FOOTNOTES:
[1] I am indebted to an unpublished manuscript of Mr. S. Klyce of Winchester, Massachusetts, for the significance of the fact that our words divide into terms (of which more in the sequel) and into names which are not (strictly speaking) terms at all, but which serve to remind us of the vast and vague continuum, select portions of which only are designated by words as terms. He calls such words "infinity and zero" words. The word "experience" is a typical instance of an "infinity word." Mr. Klyce has brought out very clearly that a direct situation of experience ("situation" as I employ it is another such word) has no need of any word for itself, the thing to which the word would point being so egregiously there on its own behalf. But when communication about it takes place (as it does, not only in converse with others, but when a man attempts a mutual reference of different periods of his own life) a word is needed to remind both parties of this taken-for-granted whole (another infinity term), while confusion arises if explicit attention is not called to the fact that it is a very different sort of word from the definite terms of discourse which denote distinctions and their relations to one another. In the text, attention is called to the fact that the business man wrestling with a difficulty or a scientific man engaged in an inquiry finds his checks and control specifically in the situation in which he is employed, while the theorizer at large leaves out these checks and limits, and so loses his clews. Well, the words "experience," "situation," etc., are used to remind the thinker of the need of reversion to precisely something which never can be one of the terms of his reflection but which nevertheless furnishes the existential meaning and status of them all. "Intuition," mysticism, philosophized or sophisticated monism, are all of them aberrant ways of protesting against the consequences which result from failing to note what is conveyed by words which are not terms. Were I rewriting these essays in toto I should try to take advantage of these and other indispensable considerations advanced by Mr. Klyce; but as the essays must stand substantially as they were originally written, and as an Introduction to them must, in order to be intelligible, be stated in not incongruous phraseology, I wish simply to ask the reader to bear in mind this radical difference between such words as "experience," "reality," "universe," "situation," and such terms as "typewriter," "me," "consciousness," "existence," when used (as they must be used if they are to be terms) in a differential sense. The term "reality" is particularly treacherous, for the careless tradition of philosophy (a carelessness fostered, I am sure, by failure to make verbally explicit the distinction to which Mr. Klyce has called attention) uses "reality" both as a term of indifferent reference, equivalent to everything taken together or referred to en masse as over against some discrimination, and also as a discriminative term with a highly eulogistic flavor: as real money in distinction from counterfeit money. Then, although every inquiry in daily life, whether technological or scientific, asks whether a thing is real only in the sense of asking what thing is real, philosophy concludes to a wholesale distinction between the real and the unreal, the real and the apparent, and so creates a wholly artificial problem.
If the philosopher, whether idealistic or realistic, who holds that it is self-contradictory to criticize purely intellectualistic conceptions of the world, because the criticism itself goes on intellectualistic terms, so that its validity depends upon intellectual (or cognitive) conditions, will but think of the very brute doings in which a chemist engages to fix the meanings of his terms and to test his theories and conceptions, he will perceive that all intellectual knowing is but a method for conducting an experiment, and that arguments and objections are but stimuli to induce somebody to try a certain experiment—to have recourse, that is, to a non-logical non-intellectual affair. Or again, the argument is an invitation to him to note that at the very time in which he is thinking, his thinking is set in a continuum which is not an object of thought. The importance attached to the word "experience," then, both in the essays and in this Introduction, is to be understood as an invitation to employ thought and discriminative knowledge as a means of plunging into something which no argument and no term can express; or rather as an invitation to note the fact that no plunge is needed, since one's own thinking and explicit knowledge are already constituted by and within something which does not need to be expressed or made explicit. And finally, there is nothing mystical about this, though mysticism doubtless roots in this fact. Its import is only to call notice to the meaning of, say, formulae communicated by a chemist to others as the result of his experiment. All that can be communicated or expressed is that one believes such and such a thing. The communication has scientific instead of merely social significance because the communicated formula is a direction to other chemists to try certain procedures and see what they get. The direction is capable of expression; the result of the experiment, the experience, to which the propositions refer and by which they are tested, is not expressible. (Poetry, of course, is a more competent organ of suggesting it than scientific prose.) The word "experience" is, I repeat, a notation of an inexpressible as that which decides the ultimate status of all which is expressed; inexpressible not because it is so remote and transcendent, but because it is so immediately engrossing and matter of course.
[2] There are certain points of similarity between this doctrine and that of Holt regarding contradictions and that of Montague regarding "consciousness" as a case of potential energy. But the latter doctrine seems to me to suffer, first, from an isolation of the brain from the organism, which leads to ignoring the active doing, and, secondly, from an isolation of the "moment" of reduction of actual to potential energy. It appears as a curiously isolated and self-sufficient event, instead of as the focus of readjustment in an organized activity at the pivotal point of maximum "tension"—that is, of greatest inhibition in connection with greatest tendency to discharge. And while I think Holt is wholly right in connecting the possibility of error with objectively plural and conflicting forces, I should hardly regard it as linguistically expedient to call counterbalancing forces "contradictory." The counterbalancing forces of the vaulting do not seem to me contradictory in the arch. But if their presence led me to attempt to say "up" and "down" at the same time there would be contradiction. But even admitting that contradictory propositions are merely about forces which are contradictory—heating and cooling—it is still a long way to error. For propositions about such "contradictions" are obviously true propositions. It is only when we make that reaction to one factor which is appropriate to dealing with the other that there is error; and this can happen where there are no contradictory forces at all beyond the fact that the agent is pulled two incompatible and opposed ways at the same time.
[3] For emphasis I am here exaggerating by condensing into a single decisive act an operation which is continuously going on.
[4] I would remark in passing that a recognition that a thing may be continuous in one respect and discrete in another would obviate a good many difficulties.
[5] In effect, the fallacy is the same as that of an idealistic theory which holds that all objects are "really" associations of sensations.
[6] This statement is meant literally. The "sensations" of color, sound, etc., to which appeal is made in a scientific inquiry are nothing mental in structure or stuff; they are actual, extra-organic things analyzed down to what is so indubitably there that it may safely be taken as a basis of inference.
[7] A term is not of course a mere word; a mere word is non-sense, for a sound by itself is not a word at all. Nor is it a mere meaning, which is not even natural non-sense, being (if it be at all) supernatural or transcendental nonsense. "Terms" signify that certain absent existences are indicated by certain given existences, in the respect that they are abstracted and fixed for intellectual use by some physically convenient means, such as a sound or a muscular contraction of the vocal organs.