No one doubts that thought, at least reflective, as distinct from what
is sometimes called constitutive, thought, is derivative and secondary.
It comes after something and out of something, and for the sake of
something. No one doubts that the thinking of everyday practical life
and of science is of this reflective type. We think about; we reflect
over. If we ask what it is which is primary and radical to thought; if
we ask what is the final objective for the sake of which thought
intervenes; if we ask in what sense we are to understand thought as a
derived procedure, we are plunging ourselves into the very heart of the
logical problem: the relation of thought to its empirical antecedents
and to its consequent, truth, and the relation of truth to reality.
Yet from the naïve point of view no difficulty attaches to these
questions. The antecedents of thought are our universe of life and love;
of appreciation and struggle. We think about anything and everything:
snow on the ground; the alternating clanks and thuds that rise from
below; the relation of the Monroe Doctrine to the embroglio in
Venezuela; the relation of art to industry; the poetic quality of a
painting by Botticelli; the battle of Marathon; the economic
interpretation of history; the proper definition of cause; the best
method of reducing expenses; whether and how to renew the ties of a
broken friendship; the interpretation of an equation in hydrodynamics;
etc.
Through the madness of this miscellaneous citation there appears so much
of method: anything--event, act, value, ideal, person, or place--may be
an object of thought. Reflection busies itself alike with physical
nature, the record of social achievement, and the endeavors of social
aspiration. It is with reference to _such_ affairs that thought is
derivative; it is with reference to them that it intervenes or mediates.
Taking some part of the universe of action, of affection, of social
construction, under its special charge, and having busied itself
therewith sufficiently to meet the special difficulty presented, thought
releases that topic and enters upon further more direct experience.
Sticking for a moment to this naïve standpoint, we recognize a certain
rhythm of direct practice and derived theory; of primary construction
and of secondary criticism; of living appreciation and of abstract
description; of active endeavor and of pale reflection. We find that
every more direct primary attitude passes upon occasion into its
secondary deliberative and discursive counterpart. We find that when the
latter has done its work it passes away and passes on. From the naïve
standpoint such rhythm is taken as a matter of course. There is no
attempt to state either the nature of the occasion which demands the
thinking attitude, nor to formulate a theory of the standard by which is
judged its success. No general theory is propounded as to the exact
relationship between thinking and what antecedes and succeeds it. Much
less do we ask how empirical circumstances can generate rationality of
thought; nor how it is possible for reflection to lay claim to power of
determining truth and thereby of constructing further reality.
If we were to ask the thinking of naïve life to present, with a minimum
of theoretical elaboration, its conception of its own practice, we
should get an answer running not unlike this: Thinking is a kind of
activity which we perform at specific need, just as at other need we
engage in other sorts of activity: as converse with a friend; draw a
plan for a house; take a walk; eat a dinner; purchase a suit of
clothes; etc., etc. In general, its material is anything in the wide
universe which seems to be relevant to this need--anything which may
serve as a resource in defining the difficulty or in suggesting modes of
dealing effectively with it. The measure of its success, the standard of
its validity, is precisely the degree in which the thinking actually
disposes of the difficulty and allows us to proceed with more direct
modes of experiencing, that are forthwith possessed of more assured and
deepened value.
If we inquire why the naïve attitude does not go on to elaborate these
implications of its own practice into a systematic theory, the answer,
on its own basis, is obvious. Thought arises in response to its own
occasion. And this occasion is so exacting that there is time, as there
is need, only to do the thinking which is needed in that occasion--not
to reflect upon the thinking itself. Reflection follows so naturally
upon its appropriate cue, its issue is so obvious, so practical, the
entire relationship is so organic, that once grant the position that
thought arises in reaction to specific demand, and there is not the
particular type of thinking called logical theory because there is not
the practical demand for reflection of that sort. Our attention is taken
up with particular questions and specific answers. What we have to
reckon with is not the problem of, How can I think _überhaupt_? but, How
shall I think right _here and now_? Not what is the test of thought at
large, but what validates and confirms _this_ thought?
