1. Continuity versus Dualism. A number of theories of knowing have been
criticized in the previous pages. In spite of their differences from one
another, they all agree in one fundamental respect which contrasts
with the theory which has been positively advanced. The latter
assumes continuity; the former state or imply certain basic divisions,
separations, or antitheses, technically called dualisms. The origin of
these divisions we have found in the hard and fast walls which mark off
social groups and classes within a group: like those between rich and
poor, men and women, noble and baseborn, ruler and ruled. These barriers
mean absence of fluent and free intercourse. This absence is equivalent
to the setting up of different types of life-experience, each with
isolated subject matter, aim, and standard of values. Every such social
condition must be formulated in a dualistic philosophy, if philosophy is
to be a sincere account of experience. When it gets beyond dualism--as
many philosophies do in form--it can only be by appeal to something
higher than anything found in experience, by a flight to some
transcendental realm. And in denying duality in name such theories
restore it in fact, for they end in a division between things of this
world as mere appearances and an inaccessible essence of reality.
So far as these divisions persist and others are added to them, each
leaves its mark upon the educational system, until the scheme of
education, taken as a whole, is a deposit of various purposes and
procedures. The outcome is that kind of check and balance of segregated
factors and values which has been described. (See Chapter XVIII.)
The present discussion is simply a formulation, in the terminology of
philosophy, of various antithetical conceptions involved in the theory
of knowing. In the first place, there is the opposition of empirical and
higher rational knowing. The first is connected with everyday affairs,
serves the purposes of the ordinary individual who has no specialized
intellectual
pursuit, and brings his wants into some kind of working connection with
the immediate environment. Such knowing is depreciated, if not despised,
as purely utilitarian, lacking in cultural significance. Rational
knowledge is supposed to be something which touches reality in ultimate,
intellectual fashion; to be pursued for its own sake and properly to
terminate in purely theoretical insight, not debased by application
in behavior. Socially, the distinction corresponds to that of the
intelligence used by the working classes and that used by a learned
class remote from concern with the means of living. Philosophically, the
difference turns about the distinction of the particular and universal.
Experience is an aggregate of more or less isolated particulars,
acquaintance with each of which must be separately made. Reason deals
with universals, with general principles, with laws, which lie above the
welter of concrete details. In the educational precipitate, the pupil
is supposed to have to learn, on one hand, a lot of items of specific
information, each standing by itself, and upon the other hand, to
become familiar with a certain number of laws and general relationships.
Geography, as often taught, illustrates the former; mathematics, beyond
the rudiments of figuring, the latter. For all practical purposes, they
represent two independent worlds.
Another antithesis is suggested by the two senses of the word
"learning." On the one hand, learning is the sum total of what is
known, as that is handed down by books and learned men. It is something
external, an accumulation of cognitions as one might store material
commodities in a warehouse. Truth exists ready-made somewhere. Study is
then the process by which an individual draws on what is in storage. On
the other hand, learning means something which the individual does when
he studies. It is an active, personally conducted affair. The dualism
here is between knowledge as something external, or, as it is often
called, objective, and knowing as something purely internal, subjective,
psychical. There is, on one side, a body of truth, ready-made, and, on
the other, a ready-made mind equipped with a faculty of knowing--if it
only wills to exercise it, which it is often strangely loath to do. The
separation, often touched upon, between subject matter and method is the
educational equivalent of this dualism. Socially the distinction has
to do with the part of life which is dependent upon authority and
that where individuals are free to advance. Another dualism is that of
activity and passivity in knowing. Purely empirical and physical things
are often supposed to be known by receiving impressions. Physical
things somehow stamp themselves upon the mind or convey themselves
into consciousness by means of the sense organs. Rational knowledge and
knowledge of spiritual things is supposed, on the contrary, to spring
from activity initiated within the mind, an activity carried on better
if it is kept remote from all sullying touch of the senses and external
objects. The distinction between sense training and object lessons
and laboratory exercises, and pure ideas contained in books, and
appropriated--so it is thought--by some miraculous output of mental
energy, is a fair expression in education of this distinction. Socially,
it reflects a division between those who are controlled by direct
concern with things and those who are free to cultivate themselves.
