minutes' walk from 'Memorial Hall,' and to be thinking truly of the
latter object. My mind may have before it only the name, or it may have
a clear image, or it may have a very dim image of the hall, but such
intrinsic differences in the image make no difference in its cognitive
function. Certain _extrinsic_ phenomena, special experiences of
conjunction, are what impart to the image, be it what it may, its
knowing office.
For instance, if you ask me what hall I mean by my image, and I can
tell you nothing; or if I fail to point or lead you towards the Harvard
Delta; or if, being led by you, I am uncertain whether the Hall I see be
what I had in mind or not; you would rightly deny that I had 'meant'
that particular hall at all, even though my mental image might to some
degree have resembled it. The resemblance would count in that case as
coincidental merely, for all sorts of things of a kind resemble one
another in this world without being held for that reason to take
cognizance of one another.
On the other hand, if I can lead you to the hall, and tell you of its
history and present uses; if in its presence I feel my idea, however
imperfect it may have been, to have led hither and to be now
_terminated;_ if the associates of the image and of the felt hall run
parallel, so that each term of the one context corresponds serially, as
I walk, with an answering term of the others; why then my soul was
prophetic, and my idea must be, and by common consent would be, called
cognizant of reality. That percept was what I _meant_, for into it my
idea has passed by conjunctive experiences of sameness and fulfilled
intention. Nowhere is there jar, but every later moment continues and
corroborates an earlier one.
In this continuing and corroborating, taken in no transcendental sense,
but denoting definitely felt transitions, _lies all that the knowing of
a percept by an idea can possibly contain or signify_. Wherever such
transitions are felt, the first experience _knows_ the last one. Where
they do not, or where even as possibles they can not, intervene, there
can be no pretence of knowing. In this latter case the extremes will be
connected, if connected at all, by inferior relations--bare likeness or
succession, or by 'withness' alone. Knowledge of sensible realities thus
comes to life inside the tissue of experience. It is _made_; and made by
relations that unroll themselves in time. Whenever certain
intermediaries are given, such that, as they develop towards their
terminus, there is experience from point to point of one direction
followed, and finally of one process fulfilled, the result is that
_their starting-point thereby becomes a knower and their terminus an
object meant or known_. That is all that knowing (in the simple case
considered) can be known-as, that is the whole of its nature, put into
experiential terms. Whenever such is the sequence of our experiences we
may freely say that we had the terminal object 'in mind' from the
outset, even although _at_ the outset nothing was there in us but a flat
piece of substantive experience like any other, with no
self-transcendency about it, and no mystery save the mystery of coming
into existence and of being gradually followed by other pieces of
substantive experience, with conjunctively transitional experiences
between. That is what we _mean_ here by the object's being 'in mind.' Of
any deeper more real way of being in mind we have no positive
conception, and we have no right to discredit our actual experience by
talking of such a way at all.
I know that many a reader will rebel at this. "Mere intermediaries," he
will say, "even though they be feelings of continuously growing
fulfilment, only _separate_ the knower from the known, whereas what we
have in knowledge is a kind of immediate touch of the one by the other,
an 'apprehension' in the etymological sense of the word, a leaping of
the chasm as by lightning, an act by which two terms are smitten into
one, over the head of their distinctness. All these dead intermediaries
of yours are out of each other, and outside of their termini still."
But do not such dialectic difficulties remind us of the dog dropping his
bone and snapping at its image in the water? If we knew any more real
kind of union _aliunde_, we might be entitled to brand all our
empirical unions as a sham. But unions by continuous transition are the
only ones we know of, whether in this matter of a knowledge-about that
terminates in an acquaintance, whether in personal identity, in logical
predication through the copula 'is,' or elsewhere. If anywhere there
were more absolute unions realized, they could only reveal themselves to
us by just such conjunctive results. These are what the unions are
_worth_, these are all that _we can ever practically mean_ by union, by
continuity. Is it not time to repeat what Lotze said of substances, that
to _act like_ one is to _be_ one?[33] Should we not say here that to be
experienced as continuous is to be really continuous, in a world where
experience and reality come to the same thing? In a picture gallery a
painted hook will serve to hang a painted chain by, a painted cable will
hold a painted ship. In a world where both the terms and their
distinctions are affairs of experience, conjunctions that are
experienced must be at least as real as anything else. They will be'
absolutely' real conjunctions, if we have no transphenomenal Absolute
ready, to derealize the whole experienced world by, at a stroke. If, on
the other hand, we had such an Absolute, not one of our opponents'
theories of knowledge could remain standing any better than ours could;
for the distinctions as well as the conjunctions of experience would
impartially fall its prey. The whole question of how 'one' thing can
know 'another' would cease to be a real one at all in a world where
otherness itself was an illusion.[34]
So much for the essentials of the cognitive relation, where the
knowledge is conceptual in type, or forms knowledge 'about' an object.
