[1] I am indebted to an unpublished manuscript of Mr. S. Klyce of
Winchester, Massachusetts, for the significance of the fact that our
words divide into _terms_ (of which more in the sequel) and into names
which are not (strictly speaking) terms at all, but which serve to
remind us of the vast and vague continuum, select portions of which
only are designated by words as _terms_. He calls such words "infinity
and zero" words. The word "experience" is a typical instance of an
"infinity word." Mr. Klyce has brought out very clearly that a direct
situation of experience ("situation" as I employ it is another such
word) has no need of any word for itself, the thing to which the word
would point being so egregiously there on its own behalf. But when
communication about it takes place (as it does, not only in converse
with others, but when a man attempts a mutual reference of different
periods of his own life) a word is needed to remind both parties of
this taken-for-granted whole (another infinity term), while confusion
arises if explicit attention is not called to the fact that it is a
very different sort of word from the definite terms of discourse which
denote distinctions and their relations to one another. In the text,
attention is called to the fact that the business man wrestling with a
difficulty or a scientific man engaged in an inquiry finds his checks
and control specifically in the situation in which he is employed,
while the theorizer at large leaves out these checks and limits, and
so loses his clews. Well, the words "experience," "situation," etc.,
are used to _remind_ the thinker of the need of reversion to precisely
something which never can be one of the terms of his reflection but
which nevertheless furnishes the existential meaning and status of
them all. "Intuition," mysticism, philosophized or sophisticated
monism, are all of them aberrant ways of protesting against the
consequences which result from failing to note what is conveyed by
words which are not terms. Were I rewriting these essays _in toto_ I
should try to take advantage of these and other indispensable
considerations advanced by Mr. Klyce; but as the essays must stand
substantially as they were originally written, and as an Introduction
to them must, in order to be intelligible, be stated in not
incongruous phraseology, I wish simply to ask the reader to bear in
mind this radical difference between such words as "experience,"
"reality," "universe," "situation," and such terms as "typewriter,"
"me," "consciousness," "existence," when used (as they must be used if
they are to be terms) in a differential sense. The term "reality" is
particularly treacherous, for the careless tradition of philosophy (a
carelessness fostered, I am sure, by failure to make verbally explicit
the distinction to which Mr. Klyce has called attention) uses
"reality" both as a term of indifferent reference, equivalent to
everything taken together or referred to _en masse_ as over against
some discrimination, and also as a discriminative term with a highly
eulogistic flavor: as _real_ money in distinction from counterfeit
money. Then, although every inquiry in daily life, whether
technological or scientific, asks _whether_ a thing is real only in
the sense of asking _what_ thing is real, philosophy concludes to a
wholesale distinction between the real and the unreal, the real and
the apparent, and so creates a wholly artificial problem.
If the philosopher, whether idealistic or realistic, who holds that it
is self-contradictory to criticize purely intellectualistic
conceptions of the world, because the criticism itself goes on
intellectualistic terms, so that its validity depends upon
intellectual (or cognitive) conditions, will but think of the very
brute doings in which a chemist engages to fix the meanings of his
terms and to test his theories and conceptions, he will perceive that
all intellectual knowing is but a method for conducting an experiment,
and that arguments and objections are but stimuli to induce somebody
to try a certain experiment--to have recourse, that is, to a
non-logical non-intellectual affair. Or again, the argument is an
invitation to him to note that at the very time in which he is
thinking, his thinking is set in a continuum which is not an object of
thought. The importance attached to the word "experience," then, both
in the essays and in this Introduction, is to be understood as an
invitation to employ thought and discriminative knowledge as a means
of plunging into something which no argument and no term can express;
or rather as an invitation to note the fact that no plunge is needed,
since one's own thinking and explicit knowledge are already
constituted by and within something which does not need to be
expressed or made explicit. And finally, there is nothing mystical
about this, though mysticism doubtless roots in this fact. Its import
is only to call notice to the meaning of, say, formulae communicated
by a chemist to others as the result of his experiment. All that can
be communicated or expressed is that one believes such and such a
thing. The communication has scientific instead of merely social
significance because the communicated formula is a direction to other
chemists to try certain procedures and see what they get. The
_direction_ is capable of expression; the result of the experiment,
the experience, to which the propositions refer and by which they are
tested, is not expressible. (Poetry, of course, is a more competent
organ of suggesting it than scientific prose.) The word "experience"
is, I repeat, a notation of an inexpressible as that which decides the
ultimate status of all which is expressed; inexpressible not because
it is so remote and transcendent, but because it is so immediately
engrossing and matter of course.
[2] There are certain points of similarity between this doctrine and
that of Holt regarding contradictions and that of Montague regarding
"consciousness" as a case of potential energy. But the latter doctrine
seems to me to suffer, first, from an isolation of the brain from the
organism, which leads to ignoring the active doing, and, secondly,
from an isolation of the "moment" of reduction of actual to potential
energy. It appears as a curiously isolated and self-sufficient event,
instead of as the focus of readjustment in an organized activity at
the pivotal point of maximum "tension"--that is, of greatest
inhibition in connection with greatest tendency to discharge. And
while I think Holt is wholly right in connecting the possibility of
error with objectively plural and conflicting forces, I should hardly
regard it as linguistically expedient to call counterbalancing forces
"contradictory." The counterbalancing forces of the vaulting do not
seem to me contradictory in the arch. But if their presence led me to
attempt to say "up" and "down" at the same time there would be
contradiction. But even admitting that contradictory propositions are
merely about forces which are contradictory--heating and cooling--it
is still a long way to error. For propositions about such
"contradictions" are obviously true propositions. It is only when we
make that reaction to one factor which is appropriate to dealing with
the other that there is error; and this can happen where there are no
contradictory forces at all beyond the fact that the _agent_ is pulled
two incompatible and opposed ways at the same time.
[3] For emphasis I am here exaggerating by condensing into a single
decisive act an operation which is continuously going on.
[4] I would remark in passing that a recognition that a thing may be
continuous in one respect and discrete in another would obviate a good
many difficulties.
[5] In effect, the fallacy is the same as that of an idealistic theory
which holds that all objects are "really" associations of sensations.
[6] This statement is meant literally. The "sensations" of color,
sound, etc., to which appeal is made in a scientific inquiry are
nothing mental in structure or stuff; they are actual, extra-organic
things analyzed down to what is so indubitably there that it may
safely be taken as a basis of inference.
[7] A term is not of course a mere word; a mere word is non-sense, for
a sound by itself is not a word at all. Nor is it a mere meaning,
which is not even natural non-sense, being (if it be at all)
supernatural or transcendental nonsense. "Terms" signify that certain
absent existences are indicated by certain given existences, in the
respect that they are abstracted and fixed for intellectual use by
some physically convenient means, such as a sound or a muscular
contraction of the vocal organs.
[8] This distinction of indication as existential and implication as
conceptual or essential, I owe to Mr. Alfred Sidgwick. See his
_Fallacies_, p. 50.
[9] James, _Psychology_, II, 665.
[10] I have even seen, in a criticism of the essays, the method of
genesis opposed to the method of experimentation--as if
experimentation were anything but the generation of some special
object!