Another current opposition is that said to exist between the intellect
and the emotions. The emotions are conceived to be purely private and
personal, having nothing to do with the work of pure intelligence in
apprehending facts and truths,--except perhaps the single emotion of
intellectual curiosity. The intellect is a pure light; the emotions are
a disturbing heat. The mind turns outward to truth; the emotions
turn inward to considerations of personal advantage and loss. Thus in
education we have that systematic depreciation of interest which
has been noted, plus the necessity in practice, with most pupils, of
recourse to extraneous and irrelevant rewards and penalties in order to
induce the person who has a mind (much as his clothes have a pocket) to
apply that mind to the truths to be known. Thus we have the spectacle
of professional educators decrying appeal to interest while they uphold
with great dignity the need of reliance upon examinations, marks,
promotions and emotions, prizes, and the time-honored paraphernalia of
rewards and punishments. The effect of this situation in crippling
the teacher's sense of humor has not received the attention which it
deserves.
All of these separations culminate in one between knowing and doing,
theory and practice, between mind as the end and spirit of action and
the body as its organ and means. We shall not repeat what has been said
about the source of this dualism in the division of society into a class
laboring with their muscles for material sustenance and a class
which, relieved from economic pressure, devotes itself to the arts of
expression and social direction. Nor is it necessary to speak again
of the educational evils which spring from the separation. We shall be
content to summarize the forces which tend to make the untenability of
this conception obvious and to replace it by the idea of continuity.
(i) The advance of physiology and the psychology associated with it have
shown the connection of mental activity with that of the nervous system.
Too often recognition of connection has stopped short at this point; the
older dualism of soul and body has been replaced by that of the brain
and the rest of the body. But in fact the nervous system is only
a specialized mechanism for keeping all bodily activities working
together. Instead of being isolated from them, as an organ of knowing
from organs of motor response, it is the organ by which they interact
responsively with one another. The brain is essentially an organ
for effecting the reciprocal adjustment to each other of the stimuli
received from the environment and responses directed upon it. Note that
the adjusting is reciprocal; the brain not only enables organic activity
to be brought to bear upon any object of the environment in response to
a sensory stimulation, but this response also determines what the next
stimulus will be. See what happens, for example, when a carpenter is
at work upon a board, or an etcher upon his plate--or in any case of a
consecutive activity. While each motor response is adjusted to the
state of affairs indicated through the sense organs, that motor response
shapes the next sensory stimulus. Generalizing this illustration, the
brain is the machinery for a constant reorganizing of activity so as to
maintain its continuity; that is to say, to make such modifications in
future action as are required because of what has already been done. The
continuity of the work of the carpenter distinguishes it from a routine
repetition of identically the same motion, and from a random
activity where there is nothing cumulative. What makes it continuous,
consecutive, or concentrated is that each earlier act prepares the way
for later acts, while these take account of or reckon with the results
already attained--the basis of all responsibility. No one who has
realized the full force of the facts of the connection of knowing with
the nervous system and of the nervous system with the readjusting of
activity continuously to meet new conditions, will doubt that knowing
has to do with reorganizing activity, instead of being something
isolated from all activity, complete on its own account.
(ii) The development of biology clinches this lesson, with its discovery
of evolution. For the philosophic significance of the doctrine of
evolution lies precisely in its emphasis upon continuity of simpler
and more complex organic forms until we reach man. The development of
organic forms begins with structures where the adjustment of environment
and organism is obvious, and where anything which can be called mind is
at a minimum. As activity becomes more complex, coordinating a greater
number of factors in space and time, intelligence plays a more and more
marked role, for it has a larger span of the future to forecast and plan
for. The effect upon the theory of knowing is to displace the notion
that it is the activity of a mere onlooker or spectator of the world,
the notion which goes with the idea of knowing as something complete in
itself. For the doctrine of organic development means that the living
creature is a part of the world, sharing its vicissitudes and fortunes,
and making itself secure in its precarious dependence only as it
intellectually identifies itself with the things about it, and,
forecasting the future consequences of what is going on, shapes its own
activities accordingly. If the living, experiencing being is an intimate
participant in the activities of the world to which it belongs, then
knowledge is a mode of participation, valuable in the degree in which it
is effective. It cannot be the idle view of an unconcerned spectator.