In conformity with this view, it follows that a generic account of our
thinking behavior, the generic account termed logical theory, arises at
historic periods in which the situation has lost the organic character
above described. The general theory of reflection, as over against its
concrete exercise, appears when occasions for reflection are so
overwhelming and so mutually conflicting that specific adequate
response in thought is blocked. Again, it shows itself when practical
affairs are so multifarious, complicated, and remote from control that
thinking is held off from successful passage into them.
Anyhow (sticking to the naïve standpoint), it is true that the stimulus
to that particular form of reflective thinking termed logical theory is
found when circumstances require the act of thinking and nevertheless
impede clear and coherent thinking in detail; or when they occasion
thought and then prevent the results of thinking from exercising
directive influence upon the immediate concerns of life. Under these
conditions we get such questions as the following: What is the relation
of rational thought to crude or unreflective experience? What is the
relation of thought to reality? What is the barrier which prevents
reason from complete penetration into the world of truth? What is it
that makes us live alternately in a concrete world of experience in
which thought as such finds not satisfaction, and in a world of ordered
thought which is yet only abstract and ideal?
It is not my intention here to pursue the line of historical inquiry
thus suggested. Indeed, the point would not be mentioned did it not
serve to fix attention upon the nature of the logical problem.
It is in dealing with this latter type of questions that logical theory
has taken a turn which separates it widely from the theoretical
implications of practical deliberation and of scientific research. The
two latter, however much they differ from each other in detail, agree in
a fundamental principle. They both assume that every reflective problem
and operation arises with reference to some _specific_ situation, and
has to subserve a _specific_ purpose dependent upon its own occasion.
They assume and observe distinct limits--limits from which and to which.
There is the limit of origin in the needs of the particular situation
which evokes reflection. There is the limit of terminus in successful
dealing with the particular problem presented--or in retiring, baffled,
to take up some other question. The query that at once faces us
regarding the nature of logical theory is whether reflection upon
reflection shall recognize these limits, endeavoring to formulate them
more exactly and to define their relationships to each other more
adequately; or shall it abolish limits, do away with the matter of
specific conditions and specific aims of thought, and discuss thought
and its relation to empirical antecedents and rational consequents
(truth) at large?
At first blush, it might seem as if the very nature of logical theory as
generalization of the reflective process must of necessity disregard the
matter of particular conditions and particular results as irrelevant.
How, the implication runs, could reflection become generalized save by
elimination of details as irrelevant? Such a conception in fixing the
central problem of logic fixes once for all its future career and
material. The essential business of logic is henceforth to discuss the
relation of thought as such to reality as such. It may, indeed, involve
much psychological material, particularly in the discussion of the
processes which antecede thinking and which call it out. It may involve
much discussion of the concrete methods of investigation and
verification employed in the various sciences. It may busily concern
itself with the differentiation of various types and forms of
thought--different modes of conceiving, various conformations of
judgment, various types of inferential reasoning. But it concerns itself
with any and all of these three fields, not on their own account or as
ultimate, but as subsidiary to the main problem: the relation of thought
as such, or at large, to reality as such, or at large. Some of the
detailed considerations referred to may throw light upon the terms under
which thought transacts its business with reality; upon, say, certain
peculiar limitations it has to submit to as best it may. Other
considerations throw light upon the ways in which thought gets at
reality. Still other considerations throw light upon the forms which
thought assumes in attacking and apprehending reality. But in the end
all this is incidental. In the end the one problem holds: How do the
specifications of thought as such hold good of reality as such? In fine,
logic is supposed to grow out of the epistemological inquiry and to lead
up to its solution.
From this point of view various aspects of logical theory are well
stated by an author whom later on we shall consider in some detail.
