IV
We come now to the consideration of the third element in our problem; ideality, important and normative value, in relation to experience; the antithesis 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 suggest principles true “on the whole” or usually, but without furnishing instruction as to their exact 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, dynamic transitions drop out because, for the purpose 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 atomistic standing of their own. This is the only alternative to what the psychologists term “total reminiscence,” 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, giving us just another embarrassing present experience, illusory because irrelevant, memory must work by retail—by summoning distinct cases, events, sequences, precedents. Dis-membering is 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 favorable 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 dismembering of the vital present into the disconnected past is correlative to an anticipation, an idealization of the future.
Moreover, the contingent character of the principle 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 exigency 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 Aristotle’s valuation of “experience” with respect to its contingency, if he had but once employed the function of developing and perfecting value, instead 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 contents undergo change of meaning, and of meaning in the sense of excellence, value. Every experience is in-course,[42] 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 effort, both precedent, the reduction of the present idealization, the anticipation of the possible, though doubtful, future, emerge. Without idealization, that is, without conception of the favorable issue that the present, defined in terms of precedents, may portend in its transition, the recollection of precedents, and the formulation of tentative rules is nonsense. But without the identification of the present in terms of elements suggested by the past, without recognition, the ideal, the value projected as end, remains inert, helpless, sentimental, without means of realization. Resembling cases and anticipation, memory and idealization, 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. Control of the character of the change in the direction 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 automatically injected and kept in the world of experience by any force not reflected in human memories 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 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 emphasized, 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. Objective ontological teleology spells machinery. Reflective and volitional, experimental teleology alone spells ideality.[43] Objective, rationalistic idealism breaks upon the fact that it can have no intermediary between a brutally achieved embodiment of meaning (physical in character or else of that peculiar 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 experience, and that acknowledges the possible control of 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[44]
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 uppermost, have left me with a conviction that the fundamental difference is not so much in matters overtly discussed as in a presupposition that remains 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 empiricism.[45]
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 describe 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 congruous 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 account 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 psychologist’s horse, the logician’s horse, or the metaphysician’s horse.
In each case, the nub of the question is, what sort of experience is denoted or indicated: a concrete 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 experience. And 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 conceived primarily as a perceiver or as a thinker being a further, and secondary, question. This is the root-paralogism of all idealisms, whether subjective or objective, psychological or epistemological. 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 fallacious 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 piecemeal, what it is to a finite and partial knower. Or, put more positively, knowing is one mode of experiencing, and the primary philosophic demand (from the standpoint of immediatism) is to find out what sort of an experience knowing is—or, concretely how things are experienced when they are experienced as known things.[46] 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 knowing experience, as compared with things experienced 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, metaphysically, absolutely, without qualification, everything in its reality (as distinct from its “appearance,” or phenomenal occurrence) is what a knower would find it to be, is, from the immediatist’s standpoint, if not the root of all philosophic evil, at least one of its main roots. For this leaves out of account what the knowledge standpoint is itself experienced as.
I start and am flustered by a noise heard. Empirically, that noise is fearsome; it really is, not merely phenomenally or subjectively so. That is what it is experienced as being. But, when I experience 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 unreality has given place to a reality, nor that some transcendental (unexperienced) Reality has changed,[47] 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 existence effected through the medium of cognition. The content of the latter experience cognitively regarded 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 standpoint, mean a concrete difference in actual things experienced.[48] Again, in many cases, only in retrospect is the prior experience cognitionally regarded at all. In such cases, it is only in regard to contrasted content in 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 cognition, results in what is relatively, at least, more real.[49] In short, a critic may say that, when I was 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 distinction 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 understanding 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-frightened? I see absolutely no reason for claiming that the experience must be described by the former phrase. In all probability (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” is something not concretely experienced (whose nature 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.[50] 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 cognized, as a known object, and is thereby transformed, or reorganized. The fright-at-the-noise in the case cited is obviously cognitive, in this sense. By description, it induces an investigation or inquiry 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 experience 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.[51] But 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 indicate the absolute, final, irreducible, and inexpugnable concrete quale which everything experienced 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. Suppose we take, as a crucial case for the empiricist, an out and out illusion, say of Zöllner’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 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 experience 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 contained. It is because this thing, afterwards adjudged 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.[52]
If any experience, then a determinate experience; and this determinateness is the only, and is the adequate, principle of control, or “objectivity.” 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 confusion 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, doubtfulness, confusion, at large or in general. It is this vagueness, and no other; absolutely unique, absolutely what it is.[53] Whatever gain in clearness, in fullness, in trueness of content is experienced must grow out of some element in the experience of this experienced as what it is. To return to the illusion: If the experience of the lines as convergent is illusory, it is because of some elements in the thing as experienced, not because of something defined in terms of externality to this particular experience. 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 concretely, the experience of convergent lines contains within itself the elements of the transformation 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 continuous 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 hypothetical all-knower as of the vague, blind experience 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, transformable through a series of experienced reals without break of continuity, into the absolute thought-experience. There is no need of logical manipulation to effect the transformation, 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 experience 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.[54] The reader 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 identical in kind (but differing in problem and hence in operation) with that of the scientist. If you wish to find out what subjective, objective, physical, mental, cosmic, psychic, cause, substance, purpose, activity, evil, being, quality—any philosophic 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, immortality, 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. Philosophic conceptions have, I believe, outlived their usefulness considered as stimulants to emotion, or as a species of sanctions; and a larger, more fruitful and more valuable career awaits them considered as specifically experienced meanings.
