No one doubts that thought, at least reflective as distinct from what
is sometimes called constitutive thought, is derivative and secondary.
It comes after something and out of something, and for the sake of
something. No one doubts that the thinking of everyday practical life
and of science is of this reflective type. We think about; we reflect
over. If we ask what it is which is primary and radical to thought; if
we ask what is the final objective for the sake of which thought
intervenes; if we ask in what sense we are to understand thought as a
derived procedure, we are plunging ourselves into the very heart of
the logical problem: the relation of thought to its empirical
antecedents and to its consequent, truth, and the relation of truth to
reality.
Yet from the naïve point of view no difficulty attaches to these
questions. The antecedents of thought are our universe of life and
love; of appreciation and struggle. We think about anything and
everything: snow on the ground; the alternating clanks and thuds that
rise from below; the relation of the Monroe Doctrine to the embroglio
in Venezuela; the relation of art to industry; the poetic quality of
a painting by Botticelli; the battle of Marathon; the economic
interpretation of history; the proper definition of cause; the best
method of reducing expenses; whether and how to renew the ties of a
broken friendship; the interpretation of an equation in hydrodynamics,
etc.
Through the madness of this miscellaneous citation there appears so
much of method: anything--event, act, value, ideal, person, or
place--may be an object of thought. Reflection busies itself alike
with physical nature, the record of social achievement, and the
endeavors of social aspiration. It is with reference to _such_ affairs
that thought is derivative; it is with reference to them that it
intervenes or mediates. Taking some part of the universe of action, of
affection, of social construction, under its special charge, and
having busied itself therewith sufficiently to meet the special
difficulty presented, thought releases that topic and enters into
further more direct experience.
Sticking for a moment to this naïve standpoint, we recognize a certain
rhythm of direct practice and derived theory; of primary construction
and of secondary criticism; of living appreciation and of abstract
description; of active endeavor and of pale reflection. We find that
every more direct primary attitude passes upon occasion into its
secondary deliberative and discursive counterpart. We find that when
the latter has done its work it passes away and passes on. From the
naïve standpoint such rhythm is taken as a matter of course. There is
no attempt either to state the nature of the occasion which demands
the thinking attitude, or to formulate a theory of the standard by
which is judged its success. No general theory is propounded as to the
exact relationship between thinking and what antecedes and succeeds
it. Much less do we ask how empirical circumstances can generate
rationality of thought; nor how it is possible for reflection to lay
claim to power of determining truth and thereby of constructing
further reality.
If we were to ask the thinking of naïve life to present, with a
minimum of theoretical elaboration, its conception of its own
practice, we should get an answer running not unlike this: Thinking is
a kind of activity which we perform at specific need, just as at other
need we engage in other sorts of activity: as converse with a friend;
draw a plan for a house; take a walk; eat a dinner; purchase a suit of
clothes, etc. In general, its material is anything in the wide
universe which seems to be relevant to this need--anything which may
serve as a resource in defining the difficulty or in suggesting modes
of dealing effectively with it. The measure of its success, the
standard of its validity, is precisely the degree in which the
thinking actually disposes of the difficulty and allows us to proceed
with more direct modes of experiencing, that are forthwith possessed
of more assured and deepened value.
If we inquire why the naïve attitude does not go on to elaborate these
implications of its own practice into a systematic theory, the answer,
on its own basis, is obvious. Thought arises in response to its own
occasion. And this occasion is so exacting that there is time, as
there is need, only to do the thinking which is needed in that
occasion--not to reflect upon the thinking itself. Reflection follows
so naturally upon its appropriate cue, its issue is so obvious, so
practical, the entire relationship is so organic, that once grant the
position that thought arises in reaction to specific demand, and there
is not the particular type of thinking called logical theory because
there is not the practical demand for reflection of that sort. Our
attention is taken up with particular questions and specific answers.
What we have to reckon with is not the problem of, How can I think
_überhaupt_? but, How shall I think right _here and now_? Not what is
the test of thought at large, but what validates and confirms _this_
thought?
In conformity with this view, it follows that a generic account of our
thinking behavior, the generic account termed logical theory, arises
at historic periods in which the situation has lost the organic
character above described. The general theory of reflection, as over
against its concrete exercise, appears when occasions for reflection
are so overwhelming and so mutually conflicting that specific adequate
response in thought is blocked. Again, it shows itself when practical
affairs are so multifarious, complicated, and remote from control that
thinking is held off from successful passage into them.
