to experience as to invite attention. In its subjective form, or
sensationalism, it claims to be the last word of empiricism. In its
objective, or rational form, it claims to make good the deficiencies of
the subjective type, by emphasizing the work of thought that supplies
the factors of objectivity and universality lacking in sensationalism.
With reference to experience _as it now is_, such idealism is half
opposed to empiricism and half committed to it,--antagonistic, so
far as existing experience is regarded as tainted with a sensational
character; favorable, so far as this experience is even now prophetic
of some final, all-comprehensive, or absolute experience, which in
truth is one with reality.
That this combination of opposition to present experience with devotion
to the cause of experience in the abstract leaves objective idealism
in a position of unstable equilibrium from which it can find release
only by euthanasia in a thorough-going empiricism seems evident.
Some of the reasons for this belief may be readily approached by
a summary sketch of three historic episodes in which have emerged
important conceptions of experience and its relation to reason. The
first takes us to classic Greek thought. Here experience means the
preservation, through memory, of the net result of a multiplicity of
particular doings and sufferings; a preservation that affords positive
skill in maintaining further practice, and promise of success in new
emergencies. The craft of the carpenter, the art of the physician
are standing examples of its nature. It differs from instinct and
blind routine or servile practice because there is some knowledge of
materials, methods, and aims, in their adjustment to one another.
Yet the marks of its passive, habitual origin are indelibly stamped
upon it. On the knowledge side it can never aspire beyond opinion,
and if true opinion be achieved, it is only by happy chance. On the
active side it is limited to the accomplishment of a special work or
a particular product, following some unjustified, because assumed,
method. Thus it contrasts with the true knowledge of reason, which
is direct apprehension, self-revealing and self-validating, of an
eternal and harmonious content. The regions in which experience and
reason respectively hold sway are thus explained. Experience has to do
with production, which, in turn, is relative to decay. It deals with
generation, becoming, not with finality, being. Hence it is infected
with the trait of relative non-being, of mere imitativeness; hence its
multiplicity, its logical inadequacy, its relativity to a standard and
end beyond itself. Reason, _per contra_, has to do with meaning, with
significance (ideas, forms), that is eternal and ultimate. Since the
meaning of anything is the worth, the good, the end of that thing,
experience presents us with partial and tentative efforts to achieve
the embodiment of purpose, under conditions that doom the attempt to
inconclusiveness. It has, however, its meed of reality in the degree in
which its results _participate_ in meaning, the good, reason.
From this classic period, then, comes the antithesis of experience as
the historically achieved _embodiments_ of meaning, partial, multiple,
insecure, to reason as the source, author, and container of _meaning_,
permanent, assured, unified. Idealism means ideality, experience means
brute and broken facts. That things exist because of and for the
sake of meaning, and that experience gives us meaning in a servile,
interrupted, and inherently deficient way--such is the standpoint.
Experience gives us meaning in process of becoming; special and
isolated instances in which it _happens_, temporally, to appear, rather
than meaning pure, undefiled, independent. Experience presents purpose,
the good, struggling against obstacles, “involved in matter.”
Just how much the vogue of modern neo-Kantian idealism, professedly
built upon a strictly epistemological instead of upon a cosmological
basis, is due, in days of a declining theology, to a vague sense that
affirming the function of reason in the constitution of a knowable
world (which in its own constitution as logically knowable may be,
morally and spiritually, anything you please), carries with it an
assurance of the superior reality of the good and the beautiful as
well as of the “true,” it would be hard to say. Certainly unction
seems to have descended upon epistemology, in apostolic succession,
from classic idealism; so that neo-Kantianism is rarely without a tone
of edification, as if feeling itself the patron of man’s spiritual
interests in contrast to the supposed crudeness and insensitiveness
of naturalism and empiricism. At all events, we find here one element
in our problem: Experience considered as the summary of past episodic
adventures and happenings in relation to fulfilled and adequately
expressed meaning.
The second historic event centers about the controversy of innate
ideas, or pure concepts. The issue is between empiricism and
rationalism as theories of the origin and validation of scientific
knowledge. The empiricist is he who feels that the chief obstacle
which prevents scientific method from making way is the belief in
pure thoughts, not derived from particular observations and hence not
responsible to the course of experience. His objection to the “high _a
priori_ road” is that it introduces in irresponsible fashion a mode
of presumed knowledge which may be used at any turn to stand sponsor
for mere tradition and prejudice, and thus to nullify the results of
science resting upon and verified by observable facts. Experience
thus comes to mean, to use the words of Peirce, “that which is forced
upon a man’s recognition will-he, nill-he, and shapes his thoughts
to something quite different from what they naturally would have
taken.”[31] The same definition is found in James, in his chapter on
Necessary Truths: “Experience means experience of something foreign
supposed to impress us whether spontaneously or in consequence of our
own exertions and acts.”[32] As Peirce points out, this notion of
experience as the foreign element that forces the hand of thought and
controls its efficacy, goes back to Locke. Experience is “observation
employed either about external sensible objects, or about the internal
operations of our minds”[33]--as furnishing in short all the valid
data and tests of thinking and knowledge. This meaning, thinks Peirce,
should be accepted “as a landmark which it would be a crime to disturb
or displace.”