[Note: The reception of this essay proved that I was unreasonably sanguine in thinking that the foot-note of warning, appended to the title, would forfend radical misapprehension. I see now that it was unreasonable to expect that the word “immediate” in a philosophic writing could be generally understood to apply to anything except knowledge, 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 reflection, 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 as.
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.
There is nothing in the text to imply that things exist in experience atomically or in isolation. When it is said that a thing as cognized is different from an earlier non-cognitionally 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 discreteness 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 experiencing of them. The import of the article is to the effect that we are not entitled to draw philosophic (as distinct 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 Woodbridge), raised a point of fact, holding that cognitional 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 remarking 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 modifications 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 Bakewell, p. 520 and p. 687; one by Bode, p. 658; one by Woodbridge, p. 573; Vol. III. of the same Journal, by Leighton, p. 174.]
“CONSCIOUSNESS” AND EXPERIENCE[55]
Every science in its final standpoint and working aims is controlled by conditions lying outside itself—conditions that subsist in the practical life of the time. With no science is this as obviously true as with psychology. Taken without nicety of analysis, no one would deny that psychology 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 attributed 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 reflected, 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; they aim at arousing such different impulses and at organizing them according to such different purposes, 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 psychology, a technical subject, hoping that the human meaning may yet appear.
There is at present a strong, apparently a growing tendency to conceive of psychology as an account of the consciousness of the individual, considered as something in and by itself; consciousness, 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 account 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 conception be true, there is no intimate, no important connection of psychology and philosophy at large. 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 intelligent discussion.
But there is another possibility. If the individual of whom psychology treats be, after all, a social individual, any absolute setting off and apart of a sphere of consciousness as, even for scientific purposes, self-sufficient, is condemned in advance. 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 incorporates and animates, that meaning has psychology for philosophy.
This problem is too important and too large to suffer attack in an evening’s address. Yet I venture to consider a portion of it, hoping that such things as appear will be useful clues in entering wider territory. We may ask what is the effect upon psychology of considering its material as 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 consciousness “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, maturing, and dissolution. It is both analytic and synthetic—analytic in that it resolves each state into its constituent elements; synthetic in that it discovers the processes by which these elements combine into complex wholes and series. It leaves alone—it shuts out—questions concerning the validity, the objective import of these modifications: of their value in conveying truth, in effecting 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 variety 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 excursion into ultimates, into that never-ending panorama 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 conviction—that the partial sciences, just because they are partial, are not expected to be coherent with themselves nor with one another; when the metaphysician, I say, praises the psychologist for sticking to his last, we are reminded that another motive 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.
But, be the reasons as they may, there is little doubt of the fact. Almost all our working psychologists 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 “consciousness as such.” But I do not believe that the limitation is final. Quite the contrary: if “consciousness” or “state of consciousness” be given intelligible 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 recognizing 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 studying. 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 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 understand that which is anything but a state of consciousness. 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 defines itself. I conceive that states of consciousness (and I hope you will take the phrase broadly enough to cover all the specific data of psychology) have no existence before the psychologist begins to work. He brings them into existence. What we are really after is the process of experience, 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 part it plays in maintaining an inclusive, expanding, 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, phenomena 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 footprints 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 elements, and finally, thereby, to discover the laws of their arrangement in space!
