THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE PSYCHOLOGICAL STANDPOINT
The "psychological method," as so far presented, is an outline which
must be developed in detail before its philosophical import is revealed.
For several years following the publication of his first articles in
_Mind_ Dewey was occupied with the task of working out his method in
greater detail, and giving it more concrete form. His thought during
this period follows a fairly regular order of development, which is to
be sketched in the present chapter.
In 1887 Dewey published in _Mind_ an article entitled "Knowledge as
Idealisation."[21] This article is, in effect, a consideration of one of
the special problems of the "psychological method." If reality is an
eternal and all-inclusive consciousness, in which sensations and
meanings are ordered according to a rational system, what must be the
nature of the finite thought-process which apprehends this reality? In
his previous articles Dewey had proposed the "psychological method" as
an actual mode of investigation, and questions concerning the nature of
the human thought-process naturally forced themselves upon his
attention.
The thought-process is, to begin with, a relating activity which gives
meaning to experience. Says Dewey: "When Psychology recognizes that the
relating activity of mind is one not exercised _upon_ sensations, but
one which supplies relations and thereby makes meaning (makes
experience, as Kant said), Psychology will be in a position to explain,
and thus to become Philosophy."[22] This statement raises the more
specific question, what is meaning?
Every idea, Dewey remarks, has two aspects: existence and meaning.
"Recognizing that every psychical fact does have these two aspects, we
shall, for the present, confine ourselves to asking the nature,
function and origin of the aspect of meaning or significance--the
content of the idea as opposed to its existence."[23] The meaning aspect
of the idea cannot be reduced to the centrally excited image existences
which form a part of the existence-aspect of the idea. "I repeat, as
existence, we have only a clustering of sensuous feelings, stronger and
weaker."[24] But the thing is not perceived as a clustering of feelings;
the sensations are immediately interpreted as a significant object.
"Perceiving, to restate a psychological commonplace, is interpreting.
The content of the perception is what is signified."[25] Dewey's
treatment of sensations, at this point, is somewhat uncertain. If it be
a manifold that is given to the act of interpretation, Kant's difficulty
is again presented. The bare sensations taken by themselves mean
nothing, and yet everything does mean something in being apprehended.
The conclusion should be that there is no such thing as mere existence.
Dewey's judgment is undecided on this issue. "It is true enough," he
says, "that without the idea _as existence_ there would be no
experience; the sensuous clustering is a condition _sine qua non_ of
all, even the highest spiritual, consciousness. But it is none the less
true that if we could strip any psychical existence of all its qualities
except bare existence, there would be nothing left, not even existence,
for our intelligence.... If we take out of an experience all that it
_means_, as distinguished from what it _is_--a particular occurrence at
a certain time, there is no psychical experience. The barest fragment of
consciousness that can be hit upon has meaning as well as being."[26] An
interpretation of reality as truly organic would treat mechanical
sensation as a pure fiction. But Dewey clings to 'existence' as a
necessary 'aspect' of the psychical fact. The terms and relations never
entirely fuse, although they are indispensable to each other. There is
danger that the resulting view of experience will be somewhat angular
and structural.
At one point, indeed, Dewey asserts that there is no such thing as a
merely immediate psychical fact, at least for our experience. "So far is
it from being true that we know only what is _immediately_ present in
consciousness, that it should rather be said that what is _immediately_
present is never known."[27] But in the next paragraph Dewey remarks:
"That which is immediately present is the sensuous existence; that which
is known is the content conveyed by this existence."[28] The sensation
is not known, and therefore probably not experienced. In this case Dewey
is departing from his own principles, by introducing non-experienced
factors into his interpretation of experience. The language is
ambiguous. If nothing is immediately given, then the sensuous content is
not so given.
