knowledge as a well-ordered economy, where reason is sovereign, where
the permanent is the standard of reference for the changing, and where
the individual may always escape from his own mere individuality
and find support and reinforcement in a system of relations that
lies outside of and yet gives validity to his own passing states of
consciousness. Thus the rationalists hold that we must find in a
universal intelligence a source of truth and guarantee of value that is
sought in vain in the confused and flowing mass of sensations.
The rationalist, in making the concept or general idea the
all-important thing in knowledge, believes himself to be asserting the
interests of order as against destructive caprice and the license of
momentary whim. He finds that his cause is bound up with that of the
discovery of truth as the necessary instrument and method for action.
Only by reference to the general and the rational can the individual
find perspective, secure direction for his appetites and impulses, and
escape from the uncontrolled and ruinous reactions of his own immediate
tendency.
The concept, once more, in its very generality, in its elevation above
the intensities and conflicts of momentary passions and interests, is
the conserver of the experience of the past. It is the wisdom of the
past put into capitalized and funded form to enable the individual to
get away from the stress and competition of the needs of the passing
moment. It marks the difference between barbarism and civilization,
between continuity and disintegration, between the sequence of
tradition that is the necessity of intelligent thought and action, and
the random and confused excitation of the hour.
When we thus consider not the details of the positions of the
sensationalist and rationalist, but the motives that have induced them
to assume these positions, we discover what is meant in saying that the
question is still a practical, a social one, and that the two schools
stand for certain one-sided factors of social life. If we have on one
side the demand for freedom, for personal initiation into experience,
for variety and progress, we have on the other side the demand for
general order, for continuous and organized unity, for the conservation
of the dearly bought resources of the past. This is what I mean by
saying that the sensationalist abstracts in conscious form the position
and tendency of the Germanic element in modern civilization, the
factor of appetite and impulse, of keen enjoyment and satisfaction, of
stimulus and initiative. Just so the rationalist erects into conscious
abstraction the principle of the Græco-Roman world, that of control, of
system, of order and authority.
That the principles of freedom and order, of past and future, or
conservation and progress, of incitement to action and control of that
incitation, are correlative, I shall not stop to argue. It may be
worth while, however, to point out that exactly the same correlative
and mutually implicating connection exists between sensationalism and
rationalism, considered as philosophical accounts of the origin and
nature of knowledge.
The strength of each school lies in the weakness of its opponent.
The more the sensationalist appears to succeed in reducing knowledge
to the associations of sensation, the more he creates a demand for
thought to introduce background and relationship. The more consistent
the sensationalist, the more openly he reveals the sensation in its
own nakedness crying aloud for a clothing of value and meaning which
must be borrowed from reflective and rational interpretation. On the
other hand, the more reason and the system of relations that make up
the functioning of reason are magnified, the more is felt the need of
sensation to bring reason into some fruitful contact with the materials
of experience. Reason must have the stimulus of this contact in order
to be incited to its work and to get materials to operate with. The
cause, then, why neither school can come to rest in itself is precisely
that each abstracts one essential factor of conduct.
This suggests, finally, that the next move in philosophy is precisely
to transfer attention from the details of the position assumed, and
the arguments used in these two schools, to the practical motives that
have unconsciously controlled the discussion. The positions have been
sufficiently elaborated. Within the past one hundred years, within
especially the last generation, each has succeeded in fully stating
its case. The result, if we remain at this point, is practically a
deadlock. Each can make out its case against the other. To stop at such
a point is a patent absurdity. If we are to get out of the cul-de-sac
it must be by bringing into consciousness the tacit reference to action
that all the time has been the controlling factor.
In a word, another great rhythmic movement is seen to be approaching
its end. The demand for science and philosophy was the demand for
truth and a sure standard of truth which the new-born individual might
employ in his efforts to build up a new world to afford free scope
to the powers stirring within him. The urgency and acuteness of this
demand caused, for the time being, the transfer of attention from the
nature of practice to that of knowledge. The highly theoretical and
abstract character of modern epistemology, combined with the fact that
this highly abstract and theoretic problem has continuously engaged the
attention of thought for more than three centuries, is, to my mind,
proof positive that the question of knowledge was for the time being
the point in which the question of practice centered, and through which
it must find outlet and solution.