Yet the immediate data are footprints, and footprints 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 psychologist. 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 problem. They are his footprints, his clues through which he places before himself the life-process he is studying—with the further difference that his footprints are not after all given to him, but are developed by his investigation.[56]
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 experiencing 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 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, loving give the points of departure; they alone are concrete experiences. To understand these experiences, under what conditions they arise, and what effects they produce, analysis into states of consciousness occurs. And the modes of consciousness that are figured remain unarranged and unimportant, 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 propose, to observe, to be kindly affectioned, are terms of value, of practice, of operation; just as digestion, respiration, locomotion express functions, not observable “objects.” But there is an object that may be described: lungs, stomach, leg-muscles, or whatever. Through the structure we present 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 point of departure, that prescribed the problem and that set the limits, physical as well as intellectual, 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 translation. States of consciousness are the morphology of certain functions.[57] What is true of analysis, of description, is true equally of classification. Knowing, willing, feeling, name states of consciousness not in terms of themselves, but in terms of acts, attitudes, found in experience.[58]
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 explained 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.[59] 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 consciousness 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 processes as association are concretely inexplicable when 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.[60]
We have only to note that there are two opposing schools in psychology to see in what an unscientific 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 dualisms present themselves, the same necessity of choosing between two schools. One, lost in the distinctions that it has developed, denies the function because it can find objectively presented only states of consciousness. So it abrogates the function, regarding it as a mere aggregate of such states, or as a purely external and factitious relation between them. The other school, recognizing that this procedure explains away rather than explains, the values of experience, attempts to even up by declaring that certain functions are themselves immediately given data of consciousness, existing side by side with the “states,” but indefinitely transcending them in worth, and apprehended 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 ultimate truths, its hierarchy of intuitions, its ready-made faculties. To be sure, these “spiritual faculties” are now largely reduced to some one comprehensive form—Apperception, or Will, or Attention, 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 acting upon them from the outside so as to bring co-operation and harmony into them![61] This division into psychological schools is as reasonable as would be one of botanists into rootists and flowerists; of 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 experience that the zoologist, geologist, chemist, mathematician, and historian deal with, and that what characterizes his specialty is not some data or existences 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 philosophical bearing. As a matter of fact, the larger part of the questions that are being discussed in current epistemology and what is termed metaphysic of logic and ethic arise out of (and are hopelessly compromised by) this original assumption 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 irony of the situation. The epistemologist’s problem 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 reveals the thoroughness of the psychologist’s revenge. Just and only because experience has been reduced to “states of consciousness” as independent existences, does the question of self-transcendence have any meaning. The entire epistemological industry is one—shall I say it—of a 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, indeed, excuse the psychologist for not carrying on the special inquiries that are the business of logical, ethical, and esthetical philosophy; but can we excuse ourselves for forcing his results into such a shape as to make philosophic problems so arbitrary that they are soluble only by arbitrarily wrenching scientific facts?
Undoubtedly we are between two fires. In placing upon psychology the responsibility of discovering the method of experience, as a sequence of acts and passions, do we not destroy just that limitation to concrete detail which now constitutes 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 separate 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 tearing 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. Examination of this period is instructive; there is much in contemporary investigation and discussion that is almost unpleasantly reminiscent in its suggestiveness. The psychologist should profit by the intervening history of science. The conception of evolution 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 comprehension, and betokens failure to grasp the problem.
With the change in standpoint from self-included existence to including process, from structural 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 adjustment. Not that the concrete, empirical phenomenon loses in worth, much less that unverifiable “metaphysical” entities are impertinently introduced; but that our aim is the discovery of a process of actions in its adaptations to circumstance. 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, adjustments marking the favorable equilibrium of the whole organism; they connect with the question of the use of sensation in general and auditory sensations 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 significance 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 significance 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 conditions.
Of course, I am far from saying that every psychologist must make the whole journey. Each individual may contract, as he pleases, for any section or subsection he prefers; and undoubtedly the well-being of the science is advanced by such division of labor. But psychology goes over the whole ground from detecting every distinct act of experiencing, to seeing what need calls out the special organ fitted to cope with the situation, and discovering the machinery through which it operates to keep a-going the course of action.
But, I shall be told, the wall that divides psychology 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 experience. But philosophy is a matter of values; of the criticism and justification of certain validities. One deals, it is said, with genesis, with conditions 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 philosophy 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 patient study of conditions of origin and development. The method of analysis in mathematics is the method of construction. The experimental method 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 conception of evolution is no more and no less the discovery of a general law of life than it is the generalization of all scientific method. Everywhere analysis that cannot proceed by examining the successive 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 preliminary. 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 reflection. Not so with natural history when it is worthy of its name. Here the analysis is the unfolding 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. Nothing 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 accordingly it has its meaning. Nothing is more naïve 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. Nature knows no such divorce of quality and circumstance. 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 serving 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 lifehistory. 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 achievement of finite individuals; it tells the tale of approach to the treasures of truth, of partial victory, 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. Psychology, 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 distinction between these individual strivings and achievements, and the “Reality” that subsists and supports its own structure outside these finite futilities. The processes by which we turn over The Reality into terms of our fragmentary unconcluded, inconclusive experiences are so extrinsic to the Reality itself as to have no revealing power with reference to it. There is the ordo ad universum, the subject of philosophy; there is the ordo ad individuum, the subject of psychology.
