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EXPERIENCE AND NATURE

PUBLISHED ON THE FOUNDATION ESTABLISHED IN MEMORY OF

PAUL CARUS

EDITOR OF THE OPEN COURT AND THE MONIST 1888-19x9

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EXPERIENCE AND NATURE

JOHN DEWEY

LONDON GEORGE ALLEN & UNWIN, LTD.

RUSKIN HOUSE, 40 MUSEUM STREET, W.CX 1929

PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

CONTENTS

JPAGE

THE PAUL CARUS FOUNDATION .... ix

CHAPTER

I. EXPERIENCE AND PHILOSOPHIC METHOD . la

II. EXISTP;NCE AS PRECARIOUS AND AS STABLE . 40

III. NATURE, ENDS AND HISTORIES .... 78

IV. NATURE, MEANS AND KNOWLEDGE . . . 121 V. NATURE, COMMUNICATION AND AS MEANING 166

VI. NATURE, MIND AND THE SUBJECT . . . 208

VII. NATURE, LIFE AND BODY-MIND . . . . 248

VIII. EXISTENCE, IDEAS AND CONSCIOUSNESS . . 298

IX. EXPERIENCE, NATURE AND ART . . . . 354

X. EXISTENCE, VALUE AND CRITICISM . . . 394

INDEX 439

THE PAUL CARUS FOUNDATION

Dr. Paul Carus was born in Usenburg, Germany, hi 1852. He was educated at the Universities of Strass- burg and Tubingen, from the latter of which he received the doctorate of philosophy in 1876. It was, however, in the United States, to which he shortly after removed, that his life-work was performed. He became editor of the Open Court in 1888, and later established The Monist, remaining throughout his career, editor of these two peri* odicals and Director of the editorial policies of the Open Court Company. He died in February, 1919, at La Salle, Illinois.

The primary interests which actuated Dr. Carus's life- work were in the field of philosophy, touching with almost equal weight the two great phases of modern speculative concern represented by the philosophy of science and com- parative religion. To each of these he devoted numerous special studies, and to each he gave the influence of the press which he directed. This influence was in no sense narrow or specialistic. Dr. Caxus was personally pro- foundly concerned for the broadening of that understand- ing in all intellectual fields which he felt must be the foundation of whatever is to be valuable in our future human culture; he saw his philosophy never as a closet pursuit, but always as a quest for the social illumination of mankind, in which his hope of betterment lay. In this interest he combatted prejudice, in religion and science alike, seeking to divest the spirit of truth of all cloaking of formula, and turning with eager and open

x THE PAUL CARUS FOUNDATION

eyes in every direction in which there was a suggestion of light and leading — to men and to thought of every com- plexion and to all levels of active human concern with matters of reflection. Dr. Cams was, in fact, strongly Socratic in disposition: he wished to bring philosophy down from the skies of a too studied abstraction and habituate it to the houses of men's souls and to the rich and changing tides of cultural interests. Certainly so far as America is concerned his service is a signal one. During much of his career he stood almost alone as a philosopher outside academic walls, a living exponent of the fact that philosophy is significant as a force as well as useful as an educational discipline. He looked to the cultivation of philosophy as a frame of mind open to all, lay and professional, who should come to see that social liberty is made secure only where there is growth of a sympathetic public intelligence.

It is with the spirit and intention of Dr. Carus's life- work in mind that his family have established in his memory the Paul Cams Lectures. In the United States, foundations devoted to the cultivation of philosophy are so confined to scholastic institutions that the whole field of philosophic concern tends to assume the slant of an immured and scholastic discipline; and the observer is tempted to say that the greatest gift that can befall philosophic liberalism is one that will cause its followers to forget their professional character. Such a gift, certainly, is more than suggested by a lectureship which comes with no institutional atmosphere to further the free play of the mind upon all phases of life. In the stipulations for the Carus lectures, the themes of the lectures are left without definition, for it is recognized that philosophy is

THE PAUL CARUS FOUNDATION xi

a spirit of approach rather than a set of problems or theories; and the choice of the lecturers, while it is properly placed in the hands of those who make the study of philosophy their profession, is in no manner limited. The Foundation is free, and it asks of its beneficiaries no other response than the spirit of liberalism.

The conditions governing the lectures are few. They are established as a memorial and are to be called the "Paul Cams Lectures." The lecturers are to be chosen by committees appointed from the Divisions of the Ameri- can Philosophical Association. The lecturer is recognized by an honorarium of one thousand dollars, and the lec- tures are to be published by the Open Court Company in a series of volumes, which, it is hoped, as the years pass, will become representative of the finest phases of our speculative thought. It is expected that series of lec- tures will be delivered biennially, the time and place being set by the committees to whom is delegated the selection of the lecturers. It is more than happy that the first series of the Paul Carus Lectures should have been delivered by John Dewey, for there is no living American philosopher of whom it can more truly be said that his influence is oi the type which represents Dr. Carus's ideal*

HARTLEY BURR ALEXANDER.

PREFACE

The publication of this new edition has made it possible to rewrite completely the first chapter as well as to make a few minor corrections throughout the volume. The first chapter was intended as an introduction. It failed of its purpose; it was upon the whole more technical and harder reading than the chapters which it was supposed to intro- duce. It was also rather confused in mode of presentation, and at one important point in thought as well. It is hoped that its new form is both simpler and possessed of greater continuity. If the original intent is now better fulfilled, it is largely due to the help of kindly critics. I wish to record my especial indebtedness to Professor M. C. Otto of the University of Wisconsin and Mr. Joseph Ratner of Colum- bia University.

In addition to the complete revision of the first chapter, the new edition affords an occasion for inserting in these prefatory remarks what is not to be found in the earlier text; namely, a summary of the thought of the book in the order of its development. The course of the ideas is deter- mined by a desire to apply in the more general realm of phi- losophy the thought which is effective in dealing with any and every genuine question, from the elaborate problems of science to the practical deliberations of daily life, trivial or momentous. The constant task of such thought is to estab- lish working connections between old and new subject-mat- ters. We cannot lay hold of the new, we cannot even keep it before our minds, much less understand it, save by the use

ii PREFACE

of ideas and knowledge we already possess. But just be- cause the new is n£w it is not a mere repetition of something already had and mastered. The old takes on new color and meaning in being employed to grasp and interpret the new. The greater the gap, the disparity, between what has be- come a familiar possession and the traits presented in new subject-matter, the greater is the burden imposed upon reflection; the distance between old and new is the measure of the range and depth of the thought required.

Breaks and incompatibilities occur in collective culture as well as in individual life. Modern science, modern in- dustry and politics, have presented us with an immense amount of material foreign to, often inconsistent with, the most prized intellectual and moral heritage of the western world. This is the cause of our modern intellectual per- plexities and confusions. It sets the especial problem for philosophy to-day and for many days to come. Every significant philosophy is an attempt to deal with it; those theories to which this statement seems to apply least are attempts to bridge the gulf by seeking an escape or refuge. I have not striven in this volume for a reconciliation be- tween the new and the old. I think such endeavors are likely to give rise to casualties to good faith and candor. But in employing, as one must do, a body of old beliefs and ideas to apprehend and understand the new, I have also kept in mind the modifications and transformations that are exacted of those old beliefs.

I believe that the method of empirical naturalism pre- sented in this volume provides the way, and the only way — although of course no two thinkers will travel it in just the same fashion — by which one can freely accept the standpoint and conclusions of modern science: the wa£ by

PREFACE iii

which we can be genuinely naturalistic and yet maintain cherished values, provided they are critically clarified and reinforced. The naturalistic method, when it is con- sistently followed, destroys many things once cherished; but it destroys them by revealing their inconsistency with the nature of things — a flaw that always attended them and deprived them of efficacy for aught save emotional consolation. But its main purport is not destructive; empirical naturalism is rather a winnowing fan. Only chaff goes, though perhaps the chaff had once been treas- ured. An empirical method which remains true to nature does not "save"; it is not an insurance device nor a me- chanical antiseptic. But it inspires the mind with courage and vitality to create new ideals and values in the face of the perplexities of a new world.

The new introductory chapter (Chapter I) accordingly takes up the question of method, especially with respect to the relation that exists between experience and nature. It points to faith in experience when intelligently used as a means of disclosing the realities of nature. It finds that nature and experience are not enemies or alien. Experi- ence is not a veil that shuts man off from nature; it is a means of penetrating continually further into the heart of nature. There is in the character of human experience no index-hand pointing to agnostic conclusions, but rather a growing progressive self -disclosure of nature itself. The failures of philosophy have come from lack of confidence in the directive powers that inhere in experience, if men have but the wit and courage to follow them.

Chapter II explains our starting point: namely, that the things of ordinary experience contain within themselves a mixture of the perilous and uncertain with the settled and

iv PREFACE

uniform. The need for security compels men to fasten upon the regular in order to minimize and to control the precarious and fluctuating. In actual experience this is a practical enterprise, made possible by knowledge of the recurrent and stable, of facts and laws. Philosophies have too often tried to forego the actual work that is involved in penetrating the true nature of experience, by setting up a purely theoretical security and certainty. The influence of this attempt upon the traditional philosophic preference for unity, permanence, universals, over plurality, change and particulars is pointed out, as well as its effect in creating the traditional notion of substance, now under- mined by physical science. The tendency of modern science to substitute qualitative events, marked by certain similar properties and by recurrences, for the older notion of fixed substances is shown to agree with the attitude of naive experience, while both point to the idea of matter and mind as significant characters of events, presented in dif- ferent contexts, rather than underlying and ultimate sub- stances.

Chapters III and IV discuss one of the outstanding problems in philosophy — namely, the question of laws, mechanical uniformities, on one hand and, on the other, ends, purposes, uses and enjoyments. It is pointed out that in actual experience the latter represent the conse- quences of series of changes in which the outcomes or ends have the value of consummation and fulfillment; and that because of this value there is a tendency to perpetuate them, render them stable, and repeat them. It is then shown that the foundation for value and the striving to realize it is found in nature, because when nature is viewed as consisting of events rather than substances, it is char-

PREFACE v

acterized by histories, that is, by continuity of change pro- ceeding from beginnings to endings. Consequently, it is natural for genuine initiations and consummations to oc- cur in experience. Owing to the presence of uncertain and precarious factors in these histories, attainment of ends, of goods, is unstable and evanescent. The only way to render them more secure is by ability to control the changes that intervene between the beginning and the end of a process. These intervening terms when brought under control are means in the literal and in the practical sense of the word. When mastered in actual experience they constitute tools, techniques, mechanisms, etc. Instead of being foes of purposes, they are means of execution; they are also tests for differentiating genuine aims from merely emotional and fantastic ideals.

The office of physical science is to discover those prop- erties and relations of things in virtue of which they are capable of being used as instrumentalities; physical science makes claim to disclose not the inner nature of things but only those connections of things with one another that determine outcomes and hence can be used as means. The intrinsic nature of events is revealed in experience as the immediately felt qualities of things. The intimate co- ordination and even fusion of these qualities with the regularities that form the objects of knowledge, in the proper sense of the word "knowledge," characterizes intel- ligently directed experience, as distinct from mere casual and uncritical experience.

This conception of the instrumental nature of the ob- jects of scientific knowing forms the pivot upon which further 'discussion turns (Chapter V). That character of everyday experience which has been most systematically

vi PREFACE

ignored by philosophy is the extent to which it is saturated with the results of social intercourse and communication. Because this factor has been denied, meanings have either been denied all objective validity, or have been treated as miraculous extra-natural intrusions. If, however, lan- guage, for example, is recognized as the instrument of so- cial cooperation and mutual participation, continuity is established between natural events (animal sound, cries, etc.) and the origin and development of meanings. Mind is seen to be a function of social interactions, and to be a genuine character 'of natural events when these attain the stage of widest and most complex interaction with one another. Ability to respond to meanings and to employ them, instead of reacting merely to physical contacts, makes the difference between man and other animals; it is the agency for elevating man into the realm of what is usually called the ideal and spiritual. In other words, the social participation affected by communication, through language and other tools, is the naturalistic link which does away with the often alleged necessity of dividing the ob- jects of experience into two worlds, one physical and one ideal.

Chapter VI makes the transition from this realization that the social character of meanings forms the solid con- tent of mind to considering mind as individual or "sub- jective." One of the most marked features of modern thought as distinct from ancient and medieval thought is its emphasis upon mind as personal or even private, its identification with selfhood. The connection of this under- lying but misinterpreted fact with experience is made by showing that modern as distinct from ancient culture is characterized by the importance attached to initiation,

PREFACE vii

invention and variation. Thus mind in its individual aspect is shown to be the method of change and progress in the significances and values attached to things. This trait is linked up to natural events by recurring to their particular and variable, their contingent, quality. In and of itself this factor is puzzling; it accounts for accidents and irra- tionalities. It was long treated as such in the history of mankind; the individual characteristics of mind were re- garded as deviations from the normal, and as dangers against which society had to protect itself. Hence the long rule of custom, the rigid conservatism, and the still existing regime of conformity and intellectual standardiza- tion. The development of modern science began when there was recognized in certain technical fields a power to utilize variations as the starting points of new observa- tions, hypotheses and experiments. The growth of the experimental as distinct from the dogmatic habit of mind is due to increased ability to utilize variations for con- structive ends instead of suppressing them.

Life, as a trait of natural organisms, was incidentally treated in connection with the development of tools, of language and of individual variations. Its consideration as the link between physical nature and experience forms the topic of the mind-body problem (Chapter VII). The isolation of nature and experience from each other has rendered the undeniable connection of thought and effec- tiveness of knowledge and purposive action, with the body, an insoluble mystery. Restoration of continuity is shown to do away with the mind-body problem. It leaves us with an organism in which events have those qualities, usually called feelings, not realized in events that form inanimate thiflgs, and which, when living creatures communicate with

viii PREFACE

one another so as to share in common, and hence uni- versalized, objects, take on distinctively mental properties. The continuity of nature and experience is shown to resolve many problems that become only the more taxing when continuity is ignored.

The traits of living creatures are then considered (Chap- ter VIII) in connection with the conscious aspect of be- havior and experience, the quality of immediacy attaching to events when they are actualized in experience by means of organic and social interactions. The difference and the connection of mind and consciousness is set forth. The meanings that form mind become consciousness, or ideas, impressions, etc., when something within the meanings or in their application becomes dubious, and the meaning in question needs reconstruction. This principle explains the focal and rapidly shifting traits of the objects of con- sciousness as such. A sensitive and vital mental career thus depends upon being awake to questions and problems; consciousness stagnates and becomes restricted and dull when this interest wanes.

The highest because most complete incorporation of natural forces and operations in experience is found in art (Chapter IX). Art is a process of production in which natural materials are re-shaped in a projection toward consummatory fulfillment through regulation of trains of events that occur in a less regulated way on lower levels of nature. Art is "fine" in the degree in which ends, the final termini, of natural processes are dominant and con- spicuously enjoyed. All art is instrumental in its use of techniques and tools. It is shown that normal artistic experience involves bringing to a better balance than is found elsewhere in either nature or experience the consilm-

PREFACE »

matory and instrumental phases of events. Art thus rep- resents the culminating event of nature as well as the climax of experience. In this connection the usual sharp separation made between art and science is criticized; it is argued that science as method is more basic than science as subject-matter, and that scientific inquiry is an art, at once instrumental in control and final as a pure enjoyment of mind.

This recurrence to the topic of ends, or consummatory consequences, and of desire and striving for them, raises the question of the nature of values (Chapter X). Values are naturalistically interpreted as intrinsic qualities of events in their consummatory reference. The question of the control of the course of events so that it may yield, as ends or termini, objects that are stable and that tend toward creation of other values, introduces the topic of value-judgments or valuations. These constitute what is generically termed criticism. A return is made to the theme of the first chapter by emphasizing the crucial sig- nificance of criticism in all phases of experience for its intelligent control. Philosophy, then, is a generalized theory of criticism. Its ultimate value for life-experience is that it continuously provides instruments for the criti- cism of those values — whether of beliefs, institutions, ac- tions or products — that are found in all aspects of experience. The chief obstacle to a more effective criticism of current values lies in the traditional separation of nature and experience, which it is the purpose of this volume to replace by the idea of continuity.

January, 1929, New York City.

JOHN DEWEY.

CHAPTER ONE

EXPERIENCE AND PHILOSOPHIC METHOD

The title of this volume, Experience and Nature, is in- tended to signify that the philosophy here presented may be termed either empirical naturalism or naturalistic em- piricism, or, taking "experience" in its usual signification, naturalistic humanism.

To many the associating of the two words will seem like talking of a round square, so engrained is the notion of the separation of man and experience from nature. Experi- ence, they say, is important for those beings who have it, but is too casual and sporadic in its occurrence to carry with it any important implications regarding the nature of Nature. Nature, on the other hand, is said to be complete apart from experience. Indeed, according to some think- ers the case is even in worse plight: Experience to them is not only something extraneous which is occasionally super- imposed upon nature, but it forms a veil or screen which shuts us off from nature, unless in some way it can be "transcended." So something non-natural by way of rea- son or intuition is introduced, something supra-empirical. According to an opposite school experience fares as badly, nature being thought to signify something wholly material and mechanistic; to frame a theory of experience in naturalistic terms is, accordingly, to degrade and deny the noble and ideal values that characterize experience.

I know of no route by which dialectical argument can answer such objections. They arise from associations with woi;ds and cannot be dealt with argumentatively. One can

la

2a EXPERIENCE AND NATURE

only hope in the course of the whole discussion to disclose the meanings which are attached to "experience" and "nature," and thus insensibly produce, if one is fortunate, a change in the significations previously attached to them. This process of change may be hastened by calling atten- tion to another context in which nature and experience get on harmoniously together — wherein experience presents it- self as the method, and the only method, for getting at nature, penetrating its secrets, and wherein nature em- pirically disclosed (by the use of empirical method in natural science) deepens, enriches and directs the further development of experience.

In the natural sciences there is a union of experience and nature which is not greeted as a monstrosity; on the con- trary, the inquirer must use empirical method if his findings are to be treated as genuinely scientific. The investigator assumes as a matter of course that experience, controlled in specifiable ways, is the avenue that leads to the facts and laws of nature. He uses reason and calculation freely; he could not get along without them. But he sees to it that ventures of this theoretical sort start from and terminate in directly experienced subject-matter. Theory may in- tervene in a long course of reasoning, many portions of which are remote from what is directly experienced. But the vine of pendant theory is attached at both ends to the pillars of observed subject-matter. And this experienced material is the same for the scientific man and the man in the street. The latter cannot follow the intervening reasoning without special preparation. But stars, rocks, trees, and creeping things are the same material of ex- perience for both.

These commonplaces take on significance when the rela- tion of experience to the formation of a philosophic theory

PHILOSOPHIC METHOD 3a

of nature is in question. They indicate that experience, if scientific inquiry is justified, is no infinitesimally thin layer or foreground of nature, but that it penetrates into it, reaching down into its depths, and in such a way that its grasp is capable of expansion; it tunnels in all direc- tions and in so doing brings to the surface things at first hidden — as miners pile high on the surface of the earth treasures brought from below. Unless we are prepared to deny all validity to scientific inquiry, these facts have a value that cannot be ignored for the general theory of the relation of nature and experience.

It is sometimes contended, for example, that since ex- perience is a late comer in the history of our solar system and planet, and since these occupy a trivial place in the wide areas of celestial space, experience is at most a slight and insignificant incident in nature. No one with an hon- est respect for scientific conclusions can deny that experi- ence as an existence is something that occurs only under highly specialized conditions, such as are found in a highly organized creature which in turn requires a specialized en- vironment. There is no evidence that experience occurs everywhere and everywhen. But candid regard for scien- tific inquiry also compels the recognition that when ex- perience does occur, no matter at what limited portion of time and space, it enters into possession of some portion of nature and in such a manner as to render other of its precincts accessible.

