IV

Why has the description of experience been so remote from the facts of

empirical situations? To answer this question throws light upon the

submergence of recent philosophizing in epistemology--that is, in

discussions of the nature, possibility, and limits of knowledge in

general, and in the attempt to reach conclusions regarding the ultimate

nature of reality from the answers given to such questions.

The reply to the query regarding the currency of a non-empirical

doctrine of experience (even among professed empiricists) is that the

traditional account is derived from a conception once universally

entertained regarding the subject or bearer or center of experience. The

description of experience has been forced into conformity with this

prior conception; it has been primarily a deduction from it, actual

empirical facts being poured into the moulds of the deductions. The

characteristic feature of this prior notion is the assumption that

experience centers in, or gathers about, or proceeds from a center or

subject which is outside the course of natural existence, and set over

against it:--it being of no importance, for present purposes, whether

this antithetical subject is termed soul, or spirit, or mind, or ego, or

consciousness, or just knower or knowing subject.

There are plausible grounds for thinking that the currency of the idea

in question lies in the form which men's religious preoccupations took

for many centuries. These were deliberately and systematically

other-worldly. They centered about a Fall which was not an event in

nature, but an aboriginal catastrophe that corrupted Nature; about a

redemption made possible by supernatural means; about a life in another

world--essentially, not merely spatially, Other. The supreme drama of

destiny took place in a soul or spirit which, under the circumstances,

could not be conceived other than as non-natural--extra-natural, if not,

strictly speaking, supernatural. When Descartes and others broke away

from medieval interests, they retained as commonplaces its intellectual

apparatus: Such as, knowledge is exercised by a power that is

extra-natural and set over against the world to be known. Even if they

had wished to make a complete break, they had nothing to put as knower

in the place of the soul. It may be doubted whether there was any

available empirical substitute until science worked out the fact that

physical changes are functional correlations of energies, and that man

is continuous with other forms of life, and until social life had

developed an intellectually free and responsible individual as its

agent.

But my main point is not dependent upon any particular theory as to the

historic origin of the notion about the bearer of experience. The point

is there on its own account. The essential thing is that the bearer was

conceived as outside of the world; so that experience consisted in the

bearer's being affected through a type of operations not found anywhere

in the world, while knowledge consists in surveying the world, looking

at it, getting the view of a spectator.

The theological problem of attaining knowledge of God as ultimate

reality was transformed in effect into the philosophical problem of the

possibility of attaining knowledge of reality. For how is one to get

beyond the limits of the subject and subjective occurrences? Familiarity

breeds credulity oftener than contempt. How can a problem be artificial

when men have been busy discussing it almost for three hundred years?

But if the assumption that experience is something set over against the

world is contrary to fact, then the problem of how self or mind or

subjective experience or consciousness can reach knowledge of an

external world is assuredly a meaningless problem. Whatever questions

there may be about knowledge, they will not be the kind of problems

which have formed epistemology.

The problem of knowledge as conceived in the industry of epistemology is

the problem of knowledge _in general_--of the possibility, extent, and

validity of knowledge in general. What does this "in general" mean? In

ordinary life there are problems a-plenty of knowledge in particular;

every conclusion we try to reach, theoretical or practical, affords such

a problem. But there is no problem of knowledge in general. I do not

mean, of course, that general statements cannot be made about knowledge,

or that the problem of attaining these general statements is not a

genuine one. On the contrary, specific instances of success and failure

in inquiry exist, and are of such a character that one can discover the

conditions conducing to success and failure. Statement of these

conditions constitutes logic, and is capable of being an important aid

in proper guidance of further attempts at knowing. But this logical

problem of knowledge is at the opposite pole from the epistemological.

Specific problems are about right conclusions to be reached--which

means, in effect, right ways of going about the business of inquiry.

They imply a difference between knowledge and error consequent upon

right and wrong methods of inquiry and testing; not a difference

between experience and the world. The problem of knowledge _ueberhaupt_

exists because it is assumed that there is a knower in general, who is

outside of the world to be known, and who is defined in terms

antithetical to the traits of the world. With analogous assumptions, we

could invent and discuss a problem of digestion in general. All that

would be required would be to conceive the stomach and food-material as

inhabiting different worlds. Such an assumption would leave on our hands

the question of the possibility, extent, nature, and genuineness of any

transaction between stomach and food.

But because the stomach and food inhabit a continuous stretch of

existence, because digestion is but a correlation of diverse activities

in one world, the problems of digestion are specific and plural: What

are the particular correlations which constitute it? How does it proceed

in different situations? What is favorable and what unfavorable to its

best performance?--and so on. Can one deny that if we were to take our

clue from the present empirical situation, including the scientific

notion of evolution (biological continuity) and the existing arts of

control of nature, subject and object would be treated as occupying the

same natural world as unhesitatingly as we assume the natural

conjunction of an animal and its food? Would it not follow that

knowledge is one way in which natural energies cooeperate? Would there be

any problem save discovery of the peculiar structure of this

cooeperation, the conditions under which it occurs to best effect, and

the consequences which issue from its occurrence?

It is a commonplace that the chief divisions of modern philosophy,

idealism in its different kinds, realisms of various brands, so-called

common-sense dualism, agnosticism, relativism, phenomenalism, have grown

up around the epistemological problem of the general relation of subject

and object. Problems not openly epistemological, such as whether the

relation of changes in consciousness to physical changes is one of

interaction, parallelism, or automatism have the same origin. What

becomes of philosophy, consisting largely as it does of different

answers to these questions, in case the assumptions which generate the

questions have no empirical standing? Is it not time that philosophers

turned from the attempt to determine the comparative merits of various

replies to the questions to a consideration of the claims of the

questions?

