absurd. Since we are bound to treat it as respectfully as noetic monism,
until the facts shall have tipped the beam, we find that our pragmatism,
tho originally nothing but a method, has forced us to be friendly to the
pluralistic view. It MAY be that some parts of the world are connected
so loosely with some other parts as to be strung along by nothing but
the copula AND. They might even come and go without those other parts
suffering any internal change. This pluralistic view, of a world of
ADDITIVE constitution, is one that pragmatism is unable to rule out from
serious consideration. But this view leads one to the farther hypothesis
that the actual world, instead of being complete 'eternally,' as the
monists assure us, may be eternally incomplete, and at all times subject
to addition or liable to loss.
It IS at any rate incomplete in one respect, and flagrantly so. The very
fact that we debate this question shows that our KNOWLEDGE is incomplete
at present and subject to addition. In respect of the knowledge it
contains the world does genuinely change and grow. Some general remarks
on the way in which our knowledge completes itself--when it does
complete itself--will lead us very conveniently into our subject for
this lecture, which is 'Common Sense.'
To begin with, our knowledge grows IN SPOTS. The spots may be large or
small, but the knowledge never grows all over: some old knowledge always
remains what it was. Your knowledge of pragmatism, let us suppose, is
growing now. Later, its growth may involve considerable modification of
opinions which you previously held to be true. But such modifications
are apt to be gradual. To take the nearest possible example, consider
these lectures of mine. What you first gain from them is probably a
small amount of new information, a few new definitions, or distinctions,
or points of view. But while these special ideas are being added, the
rest of your knowledge stands still, and only gradually will you 'line
up' your previous opinions with the novelties I am trying to instil, and
modify to some slight degree their mass.
You listen to me now, I suppose, with certain prepossessions as to my
competency, and these affect your reception of what I say, but were I
suddenly to break off lecturing, and to begin to sing 'We won't go home
till morning' in a rich baritone voice, not only would that new fact be
added to your stock, but it would oblige you to define me differently,
and that might alter your opinion of the pragmatic philosophy, and in
general bring about a rearrangement of a number of your ideas. Your mind
in such processes is strained, and sometimes painfully so, between its
older beliefs and the novelties which experience brings along.
Our minds thus grow in spots; and like grease-spots, the spots spread.
But we let them spread as little as possible: we keep unaltered as much
of our old knowledge, as many of our old prejudices and beliefs, as we
can. We patch and tinker more than we renew. The novelty soaks in; it
stains the ancient mass; but it is also tinged by what absorbs it. Our
past apperceives and co-operates; and in the new equilibrium in which
each step forward in the process of learning terminates, it happens
relatively seldom that the new fact is added RAW. More usually it is
embedded cooked, as one might say, or stewed down in the sauce of the
old.
New truths thus are resultants of new experiences and of old truths
combined and mutually modifying one another. And since this is the case
in the changes of opinion of to-day, there is no reason to assume that
it has not been so at all times. It follows that very ancient modes
of thought may have survived through all the later changes in men's
opinions. The most primitive ways of thinking may not yet be wholly
expunged. Like our five fingers, our ear-bones, our rudimentary caudal
appendage, or our other 'vestigial' peculiarities, they may remain as
indelible tokens of events in our race-history. Our ancestors may at
certain moments have struck into ways of thinking which they might
conceivably not have found. But once they did so, and after the fact,
the inheritance continues. When you begin a piece of music in a certain
key, you must keep the key to the end. You may alter your house ad
libitum, but the ground-plan of the first architect persists--you can
make great changes, but you cannot change a Gothic church into a Doric
temple. You may rinse and rinse the bottle, but you can't get the taste
of the medicine or whiskey that first filled it wholly out.
My thesis now is this, that OUR FUNDAMENTAL WAYS OF THINKING ABOUT
THINGS ARE DISCOVERIES OF EXCEEDINGLY REMOTE ANCESTORS, WHICH HAVE BEEN
ABLE TO PRESERVE THEMSELVES THROUGHOUT THE EXPERIENCE OF ALL SUBSEQUENT
TIME. They form one great stage of equilibrium in the human mind's
development, the stage of common sense. Other stages have grafted
themselves upon this stage, but have never succeeded in displacing it.
Let us consider this common-sense stage first, as if it might be final.
In practical talk, a man's common sense means his good judgment, his
freedom from excentricity, his GUMPTION, to use the vernacular word. In
philosophy it means something entirely different, it means his use of
certain intellectual forms or categories of thought. Were we lobsters,
or bees, it might be that our organization would have led to our using
quite different modes from these of apprehending our experiences. It
MIGHT be too (we cannot dogmatically deny this) that such categories,
unimaginable by us to-day, would have proved on the whole as serviceable
for handling our experiences mentally as those which we actually use.