A geologist living in 1928 tells us about events that happened not only before he was born but millions of years before any human being came into existence on this earth. He does so by starting from things that are now the material of experience. Lyell revolutionized geology by perceiving that the sort of thing that can be experienced

4a EXPERIENCE AND NATURE

now in the operations of fire, water, pressure, is the sort of thing by which the earth took on its present structural forms. Visiting a natural history museum, one beholds a mass of rock and, reading a label, finds that it comes from a tree that grew, so it is affirmed, five million years ago. The geologist did not leap from the thing he can see and touch to some event in by-gone ages; he collated this observed thing with many others, of different kinds, found all over the globe; the results of his comparisons he then compared with data of other experiences, say, the as- tronomer's. He translates, that is, observed coexistences into non-observed, inferred sequences. Finally he dates his object, placing it in an order of events. By the same sort of method he predicts that at certain places some things not yet experienced will be observed, and then he takes pains to bring them within the scope of experience. The scientific conscience is, moreover, so sensitive with respect to the necessity of experience that when it reconstructs the past it is not fully satisfied with inferences drawn from even a large and cumulative mass of uncontradicted evi- dence; it sets to work to institute conditions of heat and pressure and moisture, etc., so as actually to reproduce in experiment that which he has inferred.

These commonplaces prove that experience is of as well as in nature. It is not experience which is experienced, but nature — stones, plants, animals, diseases, health, tem- perature, electricity, and so on. Things interacting in certain ways are experience; they are what is experienced. Linked in certain other ways with another natural object — the human organism — they are how things are experi- enced as well. Experience thus reaches down into nature; it has depth. It also has breadth and to an indefinitely

PHILOSOPHIC METHOD i

elastic extent. It stretches. That stretch constitutes inference.

Dialectical difficulties, perplexities due to definitions given to the concepts that enter into the discussion, may be raised. It is said to be absurd that what is only a tiny part of nature should be competent to incorporate vast reaches of nature within itself. But even were it logically absurd one would be bound to cleave to it as a fact. Logic, however, is not put under a strain. The fact that some- thing is an occurrence does not decide what kind of an occurrence it is; that can be found out only by examina- tion. To argue from an experience "being an experience" to what it is of and about is warranted by no logic, even though modern thought has attempted it a thousand times. A bare event is no event at all; something happens. What that something is, is found out by actual study. This applies to seeing a flash of lightning and holds of the longer event called experience. The very existence of science is evidence that experience is such an occurrence that it pene- trates into nature and expands without limit through it.

These remarks are not supposed to prove anything about experience and nature for philosophical doctrine; they are not supposed to settle anything about the worth of em- pirical naturalism. But they do show that in the case of natural science we habitually treat experience as starting- point, and as method for dealing with nature, and as the goal in which nature is disclosed for what it is. To realize this fact is at least to weaken those verbal associations which stand in the way of apprehending the force of em- pirical method in philosophy.

The same considerations apply to the other objection that. was suggested: namely, that to view experience natur- alistically is to reduce it to something materialistic, depriv-

2 EXPERIENCE AND NATURE

ing it of all ideal significance. If experience actually pre- sents esthetic and moral traits, then these traits may also be supposed to reach down into nature, and to testify to something that belongs to nature as truly as does the me- chanical structure attributed to it in physical science. To rule out that possibility by some general reasoning is to forget that the very meaning and purport of empirical method is that things are to be studied on their own account, so as to find out what is revealed when they are experienced. The traits possessed by the subject-matters of experience are as genuine as the characteristics of sun and electron. They are jound, experienced, and are not to be shoved out of being by some trick of logic. When found, their ideal qualities are as relevant to the philo- sophic theory of nature as are the traits found by physical inquiry.

To discover some of these general features of experi- enced things and to interpret their significance for a phil- osophic theory of the universe in which we live is the aim of this volume. From the point of view adopted, the theory of empirical method in philosophy does for experi- enced subject-matter on a liberal scale what it does for special sciences on a technical scale. It is this aspect of method with which we are especially concerned in the present chapter.

If the empirical method were universally or even gen- erally adopted in philosophizing, there would be no need of referring to experience. The scientific inquirer talks and writes about particular observed events and qualities, about specific calculations and reasonings. He makes no allu- sion to experience; one would probably have to search a long time through reports of special researches in order to find the word. The reason is that everything desig-

PHILOSOPHIC METHOD 3

nated by the word "experience" is so adequately incorpor- ated into scientific procedures and subject-matter that to mention experience would be only to duplicate in a general term what is already covered in definite terms.

Yet this was not always so. Before the technique of empirical method was developed and generally adopted, it was necessary to dwell explicitly upon the importance of "experience" as a starting point and terminal point, as setting problems and as testing proposed solutions. We need not be content with the conventional allusion to Roger Bacon and Francis Bacon. The followers of Newton and the followers of the Cartesian school carried on a definite controversy as to the place occupied by experience and experiment in science as compared with intuitive concepts and with reasoning from them. The Cartesian school relegated experience to a secondary and almost accidental place, and only when the Galilean-Newtonian method had wholly triumphed did it cease to be necessary to mention the importance of experience. We may, if sufficiently hopeful, anticipate a similar outcome in philosophy. But the date does not appear to be close at hand ; we are nearer in philosophic theory to the time of Roger Bacon than to that of Newton.

In short, it is the contrast of empirical method with other methods employed in philosophizing, together with the striking dissimilarity of results yielded by an em- pirical method and professed non-empirical methods that make the discussion of the methodological import of "experience" for philosophy pertinent and indeed indispensable.

This consideration of method may suitably begin with the Contrast between gross, macroscopic, crude subject- matters in primary experience and the refined, derived

4 EXPERIENCE AND NATURE

objects of reflection. The distinction is one between what is experienced as the result of a minimum of incidental reflection and what is experienced in consequence of con- tinued and regulated reflective inquiry. For derived and refined products are experienced only because of the inter- vention of systematic thinking. The objects of both science and philosophy obviously belong chiefly to the secondary and refined system. But at this point we come to a marked divergence between science and philosophy. For the natural sciences not only draw their material from primary experience, but they refer it back again for test. Darwin began with the pigeons, cattle and plants of breeders and gardeners. Some of the con- clusions he reached were so contrary to accepted beliefs that they were condemned as absurd, contrary to common- sense, etc. But scientific men, whether they accepted his theories or not, employed his hypotheses as directive ideas for making new observations and experiments among the things of raw experience — just as the metallurgist who extracts refined metal from crude ore makes tools that are then set to work to control and use other crude materials. An Einstein working by highly elaborate methods of reflec- tion, calculates theoretically certain results in the deflection of light by the presence of the sun. A technically equipped expedition is sent to South Africa so that by means of experiencing a thing — an eclipse — in crude, primary, ex- perience, observations can be secured to compare with, and test the theory implied in, the calculated result.

The facts are familiar enough. They are cited in order to invite attention to the relationship between the objects of primary and of secondary or reflective experience. That the subject-matter of primary experience sets the problems and furnishes the first data of the reflection which con-

PHILOSOPHIC METHOD 5

structs the secondary objects is evident; it is also obvious that test and verification of the latter is secured only by return to things of crude or macroscopic experience — the sun, earth, plants and animals of common, every-day life. But just what role do the objects attained in reflection play? Where do they come in? They explain the primary objects, they enable us to grasp them with understanding, instead of just having sense-contact with them. But how? Well, they define or lay out a path by which return to experienced things is of such a sort that the meaning, the significant content, of what is experienced gains an en- riched and expanded force because of the path or method by which it was reached. Directly, in immediate contact it may be just what it was before — hard, colored, odorous, etc. But when the secondary objects, the refined objects, are employed as a method or road for coming at them, these qualities cea^e to be isolated details; they get the meaning contained in a whole system of related objects; they are rendered continuous with the rest of nature and take on the import of the things they are now seen to be continuous with. The phenomena observed in the eclipse tested and, as far as they went, confirmed Einstein's theory of deflection of light by mass. But that is far from being the whole story. The phenomena themselves got a far- reaching significance they did not previously have. Per- haps they would not even have been noticed if the theory had not been employed as a guide or road to observation of them. But even if they had been noticed, they would have been dismissed as of no importance, just as we daily drop from attention hundreds of perceived details for which we have no intellectual use. But approached by means of theory these lines of slight deflection take on a

6 EXPERIENCE AND NATURE

significance as large as that of the revolutionary theory that lead to their being experienced.

This empirical method I shall call the denotative method. That philosophy is a mode of reflection, often of a subtle and penetrating sort, goes without saying. The charge that is brought against the non-empirical method of phil- osophizing is not that it depends upon theorizing, but that it fails to use refined, secondary products as a path point- ing and leading back to something in primary experience. The resulting failure is three-fold.

First, there is no verification, no effort even to test and check. What is even worse, secondly, is that the things of ordinary experience do not get enlargement and enrich- ment of meaning as they do when approached through the medium of scientific principles and reasonings. This lack of function reacts, in the third place, back upon the philosophic subject-matter in itself. Not tested by being employed to see what it leads to in ordinary experience and what new meanings it contributes, this subject-matter becomes arbitrary, aloof — what is called "abstract" when that word is used in a bad sense to designate something which exclusively occupies a realm of its own without contact with the things of ordinary experience.

As the net outcome of these three evils, we find that extraordinary phenomenon which accounts for the revul- sion of many cultivated persons from any form of phil- osophy. The objects of reflection in philosophy, being reached by methods that seem to those who employ them rationally mandatory are taken to be "real" in and of themselves — and supremely real. Then it becomes an insoluble problem why the things of gross, primary ex- perience, should be what they are, or indeed why .they should be at all. The refined objects of reflection in the

PHILOSOPHIC METHOD 7

natural sciences, however, never end by rendering the subject-matter from which they are derived a problem; rather, when used to describe a path by which some goal in primary experience is designated or denoted, they solve perplexities to which that crude material gives rise but which it cannot resolve of itself. They become means of control, of enlarged use and enjoyment of ordinary things. They may generate new problems, but these are problems of the same sort, to be dealt with by further use of the same methods of inquiry and experimentation. The prob- lems to which empirical method gives rise afford, in a word, opportunities for more investigations yielding fruit in new and enriched experiences. But the problems to which non- empirical method gives rise in philosophy are blocks to inquiry, blind alleys; they are puzzles rather than prob- lems, solved only by calling the original material of primary experience, "phenomenal," mere appearance, mere impres- sions, or by some other disparaging name.

Thus there is here supplied, I think, a first-rate test of the value of any philosophy which is offered us: Does it end in conclusions which, when they are referred back to ordinary life-experiences and their predicaments, render them more significant, more luminous to us, and make our dealings with them more fruitful? Or does it terminate in rendering the things of ordinary experience more opaque than they were before, and in depriving them of having in "reality" even the significance they had previously seemed to have? Does it yield the enrichment and increase of power of ordinary things which the results of physical science afford when applied in every-day affairs? Or does it become a mystery that these ordinary things should be what they are; and are philosophic concepts left to dwell in separation in some technical realm of their own? It is the

8 EXPERIENCE AND NATURE

fact, I repeat, that so many philosophies terminate in con- clusions that make it necessary to disparage and condemn primary experience, leading those who hold them to meas- ure the sublimity of their "realities" as philosophically defined by remoteness from the concerns of daily life, which leads cultivated common-sense to look askance at philosophy.

These general statements must be made more definite. We must illustrate the meaning of empirical method by seeing some of its results in contrast with those to which non-empirical philosophies conduct us. We begin by not- ing that "experience" is what James called a double- barrelled word.1 Like its congeners, life and history, it includes what men do and suffer, what they strive for, love, believe and endure, and also how men act and are acted upon, the ways in which they do and suffer, desire and enjoy, see, believe, imagine — in short, processes of experi- encing. "Experience" denotes the planted field, the sowed seeds, the reaped harvests, the changes of night and day, spring and autumn, wet and dry, heat and cold, that are observed, feared, longed for; it also denotes the one who plants and reaps, who works and rejoices, hopes, fears, plans, invokes magic or chemistry to aid him, who is down- cast or triumphant. It is "double-barrelled" in that it recognizes in its primary integrity no division between act and material, subject and object, but contains them both in an unanalyzed totality. "Thing" and "thought," as James says in the same connection, are single-barrelled; they refer to products discriminated by reflection out of primary experience. 2

It is significant that "life" and "history" have the same

1 Essays in Radical Empiricism, p. 10.

2 It is not intended, however, to attribute to James precisely the in- terpretation given in the text.

PHILOSOPHIC METHOD 9

fullness of undivided meaning. Life denotes a function, a comprehensive activity, in which organism and environ- ment are included. Only upon reflective analysis does it break up into external conditions — air breathed, food taken, ground walked upon — and internal structures — lungs respiring, stomach digesting, legs walking. The scope of "history" is notorious: it is the deeds enacted, the tragedies undergone; and it is the human comment, record, and interpretation that inevitably follow. Objec- tively, history takes in rivers, mountains, fields and for- ests, laws and institutions; subjectively it includes the purposes and plans, the desires and emotions, through which these things are administered and transformed.

Now empirical method is the only method which can do justice to this inclusive integrity of "experience." It alone takes this integrated unity as the starting point for phil- osophic thought. Other methods begin with results of a reflection that has already torn in two the subject-matter experienced and the operations and states of experiencing. The problem is then to get together again what has been sundered — which is as if the king's men started with the fragments of the egg and tried to construct the whole egg out of them. For empirical method the problem is nothing so impossible of solution. Its problem is to note how and why the whole is distinguished into subject and object, nature and mental operations. Having done this, it is in a position to see to what effect the distinction is made: how the distinguished factors function in the further control and enrichment of the subject-matters of crude but total experi- ence. Non-empirical method starts with a reflective product as if it were primary, as if it were the originally "given." To non-empirical method, therefore, object and

10 EXPERIENCE AND NATURE

subject, mind and matter (or whatever words and ideas are used) are separate and independent. Therefore it has upon its hands the problem of how it is possible to know at all ; how an outer world can affect an inner mind ; how the acts of mind can reach out and lay hold of objects defined in antithesis to them. Naturally it is at a loss for an answer, since its premisses make the fact of knowledge both unnatural and unempirical. One thinker turns meta- physical materialist and denies reality to the mental; an- other turns psychological idealist, and holds that matter and force are merely disguised psychical events. Solutions are given up as a hopeless task, or else different schools pile one intellectual complication on another only to arrive by a long and tortuous course at that which nai've experience already has in its own possession.

The first and perhaps the greatest difference made in philosophy by adoption respectively of empirical or non- empirical method is, thus, the difference made in what is selected as original material. To a truly naturalistic em- piricism, the moot problem of the relation of subject and object is the problem of what consequences follow in and for primary experience from the distinction of the physical and the psychological or mental from each other. The answer is not far to seek. To distinguish in reflection the physical and to hold it in temporary detachment is to be set upon the road that conducts to tools and technologies, to construction of mechanisms, to the arts that ensue in the wake of the sciences. That these constructions make possible a better regulation of the affairs of primary ex- perience is evident. Engineering and medicine, all the utilities that make for expansion of life, are the answer. There is better administration of old familiar things, 'and there is invention of new objects and satisfactions. Along

PHILOSOPHIC METHOD 11

with this added ability in regulation goes enriched mean- ing and value in things, clarification, increased depth and continuity — a result even more precious than is the added power of control.

The history of the development of the physical sciences is the story of the enlarging possession by mankind of more efficacious instrumentalities for dealing witth the conditions of life and action. But when one neglects the connection of these scientific objects with the affairs of primary experience, the result is a picture of a world of things indifferent to human interests because it is wholly apart from experience. It is more than merely isolated, for it is set in opposition. Hence when it is viewed as fixed and final in itself it is a source of oppression to the heart and paralysis to imagination. Since this picture of the physical universe and philosophy of the character of physical ob- jects is contradicted by every engineering project and every intelligent measure of public hygiene, it would seem to be time to examine the foundations upon which it rests, and find out how and why such conclusions are come to.

When objects are isolated from the experience through which they are reached and in which they function, ex- perience itself becomes reduced to the mere process of experiencing, and experiencing is therefore treated as if it were also complete in itself. We get the absurdity of an experiencing which experiences only itself, states and processes of consciousness, instead of the things of nature. Since the seventeenth century this conception of experience as the equivalent of subjective private consciousness set over against nature, which consists wholly of physical objects, has wrought havoc in philosophy. It is responsible for the feeling mentioned at the outset that "nature" and

12 EXPERIENCE AND NATURE

"experience" are names for things which have nothing to do with each other.

Let us inquire how the matter stands when these mental and psychical objects are looked at in their connection with experience in its primary and vital modes. As has been suggested, these objects are not original, isolated and self- sufficient. They represent the discriminated analysis of the process of experiencing from subject-matter experienced. Although breathing is in fact a function that includes both air and the operations of the lungs, we may detach the latter for study, even though we cannot separate it in fact. So while we always know, love, act for and against things, instead of experiencing ideas, emotions and mental intents, the attitudes themselves may be made a special object of attention, and thus come to form a distinctive subject-matter of reflective, although not of primary, ex- perience.

We primarily observe things, not observations. But the act of observation may be inquired into and form a sub- ject of study and become thereby a refined object; so may the acts of thinking, desire, purposing, the state of affec- tion, reverie, etc. Now just as long as these attitudes are not distinguished and abstracted, they are incorporated into subject-matter. It is a notorious fact that the one who hates finds the one hated an obnoxious and despicable character; to the lover his adored one is full of intrin- sically delightful and wonderful qualities. The connection between such facts and the fact of animism is direct.

The natural and original bias of man is all toward the objective; whatever is experienced is taken to be there independent of the attitude and act of the self. Its "there- ness," its independence of emotion and volition, render the properties of things, whatever they are, cosmic. Only

PHILOSOPHIC METHOD 13

when vanity, prestige, rights of possession are involved does an individual tend to separate off from the environment and the group in which he, quite literally, lives, some things as being peculiarly himself. It is obvious that a total, un- analyzed world does not lend itself to control; that, on the contrary it is equivalent to the subjection of man to what- ever occurs, as if to fate. Until some acts and their con- sequences are discriminatingly referred to the human organism and other energies and effects are referred to other bodies, there is no leverage, no purchase, with which to regulate the course of experience. The abstraction of certain qualities of things as due to human acts and states is the pou sto of ability in control. There can be no doubt that the long period of human arrest at a low level of culture was largely the result of failure to select the human being and his acts as a special kind of object, having his own characteristic activities that condition specifiable consequences.

In this sense, the recognition of "subjects" as centres of experience together with the development of "subjectiv- ism" marks a great advance. It is equivalent to the emer- gence of agencies equipped with special powers of observa- tion and experiment, and with emotions and desires that are efficacious for production of chosen modifications of nature. For otherwise the agencies are submerged in nature and produce qualities of things which must be accepted and submitted to. It is no mere play on words to say that recognition of subjective minds having a special equipment of psychological abilities is a necessary factor in subjecting the energies of nature to use as instrumen- talities for ends.

Out of the indefinite number of possible illustrations of the consequences of reflective analysis yielding personal

14 EXPERIENCE AND NATURE

or "subjective" minds we cite one case. It concerns the influence of habitual beliefs and expectations in their social generation upon what is experienced. The things of pri- mary experience are so arresting and engrossing that we tend to accept them just as they are — the flat earth, the march of the sun from east to west and its sinking under the earth. Current beliefs in morals, religion and politics similarly reflect the social conditions which present them- selves. Only analysis shows that the ways in which we believe and expect have a tremendous affect upon what we believe and expect. We have discovered at last that these ways are set, almost abjectly so, by social factors, by tradition and the influence of education. Thus we discover that we believe many things not because the things are so, but because we have become habituated through the weight of authority, by imitation, prestige, instruction, the uncon- scious effect of language, etc. We learn, in short, that qualities which we attribute to objects ought to be imputed to our own ways of experiencing them, and that these in turn are due to the force of intercourse and custom. This discovery marks an emancipation; it purifies and remakes the objects of our direct or primary experience. The power of custom and tradition in scientific as well as in moral beliefs never suffered a serious check until analysis re- vealed the effect of personal ways of believing upon things believed, and the extent to which these ways are unwit- tingly fixed by social custom and tradition. In spite of the acute and penetrating powers of observation among the Greeks, their "science" is a monument of the extent to which the effects of acquired social habits as well as of organic constitution were attributed directly to natural events. The de-personalizing and de-socializing of ?ome objects, to be henceforth the objects of physical science,

PHILOSOPHIC METHOD IS

was a necessary precondition of ability to regulate experi- ence by directing the attitudes and objects that enter into it.

