CHANGED CONCEPTIONS OF EXPERIENCE AND REASON
What is experience and what is Reason, Mind? What is the scope of
experience and what are its limits? How far is it a sure ground of
belief and a safe guide of conduct? Can we trust it in science and in
behavior? Or is it a quagmire as soon as we pass beyond a few low
material interests? Is it so shaky, shifting, and shallow that instead
of affording sure footing, safe paths to fertile fields, it misleads,
betrays, and engulfs? Is a Reason outside experience and above it needed
to supply assured principles to science and conduct? In one sense, these
questions suggest technical problems of abstruse philosophy; in another
sense, they contain the deepest possible questionings regarding the
career of man. They concern the criteria he is to employ in forming his
beliefs; the principles _by_ which he is to direct his life and the ends
_to_ which he is to direct it. Must man transcend experience by some
organ of unique character that carries him into the super-empirical?
Failing this, must he wander sceptical and disillusioned? Or is human
experience itself worth while in its purposes and its methods of
guidance? Can it organize itself into stable courses or must it be
sustained from without?
We know the answers of traditional philosophy. They do not thoroughly
agree among themselves, but they agree that experience never rises above
the level of the particular, the contingent, and the probable. Only a
power transcending in origin and content any and all conceivable
experience can attain to universal, necessary and certain authority and
direction. The empiricists themselves admitted the correctness of these
assertions. They only said that since there is no faculty of Pure Reason
in the possession of mankind, we must put up with what we have,
experience, and make the most possible out of it. They contented
themselves with sceptical attacks upon the transcendentalist, with
indications of the ways in which we might best seize the meaning and
good of the passing moment; or like Locke, asserted that in spite of the
limitation of experience, it affords the light needed to guide men's
footsteps modestly in conduct. They affirmed that the alleged
authoritative guidance by a higher faculty had practically hampered men.
It is the function of this lecture to show how and why it is now
possible to make claims for experience as a guide in science and moral
life which the older empiricists did not and could not make for it.
Curiously enough, the key to the matter may be found in the fact that
the old notion of experience was itself a product of experience--the
only kind of experience which was then open to men. If another
conception of experience is now possible, it is precisely because the
quality of experience as it may now be lived has undergone a profound
social and intellectual change from that of earlier times. The account
of experience which we find in Plato and Aristotle is an account of what
Greek experience actually was. It agrees very closely with what the
modern psychologist knows as the method of learning by trial and error
as distinct from the method of learning by ideas. Men tried certain
acts, they underwent certain sufferings and affections. Each of these in
the time of its occurrence is isolated, particular--its counterpart is
transient appetite and transient sensation. But memory preserves and
accumulates these separate incidents. As they pile up, irregular
variations get cancelled, common features are selected, reinforced and
combined. Gradually a habit of action is built up, and corresponding to
this habit there forms a certain generalized picture of an object or
situation. We come to know or note not merely this particular which as a
particular cannot strictly be known at all (for not being classed it
cannot be characterized and identified) but to recognize it as man,
tree, stone, leather--an individual of a certain kind, marked by a
certain universal form characteristic of a whole species of thing.
Along with the development of this common-sense knowledge, there grows
up a certain regularity of conduct. The particular incidents fuse, and a
_way_ of acting which is general, as far as it goes, builds up. The
skill develops which is shown by the artisan, the shoemaker, the
carpenter, the gymnast, the physician, who have regular ways of handling
cases. This regularity signifies, of course, that the particular case is
not treated as an isolated particular, but as one of a kind, which
therefore demands a _kind_ of action. From the multitude of particular
illnesses encountered, the physician in learning to class some of them
as indigestion learns also to treat the cases of the class in a common
or general way. He forms the rule of recommending a certain diet, and
prescribing a certain remedy. All this forms what we call experience. It
results, as the illustration shows, in a certain general insight and a
certain organized ability in action.