Lotze[1] refers to "universal forms and principles of thought which hold
good everywhere both in judging of reality and in weighing possibility,
_irrespective of any difference in the objects_." This defines the
business of _pure_ logic. This is clearly the question of thought as
such--of thought at large or in general. Then we have the question "of
how far the most complete structure of thought ... can claim to be an
adequate account of that which we seem compelled to assume as the object
and occasion of our ideas." This is clearly the question of the relation
of thought at large to reality at large. It is epistemology. Then comes
"applied logic," having to do with the actual employment of concrete
forms of thought with reference to investigation of specific topics and
subjects. This "applied" logic would, if the standpoint of practical
deliberation and of scientific research were adopted, be the sole
genuine logic. But the existence of thought _in itself_ having been
agreed upon, we have in this "applied" logic only an incidental inquiry
of how the particular resistances and oppositions which "pure" thought
meets from particular matters may best be discounted. It is concerned
with methods of investigation which obviate defects in the relationship
of thought at large to reality at large, as these present themselves
under the limitations of human experience. It deals merely with
hindrances, and with devices for overcoming them; it is directed by
considerations of utility. When we reflect that this field includes the
entire procedure of practical deliberation and of concrete scientific
research, we begin to realize something of the significance of the
theory of logic which regards the limitations of specific origination
and specific outcome as irrelevant to its main problem, which assumes an
activity of thought "pure" or "in itself," that is, "irrespective of any
difference in its objects."
This suggests, by contrast, the opposite mode of stating the problem of
logical theory. Generalization of the nature of the reflective process
certainly involves elimination of much of the specific material and
contents of the thought-situations of daily life and of critical
science. Quite compatible with this, however, is the notion that it
seizes upon _certain_ specific conditions and factors, and aims to bring
them to clear consciousness--not to abolish them. While eliminating the
particular material of particular practical and scientific pursuits,
(1) it may strive to hit upon the common denominator in the various
situations which are antecedent or primary to thought and which evoke
it; (2) it may attempt to show how typical features in the specific
antecedents of thought call out to diverse typical modes of
thought-reaction; (3) it may attempt to state the nature of the specific
consequences in which thought fulfils its career.
(1) It does not eliminate dependence upon specific occasions as
provocative of thought; but endeavors to define _what_ in the various
situations constitutes them thought-provoking. The specific occasion is
not eliminated, but insisted upon and brought into the foreground.
Consequently psychological considerations are not subsidiary incidents,
but of essential importance so far as they enable us to trace the
generation of the thought-situation. (2) So from this point of view the
various types and modes of conceiving, judging, and inference are
treated, not as qualifications of thought per se or at large, but of
thought engaged in its specific, most economic, effective response to
its own particular occasion; they are adaptations for control of
stimuli. The distinctions and classifications that have been accumulated
in "formal" logic are relevant data; but they demand interpretation from
the standpoint of use as organs of adjustment to material antecedents
and stimuli. (3) Finally the question of validity, or ultimate objective
of thought, is relevant; but is such as a matter of the specific issue
of the specific career of a thought-function. All the typical
investigatory and verificatory procedures of the various sciences are
inherently concerned as indicating the ways in which thought actually
brings itself to its own successful fulfilment in dealing with various
types of problems.
While the epistemological type of logic may, as we have seen, leave
(under the name of applied logic), a subsidiary place open for the
instrumental type, the type which deals with thinking as a specific
procedure relative to a specific antecedent occasion and to a subsequent
specific fulfilment, is not able to reciprocate the favor. From its
point of view, an attempt to discuss the antecedents, data, forms, and
objective of thought, apart from reference to particular position
occupied, and particular part played in the growth of experience is to
reach results which are not so much either true or false as they are
radically meaningless--because they are considered apart from limits.
Its results are not only abstractions (for all theorizing ends in
abstractions), but abstractions without possible reference or bearing.
