determinateness is the only, and is the adequate, principle of
control, or “objectivity.” The experience may be of the vaguest sort.
I may not see anything which I can identify as a familiar object--a
table, a chair, etc. It may be dark; I may have only the vaguest
impression that there is something which looks like a table. Or I may
be completely befogged and confused, as when one rises quickly from
sleep in a pitch-dark room. But this vagueness, this doubtfulness,
this confusion is the thing experienced, and, _qua_ real, is as “good”
a reality as the self-luminous vision of an Absolute. It is not just
vagueness, doubtfulness, confusion, at large or in general. It is
_this_ vagueness, and no other; absolutely unique, absolutely what
_it_ is.[53] Whatever gain in clearness, in fullness, in trueness of
content is experienced must grow out of some element in the experience
of _this_ experienced _as_ what it is. To return to the illusion: If
the experience of the lines as convergent is illusory, it is because of
some elements in the thing as experienced, not because of something
defined in terms of externality to this particular experience. If the
illusoriness can be detected, it is because the thing experienced
is real, having within its experienced reality elements whose _own
mutual_ tension effects its reconstruction. Taken concretely, the
experience of convergent lines contains within itself the elements
of the transformation of its own content. It is _this_ thing, and
not some separate truth, that clamors for its own reform. There is,
then, from the empiricist’s point of view, no need to search for some
aboriginal _that_ to which all successive experiences are attached,
and which is somehow thereby undergoing continuous change. Experience
is always of _thats_; and the most comprehensive and inclusive
experience of the universe that the philosopher himself can obtain
is the experience of a characteristic _that_. From the empiricist’s
point of view, this is as true of the exhaustive and complete insight
of a hypothetical all-knower as of the vague, blind experience of the
awakened sleeper. As reals, they stand on the same level. As trues,
the latter has by definition the better of it; but if this insight is
in any way the truth of the blind awakening, it is because the latter
has, in its _own_ determinate _quale_, elements of real continuity
with the former; it is, _ex hypothesi_, transformable through a series
of experienced reals without break of continuity, into the absolute
thought-experience. There is no need of logical manipulation to effect
the transformation, nor _could_ any logical consideration effect it.
If effected at all it is just by immediate experiences, each of which
is just as real (no more, no less) as either of the two terms between
which they lie. Such, at least, is the meaning of the empiricist’s
contention. So, when he talks of experience, he does not mean some
grandiose, remote affair that is cast like a net around a succession
of fleeting experiences; he does not mean an indefinite total,
comprehensive experience which somehow engirdles an endless flux; he
means that _things_ are what they are experienced to be, and that every
experience is _some_ thing.
From the postulate of empiricism, then (or, what is the same thing,
from a _general_ consideration of the concept of experience), nothing
can be deduced, not a single philosophical proposition.[54] The
reader may hence conclude that all this just comes to the truism that
experience is experience, or is what it is. If one attempts to draw
conclusions from the bare concept of experience, the reader is quite
right. But the real significance of the principle is that of a method
of philosophical analysis--a method identical in kind (but differing
in problem and hence in operation) with that of the scientist. If you
wish to find out what subjective, objective, physical, mental, cosmic,
psychic, cause, substance, purpose, activity, evil, being, quality--any
philosophic term, in short--means, go to experience and see what the
thing is experienced _as_.
Such a method is not spectacular; it permits of no offhand
demonstrations of God, freedom, immortality, nor of the exclusive
reality of matter, or ideas, or consciousness, etc. But it supplies a
way of telling what all these terms mean. It may seem insignificant,
or chillingly disappointing, but only upon condition that it be not
worked. Philosophic conceptions have, I believe, outlived their
usefulness considered as stimulants to emotion, or as a species of
sanctions; and a larger, more fruitful and more valuable career awaits
them considered as specifically experienced meanings.
