivity of the things before us in ordinary sense-perception (or physical judgment) which is not unlike the felt insistence of remorse and grief.[123] This feeling is so conspicuous a feature of the state of consciousness in physical judgment as frequently to serve the plain man as his last and irrefragable evidence of the metaphysical independence of the material world, and it is indeed a feature whose explanation does throw much light upon the meaning of the consciousness of objectivity as a factor within experience. Now, there is another common feeling—or, as we do not scruple to call it, another emotion—which is perhaps quite as often appealed to in this way; though, as we believe, never in quite the same connection in any argument in which the two experiences are called upon to do service to the same end. Material objects, we are told, are reliable and stable as distinguished from the fleeting illusive images of a dream—they have a "solidity" in virtue of which one can "depend upon them," are "hard and fast" remaining faithfully where one deposits them for future use or, if they change and disappear, doing so in accordance with fixed laws which make the changes calculable in advance. The material realm is the realm of "solid fact" in which one can work with assurance that causes will infallibly produce their right and proper effects, and to which one willingly returns from the dream-world in which his adversary, the "idealist," would hold him spellbound. We propose now briefly to consider these two modes of apprehension of external physical reality in the light of the general analysis of judgment given above—from which it will appear that they are, psychologically, emotional expressions of what have been set forth as the essential features of the judgment-situation, whether in its physical, ethical, or economic forms. From this we shall argue that there should actually be in the ethical and economic spheres similar, or essentially identical, "emotions of reality," and we shall then proceed to verify the hypothesis by pointing to those ethical and economic experiences which answer the description.
We have seen that the center of attention or subject in the judgment-process is as such problematic—in the sense that there are certain of its observed and recognized attributes which make it in some sense relevant and useful to the purpose in hand, while yet other of its attributes (or absences of certain attributes) suggest conflicting activities. The object which one sees is certainly a stone and of convenient size for hurling at the pursuing animal. The situation has been analyzed and found to demand a missile, and this demand has led to search for and recognition of a stone. The stone, however, may be of a color suggesting a soft and crumbling texture, or its form may appear from a distance to be such as to make it practically certain to miss the mark, however carefully it may be aimed and thrown. Until these points of difficulty have been ascertained, the stone is wanting still in certain essential determinations. So far as it has been certainly determined, it prompts to the response directly suggested by one's general end of defense and escape, but there are these other indications which hold this response in check and which, if verified, will cause the stone to be let lie unused. Now, we have, in this situation of conflict or tension between opposed incitements given by the various discriminated characters of the object, the explanation of the aspect of obtrusiveness, of arbitrary resistance to and independence of one's will, which for the time being seems the unmistakable mark or coefficient of the thing's objectivity. For it is not the object as a whole that is obtrusive; indeed, clearly, there could be no obtrusiveness on the part of an "object as a whole," and in such a case there could also be no judgment. The obtrusion in the case before us is not a sense of the energy of a recalcitrant metaphysical object put forth upon a coerced and helpless human will, but simply a conscious interpretation of the inhibition of certain of the agent's motor tendencies by certain others prompted by the object's "suspicious" and as yet undetermined appearances or possible attributes. The object as amenable to use—those of its qualities which taken by themselves are unquestionable and clearly conducive to the agent's purpose—needs no attention for the moment, let us say. The attention is rather upon the dubious and to all appearance unfavorable qualities, and these for the time being make up the sum and content of the agent's knowledge of the object. On the other hand, the agent as an active self is identified with the end and with those modes of response to the object which promise to contribute directly to its realization. It is in this direction that his interest is set and he strains with all his powers of mind to move, and it is upon the self as identified with, and for the time being expressed in, the "effort of the agent's will" that the object as resistant, refusing to be misconstrued, obtrudes. One must see the object and must acknowledge its apparent, or in the end its ascertained, unfitness. One is "coerced." The situation is one of conflict, and it is out of the conflict that the essentially emotional experience of "resistance" emerges.[124] The more special emotions of impatience, anger, or discouragement may in a given case not be present or may be suppressed, but the emotion of objectivity will still remain.[125]