Some such assumption as this lies latent, I am convinced, in all forswearings of the kinship of 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 remarking that the doctrine is almost never consistently 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 practical and social. The doctrine of the accidental, futile, transitory significance of the individual’s experience as compared with eternal realities; 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 rearrangement comes, our estimate of the nature and importance of psychology will mirror the change.
When man’s command of the methods that control 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 submit his perception and purpose blankly to the blank reality beyond. Under such circumstances, external authority must reign; the belief that human experience in itself is approximate, not intrinsic, is inevitable. Under such circumstances, reference to the individual, to the subject, is a resort only for explaining error, illusion, and uncertainty. The necessity of external control and external 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 salvation 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 democracy. Its postulate is that since experience fulfils itself in individuals, since it administers itself through their instrumentality, the account of 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 getting 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 universals, all particulars and individuals are subject for valuation and regulation. Without such possession, it is only the courage of the fool that would undertake the venture to which democracy has committed itself—the ordering of life in response 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 deification is monstrous fetishism, unless the deity be there; unless the universal lives, moves, and has its being in experience as individualized.[62] This conviction 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 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 pretentiously 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 something in experience, something in things, which the physical and the biological sciences do not touch; something, moreover, which is not just more experiences 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 assumed there be experience. It is psychology which tells us how this possible experience loses its barely hypothetical character, and is stamped with categorical unquestioned experiencedness; how, in a word, it becomes here and now in some uniquely individualized life. Here is the necessary transition of science into philosophy; a passage that 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 increased 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 interpretation 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 functional and pragmatic empiricism proffered in this volume has been constantly objected to on the ground that its conceptions of knowledge and verification lead only to subjectivism 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 characterizes the procedure of many psychologists of to-day, is responsible for keeping alive quite unreal problems in philosophy.]
THE SIGNIFICANCE OF THE PROBLEM OF KNOWLEDGE[63]
It is now something over a century since Kant called upon philosophers to cease their discussion regarding the nature of the world and the principles of existence until they had arrived at some conclusion regarding the nature of the knowing process. But students of philosophy know that Kant formulated the question “how knowledge is possible” rather than created it. As matter 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 scholastic, 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 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 perception without conception is blind, while conception 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 thought. 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 coöperate in bringing about the unified result of science, becomes 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 inquiring what this interest, prolonged for over three centuries, in the possibility and nature of knowledge, stands for; what the conviction as to the necessity of the union of sensation and thought, together with the inability to reach conclusions regarding 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 epistemology 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 abstractness 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 mankind, 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 practice. The distinctions which the philosophers raise, the oppositions which they erect, the weary treadmill which they pursue between sensation and thought, subject and object, mind and matter, are not invented ad hoc, but are simply the concise reports 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 untroubled, with clear consciousness of what it is about. As the philosopher has received his problem 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 opposition of sensationalism and rationalism is due to the fact that sensation and reason stand for the two 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 statement, 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 assertions 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.
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 implication, human, when reflective thought had not developed 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 unconscious union with corporate life, finding therein stimuli, codes, and values, has departed. The development 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 scientific observation and imagination has transformed the physical widening of the horizon, brought about by commerce and intercourse, into an intellectual 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 turn? The “Know thyself” of Socrates is the reply to the practical problem which confronted Athens in his day. Investigation into the true ends and worths of human life, sifting and testing 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 practical 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 philosopher. The question is addressed by Socrates to every individual and to every group with which he comes in contact. Because the question is practical 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 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 confess that he only knows his own ignorance as to its answer, the inevitable point of further consideration is the discovery of a method which shall enable the question to be answered. This is the significance of Plato. The problem is the absolutely inevitable outgrowth of the Socratic position; and yet it carried with it just as inevitably the separation 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 practice; but in the meantime the theory must be worked out as theory or else no application. This represents the peculiar equilibrium and the peculiar point of contradiction in the Platonic system. All philosophy is simply for the sake of the organization and regulation of social life; and yet the philosophers must be a class by themselves, working out their peculiar problems with their own particular 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 compromise and of adjustment. It is relative to partial aims and finite agents. The sphere of absolute 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 completed 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 literally. It is impossible that men should really separate 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 indirect and unconscious way, what perhaps it could never have effected by the more immediate and practical method of Socrates. Philosophy became an organ of vision, an instrument of interpretation; 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 variety 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 disintegration. 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 organization of the system of Roman jurisprudence. There is perhaps no more fascinating chapter in the history of humanity than the slow and tortuous 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 immediate force and enthusiasm of the movement initiated by Jesus began to grow fainter and the commanding influence of his own personality commenced 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 humanity, into a splendid and coherent view of the universe; a view that resisted all disintegrating influences 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 accomplished, or of the thoroughness of the work done. We have perhaps even more inadequate conceptions of the great organizing and centralizing work done by Greek thought in the political sphere. When the military and administrative genius of Rome brought the whole world in subjection to itself, the most pressing of practical problems was to give unity of practical aim and harmony of working machinery to the vast and confused mass of local custom and tradition, religious, social, economic, and intellectual, as well as political. In this juncture the great administrators and lawyers of Rome seized with avidity upon the results of the intellectual analysis of social 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 order into chaos and of transforming the confused and conflicting medley of practice and opinion into a harmonious social structure. Roman law, that formed the vertebral 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 philosophy to theology is a subordination of science to a formulated conception of human welfare. Its essence is present, not wherever there is metaphysics but wherever the spirit of truth is subordinated to any preconceived practical intent.” (“History of Esthetics,” p. 146.)
