first falls into the psychological fallacy; and then having himself
taken the psychologist’s attitude (the attitude which is interested in
meanings as themselves self-inclosed “ideas”) accuses the empiricist
whom he criticises of having confused mere psychological existence
with logical validity. That is, he begins by supposing that the smell
of our illustration (and all the cognitional objects for which this
is used as a symbol) is a purely mental or psychical state, so that
the question of logical reference or intention is the problem of how
the merely mental can “know” the extra-mental. But from a strictly
empirical point of view, the smell which knows is no more merely mental
than is the rose known. We may, if we please, say that the smell when
involving conscious meaning or intention is “mental,” but this term
“mental” does not denote some separate type of existence--existence
as a state of consciousness. It denotes only the fact that the smell,
a real and non-psychical object, now exercises an intellectual
_function_. This new property involves, as James has pointed out, an
_additive_ relation--a new property possessed by a non-mental object,
when that object, occurring in a new context, assumes a further
office and use.[17] To be “in the mind” means to be in a situation
in which the function of intending is directly concerned.[18] Will
not some one who believes that the knowing experience is _ab origine_
a strictly “mental” thing, explain how, as matter of fact, it does
get a specific, extra-mental reference, capable of being tested,
confirmed, or refuted? Or, if he believes that viewing it as merely
mental expresses only the form it takes for psychological analysis,
will he not explain why he so persistently attributes the inherently
“mental” characterization of it to the empiricist whom he criticises?
An object _becomes_ meaning when used empirically in a certain way;
and, under certain circumstances, the exact character and worth of
this meaning _becomes_ an object of solicitude. But the transcendental
epistemologist with his purely psychical “meanings” and his purely
extra-empirical “truths” assumes a _Deus ex Machina_ whose mechanism
is preserved a secret. And as if to add to the arbitrary character of
his assumption, he has to admit that the transcendental _a priori_
faculty by which mental states get objective reference does not in the
least help us to discriminate, _in the concrete_, between an objective
reference that is false and one that is valid.
(2) The counterpart assumption to that of pure aboriginal “mental
states” is, of course, that of an Absolute Reality, fixed and complete
in itself, of which our “mental states” are bare transitory hints,
their true meaning and their transcendent goal being the Truth _in
rerum natura_. If the organ and medium of knowing is a self-inclosed
order of existence different in kind from the Object to be known,
then that Object must stand out there in complete aloofness from the
concrete purpose and procedure of knowing it. But if we go back to
the knowing as a natural occurrence, capable of description, we find
that just as a smell does not mean Rose in general (or anything else
at large), but means a _specific_ group of qualities whose experience
is intended and anticipated, so the function of knowing is always
expressed in connections between a given experience and a specific
possible wanted experience. The “rose” that is meant in a particular
situation _is_ the rose of that situation. When this experience is
consummated, it is achieved as the fulfilment of the conditions in
which just _that_ intention was entertained--not as the fulfilment of
a faculty of knowledge or a meaning in general. Subsequent meanings
and subsequent fulfilments may increase, may enrich the consummating
experience; the object or content of the rose as known may be other and
fuller next time and so on. But we have no right to set up “a rose” at
large or in general as the object of the knowing odor; the object of a
knowledge is always strictly correlative to that particular thing which
means it. It is not something which can be put in a wholesale way over
against that which cognitively refers to it, as when the epistemologist
puts the “real” rose (object) over against a merely phenomenal or
empirical rose which _this_ smell happens to mean. As the meaning gets
more complex, fuller, more finely discriminated, the object which
realizes or fulfils the meaning grows similarly in quality. But we
cannot set up a rose, an object of fullest, complete, and exhaustive
content as that which is really meant by any and every odor of a
rose, whether it consciously meant to mean it or not. The test of
the cognitional rectitude of the odor lies in the _specific_ object
which it sets out to secure. This is the meaning of the statement that
the import of _each_ term is found in its relationship to the other.
