all well enough for psychology, but went astray because it invaded
the field of logic. If we mean by psychology a natural history of
what at any time _passes_ for knowledge, and by logic conscious
control in the direction of grounded assurance, this remark appears
to reverse the truth. As a natural history of knowledge in the sense
of opinion and belief, Locke’s account of discrete, simple ideas or
meanings, which are compounded and then distributed, does palpable
violence to the facts. But every line of Locke shows that he was
interested in knowledge in its honorific sense--controlled certainty,
or, where this is not feasible, measured probability. And to logic
as an account of the way in which we by art build up a _tested_
assurance, a rationalized conviction, Locke makes an important positive
contribution. The pity is that he inclined to take it for the whole
of the logic of science,[40] not seeing that it was but a correlative
division of labor to the work of hypotheses or inference; and that he
tended to identify it with a natural history or psychology. The latter
tendency exposed Locke to the Humian interpretation, and permanently
sidetracked the positive contribution of his theory to logic, while it
led to that confusion of an untrue psychology with a logic valid within
limits, of which Mill is the standard example.
In analytic observation, it is a positive object to strip off all
inferential meaning so far as may be--to reduce the facts as nearly
as may be to derationalized data, in order to make possible a new and
better rationalization. In and because of this process, the perceptual
data approach the limit of a disconnected manifold, of the brutely
given, of the merely sensibly present; while meaning stands out as
a searched for principle of unification and explanation, that is,
as a thought, a concept, an hypothesis. The extent to which this is
carried depends wholly upon the character of the specific situation and
problem; but, speaking generally, or of limiting tendencies, one may
say it is carried to mere observation, pure brute description, on the
one side, and to mere thought, that is hypothetical inference, on the
other.
So far as Locke ignored this instrumental character of observation, he
naturally evoked and strengthened rationalistic idealism; he called
forth its assertion of the need of reason, of concepts, of universals,
to constitute knowledge in its eulogistic sense. But two contrary
errors do not make a truth, although they suggest and determine the
nature of some relevant truth. This truth is the empirical origin, in
a determinate type of situation, of the contrast of observation and
conception; the empirical relevancy and the empirical worth of this
contrast in controlling the character of subsequent experiences. To
suppose that perception as it concretely exists, either in the early
experiences of the animal, the race, or the individual, or in its
later refined and expanded experiences, is identical with the sharply
analyzed, objectively discriminated and internally disintegrated
elements of scientific observation, is a perversion of experience; a
perversion for which, indeed, professed empiricists set the example,
but which idealism must perpetuate if it is not to find its end in an
improved, functional empiricism.[41]
IV
We come now to the consideration of the third element in our problem;
ideality, important and normative value, in relation to experience;
the antithesis of experience as a tentative, fragmentary, and
ineffectual embodiment of meaning over against the perfect, eternal
system of meanings which experience suggests even in nullifying and
mutilating.
That from the _memory_ standpoint experience presents itself as a
multiplicity of episodic events with just enough continuity among
them to suggest principles true “on the whole” or usually, but
without furnishing instruction as to their exact range and bearing,
seems obvious enough. Why should it not? The motive which leads to
reflection on _past_ experience could be satisfied in no other way.
Continuities, connecting links, dynamic transitions drop out because,
for the purpose of the recollection, they would be hindrances if now
repeated; or because they are now available only when themselves
objectified in definite terms and thus given a _quasi_ independent, a
_quasi_ atomistic standing of their own. This is the only alternative
to what the psychologists term “total reminiscence,” which, so far
as total, leave us with an elephant on our hands. Unless we are
going to have a wholesale revivification of the past, giving us just
another embarrassing present experience, illusory because irrelevant,
memory must work by retail--by summoning _distinct_ cases, events,
sequences, precedents. Dis-membering is a positively necessary part
of re-membering. But the resulting _disjecta membra_ are in no sense
experience as it was or is; they are simply elements held apart, and
yet tentatively implicated together, in present experience for the
sake of its most favorable evolution; evolution in the direction of
the most excellent meaning or value conceived. If the remembering is
efficacious and pertinent, it reveals the possibilities of the present;
that is to say, it clarifies the transitive, transforming character
that belongs inherently to the present. The dismembering of the vital
present into the disconnected past is correlative to an anticipation,
an idealization of the future.