Once more the irony of history displays itself. Thought has become practical, it has become the regulator of individual conduct and social organization, but at the expense of its own freedom and power. The defining characteristic of medievalism in state and in church, in political and spiritual 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 remotest 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 result, truths originally developed by the freest possible criticism and investigation became external, and imposed themselves upon the mass of individuals by the mere weight of authoritative law. The external, transcendental, and supernatural 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. 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 Græco-Roman civilization. The authoritative truth embodied 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 demands his own rights in the way of feeling, doing, and knowing for himself. Science, art, religion, 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 historic 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 interference 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 himself, claiming to be the legitimate center of all action and standard for all organization, was dependent, as I have already indicated, upon the intervening 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 individual could be only a source of disorder and a disturber 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 individual feeling and thought, could make itself valid. The logical realism and universalism of scholastic philosophy simply reflect the actual subjection of the individual to that associated and corporate life which, in conserving the past, provided the principle of control.
But the eager, hungry barbarian was there, implicated in this universalism. He must be active in receiving and in absorbing the truth authoritatively doled out to him. Even the most rigid forms of medieval Christianity could not avoid postulating 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 civilization 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, required 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 medievalism has succeeded, has fulfilled its function, the individual can begin to assert himself.
Contrast this critical period, finding its expression equally in the art of the Renaissance, the revival 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 internal forces that were threatening it. The problem 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 fourteenth century, it was not his own intimate community life which was slipping away from him. It was an alien and remote life which had finally become 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 individual should do with the wealth of resources of which he found himself the rightful heir and administrator. 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 appropriate manifestations of the vigorous and richly endowed individual.
Hence the conception of progress as a ruling 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 initiation. 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 utilizing 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 consciousness of this claim of the individual to be able 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 organization 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 possible,” 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 territory 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 undertaken, 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 increasing urgency and definiteness 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 those which we 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 fundamental question of practice and of social direction, 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 sensational and empirical schools represent in conscious and reflective form the continuation of the principle 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 Græco-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 advanced 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 we get any personal contact with reality, and hence, any genuine guarantee of vital truth. Thought is pale, and remote from the concrete stuff of knowledge and experience. It only formulates 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 individual. In this remoteness, when they claim any final value, they violate the very first principle of the modern consciousness. What is the distinguishing characteristic of modern life, unless it be precisely that the individual shall not simply get, 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 notions: 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 to the innate and the a priori was felt to be opposition 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 sensationalists 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 constant 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 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 simply a chaos of disintegrated and floating débris? 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 economy, where reason is sovereign, where the permanent 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 general idea the all-important thing in knowledge, believes himself to be asserting the interests of order as against destructive caprice and the license of 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 direction 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 moment. It marks the difference between barbarism and civilization, between continuity and disintegration, 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 on the other side the demand for general order, for continuous and organized unity, for the conservation 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 impulse, of keen enjoyment and satisfaction, of stimulus and initiative. Just so the rationalist erects into conscious abstraction the principle of the Græco-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 connection exists between sensationalism and rationalism, 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 appears to succeed in reducing knowledge to the associations of sensation, the more he creates a demand for thought to introduce background and relationship. The more consistent the sensationalist, the more openly he reveals the sensation in its own nakedness crying aloud for a clothing of value and meaning which must be borrowed from 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 sensation 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 come to rest in itself is precisely that each abstracts 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 arguments 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 succeeded 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 bringing 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 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, combined 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 knowledge 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 assertion of Kant has haunted and determined the course of philosophy in the intervening years—how his solution at once seems inevitable and unsatisfactory. 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 with these two opposed things still at war with each other, plus the miracle of their final combination.