But needless to insist, the generality and the organization are
restricted and fallible. They hold, as Aristotle was fond of pointing
out, usually, in most cases, as a rule, but not universally, of
necessity, or as a principle. The physician is bound to make mistakes,
because individual cases are bound to vary unaccountably: such is their
very nature. The difficulty does not arise in _a_ defective experience
which is capable of remedy in some better experience. Experience
itself, as such, is defective, and hence default is inevitable and
irremediable. The only universality and certainty is in a region above
experience, that of the rational and conceptual. As the particular was a
stepping-stone to image and habit, so the latter may become a
stepping-stone to conceptions and principles. But the latter leave
experience behind, untouched; they do not react to rectify it. Such is
the notion which still lingers in the contrast of "empirical" and
"rational" as when we say that a certain architect or physician is
empirical, not scientific in his procedures. But the difference between
the classic and the modern notion of experience is revealed in the fact
that such a statement is now a charge, a disparaging accusation, brought
against _a_ particular architect or physician. With Plato, Aristotle and
the Scholastic, it was a charge against the callings, since they were
modes of experience. It was an indictment of all practical action in
contrast with conceptual contemplation.
The modern philosopher who has professed himself an empiricist has
usually had a critical purpose in mind. Like Bacon, Locke, Condillac and
Helvetius, he stood face to face with a body of beliefs and a set of
institutions in which he profoundly disbelieved. His problem was the
problem of attack upon so much dead weight carried uselessly by
humanity, crushing and distorting it. His readiest way of undermining
and disintegrating was by appealing to experience as a final test and
criterion. In every case, active reformers were "empiricists" in the
philosophical sense. They made it their business to show that some
current belief or institution that claimed the sanction of innate ideas
or necessary conceptions, or an origin in an authoritative revelation of
reason, had in fact proceeded from a lowly origin in experience, and had
been confirmed by accident, by class interest or by biased authority.
The philosophic empiricism initiated by Locke was thus disintegrative in
intent. It optimistically took it for granted that when the burden of
blind custom, imposed authority, and accidental associations was
removed, progress in science and social organization would spontaneously
take place. Its part was to help in removing the burden. The best way to
liberate men from the burden was through a natural history of the origin
and growth in the mind of the ideas connected with objectionable beliefs
and customs. Santayana justly calls the psychology of this school a
malicious psychology. It tended to identify the history of the formation
of certain ideas with an account of the things to which the ideas
refer--an identification which naturally had an unfavorable effect on
the things. But Mr. Santayana neglects to notice the social zeal and aim
latent in the malice. He fails to point out that this "malice" was
aimed at institutions and traditions which had lost their usefulness; he
fails to point out that to a large extent it was true of them that an
account of their psychological origin was equivalent to a destructive
account of the things themselves. But after Hume with debonair
clarity pointed out that the analysis of beliefs into sensations
and associations left "natural" ideas and institutions in the
same position in which the reformers had placed "artificial" ones,
the situation changed. The rationalists employed the logic of
sensationalistic-empiricism to show that experience, giving only a heap
of chaotic and isolated particulars, is as fatal to science and to moral
laws and obligations as to obnoxious institutions; and concluded that
"Reason" must be resorted to if experience was to be furnished with any
binding and connecting principles. The new rationalistic idealism of
Kant and his successors seemed to be necessitated by the totally
destructive results of the new empirical philosophy.
Two things have rendered possible a new conception of experience and a
new conception of the relation of reason to experience, or, more
accurately, of the place of reason _in_ experience. The primary factor
is the change that has taken place in the actual nature of experience,
its contents and methods, as it is actually lived. The other is the
development of a psychology based upon biology which makes possible a
new scientific formulation of the nature of experience.