We return, then, to our opening problem: the meaning of the question
of the possibility of knowledge raised by Kant a century ago, and of
his assertion that sensation without thought is blind, thought without
sensation empty. Once more I recall to the student of philosophy
how this assertion of Kant has haunted and determined the course of
philosophy in the intervening years--how his solution at once seems
inevitable and unsatisfactory. It is inevitable in that no one can
fairly deny that both sense and reason are implicated in every fruitful
and significant statement of the world; unconvincing because we are
after all left with these two opposed things still at war with each
other, plus the miracle of their final combination.
When I say that the only way out is to place the whole modern industry
of epistemology in relation to the conditions that gave it birth and
the function it has to fulfil, I mean that the unsatisfactory character
of the entire neo-Kantian movement lies in its assumption that
knowledge gives birth to itself and is capable of affording its own
justification. The solution that is always sought and never found so
long as we deal with knowledge as a self-sufficing purveyor of reality,
reveals itself when we conceive of knowledge as a statement of action,
that statement being necessary, moreover, to the successful ongoing of
action.
The entire problem of medieval philosophy is that of absorption,
of assimilation. The result was the creation of the individual.
Hence the problem of modern life is that of reconstruction, reform,
reorganization. The entire content of experience needs to be passed
through the alembic of individual agency and realization. The
individual is to be the bearer of civilization; but this involves a
remaking of the civilization that he bears. Thus we have the dual
question: How can the individual become the organ of corporate action?
How can he make over the truth authoritatively embodied in institutions
of church and state into frank, healthy, and direct expressions of
the simple act of free living? On the other hand, how can civilization
preserve its own integral value and import when subordinated to the
agency of the individual instead of exercising supreme sway over him?
The question of knowledge, of the discovery and statement of truth,
gives the answer to this question; and it alone gives the answer.
Admitting that the practical problem of modern life is the maintenance
of the moral values of civilization through the medium of the insight
and decision of the individual, the problem is foredoomed to futile
failure save as the individual in performing his task can work with
a definite and controllable tool. This tool is science. But this
very fact, constituting the dignity of science and measuring the
importance of the philosophic theory of knowledge, conferring upon
them the religious value once attaching to dogma and the disciplinary
significance once belonging to political rules, also sets their limit.
The servant is not above his master.
When a theory of knowledge forgets that its value rests in solving the
problem out of which it has arisen, viz., that of securing a method of
action; when it forgets that it has to work out the conditions under
which the individual may freely direct himself without loss to the
historic values of civilization--when it forgets these things it begins
to cumber the ground. It is a luxury, and hence a social nuisance and
disturber. Of course, in the very nature of things, every means or
instrument will for a while absorb attention so that it becomes the
end. Indeed it is the end when it is an indispensable condition of
onward movement. But when once the means have been worked out they must
operate as such. When the nature and method of knowledge are fairly
understood, then interest must transfer itself from the possibility of
knowledge to the possibility of its application to life.
The sensationalist has played his part in bringing to effective
recognition the demand in valid knowledge for individuality of
experience, for personal participation in materials of knowledge.
The rationalist has served his time in making it clear once for all
that valid knowledge requires organization, and the operation of a
relatively permanent and general factor. The Kantian epistemologist
has formulated the claims of both schools in defining judgment as
the relation of perception and conception. But when it goes on to
state that this relation is itself knowledge, or can be found in
knowledge, it stultifies itself. Knowledge can define the percept and
elaborate the concept, but their union can be found only in action. The
experimental method of modern science, its erection into the ultimate
mode of verification, is simply this fact obtaining recognition. Only
action can reconcile the old, the general, and the permanent with the
changing, the individual, and the new. It is action as progress, as
development, making over the wealth of the past into capital with which
to do an enlarging and freer business, that alone can find its way
out of the cul-de-sac of the theory of knowledge. Each of the older
movements passed away because of its own success, failed because it did
its work, died in accomplishing its purpose. So also with the modern
philosophy of knowledge; there must come a time when we have so much
knowledge in detail, and understand so well its method in general,
that it ceases to be a problem. It becomes a tool. If the problem of
knowledge is not intrinsically meaningless and absurd it must in course
of time be solved. Then the dominating interest becomes the _use_ of
knowledge; the conditions under which and ways in which it may be most
organically and effectively employed to direct conduct.