From this point of view, the taking of something, whether that something
be thinking activity, its empirical condition, or its objective goal,
apart from the limits of a historic or developing situation, is the
essence of _metaphysical_ procedure--in the sense of metaphysics which
makes a gulf between it and science.
As the reader has doubtless anticipated, it is the object of this
chapter to present the problem and industry of reflective thought from
this latter point of view. I recur again to the standpoint of naïve
experience, using the term in a sense wide enough to cover both
practical procedure and concrete scientific research. I resume by saying
that this point of view knows no fixed distinction between the empirical
values of unreflective life and the most abstract process of rational
thought. It knows no fixed gulf between the highest flight of theory and
control of the details of practical construction and behavior. It
passes, according to the occasion and opportunity of the moment, from
the attitude of loving and struggling and doing to that of thinking and
the reverse. Its contents or material shift their values back and forth
from technological or utilitarian to æsthetic, ethic, or affectional. It
utilizes data of perception or of discursive ideation as need calls,
just as an inventor now utilizes heat, now mechanical strain, now
electricity, according to the demands set by his aim. From this point of
view, more definite logical import is attached to our earlier statements
(p. 2) regarding the possibility of taking anything in the universe of
experience as subject-matter of thought. Anything from past experience
may be taken which appears to be an element in either the statement or
the solution of the present problem. Thus we understand the coexistence
without contradiction of an indeterminate possible field and a limited
actual field. The undefined set of means becomes specific through
reference to an end.
In all this, there is no difference of kind between the methods of
science and those of the plain man. The difference is the greater
control in science of the statement of the problem, and of the
selection and use of relevant material, both sensible or ideational. The
two are related to each other just as the hit-or-miss, trial-and-error
inventions of uncivilized man stand to the deliberate and consecutively
persistent efforts of a modern inventor to produce a certain complicated
device for doing a comprehensive piece of work. Neither the plain man
nor the scientific inquirer is aware, as he engages in his reflective
activity, of any transition from one sphere of existence to another. He
knows no two fixed worlds--reality on one side and mere subjective ideas
on the other; he is aware of no gulf to cross. He assumes uninterrupted,
free, and fluid passage from ordinary experience to abstract thinking,
from thought to fact, from things to theories and back again.
Observation passes into development of hypothesis; deductive methods
pass to use in description of the particular; inference passes into
action with no sense of difficulty save those found in the particular
task in question. The fundamental assumption is _continuity_ in and of
experience.
This does not mean that fact is confused with idea, or observed datum
with voluntary hypothesis, theory with doing, any more than a traveler
confuses land and water when he journeys from one to the other. It
simply means that each is placed and used with reference to service
rendered the other, and with reference to future use of the other.
Only the epistemological spectator is aware of the fact that the
everyday man and the scientific man in this free and easy intercourse
are rashly assuming the right to glide over a cleft in the very
structure of reality. This fact raises a query not favorable to the
epistemologist. Why is it that the scientific man, who is constantly
plying his venturous traffic of exchange of facts for ideas, of theories
for laws, of real things for hypotheses, should be so wholly unaware of
the radical and generic (as distinct from specific) difficulty of the
undertakings in which he is engaged? We thus come afresh to our inquiry:
Does not the epistemological logician unwittingly transfer the specific
difficulty which always faces the scientific man--the difficulty in
detail of correct and adequate translation back and forth of _this_ set
of facts and _this_ group of ideas--into a totally different problem of
the wholesale relation of thought at large with reality in general? If
such be the case, it is clear that the very way in which the
epistemological type of logic states the problem of thinking, in
relation both to empirical antecedents and to objective truth, makes
that problem insoluble. Working terms, terms which as working are
flexible and historic, relative, are transformed into absolute, fixed,
and predetermined forms of being.
We come a little closer to the problem when we recognize that every
scientific inquiry passes historically through at least four stages.