When dominating religious ideas were built up about the idea that the

self is a stranger and pilgrim in this world; when morals, falling in

line, found true good only in inner states of a self inaccessible to

anything but its own private introspection; when political theory

assumed the finality of disconnected and mutually exclusive

personalities, the notion that the bearer of experience is antithetical

to the world instead of being in and of it was congenial. It at least

had the warrant of other beliefs and aspirations. But the doctrine of

biological continuity or organic evolution has destroyed the scientific

basis of the conception. Morally, men are now concerned with the

amelioration of the conditions of the common lot in this world. Social

sciences recognize that associated life is not a matter of physical

juxtaposition, but of genuine intercourse--of community of experience in

a non-metaphorical sense of community. Why should we longer try to patch

up and refine and stretch the old solutions till they seem to cover the

change of thought and practice? Why not recognize that the trouble is

with the problem?

A belief in organic evolution which does not extend unreservedly to the

way in which the subject of experience is thought of, and which does not

strive to bring the entire theory of experience and knowing into line

with biological and social facts, is hardly more than Pickwickian. There

are many, for example, who hold that dreams, hallucinations, and errors

cannot be accounted for at all except on the theory that a self (or

"consciousness") exercises a modifying influence upon the "real object."

The logical assumption is that consciousness is outside of the real

object; that it is something different in kind, and therefore has the

power of changing "reality" into appearance, of introducing

"relativities" into things as they are in themselves--in short, of

infecting real things with subjectivity. Such writers seem unaware of

the fact that this assumption makes consciousness supernatural in the

literal sense of the word; and that, to say the least, the conception

can be accepted by one who accepts the doctrine of biological continuity

only after every other way of dealing with the facts has been exhausted.

Realists, of course (at least some of the Neo-realists), deny any such

miraculous intervention of consciousness. But they[6] admit the reality

of the problem; denying only this particular solution, they try to find

some other way out, which will still preserve intact the notion of

knowledge as a relationship of a general sort between subject and

object.

Now dreams and hallucinations, errors, pleasures, and pains, possibly

"secondary" qualities, do not occur save where there are organic centers

of experience. They cluster about a subject. But to treat them as things

which inhere exclusively in the subject; or as posing the problem of a

distortion of _the_ real object by a knower set over against the world,

or as presenting facts to be explained primarily as cases of

contemplative knowledge, is to testify that one has still to learn the

lesson of evolution in its application to the affairs in hand.

If biological development be accepted, the subject of experience is at

least an animal, continuous with other organic forms in a process of

more complex organization. An animal in turn is at least continuous with

chemico-physical processes which, in living things, are so organized as

really to constitute the activities of life with all their defining

traits. And experience is not identical with brain action; it is the

entire organic agent-patient in all its interaction with the

environment, natural and social. The brain is primarily an organ of a

certain kind of behavior, not of knowing the world. And to repeat what

has already been said, experiencing is just certain modes of

interaction, of correlation, of natural objects among which the organism

happens, so to say, to be one. It follows with equal force that

experience means primarily not knowledge, but ways of doing and

suffering. Knowing must be described by discovering what particular

mode--qualitatively unique--of doing and suffering it is. As it is, we

find experience assimilated to a non-empirical concept of knowledge,

derived from an antecedent notion of a spectator outside of the

world.[7]

In short, the epistemological fashion of conceiving dreams, errors,

"relativities," etc., depends upon the isolation of mind from intimate

participation with other changes in the same continuous nexus. Thus it

is like contending that when a bottle bursts, the bottle is, in some

self-contained miraculous way, exclusively responsible. Since it is the

nature of a bottle to be whole so as to retain fluids, bursting is an

abnormal event--comparable to an hallucination. Hence it cannot belong

to the "real" bottle; the "subjectivity" of glass is the cause. It is

obvious that since the breaking of glass is a case of specific

correlation of natural energies, its accidental and abnormal character

has to do with _consequences_, not with causation. Accident is

interference with the consequences for which the bottle is intended. The

bursting considered apart from its bearing on these consequences is on a

plane with any other occurrence in the wide world. But from the

standpoint of a desired future, bursting is an anomaly, an interruption

of the course of events.

The analogy with the occurrence of dreams, hallucinations, etc., seems

to me exact. Dreams are not something outside of the regular course of

events; they are in and of it. They are not cognitive distortions of

real things; they are _more_ real things. There is nothing abnormal in

their existence, any more than there is in the bursting of a bottle.[8]

But they may be abnormal, from the standpoint of their influence, of

their operation as stimuli in calling out responses to modify the

future. Dreams have often been taken as prognostics of what is to

happen; they have modified conduct. A hallucination may lead a man to

consult a doctor; such a consequence is right and proper. But the

consultation indicates that the subject regarded it as an indication of

consequences which he feared: as a symptom of a disturbed life. Or the

hallucination may lead him to anticipate consequences which in fact flow

only from the possession of great wealth. Then the hallucination is a

disturbance of the normal course of events; the occurrence is wrongly

_used_ with reference to eventualities.

To regard reference to use and to desired and intended consequences as

involving a "subjective" factor is to miss the point, for this has

regard to the future. The uses to which a bottle are put are not mental;

they do not consist of physical states; they are further correlations of

natural existences. Consequences in use are genuine natural events; but

they do not occur without the intervention of behavior involving

anticipation of a future. The case is not otherwise with an

hallucination. The differences it makes are in any case differences in

the course of the one continuous world. The important point is whether

they are good or bad differences. To use the hallucination as a sign of

organic lesions that menace health means the beneficial result of seeing

a physician; to respond to it as a sign of consequences such as actually

follow only from being persecuted is to fall into error--to be abnormal.

The persecutors are "unreal"; that is, there are no things which act as

persecutors act; but the hallucination exists. Given its conditions it

is as natural as any other event, and poses only the same kind of

problem as is put by the occurrence of, say, a thunderstorm. The

"unreality" of persecution is not, however, a subjective matter; it

means that conditions do not exist for producing the _future_

consequences which are now anticipated and reacted to. Ability to

anticipate future consequences and to respond to them as stimuli to

present behavior may well _define_ what is meant by a mind or by

"consciousness."[9] But this is only a way of saying just what kind of a

real or natural existence the subject is; it is not to fall back on a

preconception about an unnatural subject in order to characterize the

occurrence of error.

