possession of important philosophical bearing. As a matter of fact,
the larger part of the questions that are being discussed in current
epistemology and what is termed metaphysic of logic and ethic arise
out of (and are hopelessly compromised by) this original assumption
of “consciousness as such”--in other words, are provoked by the exact
reason that is given for denying to psychology any essential meaning
for epistemology and metaphysic. Such is the irony of the situation.
The epistemologist’s problem is, indeed, usually put as the question of
how the subject can so far “transcend” itself as to get valid assurance
of the objective world. The very phraseology in which the problem is
put reveals the thoroughness of the psychologist’s revenge. Just and
only because experience has been reduced to “states of consciousness”
as independent existences, does the question of self-transcendence
have any meaning. The entire epistemological industry is one--shall
I say it--of a Sisyphean nature. _Mutatis mutandis_, the same holds
of the metaphysic of logic, ethic, and esthetic. In each case, the
basic problem has come to be how a mere state of consciousness can be
the vehicle of a system of truth, of an objectively valid good, of
beauty which is other than agreeable feeling. We may, indeed, excuse
the psychologist for not carrying on the special inquiries that are
the business of logical, ethical, and esthetical philosophy; but can
we excuse ourselves for forcing his results into such a shape as to
make philosophic problems so arbitrary that they are soluble only by
arbitrarily wrenching scientific facts?
Undoubtedly we are between two fires. In placing upon psychology
the responsibility of discovering the method of experience, as a
sequence of acts and passions, do we not destroy just that limitation
to concrete detail which now constitutes it a science? Will not the
psychologist be the first to repudiate this attempt to mix him up
in matters philosophical? We need only to keep in mind the specific
facts involved in the term Course or Process of Experience to avoid
this danger. The immediate preoccupation of the psychologist is with
very definite and empirical facts--questions like the limits of
audition, of the origin of pitch, of the structure and conditions of
the musical scale, etc. Just so the immediate affair of the geologist
is with particular rock-structures, of the botanist with particular
plants, and so on. But through the collection, description, location,
classification of rocks the geologist is led to the splendid story
of world-forming. The limited, fixed, and separate piece of work is
dissolved away in the fluent and dynamic drama of the earth. So, the
plant leads with inevitableness to the whole process of life and its
evolution.
In form, the botanist still studies the genus, the species, the
plant--hardly, indeed, that; rather the special parts, the structural
elements, of the plant. In reality, he studies life itself; the
structures are the indications, the signature through which he
renders transparent the mystery of life growing in the changing
world. It was doubtless necessary for the botanist to go through the
Linnean period--the period of engagement with rigid detail and fixed
classifications; of tearing apart and piecing together; of throwing
all emphasis upon peculiarities of number, size, and appearance of
matured structure; of regarding change, growth, and function as
external, more or less interesting, attachments to form. Examination
of this period is instructive; there is much in contemporary
investigation and discussion that is almost unpleasantly reminiscent in
its suggestiveness. The psychologist should profit by the intervening
history of science. The conception of evolution is not so much an
additional law as it is a face-about. The fixed structure, the separate
form, the isolated element, is henceforth at best a mere stepping-stone
to knowledge of process, and when not at its best, marks the end of
comprehension, and betokens failure to grasp the problem.
With the change in standpoint from self-included existence to including
process, from structural unit of composition to controlling unity
of function, from changeless form to movement in growth, the whole
scheme of values is transformed. Faculties are definite directions of
development; elements are products that are starting-points for new
processes; bare facts are indices of change; static conditions are
modes of accomplished adjustment. Not that the concrete, empirical
phenomenon loses in worth, much less that unverifiable “metaphysical”
entities are impertinently introduced; but that our aim is the
discovery of a process of actions in its adaptations to circumstance.
If we apply this evolutionary logic in psychology, where shall we
stop? Questions of limits of stimuli in a given sense, say hearing,
are in reality questions of temporary arrests, adjustments marking the
favorable equilibrium of the whole organism; they connect with the
question of the use of sensation in general and auditory sensations
in particular for life-habits; of the origin and use of localized and
distinguished perception; and this, in turn, involves within itself
the whole question of space and time recognition; the significance
of the thing-and-quality experience, and so on. And when we are told
that the question of the origin of space experience has nothing at all
to do with the question of the nature and significance of the space
experienced, the statement is simply evidence that the one who makes
it is still at the static standpoint; he believes that things, that
relations, have existence and significance apart from the particular
conditions under which they come into experience, and apart from the
special service rendered in those particular conditions.