Anyhow (sticking to the naïve standpoint), it is true that the
stimulus to that particular form of reflective thinking termed logical
theory is found when circumstances require the act of thinking and
nevertheless impede clear and coherent thinking in detail; or when
they occasion thought and then prevent the results of thinking from
exercising directive influence upon the immediate concerns of life.
Under these conditions we get such questions as the following: What is
the relation of rational thought to crude or unreflective experience?
What is the relation of thought to reality? What is the barrier which
prevents reason from complete penetration into the world of truth?
What is it that makes us live alternately in a concrete world of
experience in which thought as such finds not satisfaction, and in a
world of ordered thought which is yet only abstract and ideal?
It is not my intention here to pursue the line of historical inquiry
thus suggested. Indeed, the point would not be mentioned did it not
serve to fix attention upon the nature of the logical problem.
It is in dealing with this latter type of question that logical theory
has taken a turn which separates it widely from the theoretical
implications of practical deliberation and of scientific research.
The two latter, however much they differ from each other in detail,
agree in a fundamental principle. They both assume that every
reflective problem and operation arises with reference to some
_specific_ situation, and has to subserve a _specific_ purpose
dependent upon its own occasion. They assume and observe distinct
limits--limits from which and to which. There is the limit of origin
in the needs of the particular situation which evokes reflection.
There is the limit of terminus in successful dealing with the
particular problem presented--or in retiring, baffled, to take up some
other question. The query that at once faces us regarding the nature
of logical theory is whether reflection upon reflection shall
recognize these limits, endeavoring to formulate them more exactly and
to define their relationships to each other more adequately; or shall
it abolish limits, do away with the matter of specific conditions and
specific aims of thought, and discuss thought and its relation to
empirical antecedents and rational consequents (truth) at large?
At first blush, it might seem as if the very nature of logical theory
as generalization of the reflective process must of necessity
disregard the matter of particular conditions and particular results
as irrelevant. How, the implication runs, could reflection become
generalized save by elimination of details as irrelevant? Such a
conception in fixing the central problem of logic fixes once for all
its future career and material. The essential business of logic is
henceforth to discuss the relation of thought as such to reality as
such. It may, indeed, involve much psychological material,
particularly in the discussion of the processes which antecede
thinking and which call it out. It may involve much discussion of the
concrete methods of investigation and verification employed in the
various sciences. It may busily concern itself with the
differentiation of various types and forms of thought--different modes
of conceiving, various conformations of judgment, various types of
inferential reasoning. But it concerns itself with any and all of
these three fields, not on their own account or as ultimate, but as
subsidiary to the main problem: the relation of thought as such, or at
large, to reality as such, or at large. Some of the detailed
considerations referred to may throw light upon the terms under which
thought transacts its business with reality; upon, say, certain
peculiar limitations it has to submit to as best it may. Other
considerations throw light upon the ways in which thought gets at
reality. Still other considerations throw light upon the forms which
thought assumes in attacking and apprehending reality. But in the end
all this is incidental. In the end the one problem holds: How do the
specifications of thought as such hold good of reality as such? In
fine, logic is supposed to grow out of the epistemological inquiry and
to lead up to its solution.
From this point of view various aspects of logical theory are well
stated by an author whom later on we shall consider in some detail.
Lotze[11] refers to "universal forms and principles of thought which
hold good everywhere both in judging of reality and in weighing
possibility, _irrespective of any difference in the objects_." This
defines the business of _pure_ logic. This is clearly the question of
thought as such--of thought at large or in general. Then we have the
question "of how far the most complete structure of thought ... can
claim to be an adequate account of that which we seem compelled to
assume as the object and occasion of our ideas." This is clearly the
question of the relation of thought at large to reality at large. It
is epistemology. Then comes "applied logic," having to do with the
actual employment of concrete forms of thought with reference to
investigation of specific topics and subjects. This "applied" logic
would, if the standpoint of practical deliberation and of scientific
research were adopted, be the sole genuine logic. But the existence of
thought _in itself_ having been agreed upon, we have in this "applied"
logic only an incidental inquiry of how the particular resistances and
oppositions which "pure" thought meets from particular matters may
best be discounted. It is concerned with methods of investigation
which obviate defects in the relationship of thought at large to
reality at large, as these present themselves under the limitations
of human experience. It deals merely with hindrances, and with devices
for overcoming them; it is directed by considerations of utility. When
we reflect that this field includes the entire procedure of practical
deliberation and of concrete scientific research, we begin to realize
something of the significance of the theory of logic which regards the
limitations of specific origination and specific outcome as irrelevant
to its main problem, which assumes an activity of thought "pure" or
"in itself," that is, "irrespective of any difference in its objects."