It consists in intermediary experiences (possible, if not actual) of
continuously developing progress, and, finally, of fulfilment, when the
sensible percept, which is the object, is reached. The percept here not
only _verifies_ the concept, proves its function of knowing that percept
to be true, but the percept's existence as the terminus of the chain of
intermediaries _creates_ the function. Whatever terminates that chain
was, because it now proves itself to be, what the concept 'had in mind.'
The towering importance for human life of this kind of knowing lies in
the fact that an experience that knows another can figure as its
_representative_, not in any quasi-miraculous 'epistemological' sense,
but in the definite practical sense of being its _substitute_ in various
operations, sometimes physical and sometimes mental, which lead us to
its associates and results. By experimenting on our ideas of reality, we
may save ourselves the trouble of experimenting on the real experiences
which they severally mean. The ideas form related systems, corresponding
point for point to the systems which the realities form; and by letting
an ideal term call up its associates systematically, we may be led to a
terminus which the corresponding real term would have led to in case we
had operated on the real world. And this brings us to the general
question of substitution.
IV. SUBSTITUTION
In Taine's brilliant book on 'Intelligence,' substitution was for the
first time named as a cardinal logical function, though of course the
facts had always been familiar enough. What, exactly, in a system of
experiences, does the 'substitution' of one of them for another mean?
According to my view, experience as a whole is a process in time,
whereby innumerable particular terms lapse and are superseded by others
that follow upon them by transitions which, whether disjunctive or
conjunctive in content, are themselves experiences, and must in general
be accounted at least as real as the terms which they relate. What the
nature of the event called 'superseding' signifies, depends altogether
on the kind of transition that obtains. Some experiences simply abolish
their predecessors without continuing them in any way. Others are felt
to increase or to enlarge their meaning, to carry out their purpose, or
to bring us nearer to their goal. They 'represent' them, and may fulfil
their function better than they fulfilled it themselves. But to 'fulfil
a function' in a world of pure experience can be conceived and defined
in only one possible way. In such a world transitions and arrivals (or
terminations) are the only events that happen, though they happen by so
many sorts of path. The only function that one experience can perform is
to lead into another experience; and the only fulfilment we can speak of
is the reaching of a certain experienced end. When one experience leads
to (or can lead to) the same end as another, they agree in function. But
the whole system of experiences as they are immediately given presents
itself as a quasi-chaos through which one can pass out of an initial
term in many directions and yet end in the same terminus, moving from
next to next by a great many possible paths.
Either one of these paths might be a functional substitute for another,
and to follow one rather than another might on occasion be an
advantageous thing to do. As a matter of fact, and in a general way,
the paths that run through conceptual experiences, that is, through
'thoughts' or 'ideas' that 'know' the things in which they terminate,
are highly advantageous paths to follow. Not only do they yield
inconceivably rapid transitions; but, owing to the 'universal'
character[35] which they frequently possess, and to their capacity for
association with one another in great systems, they outstrip the tardy
consecutions of the things themselves, and sweep us on towards our
ultimate termini in a far more labor-saving way than the following of
trains of sensible perception ever could. Wonderful are the new cuts and
the short-circuits which the thought-paths make. Most thought-paths, it
is true, are substitutes for nothing actual; they end outside the real
world altogether, in wayward fancies, utopias, fictions or mistakes. But
where they do re-enter reality and terminate therein, we substitute them
always; and with these substitutes we pass the greater number of our
hours.
This is why I called our experiences, taken all together, a quasi-chaos.
There is vastly more discontinuity in the sum total of experiences than
we commonly suppose. The objective nucleus of every man's experience,
his own body, is, it is true, a continuous percept; and equally
continuous as a percept (though we may be inattentive to it) is the
material environment of that body, changing by gradual transition when
the body moves. But the distant parts of the physical world are at all
times absent from us, and form conceptual objects merely, into the
perceptual reality of which our life inserts itself at points discrete
and relatively rare. Round their several objective nuclei, partly shared
and common and partly discrete, of the real physical world, innumerable
thinkers, pursuing their several lines of physically true cogitation,
trace paths that intersect one another only at discontinuous perceptual
points, and the rest of the time are quite incongruent; and around all
the nuclei of shared 'reality,' as around the Dyak's head of my late
metaphor, floats the vast cloud of experiences that are wholly
subjective, that are non-substitutional, that find not even an eventual
ending for themselves in the perceptual world--the mere day-dreams and
joys and sufferings and wishes of the individual minds. These exist
_with_ one another, indeed, and with the objective nuclei, but out of
them it is probable that to all eternity no interrelated system of any
kind will ever be made.