Thus the Socratic period recurs; but recurs with the deepened meaning
of the intervening weary years of struggle, confusion, and conflict
in the growth of the recognition of the need of patient and specific
methods of interrogation. So, too, the authoritative and institutional
truth of scholasticism recurs, but recurs borne up upon the vigorous
and conscious shoulders of the freed individual who is aware of his
own intrinsic relations to truth, and who glories in his ability to
carry civilization--not merely to carry it, but to carry it on. Thus
another swing in the rhythm of theory and practice begins.
How does this concern us as philosophers? For the world it means that
philosophy is henceforth a method and not an original fountain head of
truth, nor an ultimate standard of reference. But what is involved for
philosophy itself in this change? I make no claims to being a prophet,
but I venture one more and final unproved statement, believing, with
all my heart, that it is justified both by the moving logic of the
situation, and by the signs of the times. I refer to the growing
transfer of interest from metaphysics and the theory of knowledge to
psychology and social ethics--including in the latter term all the
related concrete social sciences, so far as they may give guidance to
conduct.
There are those who see in psychology only a particular science
which they are pleased to term purely empirical (unless it happen to
restate in changed phraseology the metaphysics with which they are
familiar). They see in it only a more or less incoherent mass of facts,
interesting because relating to human nature, but below the natural
sciences in point of certainty and definiteness, as also far below
pure philosophy as to comprehensiveness and ability to deal with
fundamental issues. But if I may be permitted to dramatize a little
the position of the psychologist, he can well afford to continue
patiently at work, unmindful of the occasional supercilious sneers of
the epistemologist. The cause of modern civilization stands and falls
with the ability of the individual to serve as its agent and bearer.
And psychology is naught but the account of the way in which individual
life is thus progressively maintained and reorganized. Psychology
is the attempt to state in detail the machinery of the individual
considered as the instrument and organ through which social action
operates. It is the answer to Kant’s demand for the formal phase of
experience--how experience as such is constituted. Just because the
whole burden and stress, both of conserving and advancing experience is
more and more thrown upon the individual, everything which sheds light
upon how the individual may weather the stress and assume the burden is
precious and imperious.
Social ethics in inclusive sense is the correlative science. Dealing
not with the form or mode or machinery of action, it attempts rather
to make out its filling and make up the values that are necessary to
constitute an experience which is worth while. The sociologist, like
the psychologist, often presents himself as a camp follower of genuine
science and philosophy, picking up scraps here and there and piecing
them together in somewhat of an aimless fashion--fortunate indeed, if
not vague and over-ambitious. Yet social ethics represents the attempt
to translate philosophy from a general and therefore abstract method
into a working and specific method; it is the change from inquiring
into the nature of value in general to inquiring as to the _particular_
values that ought to be realized in the life of every one, and as to
the conditions which render possible this realization.
There are those who will see in this conception of the outcome of a
four-hundred-year discussion concerning the nature and possibility
of knowledge a derogation from the high estate of philosophy. There
are others who will see in it a sign that philosophy, after wandering
aimlessly hither and yon in a wilderness without purpose or outcome,
has finally come to its senses--has given up metaphysical absurdities
and unverifiable speculations, and become a purely positive science
of phenomena. But there are yet others who will see in this movement
the fulfilment of its vocation, the clear consciousness of a function
that it has always striven to perform; and who will welcome it as a
justification of the long centuries when it appeared to sit apart, far
from the common concerns of man, busied with discourse of essence and
cause, absorbed in argument concerning subject and object, reason and
sensation. To such this outcome will appear the inevitable sequel of
the saying of Socrates that “an unexamined life is not one fit to be
led by man”; and a better response to his injunction “Know thyself.”