Of course, I am far from saying that every psychologist must make the
whole journey. Each individual may contract, as he pleases, for any
section or subsection he prefers; and undoubtedly the well-being of
the science is advanced by such division of labor. But psychology
goes over the whole ground from detecting every distinct act of
experiencing, to seeing what need calls out the special organ fitted to
cope with the situation, and discovering the machinery through which it
operates to keep a-going the course of action.
But, I shall be told, the wall that divides psychology from philosophy
cannot be so easily treated as non-existent. Psychology is a matter of
natural history, even though it may be admitted that it is the natural
history of the course of experience. But philosophy is a matter of
values; of the criticism and justification of certain validities. One
deals, it is said, with genesis, with conditions of temporal origin
and transition; the other with analysis, with eternal constitution. I
shall have to repeat that just this rigid separation of genesis and
analysis seems to me a survival from a pre-evolutionary, a pre-historic
age. It indicates not so much an assured barrier between philosophy
and psychology as the distance dividing philosophy from all science.
For the lesson that mathematicians first learned, that physics and
chemistry pondered over, in which the biological disciplines were
finally tutored, is that sure and delicate analysis is possible only
through the patient study of conditions of origin and development.
The method of analysis in mathematics is the method of construction.
The experimental method is the method of making, of following the
history of production; the term “cause” that has (when taken as an
existent entity) so hung on the heels of science as to impede its
progress, has universal meaning when read as condition of appearance
in a process. And, as already intimated, the conception of evolution
is no more and no less the discovery of a general law of life than it
is the generalization of all scientific method. Everywhere analysis
that cannot proceed by examining the successive stages of its subject,
from its beginning up to its culmination, that cannot control this
examination by discovering the conditions under which successive stages
appear, is only preliminary. It may further the invention of proper
tools of inquiry, it may help define problems, it may serve to suggest
valuable hypotheses. But as science it breathes an air already tainted.
There is no way to sort out the results flowing from the subject-matter
itself from those introduced by the assumptions and presumptions of
our own reflection. Not so with natural history when it is worthy of
its name. Here the analysis is the unfolding of the existence itself.
Its distinctions are not pigeon-holes of our convenience; they are
stakes that mark the parting of the ways in the process itself. Its
classifications are not a grasp at factors resisting further analysis;
they are the patient tracings of the paths pursued. Nothing is more
out of date than to suppose that interest in genesis is interest in
reducing higher forms to cruder ones: it is interest in locating the
exact and objective conditions under which a given fact appears, and
in relation to which accordingly it has its meaning. Nothing is more
naïve than to suppose that in pursuing “natural history” (term of scorn
in which yet resides the dignity of the world-drama) we simply learn
something of the temporal conditions under which a given value appears,
while its own eternal essential quality remains as opaque as before.
Nature knows no such divorce of quality and circumstance. Things come
when they are wanted and as they are wanted; their quality is precisely
the response they give to the conditions that call for them, while
the furtherance they afford to the movement of their whole is their
meaning. The severance of analysis and genesis, instead of serving as
a ready-made test by which to try out the empirical, temporal events
of psychology from the rational abiding constitution of philosophy,
is a brand of philosophic dualism: the supposition that values are
externally obtruded and statically set in irrelevant rubbish.
There are those who will admit that “states of consciousness” are
but the cross-sections of flow of behavior, arrested for inspection,
made in order that we may reconstruct experience in its lifehistory.
Yet in the knowledge of the course and method of our experience,
they will hold that we are far from the domain proper of philosophy.
Experience, they say, is just the historic achievement of finite
individuals; it tells the tale of approach to the treasures of truth,
of partial victory, but larger defeat, in laying hold of the treasure.
But, they say, reality is not the path to reality, and record of
devious wanderings in the path is hardly a safe account of the goal.
Psychology, in other words, may tell us something of how we mortals
lay hold of the world of things and truths; of how we appropriate
and assimilate its contents; and of how we react. It may trace the
issues of such approaches and apprehensions upon the course of our
own individual destinies. But it cannot wisely ignore nor sanely deny
the distinction between these individual strivings and achievements,
and the “Reality” that subsists and supports its own structure
outside these finite futilities. The processes by which we turn over
The Reality into terms of our fragmentary unconcluded, inconclusive
experiences are so extrinsic to the Reality itself as to have no
revealing power with reference to it. There is the _ordo ad universum_,
the subject of philosophy; there is the _ordo ad individuum_, the
subject of psychology.