Although the discussion may be already labored, let us take another

example--the occurrence of disease. By definition it is pathological,

abnormal. At one time in human history this abnormality was taken to be

something dwelling in the intrinsic nature of the event--in its

existence irrespective of future consequences. Disease was literally

extra-natural and to be referred to demons, or to magic. No one to-day

questions its naturalness--its place in the order of natural events. Yet

it is abnormal--for it operates to effect results different from those

which follow from health. The difference is a genuine empirical

difference, not a mere mental distinction. From the standpoint of

bearing on a subsequent course of events disease is unnatural, in spite

of the naturalness of its occurrence and origin.

The habit of ignoring reference to the future is responsible for the

assumption that to admit human participation in any form is to admit the

"subjective" in a sense which alters the objective into the phenomenal.

There have been those who, like Spinoza, regarded health and disease,

good and ill, as equally real and equally unreal. However, only a few

consistent materialists have included truth along with error as merely

phenomenal and subjective. But if one does not regard movement toward

possible consequences as genuine, wholesale denial of existential

validity to all these distinctions is the only logical course. To select

truth as objective and error as "subjective" is, on this basis, an

unjustifiably partial procedure. Take everything as fixedly given, and

both truth and error are arbitrary insertions into fact. Admit the

genuineness of changes going on, and capacity for its direction through

organic action based on foresight, and both truth and falsity are alike

existential. It is human to regard the course of events which is in line

with our own efforts as the _regular_ course of events, and

interruptions as abnormal, but this partiality of human desire is itself

a part of what actually takes place.

It is now proposed to take a particular case of the alleged

epistemological predicament for discussion, since the entire ground

cannot be covered. I think, however, the instance chosen is typical, so

that the conclusion reached may be generalized.

The instance is that of so-called relativity in perception. There are

almost endless instances; the stick bent in water; the whistle changing

pitch with change of distance from the ear; objects doubled when the eye

is pushed; the destroyed star still visible, etc., etc. For our

consideration we may take the case of a spherical object that presents

itself to one observer as a flat circle, to another as a somewhat

distorted elliptical surface. This situation gives empirical proof, so

it is argued, of the difference between a real object and mere

appearance. Since there is but one object, the existence of two

_subjects_ is the sole differentiating factor. Hence the two

appearances of the one real object is proof of the intervening

distorting action of the subject. And many of the Neo-realists who deny

the difference in question, admit the case to be one of knowledge and

accordingly to constitute an epistemological problem. They have in

consequence developed wonderfully elaborate schemes of sundry kinds to

maintain "epistemological monism" intact.

Let us try to keep close to empirical facts. In the first place the two

unlike appearances of the one sphere are physically necessary because of

the laws of reaction of light. If the one sphere did _not_ assume these

two appearances under given conditions, we should be confronted with a

hopelessly irreconcilable discrepancy in the behavior of natural energy.

That the result is natural is evidenced by the fact that two cameras--or

other arrangements of apparatus for reflecting light--yield precisely

the same results. Photographs are as genuinely physical existences as

the original sphere; and they exhibit the two geometrical forms.

The statement of these facts makes no impression upon the confirmed

epistemologist; he merely retorts that as long as it is admitted that

the organism is the cause of a sphere being seen, from different points,

as a circular and as an elliptical surface, the essence of his

contention--the modification of the real object by the subject--is

admitted. To the question why the same logic does not apply to

photographic records he makes, as far as I know, no reply at all.

The source of the difficulty is not hard to see. The objection assumes

that the alleged modifications of _the_ real object are cases of

_knowing_ and hence attributable to the influence of a _knower_.

Statements which set forth the doctrine will always be found to refer to

the organic factor, to the eye, as an observer or a percipient. Even

when reference is made to a lens or a mirror, language is sometimes used

which suggests that the writer's naivete is sufficiently gross to treat

these physical factors as if they were engaged in perceiving the sphere.

But as it is evident that the lens operates as a physical factor in

correlation with other physical factors--notably light--so it ought to

be evident that the intervention of the optical apparatus of the eye is

a purely non-cognitive matter. The relation in question is not one

between a sphere and a would-be knower of it, unfortunately condemned by

the nature of the knowing apparatus to alter the thing he would know; it

is an affair of the dynamic interaction of two physical agents in

producing a third thing, an effect;--an affair of precisely the same

kind as in any physical conjoint action, say the operation of hydrogen

and oxygen in producing water. To regard the eye as primarily a knower,

an observer, of things, is as crass as to assign that function to a

camera. But unless the eye (or optical apparatus, or brain, or organism)

be so regarded, there is absolutely no problem of observation or of

knowledge in the case of the occurrence of elliptical and circular

surfaces. Knowledge does not enter into the affair at all till _after_

these forms of refracted light have been produced. About them there is

nothing unreal. Light is really, physically, existentially, refracted

into these forms. If the same spherical form upon refracting light to

physical objects in two quite different positions produced the same

geometric forms, there would, indeed, be something to marvel at--as

there would be if wax produced the same results in contact

simultaneously with a cold body and with a warm one. Why talk about _the

real_ object in relation to _a knower_ when what is given is one real

thing in dynamic connection with another real thing?

The way of dealing with the case will probably meet with a retort; at

least, it has done so before. It has been said that the account given

above and the account of traditional subjectivism differ only verbally.

The essential thing in both, so it is said, is the admission that an

activity of a self or subject or organism makes a difference in the real

object. Whether the subject makes this difference in the very process of

knowing or makes it prior to the act of knowing is a minor matter; what

is important is that the known thing has, by the time it is known, been

"subjectified."

