reports are thus the chief notes of modern ethics. Scepticism and
traditionalism, empiricism and rationalism, crude naturalisms and
all-embracing idealisms, flourish side by side--all the more flourish,
one suspects, because side by side. Spencer exults because natural
science reveals that a rapid transit system of evolution is carrying
us automatically to the goal of perfect man in perfect society; and
his English idealistic contemporary, Green, is so disturbed by the
removal from nature of its moral qualities, that he tries to show that
this makes no difference, since nature in any case is constituted and
known through a spiritual principle which is as permanent as nature is
changing. An Amiel genteelly laments the decadence of the inner life,
while his neighbor Nietzsche brandishes in rude ecstasy the banner of
brute survival as a happy omen of the final victory of nobility of
mind. The reasonable conclusion from such a scene is that there is
taking place a transformation of attitude towards moral theory rather
than mere propagation of varieties among theories. The classic theories
all agreed in one regard. They all alike assumed the existence of
_the_ end, the _summum bonum_, the final goal; and of _the_ separate
moral force that moves to that goal. Moralists have disputed as to
whether the end is an aggregate of pleasurable state of consciousness,
enjoyment of the divine essence, acknowledgment of the law of duty,
or conformity to environment. So they have disputed as to the path by
which the final goal is to be reached: fear or benevolence? reverence
for pure law or pity for others? self-love or altruism? But these very
controversies implied that there was but the one end and the one means.
The transformation in attitude, to which I referred, is the growing
belief that the proper business of intelligence is discrimination
of multiple and present goods and of the varied immediate means of
their realization; not search for the one remote aim. The progress of
biology has accustomed our minds to the notion that intelligence is not
an outside power presiding supremely but statically over the desires
and efforts of man, but is a method of adjustment of capacities and
conditions within specific situations. History, as the lecturer on
that subject told us, has discovered itself in the idea of process.
The genetic standpoint makes us aware that the systems of the past are
neither fraudulent impostures nor absolute revelations; but are the
products of political, economic, and scientific conditions whose change
carries with it change of theoretical formulations. The recognition
that intelligence is properly an organ of adjustment in difficult
situations makes us aware that past theories were of value so far as
they helped carry to an issue the social perplexities from which they
emerged. But the chief impact of the evolutionary method is upon the
present. Theory having learned what it cannot do, is made responsible
for the better performance of what needs to be done, and what only a
broadly equipped intelligence can undertake: study of the conditions
out of which come the obstacles and the resources of adequate life,
and developing and testing the ideas that, as working hypotheses, may
be used to diminish the causes of evil and to buttress and expand the
sources of good. This program is indeed vague, but only unfamiliarity
with it could lead one to the conclusion that it is less vague than the
idea that there is a single moral ideal and a single moral motive force.
From this point of view there is no separate body of moral rules; no
separate system of motive powers; no separate subject-matter of moral
knowledge, and hence no such thing as an isolated ethical science.
If the business of morals is not to speculate upon man’s final end
and upon an ultimate standard of right, it is to utilize physiology,
anthropology, and psychology to discover all that can be discovered of
man, his organic powers and propensities. If its business is not to
search for the one separate moral motive, it is to converge all the
instrumentalities of the social arts, of law, education, economics,
and political science upon the construction of intelligent methods of
improving the common lot.
If we still wish to make our peace with the past, and to sum up the
plural and changing goods of life in a single word, doubtless the term
happiness is the one most apt. But we should again exchange free morals
for sterile metaphysics, if we imagine that “happiness” is any less
unique than the individuals who experience it; any less complex than
the constitution of their capacities, or any less variable than the
objects upon which their capacities are directed.