It applies to object meant as well as to the meaning. Fulfilment,
completion are always relative terms. _Hence the criterion of the truth
or falsity of the meaning, of the adequacy, of the cognitional thing
lies within the relationships of the situation and not without._ The
thing that means another by means of an intervening operation either
succeeds or fails in accomplishing the operation indicated, while this
operation either gives or fails to give the object meant. Hence the
truth or falsity of the original cognitional object.
IV
From this excursion, I return in conclusion to a brief general
characterization of those situations in which we are aware that
things mean other things and are so critically aware of it that, in
order to increase the probability of fulfilment and to decrease the
chance of frustration, all possible pains are taken to regulate the
meanings that attach to things. These situations define that type of
knowing which we call _scientific_. There are things that claim to
mean other experiences; in which the trait of meaning other objects
is not discovered _ab extra_, and after the event, but is part of the
thing itself. This trait of the thing is as realistic, as specific,
as any other of its traits. It is, therefore, as open to inspection
and determination as to its nature, as is any other trait. Moreover,
since it is upon this trait that assurance (as distinct from accident)
of fulfilment depends, an especial interest, an absorbing interest,
attaches to its determination. Hence the scientific type of knowledge
and its growing domination over other sorts.
We _employ_ meanings in all intentional constructions of experience--in
all anticipations, whether artistic, utilitarian or technological,
social or moral. The success of the anticipation is found to depend
upon the character of the meaning. Hence the stress upon a right
determination of these meanings. Since they are the instruments upon
which fulfilment depends _so far as that is controlled_ or other than
accidental, they become themselves objects of surpassing interest. For
all persons at some times, and for one class of persons (scientists)
at almost all times, the determination of the meanings employed in
the control of fulfilments (of acting upon meanings) is central. The
experimental or pragmatic theory of knowledge explains the dominating
importance of science; it does not depreciate it or explain it away.
Possibly pragmatic writers are to blame for the tendency of their
critics to assume that the practice they have in mind is utilitarian
in some narrow sense, referring to some preconceived and inferior
use--though I cannot recall any evidence for this admission. But
what the pragmatic theory has in mind is precisely the fact that
all the affairs of life which need regulation--_all values of all
types_--depend upon utilizations of meanings. Action is not to be
limited to anything less than the carrying out of ideas, than the
execution, whether strenuous or easeful, of meanings. Hence the
surpassing importance which comes to attach to the careful, impartial
construction of the meanings, and to their constant survey and resurvey
with reference to their value as evidenced by experiences of fulfilment
and deviation.
That truth denotes _truths_, that is, specific verifications,
combinations of meanings and outcomes reflectively viewed, is,
one may say, the central point of the experimental theory. Truth,
in general or in the abstract, is a just name for an experienced
relation among the things of experience: that sort of relation in
which intents are retrospectively viewed from the standpoint of the
fulfilment which they secure through their own natural operation
or incitement. Thus the experimental theory explains directly and
simply the absolutistic tendency to translate concrete true things
into the general relationship, Truth, and then to hypostatize this
abstraction into identity with real being, Truth _per se_ and _in se_,
of which all transitory things and events--that is, all experienced
realities--are only shadowy futile approximations. This type of
relationship is central for man’s will, for man’s conscious endeavor.
To select, to conserve, to extend, to propagate those meanings which
the course of events has generated, to note their peculiarities, to
be in advance on the alert for them, to search for them anxiously, to
substitute them for meanings that eat up our energy in vain, defines
the aim of rational effort and the goal of legitimate ambition. The
absolutistic theory is the transfer of this moral or voluntary law of
selective action into a quasi-physical (that is, metaphysical) law of
indiscriminate being. Identify metaphysical being with _significant
excellent_ being--that is, with those relationships of things which, in
our moments of deepest insight and largest survey, we would continue
and reproduce--and the experimentalist, rather than the absolutist,
is he who has a right to proclaim the supremacy of Truth, and the
superiority of the life devoted to Truth for its own sake over that of
“mere” activity. But to read back into an order of things which exists
without the participation of our reflection and aim, the quality which
defines the purpose of our thought and endeavor is at one and the same
stroke to mythologize reality and to deprive the life of thoughtful
endeavor of its ground for being.
