Speaking, then, from the standpoint of temporal order, we find
reflection, or thought, occupying an intermediate and reconstructive
position. It comes between a temporally prior situation (an organized
interaction of factors) of active and appreciative experience, wherein
some of the factors have become discordant and incompatible, and a
later situation, which has been constituted out of the first
situation by means of acting on the findings of reflective inquiry.
This final situation therefore has a richness of meaning, as well as a
controlled character lacking to its original. By it is fixed the
logical validity or intellectual force of the terms and relations
distinguished by reflection. Owing to the continuity of experience
(the overlapping and recurrence of like problems), these logical
fixations become of the greatest assistance to subsequent inquiries;
they are its working means. In such further uses, they get further
tested, defined, and elaborated, until the vast and refined systems of
the technical objects and formulae of the sciences come into
existence--a point to which we shall return later.
Owing to circumstances upon which it is unnecessary to dwell, the
position thus sketched was not developed primarily upon its own
independent account, but rather in the course of a criticism of
another type of logic, the idealistic logic found in Lotze. It is
obvious that the theory in question has critical bearings. According
to it, reflection in its distinctions and processes can be understood
only when placed in its intermediate pivotal temporal position--as a
process of control, through reorganization, of material alogical in
character. It intimates that thinking would not exist, and hence
knowledge would not be found, in a world which presented no troubles
or where there are no "problems of evil"; and on the other hand that a
reflective method is the only sure way of dealing with these
troubles. It intimates that while the results of reflection, because
of the continuity of experience, may be of wider scope than the
situation which calls out a particular inquiry and invention,
reflection itself is always specific in origin and aim; it always has
something special to cope with. For troubles are concretely specific.
It intimates also that thinking and reflective knowledge are never an
end-all, never their own purpose nor justification, but that they pass
naturally into a more direct and vital type of experience, whether
technological or appreciative or social. This doctrine implies,
moreover, that logical theory in its usual sense is essentially a
descriptive study; that it is an account of the processes and tools
which have actually been found effective in inquiry, comprising in the
term "inquiry" both deliberate discovery and deliberate invention.
Since the doctrine was propounded in an intellectual environment where
such statements were not commonplaces, where in fact a logic was
reigning which challenged these convictions at every point, it is not
surprising that it was put forth with a controversial coloring, being
directed particularly at the dominant idealistic logic. The point of
contact and hence the point of conflict between the logic set forth
and the idealistic logic are not far to seek. The logic based on
idealism had, as a matter of fact, treated knowledge from the
standpoint of an account of thought--of thought in the sense of
conception, judgment, and inferential reasoning. But while it had
inherited this view from the older rationalism, it had also learned
from Hume, via Kant, that direct sense or perceptual material must be
taken into account. Hence it had, in effect, formulated the problem of
logic as the problem of the connection of logical thought with
sense-material, and had attempted to set forth a metaphysics of
reality based upon various ascending stages of the completeness of the
rationalization or idealization of given, brute, fragmentary sense
material by synthetic activity of thought. While considerations of a
much less formal kind were chiefly influential in bringing idealism to
its modern vogue, such as the conciliation of a scientific with a
religious and moral point of view and the need of rationalizing social
and historic institutions so as to explain their cultural effect, yet
this logic constituted the _technique_ of idealism--its strictly
intellectual claim for acceptance.
The point of contact, and hence of conflict, between it and such a
doctrine of logic and reflective thought as is set forth above is, I
repeat, fairly obvious. Both fix upon thinking as the key to the
situation. I still believe (what I believed when I wrote the essays)
that under the influence of idealism valuable analyses and
formulations of the work of reflective thought, in its relation to
securing knowledge of objects, were executed. But--and the but is one
of exceptional gravity--the idealistic logic started from the
distinction between immediate plural data and unifying, rationalizing
meanings as a distinction ready-made in experience, and it set up as
the goal of knowledge (and hence as the definition of true reality) a
complete, exhaustive, comprehensive, and eternal system in which
plural and immediate data are forever woven into a fabric and pattern
of self-luminous meaning. In short, it ignored the temporally
intermediate and instrumental place of reflection; and because it
ignored and denied this place, it overlooked its essential feature:
control of the environment in behalf of human progress and well-being,
the effort at control being stimulated by the needs, the defects, the
troubles, which accrue when the environment coerces and suppresses man
or when man endeavors in ignorance to override the environment. Hence
it misconstrued the criterion of the work of intelligence; it set up
as its criterion an Absolute and Non-temporal reality at large,
instead of using the criterion of specific temporal achievement of
consequences through a control supplied by reflection. And with this
outcome, it proved faithless to the cause which had generated it and
given it its reason for being: the magnification of the work of
intelligence in our actual physical and social world. For a theory
which ends by declaring that everything is, really and eternally,
thoroughly ideal and rational, cuts the nerve of the specific demand
and work of intelligence.
From this general statement, let me descend to the technical point
upon which turns the criticism of idealistic logic by the essays.
Grant, for a moment, as a hypothesis, that thinking starts neither
from an implicit force of rationality desiring to realize itself
completely in and through and against the limitations which are
imposed upon it by the conditions of our human experience (as all
idealisms have taught), nor from the fact that in each human being is
a "mind" whose business it is just to "know"--to theorize in the
Aristotelian sense; but, rather, that it starts from an effort to get
out of some trouble, actual or menacing. It is quite clear that the
human race has tried many another way out besides reflective inquiry.
Its favorite resort has been a combination of magic and poetry, the
former to get the needed relief and control; the latter to import into
imagination, and hence into emotional consummation, the realizations
denied in fact. But as far as reflection does emerge and gets a
working foothold, the nature of its job is set for it. On the one
hand, it must discover, it must find out, it must detect; it must
inventory what is there. All this, or else it will never know what the
matter is; the human being will not find out what "struck him," and
hence will have no idea of where to seek for a remedy--for the needed
control. On the other hand, it must invent, it must project, it must
bring to bear upon the given situation what is not, as it exists,
given as a part of it.
This seems to be quite empirical and quite evident. The essays
submitted the thesis that this simple dichotomization of the practical
situation of power and enjoyment, when menaced, into what is there
(whether as obstacle or as resource), and into suggested
inventions--projections of something else to be brought to bear upon
it, ways of dealing with it--is the explanation of the time-honored
logical determinations of brute fact, datum and meaning or ideal
quality; of (in more psychological terminology) sense-perception and
conception; of particulars (parts, fragments) and universals-generics;
and also of whatever there is of intrinsic significance in the
traditional subject-predicate scheme of logic. It held, less formally,
that this view explained the eulogistic connotations always attaching
to "reason" and to the work of reason in effecting unity, harmony,
comprehension, or synthesis, and to the traditional combination of a
depreciatory attitude toward brute facts with a grudging concession of
the necessity which thought is under of accepting them and taking them
for its own subject-matter and checks. More specifically, it is held
that this view supplied (and I should venture to say for the first
time) an explanation of the traditional theory of truth as a
correspondence or agreement of existence and mind or thought. It showed
that the correspondence or agreement was like that between an invention
and the conditions which the invention is intended to meet. Thereby a
lot of epistemological hangers-on to logic were eliminated; for the
distinctions which epistemology had misunderstood were located where
they belong:--in the art of inquiry, considered as a joint process of
ascertainment and invention, projection, or "hypothesizing"--of which
more below.