VII

Return with me, if you please, to fundamentals. The word "experience"

is used freely in the essays and without much explanation. In view of

the currency of subjectivistic interpretations of that term, the chief

wonder is probably that the doctrine of the essays was not more

misunderstood than was actually the case. I have already said

something designed to clarify the sense in which the term was used. I

now come back to the matter. What is the reason for using the term at

all in philosophy? The history of philosophy supplies, I think, the

answer. No matter how subjective a turn was given to the word by Hume

and Kant, we have only to go to an earlier period to see that the

appeal to experience in philosophy was coincident with the

emancipation of science from occult essences and causes, and with the

substitution of methods of observation, controlled by experimentation

and employing mathematical considerations, for methods of mere

dialectic definition and classification. The appeal to experience was

the cry of the man from Missouri--the demand to be shown. It sprang

from the desire to command nature by observing her, instead of

anticipating her in order to deck her with aesthetic garlands and hold

her with theological chains. The significance of experience was not

that sun and moon, stick and stone, are creatures of the senses, but

that men would not put their trust any longer in things which are

said, however authoritatively, to exist, unless these things are

capable of entering into specifiable connections with the organism and

the organism with them. It was an emphatic assertion that until men

could see _how_ things got into belief, and what they did when they

got there, intellectual acceptance would be withheld.

Has not the lesson, however, been so well learned that we can drop

reference to experience? Would that such were the case. But the time

does not seem to have come. Some things enter by way of the

imagination, stimulated by emotional preferences and biases. For

_certain_ purposes, they are not the worse for having entered by that

gate, instead of through sensory-motor adjustments. Or they may have

entered because of the love of man for logical form and symmetry and

system, and because of the emotional satisfaction which harmony

awakens in a sensitive soul. They too need not be any worse for all

that. But surely it is among the businesses of philosophy to

discriminate between the kinds of goodness possessed by different

kinds of things. And how can it discriminate unless by telling by what

road they got into our experience and what they do after they get

there? Assuredly the difference is not in _intrinsic_ content. It is

not because of self-obvious and self-contained traits of the immediate

terms that Dante's world belongs to poetry and Newton's to scientific

astronomy. No amount of pure inspection and excogitation could decide

which belongs to which world. The difference in status and claim is

made by what we call experience: by the place of the two systems in

experience with respect to their generation and consequences. And

assuredly any philosophy which takes science to be not an _account_ of

the world (which it is), but a literal and exhaustive apprehension of

it in its full reality, a philosophy which therefore has no place for

poetry or possibilities, still needs a theory of experience.

If a scientific man be asked what is truth, he will reply--if he frame

his reply in terms of his practice and not of some convention--that

which is accepted upon adequate evidence. And if he is asked for a

description of adequacy of evidence, he certainly will refer to

matters of observation and experiment. It is not the self-inclosed

character of the terms and propositions nor their systematic ordering

which settles the case for him; it is the way they were obtained and

what he can do with them in getting other things. And when a

mathematician or logician asks philosophy to abandon this method, then

is just the time to be most vigorous in insisting upon the necessity

of reference to "experience" in order to fix the import of

mathematical and logical pretensions. When students influenced by the

symmetry and system of mathematics cease building up their

philosophies in terms of traits of mathematical subject-matter in

isolation, then empirical philosophers will have less call to mention

experience. Meantime, I know of no way of fixing the scope and claims

of mathematics in philosophy save to try to point out just at what

juncture it enters experience and what work it does after it has got

entrance. I have made such an attempt in my account of the fixation

and handling of suggestions as meanings. It is defective enough, but

the defects are to be remedied by a better empirical account and not

by setting up against experience the claims of a logic aloof from

experience.

The objection then to a logic which rules out knowledge getting, and

which bases logic exclusively upon the traits of known objects, is

that it is self-contradictory. There is no way to know what are the

traits of known objects, as distinct from imaginary objects, or

objects of opinion, or objects of unanalytic common-sense, save by

referring to the operations of getting, using, and testing

evidence--the processes of knowledge getting. I am making no appeal

for skepticism at large; I am not questioning the right of the

physicist, the mathematician, or the symbolic logicist to go ahead

with accepted objects and do what he can with them. I am pointing out

that anyone who professes to be concerned with finding out what

knowledge _is_, has for his primary work the job of finding out why it

is so much safer to proceed with just these objects, than with those,

say, of Aristotelian science. Aristotle was not lacking in acuteness

nor in learning. To him it was clear that objects of knowledge are the

things of ordinary perception, so far as they are referred to a form

which comparison of perceived things, in the light of a final cause,

makes evident. If this view of the objects of knowledge has gone into

the discard, if quite other objects of knowledge are now received and

employed, it is because the methods of _getting_ knowledge have been

transformed, till, for the working scientist, "objects of knowledge"

mean precisely the objects which have been obtained by approved

processes of inquiry. To exclude consideration of these processes is

thus to throw away the key to understanding knowledge and its objects.