[NOTE: The reception of this essay proved that I was unreasonably
sanguine in thinking that the foot-note of warning, appended
to the title, would forfend radical misapprehension. I see now
that it was unreasonable to expect that the word “immediate”
in a philosophic writing could be generally understood to
apply to anything except _knowledge_, even though the body of
the essay is a protest against such limitation. But I venture
to repeat that the essay is not a denial of the necessity of
“mediation,” or reflection, in knowledge, but is an assertion
that the inferential factor must _exist_, or must occur, and
that all existence is direct and vital, so that philosophy can
pass upon its nature--as upon the nature of all of the rest of
its subject-matter--only by first ascertaining what it exists or
occurs _as_.
I venture to repeat also another statement of the text: I do not
mean by “immediate experience” any aboriginal stuff out of which
things are evolved, but I use the term to indicate the necessity
of employing in philosophy the direct descriptive method that
has now made its way in all the natural sciences, with such
modifications, of course, as the subject itself entails.
There is nothing in the text to imply that things exist
in experience atomically or in isolation. When it is said
that a thing as cognized is _different_ from an earlier
non-cognitionally experienced thing, the saying no more implies
lack of continuity between the things, than the obvious remark
that a seed is different from a flower or a leaf denies their
continuity. The amount and kind of continuity or discreteness
that exists is to be discovered by recurring to what actually
occurs in experience.
Finally, there is nothing in the text that denies the existence
of things temporally prior to human experiencing of them.
Indeed, I should think it fairly obvious that we experience most
things _as_ temporally prior to our experiencing of them. The
import of the article is to the effect that we are not entitled
to draw philosophic (as distinct from scientific) conclusions
as to the meaning of prior temporal existence till we have
ascertained what it is to experience a thing as past. These four
disclaimers cover, I think, all the misapprehensions disclosed in
the four or five controversial articles (noted below) that the
original essay evoked. One of these articles (that of Professor
Woodbridge), raised a point of fact, holding that cognitional
experience tells us, without alteration, just what the things
of other types of experience are, and in that sense transcends
other experiences. This is too fundamental an issue to discuss
in a note, and I content myself with remarking that with respect
to it, the bearing of the article is that the issue must be
settled by a careful descriptive survey of things as experienced,
to see whether modifications do not occur in existences when
they are experienced _as_ known; _i.e._, as true or false in
character. The reader interested in following up this discussion
is referred to the following articles: Vol. II. of the _Journal
of Philosophy, Psychology, and Scientific Methods_, two articles
by Bakewell, p. 520 and p. 687; one by Bode, p. 658; one by
Woodbridge, p. 573; Vol. III. of the same Journal, by Leighton,
p. 174.]
“CONSCIOUSNESS” AND EXPERIENCE[55]
Every science in its final standpoint and working aims is controlled
by conditions lying outside itself--conditions that subsist in the
practical life of the time. With no science is this as obviously true
as with psychology. Taken without nicety of analysis, no one would
deny that psychology is specially occupied with the individual; that
it wishes to find out those things that proceed peculiarly from the
individual, and the mode of their connection with him. Now, the way
in which the individual is conceived, the value that is attributed to
him, the things in his make-up that arouse interest, are not due at the
outset to psychology. The scientific view regards these matters in a
reflected, a borrowed, medium. They are revealed in the light of social
life. An autocratic, an aristocratic, a democratic society propound
such different estimates of the worth and place of individuality;
they procure for the individual as an individual such different sorts
of experience; they aim at arousing such different impulses and
at organizing them according to such different purposes, that the
psychology arising in each must show a different temper.
In this sense, psychology is a political science. While the professed
psychologist, in his conscious procedure, may easily cut his
subject-matter loose from these practical ties and references, yet the
starting point and goal of his course are none the less socially set.
In this conviction I venture to introduce to an audience that could
hardly be expected to be interested in the technique of psychology, a
technical subject, hoping that the human meaning may yet appear.