THE INTELLECTUALIST CRITERION FOR TRUTH[19]
I
Among the influences that have worked in contemporary philosophy
towards disintegration of intellectualism of the epistemological type,
and towards the substitution of a philosophy of experience, the work of
Mr. Bradley must be seriously counted. One has, for example, only to
compare his metaphysics with the two fundamental contentions of T. H.
Green, namely, that reality is a single, eternal, and all-inclusive
system of relations, and that this system of relations is one in kind
with that process of relating which constitutes our thinking, to be
instantly aware of a changed atmosphere. Much of Bradley’s writings
is a sustained and deliberate polemic against intellectualism of the
Neo-Kantian type. When, however, we find conjoined to this criticism
an equally sustained contention that the philosophic conception of
reality must be based on an exclusively intellectual criterion, a
criterion belonging to and confined to theory, we have a situation
that is thought-provoking. The situation grows in interest when it is
remembered that there is a general and growing tendency among those
who appeal in philosophy to a strictly intellectualistic _method_ of
defining “reality,” to insist that the reality reached by this method
has a super-intellectual _content_: that intellectual, affectional,
and volitional features are all joined and fused in “ultimate”
reality. The curious character of the situation is that Reality is
an “absolute experience” of which the intellectual is simply one
partial and transmuted moment. Yet this reality is attained unto,
in philosophic method, by exclusive emphasis upon the intellectual
aspect of present experience and by systematic exclusion of exactly
the emotional, volitional features which with respect to content are
insisted upon! Under such circumstances the cynically-minded are moved
to wonder whether this tremendous insistence upon one factor in present
experience at the expense of others, is not because this is the only
way to maintain the notion of “Absolute Experience,” and to prevent
it from collapsing into ordinary everyday experience. This paradox is
not peculiar to Mr. Bradley. Looking at the Neo-Kantian movement in
the broad in its modern form, one might almost say that its prominent
feature is its insistence upon reaching a “Reality” that includes
extra-intellectual factors and phases, traits that are ideal in a moral
and emotional sense, by an exclusive recognition of the function of
knowledge in its isolation.
Such being the case, an examination of Mr. Bradley’s method and
criterion may have far-reaching implications. First, let us set
before ourselves the general points of Mr. Bradley’s indictment of
intellectualism.[20] Knowledge or judgment works by means of thought;
it is predication of idea (meaning) of existence as its subject. Its
final aim is to effect a complete union or harmony of existence and
meaning. But it is fore-doomed to failure, for in realizing its end
it must employ means which contradict its own purpose. This inherent
incapacity lurks in judgment with respect to subject, predicate, and
copula. The predicate or meaning necessary to complete the reality
presented in the subject can be referred to the latter and united with
it only by being itself alienated from existence. It heals the wounds
or deficiencies of its own subject (and in the end all deficiencies are
to the modern idealist discrepancies) only on condition of inflicting
another wound,--only by sundering meaning from a prior union with
existence in some other phase. This latter existence, therefore, is
always left out in the cold. It is as if we wanted to get all the cloth
in the world into one garment and our only way of accomplishing this
were to tear off a portion from one piece of goods in order to patch it
on to another.
The subject of the judgment, moreover, as well as the predicate,
stands in the way of judgment fulfilling its own task. It has
“sensuous infinitude” and it has “immediacy,” but these two traits
contradict each other. The details of the subject always go beyond
itself, being indefinitely related to something beyond. “In its given
content it has relations which do not terminate within that content”
(_ibid._, p. 176), while in its immediacy it presents an undivided
union of existence and meaning. No subject can be mere existence any
more than it can be mere meaning. It is always existent or embodied
meaning. As such it claims individuality or the character of a single
subsistent whole. But this indispensable claim is inconsistent with its
ragged-edged character, its indefinite external reference, which is
indispensable to it as subject that it may require and receive further
meaning from predication.