If this sounds paradoxical to anyone, let him think of analytical
geometry. The identical figures which Euclid defined by intrinsic
relations were defined by Descartes by the relations of their points to
adventitious co-ordinates, the result being an absolutely different and
vastly more potent way of handling curves. All our conceptions are what
the Germans call denkmittel, means by which we handle facts by thinking
them. Experience merely as such doesn't come ticketed and labeled, we
have first to discover what it is. Kant speaks of it as being in
its first intention a gewuehl der erscheinungen, a rhapsodie der
wahrnehmungen, a mere motley which we have to unify by our wits. What
we usually do is first to frame some system of concepts mentally
classified, serialized, or connected in some intellectual way, and then
to use this as a tally by which we 'keep tab' on the impressions that
present themselves. When each is referred to some possible place in the
conceptual system, it is thereby 'understood.' This notion of parallel
'manifolds' with their elements standing reciprocally in 'one-to-one
relations,' is proving so convenient nowadays in mathematics and logic
as to supersede more and more the older classificatory conceptions.
There are many conceptual systems of this sort; and the sense
manifold is also such a system. Find a one-to-one relation for your
sense-impressions ANYWHERE among the concepts, and in so far forth you
rationalize the impressions. But obviously you can rationalize them by
using various conceptual systems.
The old common-sense way of rationalizing them is by a set of concepts
of which the most important are these:
Thing;
The same or different;
Kinds;
Minds;
Bodies;
One Time;
One Space;
Subjects and attributes;
Causal influences;
The fancied;
The real.
We are now so familiar with the order that these notions have woven for
us out of the everlasting weather of our perceptions that we find it
hard to realize how little of a fixed routine the perceptions follow
when taken by themselves. The word weather is a good one to use here.
In Boston, for example, the weather has almost no routine, the only law
being that if you have had any weather for two days, you will probably
but not certainly have another weather on the third. Weather-experience
as it thus comes to Boston, is discontinuous and chaotic. In point of
temperature, of wind, rain or sunshine, it MAY change three times a
day. But the Washington weather-bureau intellectualizes this disorder by
making each successive bit of Boston weather EPISODIC. It refers it to
its place and moment in a continental cyclone, on the history of which
the local changes everywhere are strung as beads are strung upon a cord.
Now it seems almost certain that young children and the inferior animals
take all their experiences very much as uninstructed Bostonians take
their weather. They know no more of time or space as world-receptacles,
or of permanent subjects and changing predicates, or of causes,
or kinds, or thoughts, or things, than our common people know of
continental cyclones. A baby's rattle drops out of his hand, but the
baby looks not for it. It has 'gone out' for him, as a candle-flame goes
out; and it comes back, when you replace it in his hand, as the flame
comes back when relit. The idea of its being a 'thing,' whose permanent
existence by itself he might interpolate between its successive
apparitions has evidently not occurred to him. It is the same with dogs.
Out of sight, out of mind, with them. It is pretty evident that they
have no GENERAL tendency to interpolate 'things.' Let me quote here a
passage from my colleague G. Santayana's book.
"If a dog, while sniffing about contentedly, sees afar off his master
arriving after long absence...the poor brute asks for no reason why
his master went, why he has come again, why he should be loved, or why
presently while lying at his feet you forget him and begin to grunt and
dream of the chase--all that is an utter mystery, utterly unconsidered.
Such experience has variety, scenery, and a certain vital rhythm;
its story might be told in dithyrambic verse. It moves wholly by
inspiration; every event is providential, every act unpremeditated.
Absolute freedom and absolute helplessness have met together: you
depend wholly on divine favour, yet that unfathomable agency is not
distinguishable from your own life. ...[But] the figures even of that
disordered drama have their exits and their entrances; and their cues
can be gradually discovered by a being capable of fixing his
attention and retaining the order of events. ...In proportion as such
understanding advances each moment of experience becomes consequential
and prophetic of the rest. The calm places in life are filled with power
and its spasms with resource. No emotion can overwhelm the mind, for
of none is the basis or issue wholly hidden; no event can disconcert it
altogether, because it sees beyond. Means can be looked for to escape
from the worst predicament; and whereas each moment had been formerly
filled with nothing but its own adventure and surprised emotion, each
now makes room for the lesson of what went before and surmises what
may be the plot of the whole."[Footnote: The Life of Reason: Reason in
Common Sense, 1905, p. 59.]
Even to-day science and philosophy are still laboriously trying to part
fancies from realities in our experience; and in primitive times they
made only the most incipient distinctions in this line. Men believed
whatever they thought with any liveliness, and they mixed their dreams
with their realities inextricably. The categories of 'thought' and
'things' are indispensable here--instead of being realities we now call
certain experiences only 'thoughts.' There is not a category, among
those enumerated, of which we may not imagine the use to have thus
originated historically and only gradually spread.