Some such assumption as this lies latent, I am convinced, in all
forswearings of the kinship of psychology and philosophy. Two
conceptions hang together. The opinion that psychology is an account
only and finally of states of consciousness, and therefore can throw
no light upon the objects with which philosophy deals, is twin to
the doctrine that the whole conscious life of the individual is not
organic to the world. The philosophic basis and scope of this doctrine
lie beyond examination here. But even in passing one cannot avoid
remarking that the doctrine is almost never consistently held; the
doctrine logically carried out leads so directly to intellectual and
moral scepticism that the theory usually prefers to work in the dark
background as a disposition and temper of thought rather than to make a
frank statement of itself. Even in the half-hearted expositions of the
process of human experience as something merely annexed to the reality
of the universe, we are brought face to face to the consideration with
which we set out: the dependence of theories of the individual upon
the position at a given time of the individual practical and social.
The doctrine of the accidental, futile, transitory significance of the
individual’s experience as compared with eternal realities; the notion
that at best the individual is simply realizing for and in himself
what already has fixed completeness in itself is congruous only with
a certain intellectual and political scheme and must modify itself as
that shifts. When such rearrangement comes, our estimate of the nature
and importance of psychology will mirror the change.
When man’s command of the methods that control action was precarious
and disturbed; when the tools that subject the world of things and
forces to use and operation were rare and clumsy, it was unavoidable
that the individual should submit his perception and purpose blankly to
the blank reality beyond. Under such circumstances, external authority
must reign; the belief that human experience in itself is approximate,
not intrinsic, is inevitable. Under such circumstances, reference to
the individual, to the subject, is a resort only for explaining error,
illusion, and uncertainty. The necessity of external control and
external redemption of experience reports itself in a low valuation of
the self, and of all the factors and phases of experience that spring
from the self. That the psychology of medievalism should appear only as
a portion of its theology of sin and salvation is as obvious as that
the psychology of the Greeks should be a chapter of cosmology.
As against all this, the assertion is ventured that psychology,
supplying us with knowledge of the behavior of experience, is a
conception of democracy. Its postulate is that since experience
fulfils itself in individuals, since it administers itself through
their instrumentality, the account of the course and method of this
achievement is a significant and indispensable affair.
Democracy is possible only because of a change in intellectual
conditions. It implies tools for getting at truth in detail, and day
by day, as we go along. Only such possession justifies the surrender
of fixed, all-embracing principles to which, as universals, all
particulars and individuals are subject for valuation and regulation.
Without such possession, it is only the courage of the fool that would
undertake the venture to which democracy has committed itself--the
ordering of life in response to the needs of the moment in accordance
with the ascertained truth of the moment. Modern life involves the
deification of the here and the now; of the specific, the particular,
the unique, that which happens once and has no measure of value save
such as it brings with itself. Such deification is monstrous fetishism,
unless the deity be there; unless the universal lives, moves, and has
its being in experience as individualized.[62] This conviction of the
value of the individualized finds its further expression in psychology,
which undertakes to show how this individualization proceeds, and in
what aspect it presents itself.
Of course, such a conception means something for philosophy as well
as for psychology; possibly it involves for philosophy the larger
measure of transformation. It involves surrender of any claim on
the part of philosophy to be the sole source of some truths and the
exclusive guardian of some values. It means that philosophy be a
method; not an assurance company, nor a knight errant. It means an
alignment with science. Philosophy may not be sacrificed to the
partial and superficial clamor of that which sometimes officiously
and pretentiously exhibits itself as Science. But there is a sense
in which philosophy must go to school to the sciences; must have no
data save such as it receives at their hands; and be hospitable to no
method of inquiry or reflection not akin to those in daily use among
the sciences. As long as it claims for itself special territory of
fact, or peculiar modes of access to truth, so long must it occupy a
dubious position. Yet this claim it has to make until psychology comes
to its own. There is something in experience, something in things,
which the physical and the biological sciences do not touch; something,
moreover, which is not just more experiences or more existences;
but without which their materials are inexperienced, unrealized.
Such sciences deal only with what _might_ be experienced; with the
content of experience, provided and assumed there be experience. It is
psychology which tells us how this possible experience loses its barely
hypothetical character, and is stamped with categorical unquestioned
experiencedness; how, in a word, it becomes here and now in some
uniquely individualized life. Here is the necessary transition of
science into philosophy; a passage that carries the verified and solid
body of the one into the large and free form of the other.