Let us begin with the technical side--the change in psychology. We are
only just now commencing to appreciate how completely exploded is the
psychology that dominated philosophy throughout the eighteenth and
nineteenth centuries. According to this theory, mental life originated
in sensations which are separately and passively received, and which are
formed, through laws of retention and association, into a mosaic of
images, perceptions, and conceptions. The senses were regarded as
gateways or avenues of knowledge. Except in combining atomic sensations,
the mind was wholly passive and acquiescent in knowing. Volition,
action, emotion, and desire follow in the wake of sensations and images.
The intellectual or cognitive factor comes first and emotional and
volitional life is only a consequent conjunction of ideas with
sensations of pleasure and pain.
The effect of the development of biology has been to reverse the
picture. Wherever there is life, there is behavior, activity. In order
that life may persist, this activity has to be both continuous and
adapted to the environment. This adaptive adjustment, moreover, is not
wholly passive; is not a mere matter of the moulding of the organism by
the environment. Even a clam acts upon the environment and modifies it
to some extent. It selects materials for food and for the shell that
protects it. It does something to the environment as well as has
something done to itself. There is no such thing in a living creature as
mere conformity to conditions, though parasitic forms may approach this
limit. In the interests of the maintenance of life there is
transformation of some elements in the surrounding medium. The higher
the form of life, the more important is the active reconstruction of the
medium. This increased control may be illustrated by the contrast of
savage with civilized man. Suppose the two are living in a wilderness.
With the savage there is the maximum of accommodation to given
conditions; the minimum of what we may call hitting back. The savage
takes things "as they are," and by using caves and roots and occasional
pools leads a meagre and precarious existence. The civilized man goes to
distant mountains and dams streams. He builds reservoirs, digs channels,
and conducts the waters to what had been a desert. He searches the world
to find plants and animals that will thrive. He takes native plants and
by selection and cross-fertilization improves them. He introduces
machinery to till the soil and care for the harvest. By such means he
may succeed in making the wilderness blossom like the rose.
Such transformation scenes are so familiar that we overlook their
meaning. We forget that the inherent power of life is illustrated in
them. Note what a change this point of view entails in the traditional
notions of experience. Experience becomes an affair primarily of doing.
The organism does not stand about, Micawber-like, waiting for something
to turn up. It does not wait passive and inert for something to impress
itself upon it from without. The organism acts in accordance with its
own structure, simple or complex, upon its surroundings. As a
consequence the changes produced in the environment react upon the
organism and its activities. The living creature undergoes, suffers, the
consequences of its own behavior. This close connection between doing
and suffering or undergoing forms what we call experience. Disconnected
doing and disconnected suffering are neither of them experiences.
Suppose fire encroaches upon a man when he is asleep. Part of his body
is burned away. The burn does not perceptibly result from what he has
done. There is nothing which in any instructive way can be named
experience. Or again there is a series of mere activities, like
twitchings of muscles in a spasm. The movements amount to nothing; they
have no consequences for life. Or, if they have, these consequences are
not connected with prior doing. There is no experience, no learning, no
cumulative process. But suppose a busy infant puts his finger in the
fire; the doing is random, aimless, without intention or reflection. But
something happens in consequence. The child undergoes heat, he suffers
pain. The doing and undergoing, the reaching and the burn, are
connected. One comes to suggest and mean the other. Then there is
experience in a vital and significant sense.
Certain important implications for philosophy follow. In the first
place, the interaction of organism and environment, resulting in some
adaptation which secures utilization of the latter, is the primary fact,
the basic category. Knowledge is relegated to a derived position,
secondary in origin, even if its importance, when once it is
established, is overshadowing. Knowledge is not something separate and
self-sufficing, but is involved in the process by which life is
sustained and evolved. The senses lose their place as gateways of
knowing to take their rightful place as stimuli to action. To an animal
an affection of the eye or ear is not an idle piece of information about
something indifferently going on in the world. It is an invitation and
inducement to act in a needed way. It is a clue in behavior, a directive
factor in adaptation of life in its surroundings. It is urgent not
cognitive in quality. The whole controversy between empiricism and
rationalism as to the intellectual worth of sensations is rendered
strangely obsolete. The discussion of sensations belongs under the head
of immediate stimulus and response, not under the head of knowledge.
