Reconstruction in Philosophy

by John Dewey

The main traits of his thought put before our mind the larger features of a new spirit which was at work in causing intellectual reconstruction. They may suggest the social and historical forces out of which the new spirit was born. The best known aphorism of Bacon is that Knowledge is Power. Judged by this pragmatic criterion, he condemned the great body of learning then extant as not-knowledge, as pseudo- and pretentious-knowledge. For it did not give power. It was otiose, not operative. In his most extensive discussion he classified the learning of his day under three heads, delicate, fantastic and contentious. Under delicate learning, he included the literary learning which through the influence of the revival of ancient languages and literatures occupied so important a place in the intellectual life of the Renaissance. Bacon's condemnation is the more effective because he himself was a master of the classics and of all the graces and refinements which this literary study was intended to convey. In substance he anticipated most of the attacks which educational reformers since his time have made upon one-sided literary culture. It contributed not to power but to ornament and decoration. It was ostentatious and luxurious. By fantastic learning he meant the quasi-magical science that was so rife all over Europe in the sixteenth century—wild developments of alchemy, astrology, etc. Upon this he poured his greatest vials of wrath because the corruption of the good is the worst of evils. Delicate learning was idle and vain, but fantastic learning aped the form of true knowledge. It laid hold of the true principle and aim of knowledge—control of natural forces. But it neglected the conditions and methods by which alone such knowledge could be obtained, and thus deliberately led men astray.

For our purposes, however, what he says about contentious learning is the most important. For by this, he means the traditional science which had come down, in scanty and distorted measure to be sure, from antiquity through scholasticism. It is called contentious both because of the logical method used and the end to which it was put. In a certain sense it aimed at power, but power over other men in the interest of some class or sect or person, not power over natural forces in the common interest of all. Bacon's conviction of the quarrelsome, self-displaying character of the scholarship which had come down from antiquity was of course not so much due to Greek science itself as to the degenerate heritage of scholasticism in the fourteenth century, when philosophy had fallen into the hands of disputatious theologians, full of hair-splitting argumentativeness and quirks and tricks by which to win victory over somebody else.

But Bacon also brought his charge against the Aristotelian method itself. In its rigorous forms it aimed at demonstration, and in its milder forms at persuasion. But both demonstration and persuasion aim at conquest of mind rather than of nature. Moreover they both assume that some one is already in possession of a truth or a belief, and that the only problem is to convince some one else, or to teach. In contrast, his new method had an exceedingly slight opinion of the amount of truth already existent, and a lively sense of the extent and importance of truths still to be attained. It would be a logic of discovery, not a logic of argumentation, proof and persuasion. To Bacon, the old logic even at its best was a logic for teaching the already known, and teaching meant indoctrination, discipling. It was an axiom of Aristotle that only that which was already known could be learned, that growth in knowledge consisted simply in bringing together a universal truth of reason and a particular truth of sense which had previously been noted separately. In any case, learning meant growth of knowledge, and growth belongs in the region of becoming, change, and hence is inferior to possession of knowledge in the syllogistic self-revolving manipulation of what was already known—demonstration.

In contrast with this point of view, Bacon eloquently proclaimed the superiority of discovery of new facts and truths to demonstration of the old. Now there is only one road to discovery, and that is penetrating inquiry into the secrets of nature. Scientific principles and laws do not lie on the surface of nature. They are hidden, and must be wrested from nature by an active and elaborate technique of inquiry. Neither logical reasoning nor the passive accumulation of any number of observations—which the ancients called experience—suffices to lay hold of them. Active experimentation must force the apparent facts of nature into forms different to those in which they familiarly present themselves; and thus make them tell the truth about themselves, as torture may compel an unwilling witness to reveal what he has been concealing. Pure reasoning as a means of arriving at truth is like the spider who spins a web out of himself. The web is orderly and elaborate, but it is only a trap. The passive accumulation of experiences—the traditional empirical method—is like the ant who busily runs about and collects and piles up heaps of raw materials. True method, that which Bacon would usher in, is comparable to the operations of the bee who, like the ant, collects material from the external world, but unlike that industrious creature attacks and modifies the collected stuff in order to make it yield its hidden treasure.