Moreover, the contingent character of the principle or rule that
emerges from a survey of cases, instances, as distinct from a fixed or
necessary character, secures just what is wanted in the exigency of
a prospective idealization, or refinement of excellence. It is just
this character that secures flexibility and variety of outlook, that
makes possible a consideration of alternatives and an attempt to select
and to execute the more worthy among them. The fixed or necessary law
would mean a future like the past--a dead, an unidealized future. It
is exasperating to imagine how completely different would have been
Aristotle’s valuation of “experience” with respect to its contingency,
if he had but once employed the function of developing and perfecting
value, instead of the function of knowing an unalterable object, as the
standard by which to estimate and measure intelligence.
The one constant trait of experience from its crudest to its most
mature forms is that its contents undergo change of meaning, and
of meaning in the sense of excellence, value. Every experience
is in-course,[42] in course of becoming worse or better as to
its contents, or in course of conscious endeavor to sustain some
satisfactory level of value against encroachment or lapse. In this
effort, both precedent, the reduction of the present idealization,
the anticipation of the possible, though doubtful, future, emerge.
Without idealization, that is, without conception of the favorable
issue that the present, defined in terms of precedents, may portend in
its transition, the recollection of precedents, and the formulation
of tentative rules is nonsense. But without the identification of
the present in terms of elements suggested by the past, without
recognition, the ideal, the value projected as end, remains inert,
helpless, sentimental, without means of realization. Resembling cases
and anticipation, memory and idealization, are the corresponding terms
in which a present experience has its transitive force analyzed into
reciprocally pertinent means and ends.
_That_ an experience will change in content and value is the one thing
certain. _How_ it will change is the one thing naturally uncertain.
Hence the import of the art of reflection and invention. Control of
the character of the change in the direction of the worthful is the
common business of theory and practice. Here is the province of the
episodic recollection of past history and of the idealized foresight
of possibilities. The irrelevancy of an objective idealism lies in the
fact that it totally ignores the position and function of ideality in
sustained and serious endeavor. Were values automatically injected and
kept in the world of experience by any force not reflected in human
memories and projects, it would make no difference whether this force
were a Spencerian environment or an Absolute Reason. Did purpose ride
in a cosmic automobile toward a predestined goal, it would not cease to
be physical and mechanical in quality because labeled Divine Idea, or
Perfect Reason. The moral would be “let us eat, drink, and be merry,”
for to-morrow--or if not this to-morrow, then upon some to-morrow,
unaffected by our empirical memories, reflections, inventions, and
idealizations--the cosmic automobile arrives. Spirituality, ideality,
meaning as purpose, would be the last things to present themselves if
objective idealism were true. Values cannot be both ideal and given,
and their “given” character is emphasized, not transformed, when they
are called eternal and absolute. But natural values become ideal the
moment their maintenance is dependent upon the intentional activities
of an empirical agent. To suppose that values are ideal because
they are so eternally given is the contradiction in which objective
idealism has intrenched itself. Objective ontological teleology
spells machinery. Reflective and volitional, experimental teleology
alone spells ideality.[43] Objective, rationalistic idealism breaks
upon the fact that it can have no intermediary between a brutally
achieved embodiment of meaning (physical in character or else of that
peculiar quasi-physical character which goes generally by the name
of metaphysical) and a total opposition of the given and the ideal,
connoting their mutual indifference and incapacity. An empiricism
that acknowledges the transitive character of experience, and that
acknowledges the possible control of the character of the transition
by means of intelligent effort, has abundant opportunity to celebrate
in productive art, genial morals, and impartial inquiry the grace and
the severity of the ideal.