The objection gives a convenient occasion for summarizing the main

points of the argument. On the one hand, the retort of the objector

depends upon talking about _the_ real object. Employ the term "_a_ real

object," and the change produced by the activity characteristic of the

optical apparatus is of just the same kind as that of the camera lens or

that of any other physical agency. Every event in the world marks a

difference made to one existence in active conjunction with some other

existence. And, as for the alleged subjectivity, if subjective is used

merely as an adjective to designate the specific activity of a

particular existence, comparable, say, to the term feral, applied to

tiger, or metallic, applied to iron, then of course reference to

subjective is legitimate. But it is also tautological. It is like saying

that flesh eaters are carnivorous. But the term "subjective" is so

consecrated to other uses, usually implying invidious contrast with

objectivity (while subjective in the sense just suggested means specific

mode _of_ objectivity), that it is difficult to maintain this innocent

sense. Its use in any disparaging way in the situation before us--any

sense implicating contrast with a real object--assumes that the organism

_ought_ not to make any difference when it operates in conjunction with

other things. Thus we run to earth that assumption that the subject is

heterogeneous from every other natural existence; it is to be the one

otiose, inoperative thing in a moving world--our old assumption of the

self as outside of things.[10]

What and where is knowledge in the case we have been considering? Not,

as we have already seen, in the production of forms of light having a

circular and elliptical surface. These forms are natural happenings.

They may enter into knowledge or they may not, according to

circumstances. Countless such refractive changes take place without

being noted.[11] When they become subject-matter for knowledge, the

inquiry they set on foot may take on an indefinite variety of forms. One

may be interested in ascertaining more about the structural

peculiarities of the forms themselves; one may be interested in the

mechanism of their production; one may find problems in projective

geometry, or in drawing and painting--all depending upon the specific

matter-of-fact context. The forms may be _objectives_ of knowledge--of

reflective examination--or they may be means of knowing something else.

It may happen--under some circumstances it does happen--that the

objective of inquiry is the nature of the geometric form which, when

refracting light, gives rise to these other forms. In this case the

sphere is the thing known, and in this case, the forms of light are

signs or evidence of the conclusion to be drawn. There is no more reason

for supposing that they _are_ (mis)knowledges of the sphere--that the

sphere is necessarily and from the start what one is trying to

know--than for supposing that the position of the mercury in the

thermometer tube is a cognitive distortion of atmospheric pressure. In

each case (that of the mercury and that of, say, a circular surface) the

primary datum is a physical happening. In each case it may be used, upon

occasion, as a sign or evidence of the nature of the causes which

brought it about. Given the position in question, the circular form

would be an intrinsically _unreliable_ evidence of the nature and

position of the spherical body only in case it, as the direct datum of

perception, were _not_ what it is--a circular form.

I confess that all this seems so obvious that the reader is entitled to

inquire into the motive for reciting such plain facts. Were it not for

the persistence of the epistemological problem it would be an affront to

the reader's intelligence to dwell upon them. But as long as such facts

as we have been discussing furnish the subject-matter with which

philosophizing is peculiarly concerned, these commonplaces must be urged

and reiterated. They bear out two contentions which are important at the

juncture, although they will lose special significance as soon as these

are habitually recognized: Negatively, a prior and non-empirical notion

of the self is the source of the prevailing belief that experience as

such is primarily cognitional--a knowledge affair; positively,

_knowledge is always a matter of the use that is made of experienced

natural events_, a use in which given things are treated as indications

of what will be experienced under different conditions.

Let us make one effort more to clear up these points. Suppose it is a

question of knowledge of water. The thing to be known does not present

itself primarily as a matter of knowledge-and-ignorance at all. It

occurs as a stimulus to action and as the source of certain undergoings.

It is something to react to:--to drink, to wash with, to put out fire

with, and also something that reacts unexpectedly to our reactions,

that makes us undergo disease, suffocation, drowning. In this twofold

way, water or anything else enters into experience. Such presence in

experience has of itself nothing to do with knowledge or consciousness;

nothing that is in the sense of depending upon them, though it has

everything to do with knowledge and consciousness in the sense that the

latter depends upon prior experience of this non-cognitive sort. Man's

experience is what it is because his response to things (even successful

response) and the reactions of things to his life, are so radically

different from knowledge. The difficulties and tragedies of life, the

stimuli to acquiring knowledge, lie in the radical disparity of

presence-in-experience and presence-in-knowing. Yet the immense

importance of knowledge experience, the fact that turning

presence-in-experience over into presence-in-a-knowledge-experience is

the sole mode of control of nature, has systematically hypnotized

European philosophy since the time of Socrates into thinking that all

experiencing is a mode of knowing, if not good knowledge, then a

low-grade or confused or implicit knowledge.

When water is an adequate stimulus to action or when its reactions

oppress and overwhelm us, it remains outside the scope of knowledge.

When, however, the bare presence of the thing (say, as optical stimulus)

ceases to operate directly as stimulus to response and begins to operate

in connection with a forecast of the consequences it will effect when

responded to, it begins to acquire meaning--to be known, to be an

object. It is noted as something which is wet, fluid, satisfies thirst,

allays uneasiness, etc. The conception that we begin with a known visual

quality which is thereafter enlarged by adding on qualities apprehended

by the other senses does not rest upon experience; it rests upon making

experience conform to the notion that every experience _must_ be a

cognitive noting. As long as the visual stimulus operates as a stimulus

on its own account, there is no apprehension, no noting, of color or

light at all. To much the greater portion of sensory stimuli we react in

precisely this wholly non-cognitive way. In the attitude of suspended

response in which consequences are anticipated, the direct stimulus

becomes a sign or index of something else--and thus matter of noting or

apprehension or acquaintance, or whatever term may be employed. This

difference (together, of course, with the consequences which go with it)

is the difference which the natural event of knowing makes to the

natural event of direct organic stimulation. It is no change of a

reality into an unreality, of an object into something subjective; it is

no secret, illicit, or epistemological transformation; it is a genuine

acquisition of new and distinctive features through entering into

relations with things with which it was not formerly connected--namely,

possible and future things.

But, replies some one so obsessed with the epistemological point of view

that he assumes that the prior account is a rival epistemology in

disguise, all this involves no change in Reality, no difference made to

Reality. Water was all the time all the things it is ever found out to

be. Its real nature has not been altered by knowing it; any such

alteration means a mis-knowing.