That one Time which we all believe in and in which each event has its
definite date, that one Space in which each thing has its position,
these abstract notions unify the world incomparably; but in their
finished shape as concepts how different they are from the loose
unordered time-and-space experiences of natural men! Everything that
happens to us brings its own duration and extension, and both are
vaguely surrounded by a marginal 'more' that runs into the duration
and extension of the next thing that comes. But we soon lose all our
definite bearings; and not only do our children make no distinction
between yesterday and the day before yesterday, the whole past being
churned up together, but we adults still do so whenever the times are
large. It is the same with spaces. On a map I can distinctly see the
relation of London, Constantinople, and Pekin to the place where I am;
in reality I utterly fail to FEEL the facts which the map symbolizes.
The directions and distances are vague, confused and mixed. Cosmic space
and cosmic time, so far from being the intuitions that Kant said they
were, are constructions as patently artificial as any that science can
show. The great majority of the human race never use these notions, but
live in plural times and spaces, interpenetrant and DURCHEINANDER.
Permanent 'things' again; the 'same' thing and its various 'appearances'
and 'alterations'; the different 'kinds' of thing; with the 'kind' used
finally as a 'predicate,' of which the thing remains the 'subject'--what
a straightening of the tangle of our experience's immediate flux and
sensible variety does this list of terms suggest! And it is only
the smallest part of his experience's flux that anyone actually does
straighten out by applying to it these conceptual instruments. Out of
them all our lowest ancestors probably used only, and then most vaguely
and inaccurately, the notion of 'the same again.' But even then if
you had asked them whether the same were a 'thing' that had endured
throughout the unseen interval, they would probably have been at a
loss, and would have said that they had never asked that question, or
considered matters in that light.
Kinds, and sameness of kind--what colossally useful DENKMITTEL for
finding our way among the many! The manyness might conceivably have
been absolute. Experiences might have all been singulars, no one of them
occurring twice. In such a world logic would have had no application;
for kind and sameness of kind are logic's only instruments. Once we know
that whatever is of a kind is also of that kind's kind, we can travel
through the universe as if with seven-league boots. Brutes surely never
use these abstractions, and civilized men use them in most various
amounts.
Causal influence, again! This, if anything, seems to have been an
antediluvian conception; for we find primitive men thinking that almost
everything is significant and can exert influence of some sort. The
search for the more definite influences seems to have started in the
question: "Who, or what, is to blame?"--for any illness, namely, or
disaster, or untoward thing. From this centre the search for causal
influences has spread. Hume and 'Science' together have tried to
eliminate the whole notion of influence, substituting the entirely
different DENKMITTEL of 'law.' But law is a comparatively recent
invention, and influence reigns supreme in the older realm of common
sense.
The 'possible,' as something less than the actual and more than the
wholly unreal, is another of these magisterial notions of common sense.
Criticize them as you may, they persist; and we fly back to them the
moment critical pressure is relaxed. 'Self,' 'body,' in the substantial
or metaphysical sense--no one escapes subjection to THOSE forms
of thought. In practice, the common-sense DENKMITTEL are uniformly
victorious. Everyone, however instructed, still thinks of a 'thing' in
the common-sense way, as a permanent unit-subject that 'supports' its
attributes interchangeably. No one stably or sincerely uses the more
critical notion, of a group of sense-qualities united by a law. With
these categories in our hand, we make our plans and plot together, and
connect all the remoter parts of experience with what lies before our
eyes. Our later and more critical philosophies are mere fads and fancies
compared with this natural mother-tongue of thought.
Common sense appears thus as a perfectly definite stage in our
understanding of things, a stage that satisfies in an extraordinarily
successful way the purposes for which we think. 'Things' do exist, even
when we do not see them. Their 'kinds' also exist. Their 'qualities' are
what they act by, and are what we act on; and these also exist. These
lamps shed their quality of light on every object in this room. We
intercept IT on its way whenever we hold up an opaque screen. It is
the very sound that my lips emit that travels into your ears. It is the
sensible heat of the fire that migrates into the water in which we boil
an egg; and we can change the heat into coolness by dropping in a
lump of ice. At this stage of philosophy all non-European men without
exception have remained. It suffices for all the necessary practical
ends of life; and, among our own race even, it is only the highly
sophisticated specimens, the minds debauched by learning, as Berkeley
calls them, who have ever even suspected common sense of not being
absolutely true.
But when we look back, and speculate as to how the common-sense
categories may have achieved their wonderful supremacy, no reason
appears why it may not have been by a process just like that by which
the conceptions due to Democritus, Berkeley, or Darwin, achieved their
similar triumphs in more recent times. In other words, they may have
been successfully DISCOVERED by prehistoric geniuses whose names the
night of antiquity has covered up; they may have been verified by the
immediate facts of experience which they first fitted; and then from
fact to fact and from man to man they may have SPREAD, until all
language rested on them and we are now incapable of thinking naturally
in any other terms. Such a view would only follow the rule that has
proved elsewhere so fertile, of assuming the vast and remote to conform
to the laws of formation that we can observe at work in the small and
near.