This notion of the purely substitutional or conceptual physical world
brings us to the most critical of all the steps in the development of a
philosophy of pure experience. The paradox of self-transcendency in
knowledge comes back upon us here, but I think that our notions of pure
experience and of substitution, and our radically empirical view of
conjunctive transitions, are _Denkmittel_ that will carry us safely
through the pass.
V. WHAT OBJECTIVE REFERENCE IS.
Whosoever feels his experience to be something substitutional even while
he has it, may be said to have an experience that reaches beyond itself.
From inside of its own entity it says 'more,' and postulates reality
existing elsewhere. For the transcendentalist, who holds knowing to
consist in a _salto mortale_ across an 'epistemological chasm,' such an
idea presents no difficulty; but it seems at first sight as if it might
be inconsistent with an empiricism like our own. Have we not explained
that conceptual knowledge is made such wholly by the existence of things
that fall outside of the knowing experience itself--by intermediary
experiences and by a terminus that fulfils? Can the knowledge be there
before these elements that constitute its being have come? And, if
knowledge be not there, how can objective reference occur?
The key to this difficulty lies in the distinction between knowing as
verified and completed, and the same knowing as in transit and on its
way. To recur to the Memorial Hall example lately used, it is only when
our idea of the Hall has actually terminated in the percept that we know
'for certain' that from the beginning it was truly cognitive of _that_.
Until established by the end of the process, its quality of knowing
that, or indeed of knowing anything, could still be doubted; and yet the
knowing really was there, as the result now shows. We were _virtual_
knowers of the Hall long before we were certified to have been its
actual knowers, by the percept's retroactive validating power. Just so
we are 'mortal' all the time, by reason of the virtuality of the
inevitable event which will make us so when it shall have come.
Now the immensely greater part of all our knowing never gets beyond this
virtual stage. It never is completed or nailed down. I speak not merely
of our ideas of imperceptibles like ether-waves or dissociated 'ions,'
or of 'ejects' like the contents of our neighbors' minds; I speak also
of ideas which we might verify if we would take the trouble, but which
we hold for true although unterminated perceptually, because nothing
says 'no' to us, and there is no contradicting truth in sight. _To
continue thinking unchallenged is, ninety-nine times out of a hundred,
our practical substitute for knowing in the completed sense._ As each
experience runs by cognitive transition into the next one, and we
nowhere feel a collision with what we elsewhere count as truth or fact,
we commit ourselves to the current as if the port were sure. We live, as
it were, upon the front edge of an advancing wave-crest, and our sense
of a determinate direction in falling forward is all we cover of the
future of our path. It is as if a differential quotient should be
conscious and treat itself as an adequate substitute for a traced-out
curve. Our experience, _inter alia_, is of variations of rate and of
direction, and lives in these transitions more than in the journey's
end. The experiences of tendency are sufficient to act upon--what more
could we have _done_ at those moments even if the later verification
comes complete?
This is what, as a radical empiricist, I say to the charge that the
objective reference which is so flagrant a character of our experiences
involves a chasm and a mortal leap. A positively conjunctive transition
involves neither chasm nor leap. Being the very original of what we mean
by continuity, it makes a continuum wherever it appears. I know full
well that such brief words as these will leave the hardened
transcendentalist unshaken. Conjunctive experiences _separate_ their
terms, he will still say: they are third things interposed, that have
themselves to be conjoined by new links, and to invoke them makes our
trouble infinitely worse. To 'feel' our motion forward is impossible.
Motion implies terminus; and how can terminus be felt before we have
arrived? The barest start and sally forwards, the barest tendency to
leave the instant, involves the chasm and the leap. Conjunctive
transitions are the most superficial of appearances, illusions of our
sensibility which philosophical reflection pulverizes at a touch.
Conception is our only trustworthy instrument, conception and the
Absolute working hand in hand. Conception disintegrates experience
utterly, but its disjunctions are easily overcome again when the
Absolute takes up the task.
Such transcendentalists I must leave, provisionally at least, in full
possession of their creed.[36] I have no space for polemics in this
article, so I shall simply formulate the empiricist doctrine as my
hypothesis, leaving it to work or not work as it may.
Objective reference, I say then, is an incident of the fact that so much
of our experience comes as an insufficient and consists of process and
transition. Our fields of experience have no more definite boundaries
than have our fields of view. Both are fringed forever by a _more_ that
continuously develops, and that continuously supersedes them as life
proceeds. The relations, generally speaking, are as real here as the
terms are, and the only complaint of the transcendentalist's with which
I could at all sympathize would be his charge that, by first making
knowledge to consist in external relations as I have done, and by then
confessing that nine-tenths of the time these are not actually but only
virtually there, I have knocked the solid bottom out of the whole
business, and palmed off a substitute of knowledge for the genuine
thing. Only the admission, such a critic might say, that our ideas are
self-transcendent and 'true' already, in advance of the experiences that
are to terminate them, can bring solidity back to knowledge in a world
like this, in which transitions and terminations are only by exception
fulfilled.