This great emancipation was coincident with the rise of "individualism," which was in effect identical with the reflective discovery of the part played in experience by concrete selves, with their ways of acting, thinking and desiring. The results would have been all to the good if they had been interpreted by empirical method. For this would have kept the eye of thinkers constantly upon the origin of the "subjective" out of primary experience, and then directed it to the function of discriminating what is usable in the management of experienced objects. But for lack of such a method, because of isolation from em- pirical origin and instrumental use, the results of psy- chological inquiry were conceived to form a separate and isolated mental world in and of itself, self-sufficient and self-enclosed. Since the psychological movement neces- sarily coincided with that which set up physical objects as correspondingly complete and self-enclosed, there resulted that dualism of mind and matter, of a physical and a psychical world, which from the day of Descartes to the present dominates the formulation of philosophical problems.

With the dualism we are not here concerned, beyond pointing out that it is the inevitable result, logically, of the abandoning of acknowledgment of the primacy and ulti- macy of gross experience — primary as it is given in an un- controlled form, ultimate as it is given in a more regulated and significant form — a form made possible by the methods and results of reflective experience. But what we are directly concerned with at this stage of discussion is the result of the discovery of subjective objects upon phi-

16 EXPERIENCE AND NATURE

losophy in creation of wholesale subjectivism. The out- come was, that while in actual life the discovery of personal attitudes and their consequences was a great liberating in- strument, psychology became for philosophy, as Santayana has well put it, "malicious." That is, mental attitudes, ways of experiencing, were treated as self-sufficient and complete in themselves, as that which is primarily given, the sole original and therefore indubitable data. Thus the traits of genuine primary experience, in which natural things are the determining factors in production of all change, were regarded either as not-given dubious things that could be reached only b>? endowing the only certain thing, the mental, with some miraculous power, or else were denied all existence save as complexes of mental states, of impressions, sensations, feelings.1

One illustration out of the multitude available follows. It is taken almost at random, because it is both simple and typical. To illustrate the nature of experience, what experience really is, an author writes: "When I look at a chair, I say I experience it. But what I actually experi- ence is only a very few of the elements that go to make up a chair, namely the color that belongs to the chair under these particular conditions of light, the shape which the chair displays when viewed from this angle, etc." Two points are involved in any such statement. One is that "experience" is reduced to the traits connected with the

1 Because of this identification of the mental as the sole "given" in a primary, original way, appeal to experience by a philosopher is treated by many as necessarily committing one to subjectivism. It accounts for the alleged antithesis between nature and experience mentioned in the opening paragraph. It has become so deeply engrained that the em- pirical method employed in this volume has been taken by critics to be simply a re-statement of a purely subjective philosophy, although in fact it is wholly contrary to such a philosophy.

PHILOSOPHIC METHOD 17

act of experiencing, in this case the act of seeing. Certain patches of color, for example, assume a certain shape or form in connection with qualities connected with the mus- cular strains and adjustments of seeing. These qualities, which define the act of seeing when it is made an object of reflective inquiry, over against what is seen, thus become the chair itself for immediate or direct experience. Log- ically, the chair disappears and is replaced by certain qualities of sense attending the act of vision. There is no longer any other object, much less the chair which was bought, that is placed in a room and that is used to sit in, etc. If we ever get back to this total chair, it will not be the chair of direct experience, of use and enjoyment, a thing with its own independent origin, history and career; it will be only a complex of directly "given" sense qualities as a core, plus a surrounding cluster of other qualities revived imaginatively as "ideas."

The other point is that, even in such a brief statement as that just quoted, there is compelled recognition of an object of experience which is infinitely other and more than what is asserted to be alone experienced. There is the chair which is looked at; the chair displaying certain colors, the light in which they are displayed; the angle of vision implying reference to an organism that possesses an optical apparatus. Reference to these things is compul- sory, because otherwise there would be no meaning as- signable to the sense qualities — which are, nevertheless, affirmed to be the sole data experienced. It would be hard to find a more complete recognition, although an unavowed one, of the fact that in reality the account given concerns only. a selected portion of the actual experience, namely that part which defines the act of experiencing, to the

18 EXPERIENCE AND NATURE

deliberate omission, for the purpose of the inquiry in hand, of what is experienced.

The instance cited is typical of all "subjectivism" as a philosophic position. Reflective analysis of one element in actual experience is undertaken; its result is then taken to be primary; as a consequence the subject-matter of actual experience from which the analytic result was de- rived is rendered dubious and problematic, although it is assumed at every step of the analysis. Genuine empirical method sets out from the actual subject-matter of primary experience, recognizes that reflection discriminates a new factor in it, the act of seeing, makes an object of that, and then uses that new object, the organic response to light, to regulate, when needed, further experiences of the subject- matter already contained in primary experience.

The topics just dealt with, segregation of physical and mental objects, will receive extended attention in the body of this volume.1 As respects method, however, it is per- tinent at this point to summarize our results. Reference to the primacy and ultimacy of the material of ordinary ex- perience protects us, in the first place, from creating arti- ficial problems which deflect the energy and attention of philosophers from the real problems that arise out of actual subject-matter. In the second place, it provides a check or test for the conclusions of philosophic inquiry; it is a constant reminder that we must replace them, as secondary reflective products, in the experience out of which they arose, so that they may be confirmed or modi- fied by the new order and clarity they introduce into it, and the new significantly experienced objects for which they furnish a method. In the third place, in seeing how they thus function in further experiences, the philosophigal re-

1 Chapters IV and VI.

PHILOSOPHIC METHOD 19

suits themselves acquire empirical value; they are what they contribute to the common experience of man, instead of being curiosities to be deposited, with appropriate labels, in a metaphysical museum.

There is another important result for philosophy of the use of empirical method which, when it is developed, intro- duces our next topic. Philosophy, like all forms of reflec- tive analysis, takes us away, for the time being, from the things had in primary experience as they directly act and are acted upon, used and enjoyed. Now the standing temptation of philosophy, as its course abundantly demon- strates, is to regard the results of reflection as having, in and of themselves, a reality superior to that of the material of any other mode of experience. The commonest assump- tion of philosophies, common even to philosophies very different from one another, is the assumption of the iden- tity of objects of knowledge and ultimately real objects. The assumption is so deep that it is usually not expressed ; it is taken for granted as something so fundamental that it does not need to be stated. A technical example of the view is found in the contention of the Cartesian school — including Spinoza — that emotion as well as sense is but confused thought which when it becomes clear and definite or reaches its goal is cognition. That esthetic and moral experience reveal traits of real things as truly as does intel- lectual experience, that poetry may have a metaphysical import as well as science, is rarely affirmed, and when it is asserted, the statement is likely to be meant in some mystical or esoteric sense rather than in a straightforward everyday sense.

Suppose however that we start with no presuppositions save that what is experienced, since it is a manifestation of nature, may, and indeed, must be used as testimony of the

20 EXPERIENCE AND NATURE

characteristics of natural events. Upon this basis, reverie and desire are pertinent for a philosophic theory of the true nature of things; the possibilities present in imagination that are not found in observation, are something to be taken into account. The features of objects reached by scientific or reflective experiencing are important, but so are all the phenomena of magic, myth, politics, painting, and penitentiaries. The phenomena of social life are as relevant to the problem of the relation of the individual and universal as are those of logic; the existence in political organization of boundaries and barriers, of centralization, of interaction across boundaries, of expansion and absorp- tion, will be quite as important for metaphysical theories of the discrete and the continuous as is anything derived from chemical analysis. The existence of ignorance as well as of wisdom, of error and even insanity as well as of truth will be taken into account.

That is to say, nature is construed in such a way that all these things, since they are actual, are naturally possible; they are not explained away into mere "appearance" in contrast with reality. Illusions are illusions, but the occur- rence of illusions is not an illusion, but a genuine reality. What is really "in" experience extends much further than that which at any time is known. From the standpoint of knowledge, objects must be distinct; their traits must be explicit; the vague and unrevealed is a limitation. Hence whenever the habit of identifying reality with the object of knowledge as such prevails, the obscure and vague are explained away. It is important for philosophic theory to be aware that the distinct and evident are prized and why they are. But it is equally important to note that the dark and twilight abound. For in any object of primary experience there are always potentialities which are not

PHILOSOPHIC METHOD 21

explicit; any object that is overt is charged with possible consequences that are hidden; the most overt act has fac- tors which are not explicit. Strain thought as far as we may and not all consequences can be foreseen or made an express or known part of reflection and decision. In the face of such empirical facts, the assumption that nature in itself is all of the same kind, all distinct, explicit and evi- dent, having no hidden possibilities, no novelties or ob- scurities, is possible only on the basis of a philosophy which at some point draws an arbitrary line between nature and experience.

In the assertion (implied here) that the great vice of philosophy is an arbitrary "intellectualism," there is no slight cast upon intelligence and reason. By "intellectual- ism" as an indictment is meant the theory that all experi- encing is a mode of knowing, and that all subject-matter, all nature, is, in principle, to be reduced and transformed till it is defined in terms identical with the characteristics presented by refined objects of science as such. The as- sumption of "intellectualism" goes contrary to the facts of what is primarily experienced. For things are objects to be treated, used, acted upon and with, enjoyed and endured, even more than things to be known. They are things had before they are things cognized.

The isolation of traits characteristic of objects known, and then defined as the sole ultimate realities, accounts for the denial to nature of the characters which make things lovable and contemptible, beautiful and ugly, ador- able and awful. It accounts for the belief that nature is an indifferent, dead mechanism; it explains why characteris- tics that are the valuable and valued traits of objects in actual experience are thought to create a fundamentally troublesome philosophical problem. Recognition of their

22 EXPERIENCE AND NATURE

genuine and primary reality does not signify that no thought and knowledge enter in when things are loved, desired and striven for; it signifies that the former are subordinate, so that the genuine problem is how and why, to what effect, things thus experienced are transformed into objects in which cognized traits are supreme and affectional and volitional traits incidental and subsidiary.

"Intellectualism" as a sovereign method of philosophy is so foreign to the facts of primary experience that it not only compels recourse to non-empirical method, but it ends in making knowledge, conceived as ubiquitous, itself inexplicable. If we start from primary experience, occur- ring as it does chiefly in modes of action and undergoing, it is easy to see what knowledge contributes — namely, the possibility of intelligent administration of the elements of doing and suffering. We are about something, and it is well to know what we are about, as the common phrase has it. To be intelligent in action and in suffering (enjoy- ment too) yields satisfaction even when conditions cannot be controlled. But when there is possibility of control, knowledge is the sole agency of its realization. Given this element of knowledge in primary experience, it is not diffi- cult to understand how it may develop from a subdued and subsidiary factor into a dominant character. Doing and suffering, experimenting and putting ourselves in the way of having our sense and nervous system acted upon in ways that yield material for reflection, may reverse the original situation in which knowing and thinking were subservient to action-undergoing. And when we trace the genesis of knowing along this line, we also see that knowledge has a function and office in bettering and enriching the subject- matters of crude experience. We are prepared to under-

PHILOSOPHIC METHOD 23

stand what we are about on a grander scale, and to under- stand what happens even when we seem to be the hapless puppets of uncontrollable fate. But knowledge that is ubiquitous, all-inclusive and all-monopolizing, ceases to have meaning in losing all context; that it does not appear to do so when made supreme and self-sufficient is because it is literally impossible to exclude that context of non- cognitive but experienced subject-matter which gives what is known its import.

While this matter is dealt with at some length in further chapters of this volume, there is one point worth mention- ing here. When intellectual experience and its material are taken to be primary, the cord that binds experience and nature is cut. That the physiological organism with its structures, whether in man or in the lower animals, is concerned with making adaptations and uses of material in the interest of maintenance of the life-process, cannot be denied. The brain and nervous system are primarily organs of action-undergoing; biologically, it can be asserted without contravention that primary experience is of a cor- responding type. Hence, unless there is breach of historic and natural continuity, cognitive experience must originate within that of a non-cognitive sort. And unless we start from knowing as a factor in action and undergoing we are inevitably committed to the intrusion of an extra-natural, if not a supernatural, agency and principle. That pro- fessed non-supernaturalists so readily endow the organism with powers that have no basis in natural events is a fact so peculiar that it would be inexplicable were it not for the inertia of the traditional schools. Otherwise it would be evident that the only way to maintain the doctrine of natural continuity is to recognize the secondary and de- rived character aspects of experience of the intellectual or

24 EXPERIENCE AND NATURE

cognitive. But so deeply grounded is the opposite position in the entire philosophic tradition, that it is probably not surprising that philosophers are loath to admit a fact which when admitted compels an extensive reconstruction in form and content.

We have spoken of the difference which acceptance of empirical method in philosophy makes in the problem of subject-object and in that of the alleged all-inclusiveness of cognitive experience.1 There is an intimate connection between these two problems. When real objects are iden- tified, point for point, with knowledge-objects, all affec- tional and volitional objects are inevitably excluded from the "real" world, and are compelled to find refuge in the privacy of an experiencing subject or mind. Thus the notion of the ubiquity of all comprehensive cognitive ex- perience results by a necessary logic in setting up a hard and fast wall between the experiencing subject and that nature which is experienced. The self becomes not merely a pilgrim but an unnaturalized and unnaturalizable alien in the world. The only way to avoid a sharp separation between the mind which is the centre of the processes of experiencing and the natural world which is experienced is to acknowledge that all modes of experiencing are ways in which some genuine traits of nature come to manifest realization.

The favoring of cognitive objects and their characteris-

1 To avoid misapprehension, it may be well to add a statement on the latter point. It is not denied that any experienced subject-matter what- ever may become an object of reflection and cognitive inspection. But the emphasis is upon "become"; the cognitive never is all-inclusive: that is, when the material of a prior non-cognitive experience is the object of knowledge, it and the act of knowing are themselves included within a new and and wider non-cognitive experience — and this situation can never be transcended. It is only when the temporal character of experienced things is forgotten that the idea of the total "transcendence" of knowledge is asserted.

PHILOSOPHIC METHOD 25

tics at the expense of traits that excite desire, command action and produce passion, is a special instance of a principle of selective emphasis which introduces partiality and partisanship into philosophy. Selective emphasis, with accompanying omission and rejection, is the heart-beat of mental life. To object to the operation is to discard all thinking. But in ordinary matters and in scientific in- quiries, we always retain the sense that the material chosen is selected for a purpose; there is no idea of denying what is left out, for what is omitted is merely that which is not relevant to the particular problem and purpose in hand.

But in philosophies, this limiting condition is often wholly ignored. It is not noted and remembered that the favored subject-matter is chosen for a purpose and that what is left out is just as real and important in its own characteristic context. It tends to be assumed that because qualities that figure in poetical discourse and those that are central in friendship do not figure in scientific inquiry, they have no reality, at least not the kind of unquestionable reality attributed to the mathematical, mechanical or mag- neto-electric properties that constitute matter. It is natural to men to take that which is of chief value to them at the time as the real. Reality and superior value are equated. In ordinary experience this fact does no particular harm; it is at once compensated for by turning to other things which since they also present value are equally real. But philosophy often exhibits a cataleptic rigidity in attach- ment to that phase of the total objects of experience which has become especially dear to a philosopher. // is real at all hazards and only it; other things are real only in some secondary and Pickwickian sense.

For example, certainty, assurance, is immensely valuable in a world as full of uncertainty and peril as that in which

26 EXPERIENCE AND NATURE

we live. As a result whatever is capable of certainty is assumed to constitute ultimate Being, and everything else is said to be merely phenomenal, or, in extreme cases, illu- sory. The arbitrary character of the "reality" that emerges is seen in the fact that very different objects are selected by different philosophers. These may be mathe- matical entities, states of consciousness, or sense data. That is, whatever strikes a philosopher from the angle of the particular problem that presses on him as being self- evident and hence completely assured, is selected by him to constitute reality. The honorable and dignified have ranked with the mundanely certain in determining philo- sophic definitions of the real. Scholasticism considered that the True and the Good, along with Unity, were the marks of Being as such. In the face of a problem, thought always seeks to unify things otherwise fragmentary and discrepant. Deliberately action strives to attain the good; knowledge is reached when truth is grasped. Then the goals of our efforts, the things that afford satisfaction and peace under conditions of tension and unrest, are converted into that which alone is ultimate real Being. Ulterior func- tions are treated as original properties.

Another aspect of the same erection of objects of selec- tive preference into exclusive realities is seen in the addic- tion of philosophers to what is simple, their love for "ele- ments." Gross experience is loaded with the tangled and complex; hence philosophy hurries away from it to search out something so simple that the mind can rest trustfully in it, knowing that it has no surprises in store, that it will not spring anything to make trouble, that it will stay put, having no potentialities in reserve. There is again the predilection for mathematical objects; there is Spinoza with his assurance that a true idea carries truth intrinsic

PHILOSOPHIC METHOD 27

in its bosom; Locke with his "simple idea"; Hume with his "impression"; the English neo-realist with his ultimate atomic data; the American neo-realist with his ready-made essences.

Another striking example of the fallacy of selective em- phasis is found in the hypnotic influence exercised by the conception of the eternal. The permanent enables us to rest, it gives peace; the variable, the changing, is a con- stant challenge. Where things change something is hang- ing over us. It is a threat of trouble. Even when change is marked by hope of better things to come, that hope tends to project its object as something to stay once for all when it arrives. Moreover we can deal with the variable and precarious only by means of the stable and constant; "in- variants"— for the time being — are as much a necessity in practice for bringing something to pass as they are in mathematical functions. The permanent answers genuine emotional, practical and intellectual requirements. But the demand and the response which meets it are empirically always found in a special context; they arise because of a particular need and in order to effect specifiable conse- quences. Philosophy, thinking at large, allows itself to be diverted into absurd search for an intellectual philoso- pher's stone of absolutely wholesale generalizations, thus isolating that which is permanent in a function and for a purpose, and converting it into the intrinsically eternal, conceived either (as Aristotle conceived it) as that which is the same at all times, or as that which is indifferent to time, out of time.

This bias toward treating objects selected because of their value in some special context as the "real," in a superior and invidious sense, testifies to an empirical fact of importance. Philosophical simplifications are due to

28 EXPERIENCE AND NATURE

choice, and choice marks an interest moral in the broad sense of concern for what is good. Our constant and un- escapable concern is with prosperity and adversity, success and failure, achievement and frustration, good and bad. Since we are creatures with lives to live, and find ourselves within an uncertain environment, we are constructed to note and judge in terms of bearing upon weal and woe — upon value. Acknowledgment of this fact is a very dif- ferent thing, however, from the transformation effected by philosophers of the traits they find good (simplicity, cer- tainty, nobility, permanence, etc.) into fixed traits of real Being. The former presents something to be accom- plished, to be brought about by the actions in which choice is manifested and made genuine. The latter ignores the need of action to effect the better and to prove the honesty of choice; it converts what is desired into antecedent and final features of a reality which is supposed to need only logical warrant in order to be contemplatively enjoyed as true Being.

For reflection the eventual is always better or worse than the given. But since it would also be better if the eventual good were now given, the philosopher, belonging by status to a leisure class relieved from the urgent neces- sity of dealing with conditions, converts the eventual into some kind of Being, something which is, even if it does not exist. Permanence, real essence, totality, order, unity, ra- tionality, the tmum, verum et bomem of the classic tradi- tion, are eulogistic predicates. When we find such terms used to describe the foundations and proper conclusions of a philosophic system, there is ground for suspecting that an artificial simplification of existence has been per- formed. Reflection determining preference for an eventual

PHILOSOPHIC METHOD 29

good has dialectically wrought a miracle of transubstan- tiation.

Selective emphasis, choice, is inevitable whenever reflec- tion occurs. This is not an evil. Deception comes only when the presence and operation of choice is concealed, disguised, denied. Empirical method finds and points to the operation of choice as it does to any other event. Thus it protects us from conversion of eventual functions into antecedent existence: a conversion that may be said to be the philosophic fallacy, whether it be performed in behalf of mathematical subsistences, esthetic essences, the purely physical order of nature, or God. The present writer does not profess any greater candor of intent than animates fellow philosophers. But the pursuance of an empirical method, is, he submits, the only way to secure execution of candid intent. Whatever enters into choice, determining its need and giving it guidance, an empirical method frankly indicates what it is for; and the fact of choice, with its workings and consequences, an empirical method points out with equal openness.

