I am recording a protest against false reification of what is abstract, the very fault which intuitionism is insistent to lay to the charge of intellectualism. If intuitionism were to conceptualize intuition and intellect, instead of reifying them, it could not appropriate validity to either mode of consciousness and deny it to another. The satisfactoriness and richness of a given mode of consciousness depend no doubt on the constitution of the subject. The validity of consciousness in any mode has nothing to do with such personal idiosyncrasy.
James is less rigorous concerning the validity of relational knowledge than Bergson. Having found relations in the immediate content of conscious data, James cannot deny them an essential constitutiveness in the nature of reality. But such knowledge is “thin” and “poor”, in his homely and human phraseology. This is only a more naïve and genial expression than Bergson’s of the purely eulogistic primacy of quality over relation. Relations are thin and poor aspects of reality, no doubt, if you find them so. Otherwise they may be supremely interesting. That depends on your interests, which depend on your constitution. In any case, they are the aspect of reality primarily indispensable to reflective thought, which is philosophy.
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The characteristic which is most sedulously imputed by the philosophy of instinct to intellect is usefulness, but this characteristic is treated as evidence of cognitive invalidity! In point of fact, serviceableness to action in no way distinguishes intellect from instinct. Each alike is a reactive state resulting in a new situation, a new arrangement of matter; and the only thing that can give true finality to the intelligent act is the affective value of the conscious state arising out of this new situation. But the same is true of the situation which is the outcome of the instinctive act.
The distinction sometimes seems to mean that it is only acquaintance with objects (intuitive knowledge of them) that has affective value, and that this kind of consciousness is therefore an end in itself in a sense in which intellect is not. For knowledge about the object (intellectual knowledge of it) will then be supposed to have no affective value in itself, but only as it may subserve action upon the object, which action will be accompanied by acquaintance with the object. But if knowledge about an object subserves acquaintance with it, the converse is no less true. If knowledge of the location and price of a tennis ball subserves my use of it and acquaintance with it, the latter in turn subserves my knowledge about it in an indefinite number of respects. True, acquaintance with an object may not always lead to knowledge about it so obviously as in the case of the tennis ball; but again it is equally true that knowledge about certain things, for instance lines drawn upon the blackboard, has no obvious leading toward utility; the utility of a certain mathematical equation may seem quite inscrutable. But how obvious the leading may be, or how interesting the utility, is nothing to the point. The question whether or not the connection is necessarily there in all cases is answered peremptorily a priori by the polar character of knowledge by virtue of which acquaintance-with is only an aspect of knowledge-about, and vice versa.
It is flagrantly untrue, as a fact, that knowledge-about is without affective value in itself. Experience is as emphatic to the contrary as reason. If a characteristically intellectual state of mind gives you less satisfaction, or more, than one that is characteristically intuitive, the reason is quite personal and accidental in either case. It may just as well give you more as less. Being knowledge in each case, awareness at least, it has its affective value in some degree necessarily, of whichever character it may be predominantly.
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Since relation is not divorcible from quality, nor intellect from intuition, it results that, if the artist blunders through critical defect, even better art would, of itself, have saved him in spite of his critical defect. If the mustiness of the philosopher is expressible as lack of a facile instinct, merely a truer theory of life would have corrected him. No doubt life is too intricate for the most robust capacity for ratiocination. Sanity balances securely between the two biases of consciousness. Art and criticism are equally long, and the middle course a is short-cut and an economy of living. But condemnation of the validity of consciousness in any mode is a theoretical proposition irrelevant to maxims of practical sagacity. And it implies either condemning the validity of all consciousness (if intuition and intellect are aspects of each other) or else it presupposes that reality is not categorical, which Bergson fails to show. On page 24 of the present essay, we have seen that he seems, in an inconsistent way, even to maintain the contradictory thesis.
In a former paper[97] I have written as follows:
“Now, Bergson’s idea of the philosopher—an artist in life—is probably no one’s else. He is of that opinion, decidedly; a considerable part of the book [Creative Evolution] is a demonstration that actual philosophers, from Plato on, are intellectualists all, dissectors, not artists. But if Bergson’s enterprise is to be a substitute for philosophy and appropriate its name, we who are much addicted to the old enterprise will be careful to know why it is futile and illusory.”