In reply let it be said,--once more and finally,--there is no assertion

or implication about _the_ real object or _the_ real world or _the_

reality. Such an assumption goes with that epistemological universe of

discourse which has to be abandoned in an empirical universe of

discourse. The change is of _a_ real object. An incident of the world

operating as a physiologically direct stimulus is assuredly a reality.

Responded to, it produces specific consequences in virtue of the

response. Water is not drunk unless somebody drinks it; it does not

quench thirst unless a thirsty person drinks it--and so on. Consequences

occur whether one is aware of them or not; they are integral facts in

experience. But let one of these consequences be anticipated and let it,

as anticipated, become an indispensable element in the stimulus, and

then there is a known object. It is not that knowing _produces_ a

change, but that it _is_ a change of the specific kind described. A

serial process, the successive portions of which are as such incapable

of simultaneous occurrence, is telescoped and condensed into an object,

a unified inter-reference of contemporaneous properties, most of which

express potentialities rather than completed data.

Because of this change, an _object_ possesses truth or error (which the

physical occurrence as such never has); it is classifiable as fact or

fantasy; it is of a sort or kind, expresses an essence or nature,

possesses implications, etc., etc. That is to say, it is marked by

specifiable _logical_ traits not found in physical occurrences as such.

Because objective idealisms have seized upon these traits as

constituting the very essence of Reality is no reason for proclaiming

that they are ready-made features of physical happenings, and hence for

maintaining that knowing is nothing but an appearance of things on a

stage for which "consciousness" supplies the footlights. For only the

epistemological predicament leads to "presentations" being regarded as

cognitions of things which were previously unpresented. In any empirical

situation of everyday life or of science, knowledge signifies something

stated or inferred of another thing. Visible water is not a more less

erroneous presentation of H_{2}O, but H_{2}O is a knowledge about the

thing we see, drink, wash with, sail on, and use for power.

A further point and the present phase of discussion terminates. Treating

knowledge as a presentative relation between the knower and object makes

it necessary to regard the mechanism of _presentation_ as constituting

the act of knowing. Since things may be presented in sense-perception,

in recollection, in imagination and in conception, and since the

mechanism in every one of these four styles of presentation is

sensory-cerebral the problem of knowing becomes a mind-body problem.[12]

The psychological, or physiological, mechanism of presentation involved

in seeing a chair, remembering what I ate yesterday for luncheon,

imagining the moon the size of a cart wheel, conceiving a mathematical

continuum is identified with the operation of knowing. The evil

consequences are twofold. The problem of the relation of mind and body

has become a part of the problem of the possibility of knowledge in

general, to the further complication of a matter already hopelessly

constrained. Meantime the actual process of knowing, namely, operations

of controlled observation, inference, reasoning, and testing, the only

process with _intellectual_ import, is dismissed as irrelevant to the

theory of knowing. The methods of knowing practised in daily life and

science are excluded from consideration in the philosophical theory of

knowing. Hence the constructions of the latter become more and more

elaborately artificial because there is no definite check upon them. It

would be easy to quote from epistemological writers statements to the

effect that these processes (which supply the only empirically

verifiable facts of knowing) are _merely_ inductive in character, or

even that they are of purely psychological significance. It would be

difficult to find a more complete inversion of the facts than in the

latter statement, since presentation constitutes in fact the

psychological affair. A confusion of logic with physiological physiology

has bred hybrid epistemology, with the amazing result that the technique

of effective inquiry is rendered irrelevant to the theory of knowing,

and those physical events involved in the occurrence of data for knowing

are treated as if they constituted the act of knowing.

V

What are the bearings of our discussion upon the conception of the

present scope and office of philosophy? What do our conclusions indicate

and demand with reference to philosophy itself? For the philosophy which

reaches such conclusions regarding knowledge and mind must apply them,

sincerely and whole-heartedly, to its idea of its own nature. For

philosophy claims to be one form or mode of knowing. If, then, the

conclusion is reached that knowing is a way of employing empirical

occurrences with respect to increasing power to direct the consequences

which flow from things, the application of the conclusion must be made

to philosophy itself. It, too, becomes not a contemplative survey of

existence nor an analysis of what is past and done with, but an outlook

upon future possibilities with reference to attaining the better and

averting the worse. Philosophy must take, with good grace, its own

medicine.

It is easier to state the negative results of the changed idea of

philosophy than the positive ones. The point that occurs to mind most

readily is that philosophy will have to surrender all pretension to be

peculiarly concerned with ultimate reality, or with reality as a

complete (i.e., completed) whole: with _the_ real object. The surrender

is not easy of achievement. The philosophic tradition that comes to us

from classic Greek thought and that was reinforced by Christian

philosophy in the Middle Ages discriminates philosophical knowing from

other modes of knowing by means of an alleged peculiarly intimate

concern with supreme, ultimate, true reality. To deny this trait to

philosophy seems to many to be the suicide of philosophy; to be a

systematic adoption of skepticism or agnostic positivism.

The pervasiveness of the tradition is shown in the fact that so vitally

a contemporary thinker as Bergson, who finds a philosophic revolution

involved in abandonment of the traditional identification of the truly

real with the fixed (an identification inherited from Greek thought),

does not find it in his heart to abandon the counterpart identification

of philosophy with search for the truly Real; and hence finds it

necessary to substitute an ultimate and absolute flux for an ultimate

and absolute permanence. Thus his great empirical services in calling

attention to the fundamental importance of considerations of time for

problems of life and mind get compromised with a mystic, non-empirical

"Intuition"; and we find him preoccupied with solving, by means of his

new idea of ultimate reality, the traditional problems of

realities-in-themselves and phenomena, matter and mind, free-will and

determinism, God and the world. Is not that another evidence of the

influence of the classic idea about philosophy?