The adoption of an empirical method is no guarantee that all the things relevant to any particular conclusion will actually be found, or that when found they will be correctly shown and communicated. But empirical method points out when and where and how things of a designated description have been arrived at. It places before others a map of the road that has been travelled; they may ac- cordingly, if they will, re- travel the road to inspect the landscape for themselves. Thus the findings of one may be rectified and extended by the findings of others, with as much assurance as is humanly possible of confirmation, extension and rectification. The adoption of empirical method thus procures for philosophic reflection something

30 EXPERIENCE AND NATURE

of that cooperative tendency toward consensus which marks inquiry in the natural sciences. The scientific in- vestigator convinces others not by the plausibility of his definitions and the cogency of his dialectic, but by placing before them the specified course of searchings, doings and arrivals, in consequence of which certain things have been found. His appeal is for others to traverse a similar course, so as to see how what they find corresponds with his report.

Honest empirical method will state when and where and why the act of selection took place, and thus enable others to repeat it and test its worth. Selective choice, denoted as an empirical event, reveals the basis and bearing of intel- lectual simplifications; they then cease to be of such a self- enclosed nature as to be affairs only of opinion and argu- ment, admitting no alternatives save complete acceptance or rejection. Choice that is disguised or denied is the source of those astounding differences of philosophic belief that startle the beginner and that become the plaything of the expert. Choice that is avowed is an experiment to be tried on its merits and tested by its results. Under all the captions that are called immediate knowledge, or self-suf- ficient certitude of belief, whether logical, esthetic or epis- temological, there is something selected for a purpose, and hence not simple, not self-evident and not intrinsically eulogizable. State the purpose so that it may be re-experi- enced, and its value and the pertinency of selection under- taken in its behalf may be tested. The purport of thinking, scientific and philosophic, is not to eliminate choice but to render it less arbitrary and more significant. It loses its arbitrary character when its quality and consequences are such as to commend themselves to the reflection of others after they have betaken themselves to the situations indi-

PHILOSOPHIC METHOD 31

cated; it becomes significant when reason for the choice is found to be weighty and its consequences momentous. When choice is avowed, others can repeat the course of the experience; it is an experiment to be tried, not an auto- matic safety device.

This particular affair is referred to here not so much as matter of doctrine as to afford an illustration of the nature of empirical method. Truth or falsity depends upon what men find when they warily perform the experiment of ob- serving reflective events. An empirical finding is refuted not by denial that one finds things to be thus and so, but by giving directions for a course of experience that results in finding its opposite to be the case. To convince of error as well as to lead to truth is to assist another to see and find something which he hitherto has failed to find and recognize. All of the wit and subtlety of reflection and logic find scope in the elaboration and conveying of direc- tions that intelligibly point out a course to be followed. Every system of philosophy presents the consequences of some such experiment. As experiments, each has contrib- uted something of worth to our observation of the events and qualities of experienceable objects. Some harsh criti- cisms of traditional philosophy have already been sug- gested; others will doubtless follow. But the criticism is not directed at the experiments; it is aimed at the denial to them by the philosophic tradition of selective experi- mental quality, a denial which has isolated them from their actual context and function, and has thereby converted potential illuminations into arbitrary assertions.

This discussion of empirical method has had a double content. On one hand, it has tried to make clear, from the analogy of empirical method in scientific inquiry, what the method signifies (and does not signify) for philosophy.

32 EXPERIENCE AND NATURE

Such a discussion would, however, have little definite im- port unless the difference that is made in philosophy by the adoption of empirical method is pointed out. For that rea- son, we have considered some typical ways and important places in which traditional philosophies have gone astray through failure to connect their reflective results with the affairs of every-day primary experience. Three sources of large fallacies have been mentioned, each containing within itself many more sub-varieties than have been hinted at. The three are the complete separation of subject and ob- ject, (of what is experienced from how it is experi- enced) ; the exaggeration of the features of known objects at the expense of the qualities of objects of enjoyment and trouble, friendship and human association, art and indus- try; and the exclusive isolation of the results of various types of selective simplification which are undertaken for diverse unavowed purposes.

It does not follow that the products of these philosophies which have taken the wrong, because non-empirical, method are of no value or little worth for a philosophy that pursues a strictly empirical method. The contrary is the case, for no philosopher can get away from experience even if he wants to. The most fantastic views ever entertained by superstitious people had some basis in experienced fact; they can be explained by one who knows enough about them and about the conditions under which they were formed. And philosophers have been not more but less superstitious than their fellows; they have been, as a class, unusually reflective and inquiring. If some of their prod- ucts have been fantasies, it was not because they did not, even unwittingly, start from empirical method; it was not wholly because they substituted unchecked imagination for thought. No, the trouble has been that they have failed

PHILOSOPHIC METHOD 33

to note the empirical needs that generate their problems, and have failed to return the refined products back to the context of actual experience, there to receive their check, inherit their full content of meaning, and give illumination and guidance in the immediate perplexities which origi- nally occasioned reflection.

The chapters which follow make no pretence, accord- ingly, of starting to philosophize afresh as if there were no philosophies already in existence, or as if their conclusions were empirically worthless. Rather the subsequent discus- sions rely, perhaps excessively so, upon the main results of great philosophic systems, endeavoring to point out their elements of strength and of weakness when their conclu- sions are employed (as the refined objects of all reflection must be employed) as guides back to the subject-matter of crude, everyday experience.

Our primary experience as it comes is of little value for purposes of analysis and control, crammed as it is with things that need analysis and control. The very existence of reflection is proof of its deficiencies. Just as ancient astronomy and physics were of little scientific worth, be- cause, owing to the lack of apparatus and techniques of experimental analysis, they had to take the things of pri- mary observation at their face value, so "common-sense" philosophy usually repeats current conventionalities. What is averred to be implicit reliance upon what is given in common experience is likely to be merely an appeal to prejudice to gain support for some fanaticism or defence for some relic of conservative tradition which is beginning to be questioned.

The trouble, then, with the conclusions of philosophy is not in the least that they are results of reflection and theorizing. It is rather that philosophers have borrowed

34 EXPERIENCE AND NATURE

from various sources the conclusions of special analyses, particularly of some ruling science of the day, and im- ported them direct into philosophy, with no check by either the empirical objects from which they arose or those to which the conclusions in question point. Thus Plato trafficked with the Pythagoreans and imported mathematical concepts; Descartes and Spinoza took over the presuppositions of geometrical reasoning; Locke im- ported into the theory of mind the Newtonian physical cor- puscles, converting them into given "simple ideas"; Hegel borrowed and generalized without limit the rising historical method of his day; contemporary English philosophy has imported from mathematics the notion of primitive in- definable propositions, and given them a content from Locke's simple ideas, which had in the meantime become part of the stock in trade of psychological science.

Well, why not, as long as what is borrowed has a sound scientific status? Because in scientific inquiry, refined methods justify themselves by opening up new fields of subject-matter for exploration; they create new techniques of observation and experimentation. Thus when the Michelson-Moley experiment disclosed, as a matter of gross experience, facts which did not agree with the results of accepted physical laws, physicists did not think for a moment of denying the validity of what was found in that experience, even though it rendered questionable an elaborate intellectual apparatus and system. The coin- cidence of the bands of the interferometer was accepted at its face value in spite of its incompatibility with Newtonian physics. Because scientific inquirers accepted it at its face value they at once set to work to reconstruct their theories; they questioned their reflective premisses, not the full "reality" of what they saw. This task of re-adjustment

PHILOSOPHIC METHOD 35

compelled not only new reasonings and calculations in the development of a more comprehensive theory, but opened up new ways of inquiry into experienced subject-matter. Not for a moment did they think of explaining away the features of an object in gross experience because it was not in logical harmony with theory — as philosophers have so often done. Had they done so, they would have stultified science and shut themselves off from new problems and new findings in subject-matter. In short, the material of refined scientific method is continuous with that of the actual world as it is concretely experienced.

But when philosophers transfer into their theories bodily and as finalities the refined conclusions they borrow from the sciences, whether logic, mathematics or physics, these results are not employed to reveal new subject-matters and illuminate old ones of gross experience; they are employed to cast discredit on the latter and to generate new and ar- tificial problems regarding the reality and validity of the things of gross experience. Thus the discoveries of psy- chologies taken out of their own empirical context are in philosophy employed to cast doubt upon the reality of things external to mind and to selves, things and properties that are perhaps the most salient characteristics of ordi- nary experience. Similarly, the discoveries and methods of physical science, the concepts of mass, space, motion, have been adopted wholesale in isolation by philosophers in such a way as to make dubious and even incredible the reality of the affections, purposes and enjoyments of concrete ex- perience. The objects of mathematics, symbols of rela- tions having no explicit reference to actual existence, efficacious in the territory to which mathematical technique applies, have been employed in philosophy to determine the priority of essences to existence, and to create the insoluble

36 EXPERIENCE AND NATURE

problem of why pure essence ever descends into the tangles and tortuosities of existence.

What empirical method exacts of philosophy is two things: First, that refined methods and products be traced back to their origin in primary experience, in all its hetero- geneity and fullness ; so that the needs and problems out of which they arise and which they have to satisfy be acknowledged. Secondly, that the secondary methods and conclusions be brought back to the things of ordinary expe- rience, in all their coarseness and crudity, for verification. In this way, the methods of analytic reflection yield mate- rial which form the ingredients of a method of designation, denotation, in philosophy. A scientific work in physics or astronomy gives a record of calculations and deductions that were derived from past observations and experiments. But it is more than a record; it is also an indication, an assignment, of further observations and experiments to be performed. No scientific report would get a hearing if it did not describe the apparatus by means of which experi- ments were carried on and results obtained; not that ap- paratus is worshipped, but because this procedure tells other inquirers how they are to go to work to get results which will agree or disagree in their experience with those previously arrived at, and thus confirm, modify and rectify the latter. The recorded scientific result is in effect a designation of a method to be followed and a prediction of what will be found when specified observations are set on foot. That is all a philosophy can be or do. In the chap- ters that follow I have undertaken a revision and recon- struction of the conclusions, the reports, of a number of historic philosophic systems, in order that they may be usable methods by which one may go to his own experience, and, discerning what is found by use of the method, come

PHILOSOPHIC METHOD 37

to understand better what is already within the common experience of mankind.

There is a special service which the study of philosophy may render. Empirically pursued it will not be a study of philosophy but a study, by means of philosophy, of life- experience. But this experience is already overlaid and saturated with the products of the reflection of past genera- tions and by-gone ages. It is filled with interpretations, classifications, due to sophisticated thought, which have become incorporated into what seems to be fresh, nai've empirical material. It would take more wisdom than is possessed by the wisest historic scholar to track all of these absorbed borrowings to their original sources. If we may for the moment call these materials prejudices (even if they are true, as long as their source and authority is un- known), then philosophy is a critique of prejudices. These incorporated results of past reflection, welded into the genuine materials of first-hand experience, may become or- gans of enrichment if they are detected and reflected upon. If they are not detected, they often obfuscate and distort. Clarification and emancipation follow when they are de- tected and cast out; and one great object of philosophy is to accomplish this task.

An empirical philosophy is in any case a kind of intellec- tual disrobing. We cannot permanently divest ourselves of the intellectual habits we take on and wear when we assimilate the culture of our own time and place. But intelligent furthering of culture demands that we take some of them off, that we inspect them critically to see what they are made of and what wearing them does to us. We cannot achieve recovery of primitive naivete. But there is attainable a cultivated naivete of eye, ear and thought, one that can be acquired only through the discipline of

38 EXPERIENCE AND NATURE

severe thought. If the chapters which follow contribute to an artful innocence and simplicity they will have served their purpose.

I am loath to conclude without reference to the larger liberal humane value of philosophy when pursued with empirical method. The most serious indictment to be brought against non-empirical philosophies is that they have cast a cloud over the things of ordinary experience. They have not been content to rectify them. They have discredited them at large. In casting aspersion upon the things of everyday experience, the things of action and af- fection and social intercourse, they have done something worse than fail to give these affairs the intelligent direction they so much need. It would not matter much if philos- ophy had been reserved as a luxury of only a few thinkers. We endure many luxuries. The serious matter is that philosophies have denied that common experience is capa- ble of developing from within itself methods which will secure direction for itself and will create inherent stand- ards of judgment and value. No one knows how many of the evils and deficiencies that are pointed to as reasons for flight from experience are themselves due to the disregard of experience shown by those peculiarly reflective. To Waste of time and energy, to disillusionment with life that at- tends every deviation from concrete experience must be added the tragic failure to realize the value that intelligent search could reveal and mature among the things of ordi- nary experience. I cannot calculate how much of current cynicism, indifference and pessimism is due to these causes in the deflection of intelligence they have brought about. It has even become in many circles a sign of lack of sophisti- cation to imagine that life is or can be a fountain of cheer and happiness. Philosophies no more than religions can

PHILOSOPHIC METHOD 39

be acquitted of responsibility for bringing this result to pass. The transcendental philosopher has probably done more than the professed sensualist and materialist to ob- scure the potentialities of daily experience for joy and for self-regulation. If what is written in these pages has no other result than creating and promoting a respect for concrete human experience and its potentialities, I shall be content.

CHAPTER TWO

EXISTENCE AS PRECARIOUS AND AS STABLE

It was suggested in the last chapter that experience has Its equivalents in such affairs as history, life, culture. Reference to these other affairs enables us to put to one side the reminiscences which so readily give the word experience a sectarian and provincial content. Accord- ing to Tylor, culture is "that complex whole which in- cludes knowledge, belief, art, morals, custom, and any other capabilities acquired by a man as a member of society." It is, in some sense, a whole, but it is a com- plex, a diversified whole. It is differentiated into re- ligion, magic, law, fine and useful art, science, philosophy, language, domestic and political relations, etc Con- sider the following words of an anthropologist and ask if they do not fairly define the problem of philosophy, although intended for another purpose. "Cultural real- ity is never wholly deterministic nor yet wholly acciden- tal, never wholly psychological nor yet wholly objective, never wholly of yesterday nor yet wholly of today, but

combines all of these in its existential reality

A reconstructive synthesis re-establishes the synthetic unity necessarily lost in the process of analytic dismem- berment. "l I do not mean that philosophy is to be merged in an anthropological view of culture. But in a different context and by a different method, it has the task of analytic dismemberment and synthetic reconstruction of experience; the phenomena of culture as presented by

1 Golden weiscx.

EXISTENCE 41

the anthropologist provide, moreover, precious material to aid the performance of this office, material more pertinent to the task of philosophizing than that of psychology isolated from a theory of culture.

A feature of existence which is emphasized by cultural phenomena is the precarious and perilous. Sumner refers to Grimm as authority for the statement that the Germanic tribes had over a thousand distinct sayings, proverbs and apothegms, concerning luck. Time is brief, and this statement must stand instead of the dis- course which the subject deserves. Man finds himself living in an aleatory world; his existence involves, to put it baldly, a gamble. The world is a scene of risk; it is uncertain, unstable, uncannily unstable. Its dangers are irregular, inconstant, not to be counted upon as to their times and seasons. Although persistent, they are spora- dic, episodic. It is darkest just before dawn; pride goes before a fall; the moment of greatest prosperity is the moment most charged with ill-omen, most opportune for the evil eye. Plague, famine, failure of crops, disease, death, defeat in battle, are always just around the corner, and so are abundance, strength, victory, festival and song. Luck is proverbially both good and bad in its distribu- tions. The sacred and the accursed are potentialities of the same situation; and there is no category of things which has not embodied the sacred and accursed: per- sons, words, places, times, directions in space, stones, winds, animals, stars.

Anthropologists have shown incontrovertibly the part played by the precarious aspect of the world in generating religion with its ceremonies, rites, cults, myths, magic; and it has shown the pervasive penetration of these af-

42 EXPERIENCE AND NATURE

fairs into morals, law, art, and industry. Beliefs and dispositions connected with them are the background out of which philosophy and secular morals slowly de- veloped, as well as more slowly those late inventions, art for art's sake, and business is business. Interesting and instructive as is this fact, it is not the ramifications which here concern us. We must not be diverted to consider the consequences for philosophy, even for doctrines reigning today, of facts concerning the origin of philosophies. We confine ourselves to one outstanding fact: the evidence that the world of empirical things includes the uncertain, unpredictable, uncontrollable, and hazardous.

It is an old saying that the gods were born of fear. The saying is only too likely to strengthen a misconcep- tion bred by confirmed subjective habits. We first endow man in isolation with an instinct of fear and then we imagine him irrationally ejecting that fear into the environment, scattering broadcast as it were, the fruits of his own purely personal limitations, and thereby creating superstition. But fear, whether an instinct or an acquisition, is a function of the environment. JNIan fears because he exists in a fearful, an awful world. The world is precarious andT perilous. It is as easily accessible and striking evidence of this fact that primi- tive experience is cited. The voice is that of early man; but the hand is that of nature, the nature in which we still live. It was not fear of gods that created the gods.

For if the life of early man is filled with expiations and propitiations, if in his feasts and festivals what is enjoyed is gratefully shared with his gods, it is not because a belief in supernatural powers created a need for ex-

EXISTENCE 43

piatory, propitiatory and communal offerings. Every- thing that man achieves and possesses is got by actions that may involve him in other and obnoxious conse- quences in addition to those wanted and enjoyed. His acts are trespasses upon the domain of the unknown; and hence atonement, if offered in season, may ward off direful consequences that haunt even the moment of prosperity — or that most haunt that moment. While unknown consequences flowing from the past dog the present, the future is even more unknown and perilous; the present by that fact is ominous. If unknown forces that decide future destiny can be placated, the man who will not study the methods of securing their favor is incredibly flippant. In enjoyment of present food and companionship, nature, tradition and social organization have coSperated, thereby supplementing our own endeav- ors so petty and so feeble without this extraneous rein- forcement. Goods are by grace not of ourselves. He is a dangerous churl who will not gratefully acknowledge by means of free-will offerings the help that sustains him.

These things are as true today as they were in the days of early culture. It is not the facts which have changed, but the methods of insurance, regulation and acknowledgment. Herbert Spencer sometimes colored his devotion to symbolic experiences with a fact of dire experience. When he says that every fact has two opposite sides, "the one its near or visible side and the other its remote or invisible side/5 he expresses a per- sistent trait of every object in experience. The visible is set in the invisible; and in the end what is unseen decides what happens in the seen; the tangible rests pre-

44 EXPERIENCE AND NATURE

cariously upon the untouched and ungrasped. The contrast and the potential maladjustment of the im- mediate, the conspicuous and focal phase of things, with those indirect and hidden factors which determine the origin and career of what is present, are indestructible features of any and every experience. We may term the way in which our ancestors dealt with the contrast super- stitious, but the contrast is no superstition. It is a pri- mary datum in any experience.

We have substituted sophistication for superstition, at least measurably so. But the sophistication is often as irrational and as much at the mercy of words as the superstition it replaces. Our magical safeguard against the uncertain character of the world is to deny the exis- tence of chance, to mumble universal and necessary law, the ubiquity of cause and effect, the uniformity of nature, universal progress, and the inherent rationality of the universe. These magic formulae borrow their potency from conditions that are not magical. Through science we have secured a degree of power of prediction and of control; through tools, machinery and an ac- companying technique we have made the world more conformable to our needs, a more secure abode. We have heaped up riches and means of comfort between ourselves and the risks of the world. We have profes- sionalized amusement as an agency of escape and for- getfulness. But when all is said and done, the funda- mentally hazardous character of the world is not seriously modified, much less eliminated. Such an incident as the last war and preparations for a future war remind us that it is easy to overlook the extent to which, after all, our attainments are only devices for blurring the dis-

EXISTENCE 45

agreeable recognition of a fact, instead of means of altering the fact itself.