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 function it has to fulfil, I mean that the unsatisfactory character of the entire neo-Kantian movement lies in its assumption that knowledge gives birth to itself and is capable of affording its own justification. 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 problem of modern life is that of reconstruction, reform, reorganization. The entire content of experience needs to be passed through the alembic of individual agency and realization. The individual 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 action? How can he make over the truth authoritatively embodied in institutions of church and state 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 question; 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, constituting the dignity of science and measuring the importance of the philosophic theory of knowledge, conferring upon them the religious value once attaching 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 conditions under which the individual may freely direct himself without loss to the historic values of civilization—when it forgets these things it begins to 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 will for a while absorb attention so that it becomes the end. Indeed it is the end when it is an indispensable 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 bringing to effective recognition the demand in valid knowledge for individuality of experience, for personal 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 permanent and general factor. The Kantian epistemologist has formulated the claims of both schools in defining judgment as the relation of perception 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 experimental method of modern science, its erection into the ultimate mode of verification, is simply this fact obtaining recognition. Only action can reconcile 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 conditions 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 scholasticism recurs, but recurs borne up upon the vigorous and conscious shoulders of the freed individual who 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 statement, believing, with all my heart, that it is justified 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 theory 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 because relating to human nature, but below the natural sciences in point of certainty and definiteness, as also far below pure philosophy as to comprehensiveness 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 epistemologist. 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 experience—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 correlative 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 psychologist, often presents himself as a camp follower of genuine science and philosophy, picking up scraps here and there and piecing them together in somewhat 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 concerning 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 philosophy, after wandering aimlessly hither and yon in a wilderness without purpose or outcome, has finally come to its senses—has given up metaphysical absurdities and unverifiable speculations, and become a purely positive science of phenomena. But there are yet others who will see in this movement the fulfilment of its vocation, the clear consciousness of a function that it has always striven to perform; and who will welcome it as a justification of the long centuries when it appeared to sit apart, far from the common concerns of man, busied with discourse of essence and cause, absorbed in argument concerning subject and object, reason and sensation. To such this outcome will appear the inevitable sequel of the saying of Socrates that “an unexamined life is not one fit to be led by man”; and a better response to his injunction “Know thyself.”
THE END
INDEX
- Absolutism, [18], [25], [98], [102], [109–110], [121–123], [130–132];
- Essay IV., [142–153], [176], [180–181]
- Acquaintance, and knowledge, [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 unreality, [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 intelligence, [42–43]
- Experience, Essay VII., [198–225]
- Experiment, and knowledge, Essay IV., [77–111]
- 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 evolution, [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] ff.;
- are hypothetical, [144], [150–151], [187]
- Individual, [244], [265–68], [285], [297]
- Intellectualism, Essay IV., [112–153], [159]
- Intelligence, is discriminative, [39], [42], [75];
- is the good of nature, [44];
- and Morals, Essay III., [46–76];
- cosmic and personal, [55], [59];
- as biological instrument, [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 object, [6], [10], [14];
- and nature, [41];
- and freedom, [73];
- The Experimental Theory of, Essay IV., [77–111];
- defined, [90];
- and inquiry, [184–189];
- Essay XI., problem 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 III., [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];
- defined, [45];
- and science, [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];
- Essay 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 knowledge, [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 character of, [124–127]
- Tolstoi, [173] n.
- Transcendence, of knowledge, [103] n., [156–157]
- Transcendental, and supernatural, [22], [29], [282];
- view of knowledge, [24], [27];
- freedom, [74]
- Truth, criterion of, [92], [95], [107–111];
- Essay IV., [112–153];
- absolute, [137];
- identified with existence, [138], [145];
- eternal, [147], [152];
- Essay V., [154–168];
- [230–231], [237], [282]
- Utilitarianism, [62]
- Verification, making true, [139] ff., [162–164]
- Woodbridge, F. J. E., [104] n., [240] n.
FOOTNOTES
[1] The affair is even more portentous in the German with its capital letters and series of muses: “Gewiss ist der Pragmatismus erkenntnisstheoretisch Nominalismus, psychologisch Voluntarismus, naturphilosophisch Energismus, metaphysisch Agnosticismus, ethisch Meliorismus auf Grundlage des Bentham-Millschen Utilitarismus.”
[2] 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.
[3] “Life and Letters,” Vol. I., p. 282; cf. 285.
[4] “Life and Letters,” Vol. II., pp. 146, 170, 245; Vol. I., pp. 283–84. See also the closing portion of his “Variations of Animals and Plants under Domestication.”