To many timid, albeit sincere, souls of an earlier century, the decay
of the doctrine that all true and worthful science is knowledge of
final causes seemed fraught with danger to science and to morals. The
rival conception of a wide open universe, a universe without bounds in
time or space, without final limits of origin or destiny, a universe
with the lid off, was a menace. We now face in moral science a similar
crisis and like opportunity, as well as share in a like dreadful
suspense. The abolition of a fixed and final goal and causal force in
nature did not, as matter of fact, render rational conviction less
important or less attainable. It was accompanied by the provision of
a technique of persistent and detailed inquiry in all special fields
of fact, a technique which led to the detection of unsuspected forces
and the revelation of undreamed of uses. In like fashion we may
anticipate that the abolition of _the_ final goal and _the_ single
motive power and _the_ separate and infallible faculty in morals, will
quicken inquiry into the diversity of specific goods of experience, fix
attention upon their conditions, and bring to light values now dim and
obscure. The change may relieve men from responsibility for what they
cannot do, but it will promote thoughtful consideration of what they
may do and the definition of responsibility for what they do amiss
because of failure to think straight and carefully. Absolute goods
will fall into the background, but the question of making more sure
and extensive the share of all men in natural and social goods will be
urgent, a problem not to be escaped nor evaded.
Morals, philosophy, returns to its first love; love of the wisdom that
is nurse, as nature is mother, of good. But it returns to the Socratic
principle equipped with a multitude of special methods of inquiry and
testing; with an organized mass of knowledge, and with control of the
arrangements by which industry, law, and education may concentrate upon
the problem of the participation by all men and women, up to their
capacity of absorption, in all attained values. Morals may then well
leave to poetry and to art, the task (so unartistically performed by
philosophy since Plato) of gathering together and rounding out, into
one abiding picture, the separate and special goods of life. It may
leave this task with the assurance that the resultant synthesis will
not depict any final and all-inclusive good, but will add just one more
specific good to the enjoyable excellencies of life.
Humorous irony shines through most of the harsh glances turned towards
the idea of an experimental basis and career for morals. Some shiver
in the fear that morals will be plunged into anarchic confusion--a
view well expressed by a recent writer in the saying that if the _a
priori_ and transcendental basis of morals be abandoned “we shall have
merely the same certainty that now exists in physics and chemistry”!
Elsewhere lurks the apprehension that the progress of scientific method
will deliver the purposive freedom of man bound hand and foot to the
fatal decrees of iron necessity, called natural law. The notion that
laws govern and forces rule is an animistic survival. It is a product
of reading nature in terms of politics in order to turn around and then
read politics in the light of supposed sanctions of nature. This idea
passed from medieval theology into the science of Newton, to whom the
universe was the dominion of a sovereign whose laws were the laws of
nature. From Newton it passed into the deism of the eighteenth century,
whence it migrated into the philosophy of the Enlightenment, to make
its last stand in Spencer’s philosophy of the fixed environment and the
static goal.
No, nature is not an unchangeable order, unwinding itself majestically
from the reel of law under the control of deified forces. It is an
indefinite congeries of changes. Laws are not governmental regulations
which limit change, but are convenient formulations of selected
portions of change followed through a longer or shorter period of
time, and then registered in statistical forms that are amenable to
mathematical manipulation. That this device of shorthand symbolization
presages the subjection of man’s intelligent effort to fixity of law
and environment is interesting as a culture survival, but is not
important for moral theory. Savage and child delight in creating
bogeys from which, their origin and structure being conveniently
concealed, interesting thrills and shudders may be had. Civilized
man in the nineteenth century outdid these bugaboos in his image of
a fixed universe hung on a cast-iron framework of fixed, necessary,
and universal laws. Knowledge of nature does not mean subjection to
predestination, but insight into courses of change; an insight which is
formulated in “laws,” that is, methods of subsequent procedure.
Knowledge of the process and conditions of physical and social
change through experimental science and genetic history has one
result with a double name: increase of control, and increase of
responsibility; increase of power to direct natural change, and
increase of responsibility for its equitable direction toward fuller
good. Theory located within progressive practice instead of reigning
statically supreme over it, means practice itself made responsible
to intelligence; to intelligence which relentlessly scrutinizes the
consequences of every practice, and which exacts liability by an
equally relentless publicity. As long as morals occupies itself with
mere ideals, forces and conditions as they are will be good enough for
“practical” men, since they are then left free to their own devices
in turning these to their own account. As long as moralists plume
themselves upon possession of the domain of the categorical imperative
with its bare precepts, men of executive habits will always be at
their elbows to regulate the concrete social conditions through which
the form of law gets its actual filling of specific injunctions. When
freedom is conceived to be transcendental, the coercive restraint of
immediate necessity will lay its harsh hand upon the mass of men.