Even the new realists are not content to take their realism as a plea

for approaching subject-matter directly instead of through the

intervention of epistemological apparatus; they find it necessary first

to determine the status of _the_ real object. Thus they too become

entangled in the problem of the possibility of error, dreams,

hallucinations, etc., in short, the problem of evil. For I take it that

an uncorrupted realism would accept such things as real events, and find

in them no other problems than those attending the consideration of any

real occurrence--namely, problems of structure, origin, and operation.

It is often said that pragmatism, unless it is content to be a

contribution to mere methodology, must develop a theory of Reality. But

the chief characteristic trait of the pragmatic notion of reality is

precisely that no theory of Reality in general, _ueberhaupt_, is possible

or needed. It occupies the position of an emancipated empiricism or a

thoroughgoing naive realism. It finds that "reality" is a _denotative_

term, a word used to designate indifferently everything that happens.

Lies, dreams, insanities, deceptions, myths, theories are all of them

just the events which they specifically are. Pragmatism is content to

take its stand with science; for science finds all such events to be

subject-matter of description and inquiry--just like stars and fossils,

mosquitoes and malaria, circulation and vision. It also takes its stand

with daily life, which finds that such things really have to be reckoned

with as they occur interwoven in the texture of events.

The only way in which the term reality can ever become more than a

blanket denotative term is through recourse to specific events in all

their diversity and thatness. Speaking summarily, I find that the

retention by philosophy of the notion of a Reality feudally superior to

the events of everyday occurrence is the chief source of the increasing

isolation of philosophy from common sense and science. For the latter

do not operate in any such region. As with them of old, philosophy in

dealing with real difficulties finds itself still hampered by reference

to realities more real, more ultimate, than those which directly happen.

I have said that identifying the cause of philosophy with the notion of

superior reality is the cause of an _increasing_ isolation from science

and practical life. The phrase reminds us that there was a time when the

enterprise of science and the moral interests of men both moved in a

universe invidiously distinguished from that of ordinary occurrence.

While all that happens is equally real--since it really

happens--happenings are not of equal worth. Their respective

consequences, their import, varies tremendously. Counterfeit money,

although real (or rather _because_ real), is really different from valid

circulatory medium, just as disease is really different from health;

different in specific structure and so different in consequences. In

occidental thought, the Greeks were the first to draw the distinction

between the genuine and the spurious in a generalized fashion and to

formulate and enforce its tremendous significance for the conduct of

life. But since they had at command no technique of experimental

analysis and no adequate technique of mathematical analysis, they were

compelled to treat the difference of the true and the false, the

dependable and the deceptive, as signifying two kinds of existence, the

truly real and the apparently real.

Two points can hardly be asserted with too much emphasis. The Greeks

were wholly right in the feeling that questions of good and ill, as far

as they fall within human control, are bound up with discrimination of

the genuine from the spurious, of "being" from what only pretends to be.

But because they lacked adequate instrumentalities for coping with this

difference in specific situations, they were forced to treat the

difference as a wholesale and rigid one. Science was concerned with

vision of ultimate and true reality; opinion was concerned with getting

along with apparent realities. Each had its appropriate region

permanently marked off. Matters of opinion could never become matters of

science; their intrinsic nature forbade. When the practice of science

went on under such conditions, science and philosophy were one and the

same thing. Both had to do with ultimate reality in its rigid and

insuperable difference from ordinary occurrences.

We have only to refer to the way in which medieval life wrought the

philosophy of an ultimate and supreme reality into the context of

practical life to realize that for centuries political and moral

interests were bound up with the distinction between the absolutely real

and the relatively real. The difference was no matter of a remote

technical philosophy, but one which controlled life from the cradle to

the grave, from the grave to the endless life after death. By means of a

vast institution, which in effect was state as well as church, the

claims of ultimate reality were enforced; means of access to it were

provided. Acknowledgment of The Reality brought security in this world

and salvation in the next. It is not necessary to report the story of

the change which has since taken place. It is enough for our purposes

to note that none of the modern philosophies of a superior reality, or

_the_ real object, idealistic or realistic, holds that its insight makes

a difference like that between sin and holiness, eternal condemnation

and eternal bliss. While in its own context the philosophy of ultimate

reality entered into the vital concerns of men, it now tends to be an

ingenious dialectic exercised in professorial corners by a few who have

retained ancient premises while rejecting their application to the

conduct of life.

The increased isolation from science of any philosophy identified with

the problem of _the_ real is equally marked. For the growth of science

has consisted precisely in the invention of an equipment, a technique of

appliances and procedures, which, accepting all occurrences as

homogeneously real, proceeds to distinguish the authenticated from the

spurious, the true from the false, by specific modes of treatment in

specific situations. The procedures of the trained engineer, of the

competent physician, of the laboratory expert, have turned out to be the

only ways of discriminating the counterfeit from the valid. And they

have revealed that the difference is not one of antecedent fixity of

existence, but one of mode of treatment and of the consequences thereon

attendant. After mankind has learned to put its trust in specific

procedures in order to make its discriminations between the false and

the true, philosophy arrogates to itself the enforcement of the

distinction at its own cost.

More than once, this essay has intimated that the counterpart of the

idea of invidiously real reality is the spectator notion of knowledge.

If the knower, however defined, is set over against the world to be

known, knowing consists in possessing a transcript, more or less

accurate but otiose, of real things. Whether this transcript is

presentative in character (as realists say) or whether it is by means of

states of consciousness which represent things (as subjectivists say),

is a matter of great importance in its own context. But, in another

regard, this difference is negligible in comparison with the point in

which both agree. Knowing is viewing from outside. But if it be true

that the self or subject of experience is part and parcel of the course

of events, it follows that the self _becomes_ a knower. It becomes a

mind in virtue of a distinctive way of partaking in the course of

events. The significant distinction is no longer between the knower

_and_ the world; it is between different ways of being in and of the

movement of things; between a brute physical way and a purposive,

intelligent way.