The 'sensuous existences' assumed by Dewey are the ghosts of Kant's
'manifold of sensation.' The difficulty comes out clearly in the
following passage: "It is indifferent to the sensation whether it is
interpreted as a cloud or as a mountain; a danger signal, or a signal of
open passage. The auditory sensation remains unchanged whether it is
interpreted as an evil spirit urging one to murder, or as intra-organic,
due to disordered blood-pressure.... It is not the sensation in and of
itself that means this or that object; it is the sensation as
associated, composed, identified, or discriminated with other
experiences; the sensation, in short, as mediated. The whole worth of
the sensation for intelligence is the meaning it has by virtue of its
relation to the rest of experience."[29]
There is an obvious parallel between this view of experience and Kant's.
Kant, indeed, transcended the notion that experience is a structure of
sensations set in a frame-work of thought forms; but the first
_Critique_ undoubtedly leaves the average reader with such a conception
of experience. It is unjust to Kant, however, to take the mechanical
aspect of his thought as its most important phase. He stands, in the
opinion of modern critics, at a half-way stage between the mechanism of
the eighteenth century and the organic logic of the nineteenth, and his
works point the way from the lower to the higher point of view. This
was recognized by Hegel and by his followers in England. How does it
happen, then, that Dewey, who was well-read in the philosophical
literature of the day, should have persisted in a view of experience
which appears to assume the externally organized manifold of the
_Critique of Pure Reason_? Or, to put the question more explicitly, why
did he retain as a fundamental assumption Kant's 'manifold of
sensations'?
So far, Dewey has been concerned with the nature of meaning. He now
turns to knowledge, and the knowing process as that which gives meaning
to experience. Knowledge, or science, he says, is a process of following
out the ideal element in experience. "The idealisation of science is
simply a further development of this ideal element. It is, in short,
only rendering explicit and definite the meaning, the idea, already
contained in perception."[30] But if perception is already organized by
thought, the sensations must have been related in a 'productive
imagination.' Dewey, however, does not recognize such a necessity. The
factor of meaning is ideal, he continues, because it is not present as
so much immediate content, but is present as symbolized or mediated. But
the question may be asked, "Whence come the ideal elements which give to
experience its meaning?" No answer can be given except by psychology, as
an inquiry into the facts, as contrasted with the logical necessity of
experience.
Sensations acquire meaning through being identified with and
discriminated from other sensations to which they are related. But it is
not as mere existences that they are compared and related, but as
already ideas or meanings. "The identification is of the meaning of the
present sensation with some meaning previously experienced, but which,
although previously experienced, still exists because it _is_ meaning,
and not occurrence."[31] The existences to which meanings attach come
and go, and are new for every new appearance of the idea in
consciousness; but the meanings remain. "The experience, as an existence
at a given time, has forever vanished. Its meaning, as an ideal quality,
remains as long as the mind does. Indeed, its remaining is the
remaining of the mind; the conservation of the ideal quality of
experience is what makes the mind a permanence."[32]
It is not possible, Dewey says, to imagine a primitive state in which
unmeaning sensations existed alone. Meaning cannot arise out of that
which has no meaning. "Sensations cannot revive each other except as
members of one whole of meaning; and even if they could, we should have
no beginning of significant experience. Significance, meaning, must be
already there. Intelligence, in short, is the one indispensable
condition of intelligent experience."[33]
Thinking is an act which idealizes experience by transforming sensations
into an intelligible whole. It works by seizing upon the ideal element
which is already there, conserving it, and developing it. It produces
knowledge by supplying relations to experience. Dewey realizes that his
act of intelligence is similar to Kant's 'apperceptive unity.' He says:
"The mention of Kant's name suggests that both his strength and his
weakness lie in the line just mentioned. It is his strength that he
recognizes that an apperceptive unity interpreting sensations through
categories which constitute the synthetic content of self-consciousness
is indispensable to experience. It is his weakness that he conceives
this content as purely logical, and hence as formal."[34] Kant's error
was to treat the self as formal and held apart from its material. "The
self does not work with _a priori_ forms upon an _a posteriori_
material, but intelligence as ideal (or _a priori_) constitutes
experience (or the _a posteriori_) as having meaning."[35] Dewey's
standpoint here seems to be similar to that of Green. But as Kant's
unity of apperception became for Green merely a symbol of the world's
inherent intelligibility, the latter did not regard it as an actual
process of synthesis. Dewey fails to make a distinction, which might
have been useful to him, between Kant's unity of apperception and his
productive imagination. It is the latter which Dewey retains, and he
tends to identify it with the empirical process of the understanding.
