IV

The essays were published in 1903. At that time (as has been noted)

idealism was in practical command of the philosophic field in both

England and this country; the logics in vogue were profoundly

influenced by Kantian and post-Kantian thought. Empirical logics,

those conceived under the influence of Mill, still existed, but their

light was dimmed by the radiance of the regnant idealism. Moreover,

from the standpoint of the doctrine expounded in the essays, the

empirical logic committed the same logical fault as did the

idealistic, in taking sense-data to be primitive (instead of being

resolutions of the _things_ of prior experiences into elements for the

aim of securing evidence); while it had no recognition of the specific

service rendered by intelligence in the development of new meanings

and plans of new actions. This state of things may explain the

controversial nature of the essays, and their selection in particular

of an idealistic logic for animadversion.

Since the essays were written, there has been an impressive revival of

realism, and also a development of a type of logical theory--the

so-called Analytic Logic--corresponding to the philosophical

aspirations of the new realism. This marked alteration of intellectual

environment subjects the doctrine of the essays to a test not

contemplated when they were written. It is one thing to develop a

hypothesis in view of a particular situation; it is another to test

its worth in view of procedures and results having a radically

different motivation and direction. It is, of course, impossible to

discuss the analytic logic in this place. A consideration of how some

of its main tenets compare with the conclusions outlined above will,

however, throw some light upon the meaning and the worth of the

latter. Although this was formulated with the idealistic and

sensationalistic logics in mind, the hypothesis that knowledge can be

rightly understood only in connection with considerations of time and

temporal position is a general one. If it is valid, it should be

readily applicable to a critical placing of any theory which ignores

and denies such temporal considerations. And while I have learned much

from the realistic movement about the full force of the position

sketched in the essays when adequately developed; and while later

discussions have made it clear that the language employed in the

essays was sometimes unnecessarily (though naturally) infected by the

subjectivism of the positions against which it was directed, I find

that the analytic logic is also guilty of the fault of temporal

dislocation.

In one respect, idealistic logic takes cognizance of a temporal

contrast; indeed, it may fairly be said to be based upon it. It seizes

upon the contrast in intellectual force, consistency, and

comprehensiveness between the crude or raw data with which science

sets out and the defined, ordered, and systematic totality at which it

aims--and which in part it achieves. This difference is a genuine

empirical difference. Idealism noted that the difference may properly

be ascribed to the intervention of thinking--that thought is what

makes the difference. Now since the outcome of science is of higher

intellectual rank than its data, and since the intellectualistic

tradition in philosophy has always identified degrees of logical

adequacy with degrees of reality, the conclusion was naturally drawn

that _the_ real world--absolute reality--was an ideal or

thought-world, and that the sense-world, the commonsense-world, the

world of actual and historic experience, is simply a phenomenal world

presenting a fragmentary manifestation of that thought which the

process of human thinking makes progressively explicit and articulate.

This perception of the intellectual superiority of objects which are

constituted at the conclusion of thinking over those which formed its

data may fairly be termed the empirical factor in the idealistic

logic. The essence of the realistic reaction, on its logical side, is

exceedingly simple. It starts from those objects with which science,

approved science, ends. Since they are the objects which are _known_,

which are true, they are the real objects. That they are also objects

for intervening thinking is an interesting enough historical and

psychological fact, but one quite irrelevant to their natures, which

are precisely what knowledge finds them to be. In the biography of

human beings it may hold good that apprehension of objects is arrived

at only through certain wanderings, endeavors, exercises, experiments;

possibly acts called sensation, memory, reflection may be needed by

men in reaching a grasp of the objects. But such things denote facts

about the history of the knower, not about the nature of the known

object. Analysis will show, moreover, that any intelligible account of

this history, any verified statement of the psychology of knowing

assumes objects which are unaffected by the knowing--otherwise the

pretended history is merely pretense and not to be trusted. The

history of the process of knowing, moreover, implies also the terms

and propositions--truths--of logic. That logic must therefore be

assumed as a science of objects real and true, quite apart from any

process of thinking them. In short, the requirement is that we shall

think things as they are themselves, not make them into objects

constructed by thinking.