(iii) The development of the experimental method as the method of
getting knowledge and of making sure it is knowledge, and not mere
opinion--the method of both discovery and proof--is the remaining great
force in bringing about a transformation in the theory of knowledge.
The experimental method has two sides. (i) On one hand, it means that we
have no right to call anything knowledge except where our activity has
actually produced certain physical changes in things, which agree with
and confirm the conception entertained. Short of such specific changes,
our beliefs are only hypotheses, theories, suggestions, guesses, and
are to be entertained tentatively and to be utilized as indications of
experiments to be tried. (ii) On the other hand, the experimental method
of thinking signifies that thinking is of avail; that it is of avail in
just the degree in which the anticipation of future consequences is
made on the basis of thorough observation of present conditions.
Experimentation, in other words, is not equivalent to blind reacting.
Such surplus activity--a surplus with reference to what has been
observed and is now anticipated--is indeed an unescapable factor in all
our behavior, but it is not experiment save as consequences are noted
and are used to make predictions and plans in similar situations in the
future. The more the meaning of the experimental method is perceived,
the more our trying out of a certain way of treating the material
resources and obstacles which confront us embodies a prior use of
intelligence. What we call magic was with respect to many things the
experimental method of the savage; but for him to try was to try his
luck, not his ideas. The scientific experimental method is, on
the contrary, a trial of ideas; hence even when practically--or
immediately--unsuccessful, it is intellectual, fruitful; for we learn
from our failures when our endeavors are seriously thoughtful.
The experimental method is new as a scientific resource--as a
systematized means of making knowledge, though as old as life as
a practical device. Hence it is not surprising that men have not
recognized its full scope. For the most part, its significance is
regarded as belonging to certain technical and merely physical matters.
It will doubtless take a long time to secure the perception that it
holds equally as to the forming and testing of ideas in social and
moral matters. Men still want the crutch of dogma, of beliefs fixed
by authority, to relieve them of the trouble of thinking and the
responsibility of directing their activity by thought. They tend to
confine their own thinking to a consideration of which one among the
rival systems of dogma they will accept. Hence the schools are better
adapted, as John Stuart Mill said, to make disciples than inquirers. But
every advance in the influence of the experimental method is sure to
aid in outlawing the literary, dialectic, and authoritative methods
of forming beliefs which have governed the schools of the past, and to
transfer their prestige to methods which will procure an active concern
with things and persons, directed by aims of increasing temporal reach
and deploying greater range of things in space. In time the theory of
knowing must be derived from the practice which is most successful in
making knowledge; and then that theory will be employed to improve the
methods which are less successful.
2. Schools of Method. There are various systems of philosophy with
characteristically different conceptions of the method of knowing. Some
of them are named scholasticism, sensationalism, rationalism, idealism,
realism, empiricism, transcendentalism, pragmatism, etc. Many of
them have been criticized in connection with the discussion of some
educational problem. We are here concerned with them as involving
deviations from that method which has proved most effective in achieving
knowledge, for a consideration of the deviations may render clearer
the true place of knowledge in experience. In brief, the function
of knowledge is to make one experience freely available in other
experiences. The word "freely" marks the difference between the
principle of knowledge and that of habit. Habit means that an individual
undergoes a modification through an experience, which modification forms
a predisposition to easier and more effective action in a like direction
in the future. Thus it also has the function of making one experience
available in subsequent experiences. Within certain limits, it performs
this function successfully. But habit, apart from knowledge, does not
make allowance for change of conditions, for novelty. Prevision of
change is not part of its scope, for habit assumes the essential
likeness of the new situation with the old. Consequently it often leads
astray, or comes between a person and the successful performance of
his task, just as the skill, based on habit alone, of the mechanic
will desert him when something unexpected occurs in the running of the
machine. But a man who understands the machine is the man who knows what
he is about. He knows the conditions under which a given habit works,
and is in a position to introduce the changes which will readapt it to
new conditions.