This suggests, by contrast, the opposite mode of stating the problem
of logical theory. Generalization of the nature of the reflective
process certainly involves elimination of much of the specific
material and contents of the thought-situations of daily life and of
critical science. Quite compatible with this, however, is the notion
that it seizes upon _certain_ specific conditions and factors, and
aims to bring them to clear consciousness--not to abolish them. While
eliminating the particular material of particular practical and
scientific pursuits, (1) it may strive to hit upon the common
denominator in the various situations which are antecedent or primary
to thought and which evoke it; (2) it may attempt to show how typical
features in the specific antecedents of thought call out diverse
typical modes of thought-reaction; (3) it may attempt to state the
nature of the specific consequences in which thought fulfils its
career.
(1) It does not eliminate dependence upon specific occasions as
provocative of thought, but endeavors to define _what_ in the various
occasions renders them thought-provoking. The specific occasion is not
eliminated, but insisted upon and brought into the foreground.
Consequently, empirical considerations are not subsidiary incidents,
but are of essential importance so far as they enable us to trace the
generation of the thought-situation. (2) From this point of view the
various types and modes of conceiving, judging, and inference are
treated, not as qualifications of thought _per se_ or at large, but of
reflection engaged in its specific, most economic, effective response
to its own particular occasion; they are adaptations for control of
stimuli. The distinctions and classifications that have been
accumulated in "formal" logic are relevant data; but they demand
interpretation from the standpoint of use as organs of adjustment to
material antecedents and stimuli. (3) Finally the question of
validity, or ultimate objective of thought, is relevant; but relevant
as a matter of the specific issue of the specific career of a
thought-function. All the typical investigatory and verificatory
procedures of the various sciences indicate the ways in which thought
actually brings to successful fulfilment its dealing with various
types of problems.
While the epistemological type of logic may, as we have seen, leave
(under the name of applied logic) a subsidiary place open for the
instrumental type, the type which deals with thinking as a specific
procedure relative to a specific antecedent occasion and to a
subsequent specific fulfilment is not able to reciprocate the favor.
From its point of view, an attempt to discuss the antecedents, data,
forms, and objectives of thought, apart from reference to particular
position occupied and particular part played in the growth of
experience, is to reach results which are not so much either true or
false as they are radically meaningless--because they are considered
apart from limits. Its results are not only abstractions (for all
theorizing ends in abstractions), but abstractions without possible
reference or bearing. From this point of view, the taking of something
(whether that something be a thinking activity, its empirical
stimulus, or its objective goal), apart from the limits of a historic
or developing situation, is the essence of _metaphysical_
procedure--in that sense of metaphysics which makes a gulf between it
and science.
As the reader has doubtless anticipated, it is the object of this
chapter to present the problem and industry of reflective thought from
the standpoint of naïve experience, using the term in a sense wide
enough to cover both practical procedure and concrete scientific
research. I resume by saying that this point of view knows no fixed
distinction between the empirical things and values of unreflective
life and the most abstract process of rational thought. It knows no
fixed gulf between the highest flight of theory and a control of the
details of practical construction and behavior. It passes, according
to the occasion and opportunity of the moment, from the attitude of
loving and struggling and doing to that of thinking and the reverse.
Its contents or material shift their values back and forth from
technological or utilitarian to aesthetic, ethical, or affectional. It
utilizes data of perception, of meaning or of discursive ideation as
need calls, just as an inventor now utilizes heat, now mechanical
strain, now electricity, according to the demands set by his aim.
Anything from past experience may be taken which appears to be an
element in either the statement or the solution of the present
problem. Thus we understand the coexistence, without contradiction, of
an indeterminate possible field and a limited actual field. The
undefined range of possible materials becomes specific through
reference to an end.
In all this, there is no difference of kind between the methods of
science and those of the plain man. The difference is the greater
control by science of the statement of the problem, and of the
selection and use of relevant material, both sensible and conceptual.