As a _conscious_ element, a sensation marks an interruption in a course
of action previously entered upon. Many psychologists since the time of
Hobbes have dwelt upon what they call the relativity of sensations. We
_feel_ or sense cold in transition from warmth rather than absolutely;
hardness is sensed upon a background of less resistance; a color in
contrast with pure light or pure dark or in contrast with some other
hue. A continuously unchanged tone or color cannot be attended to or
sensed. What we take to be such monotonously prolonged sensations are in
truth constantly interrupted by incursions of other elements, and
represent a series of excursions back and forth. This fact was, however,
misconstrued into a doctrine about the nature of knowledge. Rationalists
used it to discredit sense as a valid or high mode of knowing things,
since according to it we never get hold of anything _in itself_ or
intrinsically. Sensationalists used it to disparage all pretence at
absolute knowledge.
Properly speaking, however, this fact of the relativity of sensation
does not in the least belong in the sphere of knowing. Sensations of
this sort are emotional and practical rather than cognitive and
intellectual. They are shocks of change, due to interruption of a prior
adjustment. They are signals to redirections of action. Let me take a
trivial illustration. The person who is taking notes has no sensation of
the pressure of his pencil on the paper or on his hand as long as it
functions properly. It operates merely as stimulus to ready and
effective adjustment. The sensory activity incites automatically and
unconsciously its proper motor response. There is a preformed
physiological connection, acquired from habit but ultimately going back
to an original connection in the nervous system. If the pencil-point
gets broken or too blunt and the habit of writing does not operate
smoothly, there is a conscious shock:--the feeling of something the
matter, something gone wrong. This emotional change operates as a
stimulus to a needed change in operation. One looks at his pencil,
sharpens it or takes another pencil from one's pocket. The sensation
operates as a pivot of readjusting behavior. It marks a break in the
prior routine of writing and the beginning of some other mode of action.
Sensations are "relative" in the sense of marking transitions in habits
of behavior from one course to another way of behaving.
The rationalist was thus right in denying that sensations as such are
true elements of knowledge. But the reasons he gave for this conclusion
and the consequences he drew from it were all wrong. Sensations are not
parts of _any_ knowledge, good or bad, superior or inferior, imperfect
or complete. They are rather provocations, incitements, challenges to an
act of inquiry which is to _terminate_ in knowledge. They are not ways
of knowing things inferior in value to reflective ways, to the ways
that require thought and inference, because they are not ways of knowing
at all. They are stimuli to reflection and inference. As interruptions,
they raise the questions: What does this shock mean? What is happening?
What is the matter? How is my relation to the environment disturbed?
What should be done about it? How shall I alter my course of action to
meet the change that has taken place in the surroundings? How shall I
readjust my behavior in response? Sensation is thus, as the
sensationalist claimed, the beginning of knowledge, but only in the
sense that the experienced shock of change is the necessary stimulus to
the investigating and comparing which eventually produce knowledge.
When experience is aligned with the life-process and sensations are seen
to be points of readjustment, the alleged atomism of sensations totally
disappears. With this disappearance is abolished the need for a
synthetic faculty of super-empirical reason to connect them. Philosophy
is not any longer confronted with the hopeless problem of finding a way
in which separate grains of sand may be woven into a strong and coherent
rope--or into the illusion and pretence of one. When the isolated and
simple existences of Locke and Hume are seen not to be truly empirical
at all but to answer to certain demands of their theory of mind, the
necessity ceases for the elaborate Kantian and Post-Kantian machinery
of _a priori_ concepts and categories to synthesize the alleged stuff of
experience. The true "stuff" of experience is recognized to be adaptive
courses of action, habits, active functions, connections of doing and
undergoing; sensori-motor co-ordinations. Experience carries principles
of connection and organization within itself. These principles are none
the worse because they are vital and practical rather than
epistemological. Some degree of organization is indispensable to even
the lowest grade of life. Even an amoeba must have some continuity in
time in its activity and some adaptation to its environment in space.