In other words, knowledge is a perception of those connections of an
object which determine its applicability in a given situation. To
take an extreme example; savages react to a flaming comet as they are
accustomed to react to other events which threaten the security of
their life. Since they try to frighten wild animals or their enemies by
shrieks, beating of gongs, brandishing of weapons, etc., they use the
same methods to scare away the comet. To us, the method is plainly
absurd--so absurd that we fail to note that savages are simply falling
back upon habit in a way which exhibits its limitations. The only reason
we do not act in some analogous fashion is because we do not take
the comet as an isolated, disconnected event, but apprehend it in
its connections with other events. We place it, as we say, in the
astronomical system. We respond to its connections and not simply to
the immediate occurrence. Thus our attitude to it is much freer. We may
approach it, so to speak, from any one of the angles provided by its
connections. We can bring into play, as we deem wise, any one of the
habits appropriate to any one of the connected objects. Thus we get at
a new event indirectly instead of immediately--by invention, ingenuity,
resourcefulness. An ideally perfect knowledge would represent such a
network of interconnections that any past experience would offer a
point of advantage from which to get at the problem presented in a new
experience. In fine, while a habit apart from knowledge supplies us with
a single fixed method of attack, knowledge means that selection may be
made from a much wider range of habits.
Two aspects of this more general and freer availability of former
experiences for subsequent ones may be distinguished. (See ante, p. 77.)
(i) One, the more tangible, is increased power of control. What cannot
be managed directly may be handled indirectly; or we can interpose
barriers between us and undesirable consequences; or we may evade them
if we cannot overcome them. Genuine knowledge has all the practical
value attaching to efficient habits in any case. (ii) But it also
increases the meaning, the experienced significance, attaching to an
experience. A situation to which we respond capriciously or by routine
has only a minimum of conscious significance; we get nothing mentally
from it. But wherever knowledge comes into play in determining a new
experience there is mental reward; even if we fail practically in
getting the needed control we have the satisfaction of experiencing a
meaning instead of merely reacting physically.
While the content of knowledge is what has happened, what is taken
as finished and hence settled and sure, the reference of knowledge
is future or prospective. For knowledge furnishes the means of
understanding or giving meaning to what is still going on and what is
to be done. The knowledge of a physician is what he has found out by
personal acquaintance and by study of what others have ascertained and
recorded. But it is knowledge to him because it supplies the resources
by which he interprets the unknown things which confront him, fills out
the partial obvious facts with connected suggested phenomena, foresees
their probable future, and makes plans accordingly. When knowledge is
cut off from use in giving meaning to what is blind and baffling,
it drops out of consciousness entirely or else becomes an object of
aesthetic contemplation. There is much emotional satisfaction to be had
from a survey of the symmetry and order of possessed knowledge, and the
satisfaction is a legitimate one. But this contemplative attitude is
aesthetic, not intellectual. It is the same sort of joy that comes from
viewing a finished picture or a well composed landscape. It would make
no difference if the subject matter were totally different, provided
it had the same harmonious organization. Indeed, it would make no
difference if it were wholly invented, a play of fancy. Applicability to
the world means not applicability to what is past and gone--that is out
of the question by the nature of the case; it means applicability to
what is still going on, what is still unsettled, in the moving scene in
which we are implicated. The very fact that we so easily overlook
this trait, and regard statements of what is past and out of reach as
knowledge is because we assume the continuity of past and future. We
cannot entertain the conception of a world in which knowledge of its
past would not be helpful in forecasting and giving meaning to its
future. We ignore the prospective reference just because it is so
irretrievably implied.
Yet many of the philosophic schools of method which have been mentioned
transform the ignoring into a virtual denial. They regard knowledge as
something complete in itself irrespective of its availability in dealing
with what is yet to be. And it is this omission which vitiates them
and which makes them stand as sponsors for educational methods which an
adequate conception of knowledge condemns. For one has only to call to
mind what is sometimes treated in schools as acquisition of knowledge
to realize how lacking it is in any fruitful connection with the ongoing
experience of the students--how largely it seems to be believed that the
mere appropriation of subject matter which happens to be stored in books
constitutes knowledge. No matter how true what is learned to those who
found it out and in whose experience it functioned, there is nothing
which makes it knowledge to the pupils. It might as well be something
about Mars or about some fanciful country unless it fructifies in the
individual's own life.