[5] Reprinted from the Hibbert Journal, Vol. VII., No. 4, July, 1909.
[6] 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.
[7] Reprinted, with considerable change in the arrangement and in the matter of the latter portion, from Mind, Vol. XV., N.S., July, 1906.
[8] I must remind the reader again of a point already suggested. 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 surveying 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.
[9] 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 naïve realism into the miracle of a mind that gets outside itself to lay its ghostly hands upon the things of an external world.
[10] 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 intervention, which characterizes knowledge, indicates precisely the way in which known things as known are immediately present.
[11] 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 existences, he might have saved us both from German Erkenntnisstheorie, and from that modern miracle play, the psychology of elements of consciousness, that under the ægis of science, does not hesitate to have psychical elements compound and breed, and in their agile intangibility put to shame the performances of their less acrobatic cousins, physical atoms.
[12] 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.
[13] 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 important 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 be what they meant.
[14] 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 practice. But it is the excess achievement of practice which makes this postponement and substitution possible.
[15] It is the failure to grasp the coupling of truth of meaning with a specific promise, undertaking, or intention expressed 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 responsible for the wholly at large view of truth which characterizes the absolutists.
[16] The belief in the metaphysical transcendence of the object 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 presented as not given in the same way as is the thing which means. It is something to be so given. No amount of careful and thorough inspection of the indicating and signifying things can remove or annihilate this gap. The probability of correct meaning may be increased in varying degrees—and this is what we mean by control. But final certitude 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).
[17] Compare his essay, “Does Consciousness Exist?” in the Journal of Philosophy, Psychology, and Scientific Methods, Vol. I., p. 480.
[18] Compare the essay on the “Problem of Consciousness,” by Professor Woodbridge, in the Garman Memorial Volume, entitled “Studies in Philosophy and Psychology.”
[19] 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 remains, I fear, too technical to be intelligible to those not familiar with recent discussions of logical theory.
[20] I follow chiefly Chapter XV. of “Appearance and Reality”—the chapter on “Thought and Reality.”
[21] The crux of the argument is contained in Chapters XIII. and XIV., on the “General Nature of Reality.”
[22] 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 conception of the nature of reality. He admits that it comes 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 intellectual discontent is the practical conflict becoming deliberately aware of itself as the most effective means of its own rectification.
[23] 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 pragmatism 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.
[24] 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 rightness 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?
[25] A paper read in the spring of 1909 before the Philosophical Club of Smith College and not previously published.
[26] Read as the Presidential Address at the fifth annual meeting of the American Philosophical Association, at Cambridge, December 28, 1905, and reprinted with verbal revisions 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 subsequent 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.
[27] 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 independent of the position and feeling of the investigator; whereas the relation of man to the universe is defined, not by the intellect alone, but by his sensitive 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 corporality 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 Miscellanies.”
[28] Hegel may be excepted from this statement. The habit of interpreting Hegel as a Neo-Kantian, a Kantian enlarged 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 Geist, to life in its own developing 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.
[29] There will of course come in time with the development of this 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 distinct from hope on one side and a sort of intellectual balance of probability of opinion on the other) can genuinely exist at all.
[30] Reprinted, with slight verbal changes, from the Philosophical Review, Vol. XV. (1906).
[31] C. S. Peirce, Monist, Vol. XVI., p. 150.
[32] Psychology, Vol. II., p. 618.
[33] “Essay concerning Human Understanding,” Book II., Chapter II., § 2. Locke doubtless derived this notion from Bacon.
[34] It is hardly necessary to refer to the stress placed upon mathematics, as well as upon fundamental propositions in logic, ethics, and cosmology.
[35] Of course there are internal historic connections between experience as effective “memory,” and experience as “observation.” 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. “Experience is nothing but Memory” (“Elements of Philosophy,” Part I., Chapter I., § 2), and hence is opposed to science.
[36] 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 subjectivist, but in the main a common sense objectivist. It was this that gave him his historic influence. But so completely has the Hume-Kant controversy dominated recent thinking that it is constantly projected backward. Within a few weeks I have seen three articles, all insisting that the meaning of the 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 experienced,” observation as a source of knowledge, as well as the act, fact, or mode of experiencing. In the Oxford Dictionary, 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 contemporaneous 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 community, 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.]
[37] 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 quem, a reconstructive modification of habit.
[38] 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 objectivity to mean controlling conditions of action (negative and positive as above) derogates at all from its naïve objectivity, or how it connotes cognitive subjectivity, or is in any way incompatible with a common-sense realistic theory of perception.