THE END
INDEX
Absolutism, 18, 25, 98, 102, 109-110, 121-123, 130-132;
_Essay IV._, 142-153, 176, 180-181
Acquaintance, and knowledge, 79-82
Action, and problem of knowledge, _Essay XI._, 271-304
_A priori_, 206-213, 292-294
Appearance, and reality, 26-28, 118-121
Aristotle, referred to, 5, 32, 35, 37, 48, 50, 78, 221, 278
Assurance, 85-88
Awareness, 93
Behavior, and intelligence, 44
Belief, _Essay VI._, 169-197
Bosanquet, B., 281
Bradley, F. H., _Essay IV._, 112-153
Change, its supposed unreality, 1;
in modern science, 8-9;
and law, 72;
and thought, 133;
of truth, 153;
of experience, 222-224, 259-260;
Christianity, metaphysic of, 178
Cognitive, 84-85, 230-233
Conflict, and thinking, 116-117, 126-127, 132, 148-149
Consistency, as criterion, 128-136
Consciousness, as end of nature, 34-35;
is partial, 43;
and knowledge, 79-80, 102, 171;
_Essay X._, 242-270;
non-existence of, 247-248
Correspondence, 158
Cosmology, and morals, 54
Custom, as background of morals, 48, 52
Darwin, his influence on philosophy, _Essay I._, 1-19;
quoted, 2, 12
Democracy, moral meaning of, 59-60, 266-267
Descartes, 8
Design, _see_ Teleology
Economic Struggle, 21, 29, 35, 41, 50
Economics, influences on morals, 57-59
Empiricism, 200-202;
_Essay IX._, 226-241, 289-291
Epistemology, _versus_ logic, 95-107, 172, 185, 201, 296-298
Error, and becoming, 100
Evolution, of species, 1, 8;
and design, 12-13;
and teleology, 32-35;
and intelligence, 42-43
Experience, _Essay VII._, 198-225
Experiment, and knowledge, _Essay IV._, 77-111
Feeling, 80-81
Final Cause, _see_ Teleology
Functions, true data of psychology, 250-255
Galileo, 8
Genesis, and value, 261-264
Good, is concrete and plural, 15-17, 23, 27;
of Nature, _Essay II._, 20-45;
and evolution, 31-35, 43;
and mysticism, 39, 42;
Greek view of, 46-50;
medieval view of, 52-54;
as fixed, 67
Gordon, K., 215 n.
Gray, Asa, on evolution and design, 12
Happiness, nature of, 69
Hegel, 65, 174 n.
Hobbes, 203 n.
Hume, 82 n., 204 n.
Idealism, 28, 38, 191;
_Essay VII._, 198-225, 228
Ideality, 89, 120, 219-225
Ideas, nature of, 134, 155;
their verification, 141 ff.;
are hypothetical, 144, 150-151, 187
Individual, 244, 265-68, 285, 297
Intellectualism, _Essay IV._, 112-153, 159
Intelligence, is discriminative, 39, 42, 75;
is the good of nature, 44;
and Morals, _Essay III._, 46-76;
cosmic and personal, 55, 59;
as biological instrument, 68;
indirection of activity, 133, 149
Introspection, 250 n.
James, Wm., 104, 194 n., 202, 222 n., 246
Judgment, Bradley’s theory of, 114-117;
of the past, 160-61, 165;
Kant’s theory of, 272
Kant, 63-65, 206-213, 271
Knowledge, its proper object, 6, 10, 14;
and nature, 41;
and freedom, 73;
The Experimental Theory of, _Essay IV._, 77-111;
defined, 90;
and inquiry, 184-189;
_Essay XI._, problem of, 271-304
Locke, 93, 202-204, 217-218
Maine, Sir Henry, quoted, 46
Meaning, and knowledge, 87-90;
and judgment, 116-117, 200
Mechanism, 23, 34, 57
Memory, 220
Moore, A. W., 91 n.
Morals, _Essay III._, 46-76
Mysticism, 38-40, 42
Naturalism, 195
Nature, teleology of, 10;
The Good of, _Essay II._, 20-45;
animistic character of, 51;
change in, 72
Newton, influence of, 61, 72
Organization, of experience, 208-211
Perception, ambiguity of term, 214-219
Philosophy, changes in, 14-19;
political nature of, 21;
defined, 45;
and science, 51;
and psychology, 189-191;
_Essay X._, 242-270
Plato, 21, 47, 49, 72, 219 n., 278
Pragmatism, 25, 31, 33, 55, 95 n., 109, 130 n., 144;
_Essay V._, 154-168, 193
Psychical, 81 n., 104
Psychology, and philosophy, _Essay X._, 242-270, 301
Rationalism, _Essay XI._, 271-304
“Reality,” 98, 105, 113, 129, 169 n., 172, 228, 264
Relation, and appearance, 119-120
Santayana, G., 96, 224 n.
