If we exclude acting upon the idea, no conceivable amount or kind of
intellectualistic procedure can confirm or refute an idea, or throw
any light upon its validity. How does the non-pragmatic view consider
that verification takes place? Does it suppose that we first look a
long while at the facts and then a long time at the idea, until by
some magical process the degree and kind of their agreement become
visible? Unless there is some such conception as this, what conception
of agreement is possible except the experimental or practical one? And
if it be admitted that verification involves action, how can that
action be relevant to the truth of an idea, unless the idea is itself
already relevant to action? If by acting in accordance with the
experimental definition of facts, viz., as obstacles and conditions,
and the experimental definition of the end or intent, viz., as plan
and method of action, a harmonized situation effectually presents
itself, we have the adequate and the only conceivable verification of
the intellectual factors. If the action indicated be carried out and
the disordered or disturbed situation persists, then we have not
merely confuted the tentative positions of intelligence, but we have
in the very process of acting introduced new data and eliminated some
of the old ones, and thus afforded an opportunity for the resurvey of
the facts and the revision of the plan of action. By acting faithfully
upon an inadequate reflective presentation, we have at least secured
the elements for its improvement. This, of course, gives no absolute
guaranty that the reflection will at any time be so performed as to
prove its validity in fact. But the self-rectification of intellectual
content through acting upon it in good faith is the "absolute" of
knowledge, loyalty to which is the religion of intellect.
The intellectual definition or delimitation assigned to the "given" is
thus as tentative and experimental as that ascribed to the idea. In
form both are categorical, and in content both are hypothetical. Facts
really exist just as facts, and meanings exist as meanings. One is no
more superfluous, more subjective, or less necessitated than the
other. In and of themselves as existences both are equally realistic
and compulsive. But on the basis of existence, there is no element in
either which may be strictly described as intellectual or cognitional.
There is only a practical situation in its brute and unrationalized
form. What is uncertain about the facts as given at any moment is
whether the right exclusions and selections have been made. Since that
is a question which can be decided finally only by the experimental
issue, this ascription of character is itself tentative and
experimental. If it works, the characterization and delineation are
found to be proper ones; but every admission prior to inquiry, of
unquestioned, categorical, rigid objectivity, compromises the
probability that it will work. The character assigned to the datum
must be taken as hypothetically as possible in order to preserve the
elasticity needed for easy and prompt reconsideration. Any other
procedure virtually insists that all facts and details anywhere
happening to exist and happening to present themselves (all being
equally real) must all be given equal status and equal weight, and
that their outer ramifications and internal complexities must be
indefinitely followed up. The worthlessness of this sheer accumulation
of realities, its total irrelevancy, the lack of any way of judging
the significance of the accumulations, are good proofs of the fallacy
of any theory which ascribes objective logical content to facts wholly
apart from the needs and possibilities of a situation.
The more stubbornly one maintains the _full_ reality of either his
facts or his ideas, just as they stand, the more accidental is the
discovery of relevantly significant facts and of valid ideas--the more
accidental, the less rational, is the issue of the knowledge
situation. Due progress is reasonably probable in just the degree in
which the meaning, categorical in its existing imperativeness, and the
fact, equally categorical in its brute coerciveness, are assigned only
a provisional and tentative nature with reference to control of the
situation. That this surrender of a rigid and final character for the
content of knowledge on the sides both of fact and of meaning, in
favor of experimental and functioning estimations, is precisely the
change which has marked the development of modern from mediaeval and
Greek science, seems undoubted. To learn the lesson one has only to
contrast the rigidity of phenomena and conceptions in Greek thought
(Platonic ideas, Aristotelian forms) with the modern experimental
selection and determining of facts and experimental employment of
hypotheses. The former have ceased to be ultimate realities of a
nondescript sort and have become provisional data; the latter have
ceased to be eternal meanings and have become working theories. The
fruitful application of mathematics and the evolution of a technique
of experimental inquiry have coincided with this change. That
realities exist independently of their use as intellectual data, and
that meanings exist apart from their utilization as hypotheses, are
the permanent truths of Greek realism as against the exaggerated
subjectivism of modern philosophy; but the conception that this
existence is to be defined in the same way as are contents of
knowledge, so that perfect being is object of perfect knowledge and
imperfect being object of imperfect knowledge, is the fallacy which
Greek thought projected into modern. Science has advanced in its
methods in just the degree in which it has ceased to assume that prior
realities and prior meanings retain fixedly and finally, when entering
into reflective situations, the characters they had prior to this
entrance, and in which it has realized that their very presence within
the knowledge situation signifies that they have to be redefined and
revalued from the standpoint of the new situation.