What has been said sounds pessimistic. But the con- cern is not with morals but with metaphysics, with, that is to say, the nature of the existential world in which we live. It would have been as easy and more comfortable to emphasize good luck, grace, unexpected and unwon joys, those unsought for happenings which we so signi- ficantly call happiness. We might have appealed to good fortune as evidence of this important trait of hazard in nature. Comedy is as genuine as tragedy. But it is traditional that comedy strikes a more superficial note than tragedy. And there is an even better reason for appealing to misfortunes and mistakes as evidence of the precarious nature of the world. The problem of evil is a well recognized problem, while we rarely or never hear of a problem of good. Goods we take for granted; they are as they should be; they are natural and proper. The good is a recognition of our deserts. When we pull out a plum we treat it as evidence of the real order of cause and effect in the world. For this reason it is diffi- cult for the goods of existence to furnish as convincing evidence of the uncertain character of nature as do evils. It is the latter we term accidents, not the former, even when their adventitious character is as certain.

What of it all, it may be asked? In the sense in which an assertion is true that uncontrolled distribution of good and evil is evidence of the precarious, uncertain nature of existence, it is a truism, and no problem is forwarded by its reiteration. But it is submitted that just this predicament of the inextricable mixture of stability and uncertainty gives rise to philosophy, and

46 EXPERIENCE AND NATURE

that it is reflected in all its recurrent problems and issues. If classic philosophy says so much about unity and so little about unreconciled diversity, so much about the eternal and permanent, and so little about change (save as something to be resolved into combinations of the permanent), so much about necessity and so little about contingency, so much about the comprehending universal and so little about the recalcitrant particular, it may well be because the ambiguousness and ambivalence of reality are actually so pervasive. Since these things form the problem, solution is more apparent (although not more actual), in the degree in which whatever of stability and assurance the world presents is fastened upon and asserted.

Upon their surface, the reports of the world which form our different philosophies are various to the point of stark contrariness. They range from spiritualism to materialism, from absolutism to relativistic pheno- menalism, from transcendentalism to positivism, from rationalism to sensationalism, from idealism to realism, from subjectivism, to bald objectivism, from Platonic realism to nominalism. The array of contradictions is so imposing as to suggest to sceptics that the mind of man has tackled an impossible job, or that philosophers have abandoned themselves to vagary. These radical op- positions in philosophers suggest however another con- sideration. They suggest that all their different philos- ophies have a common premise, and that their diversity is due to acceptance of a common premise. Variant philosophies may be looked at as different ways of sup- plying recipes for denying to the universe the character of contingency which it possesses so integrally that its

EXISTENCE 4T

denial leaves the reflecting mind without a clew, and puts subsequent philosophising at the mercy of tempera- ment, interest and local surroundings.

Quarrels among conflicting types of philosophy are thus family quarrels. They go on within the limits of a too domestic circle, and can be settled only by venturing further afield, and out of doors. Concerned with im- puting complete, finished and sure character to the world of real existence, even if things have to be broken into two disconnected pieces in order to accomplish the result, the character desiderated can plausibly be found in reason or in mechanism; in rational conceptions like those of mathematics, or brute things like sensory data; in atoms or in essences; in consciousness or in a physical externality which forces and overrides consciousness.

As against this common identification of reality with what is sure, regular and finished, experience in unsophis- ticated forms gives evidence of a different world and points to a different metaphysics. We live in a world which is an impressive and irresistible mixture of suf- ficiencies, tight completenesses, order, recurrences which make possible prediction and control, and singularities, ambiguities, uncertain possibilities, processes going on to consequences as yet indeterminate. They are mixed not mechanically but vitally like the wheat and tares of the parable. We may recognize them separately but we cannot divide them, for unlike wheat and tares they grow from the same root. Qualities have defects as neces- sary conditions of their excellencies; the instrumentalities of truth are the causes of error; change gives meaning to permanence and recurrence makes novelty possible. A world that was wholly risky would be a world in which

48 EXPERIENCE AND NATURE

adventure is impossible, and only a living world can in- clude death. Such facts have been celebrated by think- ers like Heracleitus and Laotze; they have been greeted by theologians as furnishing occasions for exercise of divine grace; they have been elaborately formulated by various schools under a principle of relativity, so de- fined as to become itself final and absolute. They have rarely been frankly recognized as fundamentally signifi- cant for the formation of a naturalistic metaphysics.

Aristotle perhaps came the nearest to a start in that direction. But his thought did not go far on the road, though it may be used to suggest the road which he failed to take. Aristotle acknowledges contingency, but he never surrenders his bias in favor of the fixed, certain and finished. His whole theory of forms and ends is a theory of the superiority in Being of rounded- out fixities. His physics is a fixation of ranks or grades of necessity and contingency so sorted that necessity measures dignity and equals degree of reality, while con- tingency and change measure degrees of deficiency of Being. The empirical impact and sting of the mixture of universality and singularity and chance is evaded by parcelling out the regions of space so that they have their natural abode in different portions of nature. His logic is one of definition and classification, so that its task is completed when changing and contingent things are distinguished from the necessary, universal and fixed, by attribution to inferior species of things. Chance ap- pears in thought not as a calculus of probabilities in pre- dicting the observable occurrence of any and every event, but as marking an inferior type of syllogism. Things that move are intrinsically different from things

EXISTENCE 49

that exhibit eternal regularity. Change is honestly recognized as a genuine feature of some things, but the point of the recognition is avoided by imputing altera- tion to inherent deficiency of Being over against com- plete Being which never changes. Changing things be- long to a purgatorial realm, where they wander aimlessly until redeemed by love of finality of form, the acquisi- tion of which lifts them to a paradise of self-sufficient Being. With slight exaggeration, it may be said that the thoroughgoing way in which Aristotle defined, dis- tinguished and classified rest and movement, the finished and the incomplete, the actual and potential, did more to fix tradition, the genteel tradition one is tempted to add, which identifies the fixed and regular with reality of Being and the changing and hazardous with deficiency of Being than ever was accomplished by those who took the shorter path of asserting that change is illusory.

His philosophy was closer to empirical facts than most modern philosophies, in that it was neither monistic nor dualistic but openly pluralistic. His plurals fall however, within a grammatical system, to each portion of which a corresponding cosmic status is allotted. Thus his pluralism solved the problem of how to have your cake and eat it too, for a classified and hierarchically ordered set of pluralities, of variants, has none of the sting of the miscellaneous and uncoordinated plurals of our actual world. In this classificatory scheme of separation he has been followed, though perhaps unwittingly, by many philosophers of different import. Thus Kant assigns all that is manifold and chaotic to one realm, that of sense, and all that is uniform and regular to that of reason. A single and all embracing dialectic problem of the com-

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bination of sense and thought is thereby substituted for the concrete problems that arise through the mixed and varied union in existence of the variable and the con- stant, the necessary and that which proceeds uncertainly.

The device is characteristic of a conversion such as has already been commented upon of a moral insight to be made good in action into an antecedent meta- physics of existence or a general theory of knowledge. The striving to make stability of meaning prevail over the instability of events is the main task of intelligent human effort. But when the function is dropped from the province of art and treated as a property of given things, whether cosmological or logical, effort is rendered use- less, and a premium is put upon the accidental good- fortune of a class that happens to be furnished by the toil of another class with products that give to life its dignity and leisurely stability.

The argument is not forgetful that there are, from Heracleitus to Bergson, philosophies, metaphysics, of change. One is grateful to them for keeping alive a sense of what classic, orthodox philosophies have whisked out of sight. But the philosophies of flux also indicate the intensity of the craving for the sure and fixed. They have deified change by making it universal, regular, sure. To say this is not, I hope, verbal by-play. Consider the wholly eulogistic fashion in which Hegel and Bergson, and the professedly evolutionary philosophers of becom- ing, have taken change. With Hegel becoming is a rational process which defines logic although a new and strange logic, and an absolute, although new and strange, God. With Spencer, evolution is but the transitional process of attaining a fixed and universal equilibrium of

EXISTENCE SI

harmonious adjustment With Bergson, change is the creative operation of God, or is God — one is not quite sure which. The change of change is not only cosmic pyrotechnics, but is a process of divine, spiritual, energy. We are here in the presence of prescription, not descrip- tion. Romanticism is an evangel in the garb of meta- physics. It sidesteps the painful, toilsome labor of understanding and of control which change sets us, by glorifying it for its own sake. Flux is made something to revere, something profoundly akin to what is best within ourselves, will and creative energy. It is not, as it is in experience, a call to effort, a challenge to investi- gation, a potential doom of disaster and death.

If we follow classical terminology, philosophy is love of wisdom, while metaphysics is cognizance of the generic traits of existence. In this sense of metaphysics, incom- pleteness and precariousness is a trait that must be given footing of the same rank as the finished and fixed. Love of wisdom is concerned with finding its implica- tions for the conduct of life, in devotion to what is good. On the cognitive side, the issue is largely that of measure, of the ratio one bears to others in the situations of life. On the practical side, it is a question of the use to be made of each, of turning each to best account. Man is naturally philosophic, rather than metaphysical or coldJy scientific, noting and describing. Concerned with pru- dence if not with what is honorifically called wisdom, man naturally prizes knowledge only for the sake of its bearing upon success and failure in attaining goods and avoiding evils. This is a fact of our structure and nothing is gained by recommending it as an ideal truth, and equally nothing is gained by attributing to intellect

52 EXPERIENCE AND NATURE

aui intrinsic relationship to pure truth for its own sake or bare fact on its own account. The first method en- courages dogma, and the second expresses a myth. The love of knowledge for its own sake is an ideal of morals; it is an integral condition of the wisdom that rightly conceives and effectually pursues the good. For wisdom as to ends depends upon acquaintance with conditions and means, and unless the acquaintance is adequate and fair, wisdom becomes a sublimated folly of self-deception. Denial of an inherent relation of mind to truth or fact for its own sake, apart from insight into what the fact or truth exacts of us in behavior and imposes upon us in joy and suffering; and simultaneous affirmation that devotion to fact, to truth, is a necessary moral demand, involve no inconsistency. Denial relates to natural events as independent of choice and endeavor; affirma- tion relates to choice and action. But choice and the reflective effort involved in it are themselves such con- tingent events and so bound up with the precarious un- certainty of other events, that philosophers have too readily assumed that metaphysics, and science of fact and truth, are themselves wisdom, thinking thus to avoid the necessity of either exercising or recognizing choice. The consequence is that conversion of un- avowed morals or wisdom into cosmology, and into a metaphysics of nature, which was termed in the last chapter the philosophic fallacy. It supplies the for- mula of the technique by which thinkers have relegated the uncertain and unfinished to an invidious state of unreal being, while they have systematically exalted the assured and complete to the rank of true Being.

EXISTENCE II

Upon the side of wisdom, as human brings Interested in good and bad things in their connection with human conduct, thinkers are concerned to mitigate the instability of life, to introduce moderation, temper and economy, and when worst comes to worst to suggest consola- tions and compensations. They are concerned with rendering more stable good things, and more unstable bad things; they are interested in how changes may be turned to account in the consequences to which they contribute. The facts of the ungoing, unfinished and ambiguously potential world give point and poignancy to the search for absolutes and finalities. Then when philosophers have hit in reflection upon a thing which is stably good in quality and hence worthy of persistent and continued choice, they hesitate, and withdraw from the effort and struggle that choice demands: — namely, from the effort to give it some such stability in observed existence as it possesses in quality when thought of. Thus it becomes a refuge, an asylum for contemplation, or a theme for dialectical elaboration, instead of an ideal to inspire and guide conduct.

Since thinkers claim to be concerned with knowledge of existence, rather than with imagination, they have to make good the pretention to knowledge. Hence they transmute the imaginative perception of the stably good object into a definition and description of true reality in contrast with lower and specious existence, which, being precarious and incomplete, alone involves us in the necessity of choice and active struggle. Thus they remove from actual existence the very traits which generate philosophic reflection and which give point and bearing to its conclusions. In briefest formula, "reality"

14 EXPERIENCE AND NATURE

becomes what we wish existence to be, after we have analyzed its defects and decided upon what would re- move them; "reality" is what existence would be if our reasonably justified preferences were so completely es- tablished in nature as to exhaust and define its entire being and thereby render search and struggle unneces- sary. What is left over, (and since trouble, struggle, conflict, and error still empirically exist, somethin ; is left over) being excluded by definition from full reality is assigned to a grade or order of being which is asserted to be metaphysically inferior; an order variously called appearance, illusion, mortal mind, or the merely em- pirical, against what really and truly is. Then the prob- lem of metaphysics alters: instead of being a detection and description of the generic traits of existence, it be- comes an endeavor to adjust or reconcile to each other two separate realms of being. Empirically we have just what we started with: the mixture of the precarious and problematic with the assured and complete. But a classificatory device, based on desire and elaborated in reflective imagination, has been introduced by which the two traits are torn apart, one of them being labelled reality and the other appearance. The genuinely moral problem of mitigating and regulating the troublesome factor by active employment of the stable factor then drops out of sight. The dialectic problem of logical reconciliation of two notions has taken its place.

The most widespread of these classificatory devices, the one of greatest popular appeal, is that which divides existence into the supernatural and the natural. Men may fear the gods but it is axiomatic that the gods have nothing to fear. They lead a life of untroubled serenity,

EXISTENCE SS

the Jffe that pleases them. There is a long story between the primitive forms of this division of objects of experi- ence and the dialectical imputation to the divine of omnipotence, omniscience, eternity and infinity, in con- trast with the attribution to man and experienced nature of finitude, weakness, limitation, struggle and change. But in the make-up of human psychology the later history is implicit in the early crude division. One realm is the home of assured appropriation and posses- sion; the other of striving, transiency and frustration* How many persons are there today who conceive that they have disposed of ignorance, struggle and disappoint- ment by pointing to man's "finite" nature — as if finitude signifies anything else but an abstract classificatory naming of certain concrete and discriminable traits of nature itself — traits of nature which generate ignorance, arbitrary appearance and disappearance, failure and striving. It pleases man to substitute the dialectic exercise of showing how the "finite" can exist with or within the "infinite" for the problem of dealing with the contingent, thinking to solve the problem by distin- guishing and naming its factors. Failure of the exercise s certain, but the failure can be flourished as one more >roof of the finitude of man's intellect, and the need- essness because impotency of endeavor of "finite" :reatures to attack ignorance and oppressive fatalities. Wisdom then consists in administration of the temporal, anite and human in its relation to the eternal and in- inite, by means of dogma and cult, rather than in regula- tion of the events of life by understanding of actual conditions.

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It does not demand great ingenuity to detect the inversion here. The starting point is precisely the existing mixture of the regular and dependable and the unsettled and uncertain. There are a multitude of recipes for obtaining a vicarious possession of the stable and final without getting involved in the labor and pain of intellectual effort attending regulation of the condi- tions upon which these fruits depend.

This situation is worthy of remark as an exemplifica- tion of how easy it is to arrive at a description of exis- tence via a theory of wisdom, of reflective insight into goods. It has a direct bearing upon a metaphysical doctrine which is not popular, like the division into the supernatural, and natural, but which is learned and technical. The philosopher may have little esteem for the crude forms assumed by the popular metaphysics of earth and heaven, of God, nature, and man. But the philosopher has often proceeded in a manner analogous to that which resulted in this popular metaphysics; some of the most cherished metaphysical distinctions seem to be but learned counterparts, dependent upon an elaborate intellectual technique, for these rough, crude notions of supernatural and natural, divine and human, in popular belief. I refer to such things as the Platonic division into ideal archetypes and physical events; the Aristotelian division into form which is actuality and matter which is potential, when that is understood as a distinction of ranks of reality ; the noumenal things, things- in-themselves of Kant in contrast with natural objects as phenomenal; the distinction, current among content porary absolute idealists, of reality and appearance.

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The division however is not confined to philosophers with leanings toward spiritualistic philosophies. There is some evidence that Plato got the term Idea, as a name for essential form, from Democritus. Whether this be the case or no, the Idea of Democritus, though having a radically diverse structure from the Platonic Idea, had the same function of designating a finished, complete, stable, wholly unprecarious reality. Both philosophers craved solidity and both found it; corresponding to the Platonic phenomenal flux are the Democritean things as they are in custom or ordinary experience: corre- sponding to the ideal archetypes are substantial indi- visible atoms. Corresponding, again to the Platonic theory of Ideas is the modern theory of mathematical structures which are alone independently real, while the empirical impressions and suggestions to which they give rise is the counterpart of his realm of phenomena.

Apart from the materialistic and spirtualistic schools, there is the Spinozistic division into attributes and modes; the old division of essence and existence, and its modern counterpart subsistence and existence. It is impossible to force Mr. Bertrand Russell into any one of the pigeon- holes of the cabinet of conventional philosophic schools. But moral, or philosophical, motivation is obvious in his metaphysics when he says that mathematics takes us "into the region of absolute necessity, to which not only the actual world but every possible world must conform.'1 Indeed with his usual lucidity, he says, mathematics "finds a habitation eternally standing, where our ideals are fully satisfied and our best hopes are not thwarted.11 When he adds that contemplation of such objects is the "chief means of overcoming the terrible sent* of knpo-

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tence,of weakness, of exile amid hostile power, which Is too apt to result from acknowledging the all but omnipotence of alien forces," the presence of moral origin is explicit.

No modern thinker has pointed out so persuasively as Santayana that "every phase of the ideal world emanates from the natural," that "sense, art, religion, society express nature exuberantly." And yet unless one reads him wrong, he then confounds his would-be disciples and confuses his critics by holding that nature is truly pre- sented only in an esthetic contemplation of essences reached by physical science, an envisagement reached through a dialectic which "is a transubstantiation of matter, a passage from existence to eternity." This passage moreover is so utter that there is no road back. The stable ideal meanings which are the fruit of nature- are forbidden, in the degree in which they are its highest and truest fruits, from dropping seeds in nature to its further fructification.

The perception of genetic continuity between the dynamic flux of nature and an eternity of static ideal forms thus terminate in a sharp division, in reiteration of the old tradition. Perhaps it is a caricature to say that the ultimate of reason is held to be ability to behold nature as a complete mechanism which generates and sustains the beholding of the mechanism, but the carica- ture is not wilful. If the separation of contingency and necessity is abandoned, what is there to exclude a belief that science, while it is grasp of the regular and stable mechanism of nature, is also an organ of regulating and enriching, through its own expansion, the more exu- berant and irregular expressions of nature in human intercourse, the arts, religion, industry, and politics?

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To follow out the latter suggestion would take us to a theme reserved for later consideration. We are here concerned with the fact that it is the intricate mixture of the stable and the precarious, the fixed and the unpredicta- bly novel, the assured and the uncertain, in existence which sets mankind upon that love of wisdom which forms philosophy. Yet too commonly, although in a great variety of technical modes, the result of the search is converted into a metaphysics which denies or conceals from acknowledgment the very characters of existence which initiated it, and which give significance to its conclusions. The form assumed by the denial is, most frequently, that striking division into a superior true realm of being and lower illusory, insignificant or pheno- menal realm which characterizes metaphysical systems as unlike as those of Plato and Democritus, St. Thomas and Spinoza, Aristotle and Kant, Descartes and Comte, Haeckel and Mrs. Eddy.

The same jumble of acknowledgment and denial attends the conception of Absolute Experience: as if any experience could be more absolutely experience than that which marks the life of humanity. This conception constitutes the most recent device for first admitting and then denying the combinedly stable and unstable nature of the world. Its plaintive recognition of our experience as finite and temporal, as full of error, conflict and con- tradiction, is an acknowledgment of the precarious un- certainty of the objects and connections that constitute nature as it emerges in history. Human experience however has also the pathetic longing for truth, beauty and order. There is more than the longing: there are moments of achievement. Experience exhibits ability

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to possess harmonious objects. It evinces an ability, within limits, to safeguard the excellent objects and to deflect and reduce the obnoxious ones. The concept of an absolute experience which is only and always perfect and good, first explicates these desirable implica- tions of things of actual experience, and then asserts that they alone are real. The experienced occurrences which give poignancy and pertinency to the longing for a better world, the experimental endeavors and plans which make possible actual betterments within the objects of actual experience, are thus swept out of real Being into a limbo of appearances.