With respect to the copula the following quotation from the
“Principles” of Logic (p. 10) may serve: “Judgment proper is the
_act_ which refers the ideal content (recognized as such) to the
reality beyond the act.” In other words, judgment as act (and it is
the act which is expressed in the copula) must always fall outside
of the content of knowledge as such; yet since this act certainly
falls within reality, it would have to be recognized and stated by
any knowledge pretending to competency with respect to reality as a
whole. These considerations, stated in this way, are highly technical
and presuppose a knowledge not merely of Mr. Bradley’s own logic, but
also of the logical analysis of knowledge initiated by Kant and carried
on by Herbart, Lotze, and others. Their main import may, however, be
stated in comparatively non-technical form. Human experience is full of
discrepancies. Were experience purely a matter of brute existence (such
as we sometimes imagine the animals’ experience to be) it would be
totally lacking in meaning and there would be no problems, no thinking,
no occasion for thinking, and hence no philosophy. On the other hand,
if experience were a complete, tight-jointed union of existence and
meaning, there would be no dissatisfaction, no problems, no cause for
efforts to patch up defects and contradictions. Existences, things,
would embody all the meanings that they suggest; while abstract
meanings, values that are _merely_ ideal, that are projected or thought
of but not fulfilled, would be totally unheard of. But our experience
stands in marked contrast to both these types of experience. It
is neither an affair of meaningless existence nor of existence
self-luminous with fulfilled meaning. All things that we experience
have _some_ meaning, but that meaning is always so partially embodied
in things that we cannot rest in them. They point beyond themselves;
they indicate meanings which they do not fulfil; they suggest values
which they fail to embody, and when we go to other things for the
fruition of what is denied, we either find the same situation of
division over again, or we find even more positive disappointment
and frustration--we find contrary meanings set up. Now all thinking
grows out of this discrepancy between existence and the meaning which
it partially embodies and partially refuses, which it suggests but
declines to express. Yet thinking, the mode of bringing existence and
meaning into harmony with each other, always works by selection, by
abstraction; it sets up and projects meanings which are ideal only,
footless, in the air, matters of thought only, not of sentiency or
immediate existence. It emphasizes the ideal of a completed union
of existence and meaning, but is helpless to effect it. And this
helplessness (according to Mr. Bradley) is not due to external pressure
but to the very structure of thought itself.
From every point of view knowledge operates under conditions, (and
these not externally imposed but inherent in its own nature as
judgment,) that render it incapable of realizing its aim of complete
union of existence and meaning. Granted the argument, and it is
difficult to imagine a more serious indictment against the pretensions
of philosophy to reach “Reality” _via_ the exclusive path of knowledge.
The presence of contradiction is Mr. Bradley’s criterion for
“appearance,” just as its absence is his criterion for “reality.” It
thus goes without saying that knowledge and truth which we can attain
are matters of appearance. Contradiction between existence and meaning
is its last word. This is not merely a logical deduction from Mr.
Bradley’s position, but is expressly stated by him. “Thus the truth
belongs to existence, but it does not as such exist.... Truth shows
a dissection but never an actual life” (“Appearance and Reality,” p.
167). Again, “every truth is appearance since in it we have divorce
of quality from being” (_ibid._, p. 187). “Even absolute truth seems
in the end to turn out erroneous.... Internal discrepancy belongs
irremovably to truth’s proper character.... Truth is one aspect of
experience and is therefore made imperfect and limited by what it fails
to include” (_ibid._, pp. 544-545). Nothing could be more explicit as
to the inherently contradictory character of truth, both as an ideal
and as an accomplished fact; nothing more positive as to the unreality
or appearance-character of truth. We cannot, on Mr. Bradley’s method,
stop here. Not only is knowledge--working as it does through thought
which is always partial, selective, abstractive--doomed to failure
in accomplishing its task, but the existence of the contradiction
between the suggestion of meanings by existence and this realization in
existence is itself due to thought.