This seems to me an excellent place for applying the pragmatic method.
When a dispute arises, that method consists in auguring what practical
consequences would be different if one side rather than the other were
true. If no difference can be thought of, the dispute is a quarrel over
words. What then would the self-transcendency affirmed to exist in
advance of all experiential mediation or termination, be _known-as_?
What would it practically result in for _us_, were it true?
It could only result in our orientation, in the turning of our
expectations and practical tendencies into the right path; and the
right path here, so long as we and the object are not yet face to face
(or can never get face to face, as in the case of ejects), would be the
path that led us into the object's nearest neighborhood. Where direct
acquaintance is lacking, 'knowledge about' is the next best thing, and
an acquaintance with what actually lies about the object, and is most
closely related to it, puts such knowledge within our grasp. Ether-waves
and your anger, for example, are things in which my thoughts will never
_perceptually_ terminate, but my concepts of them lead me to their very
brink, to the chromatic fringes and to the hurtful words and deeds which
are their really next effects.
Even if our ideas did in themselves carry the postulated
self-transcendency, it would still remain true that their putting us
into possession of such effects _would be the sole cash-value of the
self-transcendency for us_. And this cash-value, it is needless to say,
is _verbatim et literatim_ what our empiricist account pays in. On
pragmatist principles therefore, a dispute over self-transcendency is a
pure logomachy. Call our concepts of ejective things self-transcendent
or the reverse, it makes no difference, so long as we don't differ about
the nature of that exalted virtue's fruits--fruits for us, of course,
humanistic fruits. If an Absolute were proved to exist for other
reasons, it might well appear that _his_ knowledge is terminated in
innumerable cases where ours is still incomplete. That, however, would
be a fact indifferent to our knowledge. The latter would grow neither
worse nor better, whether we acknowledged such an Absolute or left him
out.
So the notion of a knowledge still _in transitu_ and on its way joins
hands here with that notion of a 'pure experience' which I tried to
explain in my [essay] entitled 'Does Consciousness Exist?' The instant
field of the present is always experience in its 'pure' state, plain
unqualified actuality, a simple _that_, as yet undifferentiated into
thing and thought, and only virtually classifiable as objective fact or
as some one's opinion about fact. This is as true when the field is
conceptual as when it is perceptual. 'Memorial Hall' is 'there' in my
idea as much as when I stand before it. I proceed to act on its account
in either case. Only in the later experience that supersedes the present
one is this _naif_ immediacy retrospectively split into two parts, a
'consciousness' and its 'content,' and the content corrected or
confirmed. While still pure, or present, any experience--mine, for
example, of what I write about in these very lines--passes for 'truth.'
The morrow may reduce it to 'opinion.' The transcendentalist in all his
particular knowledges is as liable to this reduction as I am: his
Absolute does not save him. Why, then, need he quarrel with an account
of knowing that merely leaves it liable to this inevitable condition?
Why insist that knowing is a static relation out of time when it
practically seems so much a function of our active life? For a thing to
be valid, says Lotze, is the same as to make itself valid. When the
whole universe seems only to be making itself valid and to be still
incomplete (else why its ceaseless changing?) why, of all things,
should knowing be exempt? Why should it not be making itself valid like
everything else? That some parts of it may be already valid or verified
beyond dispute, the empirical philosopher, of course, like any one else,
may always hope.
VI. THE CONTERMINOUSNESS OF DIFFERENT MINDS[37]
With transition and prospect thus enthroned in pure experience, it is
impossible to subscribe to the idealism of the English school. Radical
empiricism has, in fact, more affinities with natural realism than with
the views of Berkeley or of Mill, and this can be easily shown.
For the Berkeleyan school, ideas (the verbal equivalent of what I term
experiences) are discontinuous. The content of each is wholly immanent,
and there are no transitions with which they are consubstantial and
through which their beings may unite. Your Memorial Hall and mine, even
when both are percepts, are wholly out of connection with each other.
Our lives are a congeries of solipsisms, out of which in strict logic
only a God could compose a universe even of discourse. No dynamic
currents run between my objects and your objects. Never can our minds
meet in the _same_.
The incredibility of such a philosophy is flagrant. It is 'cold,
strained, and unnatural' in a supreme degree; and it may be doubted
whether even Berkeley himself, who took it so religiously, really
believed, when walking through the streets of London, that his spirit
and the spirits of his fellow wayfarers had absolutely different towns
in view.