(_a_) The first of these stages is, if I may be allowed the bull, that
in which scientific inquiry does not take place at all, because no
problem or difficulty in the quality of the experience has presented
itself to provoke reflection. We have only to cast our eye back from the
existing status of any science, or back from the status of any
particular topic in any science, to discover a time when no reflective
or critical thinking busied itself with the matter--when the facts and
relations were taken for granted and thus were lost and absorbed in the
value which accrued from the experience. (_b_) After the dawning of the
problem, there comes a period of occupation with relatively crude and
unorganized facts--the hunting for, locating, and collecting of raw
material. This is the empiric stage, which no existing science, however
proud in its attained rationality, can disavow as its own progenitor.
(_c_) Then there is also a speculative stage: a period of guessing, of
making hypotheses, of framing ideas which later on are labeled and
condemned as only ideas. There is a period of distinction and
classification-making which later on is regarded as only
mentally-gymnastic in character. And no science, however proud in its
present security of experimental assurance, can disavow a scholastic
ancestor. (_d_) Finally, there comes a period of fruitful interaction
between the mere ideas and the mere facts: a period when observation is
determined by experimental conditions depending upon the use of certain
guiding conceptions; when reflection is directed and checked at every
point by the use of experimental data, and by the necessity of finding
such form for itself as will enable it to serve as premise in a
deduction leading to evolution of new meanings, and ultimately to
experimental inquiry, which brings to light new facts. In the emerging
of a more orderly and significant region of fact, and of a more coherent
and self-luminous system of meaning, we have the natural limit of
evolution of the logic of a given science.
But consider what has happened in this historic record. Unanalyzed
experience has broken up into distinctions of facts and ideas; the
factual side has been developed by indefinite and almost miscellaneous
descriptions and cumulative listings; the conceptual side has been
developed by unchecked and speculative elaboration of definitions,
classifications, etc. There has been a relegation of accepted meanings
to the limbo of mere ideas; there has been a passage of some of the
accepted facts into the region of mere hypothesis and opinion.
Conversely, there has been a continued issuing of ideas from the region
of hypotheses and theories into that of facts, of accepted objective and
meaningful contents. Out of a world of only _seeming_ facts, and of only
_doubtful_ ideas, there emerges a universe continually growing in
definiteness, order, and luminosity.
This progress, verified in every record of science, is an absolute
monstrosity from the standpoint of the epistemology which assumes a
thought in general, on one side, and a reality in general, on the other.
The reason that it does not present itself as such a monster and miracle
to those actually concerned with it is because there is a certain
_homogeneity_ or _continuity_ of reference and of use which controls all
diversities in both the modes of existence specified and the grades of
value assigned. The distinction of thought and fact is treated in the
growth of a science, or of any particular scientific problem, as an
_induced_ and _intentional_ practical division of labor; as relative
assignments of position with reference to performance of a task; as
deliberate distribution of forces at command for their more economic
use. The interaction of bald fact and hypothetical idea into the outcome
of a single world of scientific apprehension and comprehension is but
the successful achieving of the aim on account of which the distinctions
in question were instituted.
Thus we come back to the problem of logical theory. To take the
distinctions of thought and fact, etc., as ontological, as inherently
fixed in the make-up of the structure of being, is to treat the actual
development of scientific inquiry and scientific control as a mere
subsidiary topic ultimately of only utilitarian worth. It is also to
state the terms upon which thought and being transact business in a way
so totally alien to the use made of these distinctions in concrete
experience as to create a problem which can be discussed only in terms
of itself--not in terms of the conduct of life--metaphysics again in the
bad sense of that term. As against this, the problem of a logic which
aligns itself with the origin and employ of reflective thought in
everyday life and in critical science, is to follow the natural history
of thinking as a life-process having its own generating antecedents and
stimuli, its own states and career, and its own specific objective or
limit.