There is at present a strong, apparently a growing tendency to conceive
of psychology as an account of the consciousness of the individual,
considered as something in and by itself; consciousness, the assumption
virtually runs, being of such an order that it may be analyzed,
described, and explained in terms of just itself. The statement, as
commonly made, is that psychology is an account of consciousness, _qua_
consciousness; and the phrase is supposed to limit psychology to a
certain definite sphere of fact that may receive adequate discussion
for scientific purposes, without troubling itself with what lies
outside. Now if this conception be true, there is no intimate, no
important connection of psychology and philosophy at large. That
philosophy, whose range is comprehensive, whose problems are catholic,
should be held down by a discipline whose voice is as partial as its
material is limited, is out of the range of intelligent discussion.
But there is another possibility. If the individual of whom psychology
treats be, after all, a social individual, any absolute setting off and
apart of a sphere of consciousness as, even for scientific purposes,
self-sufficient, is condemned in advance. All such limitation, and
all inquiries, descriptions, explanations that go with it, are only
preliminary. “Consciousness” is but a symbol, an anatomy whose life is
in natural and social operations. To know the symbol, the psychical
letter, is important; but its necessity lies not within itself, but
in the need of a language for reading the things signified. If this
view be correct, we cannot be so sure that psychology is without large
philosophic significance. Whatever meaning the individual has for the
social life that he both incorporates and animates, that meaning has
psychology for philosophy.
This problem is too important and too large to suffer attack in
an evening’s address. Yet I venture to consider a portion of it,
hoping that such things as appear will be useful clues in entering
wider territory. We may ask what is the effect upon psychology of
considering its material as something so distinct as to be capable
of treatment without involving larger issues. In this inquiry we
take as representative some such account of the science as this:
Psychology deals with consciousness “as such” in its various modes and
processes. It aims at an isolation of each such as will permit accurate
description: at statement of its place in the serial order such as will
enable us to state the laws by which one calls another into being,
or as will give the natural history of its origin, maturing, and
dissolution. It is both analytic and synthetic--analytic in that it
resolves each state into its constituent elements; synthetic in that it
discovers the processes by which these elements combine into complex
wholes and series. It leaves alone--it shuts out--questions concerning
the validity, the objective import of these modifications: of their
value in conveying truth, in effecting goodness, in constituting
beauty. For it is just with such questions of worth, of validity, that
philosophy has to do.
Some such view as this is held by the great majority of working
psychologists to-day. A variety of reasons have conspired to bring
about general acceptance. Such a view seems to enroll one in the ranks
of the scientific men rather than of the metaphysicians--and there are
those who distrust the metaphysicians. Others desire to take problems
piecemeal and in detail, avoiding that excursion into ultimates, into
that never-ending panorama of new questions and new possibilities
that seems to be the fate of the philosopher. While no temperate
mind can do other than sympathize with this view, it is hardly more
than an expedient. For, as Mr. James remarks, after disposing of
the question of free-will by relegating it to the domain of the
metaphysician:--“Metaphysics means only an unusually obstinate attempt
to think clearly and consistently”--and clearness and consistency are
not things to be put off beyond a certain point. When the metaphysician
chimes in with this new-found modesty of the psychologist, so different
from the disposition of Locke and Hume and the Mills, salving his
metaphysical conscience with the remark--it hardly possesses the
dignity of a conviction--that the partial sciences, just because they
are partial, are not expected to be coherent with themselves nor with
one another; when the metaphysician, I say, praises the psychologist
for sticking to his last, we are reminded that another motive is
also at work. There is a half-conscious irony in this abnegation of
psychology. It is not the first time that science has assumed the work
of Cinderella; and, since Mr. Huxley has happily reminded her, she is
not altogether oblivious, in her modesty, of a possible future check to
the pride of her haughty sister, and of a certain coronation that shall
mark her coming to her own.
But, be the reasons as they may, there is little doubt of the fact.
Almost all our working psychologists admit, nay, herald this limitation
of their work. I am not presumptuous enough to set myself against this
array. I too proclaim myself of those who believe that psychology has
to do (at a certain point, that is) with “consciousness as such.” But
I do not believe that the limitation is final. Quite the contrary:
if “consciousness” or “state of consciousness” be given intelligible
meaning, I believe that this conception is the open gateway into the
fair fields of philosophy. For, note you, the phrase is an ambiguous
one. It may mean one thing to the metaphysician who proclaims: Here
finally we have psychology recognizing her due metes and bounds,
giving bonds to trespass no more. It may mean quite another thing to
the psychologist in his work--whatever he may happen to say about it.