[39] For this suggested interpretation of the esthetic as surprising, or unintended, gratuitous collateral reinforcement, see Gordon, “Psychology of Meaning.”
[40] 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.”
[41] Plato, especially in his “Theætetus,” seems to have begun the procedure of blasting the good name of perceptive experience by identifying a late and instrumental distinction, having to do with logical control, with all experience whatsoever.
[42] 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 metaphysical fictions pour into our philosophy.”—Journal of Philosophy, Psychology, and Scientific Methods, Vol. I., p. 536.
[43] 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 idealization.
[44] Reprinted, with very slight change, from the Journal of Philosophy, Psychology, and Scientific Methods, Vol. II., No. 15, July, 1905.
[45] 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-directly-experienced terms in order to justify that which is directly experienced. Hence I have criticised such empiricism (Philosophical Review, Vol. XI., No. 4, p. 364) as essentially absolutistic in character; and also (“Studies in Logical Theory,” pp. 30, 58) as an attempt to build up experience in terms of certain methodological checks and cues of attaining certainty.
[46] I 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 standpoint 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.
[47] Since the non-empiricist believes in things-in-themselves (which he may term “atoms,” “sensations,” transcendental unities, a priori concepts, an absolute experience, or whatever), and since he finds that the empiricist makes much of change (as he must, since change is continuously experienced) 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.
[48] 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 recent articles may well be consulted. 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.
[49] 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 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.
[50] In general, I think the distinction between -ive and -ed one of the most fundamental of philosophic distinctions, and one of the most neglected. The same holds of -tion and -ing.
[51] What is criticised, now as “geneticism” (if I may coin the word) and now as “pragmatism” is, in its truth, just the fact that the empiricist does take account of the experienced “drift, occasion, and contexture” of things experienced—to use Hobbes’s phrase.
[52] Perhaps the point would be clearer if expressed in this way: Except as subsequent estimates of worth are introduced, “real” means only existent. The eulogistic connotation that makes the term Reality equivalent to true or genuine being has great pragmatic significance, but its confusion with reality as existence is the point aimed at in the above paragraph.
[53] One does not so easily escape medieval Realism as one thinks. Either every experienced thing has its own determinateness, its own unsubstitutable, unredeemable reality, or else “generals” are separate existences after all.
[54] 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 concretely how they arose and how they are to be corrected. In a word, his logical relationship to statements that profess to relate to things-in-themselves, unknowables, inexperienced substances, etc., is precisely that of the psychologist to the Zöllner lines.
[55] Delivered as a public address before the Philosophic Union of the University of California, with the title “Psychology and Philosophic Method,” May, 1899, and published in the University Chronicle for August, 1899. Reprinted, with slight verbal changes, mostly excisions.
[56] 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 untrustworthy, 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 alteration. If introspection should give us the original experience 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 proposition may bring to light various other matters worthy of note.
[57] Thus to divorce “structure psychology” from “function psychology” is to leave us without possibility of scientific comprehension of function, while it deprives us of all standard of reference in selecting, observing, and explaining the structure.
[58] 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 unsophisticated.” 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 these are reached by scientific abstraction in order to account for complex forms. From which it would appear that they are hypothecated as products of interpretation and for purposes of further interpretation. Only the delusion that the more complex forms are just aggregates (instead 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 methodological appliance.
[59] 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 comprehensible that process is thoroughly pertinent.
[60] 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.
[61] The “functions” are in truth ordinary everyday acts and attitudes: seeing, smelling, talking, listening, remembering, hoping, loving, fearing.
[62] This is perhaps a suitable moment to allude to the absence, in this discussion, of reference to what is sometimes termed rational psychology—the assumption of a separate, substantialized ego, soul, or whatever, existing side by side with particular experiences and “states of consciousness,” acting upon them and acted upon by them. In ignoring this and confining myself to the “states of consciousness” theory and the “natural history” theory, I may appear not only to have unduly narrowed the concerns at issue, but to have weakened my own point, as this doctrine 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 experienced 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.
[63] Delivered before the Philosophical Club of the University of Michigan, in the winter of 1897, and reprinted with slight change from a monograph in the “University of Chicago Contributions to Philosophy,” 1897.
Transcriber’s Notes
Punctuation, hyphenation, and spelling were made consistent when a predominant preference was found in this book; otherwise they were not changed.
Simple typographical errors were corrected; occasional unbalanced quotation marks retained.
Ambiguous hyphens at the ends of lines were retained.
Index not checked for proper alphabetization or correct page references.
Page [24]: “transgression” was misprinted as “trangression”; changed here.
Page [39]: “bewrayeth” was printed that way.
Page [158]: “cor-respondence” was printed with the hyphen.