THE POSTULATE OF IMMEDIATE EMPIRICISM[44]
The criticisms made upon that vital but still unformed movement
variously termed radical empiricism, pragmatism, humanism,
functionalism, according as one or another aspect of it is uppermost,
have left me with a conviction that the _fundamental_ difference is
not so much in matters overtly discussed as in a presupposition that
remains tacit: a presupposition as to what experience is and means. To
do my little part in clearing up the confusion, I shall try to make
my own presupposition explicit. The object of this paper is, then, to
set forth what I understand to be the postulate and the criterion of
_immediate empiricism_.[45]
Immediate empiricism postulates that things--anything, everything, in
the ordinary or non-technical use of the term “thing”--are what they
are experienced as. Hence, if one wishes to describe anything truly,
his task is to tell what it is experienced as being. If it is a horse
that is to be described, or the _equus_ that is to be defined, then
must the horse-trader, or the jockey, or the timid family man who
wants a “safe driver,” or the zoologist or the paleontologist tell us
what the horse is which is experienced. If these accounts turn out
different in some respects, as well as congruous in others, this is
no reason for assuming the content of one to be exclusively “real,”
and that of others to be “phenomenal”; for each account of what is
experienced will manifest that it is the account _of_ the horse-dealer,
or _of_ the zoologist, and hence will give the conditions requisite
for understanding the differences as well as the agreements of the
various accounts. And the principle varies not a whit if we bring in
the psychologist’s horse, the logician’s horse, or the metaphysician’s
horse.
In each case, the nub of the question is, _what sort of experience_ is
denoted or indicated: a concrete and determinate experience, varying,
when it varies, in specific real elements, and agreeing, when it
agrees, in specific real elements, so that we have a contrast, not
between _a_ Reality, and various approximations to, or phenomenal
representations of Reality, but between different reals of experience.
And the reader is begged to bear in mind that from this standpoint,
when “an experience” or “some sort of experience” is referred to, “some
thing” or “some sort of thing” is always meant.
Now, this statement that things are what they are experienced to be
is usually translated into the statement that things (or, ultimately,
Reality, Being) _are_ only and just what they are _known_ to be or that
things are, or Reality _is_, what it is for a conscious knower--whether
the knower be conceived primarily as a perceiver or as a thinker
being a further, and secondary, question. This is the root-paralogism
of all idealisms, whether subjective or objective, psychological
or epistemological. By our postulate, things are what they are
experienced to be; and, unless knowing is the sole and only genuine
mode of experiencing, it is fallacious to say that Reality is just and
exclusively what it is or would be to an all-competent all-knower; or
even that it _is_, relatively and piecemeal, what it is to a finite
and partial knower. Or, put more positively, knowing is one mode of
experiencing, and the primary philosophic demand (from the standpoint
of immediatism) is to find out _what_ sort of an experience knowing
is--or, concretely how things are experienced when they are experienced
_as_ known things.[46] By concretely is meant, obviously enough
(among other things), such an account of the experience of things as
known that will bring out the characteristic traits and distinctions
they possess as things of a knowing experience, as compared with
things experienced esthetically, or morally, or economically, or
technologically. To assume that, because from the _standpoint of
the knowledge experience_ things _are_ what they are known to be,
therefore, metaphysically, absolutely, without qualification,
everything in its reality (as distinct from its “appearance,” or
phenomenal occurrence) is what a knower would find it to be, is, from
the immediatist’s standpoint, if not the root of all philosophic evil,
at least one of its main roots. For this leaves out of account what
the knowledge standpoint is itself _experienced as_.
I start and am flustered by a noise heard. Empirically, that noise
_is_ fearsome; it _really_ is, not merely phenomenally or subjectively
so. That _is what_ it is experienced as being. But, when I experience
the noise as a _known_ thing, I find it to be innocent of harm. It
is the tapping of a shade against the window, owing to movements of
the wind. The experience has changed; that is, the thing experienced
has changed--not that an unreality has given place to a reality, nor
that some transcendental (unexperienced) Reality has changed,[47]
not that truth has changed, but just and only the concrete reality
experienced has changed. I now feel ashamed of my fright; and the noise
as fearsome is changed to noise as a wind-curtain fact, and hence
practically indifferent to my welfare. This is a change of experienced
existence effected through the medium of cognition. The content of the
latter experience cognitively regarded is doubtless _truer_ than the
content of the earlier; but it is in no sense more real. To call it
truer, moreover, must, from the empirical standpoint, mean a concrete
_difference_ in actual things experienced.[48] Again, in many cases,
only in retrospect is the prior experience cognitionally regarded at
all. In such cases, it is only in regard to contrasted content _in_ a
subsequent experience that the determination “truer” has force.