This revival of realism coincided also with an important movement in

mathematics and logic: the attempt to treat logical distinctions by

mathematical methods; while at the same time mathematical

subject-matter had become so generalized that it was a theory of types

and orders of terms and propositions--in short, a logic. Certain minds

have always found mathematics the type of knowledge, because of its

definiteness, order, and comprehensiveness. The wonderful

accomplishments of modern mathematics, including its development into

a type of highly generalized logic, was not calculated to lessen the

tendency. And while prior philosophers have generally played their

admiration of mathematics into the hands of idealism (regarding

mathematical subject-matter as the embodiment or manifestation of pure

thought), the new philosophy insisted that the terms and types of

order constituting mathematical and logical subject-matter were real

in their own right, and (at most) merely led up to and discovered by

thinking--an operation, moreover, itself subjected (as has been

pointed out) to the entities and relationships set forth by logic.

The inadequacy of this summary account may be pardoned in view of the

fact that no adequate exposition is intended; all that is wanted is

such a statement of the general relationship of idealism to realism as

may serve as the point of departure for a comparison with the

instrumentalism of the essays. In bare outline, it is obvious that the

two latter agree in regarding thinking as instrumental, not as

constitutive. But this agreement turns out to be a formal matter in

contrast with a disagreement concerning that _to which_ thinking is

instrumental. The new realism finds that it is instrumental simply to

knowledge of objects. From this it infers (with perfect correctness and

inevitableness) that thinking (including all the operations of discovery

and testing as they might be set forth in an inductive logic) is a mere

psychological preliminary, utterly irrelevant to any conclusions

regarding the nature of objects known. The thesis of the essays is that

thinking is instrumental to a control of the environment, a control

effected through acts which would not be undertaken without the prior

resolution of a complex situation into assured elements and an

accompanying projection of possibilities--without, that is to say,

thinking.

Such an instrumentalism seems to analytic realism but a variant of

idealism. For it asserts that processes of reflective inquiry play a

part in shaping the objects--namely, terms and propositions--which

constitute the bodies of scientific knowledge. Now it must not only be

admitted but proclaimed that the doctrine of the essays holds that

intelligence is not an otiose affair, nor yet a mere preliminary to a

spectator-like apprehension of terms and propositions. In so far as it

is idealistic to hold that objects of knowledge _in their capacity of

distinctive objects of knowledge_ are determined by intelligence, it

is idealistic. It believes that faith in the constructive, the

creative, competency of intelligence was the redeeming element in

historic idealisms. Lest, however, we be misled by general terms, the

scope and limits of this "idealism" must be formulated.

(1) Its distinguishing trait is that it defines thought or

intelligence by function, by work done, by consequences effected. It

does not start with a power, an entity or substance or activity which

is ready-made thought or reason and which as such constitutes the

world. Thought, intelligence, is to it just a name for the events and

acts which make up the processes of analytic inspection and projected

invention and testing which have been described. These events, these

acts, are wholly natural; they are "realistic"; they comprise the

sticks and stones, the bread and butter, the trees and horses, the

eyes and ears, the lovers and haters, the sighs and delights of

ordinary experience. Thinking is what some of the actual existences

_do_. _They_ are in no sense constituted by thinking; on the contrary,

the problems of thought are set by _their_ difficulties and its

resources are furnished by _their_ efficacies; its acts are _their_

doings adapted to a distinctive end.

(2) The reorganization, the modification, effected by thinking is, by

this hypothesis, a physical one. Thinking ends in experiment and

experiment is an _actual_ alteration of a physically antecedent

situation in those details or respects which called for thought in

order to do away with some evil. To suffer a disease and to try to do

something for it is a primal experience; to look into the disease, to

try and find out just what makes it a disease, to invent--or

hypothecate--remedies is a reflective experience; to try the suggested

remedy and see whether the disease is helped is the act which

transforms the data and the intended remedy into _knowledge objects_.