The two are related to each other just as the hit-or-miss,
trial-and-error inventions of uncivilized man stand to the deliberate
and consecutively persistent efforts of a modern inventor to produce
a certain complicated device for doing a comprehensive piece of work.
Neither the plain man nor the scientific inquirer is aware, as he
engages in his reflective activity, of any transition from one sphere
of existence to another. He knows no two fixed worlds--reality on one
side and mere subjective ideas on the other; he is aware of no gulf to
cross. He assumes uninterrupted, free, and fluid passage from ordinary
experience to abstract thinking, from thought to fact, from things to
theories and back again. Observation passes into development of
hypothesis; deductive methods pass into use in description of the
particular; inference passes into action, all with no sense of
difficulty save those found in the particular task in question. The
fundamental assumption is _continuity_.
This does not mean that fact is confused with idea, or observed datum
with voluntary hypothesis, theory with doing, any more than a traveler
confuses land and water when he journeys from one to the other. It
simply means that each is placed and used with reference to service
rendered the other, and with reference to the future use of the other.
Only the epistemological spectator of traditional controversies is
aware of the fact that the everyday man and the scientific man in this
free and easy intercourse are rashly assuming the right to glide over
a cleft in the very structure of reality. This fact raises a query not
favorable to the epistemologist. Why is it that the scientific man,
who is constantly plying his venturous traffic of exchange of facts
for ideas, of theories for laws, of real things for hypotheses, should
be so wholly unaware of the radical and generic (as distinct from
specific) difficulty of the undertakings in which he is engaged? We
thus come afresh to our inquiry: Does not the epistemological logician
unwittingly transfer the specific difficulty which always faces the
scientific man--the difficulty in detail of correct and adequate
translation back and forth of _this_ set of facts and _this_ group of
reflective consideration--into a totally different problem of the
wholesale relation of thought at large to reality in general? If such
be the case, it is clear that the very way in which the
epistemological type of logic states the problem of thinking, in
relation both to empirical antecedents and to objective truth, makes
that problem insoluble. Working terms, terms which as working are
flexible and historic, relative and methodological, are transformed
into absolute, fixed, and predetermined properties of being.
We come a little closer to the problem when we recognize that every
scientific inquiry passes historically through at least four stages.
(_a_) The first of these stages is, if I may be allowed the bull, that
in which scientific inquiry does not take place at all, because no
problem or difficulty in the quality of the experience presents itself
to provoke reflection. We have only to cast our eye back from the
existing status of any science, or back from the status of any
particular topic in any science, to discover a time when no reflective
or critical thinking busied itself with the matter--when the facts and
relations were taken for granted and thus were lost and absorbed in
the net meaning which accrued from the experience. (_b_) After the
dawning of the problem there comes a period of occupation with
relatively crude and unorganized facts--hunting for, locating, and
collecting raw material. This is the empiric stage, which no existing
science, however proud in its attained rationality, can disavow as its
own progenitor. (_c_) Then there is also a speculative stage: a period
of guessing, of making hypotheses, of framing ideas which later on are
labeled and condemned as only ideas. There is a period of
distinction-making and classification-making which later on is
regarded as only mentally gymnastic in character. And no science,
however proud in its present security of experimental assurance, can
disavow a scholastic ancestor. (_d_) Finally, there comes a period of
fruitful interaction between the mere ideas and the mere facts: a
period when observation is determined by experimental conditions
depending upon the use of certain guiding conceptions; when reflection
is directed and checked at every point by the use of experimental
data, and by the necessity of finding such a form for itself as will
enable it to serve in a deduction leading to evolution of new
meanings, and ultimately to experimental inquiry which brings to
light new facts. In the emerging of a more orderly and significant
region of fact, and of a more coherent and self-luminous system of
meaning, we have the natural limit of evolution of the logic of a
given science.
But consider what has happened in this historic record. Unanalyzed
experience has broken up into distinctions of facts and ideas; the
factual side has been developed by indefinite and almost miscellaneous
descriptions and cumulative listings; the conceptual side has been
developed by unchecked and speculative elaboration of definitions,
classifications, etc. Then there has been a relegation of accepted
meanings to the limbo of mere ideas; there has been a passage of some
of the accepted facts into the region of mere hypothesis and opinion.
Conversely, there has been a continued issuing of ideas from the
region of hypotheses and theories into that of facts, of accepted
objective and meaningful objects. Out of a world of only _seeming_
facts, and of only _doubtful_ ideas, there emerges a world continually
growing in definiteness, order, and luminosity.