It may be that the psychologist deals with states of consciousness
as the significant, the analyzable and describable form, to which he
reduces the things he is studying. Not that they _are_ that existence,
but that they are its indications, its clues, in shape for handling
by scientific methods. So, for example, does the paleontologist
work. Those curiously shaped and marked forms to which he is devoted
are not life, nor are they the literal termini of his endeavor; but
through them as signs and records he construes a life. And again, the
painter-artist might well say that he is concerned only with colored
paints as such. Yet none the less through them as registers and
indices, he reveals to us the mysteries of sunny meadow, shady forest,
and twilight wave. These are the things-in-themselves of which the oils
on his palette are phenomena.
So the preoccupation of the psychologist with states of consciousness
may signify that they are the media, the concrete conditions to which
he purposely reduces his material, in order, _through them_, as
methodological helps, to get at and understand that which is anything
but a state of consciousness. To him, however, who insists upon the
fixed and final limitation of psychology, the state of consciousness is
not the shape some fact takes from the exigency of investigation; it
is literally the full fact itself. It is not an intervening term; it
bounds the horizon. Here, then, the issue defines itself. I conceive
that states of consciousness (and I hope you will take the phrase
broadly enough to cover all the specific data of psychology) have no
existence before the psychologist begins to work. He brings them into
existence. What we are really after is the process of experience, the
way in which it arises and behaves. We want to know its course, its
history, its laws. We want to know its various typical forms; how
each originates; how it is related to others; the part it plays in
maintaining an inclusive, expanding, connected course of experience.
Our problem as psychologists is to learn its _modus operandi_, its
method.
The paleontologist is again summoned to our aid. In a given district
he finds a great number and variety of footprints. From these he goes
to work to construct the structure and the life habits of the animals
that made them. The tracks exist undoubtedly; they are there; but yet
he deals with them not as final existences but as signs, phenomena in
the literal sense. Imagine the hearing that the critic would receive
who should inform the paleontologist that he is transcending his
field of scientific activity; that his concern is with footprints
as such, aiming to describe each, to analyze it into its simplest
forms, to compare the different kinds with one another so as to detect
common elements, and finally, thereby, to discover the laws of their
arrangement in space!
Yet the immediate data are footprints, and footprints only. The
paleontologist does in a way do all these things that our imaginary
critic is urging upon him. The difference is not that he arbitrarily
lugs in other data; that he invents entities and faculties that are
not there. The difference is in his standpoint. His interest is in
the animals, and the data are treated in whatever way seems likely to
serve this interest. So with the psychologist. He is continually and
perforce occupied with minute and empirical investigation of special
facts--states of consciousness, if you please. But these neither define
nor exhaust his scientific problem. They are his footprints, his
clues through which he places before himself the life-process he is
studying--with the further difference that his footprints are not after
all given to him, but are developed by his investigation.[56]
The supposition that these states are somehow existent by themselves
and in this existence provide the psychologist with ready-made
material is just the supreme case of the “psychological fallacy”: the
confusion of experience as it is to the one experiencing with what the
psychologist makes out of it with his reflective analysis.
The psychologist begins with certain operations, acts, functions as
his data. If these fall out of sight in the course of discussion, it
is only because having been taken for granted, they remain to control
the whole development of the inquiry, and to afford the sterling medium
of redemption. Acts such as perceiving, remembering, intending, loving
give the points of departure; they alone are concrete experiences.
To understand these experiences, under what conditions they arise,
and what effects they produce, analysis into states of consciousness
occurs. And the modes of consciousness that are figured remain
unarranged and unimportant, save as they may be translated back into
acts.
To remember is to do something, as much as to shoe a horse, or to
cherish a keepsake. To propose, to observe, to be kindly affectioned,
are terms of value, of practice, of operation; just as digestion,
respiration, locomotion express functions, not observable “objects.”