Its life and experience cannot possibly consist in momentary, atomic,
and self-enclosed sensations. Its activity has reference to its
surroundings and to what goes before and what comes after. This
organization intrinsic to life renders unnecessary a super-natural and
super-empirical synthesis. It affords the basis and material for a
positive evolution of intelligence as an organizing factor within
experience.
Nor is it entirely aside from the subject to point out the extent in
which social as well as biological organization enters into the
formation of human experience. Probably one thing that strengthened the
idea that the mind is passive and receptive in knowing was the
observation of the helplessness of the human infant. But the observation
points in quite another direction. Because of his physical dependence
and impotency, the contacts of the little child with nature are mediated
by other persons. Mother and nurse, father and older children, determine
what experiences the child shall have; they constantly instruct him as
to the meaning of what he does and undergoes. The conceptions that are
socially current and important become the child's principles of
interpretation and estimation long before he attains to personal and
deliberate control of conduct. Things come to him clothed in language,
not in physical nakedness, and this garb of communication makes him a
sharer in the beliefs of those about him. These beliefs coming to him as
so many facts form his mind; they furnish the centres about which his
own personal expeditions and perceptions are ordered. Here we have
"categories" of connection and unification as important as those of
Kant, but empirical not mythological.
From these elementary, if somewhat technical considerations, we turn to
the change which experience itself has undergone in the passage from
ancient and medieval to modern life. To Plato, experience meant
enslavement to the past, to custom. Experience was almost equivalent to
established customs formed not by reason or under intelligent control
but by repetition and blind rule of thumb. Only reason can lift us above
subjection to the accidents of the past. When we come to Bacon and his
successors, we discover a curious reversal. Reason and its bodyguard of
general notions is now the conservative, mind-enslaving factor.
Experience is the liberating power. Experience means the new, that which
calls us away from adherence to the past, that which reveals novel facts
and truths. Faith in experience produces not devotion to custom but
endeavor for progress. This difference in temper is the more significant
because it was so unconsciously taken for granted. Some concrete and
vital change must have occurred in actual experience as that is lived.
For, after all, the thought of experience follows after and is modelled
upon the experience actually undergone.
When mathematics and other rational sciences developed among the Greeks,
scientific truths did not react back into daily experience. They
remained isolated, apart and super-imposed. Medicine was the art in
which perhaps the greatest amount of positive knowledge was obtained,
but it did not reach the dignity of science. It remained an art. In
practical arts, moreover, there was no conscious invention or purposeful
improvement. Workers followed patterns that were handed down to them,
while departure from established standards and models usually resulted
in degenerate productions. Improvements came either from a slow,
gradual, and unacknowledged accumulation of changes or else from some
sudden inspiration, which at once set a new standard. Being the result
of no conscious method, it was fittingly attributed to the gods. In the
social arts, such a radical reformer as Plato felt that existing evils
were due to the absence of such fixed patterns as controlled the
productions of artisans. The ethical purport of philosophy was to
furnish them, and when once they were instituted, they were to be
consecrated by religion, adorned by art, inculcated by education and
enforced by magistrates so that alteration of them would be impossible.
It is unnecessary to repeat what has been so often dwelt upon as to the
effect of experimental science in enabling man to effect a deliberate
control of his environment. But since the impact of this control upon
the traditional notion of experience is often overlooked, we must point
out that when experience ceased to be empirical and became experimental,
something of radical importance occurred. Aforetime man employed the
results of his prior experience only to form customs that henceforth had
to be blindly followed or blindly broken. Now, old experience is used to
suggest aims and methods for developing a new and improved experience.