Knowing, psychologically considered, is a synthetic process. "And this
is to say that experience grows as intelligence adds out of its own
ideal content ideal quality.... The growth of the power of comparison
implies not a formal growth, but a synthetic internal growth."[36]
Dewey, of course, views understanding as an integral part of reality's
processes rather than as a process apart, but it is for him a very
special activity, which builds up the meaning of experience. "Knowledge
might be indifferently described, therefore, as a process of
idealisation of experience, or of realisation of intelligence. It is
each through the other. Ultimately the growth of experience must consist
in the development out of itself by intelligence of its own implicit
ideal content upon occasion of the solicitation of sensation."[37]
The difficulties of Dewey's original position are numerous. The relation
of the self, as a synthetic activity, to the "Eternal Consciousness," in
which meaning already exists in a completed form, is especially
perplexing. Does the self merely trace out the meaning already present
in reality, or is it a factor in the creation of meaning? It is clear
that if the thinking process is a genuinely synthetic activity, imposing
meaning on sensations, it literally 'makes the world' of our experience.
But, on the other hand, if meaning is given to thought, as a part of its
data, the self merely reproduces in a subjective experience the thought
which exists objectively in the eternal mind. The dilemma arises as a
result of Dewey's initial conception of reality as a structure of
sensations and meanings. This conception of reality must be given up, if
the notion of thought as a process of idealization is to be retained.
In 1888, Dewey's _Leibniz's New Essays Concerning the Human
Understanding_ appeared, and during the two years following he appears
to have become interested in ethical theory, the results of his study
beginning to appear in 1890. Dewey's ethical theories have so important
a bearing upon his logical theory as to demand special attention. They
will be reserved, therefore, for a separate chapter, and attention will
be given here to the more strictly logical studies of the period.
The three years which intervened between the publication of the essay on
"Knowledge as Idealisation" and the appearance of an article "On Some
Current Conceptions of the term 'Self,'" in _Mind_ (1890),[38] did not
serve to divert Dewey's attention from the inquiries in which he had
previously been interested. On the contrary, the later article shows how
persistently his mind must have dwelt upon the problems connected with
the notion of the self as a synthetic activity in experience.
The immediate occasion for the article on the Self was the appearance of
Professor Andrew Seth's work, _Hegelianism and Personality_ (1889).
Dewey appears to have been influenced by Seth at an even earlier
period,[39] and he now found the lectures on Hegel stimulating in
connection with his own problems about thought and reality.
It will not be necessary to go into the details of Dewey's criticism of
the three ideas of the self presented by Seth. Since it is Dewey's own
position that is in question, it is better to begin with his account of
the historical origin of these definitions, "chiefly as found in Kant,
incidentally in Hegel as related to Kant."[40] Dewey turns to the
'Transcendental Deduction,' and follows Kant's description of the
synthetic unity of apperception. "Its gist," he says, "in the second
edition of the _K.d.r.V._, is the proof that the identity of
self-consciousness involves the synthesis of the manifold of feelings
through rules or principles which render this manifold objective, and
that, therefore, the analytic identity of self-consciousness involves an
objective synthetic unity of consciousness."[41] To say that
self-consciousness is identical is a merely analytical proposition, and,
as it stands, unfruitful. "But if we ask how we know this sameness or
identity of consciousness, the barren principle becomes wonderfully
fruitful."[42] In order to know reality as mine, not only must the
consciousness that it is mine accompany each particular impression, but
each must be known as an element in _one_ consciousness. "The sole way
of accounting for this analytic identity of consciousness is through the
activity of consciousness in connecting or 'putting together' the
manifold of sense."[43]
In the 'Deduction' of the first _Critique_, Dewey continues, Kant begins
with the consciousness of objects, rather than with the identity of
self-consciousness. Here also consciousness implies a unity, which is
not merely formal, but one which actually connects the manifold of sense
by an act. "Whether, then, we inquire what is involved in mere sameness
of consciousness, or what is involved in an objective world, we get the
same answer: a consciousness which is not formal or analytic, but which
is synthetic of sense, and which acts universally (according to
principles) in this synthesis."[44]