Along with this contrast between subjugation of nature and subjection of other minds and the elevation of a method of discovery above a method of demonstration, went Bacon's sense of progress as the aim and test of genuine knowledge. According to his criticisms, the classic logic, even in its Aristotelian form, inevitably played into the hands of inert conservatism. For in accustoming the mind to think of truth as already known, it habituated men to fall back on the intellectual attainments of the past, and to accept them without critical scrutiny. Not merely the medieval but the renaissance mind tended to look back to antiquity as a Golden Age of Knowledge, the former relying upon sacred scriptures, the latter upon secular literatures. And while this attitude could not fairly be charged up against the classic logic, yet Bacon felt, and with justice, that any logic which identified the technique of knowing with demonstration of truths already possessed by the mind, blunts the spirit of investigation and confines the mind within the circle of traditional learning.

Such a logic could not avoid having for its salient features definition of what is already known (or thought to be known), and its systematization according to recognized canons of orthodoxy. A logic of discovery on the other hand looks to the future. Received truth it regards critically as something to be tested by new experiences rather than as something to be dogmatically taught and obediently received. Its chief interest in even the most carefully tested ready-made knowledge is the use which may be made of it in further inquiries and discoveries. Old truth has its chief value in assisting the detection of new truth. Bacon's own appreciation of the nature of induction was highly defective. But his acute sense that science means invasion of the unknown, rather than repetition in logical form of the already known, makes him nevertheless the father of induction. Endless and persistent uncovering of facts and principles not known—such is the true spirit of induction. Continued progress in knowledge is the only sure way of protecting old knowledge from degeneration into dogmatic doctrines received on authority, or from imperceptible decay into superstition and old wives' tales.

Ever-renewed progress is to Bacon the test as well as the aim of genuine logic. Where, Bacon constantly demands, where are the works, the fruits, of the older logic? What has it done to ameliorate the evils of life, to rectify defects, to improve conditions? Where are the inventions that justify its claim to be in possession of truth? Beyond the victory of man over man in law courts, diplomacy and political administration, they are nil. One had to turn from admired "sciences" to despised arts to find works, fruits, consequences of value to human kind through power over natural forces. And progress in the arts was as yet intermittent, fitful, accidental. A true logic or technique of inquiry would make advance in the industrial, agricultural and medical arts continuous, cumulative and deliberately systematic.

If we take into account the supposed body of ready-made knowledge upon which learned men rested in supine acquiescence and which they recited in parrot-like chorus, we find it consists of two parts. One of these parts is made up of the errors of our ancestors, musty with antiquity and organized into pseudo-science through the use of the classic logic. Such "truths" are in fact only the systematized mistakes and prejudices of our ancestors. Many of them originated in accident; many in class interest and bias, perpetuated by authority for this very reason—a consideration which later actuated Locke's attack upon the doctrine of innate ideas. The other portion of accepted beliefs comes from instinctive tendencies of the human mind that give it a dangerous bias until counteracted by a conscious and critical logic.

The mind of man spontaneously assumes greater simplicity, uniformity and unity among phenomena than actually exists. It follows superficial analogies and jumps to conclusions; it overlooks the variety of details and the existence of exceptions. Thus it weaves a web of purely internal origin which it imposes upon nature. What had been termed science in the past consisted of this humanly constructed and imposed web. Men looked at the work of their own minds and thought they were seeing realities in nature. They were worshipping, under the name of science, the idols of their own making. So-called science and philosophy consisted of these "anticipations" of nature. And the worst thing that could be said about traditional logic was that instead of saving man from this natural source of error, it had, though attributing to nature a false rationality of unity, simplicity and generality, sanctioned these sources of delusion. The office of the new logic would be to protect the mind against itself: to teach it to undergo a patient and prolonged apprenticeship to fact in its infinite variety and particularity: to obey nature intellectually in order to command it practically. Such was the significance of the new logic—the new tool or organon of learning, so named in express opposition to the organon of Aristotle.

Certain other important oppositions are implied. Aristotle thought of reason as capable of solitary communion with rational truth. The counterpart of his celebrated saying that man is a political animal, is that Intelligence, Nous, is neither animal, human nor political. It is divinely unique and self-enclosed. To Bacon, error had been produced and perpetuated by social influences, and truth must be discovered by social agencies organized for that purpose. Left to himself, the individual can do little or nothing; he is likely to become involved in his own self-spun web of misconceptions. The great need is the organization of co-operative research, whereby men attack nature collectively and the work of inquiry is carried on continuously from generation to generation. Bacon even aspired to the rather absurd notion of a method so perfected that differences in natural human ability might be discounted, and all be put on the same level in production of new facts and new truths. Yet this absurdity was only the negative side of his great positive prophecy of a combined and co-operative pursuit of science such as characterizes our own day. In view of the picture he draws in his New Atlantis of a State organized for collective inquiry, we readily forgive him his exaggerations.