This progress, verified in every record of science, is an absolute
monstrosity from the standpoint of the epistemology which assumes a
thought in general, on one side, and a reality in general, on the
other. The reason that it does not present itself as such a monster
and miracle to those actually concerned with it is because
_continuity_ of reference and of use controls all diversities in the
modes of existence specified and the types of significance assigned.
The distinction of meaning and fact is treated in the growth of a
science, or of any particular scientific problem, as an _induced_ and
_intentional_ practical division of labor; as assignments of relative
position with reference to performance of a task; as deliberate
distribution of forces at command for their more economic use. The
absorption of bald fact and hypothetical idea into the formation of a
single world of scientific apprehension and comprehension is but the
successful achieving of the aim on account of which the distinctions
in question were instituted.
Thus we come back to the problem of logical theory. To take the
distinctions of thought and fact, etc., as ontological, as inherently
fixed in the makeup of the structure of being, results in treating the
actual technique of scientific inquiry and scientific control as a
mere subsidiary topic--ultimately of only utilitarian worth. It also
states the terms upon which thought and being transact business in a
way so totally alien to concrete experience that it creates a problem
which can be discussed only in terms of itself--not in terms of the
conduct of life. As against this, the logic which aligns itself with
the origin and employ of reflective thought in everyday life and
critical science follows the natural history of thinking as a
life-process having its own generating antecedents and stimuli, its
own states and career, and its own specific objective or limit.
This point of view makes it possible for logical theory to come to
terms with psychology. When logic is considered as having to do with
the wholesale activity of thought _per se_, the question of the
historic process by which this or that particular thought came to be,
of how its object happens to present itself as sensory, or perceptual,
or conceptual, is quite irrelevant. These things are mere temporal
accidents. The psychologist (not lifting his gaze from the realm of
the changeable) may find in them matters of interest. His whole
industry is just with natural history--to trace events as they
mutually excite and inhibit one another. But the logician, we are
told, has a deeper problem and an outlook of more unbounded horizon.
He deals with the question of the eternal nature of thought and its
eternal validity in relation to an eternal reality. He is concerned,
not with genesis, but with value, not with a historic cycle, but with
absolute entities and relations.
Still the query haunts us: Is this so in truth? Or has the logician of
a certain type arbitrarily made it so by taking his terms apart from
reference to the specific occasions in which they arise and situations
in which they function? If the latter, then the very denial of
historic relationship, the denial of the significance of historic
method, is indicative of the unreal character of his own abstraction.
It means in effect that the affairs under consideration have been
isolated from the conditions in which alone they have determinable
meaning and assignable worth. It is astonishing that, in the face of
the advance of the evolutionary method in natural science, any
logician can persist in the assertion of a rigid difference between
the problem of origin and of nature; between genesis and analysis;
between history and validity. Such assertion simply reiterates as
final a distinction which grew up and had meaning in pre-evolutionary
science. It asserts, against the most marked advance which scientific
method has yet made, a survival of a crude period of logical
scientific procedure. We have no choice save either to conceive of
thinking as a response to a specific stimulus, or else to regard it as
something "in itself," having just in and of itself certain traits,
elements, and laws. If we give up the last view, we must take the
former. In this case it will still possess distinctive traits, but
they will be traits of a specific response to a specific stimulus.
The significance of the evolutionary method in biology and social
history is that every distinct organ, structure, or formation, every
grouping of cells or elements, is to be treated as an instrument of
adjustment or adaptation to a particular environing situation. Its
meaning, its character, its force, is known when, and only when, it is
considered as an arrangement for meeting the conditions involved in
some specific situation. This analysis is carried out by tracing
successive stages of development--by endeavoring to locate the
particular situation in which each structure has its origin, and by
tracing the successive modifications through which, in response to
changing media, it has reached its present conformation.[12] To
persist in condemning natural history from the standpoint of what
natural history meant before it identified itself with an evolutionary
process is not so much to exclude the natural-history standpoint from
philosophic consideration as it is to evince ignorance of what it
signifies.