In the end, men do what they can do. They refrain from doing what they
cannot do. They do what their own specific powers in conjunction with
the limitations and resources of the environment permit. The effective
control of their powers is not through precepts, but through the
regulation of their conditions. If this regulation is to be not merely
physical or coercive, but moral, it must consist of the intelligent
selection and determination of the environments in which we act; and
in an intelligent exaction of responsibility for the use of men’s
powers. Theorists inquire after the “motive” to morality, to virtue and
the good, under such circumstances. What then, one wonders, is their
conception of the make-up of human nature and of its relation to virtue
and to goodness? The pessimism that dictates such a question, if it be
justified, precludes any consideration of morals.
The diversion of intelligence from discrimination of plural and
concrete goods, from noting their conditions and obstacles, and from
devising methods for holding men responsible for their concrete use
of powers and conditions, has done more than brute love of power
to establish inequality and injustice among men. It has done more,
because it has confirmed with social sanctions the principle of feudal
domination. All men require moral sanctions in their conduct: the
consent of their kind. Not getting it otherwise, they go insane to
feign it. No man ever lived with the exclusive approval of his own
conscience. Hence the vacuum left in practical matters by the remote
irrelevancy of transcendental morals has to be filled in somehow.
It is filled in. It is filled in with class-codes, class-standards,
class-approvals--with codes which recommend the practices and habits
already current in a given circle, set, calling, profession, trade,
industry, club, or gang. These class-codes always lean back upon
and support themselves by the professed ideal code. This latter
meets them more than half-way. Being in its pretense a theory for
regulating practice, it must demonstrate its practicability. It is
uneasy in isolation, and travels hastily to meet with compromise and
accommodation the actual situation in all its brute unrationality.
Where the pressure is greatest--in the habitual practice of the
political and economic chieftains--there it accommodates the most.
Class-codes of morals are sanctions, under the caption of ideals, of
uncriticised customs; they are recommendations, under the head of
duties, of what the members of the class are already most given to
doing. If there are to obtain more equable and comprehensive principles
of action, exacting a more impartial exercise of natural power and
resource in the interests of a common good, members of a class must
no longer rest content in responsibility to a class whose traditions
constitute its conscience, but be made responsible to a society whose
conscience is its free and effectively organized intelligence.
In such a conscience alone will the Socratic injunction to man to know
himself be fulfilled.
THE EXPERIMENTAL THEORY OF KNOWLEDGE[7]
It should be possible to discern and describe a knowing as one
identifies any object, concern, or event. It must have its own marks;
it must offer characteristic features--as much so as a thunder-storm,
the constitution of a State, or a leopard. In the search for this
affair, we are first of all desirous for something which is for itself,
contemporaneously with its occurrence, a cognition, not something
called knowledge by another and from without--whether this other be
logician, psychologist, or epistemologist. The “knowledge” may turn
out false, and hence no knowledge; but this is an after-affair; it may
prove to be rich in fruitage of wisdom, but if this outcome be only
wisdom after the event, it does not concern us. What we want is just
something which takes itself as knowledge, rightly or wrongly.