The notion of Absolute Experience thus serves as a symbol of two facts. One is the ineradicable union in nature of the relatively stable and the relatively con- tingent. The division of the movement and leadings of things which are experienced into two parts, such that one set constitutes and defines absolute and eternal experience, while the other set constitutes and defines finite experience, tells us nothing about absolute experi- ence. It tells us a good deal about experience as it exists: namely, that it is such as to involve permanent and general objects of reference as well as temporally changing events; the possibility of truth as well as error; conclusive objects and goods as well as things whose purport and nature is determinable only in an indeter- minat$ future. Nothing is gained — except the delights of a dialectic problem — in labelling one assortment ab- solute experience and the other finite experience. Since the appeal of the adherents of the philosophy of absolute and phenomenal experience is to a logical criterion, namely, to the implication in every judgment, however

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erroneous, of a standard of consistency which excludes any possibility of contradictoriness, the inherent logical contradictions in the doctrine itself are worth noting.

In the first place, the contents as well as the form of ultimate Absolute Experience are derived from and based upon the features of actual experience, the very experience which is then relegated to unreality by the supreme reality derived from its unreality. It is "real" just long enough to afford a spring-board into ultimate reality and to afford a hint of the essential contents of the latter and then it obligingly dissolves into mere appear- ance. If we start from the standpoint of the Absolute Experience thus reached, the contradiction is repeated from its side. Although absolute, eternal, all-compre- hensive, and pervasively integrated into a whole so logically perfect that no separate patterns, to say nothing of seams and holes, can exist in it, it proceeds to play a tragic joke upon itself — for there is nothing else to be fooled — by appearing in a queer combination of rags and glittering gew-gaws, in the garb of the temporal, partial and conflicting things, mental as well as physical, of ordinary experience. I do not cite these dialectic con- tradictions as having an inherent importance. But the fact that a doctrine which avowedly takes logical con- sistence for its method and criterion, whose adherents are noteworthy for dialectic acumen in specific issues, should terminate in such thoroughgoing contradictions may be cited as evidence that after all the doctrine is merely engaged in an arbitrary sorting out of characters of things which in nature are always present in conjunc- tion and interpenetratioru

«2 EXPERIENCE AND NATURE

The union of the hazardous and the stable, of the in- complete and the recurrent, is the condition of all ex- perienced satisfaction as truly as of our predicaments and problems. While it is the source of ignorance, error and failure of expectation, it is the source of the delight which fulfillments bring. For if there were nothing in the way, if there were no deviations and resistances, fulfillment would be at once, and in so being would ful- fill nothing, but merely be. It would not be in connec- tion with desire or satisfaction. Moreover when a fulfillment comes and is pronounced good, it is judged good, distinguished and asserted, simply because it is in jeopardy, because it occurs amid indifferent and diver- gent things. Because of this mixture of the regular and that which cuts across stability, a good object once experienced acquires ideal quality and attracts demand and effort to itself. A particular ideal may be an illusion, but having ideals is no illusion. It embodies features of existence. Although imagination is often fantastic it is also an organ of nature; for it is the appropriate phase of indeterminate events moving toward eventualities that are now but possibilities. A purely stable world permits of no illusions, but neither is it clothed with ideals. It just exists. To be good is to be better than; and there can be no better except where there is shock and discord combined with enough assured order to make attainment of harmony possible. Better objects when brought into existence are existent not ideal; they retain ideal quality only retrospectively as commemorative of issue from prior conflict and prospectively, in contrast with forces which make for their destruction. Water that slakes thirst, or a conclusion that solves a problem

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have ideal character as longes thirst or problem persists in a way which qualifies the result. But water that is not a satisfaction of need has no more ideal quality than water running through pipes into a reservoir; a solution ceases to be a solution and becomes a bare incident of existence when its antecedent generating conditions of doubt, ambiguity and search are lost from its context. While the precarious nature of existence is indeed the source of all trouble, it is also an indispensable condition of ideality, becoming a sufficient condition when conjoined with the regular and assured.

We long, amid a troubled world, for perfect being. We forget that what gives meaning to the notion of perfection is the events that create longing, and that, apart from them, a "perfect' ' world would mean just an unchanging brute existential thing. The ideal significance of esthetic objects is no exception to this principle. Their satisfying quality, their power to compose while they arouse, is not dependent upon definite prior desire and effort as is the case with the ideally satisfying quality of practical and scientific objects. It is part of their peculiar satisfying quality to be gratuitous, not purchased by endeavor. The contrast to other things of this detachment from toil and labor in a world where most realizations have to be bought, as well as the contrast to trouble and uncertainty, give esthetic objects their peculiar traits. If all things came to us in the way our esthetic objects do, none of them would be a source of esthetic delight.

Some phases of recent philosophy have made much of need, desire and satisfaction. Critics have frequently held that the outcome is only recurrence to an older sub- jective empiricism, though with substitution of affections

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and volitional states for cognitive sensory states. But need and desire are exponents of natural being. They are, if we use Aristotelian phraseology, actualizations of its contingencies and incompletenesses; as such nature itself is wistful and pathetic, turbulent and passionate. Were it not, the existence of wants would be a miracle. In a world where everything is complete, nothing requires any- thing else for its completion. A world in which events can be carried to a finish only through the coinciding assistance of other transitory events, is already necessi- tous, a world of begging as well as of beggarly elements. If human experience is to express and reflect this world, it must be marked by needs; in becoming aware of the needful and needed quality of things it must project satis- factions or completions. For irrespective of whether a satisfaction is conscious, a satisfaction or non-satisfac- tion is an objective thing with objective conditions. It means fulfillment of the demands of objective factors. Happiness may mark an awareness of such satisfaction, and it may be its culminating form. But satisfaction is not subjective, private or personal: it is conditioned by objective partialities and defections and made real by objective situations and completions.

By the same logic, necessity implies the precarious and contingent. A world that was all necessity would not be a world of necessity; it would just be. For in its being, nothing would be necessary for anything else. But where some things are indigent, other things are necessary if demands are to be met. The common failure to note the fact that a world of complete being would be a world in which necessity is meaningless is due to a rapid shift from one universe of discourse to another. First we

EXISTENCE 65

postulate a whole of Being; then we shift to a part; now since a "part" is logically dependent as such in its exis- tence and its properties, it is necessitated by other parts. But we have unwittingly introduced contingency in the very fact of marking off something as just a part. If the logical implications of the original notion are held to firmly, a part is already a part-of-a-whole. Its being what it is, is not necessitated by the whole or by other parts: its being what it is, is just a name for the whole being what it is. Whole and parts alike are but names for existence there as just what it is. But wherever we can say if so-and-so, then something else, there is necessity, because partialities are implied which are not just parts- of-a-whole. A world of "ifs" is alone a world of "musts" — the "ifs" express real differences; the "musts" real con- nections. The stable and recurrent is needed for the ful- fillment of the possible; the doubtful can be settled only through its adaptation to stable objects. The necessary is always necessary for, not necessary in and of itself; it is conditioned by the contingent, although itself a condition of the full determination of the latter.

One of the most striking phases of the history of philosophic thought is the recurrent grouping together of unity, permanence (or "the eternal"), completeness and rational thought, while upon another side full multi- plicity, change and the temporal, the partial, defective, sense and desire. This division is obviously but another case of violent separation of the precarious and unsettled from the regular and determinate. One aspect of it however, is worthy of particular attention: the connection of thought and unity. Empirically, all reflection set* out from the problematic and confused. Its aim is to

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clarify and ascertain. When thinking is successful, Its career closes in transforming the disordered into the orderly, the mixed-up into the distinguished or placed, the unclear and ambiguous into the defined and unequivocal, the disconnected into the systematized. It is empirically assured that the goal of thinking does not remain a mere ideal, but is attained often enough so as to render reasona- ble additional efforts to achieve it.

In these facts we have, I think, the empirical basis of the philosophic doctrines which assert that reality is really and truly a rational system, a coherent whole of relations that cannot be conceived otherwise than in terms of in- tellect. Reflective inquiry moves in each particular case from differences toward unity; from indeterminate and ambiguous position to clear determination, from confusion and disorder to system. When thought in a given case has reached its goal of organized totality, of definite rela- tions of distinctly placed elements, its object is the ac- cepted starting point, the defined subject matter, of further experiences; antecedent and outgrown conditions of dark- ness and of unreconciled differences are dismissed as a transitory state of ignorance and inadequate apprehen- sions. Retain connection of the goal with the thinking by which it is reached, and then identify it with true reality in contrast with the merely phenomenal, and the outline of the logic of rational and "objective" idealisms is before us. Thought like Being, has two forms, one real; the other phenomenal. It is compelled to take on reflective form, it involves doubt, inquiry and hypothesis, because it sets out from a subject-matter conditioned by sense, a fact which proves that thought, intellect, is not pure in man, but restricted by an animal organism that

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fe but one part Hnked with other parts, of nature. But the conclusion of reflection affords us a pattern and guarantee of thought which is constitutive; one with the system of objective reality. Such in outline is the pro- cedure of all ontological logics.

A philosophy which accepts the denotative or empirical method accepts at full value the fact that reflective think- ing transforms confusion, ambiguity and discrepancy into illumination, definiteness and consistency. But it also points to the contextual situation in which thinking occurs. It notes that the starting point is the actually problematic, and that the problematic phase resides in some actual and specifiable situation.

It notes that the means of converting the dubious into the assured, and the incomplete into the determinate, is use of assured and established things, which are just as empirical and as indicative of the nature of experienced things as is the uncertain. It thus notes that thinking is no different in kind from the use of natural materials and energies, say fire and tools, to refine, re-order, and shape other natural materials, say ore. In both cases, there are matters which as they stand are unsatisfactory and there are also adequate agencies for dealing with them and connecting them. At no point or place is there any jump outside empirical, natural objects and their rela- tions. Thought and reason are not specific powers. They consist of the procedures intentionally employed in the application to each other of the unsatisfactorily con- fused and indeterminate on one side and the regular and stable on the other. Generalizing from such observa- tions, empirical philosophy perceives that thinking is a continuous process of temporal re-organization within one

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and the same world of experienced things, not a jump from the latter world into one of objects constituted once for all by thought. It discovers thereby the empirical basis of rational idealism, and the point at which it empirically goes astray. Idealism fails to take into account the specified or concrete character of the uncertain situation in which thought occurs; it fails to note the empirically concrete nature of the subject-matter, acts, and tools by which determination and consistency are reached; it fails to note that the conclusive eventual objects having the latter properties are themselves as many as the situations dealt with. The conversion of the logic of reflection into an ontology of rational being is thus due to arbitrary conversion of an eventual natural function of unification into a causal antecedent reality; this in turn is due to the tendency of the imagination working under the influence of emotion to carry unification from an actual, objective and experimental enterprise, limited to particular situations where it is needed, into an un- restricted, wholesale movement which ends in an all- absorbing dream.

The occurrence of reflection is crucial for dualistic metaphysics as well as for idealistic ontologies. Re- flection occurs only in situations qualified by uncertainty, alternatives, questioning, search, hypotheses, tentative trials or experiments which test the worth of thinking. A naturalistic metaphysics is bound to consider reflection as itself a natural event occurring within nature because of traits of the latter. It is bound to inference from the em- pirical traits of thinking in precisely the same way as the sciences make inferences from the happening of suns, radio-activity, thunder-storms or any other natural event.

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Traits of reflection are as truly indicative or evidential of the traits of other things as are the traits of these events. A theory of the nature of the occurrence and career of a sun reached by denial of the obvious traits of the sun, or by denial that these traits are so connected with the traits of other natural events that they can be used as evidence concerning the nature of these other things, would hardly possess scientific standing. Yet philoso- phers, and strangely enough philosophers who call them- selves realists, have constantly held that the traits which are characteristic of thinking, namely, uncertainty, am- biguity, alternatives, inquiring, search, selection, ex- perimental reshaping of external conditions, do not pos- sess the same existential character as do the objects of valid knowledge. They have denied that these traits are evidential of the character of the world within which thinking occurs. They have not, as realists, asserted that these traits are mere appearances; but they have often asserted and implied that such things are only personal or psychological in contrast with a world of objective nature. But the interests of empirical and denotative method and of naturalistic metaphysics wholly coincide. The world must actually be such as to generate ignorance and in- quiry; doubt and hypothesis, trial and temporal con- clusions; the latter being such that they develop out of existences which while wholly "real" are not as satis- factory, as good, or as significant, as those into which they are eventually re-organized. The ultimate evidence of genuine hazard, contingency, irregularity and indeter- minateness in nature is thus found in the occurrence of thinking. The traits of natural existence which generate the fears and adorations of superstitious bar-

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barians generate the scientific procedures of disciplined civilization. The superiority of the latter does not con- sist in the fact that they are based on "real" existence, while the former depend wholly upon a human nature different from nature in general. It consists in the fact that scientific inquiries reach objects which are better, because reached by method which controls them and which adds greater control to life itself, method which mitigates accident, turns contingency to account, and releases thought and other forms of endeavor.

The conjunction of problematic and determinate characters in nature renders every existence, as well as every idea and human act, an experiment in fact, even though not in design. To be intelligently experimental is but to be conscious of this intersection of natural conditions so as to profit by it instead of being at its mercy. The Christian idea of this world and this life as a probation is a kind of distorted recognition of the situation; distorted because it applied wholesale to one stretch of existence in contrast with another, regarded as original and final. But in truth anything which can exist at any place and at any time occurs subject to tests imposed upon it by surroundings, which are only in part compatible and reinforcing. These surroundings test its strength and measure its endurance. As we can dis- course of change only in terms of velocity and accelera- tion which involve relations to other things, so assertion of the permanent and enduring is comparative. The stablest thing we can speak of is not free from conditions set to it by other things. That even the solid earth mountains, the emblems of constancy, appear and dis- appear like the clouds is an old theme of moralists and

EXISTENCE M

poets. The fixed and unchanged being erf the Demo- critean atom is now reported by inquirers to possess some of the traits of his non-being, and to embody a temporary equilibrium in the economy of nature's compromises and adjustments. A thing may endure secula seculorum and yet not be everlasting; it will crumble before the gnawing tooth of time, as it exceeds a certain measure. Eve*y existence is an event.

This fact is nothing at which to repine and nothing tc gloat over. It is something to be noted and used. If it is discomfiting when applied to good things, to our friends, possessions and precious selves, it is consoling also tc know that no evil endures forever; that the longest lane turns sometime, and that the memory of loss of nearest and dearest grows dim in time. The eventful charactei of all existences is no reason for consigning them to the realm of mere appearance any more than it is a reason f 01 idealizing flux into a deity. The important thing is measure, relation, ratio, knowledge of the comparative tempos of change. In mathematics some variables are constants in some problems; so it is in nature and life. The rate of change of some things is so slow, or is so rhythmic, that these changes have all the advantages of stability in dealing with more transitory and irregular happenings — if we know enough. Indeed, if any one thing that concerns us is subject to change, it is fortunate that all other things change. A thing "absolutely" stable and unchangeable would be out of the range of the principle of action and reaction, of resistance and leverage as well as of friction. Here it would have no applicabil- ity, no potentiality of use as measure and control of other events. To designate the slower and the regular

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rhythmic events structure, and more rapid and irregular ones process, is sound practical sense. It expresses the function of one in respect to the other.

But spiritualistic idealism and materialism alike treat this relational and functional distinction as something fixed and absolute. One doctrine finds structure in a framework of ideal forms, the other finds it in matter, They agree in supposing that structure has some super- lative reality. This supposition is another form taken by preference for the stable over the precarious and un- completed. The fact is that all structure is structure of something; anything defined as structure is a character of events, not something intrinsic and per se. A set of traits is called structure, because of its limiting function in relation to other traits of events. A house has a structure; in comparison with the disintegration and collapse that would occur without its presence, this struc- ture is fixed. Yet it is not something external to which the changes involved in building and using the house have to submit. It is rather an arrangement of changing events such that properties which change slowly, limit and direct a series of quick changes and give them an order which they do not otherwise possess. Structure is con- stancy of means, of things used for consequences, not of things taken by themselves or absolutely. Structure is what makes construction possible and cannot be dis- covered or defined except in some realized construction, construction being, of course, an evident order of changes. The isolation of structure from the changes whose stable ordering it is, renders it mysterious — something that is metaphysical in the popular sense of the word, a kind of ghostly queerness.

EXISTENCE Tl

The "matter" of materialists and the "spirit" of idealists is a creature similar to the constitution of the United States in the minds of unimaginative persons* Obviously the real constitution is certain basic relation- ships among the activities of the citizens of the country; it is a property or phase of these processes, so connected with them as to influence their rate and direction of change. But by literalists it is often conceived of as something external to them; in itself fixed, a rigid framework to which all changes must accommodate themselves. Similarly what we call matter is that character of natural events which is so tied up with changes that are sufficiently rapid to be perceptible as to give the latter a characteristic rhythmic order, the causal sequence. It is no cause or source of events or processes; no absolute monarch; no principle of explanation; no substance behind or under- lying changes — save in that sense of substance in which a man well fortified with this world's goods, and hence able to maintain himself through vicissitudes of surround- ings, is a man of substance. The name designates a character in operation, not an entity.

That structure, whether of the kind called material or of the kind summed up in the word mental, is stable or permanent relationally and in its office, may be shown in another way. There is no action without reaction; there is no exclusively one-way exercise of conditioning power, no mode of regulation that operates wholly from above to below or from within outwards or from without inwards. Whatever influences the changes of other things is itself changed. The idea of an activity proceeding only in one direction, of an unmoved mover, is a survival of Greek physic*. It has been banished from science, but

W EXPERIENCE AND NATURE

remains to haunt philosophy. The vague and myster!o« properties assigned to mind and matter, the very con- ceptions of mind and matter in traditional thought, are ghosts walking underground. The notion of matter ac- tually found in the practice of science has nothing in com- mon with the matter of materialists — and almost every- body is still a materialist as to matter, to which he merely adds a second rigid structure which he calls mind. The matter of science is a character of natural events and changes as they change; their character of regular and stable order.

Natural events are so complex and varied that there is nothing surprising in their possession of different characterizations, characters so different that they can be easily treated as opposites.

Nothing but unfamiliarity stands in the way of thinking of both mind and matter as different characters of natural events, in which matter expresses their sequential order, and mind the order of their meanings in their logical connections and dependencies. Processes may be event- ful for functions which taken in abstract separation are at opposite poles, just as physiological processes eventuate in both anabolic and katabolic functions. The idea that matter and mind are two sides or "aspects" of the same things, like the convex and the concave in a curve, is literally unthinkable.

A curve is an intelligible object and concave and convex are defined in terms of this object; they are indeed but names for properties involved in its meaning. We do not start with convexity and concavity as two independent things and then set up an unknown tertium quid to unite two disparate things. In spite of the literal absurdity of

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the comparison, it may be understood however in a way which conveys an inkling of the truth. That to which both mind and matter belong is the complex of events that constitute nature. This becomes a mysterious tertium quid, incapable of designation, only when mind and matter are taken to be static structures instead of functional characters. It is a plausible prediction that if there were an interdict placed for a generation upon the use of mind, matter, consciousness as nouns, and we were obliged to employ adjectives and adverbs, conscious and consciously, mental and mentally, material and physically, we should find many of our problems much simplified.

We have selected only a few of the variety of the illustrations that might be used in support of the idea that the significant problems and issues of life and philosophy concern the rate and mode of the conjunction of the pre- carious and the assured, the incomplete and the finished, the repetitious and the varying, the safe and sane and the haz- ardous. If we trust to the evidence of experienced things, these traits, and the modes and tempos of their inter- action with each other, are fundamental features of natural existence. The experience of their various conse- quences, according as they are relatively isolated, unhap- pily or happily combined, is evidence that wisdom, and hence that love of wisdom which is philosophy, is concerned with choice and administration of their proportioned union. Structure and process, substance and accident, matter and energy, permanence and flux, one and many, continuity and discreteness, order and progress, law and liberty, uniformity and growth, tradition and innovation, rational will and impelling desires, proof and discovery, the

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actual and the possible, are names given to various phases of their conjunction, and the issue of living de- pends upon the art with which these things are adjusted to each other.