Consequently experience becomes in so far constructively
self-regulative. What Shakespeare so pregnantly said of nature, it is
"made better by no mean, but nature makes that mean," becomes true of
experience. We do not merely have to repeat the past, or wait for
accidents to force change upon us. We _use_ our past experiences to
construct new and better ones in the future. The very fact of experience
thus includes the process by which it directs itself in its own
betterment.
Science, "reason" is not therefore something laid from above upon
experience. Suggested and tested in experience, it is also employed
through inventions in a thousand ways to expand and enrich experience.
Although, as has been so often repeated, this self-creation and
self-regulation of experience is still largely technological rather than
truly artistic or human, yet what has been achieved contains the
guaranty of the possibility of an intelligent administering of
experience. The limits are moral and intellectual, due to defects in our
good will and knowledge. They are not inherent metaphysically in the
very nature of experience. "Reason" as a faculty separate from
experience, introducing us to a superior region of universal truths
begins now to strike us as remote, uninteresting and unimportant.
Reason, as a Kantian faculty that introduces generality and regularity
into experience, strikes us more and more as superfluous--the
unnecessary creation of men addicted to traditional formalism and to
elaborate terminology. Concrete suggestions arising from past
experiences, developed and matured in the light of the needs and
deficiencies of the present, employed as aims and methods of specific
reconstruction, and tested by success or failure in accomplishing this
task of readjustment, suffice. To such empirical suggestions used in
constructive fashion for new ends the name intelligence is given.
This recognition of the place of active and planning thought within the
very processes of experience radically alters the traditional status of
the technical problems of particular and universal, sense and reason,
perceptual and conceptual. But the alteration is of much more than
technical significance. For reason is experimental intelligence,
conceived after the pattern of science, and used in the creation of
social arts; it has something to do. It liberates man from the bondage
of the past, due to ignorance and accident hardened into custom. It
projects a better future and assists man in its realization. And its
operation is always subject to test in experience. The plans which are
formed, the principles which man projects as guides of reconstructive
action, are not dogmas. They are hypotheses to be worked out in
practice, and to be rejected, corrected and expanded as they fail or
succeed in giving our present experience the guidance it requires. We
may call them programmes of action, but since they are to be used in
making our future acts less blind, more directed, they are flexible.
Intelligence is not something possessed once for all. It is in constant
process of forming, and its retention requires constant alertness in
observing consequences, an open-minded will to learn and courage in
re-adjustment.
In contrast with this experimental and re-adjusting intelligence, it
must be said that Reason as employed by historic rationalism has tended
to carelessness, conceit, irresponsibility, and rigidity--in short
absolutism. A certain school of contemporary psychology uses the term
"rationalization" to denote those mental mechanisms by which we
unconsciously put a better face on our conduct or experience than facts
justify. We excuse ourselves to ourselves by introducing a purpose and
order into that of which we are secretly ashamed. In like fashion,
historic rationalism has often tended to use Reason as an agency of
justification and apologetics. It has taught that the defects and evils
of actual experience disappear in the "rational whole" of things; that
things _appear_ evil merely because of the partial, incomplete nature of
experience. Or, as was noted by Bacon, "reason" assumes a false
simplicity, uniformity and universality, and opens for science a path of
fictitious ease. This course results in intellectual irresponsibility
and neglect:--irresponsibility because rationalism assumes that the
concepts of reason are so self-sufficient and so far above experience
that they need and can secure no confirmation in experience. Neglect,
because this same assumption makes men careless about concrete
observations and experiments. Contempt for experience has had a tragic
revenge _in_ experience; it has cultivated disregard for fact and this
disregard has been paid for in failure, sorrow and war.
The dogmatic rigidity of Rationalism is best seen in the consequences of
Kant's attempt to buttress an otherwise chaotic experience with pure
concepts. He set out with a laudable attempt at restricting the
extravagant pretensions of Reason apart from experience. He called his
philosophy critical. But because he taught that the understanding
employs fixed, _a priori_, concepts, in order to introduce connection
into experience and thereby make known _objects_ possible (stable,
regular relationships of qualities), he developed in German thought a
curious contempt for the living variety of experience and a curious
overestimate of the value of system, order, regularity for their own
sakes. More practical causes were at work in producing the peculiarly
German regard for drill, discipline, "order" and docility.