Psychology as the natural history of the various attitudes and
structures through which experiencing passes, as an account of the
conditions under which this or that attitude emerges, and of the way
in which it influences, by stimulation or inhibition, production of
other states or conformations of reflection, is indispensable to
logical evaluation the moment we treat logical theory as an account of
thinking as a response to its own generating conditions, and
consequently judge its validity by reference to its efficiency in
meeting its problems. The historical point of view describes the
sequence; the normative follows the history to its conclusion, and
then turns back and judges each historical step by viewing it in
reference to its own outcome.
In the course of changing experience we keep our balance in moving
from situations of an affectional quality to those which are
practical or appreciative or reflective, because we bear constantly in
mind the context in which any particular distinction presents itself.
As we submit each characteristic function and situation of experience
to our gaze, we find it has a dual aspect. Wherever there is striving
there are obstacles; wherever there is affection there are persons who
are attached; wherever there is doing there is accomplishment;
wherever there is appreciation there is value; wherever there is
thinking there is material-in-question. We keep our footing as we move
from one attitude to another, from one characteristic quality to
another, because of the position occupied in the whole movement by the
particular function in which we are engaged.
The distinction _between_ each attitude and function and its
predecessor and successor is serial, dynamic, operative. The
distinctions _within_ any given operation or function are structural,
contemporaneous, and distributive. Thinking follows, we will say,
striving, and doing follows thinking. Each in the fulfilment of its
own function inevitably calls out its successor. But coincident,
simultaneous, and correspondent _within_ doing is the distinction of
doer and of deed; _within_ the function of thought, of thinking and
material thought upon; within the function of striving, of obstacle
and aim, of means and end. We keep our paths straight because we do
not confuse the sequential and functional relationship of types of
experience with the contemporaneous and structural distinctions of
elements within a given function. In the seeming maze of endless
confusion and unlimited shiftings, we find our way by the means of the
stimulations and checks occurring within the process in which we are
actually engaged. Operating within empirical situations we do not
contrast or confuse a condition which is an element in the formation
of one operation with the status which is one of the distributive
terms of another function. When we ignore these specific empirical
clues and limitations, we have at once an insoluble, because
meaningless, problem upon our hands.
Now the epistemological logician deliberately shuts himself off from
those cues and checks upon which the plain man instinctively relies,
and which the scientific man deliberately searches for and adopts as
constituting his technique. Consequently he is likely to set the
attitude which has place and significance only in one of the serial
functional situations of experience over against the active attitude
which describes part of the structural constitution of another
situation; or with equal lack of justification to assimilate materials
characteristic of different stages to one another. He sets the agent,
as he is found in the intimacy of love or appreciation, over against
the externality of the fact, as that is defined within the reflective
process. He takes the material which thought selects as its
problematic data as identical with the significant content which
results from successful pursuit of inquiry; and this in turn he
regards as the material which was presented before thinking began,
whose peculiarities were the means of awakening thought. He identifies
the final deposit of the thought-function with its own generating
antecedent, and then disposes of the resulting surd by reference to
some metaphysical consideration, which remains when logical inquiry,
when science (as interpreted by him), has done its work. He does this,
not because he prefers confusion to order, or error to truth, but
simply because, when the chain of historic sequence is cut, the vessel
of thought is afloat to veer upon a sea without soundings or moorings.
There are but two alternatives: either there is an object "in itself"
of mind "in itself," or else there are a series of situations where
elements vary with the varying functions to which they belong. If the
latter, the only way in which the characteristic terms of situations
can be defined is by discriminating the functions to which they
belong. And the epistemological logician, in choosing to take his
question as one of thought which has its own form just as "thought,"
apart from the limits of the special work it has to do, has deprived
himself of these supports and stays.
The problem of logic has a more general and a more specific phase. In
its generic form, it deals with this question: How does one type of
functional situation and attitude in experience pass out of and into
another; for example, the technological or utilitarian into the
aesthetic, the aesthetic into the religious, the religious into the
scientific, and this into the socio-ethical and so on? The more
specific question is: How does the particular functional situation
termed the reflective behave? How shall we describe it? What in detail
are its diverse contemporaneous distinctions, or divisions of labor,
its correspondent _statuses_; in what specific ways do these operate
with reference to each other so as to effect the specific aim which is
proposed by the needs of the affair?