While metaphysics may stop short with noting and registering these traits, man is not contemplatively de- tached from them. They involve him in his perplexities and troubles, and are the source of his joys and achieve- ments. The situation is not indifferent to man, because it forms man as a desiring, striving, thinking, feeling creature. It is not egotism that leads man from contem- plative registration of these traits to interest in managing them, to intelligence and purposive art. Interest, think- ing, planning, striving, consummation and frustration are a drama enacted by these forces and conditions. A particular choice may be arbitrary; this is only to say that it does not approve itself to reflection. But choice is not arbitrary, not in a universe like this one, a world which is not finished and which has not consistently made up its mind where it is going and what it is going to do. Or, if we call it arbitrary, the arbitrariness is not ours but that of existence itself. And to call existence arbitrary or by any moral name, whether disparaging or honorific, is to patronize nature. To assume an attitude of con- descension toward existence is perhaps a natural human compensation for the straits of life. But it is an ulti- mate source of the covert, uncandid and cheap in philos- ophy. This compensatory disposition it is which forgets that reflection exists to guide choice and effort. Hence its love of wisdom is but an unlaborious transformation of existence by dialectic, instead of an opening and en- larging of the ways of nature in man. A true wisdom,

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devoted to the latter task, discovers in thoughtful ob- servation and experiment the method of administering the unfinished processes of existence so that frail goods shall be substantiated, secure goods be extended, and the pre- carious promises of good that haunt experienced things be more liberally fulfilled.

CHAPTER THREE NATURE, ENDS AND HISTORIES

Human experience in the large, in its coarse and con- spicuous features, has for one of its most striking features preoccupation with direct enjoyment, feasting and festivi- ties; ornamentation, dance, song, dramatic pantomime, telling yarns and enacting stories. In comparison with intellectual and moral endeavor, this trait of experience has hardly received the attention from philosophers that it demands. Even philosophers who have conceived that pleasure is the sole motive of man and the attainment of happiness his whole aim, have given a curiously sober, drab, account of the working of pleasure and the search for happiness. Consider the utilitarians how they toiled, spun and wove, but who never saw man arrayed in joy as the lilies of the field. Happiness was to them a matter of calculation and effort, of industry guided by mathematical book-keeping. The history of man shows however that man takes his enjoyment neat, and at as short range as possible.

Direct appropriations and satisfactions were prior to anything but the most elementary and exigent prudence, just as the useful arts preceded the sciences. The body is decked before it is clothed. While homes are still hovels, temples and palaces are embellished. Luxuries prevail over necessities except when necessities can be festally celebrated. Men make a game of their fishing and hunting, and turn to the periodic and disciplinary labor of agriculture only when inferiors, women and slaves,

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cannot be had to do the work. Useful labor is, whenever possible, transformed by ceremonial and ritual accompani- ments, subordinated to art that yields immediate enjoy- ment; otherwise it is attended to under the compulsion of circumstance during abbreviated surrenders of leisure. For leisure permits of festivity, in revery, ceremonies and conversation. The pressure of necessity is, however, never wholly lost, and the sense of it led men, as if with uneasy conscience at their respite from work, to impute practical efficacy to play and rites, endowing them with power to coerce events and to purchase the favor of rulers of events.

But it is possible to magnify the place of magical exer- cise and superstitious legend. The primary interest lies in staging the show and enjoying the spectacle, in giving play to the ineradicable interest in stories which illustrate the contingencies of existence combined with happier endings for emergencies than surrounding conditions often permit. It was not conscience that kept men loyal to cults and rites, and faithful to tribal myths. So far as it was not routine, it was enjoyment of the drama of life without the latter's liabilities that kept piety from decay. Interest in rites as means of influencing the course of things, and the cognitive or explanation office of myths were hardly more than an embroidery, repeating in pleas- ant form the pattern which inexpugnable necessities imposed upon practice. When rite and myth are sponta- neous rehearsal of the impact and career of practical needs and doings, they must also seem to have practical force. The political significance of July Fourth, 1776, is perhaps renewed by the juvenile celebrations of Independ- ence Day, but this effect hardly accounts for the fervor of

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the celebration. Any excuse serves for a holiday and the more the holiday is decked out with things that contrast with the pressure of workaday life while re-enacting its form, the more a holiday it is. The more unrestrained the play of fancy the greater the contrast. The super- natural has more thrills than the natural, the customary; holidays and holy-days are indistinguishable. Death is an occasion for a wake, and mourning is acclaimed with a board of funeral meats.

Reflected upon, this phase of experience manifests objects which are final. The attitude involved in their appreciation is esthetic. The operations entering into their production is fine art, distinguished from useful art. It is dangerous however to give names, especially in discourse that is far aloof from the things named— direct enjoyment of the interplay of the contingent and the effec- tive, purged of practical risks and penalties. Esthetic, fine art, appreciation, drama have an eulogistic flavor. We hesitate to call the penny-dreadful of fiction artistic, so we call it debased fiction or a travesty on art. Most sources of direct enjoyment for the masses are not art to the cultivated, but perverted art, an unworthy indulgence. Thus we miss the point. A passion of anger, a dream, relaxation of the limbs after effort, swapping of jokes, horse-play, beating of drums, blowing of tin whistles, explosion of firecrackers and walking on stilts, have the same quality of immediate and absorbing finality that is possessed by things and acts dignified by the title of es- thetic. For man is more preoccupied with enhancing life than with bare living; so that a sense of living when it attends labor and utility is borrowed not intrinsic, having been generated in those periods of relief when activity waa dramatic.

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To say these things is only to say that man is naturally more interested in consummations than he is in prepara- tions; and that consummations have first to be hit upon spontaneously and accidentally — as the baby gets food and all of us are wanned by the sun — before they can be objects of foresight, invention and industry. Conscious- ness so far as it is not dull ache and torpid comfort is a thing of the imagination. The extensions and trans- formations of existence generated in imagination may come at last to attend work so as to make it significant and agreeable. But when men are first at the height of busi- ness, they are too busy to engage either in fancy or reflective inquiry. At the outset the hunt was enjoyed in the feast, or in the calm moments of shaping spears t bows and arrows. Only later was the content of these experiences carried over into hunting itself, so that even its dangers might be savored. Labor, through its structure and order, lends play its pattern and plot; play then returns the loan with interest to work, in giving it a sense of beginning, sequence and climax. As long as imagined objects are satisfying^ the logic of drama, of suspense, thrill and success, domi- nates the logic of objective events. Cosmogonies are mythological not because savages indulge in defective scientific explanations, but because objects of imagination are consummatory in the degree in which they exuber- antly escape from the pressure of natural surroundings, even when they re-enact its crises. The congenial is first form of the consistent.

As Goldenweiser says, if supernaturalism prevails in early culture it is largely because, "the phantasmagoria of supernaturalism is esthetically attractive, it has beauty of thought and form and of movement, it abounds in delight-

«2 EXPERIENCE AND NATURE

ful samples of logical coherence, and is full of fascination for the creator, the systematizer and the beholder." And it is safe to add, that the esthetic character of logical coherence rather than its tested coherence with fact is that which yields the delight. Again speaking of the place of ceremonialism in early culture, Goldenweiser well char- acterizes it as a kind of "psychic incandescence;" because of its presence, there is "no cooling of the ever glowing mass (the conglomerate of customs) no flagging of the emotions, no sinking of the cultural associations to the more precarious level of purely ideational connections." Modern psychiatry as well as anthropology have dem- onstrated the enormous r61e of symbolism in human experience. The word symbolism, however, is a product of reflection upon direct phenomena, not a description of what happens when so-called symbols are potent. For the feature which characterizes symbolism is precisely that the thing which later reflection calls a symbol is not a symbol, but a direct vehicle, a concrete embodiment, a vital incarnation. To find its counterpart we should betake ourselves not to signal flags which convey informa- tion, ideas and direction, but to a national flag in moments of intense emotional stir of a devout patriot. Symbolism in this sense dominates not only all early art and cult but social organization as well. Rites, designs, patterns are afl charged with a significance which we may call mystic, but which is immediate and direct to those who have and celebrate them. Be the origin of the totem what it may, it is not a cold, intellectual sign of a social organiza- tion; it is that organization made present and visible, a centre of emotionally charged behavior. It is not other- wise with the symbolism uncovered in dreams and

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neurotic states by psychological analysis. Such symbols are not indicative or intellectual signs; they axe condensed substitutes of actual things and events, which embody actual things with more direct and enchanced import than do the things themselves with their distractions, imposi- tion, and irrelevances. Meanings are intellectually dis- torted and depressed, but immediately they are height- ened and concentrated.

Jesperson speaks of the origin of language in similar terms. He says that many linguistic philosophers appear to "imagine our primitive ancestors after their own image as serious and well meaning men, endowed with a large

share of common sense They leave you

with the impression that these first framers of speech were sedate citizens with a strong interest in the purely business and matter of fact aspects of life." But Jasper- son finds that the prosaic side of early culture was capable only " of calling forth short monosyllabic interjections; they are the most immutable portion* of language, and remain now at essentially the same standpoint as thou- sands of years ago." He concludes that the "genesis of language is found .... in the poetic side of life; the source of speech is not gloomy seriousness, but merry play and youthful hilarity." And no one would deny, I suppose that literature rather than business and science has developed and fixed our present linguistic resources.

It would be difficult to find a fact more significant of the traits of nature, more instructive for a naturalistic meta- physics of existence, than this cleavage of the things of human experience into actual but hard objects, and 'enjoyed but imagined objects. One might think that philosophers in their search for some datum^that possesses

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properties that put it beyond doubt, might have directed their attention to this direct phase of experience, in which objects are not a matter of sensations, ideas, beliefs or knowledge, but are something had and enjoyed. All that "self-evidence" can intelligibly mean is obviousness of presence; commonplaces like human interest in the things of sport and celebration are the most conspicuously obvious of all. In comparison, the "self-evident" things of philosophers are recondite and technical.

The other most self-evident thing in experience is use- ful labor and its coercive necessity. As direct apprecia- tive enjoyment exhibits things in their consummatory phase, labor manifests things in their connections of things with one another, in efficiency, productivity, fur- thering, hindering, generating, destroying. From the standpoint of enjoyment a thing is what it directly does for us. From that of labor a thing is what it will do to other things — the only way in which a tool or an obstacle can be defined. Extraordinary and subtle reasons have been assigned for belief in the principle of causation. Labor and the use of tools seem, however, to be a sufficient empirical reason: indeed, to be the only empirical events that can be specifically pointed to in this connection. They are more adequate grounds for acceptance of belief in causality than are the regular sequences of nature or than a category of reason, or the alleged fact of will. The first thinker who proclaimed that every event is effect of something and cause of something else, that every partic- ular existence is both conditioned and condition, merely put into words the procedure of the workman, converting a mode of practice into a formula. External regularity is familiar, customary, taken for granted, not thought of ,

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embodied in thoughtless routine. Regularity, orderly sequence, in productive labor presents itself to thought as a controlling principle. Industrial arts are the type- forms of experience that bring to light the sequential connections of things with one another.

In contrast, the enjoyment (with which suffering is to be classed) of things is a declaration that natural exist- ences are not mere passage ways to another passage way, and so on ad infinitum. Thinkers interested in esthetic experience are wont to point out the absurdity of the idea that things are good or valuable only for something else; they dwell on the fact vouchsafed by esthetic appreciation that there are things that have their goodness or value in themselves, which are not cherished for the sake of any- thing else. These philosophers usually confine this obser- vation however to human affairs isolated from nature, which they interpret exclusively in terms of labor, or causal connections. But in every event there is some- thing obdurate, self-sufficient, wholly immediate, neither a relation nor an element in a relational whole, but termi- nal and exclusive. Here, as in so many other matters, materialists and idealists agree in an underlying meta- physics which ignores in behalf of relations and relational systems, those irreducible, infinitely plural, undefinable and indescribable qualities which a thing must have in order to be, and in order to be capable of becoming the subject of relations and a theme of discourse. Immediacy of existence is ineffable. But there is nothing mystical about such ineff ability ; it expresses the fact that of direct existence it is futile to say anything to one's self and impossible to say anything to another. Discourse can but intimate connections which if followed out may lead

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one to have an existence. Things in their immediacy are unknown and unknowable, not because they are remote or behind some impenetrable veil of sensation of ideas, but because knowledge has no concern with them. For knowledge is a memorandum of conditions of their appear- ance, concerned, that is, with sequences, coexistences, relations. Immediate things may be pointed to by words, but not described or defined. Description when it occurs is but a part of a circuitous method of pointing or denot- ing; index to a starting point and road which if taken may lead to a direct and ineffable presence. To the em- pirical thinker, immediate enjoyment and suffering are the conclusive exhibition and evidence that nature has its finalities as well as its relationships.

Many modern thinkers, influenced by the notion that knowledge is the only mode of experience that grasps things, assuming the ubiquity of cognition, and noting that immediacy or qualitative existence has no place in authentic science, have asserted that qualities are always and only states of consciousness. It is a reasonable belief that there would be no such thing as "consciousness" if events did not have a phase of brute and unconditioned "isness," of being just what they irreducibly are. Con- sciousness as sensation, image and emotion is thus a par- ticular case of immediacy occurring under complicated conditions. And also without immediate qualities those relations with which science deals, would have no footing in existence and thought would have nothing beyond itself to chew upon or dig into. Without a basis in qualitative events, the characteristic subject-matter of knowledge would be algebraic ghosts, relations that do not relate. To dispose of things in which relations terminate by call-

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Ing them elements, is to discourse within a relational and logical scheme. Only if elements are more than just elements in a whole, only if they have something qualita- tively their own, can a relational system be prevented from complete collapse.

The Greeks were more naive than we are. Their thinkers were as much dominated by the esthetic charac- ters of experienced objects as modern thinkers are by their scientific and economic (or relational) traits. Con- sequently they had no difficulty in recognizing the im- portance of qualities and of things inherently closed or final. They thought of mind as a realization of natural existence or a participation in it. Thus they were saved from the epistemological problem of how things and mind, defined antithetically, can have anything to do with each other. If existence in its immediacies could speak it would proclaim, "I may have relatives but I am not related." In esthetic objects, that is in all immediately enjoyed and suffered things, in things directly possessed, they thus speak for themselves; Greek thinkers heard their voice.

Unfortunately however, these thinkers were not con- tent to speak as artists, of whom they had a low opinion. Since they were thinkers, aiming at truth or knowledge, they put art on a lower plane than science; and the only enjoyment they found worth serious attention was that of objects of thought. In consequence they formulated a doctrine in which the esthetic and the rational are con- fused on principle, and they bequeathed the confusion as an intellectual tradition to their successors. Aristotle spoke more truly than he was aware when he said that philosophy began in leisure "when almost all the neces-

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saries and things that make for comfort and recreation were present." For it was philosophic, rather than scien- tific "knowledge" which thus began. Philosophy was a telling of the story of nature after the style of all congenial stories, a story with a plot and climax, given such coher- ent properties as would render it congenial to minds demanding that objects satisfy logical canons.

Objects are certainly none the worse for having wonder and admiration for their inspiration and art for their medium. But these objects are distorted when their affiliation with the epic, temple and drama is denied, and there is claimed for them a rational and cosmic status independent of piety, drama and story. In the classic philosophy of Greece the picture of the world that was constructed on an artistic model proferred itself as being the result of intellectual study. A story composed in the interests of a refined type of enjoyment, ordered by the needs of consistency in discourse, or dialectic, became cosmology and metaphysics. Its authors took toward art and rite much the same sort of superior attitude that the modern esthete takes to vulgar forms of esthetic satisfaction. A claim for superiority in subject matter and mode of artistic treatment was indeed legitimate; but a claim was made for difference in kind. Art was an embellished imitation of the everyday or empirical affairs of life in their natural setting; philosophy was science, an envisagement of realities behind all copies, all phenomena; or a grasp of essences within them forming their valid substance. The delight attending the insight was attrib- uted to the final intrinsic dignity of the cosmic objects perceived by reason, instead of being frankly recognized to be due to a selection and arrangement of things with a view to enhancement of tranquil enjoyment

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Devotion to rites, stories and revery springs on its magical side from practical desire to control the contin- gent; but in larger measure it embodies the happiness that attends the sense of successful issue from the uncertainly hazardous. Imagination is primarily dramatic, rather than lyric, whether it takes the form of the play enacted on the stage, of the told story or silent soliloquy. The constant presence of instability and trouble gives depth and poignancy to the situations in which are pictured their subordination to final issues possessed of calm and cer- tainty. To re-enact the vicissitudes, crises and tragedies of life under conditions that deprive them of their overt dangers, is the natural rdle of "consciousness," which is tamed to respect actualities only when circumstance enforces the adoption of the method of labor, a discipline that is fortunate if it retain some of the liberation from immediate exigencies which characterizes dramatic imagination.

Modern critics of esthetics have criticized the concep- tion of Plato and Aristotle that art is imitation. But in its original statement, this conception was a description of the observed facts of drama, music and epic rather than theoretical interpretation. For these thinkers were not so stupid as to hold that art is an imitation of inert things; they held that it was a mimesis of the critical and climatic behavior of natural forces within human career and des- tiny. Such a reproduction is naturally in a new and liberal medium; it permits idealization, but the idealiza- tion is of natural events. It is self-sufficing, an end in itself, while the events seem to exist only to render the perfection of an idealized reproduction possible and per- tinent. Resort to esthetic objects is the spontaneous

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human escape and consolation in a trying and difficult world. A world that consisted entirely of stable objects directly presented and possessed would have no esthetic qualities ; it would just be, and would lack power to satisfy and to inspire. Objects are actually esthetic when they turn hazard and defeat to an issue which is above and beyond trouble and vicissitude. Festal celebration and consummatory delights belong only in a world that knows risk and hardship.

Greek philosophy as well as Greek art is a memorial of the joy in what is finished, when it is found amid a world of unrest, struggle, and uncertainty in what, since it is ended, does not commit us to the uncertain hazards of what is still going on. Without such experiences as those of Greek art it is hardly conceivable that the craving for the passage of change into rest, of the contingent, mixed and wandering into the composed and total, would have found a model after which to design a universe like the cosmos of Platonic and Aristotelian tradition. Form was the first and last word of philosophy because it had been that of art; form is change arrested in a prerogative object. It conveys a sense of the imperishable and time- less, although the material in which it is exemplified is subject to decay and contingency. It thus conveys an intimation of potentialities completely actualized in a happier realm, where events are not events, but are arrested and brought to a close in an eternal self-sustain- ing activity. Such a realm is intrinsically one of secure and self-possessed meaning. It consists of objects of immediate enjoyment hypostasized into transcendent reality. Such was the conversion of Greek esthetic con- templation effected by Greek reflection.

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The technical structure of the resulting metaphysics is familiar. The cosmically real is one with the finished, the perfect, or wholly done. Even with Aristotle, a coldly defining theory, called metaphysics, of the traits of Being, becomes a theology, or science of ultimate and eternal reality to which only ecstatic predicates are at- tributable. It consists of pure forms, self-sufficient, self- enclosed and self-sustaining; self-movement or life at eternal full-tide. Forms are ideal, and the ideal is the rational apprehended by reason. The material for this point of view was found empirically in what is consum- matory and final; and the dominion exercised by art in Greek culture fostered and enhanced attention to objects of this immediately enjoyed kind. To the spectator, artistic objects are given; they need only to be envisaged; Greek reflection, carried on by a leisure class in the inter- est of liberalizing leisure, was preeminently that of the spectator, not that of the participator in processes of pro- duction. Labor, production, did not seem to create form, it dealt with matter or changing things so as to furnish an occasion for incarnation of antecedent forms in matter. To artisans form is alien, unperceived and unenjoyed; absorbed in laboring with material, they live in a world of change and matter, even when their labors have an end in manifestation of form. Plato was so troubled by the consequences of this ignorance of form on the part of all who live in the world of practice, industrial and political, that he elaborated a plan by which their activities might be regulated by those who, above labor and entanglement in change and practice, provide in laws forms to shape the habits of those who work. Aristotle escaped the dilemma by putting nature above art, and endowing nature with

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skilled purpose that for the most part achieves ends or completions. Thus the rdle of the human artisan whether in industry or politics became relatively negligible, and the miscarriages of human art a matter of relative insignificance.