The contention of idealism, here bound up with rationalism, is that
perception and observation cannot guarantee knowledge in its honorific
sense (science); that the peculiar differentia of scientific knowledge
is a constancy, a universality, and necessity that contrast at every
point with perceptual data, and that indispensably require the
function of conception.[34] In short, _qualitative transformation_
of _facts_ (data of perception), not their mechanical subtraction
and recombination, is the difference between scientific and
perceptual knowledge. Here the problem which emerges is, of course,
the significance of perception and of conception in respect to
experience.[35]
The third episode reverses in a curious manner (which confuses present
discussion) the notion of experience as a foreign, alien, coercive
material. It regards experience as a fortuitous association, by merely
psychic connections, of individualistic states of consciousness.
This is due to the Humian development of Locke. The “objects”
and “operations,” which to Locke were just given and secured in
observation, become shifting complexes of subjective sensations and
ideas, whose apparent permanency is due to discoverable illusions.
This, of course, is the empiricism which made Kant so uneasily toss
in his dogmatic slumbers (a tossing that he took for an awakening);
and which, by reaction, called out the conception of thought as a
function operating both to elevate perceptual data to scientific
status, and also to confer objective status, or knowable character,
upon even sensational data and their associative combinations.[36]
Here emerges the third element in our problem: The function of thought
as furnishing objectivity to any experience that claims cognitive
reference or capacity.
Summing up the matter, idealism stands forth with its assertion of
thought or reason as (1) the sponsor for all significance, ideality,
purpose, in experience,--the author of the good and the beautiful
as well as the true; (2) the power, located in pure conceptions,
required to elevate perceptive or observational material to the plane
of science; and (3) the constitution that gives objectivity, even the
semblance of order, system, connection, mutual reference, to sensory
data that without its assistance are mere subjective flux.
II
I begin the discussion with the last-named function. Thought is
here conceived as _a priori_, not in the sense of particular innate
ideas, but of a function that constitutes the very possibility
of any objective experience, any experience involving reference
beyond its own mere subjective happening. I shall try to show that
idealism is condemned to move back and forth between two inconsistent
interpretations of this _a priori_ thought. It is taken to mean both
the organized, the regulated, the informed, established character
of experience, an order immanent and constitutional; and an agency
which organizes, regulates, forms, synthesizes, a power operative and
constructive. And the oscillation between and confusion of these two
diverse senses is necessary to Neo-Kantian idealism.
When Kant compared his work in philosophy to that of the men who
introduced construction into geometry, and experimentation into physics
and chemistry, the point of his remarks depends upon taking the _a
priori_ worth of thought in a regulative, directive, controlling sense,
thought as consciously, intentionally, making an experience _different_
in a _determinate_ sense and manner. But the point of his answer to
Hume consists in taking the _a priori_ in the other sense, as something
which is _already_ immanent in _any_ experience, and which accordingly
makes no determinate difference to any one experience as compared with
any other, or with any past or future form of itself. The concept is
treated first as that which makes an experience actually different,
controlling its evolution towards consistency, coherency, and objective
reliability; then, it is treated as that which has already effected
the organization of any and every experience that comes to recognition
at all. The fallacy from which he never emerges consists in vibrating
between the definition of a concept as a rule of constructive synthesis
in a _differential_ sense, and the definition of it as a static
endowment lurking in “mind,” and giving automatically a hard and fixed
law for the determination of every experienced object. The _a priori_
conceptions of Kant as immanent fall, like the rain, upon the just and
the unjust; upon error, opinion, and hallucination. But Kant slides
into these _a priori_ functions the preferential values exercised
by empirical reflective thought. The concept of triangle, taken
geometrically, means doubtless a determinate method of construing space
elements; but to Kant it also means something that exists in the mind
_prior_ to all such geometrical constructions and that unconsciously
lays down the law not only for their conscious elaboration, but also
for any space perception, even for that which takes a rectangle to
be a triangle. The first of the meanings is intelligible, and marks a
definite contribution to the logic of science. But it is not “objective
idealism”; it is a contribution to a revised empiricism. The second is
a dark saying.