Perhaps some reader may now object that as matter of fact the entire
experience _is_ cognitive, but that the earlier parts of it are only
imperfectly so, resulting in a phenomenon that is not real; while
the latter part, being a more complete cognition, results in what
is relatively, at least, more real.[49] In short, a critic may say
that, when I was frightened by the noise, I _knew_ I was frightened;
otherwise there would have been no experience at all. At this point, it
is necessary to make a distinction so simple and yet so all-fundamental
that I am afraid the reader will be inclined to pooh-pooh it away as
a mere verbal distinction. But to see that to the empiricist this
distinction is not verbal, but genuine, is the precondition of any
understanding of him. The immediatist must, by his postulate, ask
what is the fright experienced _as_. Is what is actually experienced,
I-know-I-am-frightened, or I-_am_-frightened? I see absolutely no
reason for claiming that the experience _must_ be described by the
former phrase. In all probability (and all the empiricist logically
needs is just one case of this sort) the experience is simply and just
of fright-at-the-noise. Later one may (or may not) have an experience
describable _as_ I-know-I-am-(or-was) and improperly or properly,
frightened. But this is a different experience--that is, a different
_thing_. And if the critic goes on to urge that the person “_really_”
must have known that he was frightened, I can only point out that the
critic is shifting the venue. He may be right, but, if so, it is only
because the “really” is something not concretely experienced (whose
nature accordingly is the critic’s business); and this is to depart
from the empiricist’s point of view, to attribute to him a postulate he
expressly repudiates.
The material point may come out more clearly if I say that we must
make a distinction between a thing as _cognitive_, and one as
_cognized_.[50] I should define a cognitive experience as one that has
certain bearings or implications which induce, and fulfil themselves
in, a subsequent experience in which the relevant thing is experienced
_as_ cognized, _as_ a known object, and is thereby transformed, or
reorganized. The fright-at-the-noise in the case cited is obviously
_cognitive_, in this sense. By description, it induces an investigation
or inquiry in which both noise and fright are objectively stated or
presented--the noise as a shade-wind fact, the fright as an organic
reaction to a sudden acoustic stimulus, a reaction that under the
given circumstances was useless or even detrimental, a maladaptation.
Now, pretty much all of experience is of this sort (the “is” meaning,
of course, is experienced _as_), and the empiricist is false to his
principle if he does not duly note this fact.[51] But he is equally
false to his principle if he permits himself to be confused as to the
concrete differences in the two things experienced.
There are two little words through explication of which the
empiricist’s position may be brought out--“_as_” and “_that_.” We may
express his presupposition by saying that things are what they are
experienced _as_ being; or that to give a just account of anything
is to tell what _that_ thing is experienced to be. By these words I
want to indicate the absolute, final, irreducible, and inexpugnable
concrete _quale_ which everything experienced not so much _has_ as
_is_. To grasp this aspect of empiricism is to see what the empiricist
means by objectivity, by the element of control. Suppose we take,
as a crucial case for the empiricist, an out and out illusion, say
of Zöllner’s lines. These are experienced as convergent; they are
“truly” parallel. If things are what they are experienced as being,
how can the distinction be drawn between illusion and the true state
of the case? There is no answer to this question except by sticking
to the fact that the experience of the lines as divergent is a
concrete qualitative thing or _that_. It is _that_ experience which
it is, and no other. And if the reader rebels at the iteration of
such obvious tautology, I can only reiterate that the realization of
the _meaning_ of this tautology is the key to the whole question of
the objectivity of experience, as that stands to the empiricist. The
lines of _that_ experience _are_ divergent; not merely _seem_ so. The
question of truth is not as to whether Being or Non-Being, Reality or
mere Appearance, is experienced, but as to the _worth_ of a certain
concretely experienced thing. The only way of passing upon this
question is by sticking in the most uncompromising fashion to _that_
experience as real. _That_ experience is that two lines with certain
cross-hatchings are apprehended as convergent; only by taking that
experience as real and as fully real, is there any basis for, or way of
going to, an experienced knowledge that the lines are parallel. It is
in the concrete thing _as experienced_ that all the grounds and clues
to its own intellectual or logical rectification are contained. It is
because this thing, afterwards adjudged false, is a concrete _that_,
that it develops into a corrected experience (that is, experience of a
corrected thing--we reform things just as we reform ourselves or a bad
boy) whose full content is not a whit more real, but which is true or
truer.[52]