I
This means a specific case, a sample. Yet instances are proverbially
dangerous--so naïvely and graciously may they beg the questions at
issue. Our recourse is to an example so simple, so much on its face
as to be as innocent as may be of assumptions. This case we shall
gradually complicate, mindful at each step to state just what new
elements are introduced. Let us suppose a smell, just a floating
odor. This odor may be anchored by supposing that it moves to action;
it starts changes that end in picking and enjoying a rose. This
description is intended to apply to the course of events witnessed and
recounted from without. What sort of a course must it be to constitute
a knowledge, or to have somewhere within its career that which
deserves this title? The smell, _imprimis_, is there; the movements
that it excites are there; the final plucking and gratification are
experienced. But, let us say, the smell is not the smell of the rose;
the resulting change of the organism is not a sense of walking and
reaching; the delicious finale is not the fulfilment of the movement,
and, through that, of the original smell; “is not,” in each case
meaning is “not experienced as” such. We may take, in short, these
experiences in a brutely serial fashion. The smell, _S_, is replaced
(and displaced) by a felt movement, _K_, this is replaced by the
gratification, _G_. Viewed from without, as we are now regarding it,
there is _S-K-G_. But from within, for itself, it is now _S_, now
_K_, now _G_, and so on to the end of the chapter. Nowhere is there
looking before and after; memory and anticipation are not born. Such an
experience neither is, in whole or in part, a knowledge, nor does it
exercise a cognitive function.
Here, however, we may be halted. If there is anything present in
“consciousness” at all, we may be told (at least we constantly are so
told) there must be knowledge of it as present--present, at all events,
in “consciousness.” There is, so it is argued, knowledge at least
of a simple apprehensive type, knowledge of the acquaintance order,
knowledge _that_, even though not knowledge _what_. The smell, it is
admitted, does not know _about_ anything else, nor is anything known
_about_ the smell (the same thing, perhaps); but the smell is known,
either by itself, or by the mind, or by some subject, some unwinking,
unremitting eye. No, we must reply; there is no apprehension without
some (however slight) context; no acquaintance which is not either
recognition or expectation. Acquaintance is presence honored with an
escort; presence is introduced as familiar, or an associate springs up
to greet it. Acquaintance always implies a little friendliness; a trace
of re-knowing, of anticipatory welcome or dread of the trait to follow.
This claim cannot be dismissed as trivial. If valid, it carries with
it the distance between being and knowing: and the recognition of
an element of mediation, that is, of art, in all knowledge. This
disparity, this transcendence, is not something which holds of _our_
knowledge, of finite knowledge, just marking the gap between our
type of consciousness and some other with which we may contrast it
after the manner of the agnostic or the transcendentalist (who hold
so much property in joint ownership!), but exists because knowing is
knowing, that way of bringing things to bear upon things which we call
reflection--a manipulation of things experienced in the light one of
another.
“Feeling,” I read in a recent article, “feeling is immediately
acquainted with its own quality, with its own subjective being.”[8] How
and whence this duplication in the inwards of feeling into feeling
the knower and feeling the known? into feeling as being and feeling
as acquaintance? Let us frankly deny such monsters. Feeling _is_
its own quality; is its own _specific_ (whence and why, once more,
_subjective_?) being. If this statement be dogmatism, it is at least
worth insistent declaration, were it only by way of counter-irritant
to that other dogmatism which asserts that being in “consciousness” is
always presence for or in knowledge. So let us repeat once more, that
to be a smell (or anything else) is one thing, to be _known_ as smell,
another; to be a “feeling” one thing, to be _known_ as a “feeling”
another.[9] The first is thinghood; existence indubitable, direct;
in this way all things _are_ that are in “consciousness” at all.[10]
The second is _reflected_ being, things indicating and calling for
other things--something offering the possibility of truth and hence
of falsity. The first is genuine immediacy; the second is (in the
instance discussed) a pseudo-immediacy, which in the same breath that
it proclaims its immediacy smuggles in another term (and one which
is unexperienced both in itself and in its relation) the subject or
“consciousness,” to which the immediate is related.[11]
But we need not remain with dogmatic assertions. To be acquainted
with a thing or with a person has a definite empirical meaning; we
have only to call to mind what it is to be genuinely and empirically
acquainted, to have done forever with this uncanny presence which,
though bare and simple presence, is yet known, and thus is clothed
upon and complicated. To be acquainted with a thing is to be assured
(from the standpoint of the experience itself) that it is of such and
such a character; that it will behave, if given an opportunity, in
such and such a way; that the obviously and flagrantly present trait
is associated with fellow traits that will show themselves, if the
leadings of the present trait are followed out. To be acquainted is
to anticipate to some extent, on the basis of prior experience. I am,
say, barely acquainted with Mr. Smith: then I have no extended body of
associated qualities along with those palpably present, but at least
some one suggested trait occurs; his nose, his tone of voice, the
place where I saw him, his calling in life, an interesting anecdote
about him, etc. To be acquainted is to know what a thing is _like_ in
some particular. If one is acquainted with the smell of a flower it
means that the smell is not just smell, but reminds one of some other
experienced thing which stands in continuity with the smell. There is
thus supplied a condition of control over or purchase upon what is
present, the possibility of translating it into terms of some other
trait not now sensibly present.