The term 'Self,' as thus employed by Kant, Dewey says, is the
correlative of the intelligible world. "It is the transcendental self
looked at as 'there,' as a product, instead of as an activity or
process."[45] This, however, by no means exhausts what Kant means by the
self, for while he proceeds in the 'Deduction' as if the manifold of
sense and the synthetic unity of the self were strictly correlative, he
assumes a different attitude elsewhere. The manifold of sense is
something in relation to the thing-in-itself, and the forms of thought
have a reference beyond their mere application to the manifold. In the
other connections the self appears as something purely formal; something
apart from its manifestation in experience. In view of the wider meaning
of the self, Dewey asks, "Can the result of the transcendental deduction
stand without further interpretation?" It would appear that the content
of the self is not the same as the content of the known world. The self
is too great to exhaust itself in relation to sensation. "Sense is, as
it were, inadequate to the relations which constitute
self-consciousness, and thus there must also remain a surplusage in the
self, not entering into the make-up of the known world."[46] This
follows from the fact that, while the self is unconditioned, the
manifold of sensation is conditioned, as given, by the forms of space
and time. "Experience can never be complete enough to have a content
equal to that of self-consciousness, for experience can never escape its
limitation through space and time. Self-consciousness is real, and not
merely logical; it is the ground of the reality of experience; it is
wider than experience, and yet is unknown except so far as it is
reflected through its own determinations in experience,--this is the
result of our analysis of Kant, the _Ding-an-Sich_ being eliminated but
the Kantian method and all presuppositions not involved in the notion of
the _Ding-an-Sich_ being retained."[47]
Dewey's interpretation of Kant's doctrine as presented in the
'Deductions' is no doubt essentially correct. But granting that Kant
found it necessary to introduce a synthesis in imagination to account
for the unity of experience and justify our knowledge of its relations,
it must not be forgotten that this necessity followed from the nature of
his presuppositions. If the primal reality is a 'manifold of
sensations,' proceeding from a noumenal source, and lacking meaning and
relations, it follows that the manifold must be gathered up into a unity
before the experience which we actually apprehend can be accounted for.
But if reality is experience, possessing order and coherence in its own
nature, the productive imagination is rendered superfluous. Dewey,
however, clings to the notion that thought is a "synthetic activity"
which makes experience, and draws support from Kant for his doctrine.
Dewey now inquires what relation this revised Kantian conception of the
self bears to the view advanced by Seth, viz., that the idea of
self-consciousness is the highest category of thought and explanation.
Kant had tried to discover the different forms of synthesis, by a method
somewhat artificial to be sure, and had found twelve of them. While
Hegel's independent derivation and independent placing of the categories
must be accepted, it does not follow that the idea of self-consciousness
can be included in the list, even if it be considered the highest
category. "For it is impossible as long as we retain Kant's fundamental
presupposition--the idea of the partial determination of sensation by
relation to perception, apart from its relation to conception--to employ
self-consciousness as a principle of explaining any fact of
experience."[48] It cannot be said of the self of Kant that it is simply
an hypostatized category. "It is more, because the self of Kant ... is
more than any category: it is a real activity or being."[49]
Hegel, Dewey continues, develops only one aspect of Kant's _Critique_,
that is, the logical aspect, and consequently does not fulfil Kant's
entire purpose. "This is, I repeat, not an immanent 'criticism of
categories' but an analysis of experience into its aspects and really
constituent elements."[50] Dewey, as usual, shows his opposition to a
'merely logical' method in philosophy. He plainly indicates his
dissatisfaction with the Hegelian development of Kant's standpoint. He
is unfair to Hegel, however, in attributing to him a 'merely logical'
method. Kant's self was, as Dewey asserts, something more than a
category of thought, but it is scarcely illuminating to say of Kant that
his purpose was the analysis of experience into its 'constituent
elements.' Kant did, indeed, analyze experience, but this analysis must
be regarded as incidental to a larger purpose. No criticism need be made
of Dewey's preference for the psychological, as opposed to the logical
aspects of Kant's work. The only comment to be made is that this
attitude is not in line with the modern development of idealism.
