As I write, the way is paved for me by Professor Cohen (_Journ. of
Phil., Psy., and Sci. Meth._, Vol. XI, No. 23, Nov. 5, 1914, pp.
623-24), who outlines a theory of relations closely allied to that which
I have in mind. Professor Cohen writes: "Like the distinction between
primary and secondary qualities, the distinction between qualities and
relations seems to me a shifting one because the 'nature' of a thing
changes as the thing shifts from one context to another.... To
Professors Montague and Lovejoy the 'thing' is like an old-fashioned
landowner and the qualities are its immemorial private possessions. A
thing may enter into commercial relations with others, but these
relations are extrinsic. It never parts with its patrimony. To me, the
'nature' of a thing seems not to be so private or fixed. It may consist
entirely of bonds, stocks, franchises, and other ways in which public
credit or the right to certain transactions is represented.... At any
rate, relations or transactions may be regarded as wider or more primary
than qualities or possessions. The latter may be defined as internal
relations, that is, relations _within_ the system that constitutes the
'thing.' The nature of a thing contains an essence, i.e., a group of
characteristics which, in any given system or context, remain invariant,
so that if these are changed the things drop out of our system ... but
the same thing may present different essences in different contexts. As
a thing shifts from one context to another, it acquires new relations
and drops old ones, and in all transformations there is a change or
readjustment of the line between the internal relations which constitute
the essence and the external relations which are outside the inner
circle...."
Before continuing, however, I wish to make certain interpretations of
these statements for which, of course, Professor Cohen is not
responsible, and with which he would not be wholly in agreement. My
general attitude will be shown by the first comment. Concepts are only
means of denoting fragments of experience directly or indirectly given.
If we then try to speak of a "nature of a thing" two interpretations of
this expression are possible. The "thing" as such is only a bit of
reality which some motive, that without undue extension of the term can
be called practical, has led us to treat as more or less isolable from
the rest of reality. Its nature, then, may consist of either its
relations to other practically isolated realities or things, its actual
effective value in its environment (and hence shift with the environment
as Professor Cohen points out), or may consist of its essence, the
"relations within the system," considered from the point of view of the
potentialities implied by these for various environments. In the first
sense the nature may easily change with change in environment, but if it
changes in the second sense, as Professor Cohen remarks, it "drops out
of our system." This I should interpret as meaning that we no longer
have that thing, but some other thing selected from reality by a
different purpose and point of view. I should not say with Professor
Cohen that "the same thing may present different essences in different
contexts." Every reality is more than one thing--man is an aggregate of
atoms, a living being, an animal, and a thinker, and all of these are
different things in essence, although having certain common
characteristics. All attribution of "thingship" is abstraction, and all
particular things may be said to participate in higher, i.e., more
abstract, levels of thingship. Hence the effort to retain a thingship
through a changing of essence seems to me but the echo of the motive
that has so long deduced ontological monism from the logical fact that
to conceive any two things is at least to throw them into a common
universe of discourse. Consequently I should part company from Professor
Cohen on this one point (which is perhaps largely a matter of
definition, though here not unimportant) and distinguish merely the
nature of a thing as _actual_ and as _potential_. Of these the former
alone changes with the environment, while the latter changes only as the
thing ceases to be by passing into some other thing. In other words, if
the example does not do violence to Professor Cohen's thought, I can
quite understand this paper as a stimulator of criticism, or as a means
of kindling a fire. Professor Cohen would, I suspect, take this to mean
that the same thing--this paper--must be looked upon as having two
different essences in two different contexts, for "the same thing may
possess two different essences in different contexts," whereas I should
prefer to interpret the situation as meaning that there are before me
three (and as many more as may be) different things having three
different essences: first, the paper as a physical object having a
considerable number of definite properties; second, written words,
which are undoubtedly in one sense mere structural modifications of the
physical object paper (i.e., coloring on it by ink, etc.), but whose
reality for my purpose lies in the power of evoking ideas acquired by
things as symbols (things, indeed, but things whose essence lies in the
effects they produce upon a reader rather than in their physical
character); and third, the chemical and combustion producing properties
of the paper. Now it is simpler for me to consider the situation as one
in which three things have a common point in thingship, i.e., an
abstract element in common, than to think of "_a_ thing" shifting
contexts and thereby changing its essence.