That organization of some sort exists in every experience I make no
doubt. That isolation, discrepancy, the fragmentary, the incompatible,
are brought to recognition and to logical function only with reference
to some prior existential mode of organization seems clear. And
it seems equally clear that reflection goes on with profit only
because the materials with which it deals have already some degree
of organization, or exemplify various relationships. As against
Hume, or even Locke, we may be duly grateful to Kant for enforcing
acknowledgment of these facts. But the acknowledgment means simply an
improved and revised empiricism.
For, be it noted, this organization, first, is not the work of reason
or thought, unless “reason” be stretched beyond all identification;
and, secondly, it has no sacrosanct or finally valid and worthful
character. (1) Experience always carries with it and within it certain
systematized arrangements, certain classifications (using the term
without intellectualistic prejudice), coexistent and serial. If we
attribute these to “thought” then the structure of the brain of a
Mozart which hears and combines sounds in certain groupings, the
psycho-physical visual habit of the Greek, the locomotor apparatus of
the human body in the laying-out and plotting of space is “thought.”
Social institutions, established political customs, effect and
perpetuate modes of reaction and of perception that compel a certain
grouping of objects, elements, and values. A national constitution
brings about a definite arrangement of the factors of human action
which holds even physical things together in certain determinate
orders. Every successful economic process, with its elaborate divisions
and adjustments of labor, of materials and instruments, is just such
an objective organization. Now it is one thing to say that thought has
played a part in the origin and development of such organizations, and
continues to have a rôle in their judicious employment and application;
it is another to say that these organizations _are_ thought, or
are its exclusive product. Thought that functions in these ways is
distinctively _reflective_ thought, thought as practical, volitional,
deliberately exercised for specific aims--thought as an act, an art of
skilled mediation. As _reflective_ thought, its end is to terminate its
own first and experimental forms, and to secure an organization which,
while it may evoke new reflective thinking, puts an end to the thinking
that secured the organization. _As organizations_, as established,
effectively controlling arrangements of objects in experience, their
mark is that they are not thoughts, but habits, customs of action.[37]
Moreover, such reflective thought as does intervene in the formation
and maintenance of these practical organizations harks back to prior
practical organizations, biological and social in nature. It serves
to _valuate_ organizations already existent as biological functions
and instincts, while, as itself a biological activity, it redirects
them to new conditions and results. Recognize, for example, that a
geometric concept is a practical locomotor function of arranging
stimuli in reference to maintenance of life activities _brought into
consciousness_, and then serving as a center of reorganization of
such activities to freer, more varied flexible and valuable forms;
recognize this, and we have the truth of the Kantian idea, without
its excrescences and miracles. The concept is the practical activity
doing consciously and artfully what it had aforetime done blindly and
aimlessly, and thereby not only doing it better but opening up a freer
world of significant activities. Thought as such a reorganization
of natural functions does naturally what Kantian forms and
schematizations do only supernaturally. In a word, the constructive
or organizing activity of “thought” does not inhere in thought as a
transcendental function, a form or mode of some supra-empirical ego,
mind, or consciousness, but in thought as itself vital activity. And
in any case we have passed to the idea of thought as reflectively
reconstructive and directive, and away from the notion of thought as
immanently constitutional and organizational. To make this passage
and yet to ignore its existence and import is essential to objective
idealism.
(2) No final or ultimate validity attaches to these original
arrangements and institutionalizations in any case. Their value is
teleological and experimental, not fixedly ontological. “Law and
order” are good things, but not when they become rigidity, and create
mechanical uniformity or routine. Prejudice is the acme of the _a
priori_. Of the _a priori_ in this sense we may say what is always
to be said of habits and institutions: They are good servants, but
harsh and futile masters. Organization as already effected is always
in danger of becoming a _mortmain_; it may be a way of sacrificing
novelty, flexibility, freedom, creation to static standards. The
curious inefficiency of idealism at this point is evident in the fact
that genuine thought, empirical reflective thought, is required
precisely for the purpose of re-forming established and set formations.
In short, (_a_) _a priori_ character is no exclusive function of
thought. Every biological function, every motor attitude, every vital
impulse as the carrying vehicle of experience is thus _apriorily_
regulative in prospective reference; what we call apperception,
expectation, anticipation, desire, demand, choice, are pregnant with
this constitutive and organizing power. (_b_) In so far as “thought”
does exercise such reorganizing power, it is because thought is itself
still a _vital_ function. (_c_) Objective idealism depends not only
upon ignoring the existence and capacity of vital functions, but upon a
profound confusion of the constitutional _a priori_, the unconsciously
dominant, with empirically reflective thought. In the sense in which
the _a priori_ is worth while as an attribute of thought, thought
cannot be what the objective idealist defines it as being. Plain,
ordinary, everyday empirical reflections, operating as centers of
inquiry, of suggestion, of experimentation, exercise the valuable
function of regulation, in an auspicious direction, of subsequent
experiences.