The question which finally emerges, as the result of Dewey's inquiry, is
this: What is the nature of this self-activity which is more than the
mere category of self-consciousness? "As long as sensation was regarded
as given by a thing-in-itself, it was possible to form a conception of
the self which did not identify it with the world. But when sense is
regarded as having meaning only because it is 'there' as determined by
thought, just as thought is 'there' only as determining sense, it would
seem either that the self is just their synthetic unity (thus equalling
the world) or that it must be thrust back of experience, and become a
thing-in-itself. The activity of the self can hardly be a third
something distinct from thought and from sense, and it cannot be their
synthetic union. What, then, is it?"[51] Green, Dewey says, attempted to
solve the difficulty by his "idea of a completely realized self making
an animal organism the vehicle of its own reproduction in time."[52]
This attempt was at least in the right direction, acknowledging as it
did the fact that the self is something more than the highest category
of thought.
Dewey admits his difficulties in a way that makes extended comment
unnecessary. He does not challenge the validity of the Hegelian
development of the Kantian categories, but proposes to make more of the
self than the Hegelians ordinarily do. This synthetic self-activity must
reveal itself as a concrete process; that is one of the demands of his
psychological standpoint. It is impossible to foresee what this process
would be as an actual fact of experience.
Although the next article which is to be considered does not offer a
direct answer to the problems which have so far been raised, it
nevertheless indicates the general direction which Dewey's thought is to
take. This article, on "The Present Position of Logical Theory," was
published in the _Monist_ in 1891.[53] Dewey appears at this time as the
champion of the transcendental, or Hegelian logic, in opposition to
formal and inductive logic. His attitude toward Hegel undergoes a marked
change at this period. Dewey's general objection to formal logic is well
expressed in the following passage: "It is assumed, in fine, that
thought has a nature of its own independent of facts or subject-matter;
that this thought, _per se_, has certain forms, and that these forms are
not forms which the facts themselves take, varying with the facts, but
are rigid frames, into which the facts are to be set. Now all of this
conception--the notion that the mind has a faculty of thought apart from
things, the notion that this faculty is constructed, in and of itself,
with a fixed framework, the notion that thinking is the imposing of this
fixed framework on some unyielding matter called particular objects, or
facts--all of this conception appears to me as highly scholastic."[54]
The inductive logic, Dewey says, still clings to the notion of thought
as a faculty apart from its material, operating with bare forms upon
sensations. Kant had been guilty of this separation and never overcame
it successfully. Because formal logic views thought as a process apart
from the matter with which it has to deal, it can never be the logic of
science. "For if science means anything, it is that our ideas, our
judgments may in some degree reflect and report the fact itself. Science
means, on one hand, that thought is free to attack and get hold of its
subject-matter, and, on the other, that fact is free to break through
into thought; free to impress itself--or rather to express itself--in
intelligence without vitiation or deflection. Scientific men are true to
the instinct of the scientific spirit in fighting shy of a distinct _a
priori_ factor supplied to fact from the mind. Apriorism of this sort
must seem like an effort to cramp the freedom of intelligence and of
fact, to bring them under the yoke of fixed, external forms."[55]
In opposition to this formal, and, as he calls it, subjective standpoint
in logic, Dewey stands for the transcendental logic, which supposes that
there is some kind of vital connection between thought and fact; "that
thinking, in short, is nothing but the fact in its process of
translation from brute impression to lucent meaning."[56] Hegel holds
this view of logic. "This, then, is why I conceive Hegel--entirely apart
from the value of any special results--to represent the quintessence of
the scientific spirit. He denies not only the possibility of getting
truth out of a formal, apart thought, but he denies the existence of any
faculty of thought which is other than the expression of fact
itself."[57] At another place Dewey expresses his view of Hegel as
follows: "Relations of thought are, to Hegel, the typical forms of
meaning which the subject-matter takes in its various progressive stages
of being understood."[58]
Dewey's defence of the transcendental logic is vigorous. He maintains
that the disrespect into which the transcendental logic had fallen, was
due to the fact that the popular comprehension of the transcendental
movement had been arrested at Kant, and had never gone on to Hegel.