On the same general principles the other of our two coefficients of reality may be explained. Let us assume that the stone in our illustration has at last been cleared of all ambiguity in its suggestion, having been taken as a missile, and that the man in flight now holds it ready awaiting the most favorable moment for hurling it at his pursuer. It will hardly be maintained that under these conditions the coefficient of the stone's reality as an object consists in its obtrusiveness, in its resistance to or coercion of the self. The stone is now regarded as a fixed and determinate feature of the situation—a condition which can be counted on, whatever else may fail. Over against other still uncertain aspects of the situation (which are now in their turn real because resistant, coercive, and obtrusive) stands the stone as a reassuring fact upon and about which the agent can build up the whole plan of conduct which may, if all goes well, bring him safely out of his predicament. The stone has, so to speak, passed over to the "end" side of the situation, and although it may have to be rejected for some other means of defense, as the definition of the situation proceeds and the plan of action accordingly changes (as in some degree it probably must), nevertheless for the time being the imaged activities as stimulus to which the stone is now accepted are a fixed part of the plan and guide in further judgment of the means still undefined. The agent can hardly recur to the stone, when, after attending for a time to the bewildering perplexities of the situation, he pauses once more to take an inventory of his certain resources, without something of an emotional thrill of assurance and encouragement. In this emotional appreciation of the "solidity" and "dependability" of the object the second of our coefficients of reality consists. This might be termed the Recognition, the other the Perception, coefficient. Classifying them as emotions, because both are phenomena of tension in activity, we should group the Perception coefficient with emotions of the Contraction type, like grief and anger, and the Recognition coefficient with the Expansion emotions, like joy and triumph.
Now, in the foregoing interpretation no reference has been made to any conditions peculiar to the physical type of judgment-situation. The ground of explanation has been the feature of arrest of activity for the sake of reconstruction, and this, if our analyses have been correct, is the essence of the ethical and economic situations as well as of the physical. Can there then be found in these two spheres experiences of the same nature and emerging under the same general conditions as our Perception and Recognition coefficients of reality? If so, then our case for the objective significance and value of ethical and economic judgment is in so far strengthened. (1) In the first place, then, the object in its economic character is problematic, assuming a desire on the agent's part to apply it, as means, to some new or freshly interesting end, because it has already been, and accordingly now is, set apart for other uses and cannot thoughtlessly be withdrawn from them. Extended illustration is not needed to remind one that these established and hitherto unquestioned uses will haunt the economic conscience as obtrusively and inhibit the desired course of economic conduct with as much energy of resistance as in the other case will any of the contrary promptings of a physical object. Moreover, the Recognition coefficient may as easily be identified in this connection. If one's scruples gain the day, in such a case one has at least a sense of comforting assurance in the conservatism of his choice and its accordance with the facts, however unreconciled in another way one may be to the deprivation that has thus seemed to be necessary. If, however, the new end in a measure makes good its case and the modes of expenditure which the "scruples" represented have been readjusted in accordance with it, then the means, no less than before the new interpretation had been placed upon them, will enjoy the status of Reality in the economic sense. They will be real now, however, not in the obtrusive way, as presenting aspects which inhibit the leading tendency in the judgment-process, but, instead, as means having a fixed and certain character in one's economic life, which, after the hesitation and doubt just now superseded, one may safely count upon and will do well to keep in view henceforth. (2) In the second place, mere mention of the corresponding ethical experiences must suffice, since only extended illustration from literature and life would be fully adequate: on the one hand, the "still small voice" of Conscience or the authoritativeness of Duty, "stern daughter of the voice of God;" and, on the other, the restful assurance with which, from the vantage-ground of a satisfying decision, one may look back in wonder at the possibility of so serious a temptation or in rejoicing over the new-won freedom from a burdensome and repressive prejudice.
This must for the present serve as positive exposition of our view as to the objective significance of the valuational types of judgment. There are certain essential points which have as yet not been touched upon, and there are certain objections to the general view the consideration of which will serve further to explain it; but the discussion of these various matters will more conveniently follow the special analysis of the valuational judgments, to which we shall now proceed.