This point of view makes it possible for logical theory to come to terms
with psychology.[2] When logic is considered as having to do with the
wholesale activity of thought per se, the question of the historic
process by which this or that particular thought came to be, of how its
object happens to present itself as sensation, or perception, or
conception, is quite irrelevant. These things are mere temporal
accidents. The psychologist (not lifting his gaze from the realm of the
changeable) may find in them matters of interest. His whole industry is
just with natural history--to trace series of psychical events as they
mutually excite and inhibit one another. But the logician, we are told,
has a deeper problem and an outlook of more unbounded horizon. He deals
with the question of the eternal nature of thought and its eternal
validity in relation to an eternal reality. He is concerned, not with
genesis, but with value, not with a historic cycle, but with absolute
distinctions and relations.
Still the query haunts us: Is this so in truth? Or has the logician of a
certain type arbitrarily made it thus by taking his terms apart from
reference to the specific occasions in which they arise and situations
in which they function? If the latter, then the very denial of historic
relationship and of the significance of historic method, is indicative
only of the unreal character of his own abstraction. It means in effect
that the affairs under consideration have been isolated from the
conditions in which alone they have determinable meaning and assignable
worth. It is astonishing that, in the face of the advance of the
evolutionary method in natural science, any logician can persist in the
assertion of a rigid difference between the problem of origin and of
nature; between genesis and analysis; between history and validity. Such
assertion simply reiterates as final a distinction which grew up and
had meaning in pre-evolutionary science. It asserts against the most
marked advance which scientific method has yet made a survival of a
crude period of logical scientific procedure. We have no choice save
either to conceive of thinking as a response to a specific stimulus, or
else to regard it as something "in itself," having just in and of itself
certain traits, elements, and laws. If we give up the last view, we must
take the former.
The entire significance of the evolutionary method in biology and social
history is that every distinct organ, structure, or formation, every
grouping of cells or elements, has to be treated as an instrument of
adjustment or adaptation to a particular environing situation. Its
meaning, its character, its value, is known when, and only when, it is
considered as an arrangement for meeting the conditions involved in some
specific situation. This analysis of value is carried out in detail by
tracing successive stages of development--by endeavoring to locate the
particular situation in which each structure has its origin, and by
tracing the successive modifications through which, in response to
changing media, it has reached its present conformation.[3] To persist
in condemning natural history from the standpoint of what natural
history meant before it identified itself with an evolutionary process
is not so much to exclude the natural-history standpoint from
philosophic consideration as it is to evince ignorance of what it
signifies.
Psychology as the natural history of the various attitudes and
structures through which experiencing passes, as an account of the
conditions under which this or that state emerges, and of the way in
which it influences, by stimulation or inhibition, production of other
states or conformations of consciousness, is indispensable to logical
evaluation, the moment we treat logical theory as an account of
thinking as a mode of adaptation to its own generating conditions, and
judge its validity by reference to its efficiency in meeting its
problems. The historical point of view describes the sequence; the
normative follows the sequence to its conclusion, and then turns back
and judges each historical step by viewing it in reference to its own
outcome.[4]
In the course of changing experience we keep our balance as we move from
situations of an affectional quality to those which are practical or
appreciative or reflective, because we bear constantly in mind the
context in which any particular distinction presents itself. As we
submit each characteristic function and situation of experience to our
gaze, we find it has a dual aspect. Wherever there is striving there are
obstacles; wherever there is affection there are persons who are
attached; wherever there is doing there is accomplishment; wherever
there is appreciation there is value; wherever there is thinking there
is material-in-question. We keep our footing as we move from one
attitude to another, from one characteristic quality to another, because
we know the position occupied in the whole growth by the particular
function in which we are engaged, and the position within the function
of the particular element that engages us.