But there is an object that may be described: lungs, stomach,
leg-muscles, or whatever. Through the structure we present to
ourselves the function; it appears laid out before us, spread forth
in detail--objectified in a word. The anatomist who devotes himself
to this detail may, if he please (and he probably does please to
concentrate his devotion) ignore the function: to discover what
is there, to analyze, to measure, to describe, gives him outlet
enough. But nevertheless it is the function that fixed the point
of departure, that prescribed the problem and that set the limits,
physical as well as intellectual, of subsequent investigation.
Reference to function makes the details discovered other than a
jumble of incoherent trivialities. One might as well devote himself
to the minute description of a square yard of desert soil were it not
for this translation. States of consciousness are the morphology of
certain functions.[57] What is true of analysis, of description, is
true equally of classification. Knowing, willing, feeling, name states
of consciousness not in terms of themselves, but in terms of acts,
attitudes, found in experience.[58]
Explanation, even of an “empirical sort” is as impossible as
determination of a “state” and its classification, when we
rigidly confine ourselves to modifications of consciousness as
a self-existent. Sensations are always defined, classified, and
explained by reference to conditions which, according to the theory,
are extraneous--sense-organs and stimuli. The whole physiological
side assumes a ludicrously anomalous aspect on this basis.[59] While
experimentation is retained, and even made much of, it is at the cost
of logical coherence. To experiment with reference to a bare state
of consciousness is a performance of which one cannot imagine the
nature, to say nothing of doing it; while to experiment with reference
to acts and the conditions of their occurrence is a natural and
straightforward undertaking. Such simple processes as association are
concretely inexplicable when we assume states of consciousness as
existences by themselves. As recent psychology testifies, we again have
to resort to conditions that have no place nor calling on the basis
of the theory--the principle of habit, of neural action, or else some
connection in the object.[60]
We have only to note that there are two opposing schools in psychology
to see in what an unscientific status is the subject. We have only
to consider that these two schools are the result of assuming states
of consciousness as existences _per se_ to locate the source of
the scientific scandal. No matter what the topic, whether memory
or association or attention or effort, the same dualisms present
themselves, the same necessity of choosing between two schools. One,
lost in the distinctions that it has developed, denies the function
because it can find objectively presented only states of consciousness.
So it abrogates the function, regarding it as a mere aggregate of
such states, or as a purely external and factitious relation between
them. The other school, recognizing that this procedure explains away
rather than explains, the values of experience, attempts to even up
by declaring that certain functions are themselves immediately given
data of consciousness, existing side by side with the “states,” but
indefinitely transcending them in worth, and apprehended by some higher
organ. So against the elementary contents and external associations of
the analytic school in psychology, we have the complicated machinery
of the intellectualist school, with its pure self-consciousness as a
source of ultimate truths, its hierarchy of intuitions, its ready-made
faculties. To be sure, these “spiritual faculties” are now largely
reduced to some one comprehensive form--Apperception, or Will, or
Attention, or whatever the fashionable term may be. But the principle
remains the same; the assumption of a function as a given existent,
distinguishable in itself and acting upon other existences--as if
the functions digestion and vision were regarded as separate from
organic structures, somehow acting upon them from the outside so as
to bring co-operation and harmony into them![61] This division into
psychological schools is as reasonable as would be one of botanists
into rootists and flowerists; of those proclaiming the root to be
the rudimentary and essential structure, and those asserting that
since the function of seed-bearing is the main thing, the flower is
really the controlling “synthetic” principle. Both sensationalist and
intellectualist suppose that psychology has some special sphere of
“reality” or of experience marked off for it within which the data are
just lying around, self-existent and ready-made, to be picked up and
assorted as pebbles await the visitor on the beach. Both alike fail to
recognize that the psychologist first has experience to deal with; the
same experience that the zoologist, geologist, chemist, mathematician,
and historian deal with, and that what characterizes his specialty is
not some data or existences which he may call uniquely his own; but the
problem raised--the problem of the _course_ of the acts that constitute
experiencing.