And this transformation into knowledge objects is also effected by

changing physical things by physical means.

Speaking from this point of view, the decisive consideration as

between instrumentalism and analytic realism is whether the operation

of experimentation is or is not necessary to knowledge. The

instrumental theory holds that it is; analytic realism holds that even

though it were essential in _getting_ knowledge (or in learning), it

has nothing to do with knowledge itself, and hence nothing to do with

the known object: that it makes a change only in the knower, not in

what is to be known. And for precisely the same reason,

instrumentalism holds that an object as a knowledge-object is never a

whole; that it is surrounded with and inclosed by things which are

quite other than objects of knowledge, so that knowledge cannot be

understood in isolation or when taken as mere beholding or grasping of

objects. That is to say, while it is making the sick man better or

worse (or leaving him just the same) which determines the

knowledge-value of certain findings of fact and certain conceptions as

to mode of treatment (so that by the treatment they become definitely

knowledge-objects), yet improvement or deterioration of the patient is

other than an object of cognitive apprehension. Its knowledge-object

phase is a selection in reference to prior reflections. So the

laboratory experiment of a chemist which brings to a head a long

reflective inquiry and settles the intellectual status of its findings

and theorizings (thereby making them into cognitive concerns or terms

and propositions) is itself much more than a knowledge of terms and

propositions, and only by virtue of this surplusage is it even

contemplative knowledge. He knows, say, tin, when he has made tin into

an outcome of his investigating procedures, but tin is much more than

a term of knowledge.

Putting the matter in a slightly different way, logical (as distinct

from naïve) realism confuses means of knowledge with objects of

knowledge. The means are twofold: they are (_a_) the data of a

particular inquiry so far as they are significant because of prior

experimental inquiries; and (_b_) they are the meanings which have

been settled in consequence of prior intellectual undertakings: on the

one hand, particular things or qualities as signs; on the other,

general meanings as possibilities of what is signified by given data.

Our physician has in advance a technique for telling that certain

particular traits, if he finds them, are symptoms, signs; and he has a

store of diseases and remedies in mind which may possibly be meant in

any given case. From prior reflective experiments he has learned to

look for temperature, for rate of heartbeats, for sore spots in

certain places; to take specimens of blood, sputum, of membrane, and

subject them to cultures, microscopic examination, etc. He has

acquired certain habits, in other words, in virtue of which certain

physical qualities and events are more than physical, in virtue of

which they are signs or indications of something else.

On the other hand, this something else is a somewhat not physically

present at the time: it is a series of events still to happen. It is

suggested by what is given, but is no part of the given. Now, in the

degree in which the physician comes to the examination of what is

there with a large and comprehensive stock of such possibilities or

meanings in mind, he will be intellectually resourceful in dealing

with a particular case. They (the concepts or universals of the

situation) are (together with the sign-capacity of the data) the

_means_ of knowing the case in hand; they are the agencies of

transforming it, through the actions which they call for, into an

object--an object of knowledge, a truth to be stated in propositions.

But since the professional (as distinct from the human) knower is

particularly concerned with the elaboration of these tools, the

professional knower--of which the class philosopher presents of course

one case--ungenerously drops from sight the situation in its integrity

and treats these instrumentalities of knowledge as objects of

knowledge. Each of these aspects--signs and things signified--is

sufficiently important to deserve a section on its own account.