For all utilitarian practical purposes these conceptions amply suffice;
but that they began at special points of discovery and only gradually
spread from one thing to another, seems proved by the exceedingly
dubious limits of their application to-day. We assume for certain
purposes one 'objective' Time that AEQUABILITER FLUIT, but we don't
livingly believe in or realize any such equally-flowing time. 'Space'
is a less vague notion; but 'things,' what are they? Is a constellation
properly a thing? or an army? or is an ENS RATIONIS such as space or
justice a thing? Is a knife whose handle and blade are changed the
'same'? Is the 'changeling,' whom Locke so seriously discusses, of the
human 'kind'? Is 'telepathy' a 'fancy' or a 'fact'? The moment you pass
beyond the practical use of these categories (a use usually suggested
sufficiently by the circumstances of the special case) to a merely
curious or speculative way of thinking, you find it impossible to say
within just what limits of fact any one of them shall apply.
The peripatetic philosophy, obeying rationalist propensities, has
tried to eternalize the common-sense categories by treating them very
technically and articulately. A 'thing' for instance is a being, or
ENS. An ENS is a subject in which qualities 'inhere.' A subject is a
substance. Substances are of kinds, and kinds are definite in number,
and discrete. These distinctions are fundamental and eternal. As terms
of DISCOURSE they are indeed magnificently useful, but what they mean,
apart from their use in steering our discourse to profitable issues,
does not appear. If you ask a scholastic philosopher what a substance
may be in itself, apart from its being the support of attributes, he
simply says that your intellect knows perfectly what the word means.
But what the intellect knows clearly is only the word itself and its
steering function. So it comes about that intellects SIBI PERMISSI,
intellects only curious and idle, have forsaken the common-sense level
for what in general terms may be called the 'critical' level of thought.
Not merely SUCH intellects either--your Humes and Berkeleys and Hegels;
but practical observers of facts, your Galileos, Daltons, Faradays, have
found it impossible to treat the NAIFS sense-termini of common sense
as ultimately real. As common sense interpolates her constant 'things'
between our intermittent sensations, so science EXTRApolates her world
of 'primary' qualities, her atoms, her ether, her magnetic fields, and
the like, beyond the common-sense world. The 'things' are now invisible
impalpable things; and the old visible common-sense things are supposed
to result from the mixture of these invisibles. Or else the whole NAIF
conception of thing gets superseded, and a thing's name is interpreted
as denoting only the law or REGEL DER VERBINDUNG by which certain of our
sensations habitually succeed or coexist.
Science and critical philosophy thus burst the bounds of common sense.
With science NAIF realism ceases: 'Secondary' qualities become unreal;
primary ones alone remain. With critical philosophy, havoc is made of
everything. The common-sense categories one and all cease to represent
anything in the way of BEING; they are but sublime tricks of human
thought, our ways of escaping bewilderment in the midst of sensation's
irremediable flow.
But the scientific tendency in critical thought, tho inspired at first
by purely intellectual motives, has opened an entirely unexpected range
of practical utilities to our astonished view. Galileo gave us accurate
clocks and accurate artillery-practice; the chemists flood us with new
medicines and dye-stuffs; Ampere and Faraday have endowed us with the
New York subway and with Marconi telegrams. The hypothetical things that
such men have invented, defined as they have defined them, are showing
an extraordinary fertility in consequences verifiable by sense. Our
logic can deduce from them a consequence due under certain conditions,
we can then bring about the conditions, and presto, the consequence
is there before our eyes. The scope of the practical control of nature
newly put into our hand by scientific ways of thinking vastly exceeds
the scope of the old control grounded on common sense. Its rate of
increase accelerates so that no one can trace the limit; one may even
fear that the BEING of man may be crushed by his own powers, that his
fixed nature as an organism may not prove adequate to stand the strain
of the ever increasingly tremendous functions, almost divine creative
functions, which his intellect will more and more enable him to wield.
He may drown in his wealth like a child in a bath-tub, who has turned on
the water and who cannot turn it off.
The philosophic stage of criticism, much more thorough in its negations
than the scientific stage, so far gives us no new range of practical
power. Locke, Hume, Berkeley, Kant, Hegel, have all been utterly
sterile, so far as shedding any light on the details of nature goes, and
I can think of no invention or discovery that can be directly traced
to anything in their peculiar thought, for neither with Berkeley's
tar-water nor with Kant's nebular hypothesis had their respective
philosophic tenets anything to do. The satisfactions they yield to their
disciples are intellectual, not practical; and even then we have to
confess that there is a large minus-side to the account.