There is a certain ironical humor in taking advantage of all the

improved methods of experimental inquiry with respect to all objects

of knowledge--save one, knowledge itself; in denying their relevancy

to knowing knowledge, and falling back upon the method everywhere else

disavowed--the method of relying upon isolated, self-contained

properties of subject-matter.

One of the points which gave much offense in the essays was the

reference to genetic method--to a natural history of knowledge. I hope

what has now been said makes clearer the nature of that reference. I

was to blame for not making the point more explicit; but I cannot

altogether blame myself for my naïveté in supposing that others

understood by a natural history of knowledge what I understood by it.

It had not occurred to me that anyone would think that the history by

which human ignorance, error, dogma, and superstition had been

transformed, even in its present degree of transformation, into

knowledge was something which had gone on exclusively inside of men's

heads, or in an inner consciousness. I thought of it as something

going on in the world, in the observatory and the laboratory, and in

the application of laboratory results to the control of human health,

well-being, and progress. When a biologist says that the way to

understand an organ, or the sociologist that the way to know an

institution, resides in its genesis and history, he is understood to

mean _its_ history. I took the same liberty for knowledge, that is,

for science. The accusation of "subjectivisim" taken in this light

appears as a depressing revelation of what the current opinion about

the processes of knowledge is. To stumble on a stone need not be a

process of knowledge; to hit it with a hammer, to pour acid upon it,

to put pieces in the crucible, to subject things to heat and pressure

to see if one can make a similar stone, _are_ processes of knowledge.

So is fixing suggestions by attaching names, and so is devising ways

of putting these terms together so that new suggestions will arise, or

so that suggestions may be transferred from one situation to another.

But not one of these processes is "subjective" in any sense which puts

subjectivity in opposition to the public out-of-doors world of nature

and human companionship. To set genesis in opposition to analysis is

merely to overlook the fact that the sciences of existence have found

that considerations of genesis afford their most effective methods of

analysis.[10]

The same kind of consideration applies to the favorable view taken of

psychology. If reference to modes and ways of experience--to

experiencing--is important for understanding the things with which

philosophy deals, then psychology is useful as a matter of course. For

what is meant by psychology is precisely a discrimination of the

acts and attitudes of the organism which have a bearing upon

respective subject-matters and which have accordingly to be taken

account of before the subject-matters can be properly discriminated.

The matter was especially striking in the case of Lotze. He protested

constantly against the use of psychology, and yet his own data and

procedures were infected at every turn by psychology, and, if I am at

all correct, by a false psychology. The particular separation which he

made between psychology and logic rested indeed upon a particular

psychological assumption. The question is worth asking: Is not the

marked aversion on the part of some philosophers to any reference to

psychology a Freudian symptom?

A word more upon the place assigned by the essays to _need_ and

_purpose_ and the humanistic factor generally. To save time I may

quote a sentence from an early review which attributes to the essays

the following doctrine: "If the plan turns out to be useful for our

need, it is correct--the judgment is true. The real-ideal distinction

is that between stimulus of environment and plan of action or

tentative response. Both real and ideal are equally experiences of the

individual man." These words can be interpreted either so as to convey

the position fairly, or so as radically to misconceive it; the latter

course is a little easier, as the words stand. That "real and ideal"

are experiences of the individual man in the sense that they actually

present themselves as specifications which can be studied by any man

who desires to study them is true enough. That such a study is as much

required for determining their characters as it is for determining

those of carbon dioxide or of the constitution of Great Britain is

also the contention of the paper. But if the words quoted suggest to

anyone that the real or even the ideal are somehow possessions of an

individual man, things secreted somewhere about him and then ejected,

I can only say that I cannot understand the doctrine. I know of no

ready-made and antecedent conception of "the individual man." Instead

of telling about the nature of experience by means of a prior

conception of individual man, I find it necessary to go to experience

to find out what is meant by "individual" and by "man"; and also by

"the." Consequently even in such an expression as "my experience," I

should wish not to contradict this idea of method by using the term

"my" to swallow up the term "experience," any more than if I said "my

house," or "my country." On the contrary, I should expect that any

intelligible and definite use of such phrases would throw much more

light upon "me" than upon "house" or "country"--or "experience."