This chapter may be brought to conclusion by reference to the more
ultimate value of the logic of experience, of logic taken in its wider
sense; that is, as an account of the sequence of the various typical
functions or situations of experience in their determining relations
to one another. Philosophy, defined as such a logic, makes no pretense
to be an account of a closed and finished universe. Its business is
not to secure or guarantee any particular reality or value. _Per
contra_, it gets the significance of a method. The right relationship
and adjustment of the various typical phases of experience to one
another is a problem felt in every department of life. Intellectual
rectification and control of these adjustments cannot fail to reflect
itself in an added clearness and security on the practical side. It
may be that general logic cannot become an instrument in the immediate
direction of the activities of science or art or industry; but it is
of value in criticizing and organizing tools of immediate research.
It also has direct significance in the valuation for social or
life-purposes of results achieved in particular branches. Much of the
immediate business of life is badly done because we do not know the
genesis and outcome of the work that occupies us. The manner and
degree of appropriation of the goods achieved in various departments
of social interest and vocation are partial and faulty because we are
not clear as to the due rights and responsibilities of one function of
experience in reference to others.
The value of research for social progress; the bearing of psychology
upon educational procedure; the mutual relations of fine and
industrial art; the question of the extent and nature of
specialization in science in comparison with the claims of applied
science; the adjustment of religious aspirations to scientific
statements; the justification of a refined culture for a few in face
of economic insufficiency for the mass; the relation of organization
to individuality--such are a few of the many social questions whose
answer depends upon the possession and use of a general logic of
experience as a method of inquiry and interpretation. I do not say
that headway cannot be made in such questions apart from the method
indicated: a logic of experience. But unless we have a critical and
assured view of the juncture in which and with reference to which a
given attitude or interest arises, unless we know the service it is
thereby called upon to perform, and hence the organs or methods by
which it best functions in that service, our progress is impeded and
irregular. We take a part for a whole, a means for an end; or we
attack wholesale some interest because it interferes with the deified
sway of the one we have selected as ultimate. A clear and
comprehensive consensus of social conviction and a consequent
concentrated and economical direction of effort are assured only as
there is some way of locating the position and rôle of each typical
interest and occupation. The domain of opinion is one of conflict; its
rule is arbitrary and costly. Only intellectual method affords a
substitute for opinion. A general logic of experience alone can do for
social qualities and aims what the natural sciences after centuries of
struggle are doing for activity in the physical realm.
This does not mean that systems of philosophy which have attempted to
state the nature of thought and of reality at large, apart from limits
of particular situations in the movement of experience, have been
worthless--though it does mean that their industry has been somewhat
misapplied. The unfolding of metaphysical theory has made large
contributions to positive evaluations of the typical situations and
relationships of experience--even when its conscious intention has
been quite otherwise. Every system of philosophy is itself a mode of
reflection; consequently (if our main contention be true), it too has
been evoked out of specific social antecedents, and has had its use
as a response to them. It has effected something in modifying the
situation within which it found its origin. It may not have solved the
problem which it consciously put itself; in many cases we may freely
admit that the question put has been found afterward to be so wrongly
put as to be insoluble. Yet exactly the same thing is true, in
precisely the same sense, in the history of science. For this reason,
if for no other, it is impossible for the scientific man to cast the
first stone at the philosopher.
The progress of science in any branch continually brings with it a
realization that problems in their previous form of statement are
insoluble because put in terms of unreal conditions; because the
real conditions have been mixed up with mental artifacts or
misconstructions. Every science is continually learning that its
supposed solutions are only apparent because the "solution" solves, not
the actual problem, but one which has been made up. But the very
putting of the question, the very giving of the wrong answer, induces
modification of existing intellectual habits, standpoints, and aims.
Wrestling with the problem, there is evolution of new technique to
control inquiry, there is search for new facts, institution of new
types of experimentation; there is gain in the methodic control of
experience. And all this is progress. It is only the worn-out cynic,
the de-vitalized sensualist, and the fanatical dogmatist who interpret
the continuous change of science as proving that, since each successive
statement is wrong, the whole record is error and folly; and that the
present truth is only the error not yet found out. Such draw the moral
of caring naught for all these things, or of flying to some external
authority which will deliver once for all the fixed and unchangeable
truth. But historic philosophy even in its aberrant forms has proved a
factor in the valuation of experience; it has brought problems to
light, it has provoked intellectual conflicts without which values are
only nominal; even through its would-be absolutistic isolations it has
secured recognition of mutual dependencies and reciprocal
reinforcements. Yet if it can define its work more clearly, it can
concentrate its energy upon its own characteristic problem: the genesis
and functioning in experience of various typical interests and
occupations with reference to one another.