The objection made to Kant's standpoint is that it treated thought as a
process over against experience, imposing its forms upon it from
without. "Kant never dreams, for a moment, of questioning the existence
of a special faculty of thought with its own peculiar and fixed forms.
He states and restates that thought in itself exists apart from fact and
occupies itself with fact given to it from without."[59] While Kant gave
the death blow to a merely formal conception of thought, indirectly, and
opened up the way for an organic interpretation, he did not achieve the
higher standpoint himself. Remaining at the standpoint of Kant,
therefore, the critic of the transcendental logic has much to complain
of. Scientific men deal with facts, look to them for guidance, and must
suppose that thought and fact pass into each other directly, and without
vitiation or deflection. They are correct in opposing a conception which
would interpose conditions between thought on the one hand and the facts
on the other.
But Hegel is true to the scientific spirit. "When Hegel calls thought
objective he means just what he says: that there is no special, apart
faculty of thought belonging to and operated by a mind existing separate
from the outer world. What Hegel means by objective thought is the
meaning, the significance of the fact itself; and by methods of thought
he understands simply the processes in which this meaning of fact is
evolved."[60]
If Hegel is true to the scientific spirit; if his logic presupposes that
there is an intrinsic connection of thought and fact, and views science
simply as the progressive realization of the world's ideality, then the
only questions to be asked about his logic are questions of fact
concerning his treatment of the categories. Is the world such a
connected system as he holds it to be? "And, if a system, does it, in
particular, present such phases (such relations, categories) as Hegel
shows forth?"[61] These questions are wholly objective. Such a logic as
Hegel's could scarcely make headway when it was first produced, because
the significance of the world, its ideal character, had not been brought
to light through the sciences. We are now reaching a stage, however,
where science has brought the ideality of the world into the foreground,
where it may become as real and objective a material of study as
molecules and vibrations.
This appreciation of Hegel would seem to indicate that Dewey has finally
grasped the significance of Hegel's development of the Kantian
standpoint. A close reading of the article, however, dispels this
impression. Dewey believes that he has found in Hegel a support for his
own psychological method in philosophy. It is scarcely necessary to say
that Hegel's standpoint was anything but psychological. Dewey has
already given up Kant; he will presently desert Hegel. A psychological
interpretation of the thought-process in its relations to reality is not
compatible with the critical method in philosophy.
In the next article to be examined, "The Superstition of Necessity," in
the _Monist_ (1893),[62] Dewey begins to attain the psychological
description of thought at which he had been aiming. This article was
suggested, as Dewey indicates in a foot-note, by Mr. C. S. Pierce's
article, "The Doctrine of Necessity Examined," in the _Monist_
(1892).[63] Although Dewey acknowledges his indebtedness to Pierce for
certain suggestions, the two articles have little in common.
Dewey had consistently maintained that thought is a synthetic activity
through which reality is idealized or takes on meaning. It is from this
standpoint that he approaches the subject of necessity. The following
passage reveals the connection between his former position and the one
that he is now approaching: "The whole, although first in the order of
reality, is last in the order of knowledge. The complete statement of
the whole is the goal, not the beginning of wisdom. We begin, therefore,
with fragments, which are taken for wholes; and it is only by piecing
together these fragments, and by the transformation of them involved in
this combination, that we arrive at the real fact. There comes a stage
at which the recognition of the unity begins to dawn upon us, and yet,
the tradition of the many distinct wholes survives; judgment has to
combine these two contradictory conceptions; it does so by the theory
that the dawning unity is an effect necessarily produced by the
interaction of the former wholes. Only as the consciousness of the unity
grows still more is it seen that instead of a group of independent
facts, held together by 'necessary' ties, there is one reality, of which
we have been apprehending various fragments in succession and
attributing to them a spurious wholeness and independence. We learn (but
only at the end) that instead of discovering and then connecting
together a number of separate realities, we have been engaged in the
progressive definition of one fact."[64]
Dewey adds to his idea that our knowledge of reality is a progressive
development of its implicit ideality through a synthetic
thought-process, the specification that the process of idealization
occurs in connection with particular crises and situations. There comes
a stage, he says, when unity begins to dawn and meaning emerges.