But Kant's philosophy served to provide an intellectual justification or
"rationalization" of subordination of individuals to fixed and
ready-made universal, "principles," laws. Reason and law were held to be
synonyms. And as reason came into experience from without and above, so
law had to come into life from some external and superior authority.
The practical correlate to absolutism is rigidity, stiffness,
inflexibility of disposition. When Kant taught that some conceptions,
and these the important ones, are _a priori_, that they do not arise in
experience and cannot be verified or tested in experience, that without
such ready-made injections into experience the latter is anarchic and
chaotic, he fostered the spirit of absolutism, even though technically
he denied the possibility of absolutes. His successors were true to his
spirit rather than his letter, and so they taught absolutism
systematically. That the Germans with all their scientific competency
and technological proficiency should have fallen into their tragically
rigid and "superior" style of thought and action (tragic because
involving them in inability to understand the world in which they lived)
is a sufficient lesson of what may be involved in a systematical denial
of the experimental character of intelligence and its conceptions.
By common consent, the effect of English empiricism was sceptical where
that of German rationalism was apologetic; it undermined where the
latter justified. It detected accidental associations formed into
customs under the influence of self- or class-interest where German
rational-idealism discovered profound meanings due to the necessary
evolution of absolute reason. The modern world has suffered because in
so many matters philosophy has offered it only an arbitrary choice
between hard and fast opposities: Disintegrating analysis _or_ rigid
synthesis; complete radicalism neglecting and attacking the historic
past as trivial and harmful, _or_ complete conservatism idealizing
institutions as embodiments of eternal reason; a resolution of
experience into atomic elements that afford no support to stable
organization _or_ a clamping down of all experience by fixed categories
and necessary concepts--these are the alternatives that conflicting
schools have presented.
They are the logical consequences of the traditional opposition of Sense
and Thought, Experience and Reason. Common sense has refused to follow
both theories to their ultimate logic, and has fallen back on faith,
intuition or the exigencies of practical compromise. But common sense
too often has been confused and hampered instead of enlightened and
directed by the philosophies proffered it by professional intellectuals.
Men who are thrown back upon "common sense" when they appeal to
philosophy for some general guidance are likely to fall back on routine,
the force of some personality, strong leadership or on the pressure of
momentary circumstances. It would be difficult to estimate the harm that
has resulted because the liberal and progressive movement of the
eighteenth and earlier nineteenth centuries had no method of
intellectual articulation commensurate with its practical aspirations.
Its heart was in the right place. It was humane and social in
intention. But it had no theoretical instrumentalities of constructive
power. Its head was sadly deficient. Too often the logical import of its
professed doctrines was almost anti-social in their atomistic
individualism, anti-human in devotion to brute sensation. This
deficiency played into the hands of the reactionary and obscurantist.
The strong point of the appeal to fixed principles transcending
experience, to dogmas incapable of experimental verification, the strong
point of reliance upon _a priori_ canons of truth and standards of
morals in opposition to dependence upon fruits and consequences in
experience, has been the unimaginative conception of experience which
professed philosophic empiricists have entertained and taught.
A philosophic reconstruction which should relieve men of having to
choose between an impoverished and truncated experience on one hand and
an artificial and impotent reason on the other would relieve human
effort from the heaviest intellectual burden it has to carry. It would
destroy the division of men of good will into two hostile camps. It
would permit the co-operation of those who respect the past and the
institutionally established with those who are interested in
establishing a freer and happier future. For it would determine the
conditions under which the funded experience of the past and the
contriving intelligence which looks to the future can effectually
interact with each other. It would enable men to glorify the claims of
reason without at the same time falling into a paralyzing worship of
super-empirical authority or into an offensive "rationalization" of
things as they are.