V

The position taken in the essays is frankly realistic in acknowledging

that certain brute existences, detected or laid bare by thinking but

in no way constituted out of thought or any mental process, set every

problem for reflection and hence serve to test its otherwise merely

speculative results. It is simply insisted that as a matter of fact

these brute existences are equivalent neither to the objective content

of the situations, technological or artistic or social, in which

thinking originates, nor to the things to be known--to the objects of

knowledge. Let us take the sequence of mineral rock in place, pig iron

and the manufactured article, comparing the raw material in its

undisturbed place in nature to the original _res_ of experience,

compare the manufactured article to the objective and object of

knowledge, and the brute datum to the metal undergoing extraction from

raw ore for the sake of being wrought into a useful thing. And we

should add that just as the manufacturer always has a lot of already

extracted ore on hand for use in machine processes as it is wanted, so

every person of any maturity, especially if he lives in an environment

affected by previous scientific work, has a lot of extracted data--or,

what comes to the same thing, of ready-made tools of extraction--for

use in inference as they are required. We go about with a disposition

to identify certain shapes as tables, certain sounds as words of the

French language, certain cries as evidences of distress, certain

massed colors as woods in the distance, certain empty spaces as

buttonholes, and so on indefinitely. The examples are trivial enough.

But if more complicated matters were taken, it would be seen that a

large part of the technique of science (all of science which is

specifically "inductive" in character) consists of methods of finding

out just what qualities are unambiguous, economical, and dependable

signs of those other things which cannot be got at as directly as can

the sign-bearing elements. And if we started from the more obscure and

complex difficulties of identification and diagnosis with which the

sciences of physiology, botany, astronomy, chemistry, etc., deal, we

should be forced to recognize that the identifications of everyday

life--our "perceptions" of chairs, tables, trees, friends--differ only

in presenting questions much easier of solution.

In every case, it is a matter of fixing some given physical existence

as a sign of some other existences not given in the same way as is

that which serves as a sign. These words of Mill might well be made

the motto of every logic: "To draw inferences has been said to be the

great business of life. Everyone has daily, hourly, and momentary need

of ascertaining facts which he has not directly observed.... It is

the only occupation in which the mind never ceases to be engaged."

Such being the case, the indispensable condition of doing the business

well is the careful determination of the sign-force of specific things

in experience. And this condition can never be fulfilled as long as a

thing is presented to us, so to say, in bulk. The complex

organizations which are the subject-matter of our direct activities

and enjoyments are grossly unfit to serve as intellectual indications

or evidence. Their testimony is almost worthless, they speak so many

languages. In their complexity, they point equally in all directions;

in their unity, they run in a groove and point to whatever is most

customary. To break up the complexity, to resolve it into a number of

independent variables each as irreducible as it is possible to make

it, is the only way of getting secure pointers as to what is indicated

by the occurrence of the situation in question. The "objects" of

ordinary life, stones, plants, cats, rocks, moon, etc., are neither

the data of science nor the objects at which science arrives.

We are here face to face with a crucial point in analytic realism.

Realism argues that we have no alternative except either to regard

analysis as falsifying (à la Bergson), and thus commit ourselves to

distrust of science as an organ of knowledge, or else to admit that

something eulogistically termed Reality (especially as _Existence_,

Being as subject to space and time determinations) is but a complex

made up of fixed, mutually independent simples: viz., that Reality is

truly conceived only under the caption of whole and parts, where the

parts are independent of each other and consequently of the whole. For

instrumentalism, however, the alleged dilemma simply does not exist.

The results of abstraction and analysis are perfectly real; but they

are real, like everything else, _where_ they are real: that is to say,

in some _particular_ _co_existence in the situation where they

originate and operate.

The remark is perhaps more cryptic than enlightening. Its intent is

that reflection is an actual occurrence as much so as a thunderstorm

or a growing plant, and as an actual existence it is characterized by

specific existential traits uniquely belonging to it: the entities of

simple data as such. It is in control of the evidential function that

irreducible and independent simples or elements exist. They certainly

are found there; as we have seen they _are_ "common-sense" objects

broken up into expeditious and unambiguous signs of conclusions to be

drawn, conclusions about other things with which they--the

elements--are continuous in some respects, although discrete[4] with

respect to their sensory conditions. But there is no more reason for

supposing that they exist _elsewhere_ in the same manner than there is

for supposing that centaurs coexist along with domestic horses and

cows because they coexist with the material of folk-tales or rites, or

for supposing that pigs of iron pre-existed as pigs in the mine. There

is no falsifying in analysis _because_ the analysis is carried on

within a situation which controls it. The fallacy and falsifying is on

the part of the philosopher who ignores the contextual situation and

who transfers the properties which things have as dependable

evidential signs over to things in other modes of behavior.