Necessity is a term used in connection with these transitions from
partial to greater realization of the world's total meaning. Necessity
is a middle term, or go-between. It marks a critical stage in the
development of knowledge. No necessity attaches to a whole, as such.
"_Qua_ whole, the fact simply is what it is; while the parts, instead of
being necessitated either by one another or by the whole, are the
analyzed factors constituting, in their complete circuit, the
whole."[65] But when the original whole breaks up, through its inability
to comprehend new facts under its unity, a process of judgment occurs
which aims at the establishment of a new unity. "The judgment of
necessity, in other words, is exactly and solely the transition in our
knowledge from unconnected judgments to a more comprehensive synthesis.
Its value is just the value of this transition; as negating the old
partial and isolated judgments--in its backward look--necessity has
meaning; in its forward look--with reference to the resulting completely
organized subject-matter--it is itself as false as the isolated
judgments which it replaces."[66] We say that things must be so, when we
do not know that they are so; that is, while we are in course of
determining what they are. Necessity has its value exclusively in this
transition.
Dewey attempts to show, in a discussion which need not be followed in
detail, that there is nothing radical in his view, and that it finds
support among the idealists and empiricists alike. Thinkers of both
schools (he quotes Caird and Venn) admit that the process of judgment
involves a change in objects, at least as they are for us. There is a
transformation of their value and meaning. "This point being held in
common, both schools must agree that _the progress of judgment is
equivalent to a change in the value of objects_--that objects as they
are for us, as known, change with the development of our judgments."[67]
Dewey proposes to give a more specific description of this process of
transformation, and especially, to show how the idea of necessity is
involved in it.
The process of transformation is occasioned by practical necessity. Men
have a tendency to take objects as just so much and no more; to attach
to a given subject-matter these predicates, and no others. There is a
principle of inertia, or economy, in the mind, which leads it to
maintain objects in their _status quo_ as long as possible. "There is no
doubt that the reluctance of the mind to give up an object once made
lies deep in its economies.... I wish here to call attention to the fact
that the forming of a number of distinct objects has its origin in
practical needs of our nature. The analysis and synthesis which is first
made is that of most practical importance...."[68] We tend to retain
such objects as we have, and it is not until "the original
subject-matter has been overloaded with various and opposing predicates
that we think of doubting the correctness of our first judgments, of
putting our first objects under suspicion."[69] Once the Ptolemaic
system is well established, cycles and epicycles are added without
number, rather than reconstruct the original object. When, finally, we
are compelled to make some change, we tend to invent some new object to
which the predicates can attach. "When qualities arise so incompatible
with the object already formed that they cannot be referred to that
object, it is easier to form a new object on their basis than it is to
doubt the correctness of the old...."[70] Let us suppose, then, that
under stress of practical need, we refer the new predicates to some new
object, and have, as a consequence, two objects. (Dewey illustrates this
situation by specific examples.) This separation of the two objects
cannot continue long, before we begin to discover that the two objects
are related elements in a larger whole. "The wall of partition between
the two separate 'objects' cannot be broken at one attack; they have to
be worn away by the attrition arising from their slow movement into one
another. It is the 'necessary' influence which one exerts upon the other
that finally rubs away the separateness and leaves them revealed as
elements of one unified whole."[71]
The concept of necessity has its validity in such a movement of judgment
as has been described. "Necessity, as the middle term, is the mid-wife
which, from the dying isolation of judgments, delivers the unified
judgment just coming into life--it being understood that the
separateness of the original judgments is not as yet quite negated, nor
the unity of the coming judgment quite attained."[72] The judgment of
necessity connects itself with certain facts in the situation which are
immediately concerned with our practical activities. These are facts
which, before the crisis arises, have been neglected; they are elements
in the situation which have been regarded as unessential, as not yet
making up a part of the original object. "Although after our desire has
been met they have been eliminated as accidental, as irrelevant, yet
when the experience is again desired their integral membership in the
real fact has to be recognized. This is done under the guise of
considering them as means which are necessary to bring about the
end."[73] We have the if so, then so situation. "_If_ we are to reach an
end we _must_ take certain means; while so far as we want an undefined
end, an end in general, conditions which accompany it are mere
accidents."[74] The end of this process of judgment in which necessity
appears as a half-way stage, is the unity of reality; a whole into which
the formerly discordant factors can be gathered together.