Sciences, developed out of morals, 56;
and industry, 57-58;
as mode of knowledge, 108;
and philosophy, 268-270, 287
Sensation, 94, 262 n.
Sensationalism, _Essay XI._, 271-304
Social Ethics, 302-304
Socrates, 51, 76, 275, 304
Species, equivalent to scholastic form, 3-4;
as eternal and teleological, 4-5;
basis of knowledge, 6-7
Spencer, Herbert, 16, 33, 66
Spinoza, 181
Stoicism, 172, 279
Stuart, H. W., 214 n.
Subjective, 98, 155, 204 n., 270
Teleology, of life, 4;
of nature, 10, 32;
basis of idealism, 11;
concrete, 15, 22;
and evolution, 32-35;
subjective, 223-224
Theory, 124-127
Thinking, practical character of, 124-127
Tolstoi, 173 n.
Transcendence, of knowledge, 103 n., 156-157
Transcendental, and supernatural, 22, 29, 282;
view of knowledge, 24, 27;
freedom, 74
Truth, criterion of, 92, 95, 107-111;
_Essay IV._, 112-153;
absolute, 137;
identified with existence, 138, 145;
eternal, 147, 152;
_Essay V._, 154-168;
230-231, 237, 282
Utilitarianism, 62
Verification, making true, 139 ff., 162-164
Woodbridge, F. J. E., 104 n., 240 n.
FOOTNOTES
[1] The affair is even more portentous in the German with its
capital letters and series of _muses_: “Gewiss ist der Pragmatismus
erkenntnisstheoretisch Nominalismus, psychologisch Voluntarismus,
naturphilosophisch Energismus, metaphysisch Agnosticismus, ethisch
Meliorismus auf Grundlage des Bentham-Millschen Utilitarismus.”
[2] A lecture in a course of public lectures on “Charles Darwin and His
Influence on Science,” given at Columbia University in the winter and
spring of 1909. Reprinted from the _Popular Science Monthly_ for July,
1909.
[3] “Life and Letters,” Vol. I., p. 282; cf. 285.
[4] “Life and Letters,” Vol. II., pp. 146, 170, 245; Vol. I., pp.
283-84. See also the closing portion of his “Variations of Animals and
Plants under Domestication.”
[5] Reprinted from the _Hibbert Journal_, Vol. VII., No. 4, July, 1909.
[6] A public lecture delivered at Columbia University in March, 1908,
under the title of “Ethics,” in a series of lectures on “Science,
Philosophy, and Art.” Reprinted from a monograph published by the
Columbia University Press.
[7] Reprinted, with considerable change in the arrangement and in the
matter of the latter portion, from _Mind_, Vol. XV., N.S., July, 1906.
[8] I must remind the reader again of a point already suggested. It
is the identification of presence in consciousness with knowledge as
such that leads to setting up _a_ mind (_ego_, subject) which has the
peculiar property of knowing (only so often it knows wrong!), or else
that leads to supplying “sensations” with the peculiar property of
surveying their own entrails. Given the correct feeling that knowledge
involves relationship, there being, by supposition, no other _thing_ to
which the thing in consciousness is related, it is forthwith related
to a soul substance, or to its ghostly offspring, a “subject,” or to
“consciousness” itself.
[9] Let us further recall that this theory requires either that things
present shall already be psychical things (feelings, sensations,
etc.), in order to be assimilated to the knowing mind, subject to
consciousness; or else translates genuinely naïve realism into the
miracle of a mind that gets outside itself to lay its ghostly hands
upon the things of an external world.
[10] This means that things may be present _as_ known, just as they
be present as hard or soft, agreeable or disgusting, hoped for or
dreaded. The mediacy, or the art of intervention, which characterizes
knowledge, indicates precisely the way in which known things as known
are immediately present.
[11] If Hume had had a tithe of the interest in the _flux_ of
perceptions and in _habit_--principles of continuity and of
organization--which he had in distinct and isolated existences, he
might have saved us both from German _Erkenntnisstheorie_, and from
that modern miracle play, the psychology of elements of consciousness,
that under the ægis of science, does not hesitate to have psychical
elements compound and breed, and in their agile intangibility put to
shame the performances of their less acrobatic cousins, physical atoms.
[12] In other words, the situation as described is not to be confused
with the case of hunting on purpose to test an idea regarding the dog.