Speaking of thought he says: “The relational form is a compromise on
which thought stands and which it develops.” And all the particular
antinomies which he discusses are interpreted as having their basis
in the category of relation (_ibid._, p. 180). In his section on
Appearance he goes through various aspects and distinctions of the
world, such as primary and secondary qualities, substance and its
properties, relation and qualitative elements, space and time, motion
and change, causation, etc., pointing out irreconcilable discrepancies
in them. He does not, in a _generalized_ way, expressly refer them
to any common source or root. But it seems a fair inference that the
relational character of thought is at the bottom of the whole trouble:
so that we have in the cases mentioned precisely the same situation
_in concreto_ which is set forth _in abstracto_ in the discussion of
thought. The contradictions brought up are in every case resolved
into the fundamental discrepancy supposed to exist between relations
and elements related. In each case there is the ideal of a final
unity in which relations and elements as such disappear, while in
every case the nature of relation is such as to prevent the desired
consummation. In at least one place, it is expressly declared that it
is the knowledge function which is responsible for the degradation of
reality to appearance. “We do not suggest that the thing always itself
is an appearance. We mean its character is such _that it becomes one as
soon as we judge it_. And this character we have seen throughout our
work, is ideality. Appearance consists in the looseness of content from
existence.... And we have found that everywhere throughout the world
such ideality prevails” (_ibid._, p. 486, italics not in the original).
It is not then strictly true that the divorce of meaning and existence
instigates thought; rather thought is the unruly member that creates
the divorce and then engages in the task (in which it is self-condemned
to failure) of trying to establish the unity which it has gratuitously
destroyed. Thinking, self-consciousness, is disease of the naïve unity
of thoughtless experience.
On the one hand there is a systematic discrediting of the ultimate
claims of the knowledge function, and this not from external
physiological or psychological reasons such as are sometimes alleged
against its capacity, but on the basis of its own interior logic. But
on the other hand, a strictly logical criterion is deliberately adopted
and employed as the fundamental and final criterion for the philosophic
conception of reality. Long familiarity has not dulled my astonishment
at finding exactly the same set of considerations which in the earlier
portion of the book are employed to condemn things as experienced by us
to the region of Appearance, employed in the latter portion of the book
to afford a triumphant demonstration of the existence and character of
Absolute Reality. The argument I take up first on its formal side, and
then with reference to material considerations.[21]
The positive conception of Reality is reached by the conception that
“ultimate reality must be such that it does not contradict itself;
here is an absolute criterion. And it is proved absolute by the fact
that either in endeavoring to deny it or even in attempting to doubt
it, we tacitly assume its validity” (_ibid._, pp. 136-137). That is
to say, when one sets out to think one must avoid self-contradiction;
this avoidance, or, put positively, the attainment of consistency,
harmony, is the basic law of all thinking. Since in thinking we
set out to attain reality, it follows that reality itself must be
self-consistent, and that its self-consistency determines the law
of thought. Or, as Mr. Bradley again puts the matter, “In order to
think at all you must subject yourself to the standard, a standard
which implies an absolute knowledge of reality; and while you doubt
this, you accept it, and obey, while you rebel” (_ibid._, p. 153). The
absolute knowledge referred to is, of course, the knowledge of the
thoroughly self-consistent, non-contradictory character of reality.
Every reader of Mr. Bradley’s book knows how he goes on from this point
to supply positive content to reality; to give an outline sketch of the
characters it must possess and the way in which it must possess them
in order to maintain its thoroughly self-consistent character. It is,
however, only the strictly formal aspect of the matter that I am here
concerned with.
On this side we reach, I think, the heart of the matter by asking,
in reference to the first quotation: Absolute _for what_? Surely
absolute for the process under consideration, that is absolute for
thought. But the significance of this absolute for thought is, one
may say, “absolutely” (since we are here confessedly in the realm
just of thought) determined by the nature of thought itself. Now
this nature has been already referred by considerations “belonging
irremovably to truth’s proper character,” to the world of appearance
and of internal discrepancy. Yes, one may say (speaking formally),
the criterion of thought is absolute--that is to say absolute or final
for thought; but how can one imagine that this in any way alters the
essential nature and value of thought? If knowledge works by thought,
and thought institutes appearance over against reality, any further
fact about thought--such as a statement of its criterion--falls wholly
within the limits of this situation. It is comical to suppose that a
_special_ trait of thought can be employed to alter the fundamental and
essential nature of thought. The criterion of thought must be infected
by the nature of thought, instead of being a redeeming angel which at
a critical juncture transforms the fragile creature, thought, into an
ambassador with power plenipotentiary to the court of the Absolute.