[NOTE: I have let this paper stand much as written, though now
conscious that much more is crowded into it than could properly
be presented in one paper. The drift of the ten years from ’99 to
’09 has made, I venture to believe, for increased clearness in
the main positions of the paper: The revival of a naturalistic
realism, the denial of the existence of “consciousness,” the
development of functional and dynamic psychology (accompanied
by aversion to interpretation of functions as faculties of a
soul-substance)--all of these tendencies are sympathetic with
the aim of the paper. There is another reason for letting it
stand: the new functional and pragmatic empiricism proffered
in this volume has been constantly objected to on the ground
that its conceptions of knowledge and verification lead only
to subjectivism and solipsism. The paper may indicate that the
identification of experience with bare states of consciousness
represents the standpoint of the critic, not of the empiricism
criticised, and that it is for him, not for me, to fear the
subjective implications of such a position. The paper also
clearly raises the question as to how far the isolation of
“consciousness” from nature and social life, which characterizes
the procedure of many psychologists of to-day, is responsible for
keeping alive quite unreal problems in philosophy.]
THE SIGNIFICANCE OF THE PROBLEM OF KNOWLEDGE[63]
It is now something over a century since Kant called upon philosophers
to cease their discussion regarding the nature of the world and the
principles of existence until they had arrived at some conclusion
regarding the nature of the knowing process. But students of philosophy
know that Kant formulated the question “how knowledge is possible”
rather than created it. As matter of fact, reflective thought for two
centuries before Kant had been principally interested in just this
problem, although it had not generalized its own interest. Kant brought
to consciousness the controlling motive. The discussion, both in Kant
himself and in his successors, often seems scholastic, lost in useless
subtlety, scholastic argument, and technical distinctions. Within the
last decade in particular there have been signs of a growing weariness
as to epistemology, and a tendency to turn away to more fertile
fields. The interest shows signs of exhaustion.
Students of philosophy will recognize what I mean when I say that this
growing conviction of futility and consequent distaste are associated
with the outcome of the famous dictum of Kant, that perception without
conception is blind, while conception without perception is empty. The
whole course of reflection since Kant’s time has tended to justify this
remark. The sensationalist and the rationalist have worked themselves
out. Pretty much all students are convinced that we can reduce
knowledge neither to a set of associated sensations, nor yet to a
purely rational system of relations of thought. Knowledge is judgment,
and judgment requires both a material of sense perception and an
ordering, regulating principle, reason; so much seems certain, but we
do not get any further. Sensation and thought themselves seem to stand
out more rigidly opposed to each other in their own natures than ever.
Why both are necessary, and how two such opposed factors coöperate in
bringing about the unified result of science, becomes more and more of
a mystery. It is the continual running up against this situation which
accounts for the flagging of interest and the desire to direct energy
where it will have more outcome.
This situation creates a condition favorable to taking stock of the
question as it stands; to inquiring what this interest, prolonged
for over three centuries, in the possibility and nature of knowledge,
stands for; what the conviction as to the necessity of the union of
sensation and thought, together with the inability to reach conclusions
regarding the nature of the union, signifies.
I propose then to raise this evening precisely this question: What
is the meaning of the problem of knowledge? What is its meaning, not
simply for reflective philosophy or in terms of epistemology itself,
but what is its meaning in the historical movement of humanity and as
a part of a larger and more comprehensive experience? My thesis is
perhaps sufficiently indicated in the mere taking of this point of
view. It implies that the abstractness of the discussion of knowledge,
its remoteness from everyday experience, is one of form, rather than of
substance. It implies that the problem of knowledge is not a problem
that has its origin, its value, or its destiny within itself. The
problem is one which social life, the organized practice of mankind,
has had to face. The seemingly technical and abstruse discussion of the
philosophers results from the formulation and statement of the question.
I suggest that the problem of the possibility of knowledge is but
an aspect of the question of the relation of knowing to acting, of
theory to practice. The distinctions which the philosophers raise, the
oppositions which they erect, the weary treadmill which they pursue
between sensation and thought, subject and object, mind and matter, are
not invented _ad hoc_, but are simply the concise reports and condensed
formula of points of view and practical conflicts having their source
in the very nature of modern life, conflicts which must be met and
solved if modern life is to go on its way untroubled, with clear
consciousness of what it is about. As the philosopher has received his
problem from the world of action, so he must return his account there
for auditing and liquidation.
More especially, I suggest that the tendency of all the points at issue
to precipitate in the opposition of sensationalism and rationalism
is due to the fact that sensation and reason stand for the two
forces contending for mastery in social life: the radical and the
conservative. The reason that the contest does not end, the reason for
the necessity of the combination of the two in the resultant statement,
is that both factors are necessary in action; one stands for stimulus,
for initiative; the other for control, for direction.
I cannot hope, in the time at my command this evening, to justify
these wide and sweeping assertions regarding either the origin, the
work, or the final destiny of philosophic reflection. I simply hope,
by reference to some of the chief periods of the development of
philosophy, to illustrate to you something of what I mean.