Let us return to our example. Let us suppose that _S_ is not just
displaced by _K_ and then by _G_. Let us suppose it persists; and
persists not as an unchanged _S_ alongside _K_ and _G_, nor yet as
fused with them into a new further quale _J_. For in such events, we
have only the type already considered and rejected. For an observer
the new quale might be more complex, or fuller of meaning, than the
original _S_, _K_, or _G_, but might not be experienced as complex. We
might thus suppose a composite photograph which should suggest nothing
of the complexity of its origin and structure. In this case we should
have simply another picture.
But we may also suppose that the blur of the photograph suggests
the superimposition of pictures and something of their character.
Then we get another, and for our problem, much more fruitful kind of
persistence. We will imagine that the final _G_ assumes this form:
Gratification-terminating-movement-induced-by-smell. The smell is still
present; it has persisted. It is not present in its original form,
but is represented with a quality, an office, that of having excited
activity and thereby terminating its career in a certain quale of
gratification. It is not _S_, but Σ; that is _S_ with an increment of
meaning due to maintenance and fulfilment through a process. _S_ is no
longer just smell, but smell which has excited and thereby secured.
Here we have a cognitive, but not a cognitional thing. In saying that
the smell is finally experienced as _meaning_ gratification (through
intervening handling, seeing, etc.) and meaning it not in a hapless
way, but in a fashion which operates to effect what is meant, we
retrospectively attribute intellectual force and function to the
smell--and this is what is signified by “cognitive.” Yet the smell is
not cognitional, because it did not knowingly intend to mean this; but
is found, after the event, to have meant it. Nor again is the final
experience, the Σ or transformed _S_, a knowledge.
Here again the statement may be challenged. Those who agree with the
denial that bare presence of a quale in “consciousness” constitutes
acquaintance and simple apprehension, may now turn against us, saying
that experience of fulfilment of meaning is just what we mean by
knowledge, and this is just what the Σ of our illustration is. The
point is fundamental. As the smell at first was presence or being, less
than knowing, so the fulfilment is an experience that is more than
knowing. Seeing and handling the flower, enjoying the full meaning of
the smell as the odor of just this beautiful thing, is not knowledge
because it is more than knowledge.
As this may seem dogmatic, let us suppose that the fulfilment,
the realization, experience, is a knowledge. Then how shall it be
distinguished from and yet classed with other things called knowledge,
viz., reflective, discursive cognitions? Such knowledges are what
they are precisely because they are not fulfilments, but intentions,
aims, schemes, symbols of overt fulfilment. Knowledge, perceptual and
conceptual, of a hunting dog is prerequisite in order that I may really
hunt with the hounds. The hunting in turn may increase my knowledge of
dogs and their ways. But the knowledge of the dog, _qua_ knowledge,
remains characteristically marked off from the use of that knowledge
in the fulfilment experience, the hunt. The hunt is a _realization_ of
knowledge; it alone, if you please, verifies, validates, knowledge, or
supplies tests of truth. The prior knowledge of the dog, was, if you
wish, hypothetical, lacking in assurance or categorical certainty. The
hunting, the fulfilling, realizing experience alone _gives_ knowledge,
because it alone completely assures; makes faith good in works.