It is no reply to this position to say that the "elements" or simples

were there prior to inquiry and to analysis and abstraction. Of course

their subject-matter was in some sense "there"; and, being there, was

found, discovered, or detected--hit upon. I am not questioning this

statement; rather, I have been asserting it. But I am asking for

patience and industry to consider the matter somewhat further. I would

ask the man who takes the terms of logical analysis (physical

resolution for the sake of getting assured evidential indications of

objects as yet unknown) to be things which coexist with the things of

a non-inferential situation, to inquire _in what way_ his independent

given ultimates were there prior to analysis. I would point out that

in any case they did _not_ pre-exist _as_ signs. (_a_) Consequently,

whatever traits or properties they possess as signs must at least be

referred exclusively to the reflective situation. And they must

possess some distinguishing traits _as_ signs; otherwise they would

be indistinguishable from anything else which happens to be thought

of, and could not be employed as evidence: could not be, in short,

what they are. If the reader will seriously ask just what traits data

do possess as signs, or evidence, I shall be quite content to leave

the issue to the results of his own inquiries. (_b_) Any inquiry as to

_how_ the data antecedently exist will, I am confident, show that they

do not exist in the same purity, the same external exclusiveness and

internal homogeneity, which they present within the situation of

inference, any more than the iron which pre-existed in the rocks in

the mountains was just the same as the fluxed and extracted ore. Hence

they did not exist in the same isolated simplicity. I have not the

slightest interest in exaggerating the scope of this difference. The

important matter is not its extent or range, but what such a

change--however small--indicates: namely, that the material is

entering into a new environment, and has been subjected to the changes

which will make it useful and effective in that environment. It is

trivial to suppose that the sole or even the primary difficulty which

an analytic realism has to face is the occurrence of error and

illusions, of "secondary" qualities, etc. The difficulty resides in

the contrast of the world of a naïve, say Aristotelian, realism with

that of a highly intellectualized and analytic disintegration of the

everyday world of things. If realism is generous enough to have a

place _within_ its world (as a _res_ having social and temporal

qualities as well as spatial ones) for data in process of construction

of _new_ objects, the outlook is radically different from the case

where, in the interests of a theory, a realism insists that analytic

determinations are the sole real things.[5]

