How does it stand, then, with Dewey's own account of the knowledge process? He has reflected upon experience, and claims to have given a correct account of its nature. Dewey's conception of the processes of experience is genuinely conceptual, a thought product, designed to furnish a solid basis for belief and calculation. But reflection, by his own account, is shut in to its own moment, cannot apprehend the true nature of 'non-cognitional' experiences, and cannot, therefore, deal adequately with any problems except such as are furnished it by other 'functions.' No wonder that 'anti-intellectualism' should result from such a conception of knowledge.
Philosophers have always held that the purpose of reflection (whatever reflection may be, psychologically) is the attainment of a reliable insight into the nature of the world. Practical considerations compel this view. Ordinary, casual observation is superficial and unsystematic; it never penetrates beneath the surface. Doubtless reality is, in some degree, what it is in unreflective moments; but it is frequently something more, as man learns to his sorrow. Reflection displaces the casual, haphazard attitude, in the attempt to get at the real nature of the world.
The results of reflection, moreover, are cumulative. It tends to build up, by gradual accretions, a conceptual view of reality which may serve as a relatively stable basis for conduct and calculation. Thought does, indeed, possess a transforming function. The reasoned knowledge of things is gradually extended beyond the occasional moments of inquiring thought, supplanting the casual view with a more penetrating insight; reality becomes more and better known, and less merely experienced.
Dewey reverses this view in a curious manner. It is 'experience' that is built up by the action of thought, not knowledge itself. This play on terms might be innocuous, if it were not accompanied by his separation of the knowing function from others. Dewey makes 'knowing' the servant of 'direct experience' by giving it the function of reconstructing the habits of the organism, in order that unreflective experience may be maintained with a minimum of effort. The non-reflective experience becomes the valuable experience, and knowledge is made to minister unto it. This is truly a 'transvaluation of values.'
Dewey asks: "What is it that makes us live alternately in a concrete world of experience in which thought as such finds not satisfaction, and in a world of ordered thought which is yet only abstract and ideal?"[286] This sharp separation of thought from action is vigorously maintained. Following are some of the terms by means of which the difference between direct and reflective experience is expressed: 'direct practice,' 'derived theory;' 'primary construction,' 'secondary criticism;' 'living appreciation,' 'abstract description;' 'active endeavor,' 'pale reflection.'[287] This casual, easy distinction escapes criticism because it seems harmless and unimportant. The distinction, however, is not real. It does not correspond to the simple facts of life. Thinking, far from being 'pale reflection,' is often a strenuous and energetic 'activity.' Reflection, not 'direct experience,' is often, at least, at the high moment of life. Experience becomes unmeaning on any other basis. 'Living appreciation' and 'primary construction' involve thought in a high degree; 'pale reflection' is lazy contemplation, lacking the spark of life that characterizes true thought.
There is no escape from Dewey's needlessly alarming conclusions, except by maintaining that thought accompanies all conscious life, in greater or less degree, and that the moment of real, earnest thinking is at the high tide of life, when all the powers are awake and operating. Thought must be made integral with all other activities, a feature of the total life organization, rather than an isolated phenomenon. Man is a thinking organism, not an organism with a thinker.
It is not to be supposed for a moment that by 'thought' is here meant the activity of a merely subjective knower. Dewey does, indeed, deal effectively with the subjective ego, and with representative perceptionism. But by 'thought' is here meant reflection, judgment, inference; and in this sense thought is said to be present in all experience. There can be no question of the relation of thought, so understood, to reality; for the reason that it has been so integrated with experience as to be inseparable from it. Setting aside knowing as the awareness of a conscious subject, there remains an issue with Dewey concerning the actual place of thought, as an empirical process, in experience, and the issue must be settled on definite and really empirical grounds. So much, then, for 'functionalism' and its psychology.
Something should be said, before closing this discussion, concerning philosophical methods in general, since Dewey's psychological approach to the problems of philosophy must be held responsible for his anti-intellectualistic results, with their sceptical implications. In the beginning of his career, as has been seen, Dewey adopted the 'psychological method,' and he has adhered to it consistently ever since. This initial attitude, although he was not aware of it for many years, cut him off from the community of understanding that exists among modern idealists concerning the proper aims and purposes of philosophical inquiry. Although at first a professed follower of Green and Caird, Dewey's method was not reconcilable with idealistic procedure, and in a very real sense he never was an idealist. The virulence of his later attacks on 'intellectualism' may be explained in terms of his reaction against a philosophical method which interfered with the development of his own 'naturalistic' tendencies.
The method of idealism, or speculative philosophy, is logical; but it may perfectly well be empirical at the same time. To the anti-intellectualist empirical logic is an anomaly, a red blue-bird, so to speak. The philosophical logician is represented as one who evolves reality out of his own consciousness; who labors with the concepts which have their abode in the mental sphere, and, by means of the principle of contradiction, forces them into harmony until they provide a perfectly consistent representation of the external world which, because of its perfect rationality, must somehow correspond with the cosmic reality. In spite of the fact that no man possesses, at least in a sane condition, the mental equipment requisite for such a performance, certain critics have not hesitated to impute this kind of logical procedure to the idealists. To quote from Dewey himself: "For modern philosophy is, as every college senior recites, epistemology; and epistemology, as perhaps our books and lectures sometimes forget to tell the senior, has absorbed Stoic dogma. Passionless imperturbability, absolute detachment, complete subjection to a ready-made and finished reality ... is its professed ideal.... Philosophy has dreamed the dream of a knowledge which is other than the propitious outgrowth of beliefs that shall develop aforetime their ulterior implications in order to recast them ..., the dream of a knowledge that has to do with objects having no nature save to be known."[288]
This charge against modern idealism has little foundation. Speculative philosophy repudiated, long ago, the 'epistemological standpoint' as defined by Dewey. Idealists have not fostered the conception of a knowing subject shut in to its own states, seeking information about an impersonal reality over against itself. Note, for example, this comment of Pringle-Pattison on Kant, made over thirty-five years ago: "The distinction between mind and the world, which is valid only from a certain point of view, he took as an absolute separation. He took it, to use a current phrase, abstractly—that is to say, as a mere fact, a fact standing by itself and true in any reference. And of course when two things are completely separate, they can only be brought together by a bond which is mechanical, external, and accidental to the real nature of both."[289] Dewey himself never condemned 'epistemology' more effectively. But it is useless to cite instances, for any serious student familiar with the literature of modern philosophy ought to know that 'idealism' has never really been 'epistemological' in the sense meant by Dewey and his disciples. Subjectivism is not idealism,—the stolid dogmatism of neo-realism to the contrary notwithstanding.