Only a detailed study of the original text, with its careful
illustrations, can furnish a thorough understanding of Dewey's position.
Enough has been said, however, to show that this psychological account
of the judgment process is a natural outgrowth of his former views, and
that, as it stands, it is still in conformity with his original
idealism. The article as a whole marks a half-way stage in Dewey's
philosophical development. Looking backward, it is a partial fulfilment
of the demands of "The Psychological Standpoint." It is a psychological
description of the processes whereby self-consciousness specifies itself
into parts which are still related to the whole. Looking forward, it
forecasts the functional theory of knowledge. We have, to begin with,
objects given as familiar or known experiences. So long as these are not
put under suspicion or examined, they simply are themselves, or are
non-cognitionally experienced. But on the occasion of a conflict in
experience between opposed facts and their meanings, a process of
judgment arises, whose function is to restore unity. It is in this
process of judgment as an operation in the interests of the unity of
experience, that the concepts, necessity and contingency, have their
valid application and use. They are instruments for effecting a
transformation of experience. This is the root idea of functional
instrumentalism. It is apparent, therefore, that Dewey's later
functionalism resulted from the natural growth and development of the
psychological standpoint which he adopted at the beginning of his
philosophical career.
FOOTNOTES:
[21] Vol. XII, pp. 382-396.
[22] _Ibid._, p. 394.
[23] _Op. cit._, p. 383.
[24] _Ibid._
[25] _Ibid._, p. 384.
[26] _Ibid._
[27] _Op. cit._, p. 385.
[28] _Ibid._
[29] _Ibid._, p. 388.
[30] _Op. cit._, p. 390.
[31] _Ibid._, p. 392.
[32] _Op. cit._
[33] _Ibid._, p. 393.
[34] _Ibid._, p. 394.
[35] _Ibid._, p. 395.
[36] _Op. cit._
[37] _Ibid._, p. 396. (The last sentence forecasts Dewey's later
contention that knowing is a specific act operating upon the occasion of
need.)
[38] Vol. XV, pp. 58-74.
[39] See _Mind_, Vol. XI, 1886, p. 170.
[40] _Ibid._, p. 63.
[41] _Ibid._
[42] _Ibid._, p. 64.
[43] _Op. cit._
[44] _Ibid._, p. 65.
[45] _Ibid._
[46] _Op. cit._, p. 67.
[47] _Ibid._, p. 68.
[48] _Op. cit._, p. 70.
[49] _Ibid._, p. 71.
[50] _Ibid._
[51] _Op. cit._, p. 73.
[52] _Ibid._
[53] Vol. II, pp. 1-17.
[54] _Op. cit._, p. 4.
[55] _Ibid._, p. 12.
[56] _Ibid._, p. 3.
[57] _Ibid._, p. 14.
[58] _Ibid._, p. 13.
[59] _Op. cit._, p. 11.
[60] _Ibid._, p. 12 f.
[61] _Op. cit._, p. 14.
[62] Vol. III, pp. 362-379.
[63] Vol. II, pp. 321-337.
[64] _The Monist_, Vol. III, 1893, p. 364.
[65] _Ibid._, p. 363.
[66] _Op. cit._
[67] _Ibid._, p. 364 f.
[68] _Ibid._, p. 367.
[69] _Ibid._, p. 366.
[70] _Op. cit._, p. 367.
[71] _Ibid._, p. 368.
[72] _Ibid._, p. 363.
[73] _Op. cit._, p. 372.
[74] _Ibid._