But now my divergence from Professor Cohen becomes more marked. He
continues with the following example (p. 622): "Our neighbor M. is tall,
modest, cheerful, and we understand a banker. His tallness, modesty,
cheerfulness, and the fact that he is a banker we usually regard as his
qualities; the fact that he is our neighbor is a relation which he seems
to bear to us. He may move his residence, cease to be our neighbor, and
yet remain the same person with the same qualities. If, however, I
become his tailor, his tallness becomes translated into certain
relations of measurement; if I become his social companion, his modesty
means that he will stand in certain social relations with me, etc." In
other words, we are illustrating the doctrine that "qualities are
reducible to relations" (cf. p. 623). This doctrine I cannot quite
accept without modification, for I cannot tell what it means. Without
any presuppositions as to subjectivity or consciousness (cf. p. 623,
(a).) there are in the world as I know it certain colored objects--let
the expression be taken naively to avoid idealistico-realistic
discussion which is here irrelevant. Now it is as unintelligible to me
that the red flowers and green leaves of the geraniums before my windows
should be reducible to mere relations in any existential sense, as it
would be to ask for the square root of their odor, though of course it
is quite intelligible that the physical theory and predictions
concerning green and red surfaces (or odors) should be stated in terms
of atomic distances and ether vibrations of specific lengths. The
scientific conception is, after all, nothing more than an indication of
how to take hold of things and manipulate them to get foreseen results,
and its entities are real things only in the sense that they are the
practically effective keynotes of the complex reality. Accordingly,
instead of reducing qualities to relations, it seems to me a much more
intelligible view to consider relations as abstract ways of taking
qualities in general, as qualities thought of in their function of
bridging a gap or making a transition between two bits of reality that
have previously been taken as separate things. Indeed, it is just
because things are not ontologically independent beings (but rather
selections from genuinely concatenated existence) that relations become
important as indications of the practical significance of qualitative
continuities which have been neglected in the prior isolation of the
thing. Thus, instead of an existential world that is "a network of
relations whose intersections are called terms" (p. 622), I find more
intelligible a qualitatively heterogeneous reality that can be variously
partitioned into things, and that can he abstractly replaced by systems
of terms and relations that are adequate to symbolize their effective
nature in particular respects. There is a tendency for certain
attributes to maintain their concreteness (qualitativeness) in things,
and for others to suggest the connection of things with other things,
and so to emphasize a more abstract aspect of experience. Thus then
arises a temporary and practical distinction that tends to be taken as
opposition between qualities and relations. As spatial and temporal
characteristics possess their chief practical value in the connection of
things, so they, like Professor Cohen's neighbor-character, are
ordinarily assumed abstractly as mere relations, while shapes, colors,
etc., and Professor Cohen's "modesty, tallness, cheerfulness," may be
thought of more easily without emphasis on other things and so tend to
be accepted in their concreteness as qualities, but how slender is the
dividing-line Professor Cohen's easy translation of these things into
relations makes clear.
Taken purely intellectualistically, there would be first a fiction of
separation in what is really already continuous and then another fiction
to bridge the gap thus made. This would, of course, be the falsification
against which Bergson inveighs. But this interpretation is to
misunderstand the nature of abstraction. Abstraction does not substitute
an unreal for a real, but selects from reality a genuine characteristic
of it which is adequate for a particular purpose. Thus to conceive time
as a succession of moments is not to falsify time, but to select from
processes going on in time a characteristic of them through which
predictions can be made, which may be verified and turned into an
instrument for the control of life or environment. A similar
misunderstanding of abstraction, coupled with a fuller appreciation than
Bergson evinces of the value of its results, has led to the
neo-realistic insistence on turning abstractions into existent entities
of which the real world is taken to be an organized composite aggregate.
The practice of turning qualities into merely conscious entities has
done much to obscure the status of scientific knowing, for it has left
mere quantity as the only real character of the actual world. But once
take a realistic standpoint, and quantity is no more real than quality.
For primitive man, the qualitative aspect of reality is probably the
first to which he gives heed, and it is only through efforts to get
along with the world in its qualitative character that its quantitative
side is forced upon the attention. Then so-called "exact" science is
born, but it does not follow that qualities henceforth become
insignificant. They are still the basis of all relations, even of those
that are most directly construed as quantitative. Quality and quantity
are only different aspects of the world which the status of our
practical life leads us to take separately or abstractly. "Thing" is no
less an abstraction, in which we disregard certain continuities with the
rest of the world because we are so constituted that the demands of
living make it expedient to do so. Things once given, further
abstractions become possible, among which are those leading to
mathematical thinking, in which higher abstractions are made, guided
always by the "generating problem" (cf. Karl Schmidt, _Jour. of Phil.,
Psy., and Sci. Meth._, Vol. X, No. 3, 1913, pp. 64-75).
V