The distinction _between_ each attitude and function and its predecessor
and successor is serial, dynamic, operative. The distinctions _within_
any given operation or function are structural, contemporaneous, and
distributive. Thinking follows, we will say, striving, and doing follows
thinking. Each in the fulfilment of its own function inevitably calls
out its successor. But coincident, simultaneous, and correspondent
_within_ doing, is the distinction of doer and of deed; _within_ the
function of thought, of thinking and material thought upon; within the
function of striving, of obstacle of aim, of means and end. We keep our
paths straight because we do not confuse the sequential, efficient, and
functional relationship of types of experience with the contemporaneous,
correlative, and structural distinctions of elements within a given
function. In the seeming maze of endless confusion and unlimited
shiftings, we find our way by the means of the stimulations and checks
occurring within the process we are actually engaged with. We do not
contrast or confuse a condition or state which is an element in the
formation of one operation with the status or element which is one of
the distributive terms of another function. If we do, we have at once an
insoluble, because meaningless, problem upon our hands.
Now the epistemological logician deliberately shuts himself off from
those cues and checks upon which the plain man instinctively relies, and
which the scientific man deliberately searches for and adopts as
constituting his technique. Consequently he is likely to set the sort of
object or material which has place and significance only in one of the
serial functional situations of experience, over against the active
attitude which describes part of the structural constitution of another
situation; or with equal lack of justification to assimilate terms
characteristic of different stages to one another. He sets the agent, as
he is found in the intimacy of love or appreciation, over against the
externality of the fact, as that is defined within the reflective
process. He takes the material which thought selects as its own basis
for further procedure to be identical with the significant content which
it secures for itself in the successful pursuit of its aim; and this in
turn he regards as the material which was presented at the outset, and
whose peculiarities were the express means of awakening thought. He
identifies the final deposit of the thought-function with its own
generating antecedent, and then disposes of the resulting surd by
reference to some metaphysical consideration, which remains when logical
inquiry, when science (as interpreted by him), has done its work. He
does this, not because he prefers confusion to order, or error to truth,
but simply because, when the chain of historic sequence is cut, the
vessel of thought is afloat to veer upon a sea without soundings or
moorings. There are but two alternatives: either there is an object "in
itself" of thought "in itself," or else there are a series of values
which vary with the varying functions to which they belong. If the
latter, the only way these values can be defined is by discriminating
the functions to which they belong. It is only conditions relative to a
specific period or epoch of development in a cycle of experience
which-enables one to tell what to do next, or to estimate the value and
meaning of what is already done. And the epistemological logician, in
choosing to take his question as one of thought which has its own form
just as "thought," apart from the limits of the special work it has to
do, has deprived himself of these supports and stays.
The problem of logic has a more general and a more specific phase. In
its generic form, it deals with this question: How does one type of
functional situation and attitude in experience pass out of and into
another; for example, the technological or utilitarian into the
æsthetic, the æsthetic into the religious, the religious into the
scientific, and this into the socio-ethical and so on? The more specific
question is: How does the particular functional situation termed the
reflective behave? How shall we describe it? What in detail are its
diverse contemporaneous distinctions, or divisions of labor, its
correspondent _statuses_; in what specific ways do these operate with
reference to each other so as to effect the specific aim which is
proposed by the needs of the affair?
This chapter may be brought to conclusion by reference to the more
alternate value of the logic of experience, of logic taken in its wider
sense; that is, as an account of the sequence of the various typical
functions or situations of experience in their determining relations to
one another. Philosophy, defined as such a logic, makes no pretense to
be an account of a closed and finished universe. Its business is not to
secure or guarantee any particular reality or value. _Per contra_, it
gets the significance of a method. The right relationship and adjustment
of the various typical phases of experience to one another is a problem
felt in every department of life. Intellectual rectification and control
of these adjustments cannot fail to reflect itself in an added clearness
and security on the practical side. It may be that general logic can not
become an instrument in the immediate direction of the activities of
science or art or industry; but it is of value in criticising and in
organizing the tools of immediate research in these lines. It also has
direct significance in the valuation for social or life-purposes of
results achieved in particular branches. Much of the immediate business
of life is badly done because we do not know in relation to its
congeners the organic genesis and outcome of the work that occupies us.