At the time when scholastic method developed, it had relevancy to social
conditions. It was a method for systematizing and lending rational
sanction to material accepted on authority. This subject matter meant
so much that it vitalized the defining and systematizing brought to
bear upon it. Under present conditions the scholastic method, for most
persons, means a form of knowing which has no especial connection
with any particular subject matter. It includes making distinctions,
definitions, divisions, and classifications for the mere sake of making
them--with no objective in experience. The view of thought as a purely
physical activity having its own forms, which are applied to any
material as a seal may be stamped on any plastic stuff, the view which
underlies what is termed formal logic is essentially the scholastic
method generalized. The doctrine of formal discipline in education is
the natural counterpart of the scholastic method.
The contrasting theories of the method of knowledge which go by the name
of sensationalism and rationalism correspond to an exclusive emphasis
upon the particular and the general respectively--or upon bare facts on
one side and bare relations on the other. In real knowledge, there is a
particularizing and a generalizing function working together. So far as
a situation is confused, it has to be cleared up; it has to be resolved
into details, as sharply defined as possible. Specified facts and
qualities constitute the elements of the problem to be dealt with, and
it is through our sense organs that they are specified. As setting
forth the problem, they may well be termed particulars, for they are
fragmentary. Since our task is to discover their connections and to
recombine them, for us at the time they are partial. They are to be
given meaning; hence, just as they stand, they lack it. Anything which
is to be known, whose meaning has still to be made out, offers itself as
particular. But what is already known, if it has been worked over with
a view to making it applicable to intellectually mastering new
particulars, is general in function. Its function of introducing
connection into what is otherwise unconnected constitutes its
generality. Any fact is general if we use it to give meaning to the
elements of a new experience. "Reason" is just the ability to bring the
subject matter of prior experience to bear to perceive the significance
of the subject matter of a new experience. A person is reasonable in
the degree in which he is habitually open to seeing an event which
immediately strikes his senses not as an isolated thing but in its
connection with the common experience of mankind.
Without the particulars as they are discriminated by the active
responses of sense organs, there is no material for knowing and no
intellectual growth. Without placing these particulars in the context of
the meanings wrought out in the larger experience of the past--without
the use of reason or thought--particulars are mere excitations or
irritations. The mistake alike of the sensational and the rationalistic
schools is that each fails to see that the function of sensory
stimulation and thought is relative to reorganizing experience in
applying the old to the new, thereby maintaining the continuity or
consistency of life. The theory of the method of knowing which is
advanced in these pages may be termed pragmatic. Its essential feature
is to maintain the continuity of knowing with an activity which
purposely modifies the environment. It holds that knowledge in its
strict sense of something possessed consists of our intellectual
resources--of all the habits that render our action intelligent. Only
that which has been organized into our disposition so as to enable us to
adapt the environment to our needs and to adapt our aims and desires
to the situation in which we live is really knowledge. Knowledge is
not just something which we are now conscious of, but consists of the
dispositions we consciously use in understanding what now happens.
Knowledge as an act is bringing some of our dispositions to
consciousness with a view to straightening out a perplexity, by
conceiving the connection between ourselves and the world in which we
live.
Summary. Such social divisions as interfere with free and full
intercourse react to make the intelligence and knowing of members of
the separated classes one-sided. Those whose experience has to do
with utilities cut off from the larger end they subserve are practical
empiricists; those who enjoy the contemplation of a realm of meanings
in whose active production they have had no share are practical
rationalists. Those who come in direct contact with things and have to
adapt their activities to them immediately are, in effect, realists;
those who isolate the meanings of these things and put them in a
religious or so-called spiritual world aloof from things are, in effect,
idealists. Those concerned with progress, who are striving to change
received beliefs, emphasize the individual factor in knowing; those
whose chief business it is to withstand change and conserve received
truth emphasize the universal and the fixed--and so on. Philosophic
systems in their opposed theories of knowledge present an explicit
formulation of the traits characteristic of these cut-off and one-sided
segments of experience--one-sided because barriers to intercourse
prevent the experience of one from being enriched and supplemented by
that of others who are differently situated.
In an analogous way, since democracy stands in principle for free
interchange, for social continuity, it must develop a theory of
knowledge which sees in knowledge the method by which one experience is
made available in giving direction and meaning to another. The recent
advances in physiology, biology, and the logic of the experimental
sciences supply the specific intellectual instrumentalities demanded to
work out and formulate such a theory. Their educational equivalent
is the connection of the acquisition of knowledge in the schools with
activities, or occupations, carried on in a medium of associated life.