If it be not only conceded but asserted that the subject-matter

generating the data of scientific procedure antedates the procedure,

it may be asked: what is the point of insisting so much upon the fact

that data exist only within the procedure? Is not the statement either

a trivial tautology or else an attempt to inject, _sub rosa_, a

certain idealistic dependence upon thought into even brute facts? The

question is a fair one. And the clew to the reply may be found in the

consideration that it was not historically an easy matter to reduce

the iron of the rocks to the iron which could freely and effectively

be used in the manufacture of articles. It involved hitting upon a

highly complicated art, but an art, nevertheless, which anyone with

the necessary capital and education can command today as a matter of

course, giving no thought to the fact that one is using an art

constructed originally with vast pains. Similarly it is by art, by a

carefully determined technique, that the things of our primary

experience are resolved into unquestioned and irreducible data,

lacking in inner complexity and hence unambiguous. There is no call

for the scientific man in the pursuit of his calling to take account

of this fact, any more than the manufacturer need reckon with the arts

which are required to deliver him his material. But a logician, a

philosopher, is supposed to take a somewhat broader survey; and for

his purposes the fact which the scientific inquirer can leave out of

account, because it is no part of his business, may be the important

fact. For the logician, it would seem, is concerned not with the

significance of these or those data, but with the significance of

there being such things as data, with their traits of irreducibleness,

bruteness, simplicity, etc. Now, as the special scientific inquirer

answers the question as to the significance of his special brute facts

by discovering other facts with which they are connected, so it would

seem that the logician can find out the significance of the existence

of data (the fact which concerns him) only by finding out the other

facts with which _they_ coexist--their significance being their

factual continuities. And the first step in the search for these other

facts which supply significance is the recognition that they have been

extracted for a purpose--for the purpose of guiding inference. It is

this purposeful situation of inquiry which supplies the _other_ facts

which give the existence of brute data their significance. And unless

there is such a discovery (or some better one), the logician will

inevitably fail in conceiving the import of the existence of brute

data. And this misconception is, I repeat, just the defect from which

an analytic presentative realism suffers. To perceive that the brute

data laid bare in scientific proceedings are always traits of an

extensive situation, and of that situation as one which needs control

and which is to undergo modification in some respects, is to be

protected from any temptation to turn logical specification into

metaphysical atomism. The need for the protection is sufficiently

great to justify spending some energy in pointing out that the brute

objective facts of scientific discovery are discovered facts,

discovered by physical manipulations which detach them from their

ordinary setting.

We have stated that, strictly speaking, data (as the immediate

considerations from which controlled inference proceeds) are not

objects but means, instrumentalities, of knowledge: things by which we

know rather than things known. It is by the color stain that we know a

cellular structure; it is by marks on a page that we know what some

man believes; it is by the height of the barometer that we know the

probability of rain; it is by the scratches on the rock that we know

that ice was once there; it is by qualities detected in chemical and

microscopic examination that we know that a thing is human blood and

not paint. Just what the realist asserts about so-called mental states

of sensations, images, and ideas, namely, that they are not the

subject-matter of knowledge but its agencies, holds of the chairs and

tables to which he appeals in support of his doctrine of an immediate

cognitive presentation, apart from any problem and any reflection. And

there is very solid ground for instituting the comparison: the

sensations, images, etc., of the idealist are nothing but the chairs,

tables, etc., of the realist in their ultimate irreducible

qualities.[6] The problem in which the realist appeals to the

immediate apprehension of the table is the epistemological problem,

and he appeals to the table not as an object of knowledge (as he

thinks he does), but as evidence, as a means of knowing his

conclusion--his real _object_ of knowledge. He has only to examine his

own evidence to see that it is evidence, and hence a term in a

reflective inquiry, while the nature of knowledge is the _object_ of

his knowledge.

Again, the question may be asked: Since instrumentalism admits that

the table is really "there," why make such a fuss about whether it is

there as a means or as an object of knowledge? Is not the distinction

mere hair-splitting unless it is a way of smuggling in a

quasi-idealistic dependence upon thought? The reply will, I hope,

clinch the significance of the distinction, whether or no it makes it

acceptable. Respect for knowledge and its object is the ground for

insisting upon the distinction. The object of knowledge is, so to

speak, a more dignified, a more complete, sufficient, and

self-sufficing thing than any datum can be. To transfer the traits of

the object as known to the datum of reaching it, is a material, not a

merely verbal, affair. It is precisely this shift which leads the

presentative realist to substitute for irreducibility and unambiguity

of logical function (use in inference) physical and metaphysical

isolation and elementariness. It is this shift which generates the

need of reconciling the deliverances of science with the structure and

qualities of the world in which we directly live, since it sets up a

rivalry between the claims of the data, of common-sense objects, and

of scientific objects (the results of adequate inquiry). Above all it

commits us to a view that change is in some sense unreal, since

ultimate and primary entities, being simple, do not permit of change.

No; whatever is to be said about the validity of the distinction

contended for, it cannot be said to be insignificant. A theory which

commits us to the conception of a world of Eleatic fixities as primary

and which regards alteration and organization as secondary has such

profound consequences for thought and conduct that a detection of its

motivating fallacy makes a substantial difference. No more fundamental

question can be raised than the range and force of the applicability

to nature, life, and society of the whole-and-part conception. And if

we confuse our premises by taking the existential instrumentalities of

knowledge for its real objects, all distinctions and relations in

nature, life, and society are thereby requisitioned to be really only

cases of the whole-and-part nature of things.