There is no call to repeat in detail the statements which have been

advanced. Their net purport is that the directive presence of future

possibilities in dealing with existent conditions is what is meant by

knowing; that the self becomes a knower or mind when anticipation of

future consequences operates as its stimulus. What we are now concerned

with is the effect of this conception upon the nature of philosophic

knowing.

As far as I can judge, popular response to pragmatic philosophy was

moved by two quite different considerations. By some it was thought to

provide a new species of sanctions, a new mode of apologetics, for

certain religious ideas whose standing had been threatened. By others,

it was welcomed because it was taken as a sign that philosophy was about

to surrender its otiose and speculative remoteness; that philosophers

were beginning to recognize that philosophy is of account only if, like

everyday knowing and like science, it affords guidance to action and

thereby makes a difference in the event. It was welcomed as a sign that

philosophers were willing to have the worth of their philosophizing

measured by responsible tests.

I have not seen this point of view emphasized, or hardly recognized, by

professional critics. The difference of attitude can probably be easily

explained. The epistemological universe of discourse is so highly

technical that only those who have been trained in the history of

thought think in terms of it. It did not occur, accordingly, to

non-technical readers to interpret the doctrine that the meaning and

validity of thought are fixed by differences made in consequences and in

satisfactoriness, to mean consequences in personal feelings. Those who

were professionally trained, however, took the statement to mean that

consciousness or mind in the mere act of looking at things modifies

them. It understood the doctrine of test of validity by consequences to

mean that apprehensions and conceptions are true if the modifications

affected by them were of an emotionally desirable tone.

Prior discussion should have made it reasonably clear that the source of

this misunderstanding lies in the neglect of temporal considerations.

The change made in things by the self in knowing is not immediate and,

so to say, cross-sectional. It is longitudinal--in the redirection given

to changes already going on. Its analogue is found in the changes which

take place in the development of, say, iron ore into a watch-spring, not

in those of the miracle of transubstantiation. For the static,

cross-sectional, non-temporal relation of subject and object, the

pragmatic hypothesis substitutes apprehension of a thing in terms of the

results in other things which it is tending to effect. For the unique

epistemological relation, it substitutes a practical relation of a

familiar type:--responsive behavior which changes in time the

subject-matter to which it applies. The unique thing about the

responsive behavior which constitutes knowing is the specific difference

which marks it off from other modes of response, namely, the part played

in it by anticipation and prediction. Knowing is the act, stimulated by

this foresight, of securing and averting consequences. The success of

the achievement measures the standing of the foresight by which response

is directed. The popular impression that pragmatic philosophy means that

philosophy shall develop ideas relevant to the actual crises of life,

ideas influential in dealing with them and tested by the assistance they

afford, is correct.

Reference to practical response suggests, however, another

misapprehension. Many critics have jumped at the obvious association of

the word pragmatic with practical. They have assumed that the intent is

to limit all knowledge, philosophic included, to promoting "action,"

understanding by action either just any bodily movement, or those bodily

movements which conduce to the preservation and grosser well-being of

the body. James' statement, that general conceptions must "cash in" has

been taken (especially by European critics) to mean that the end and

measure of intelligence lies in the narrow and coarse utilities which it

produces. Even an acute American thinker, after first criticizing

pragmatism as a kind of idealistic epistemology, goes on to treat it as

a doctrine which regards intelligence as a lubricating oil facilitating

the workings of the body.

One source of the misunderstanding is suggested by the fact that

"cashing in" to James meant that a general idea must always be capable

of verification in specific existential cases. The notion of "cashing

in" says nothing about the breadth or depth of the specific

consequences. As an empirical doctrine, it could not say anything about

them in general; the specific cases must speak for themselves. If one

conception is verified in terms of eating beefsteak, and another in

terms of a favorable credit balance in the bank, that is not because of

anything in the theory, but because of the specific nature of the

conceptions in question, and because there exist particular events like

hunger and trade. If there are also existences in which the most liberal

esthetic ideas and the most generous moral conceptions can be verified

by specific embodiment, assuredly so much the better. The fact that a

strictly empirical philosophy was taken by so many critics to imply an

_a priori_ dogma about the kind of consequences capable of existence is

evidence, I think, of the inability of many philosophers to think in

concretely empirical terms. Since the critics were themselves accustomed

to get results by manipulating the concepts of "consequences" and of

"practice," they assumed that even a would-be empiricist must be doing

the same sort of thing. It will, I suppose, remain for a long time

incredible to some that a philosopher should really intend to go to

specific experiences to determine of what scope and depth practice

admits, and what sort of consequences the world permits to come into

being. Concepts are so clear; it takes so little time to develop their

implications; experiences are so confused, and it requires so much time

and energy to lay hold of them. And yet these same critics charge

pragmatism with adopting subjective and emotional standards!

As a matter of fact, the pragmatic theory of intelligence means that the

function of mind is to project new and more complex ends--to free

experience from routine and from caprice. Not the use of thought to

accomplish purposes already given either in the mechanism of the body or

in that of the existent state of society, but the use of intelligence to

liberate and liberalize action, is the pragmatic lesson. Action

restricted to given and fixed ends may attain great technical

efficiency; but efficiency is the only quality to which it can lay

claim. Such action is mechanical (or becomes so), no matter what the

scope of the preformed end, be it the Will of God or _Kultur_. But the

doctrine that intelligence develops within the sphere of action for the

sake of possibilities not yet given is the opposite of a doctrine of

mechanical efficiency. Intelligence _as_ intelligence is inherently

forward-looking; only by ignoring its primary function does it become a

mere means for an end already given. The latter _is_ servile, even when

the end is labeled moral, religious, or esthetic. But action directed to

ends to which the agent has not previously been attached inevitably

carries with it a quickened and enlarged spirit. A pragmatic

intelligence is a creative intelligence, not a routine mechanic.

All this may read like a defense of pragmatism by one concerned to make

out for it the best case possible. Such is not, however, the intention.