The categories of accomplished systematization cover alike the just
and the unjust, the false and the true, while (unlike God’s rain) they
exercise no _specific_ or _differential_ activity of stimulation and
control. Error and inefficiency, as well as value and energy, are
embodied in our objective institutional classifications. As a special
favor, will not the objective idealist show how, in some one single
instance, his immanent “reason” makes any difference as respects
the detection and elimination of error, or gives even the slightest
assistance in discovering and validating the truly worthful? This
practical work, the life blood of intelligence in everyday life and
in critical science, is done by the despised and rejected matter of
concrete empirical contexts and functions. Generalizing the issue: If
the immanent organization be ascribed to thought, why should its work
be such as to demand continuous correction and revision? If specific
reflective thought, as empirical, be subject to all the limitations
supposed to inhere in experience as such, how can it assume the burden
of making good, of supplementing, reconstructing, and developing
meanings? The logic of the case seems to be that Neo-Kantian idealism
gets its status against empiricism by first accepting the Humian idea
of experience, while the express import of its positive contribution
is to show the _non-existence_ (not merely the cognitive invalidity)
of anything describable as mere states of subjective consciousness.
Thus in the end it tends to destroy itself and to make way for a more
adequate empiricism.
III
In the above discussion, I have unavoidably anticipated the second
problem: the relation of conceptual thought to perceptual data.
A distinct aspect still remains, however. Perception, as well as
apriority, is a term harboring a fundamental ambiguity. It may mean
(1) a distinct type of activity, predominantly practical in character,
though carrying at its heart important cognitive and esthetic
qualities; or (2) a distinctively cognitional experience, the function
of observation as explicitly logical--a factor in science _qua_ science.
In the first sense, as recent functional empiricism (working in
harmony with psychology, but not itself peculiarly psychological) has
abundantly shown, perception is primarily an act of adjustment of
organism and environment, differing from a mere reflex or instinctive
adaptation in that, in order to compensate for the failure of the
instinctive adjustment, it requires an objective or discriminative
presentation of conditions of action: the negative conditions or
obstacles, and the positive conditions or means and resources.[38]
This, of course, is its cognitive phase. In so far as the material
thus presented not only serves as a direct cue to further successful
activity (successful in the overcoming of obstacles to the maintenance
of the function entered upon) but presents auxiliary collateral
objects and qualities that give additional range and depth of meaning
to the activity of adjustment, perceiving is esthetic as well as
intellectual.[39]
Now such perception cannot be made antithetical to thought, for it may
itself be surcharged with any amount of imaginatively supplied and
reflectively sustained ideal factors--such as are needed to determine
and select relevant stimuli and to suggest and develop an appropriate
plan and course of behavior. The amount of such saturating intellectual
material depends upon the complexity and maturity of the behaving
agent. Such perception, moreover, is strictly teleological, since it
arises from an experienced need and functions to fulfil the purpose
indicated by this need. The cognitional content is, indeed, carried by
affectional and intentional contexts.
Then we have perception as scientific observation. This involves the
deliberate, artful exclusion of affectional and purposive factors as
exercising mayhap a vitiating influence upon the cognitive or objective
content; or, more strictly speaking, a transformation of the more
ordinary or “natural” emotional and purposive concomitants, into what
Bain calls “neutral” emotion, and a purpose of finding out what the
present conditions of the problem are. (The practical feature is not
thus denied or eliminated, but the overweening influence of a present
dominating end is avoided, so that _change of the character of the end_
may be effected, if found desirable.) Here observation may be opposed
to thought, in the sense that exact and minute description may be set
over against interpretation, explanation, theorizing, and inference.
In the wider sense of thought as equaling reflective process, the work
of observation and description forms a constituent division of labor
_within_ thought. The impersonal demarcation and accurate registration
of what is objectively there or present occurs for the sake (_a_) of
eliminating meaning which is habitually but uncritically referred, and
(_b_) of getting a basis for a meaning (at first purely inferential
or hypothetical) that may be consistently referred; and that (_c_),
resting upon examination and not upon mere _a priori_ custom, may
weather the strain of subsequent experiences. But in so far as
thought is identified with the conceptual phase as such of the entire
logical function, observation is, of course, set over against thought:
deliberately, purposely, and artfully so.