The Aristotelian conception of four-fold "causation" is openly borrowed from the arts, which for the artisan are utilitarian and menial, and are "fine" or liberal only for the cultivated spectator who is possessed of leisure — that is, is relieved from the necessity of partaking labo- riously in change and matter. Nature is an artist that works from within instead of from without. Hence all change, or matter, is potentiality for finished objects. Like other artists, nature first possesses the forms which it afterwards embodies. When arts follow fixed models, whether in making shoes, houses, or dramas, and when the element of individual invention in design is condemned as caprice, forms and ends are necessarily external to the individual worker. They preceded any particular realiza- tion. Design and plan are anonymous and universal, and carry with them no suggestion of a designing, purpo- sive mind. Models are objectively given and have only to be observed and followed. Thus there was no diffi- culty, such as one may feel to-day, in ascribing definite and regulative forms to the changes of nature, which are actualized in objects that are finalities, closures of change. The actualization in an organic body of the forms that are found in things constitutes mind as the end of nature. Their immediate possession and celebration constitutes consciousness, as far as the idea of consciousness is found in Greek thought.

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This doctrine was not an arbitrary speculation; it flowed naturally from the fact that Greek thinkers were fortunate to find ready-made to hand and eye a realm of esthetic objects with traits of order and proportion, form and finality. The arts were pursued upon the basis of a fund of realized, objective and impersonal designs and plans, which were prior to individual devising and execu- tion rather than products of individual purpose and inven- tion. The philosophers did not create out of their own speculations, the idea of materials subdued to the accept- ance and manifestation of objective forms. They found the fact in the art of their period, translating it into an intellectual formula. Philosophers were not the authors of an identification of objects informed with ideal order and proportion with a final and arresting outcome of proc- esses of antecedent change. That identification was at least implicit in the operation of artisans. Nor were the philosophers the originators of the idea that mental appro- priation of some objects is intrinsically a state of elevated satisfaction. That fact was given to them in the esthetic culture of their civilization. What the philosophers are responsible for is a peculiar one-sided interpretation of these empirical facts, an interpretation, however, which has its roots in features, although less admirable ones, of Greek culture.

For the Greek community was marked by a sharp separation of servile workers and free men of leisure, which meant a division between acquaintance with matters of fact and contemplative appreciation, be- tween unintelligent practice and unpractical intelli- gence, between affairs of change and efficiency — or instru- mentality— and of rest and enclosure— finality. Exper-

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ience afforded therefore no model for a conception of experimental inquiry and of reflection efficacious in action. In consequence, the sole notability, intelligibility, of nature was conceived to reside in objects that were ends, since they set limits to change. Changing things were not capable of being known on the basis of relationship to one another, but only on the basis of their relationship to objects beyond change, because marking its limit, and immediately precious. The terminal objects lent changing objects the properties which made them knowable; such stability of character as they possessed was derived from the form of the end-objects toward which they moved. Hence an inherent appetition or nisus toward these terminal and static objects was attributed to them. The whole scheme of cosmic change was a vehicle for attaining ends possessed of properties which caused them to be objects of attraction of all lesser things, rendering the latter uneasy and restless until they attained the end- object which constitutes their real nature. Thus an immediate contemplative possession and enjoyment of objects, dialectically ordered, was interpreted as defining both true knowledge and the highest end and good of nature. A doctrine of morals, of what is better in reflec- tive choice, was thus converted into a metaphysics and science of Being, the moral aspect being disguised to the modern mind by the fact that the highest good was conceived esthetically, instead of in the social terms which upon the whole dominate modern theories of morality.

The doctrine that objects as ends are the proper objects of science, because they are the ultimate forms of real being, met its doom in the scientific revolution of the seventeenth century. Essences and forms were attacked

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as occult; "final causes" were either wholly denied or relegated to a divine realm too high for human knowledge. The doctrine of natural ends was displaced by a doctrine of designs, ends-in-view, conscious aims constructed and entertained in individual minds independent of nature. Descartes, Spinoza and Kant are upon this matter at least in agreement with Bacon, Hume and Helvetius. The imputation to natural events of cosmic appetition towards ends, the notion that their changes were to be understood as efforts to reach a natural state of rest and perfection, were indicated as the chief source of sterility and fantasy in science; the syllogistic logic connected with the doctrine was discarded as verbal, polemical, and at its best irrelevant to the subtle operations of nature; purpose and contingency were alike relegated to the purely human and personal; nature was evacuated of qualities and became a homogeneous mass differentiated by differ- ences of homogeneous motion in a homogeneous space. Mechanical relations, which Greek thought had rejected as equivalent to the chaotic reign of pure accident, be- came the head corner-stone of the conception of law, of uniformity and order. If ends were recognized at all, it was only under the caption of design, and design was defined as conscious aim rather than as objective order and architechtonic form. Wherever the influence of modern physics penetrated, the classic theory became remote, faded, factitious, with its assertion that natural changes are inherent movements toward objects which are their fulfillments or perfections, so that the latter are true objects of knowledge, supplying the forms or charac- ters under which alone changes may be known. With the decay of this doctrine, departed also belief in cosmic

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qualitative differences and kinds, so that of necessity quality and immediacy had no recourse, expelled from ob- jective nature, save to take refuge in personal consciousness. Is this reversal of classic theories of existence inevitable? Must belief in ends involved in nature itself be sur- rendered, or be asserted only by means of a roundabout examination of the nature of knowledge which starting from conscious intent to know, finally infers that the uni- verse is a vast, non-natural fulfillment of a conscious intent? Or is there an ingredient of truth in ancient meta- physics which may be extracted and re-afl&rmed? Empiri- cally, the existence of objects of direct grasp, possession, use and enjoyment cannot be denied. Empirically, things are poignant, tragic, beautiful, humorous, settled, dis- turbed, comfortable, annoying, barren, harsh, consoling, splendid, fearful; are such immediately and in their own right and behalf. If we take advantage of the word esthetic in a wider sense than that of application to the beautiful and ugly, esthetic quality, immediate, final or self-enclosed, indubitably characterizes natural situa- tions as they empirically occur. These traits stand in themselves on precisely the same level as colors, sounds, qualities of contact, taste and smell. Any criterion that finds the latter to be ultimate and "hard" data will, impartially applied, come to the same conclusion about the former. Any quality as such is final; it is at once initial and terminal; just what it is as it exists. It may be referred to other things, it may be treated as an effect or as a sign. But this involves an extraneous extension and use. It takes us beyond quality in its immediate qualitativeness. If experienced things are valid evidence, then nature in having qualities within

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itself has what in the literal sense must be called ends, terminals, arrests, enclosures.

It is dangerous to venture at all upon the use of the word "ends" in connection with existential processes. Apologetic and theological controversies cluster about it and affect its signification. Barring this connotation, the word has an almost inexpugnable honorific flavor, so that to assert that nature is characterized by ends, the most conspicuous of which is the life of mind, seems like engaging in an eulogistic, rather than an empirical account of nature. Something much more neutral than any such implication is, however, meant. We con- stantly talk about things coming or drawing to a close; getting ended, finished, done with, over with. It is a commonplace that no thing lasts forever. We may be glad or we may be sorry but that is wholly a matter of the kind of history which is being ended. We may conceive the end, the close, as due to fulfillment, perfect attain- ment, to satiety, or to exhaustion, to dissolution, to some- thing having run down or given out. Being an end may be indifferently an ecstatic culmination, a matter-of-fact consummation, or a deplorable tragedy. Which of these things a closing or terminal object is, has nothing to do with the property of being an end.

The genuine implications of natural ends may be brought out by considering beginnings instead of endings. To insist that nature is an affair of beginnings is to assert that there is no one single and all-at-once beginning of everything. It is but another way of saying that nature is an affair of affairs, wherein each one, no matter how linked up it may be with others, has its own quality. It does not imply that every beginning marks an advance or

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improvement; as we sadly know accidents, diseases, ware, lies and errors, begin. Clearly the fact and idea of begin- ning is neutral, not eulogistic; temporal, not absolute. And since wherever one thing begins something else ends, what is true of beginnings is true of endings. Popular fiction and drama shows the bias of human nature in favor of happy endings, but by being fiction and drama they show with even greater assurance that unhappy endings are natural events.

To minds inured to the eulogistic connotation of ends, such a neutral interpretation of the meaning of ends as has just been set forth may seem to make the doctrine of ends a matter of indifference. If ends are only endings or closings of temporal episodes, why bother to call attention to ends at all, to say nothing of framing a theory of ends and dignifying it with the name of natural teleology? In the degree, however, in which the mind is weaned from partisan and ego-centric interest, acknowledgement of nature as a scene of incessant beginnings and endings, presents itself as the source of philosophic enlightenment. It enables thought to apprehend causal mechanisms and temporal finalities as phases of the same natural processes, instead of as competitors where the gain of one is the loss of the other. Mechanism is the order involved in an historic occurrence, capable of definition in terms of the order which various histories sustain to each other. Thus it is the instrumentality of control of any particular termination since a sequential order involves the last term.

The traditional conception of natural ends was to the effect that nature does nothing in vain; the accepted meaning of this phrase was that every change is for the

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sake of something which does not change, occurring in its behalf. Thus the mind started with a ready-made list of good things or perfections which it was the business of nature to accomplish. Such a view may verbally distin- guish between something called efficient causation and something else called final causation. But in effect the distinction is only between the causality of the master who contents himself with uttering an order and the efficacy of the servant who actually engages in the physical work of execution. It is only a way of attributing ulti- mate causality to what is ideal and mental — the directive order of the master — , while emancipating it from the supposed degradation of physical labor in carrying it out, as well as avoiding the difficulties of inserting an immaterial cause within the material realm. But in a legitimate ac- count of ends as endings, all directional order resides in the sequential order. This no more occurs for the sake of the end than a mountain exists for the sake of the peak which is its end. A musical phrase has a certain close, but the earlier portion does not therefore exist for the sake of the close as if it were something which is done away with when the close is reached. And so a man is not an adult until after he has been a boy, but childhood does not exist for the sake of maturity.

By the nature of the case, causality, however it be defined, consists in the sequential order itself, and not in a last term which as such is irrelevant to causality, although it may, of course be, in addition, an initial term in another sequential order. The view held — or implied— by some "mechanists", which treats an initial term as if it had an inherent generative force which it somehow emits and bestows upon its successors, is all of a piece with the view

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held by ideologists which implies that an end brings about its own antecedents. Both isolate an event from the history in which it belongs and in which it has its character. Both make a factitiously isolated position in a temporal order a mark of true reality, one theory select- ing initial place and the other final place. But in fact causality is another name for the sequential order itself; and since this is an order of a history having a begin- ning and end, there is nothing more absurd than setting causality over against either initiation or finality.

The same considerations permit a naturalistic inter- pretation of the ideas of dynamic and static. Every end is as such static; this statement is but a truism; chang- ing into something else, a thing is obviously transitive, not final. Yet the thing which is a close of one history is always the beginning of another, and in this capacity the thing in question is transitive or dynamic. This state- ment also is tautology, for dynamic does not mean pos- sessed of "force" or capable of emitting it so as to stir up other things and set them in motion; it means simply change in a connected series of events. The traditional view of force points necessarily to something transcen- dental, because outside of events, whether called God or Will or The Unknowable. So the traditional view of the static points to something fixed and rigid, incapable of change, and therefore also outside the course of things and consequently non-empirical. Empirically, however, there is a history which is a succession of histories, and in which any event is at once both beginning of one course and close of another ; is both transitive and static. The phrase constantly in our mouths, "state of affairs" is accurately descriptive, although it makes sheer nonsense in both

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the traditional spiritual and mechanistic theories. There are no changes that do not enter into an affair, Res, and there is no affair that is not bounded and thereby marked off as a state or condition. When a state ol affairs is perceived, the perceiving-of-a-state-of-affairs is a further state of affairs. Its subject-matter is a thing in the idiomatic sense of thing, r es, whether a solar-system, a stellar constellation, or an atom, a diversified and more or less loosely interconnection of events, falling within boundaries sufficiently definite to be capable of being approximately traced. Such is the unbiased evidence of experience in gross, and such in effect is the conclusion of recent physics as far as a layman can see. For this rea- son, and not because of any unique properties of a sepa- rate kind of existence, called psychic or mental, every situation or field of consciousness is marked by initiation, direction or intent, and consequence or import. What is unique is not these traits, but the property of awareness or perception. Because of this property, the initial stage is capable of being judged in the light of its probable course and consequence. There is anticipation. Each successive event being a stage in a serial process is both expectant and commemorative. What is more precisely pertinent to our present theme, the terminal outcome when anticipated (as it is when a moving cause of affairs is perceived) becomes an end-in-view, an aim, purpose, a prediction usable as a plan in shaping the course of events. In classic Greek thought, the perception of ends was simply an esthetic contemplation of the forms of ob- jects in which natural processes were completed. In most modern thought, it is an arbitrary creation of private mental operations guided by personal desire, the theoreti-

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cal alternative being that they are finite copies of the fulfilled intentions of an infinite mind. In empirical fact, they are projections of possible consequences; they are ends-in-view. The in-viewness of ends is as much con- ditioned by antecedent natural conditions as is percep- tion of contemporary objects external to the organism, trees and stones, or whatever. That is, natural processes must have actually terminated in specifiable consequences, which give those processes definition and character, before ends can be mentally entertained and be the objects of striving desire. In so far, we must side with Greek thought. But empirical ends-in-view are distinguished in two important respects from ends as they are conceived in classic thought. They are not objects of contemplative possession and use, but are intellectual and regulative means, degenerating into reminiscences or dreams unless they are employed as plans within the state of affairs. And when they are attained, the objects which they inform are conclusions and fulfillments, only as these objects are the consequence of prior reflection, deliberate choice and directed effort are they fulfillments, conclusions, comple- tions, perfections. A natural end which occurs without the intervention of human art is a terminus, a de facto boundary, but it is not entitled to any such honorific status of completions and realizations as classic meta- physics assigned them.

When we regard conscious experience, that is to say, the object and qualities characteristic of conscious life, as a natural end, we are bound to regard all objects impartially as distinctive ends in the Aristotelian sense. We cannot pick or choose; when we do pick and choose we are obvi- ously dealing with practical ends — with objects and quali-

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ties that are deemed worthy of selection by reflective, deliberate choice. These "ends" are not the less natural, if we have an eye to the continuity of experienced objects with other natural occurrences, but they are not ends without the intervention of a special affair, reflective sur- vey and choice. But popular thought, in accord with the Greek tradition, picks and chooses among all ends those which it likes and honors, at the same time ignoring and implicitly denying the act of choice. Like those who regard a happy escape from a catastrophe as a providen- tial intervention, neglecting all who have not escaped, popular teleology regards good objects as natural ends, bad objects and qualities being regarded as mere acci- dents or incidents, regrettable mechanical excess or defect. Popular teleology like Greek metaphysics, has accord- ingly been apologetic, justificatory of the beneficence of nature; it has been optimistic in a complacent way.

Primitive man like naive common sense imputes ter- minating qualities to nature — in which it follows a sound realistic metaphysics. But it also imputes to them the property of causal determination, an imputation rejected by science. Rejection by science does not prove these qualities to be mere "subjective" or "private" appearances; it only shows that they are termini, closings of serial events. Events that achieve and possess them are linked, mediatory, transitive, indicative, and the proper material of knowledge. From the standpoint of causal sequence, or the order with which science is con- cerned, qualities are superfluous, irrelevant and immater- ial. We could never predict their occurrence from the fullest acquaintance with the properties that form the objects of knowledge as such.

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From the standpoint of the latter, the relational orders, ends are abrupt and interruptive. Hence to a philosophy that takes the subject-matter of knowledge to be exclusive and exhaustive — as so much of modern philosophy has done — they form a most perplexing problem, a mystery. For with extrusive and superfluous status they combine the property of being permeating and absorbing. They alone, as we say, are of interest, and they are the cause of taking interest in other things. For living creatures they form the natural platform for regarding other things. They are the basis, directly and indirectly, erf active response to things. As compared with them, other things are obstacles and means of procuring and avoiding the occurrence of situations having them. When the word "consciousness" is — as it often is — used for a short name for the sum total of such immediate qualities as actually present themselves, it is the end or terminus of natural events. As such it is also gratuitous, superfluous and inexplicable when reality is defined in terms of the rela- tional objects of science.

By "ends" we also mean ends-in-view, aims, things viewed after deliberation as worthy of attainment and as evocative of effort. They are formed from objects taken in their immediate and terminal qualities; objects once having occurred as endings, but which are not now in existence and which are not likely to come into existence save by an action which modifies surroundings. Classic metaphysics is a confused union of these two sense of ends, the primarily natural and the secondarily natural, or practical, moral. Each meaning is intelligible, grounded, legitimate in itself. But their mixture is one of the Great Bads of philosophy. For it treats as natural ends apart

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from reflection just those objects that axe worthy and excellent to reflective choice. Popular teleology has ui*- knowingly followed the leadings that controlled Greek thought; spiritualistic quasi- theological metaphysics has consciously adopted the latter's point of view.

The features of this confused metaphysics are: First, elimination from the status of natural ends of all objects that are evil and troublesome; Secondly, the grading of objects selected to constitute natural ends into a fixed, unchangeable hierarchical order. Objects that possess and import qualities of struggle, suffering and defeat are regarded not as ends, but as frustrations of ends, as accidental and inexplicable deviations. Theology has resorted to an act of original sin to make their occurrence explicable, Greek metaphysics resorted to the presence in nature of a recalcitrant, obdurate, factor. To this pro- vincially exclusive view of natural termini, popular tele- ology adds a ranking of objects according to which some are more completely ends than others, until there is reached an object which is only end, never eventful and temporal — the end. The hierarchy is explicit in Greek thought: first, and lowest are vegetative ends, normal growth Mid reproduction; second in rank, come animal ends, locomotion and sensibility; third in rank, are ideal and rational ends, of which the highest is blissful contem- plative possession in thought of all the forms of nature. In this gradation, each lower rank while an end is also means or preformed condition of higher ends. Empiri- cal things, things of useful arts, belonging to the second class but, affected by an adventitious mixture of thought, are ultimately instrumentalities potential for the life of pure rational possession of ideal objects. Modern teleo-

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logics axe much less succinct and definite, they agree how- ever in the notion of rows of inferior ends which prepare for and culminate in something which is the end.

Such a classificatory enterprise is naturally consoling to those who enjoy a privileged status, whether as philoso- phers, as saints or scholars, and who wish to justify their special status. But its consoling apologetics should not blind us to the fact that to think of objects as more or less ends is nonsense. They either have immediate and termi- nal quality ; or they do not: quality as such is absolute not comparative. A thing may be of some shade of blue when compared with some quality that is wanted and striven for; but its blue is not itself more or less blue nor than blueness, and so with the quality of being terminal and absorbing. Objects may be more or less absorptive and arresting and thus possess degrees of intensity with respect to finality. But this difference of intensity is not, save as subject to reflective choice, a distinction in rank or class of finality. It applies to different toothaches as well as to different objects of thought; but it does not apply, inherently, to the difference between a tooth-ache and an ideal object — save that a thing like a toothache is often possessed of greater intensity of finality. If we follow the clew of the latter fact, we shall probably conclude that search for pure and unalloyed finality carries us to inarticulate sensation and overwhelming pas- sion. For such affairs are the best instances of thipgs that are complete in themselves with no outleadings.

If then rational essences or meanings are better objects of contemplation than are seizures by sensory and pas- sionate objects, it is not because the former are fulfill- ments of higher or more "real" antecedent processes.

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They are not graded on the basis of being lesser or greater actualizations. It is because they present themselves to reflective appraisal as more worthy to be striven for. And this rational character implies that the things which have the better qualities possess also transitiveness, in- strumentality, as well as immediacy and finality. They are potential and productive. They lead somewhere, per- haps to other affairs having qualities to be envisaged and deeply meditated. If dialectic were not so esthetically enjoyable to some, it would never have played the role it has played in liberating man from the dominion of sensa- tion and impulse. This shows that the esthetic object may be useful and an useful one esthetic, or that imme- diacy and efficacy1 though distinguishable qualities are not disjoined existentially . But it is no reason for making contemplative knowledge or any other particular affair the highest of all natural ends. Whether the given or the deliberately constructed is a better or higher end is not a question of intrinsic quality, but a matter of reflectively determined judgment. It is conceivable that just because certain objects are immediately good, that which secures and extends their occurrence may itself become for reflec- tive choice a supreme immediate good.

1 To avoid misapprehension it should perhaps be explicitly stated the term "efficacy" </