The possible misunderstanding is, I think, actual in the reference to

"our needs" as a criterion of the correctness of truth of an idea or

plan. According to the essays, it is the needs of a _situation_ which

are determinative. They evoke thought and the need of knowing, and it

is only within the situation that the identification of the needs with

a self occurs; and it is only by reflection upon the place of the

agent in the encompassing situation that the nature of _his_ needs can

be determined. In fact, the actual occurrence of a disturbed,

incomplete, and needy _situation_ indicates that _my_ present need is

precisely to investigate, to explore, to hunt, to pull apart things

now tied together, to project, to plan, to invent, and then to test

the outcome by seeing how it works as a method of dealing with hard

facts. One source of the demand, in short, for reference to experience

as the encompassing universe of discourse is to keep us from taking

such terms as "self," "my," "need," "satisfaction," etc., as terms

whose meanings can be accepted and proved either by themselves or by

even the most extensive dialectic reference to other terms.

Terms like "real" and "ideal," "individual," "man," "my," certainly

allow of profitable dialectic (or purely prepositional) clarification

and elaboration. But nothing is settled until these discursive

findings have been applied, through action, to things, and an

experience has been effected, which either meets or evades the

specification conceptually laid down. To suppose, for example, that

the import of the term "ideal" can be settled apart from exhibiting

in experience some specific affair, is to maintain in philosophy that

belief in the occult essence and hidden cause which science had to get

rid of before it got on the right track. The idealistic misconception

of experience is no reason for throwing away its significant point of

contact with modern science and for having recourse then to objects

distinguished from old-fashioned _Dinge an Sich_ only because they

involve just that reference to those experiences by which they were

established and to which they are applied that propositional or

analytic realism professedly and elaborately ignores. In revenge, this

ignoring leaves on our hands the "me," or knowing self, as a separate

thing within which experience falls (instead of its falling in a

specifiable place within experience), and generates the insoluble

problem of how a subjective experience can beget objective knowledge.

In concluding, let me say that reference to experience seems at

present to be the easiest way of realizing the continuities among

subject-matters that are always getting split up into dualisms. A

creation of a world of subsistences or essences which are quite other

than the world of natural existences (which are other than natural

existences adapted to the successful performance of inference) is in

itself a technical matter, though a discouraging one to a philosopher

expertly acquainted with all the difficulties which that view has

generated from the time of Plato down. But the assistance which such

a philosophy lends to the practical and current divorce of the

"ideal" from the natural world makes it a thing to be dreaded for

other than professional reasons. God only knows how many of the

sufferings of life are due to a belief that the natural scene and

operations of our life are lacking in ideal import, and to the

consequent tendency to flee for the lacking ideal factors to some

other world inhabited exclusively by ideals. That such a cut-off,

ideal world is impotent for direction and control and change of the

natural world follows as a matter of course. It is a luxury; it

belongs to the "genteel tradition" of life, the persistence of an

"upper" class given to a detached and parasitic life. Moreover, it

places the scientific inquirer within that irresponsible class. If

philosophers could aid in making it clear to a troubled humanity that

ideals are continuous with natural events, that they but represent

their possibilities, and that recognized possibilities form methods

for a conduct which may realize them in fact, philosophers would

enforce the sense of a social calling and responsibility. I do not say

that pointing out the continuity and interaction of various attitudes

and interests in experience is the only way of effecting this

consummation. But for a large number of persons today it is the

readiest way.

Much may be said about that other great rupture of continuity which

analytic realism would maintain: that between the world and the knower

as something outside of it, engaged in an otiose contemplative survey

of it. I can understand the social conditions which generated this

conception of an aloof knower. I can see how it protected the growth

of responsible inquiry which takes effect in change of the

environment, by cultivating a sense of the innocuousness of knowing,

and thus lulling to sleep the animosity of those who, being in

control, had no desire to permit reflection which had practical

import. I can see how specialists at any time, professional knowers,

so to speak, find in this doctrine a salve for conscience--a solace

which all thinkers need as long as an effective share in the conduct

of affairs is not permitted them. Above all, I can see how seclusion

and the absence of the pressure of immediate action developed a more

varied curiosity, greater impartiality, and a more generous outlook.

But all this is no reason for continuing the idealization of a remote

and separate mind or knower now that the method of intelligence is

perfected, and changed social conditions not only permit but demand

that intelligence be placed within the procession of events. An

intellectual integrity, an impartiality and detachment, which is

maintained only in seclusion is unpleasantly reminiscent of other

identifications of virtue with the innocence of ignorance. To place

knowledge where it arises and operates in experience is to know that,

as it arose because of the troubles of man, it is confirmed in

reconstructing the conditions which occasioned those troubles.

Genuine intellectual integrity is found in experimental knowing. Until

this lesson is fully learned, it is not safe to dissociate knowledge

from experiment nor experiment from experience.