The purpose is to indicate the extent to which intelligence frees action

from a mechanically instrumental character. Intelligence is, indeed,

instrumental _through_ action to the determination of the qualities of

future experience. But the very fact that the concern of intelligence is

with the future, with the as-yet-unrealized (and with the given and the

established only as conditions of the realization of possibilities),

makes the action in which it takes effect generous and liberal; free of

spirit. Just that action which extends and approves intelligence has an

intrinsic value of its own in being instrumental:--the intrinsic value

of being informed with intelligence in behalf of the enrichment of life.

By the same stroke, intelligence becomes truly liberal: knowing is a

human undertaking, not an esthetic appreciation carried on by a refined

class or a capitalistic possession of a few learned specialists, whether

men of science or of philosophy.

More emphasis has been put upon what philosophy is not than upon what

it may become. But it is not necessary, it is not even desirable, to set

forth philosophy as a scheduled program. There are human difficulties of

an urgent, deep-seated kind which may be clarified by trained

reflection, and whose solution may be forwarded by the careful

development of hypotheses. When it is understood that philosophic

thinking is caught up in the actual course of events, having the office

of guiding them towards a prosperous issue, problems will abundantly

present themselves. Philosophy will not solve these problems; philosophy

is vision, imagination, reflection--and these functions, apart from

action, modify nothing and hence resolve nothing. But in a complicated

and perverse world, action which is not informed with vision,

imagination, and reflection, is more likely to increase confusion and

conflict than to straighten things out. It is not easy for generous and

sustained reflection to become a guiding and illuminating method in

action. Until it frees itself from identification with problems which

are supposed to depend upon Reality as such, or its distinction from a

world of Appearance, or its relation to a Knower as such, the hands of

philosophy are tied. Having no chance to link its fortunes with a

responsible career by suggesting things to be tried, it cannot identify

itself with questions which actually arise in the vicissitudes of life.

Philosophy recovers itself when it ceases to be a device for dealing

with the problems of philosophers and becomes a method, cultivated by

philosophers, for dealing with the problems of men.

Emphasis must vary with the stress and special impact of the troubles

which perplex men. Each age knows its own ills, and seeks its own

remedies. One does not have to forecast a particular program to note

that the central need of any program at the present day is an adequate

conception of the nature of intelligence and its place in action.

Philosophy cannot disavow responsibility for many misconceptions of the

nature of intelligence which now hamper its efficacious operation. It

has at least a negative task imposed upon it. It must take away the

burdens which it has laid upon the intelligence of the common man in

struggling with his difficulties. It must deny and eject that

intelligence which is naught but a distant eye, registering in a remote

and alien medium the spectacle of nature and life. To enforce the fact

that the emergence of imagination and thought is relative to the

connexion of the sufferings of men with their doings is of itself to

illuminate those sufferings and to instruct those doings. To catch mind

in its connexion with the entrance of the novel into the course of the

world is to be on the road to see that intelligence is itself the most

promising of all novelties, the revelation of the meaning of that

transformation of past into future which is the reality of every

present. To reveal intelligence as the organ for the guidance of this

transformation, the sole director of its quality, is to make a

declaration of present untold significance for action. To elaborate

these convictions of the connexion of intelligence with what men undergo

because of their doings and with the emergence and direction of the

creative, the novel, in the world is of itself a program which will keep

philosophers busy until something more worth while is forced upon them.

For the elaboration has to be made through application to all the

disciplines which have an intimate connexion with human conduct:--to

logic, ethics, esthetics, economics, and the procedure of the sciences

formal and natural.

I also believe that there is a genuine sense in which the enforcement of

the pivotal position of intelligence in the world and thereby in control

of human fortunes (so far as they are manageable) is the peculiar

problem in the problems of life which come home most closely to

ourselves--to ourselves living not merely in the early twentieth century

but in the United States. It is easy to be foolish about the connexion

of thought with national life. But I do not see how any one can question

the distinctively national color of English, or French, or German

philosophies. And if of late the history of thought has come under the

domination of the German dogma of an inner evolution of ideas, it

requires but a little inquiry to convince oneself that that dogma itself

testifies to a particularly nationalistic need and origin. I believe

that philosophy in America will be lost between chewing a historic cud

long since reduced to woody fiber, or an apologetics for lost causes

(lost to natural science), or a scholastic, schematic formalism, unless

it can somehow bring to consciousness America's own needs and its own

implicit principle of successful action.

This need and principle, I am convinced, is the necessity of a

deliberate control of policies by the method of intelligence, an

intelligence which is not the faculty of intellect honored in

text-books and neglected elsewhere, but which is the sum-total of

impulses, habits, emotions, records, and discoveries which forecast what

is desirable and undesirable in future possibilities, and which contrive

ingeniously in behalf of imagined good. Our life has no background of

sanctified categories upon which we may fall back; we rely upon

precedent as authority only to our own undoing--for with us there is

such a continuously novel situation that final reliance upon precedent

entails some class interest guiding us by the nose whither it will.

British empiricism, with its appeal to what has been in the past, is,

after all, only a kind of _a priorism_. For it lays down a fixed rule

for future intelligence to follow; and only the immersion of philosophy

in technical learning prevents our seeing that this is the essence of _a

priorism_.

We pride ourselves upon being realistic, desiring a hardheaded

cognizance of facts, and devoted to mastering the means of life. We

pride ourselves upon a practical idealism, a lively and easily moved

faith in possibilities as yet unrealized, in willingness to make

sacrifice for their realization. Idealism easily becomes a sanction of

waste and carefulness, and realism a sanction of legal formalism in

behalf of things as they are--the rights of the possessor. We thus tend

to combine a loose and ineffective optimism with assent to the doctrine

of take who take can: a deification of power. All peoples at all times

have been narrowly realistic in practice and have then employed

idealization to cover up in sentiment and theory their brutalities. But

never, perhaps, has the tendency been so dangerous and so tempting as

with ourselves. Faith in the power of intelligence to imagine a future

which is the projection of the desirable in the present, and to invent

the instrumentalities of its realization, is our salvation. And it is a

faith which must be nurtured and made articulate: surely a sufficiently

large task for our philosophy.