The manner and degree of appropriation of the values achieved in various
departments of social interest and vocation are partial and faulty
because we are not clear as to the due rights and responsibilities of
one function of experience in reference to others.
The value of research for social progress; the bearing of psychology
upon educational procedure; the mutual relations of fine and industrial
art; the question of the extent and nature of specialization in science
in comparison with the claims of applied science; the adjustment of
religious aspirations to scientific statements; the justification of a
refined culture for a few in face of economic insufficiency for the
mass--such are a few of the many social questions whose _final_ answer
depends upon the possession and use of a general logic of experience as
a method of inquiry and interpretation. I do not say that headway cannot
be made in such questions apart from the method indicated: a logic of
genetic experience. But unless we have a critical and assured view of
the juncture in which and with reference to which a given attitude or
interest arises, unless we know the service it is thereby called upon to
perform and hence the organs or methods by which it best functions in
that service, our progress is impeded and irregular. We take a part for
a whole, a means for an end, or attack wholesale some other interest
because it interferes with the deified sway of the one we have selected
as ultimate. A clear and comprehensive consensus of social conviction,
and a consequent concentrated and economical direction of effort, are
assured only as there is some way of locating the position and rôle of
each typical interest and occupation in experience. The domain of
opinion is one of conflict; its rule is arbitrary and costly. Only
intellectual method affords a substitute for opinion. The general logic
of experience can alone do for the region of social values and aims what
the natural sciences after centuries of struggle are doing for activity
in the physical realm.
This does not mean that systems of philosophy which have attempted to
state the nature either of thought and of reality at large, apart from
limits of particular crises in the growth of experience, have been
worthless--though it does mean that their industry has been somewhat
misapplied. The unfolding of metaphysical theory has made large
contributions to positive evaluations of the typical situations and
relationships of experience--even when its conscious intention has been
quite otherwise. Every system of philosophy is itself a mode of
reflection; consequently (if our main contention be true), it too has
been evoked out of specific social antecedents, and has had its use as
a response to them. It has effected something in modifying the situation
within which it found its origin. It may not have solved the problem
which it consciously put itself; in many cases we may freely admit that
the question put has afterward been found to be so wrongly put as to be
insoluble. Yet exactly the same thing is true, in precisely the same
sense, in the history of science. For this reason, if for no other, it
is impossible for the scientific man to cast the first stone at the
philosopher.
The progress of science in any branch continually brings with it a
realization that problems in their previous form of statement are
insoluble because put in terms of unreal conditions; because the real
conditions have been mixed up with mental artifacts or misconstructions.
Every science is continually learning that its supposed solutions are
only apparent, because the "solution" solves, not the actual problem,
but one which has been made up. But the very putting of the question,
the very giving of the wrong answer, induces modification of existing
intellectual habits, standpoints, and aims. Wrestling with the problem,
there is evolution of new forms of technique to control its treatment,
there is search for new facts, institution of new types of
experimentation; there is gain in the methodic control of experience.
And all this is progress. It is only the worn-out cynic, the devitalized
sensualist, and the fanatical dogmatist who interpret the continuous
change of science as proving that, since each successive statement is
wrong, the whole record is error and folly; and that the present truth
is only the error not yet found out. Such draw the moral of caring
naught for all these things, or of flying to some external authority
which will deliver once for all the fixed and unchangeable truth. But
historic philosophy even in its aberrant forms has proved a factor in
the valuation of experience; it has brought problems to light, it has
provoked intellectual conflicts without which values are only nominal;
even through its would-be absolutistic isolations, it has secured
recognition of mutual dependencies and reciprocal reinforcements. Yet if
it can define its work more clearly, it can concentrate its energy upon
its own characteristic problem: the genesis and functioning in
experience of various typical interests and occupations with reference
to one another.