[Footnote: Extract from an article entitled 'A World of Pure
Experience,' in the Journal of Philosophy, etc., September 29,1904.]
Throughout the history of philosophy the subject and its object
have been treated as absolutely discontinuous entities; and thereupon
the presence of the latter to the former, or the 'apprehension' by the
former of the latter, has assumed a paradoxical character which all
sorts of theories had to be invented to overcome. Representative
theories put a mental 'representation,' 'image,' or 'content' into
the gap, as a sort of intermediary. Commonsense theories left the gap
untouched, declaring our mind able to clear it by a self-transcending
leap. Transcendentalist theories left it impossible to traverse by
finite knowers, and brought an absolute in to perform the saltatory
act. All the while, in the very bosom of the finite experience, every
conjunction required to make the relation intelligible is given in full.
Either the knower and the known are:
(1) the self-same piece of experience taken twice over in different
contexts; or they are
(2) two pieces of ACTUAL experience belonging to the same subject, with
definite tracts of conjunctive transitional experience between them; or
(3) the known is a POSSIBLE experience either of that subject or
another, to which the said conjunctive transitions WOULD lead, if
sufficiently prolonged.
To discuss all the ways in which one experience may function as the
knower of another, would be incompatible with the limits of this essay.
I have treated of type 1, the kind of knowledge called perception, in
an article in the Journal of Philosophy, for September 1, 1904, called
'Does consciousness exist?' This is the type of case in which the mind
enjoys direct 'acquaintance' with a present object. In the other types
the mind has 'knowledge-about' an object not immediately there. Type 3
can always formally and hypothetically be reduced to type 2, so that
a brief description of that type will now put the present reader
sufficiently at my point of view, and make him see what the actual
meanings of the mysterious cognitive relation may be.
Suppose me to be sitting here in my library at Cambridge, at ten
minutes' walk from 'Memorial Hall,' and to be thinking truly of the
latter object. My mind may have before it only the name, or it may have
a clear image, or it may have a very dim image of the hall, but such an
intrinsic difference in the image makes no difference in its cognitive
function. Certain extrinsic phenomena, special experiences of
conjunction, are what impart to the image, be it what it may, its
knowing office.
For instance, if you ask me what hall I mean by my image, and I can
tell you nothing; or if I fail to point or lead you towards the Harvard
Delta; or if, being led by you, I am uncertain whether the Hall I see
be what I had in mind or not; you would rightly deny that I had 'meant'
that particular hall at all, even tho my mental image might to some
degree have resembled it. The resemblance would count in that case as
coincidental merely, for all sorts of things of a kind resemble one
another in this world without being held for that reason to take
cognizance of one another.
On the other hand, if I can lead you to the hall, and tell you of its
history and present uses; if in its presence I feel my idea, however
imperfect it may have been, to have led hither and to be now TERMINATED;
if the associates of the image and of the felt hall run parallel, so
that each term of the one context corresponds serially, as I walk, with
an answering term of the other; why then my soul was prophetic, and
my idea must be, and by common consent would be, called cognizant of
reality. That percept was what I MEANT, for into it my idea has passed
by conjunctive experiences of sameness and fulfilled intention. Nowhere
is there jar, but every later moment continues and corroborates an
earlier one.
In this continuing and corroborating, taken in no transcendental sense,
but denoting definitely felt transitions, LIES ALL THAT THE KNOWING OF
A PERCEPT BY AN IDEA CAN POSSIBLY CONTAIN OR SIGNIFY. Wherever such
transitions are felt, the first experience KNOWS the last one. Where
they do not, or where even as possibles they can not, intervene, there
can be no pretence of knowing. In this latter case the extremes will be
connected, if connected at all, by inferior relations--bare likeness or
succession, or by 'withness' alone. Knowledge of sensible realities thus
comes to life inside the tissue of experience. It is MADE; and made
by relations that unroll themselves in time. Whenever certain
intermediaries are given, such that, as they develop towards their
terminus, there is experience from point to point of one direction
followed, and finally of one process fulfilled, the result is that THEIR
STARTING-POINT THEREBY BECOMES A KNOWER AND THEIR TERMINUS AN OBJECT
MEANT OR KNOWN. That is all that knowing (in the simple case considered)
can be known-as, that is the whole of its nature, put into experiential
terms. Whenever such is the sequence of our experiences we may freely
say that we had the terminal object 'in mind' from the outset, even
altho AT the outset nothing was there in us but a flat piece of
substantive experience like any other, with no self-transcendency about
it, and no mystery save the mystery of coming into existence and of
being gradually followed by other pieces of substantive experience, with
conjunctively transitional experiences between. That is what we MEAN
here by the object's being 'in mind.' Of any deeper more real way of its
being in mind we have no positive conception, and we have no right to
discredit our actual experience by talking of such a way at all.
I know that many a reader will rebel at this. 'Mere intermediaries,' he
will say, 'even tho they be feelings of continuously growing fulfilment,
only SEPARATE the knower from the known, whereas what we have in
knowledge is a kind of immediate touch of the one by the other, an
"apprehension" in the etymological sense of the word, a leaping of the
chasm as by lightning, an act by which two terms are smitten into one
over the head of their distinctness. All these dead intermediaries of
yours are out of each other, and outside of their termini still.'
But do not such dialectic difficulties remind us of the dog dropping his
bone and snapping at its image in the water? If we knew any more real
kind of union aliunde, we might be entitled to brand all our empirical
unions as a sham. But unions by continuous transition are the only ones
we know of, whether in this matter of a knowledge-about that terminates
in an acquaintance, whether in personal identity, in logical prediction
through the copula 'is,' or elsewhere. If anywhere there were more
absolute unions, they could only reveal themselves to us by just such
conjunctive results. These are what the unions are worth, these are all
that we can ever practically mean by union, by continuity. Is it not
time to repeat what Lotze said of substances, that to act like one is to
be one? Should we not say here that to be experienced as continuous is
to be really continuous, in a world where experience and reality come to
the same thing? In a picture gallery a painted hook will serve to hang
a painted chain by, a painted cable will hold a painted ship. In a world
where both the terms and their distinctions are affairs of experience,
conjunctions that are experienced must be at least as real as anything
else. They will be 'absolutely' real conjunctions, if we have no
transphenomenal absolute ready, to derealize the whole experienced world
by, at a stroke.
So much for the essentials of the cognitive relation where the knowledge
is conceptual in type, or forms knowledge 'about' an object. It consists
in intermediary experiences (possible, if not actual) of continuously
developing progress, and, finally, of fulfilment, when the sensible
percept which is the object is reached. The percept here not only
VERIFIES the concept, proves its function of knowing that percept to
be true, but the percept's existence as the terminus of the chain of
intermediaries CREATES the function. Whatever terminates that chain was,
because it now proves itself to be, what the concept 'had in mind.'
The towering importance for human life of this kind of knowing lies
in the tact that an experience that knows another can figure as its
REPRESENTATIVE, not in any quasi-miraculous 'epistemological' sense,
but in the definite, practical sense of being its substitute in various
operations, sometimes physical and sometimes mental, which lead us to
its associates and results. By experimenting on our ideas of reality, we
may save ourselves the trouble of experimenting on the real experiences
which they severally mean. The ideas form related systems, corresponding
point for point to the systems which the realities form; and by letting
an ideal term call up its associates systematically, we may be led to a
terminus which the corresponding real term would have led to in case
we had operated on the real world. And this brings us to the general
question of substitution.
What, exactly, in a system of experiences, does the 'substitution' of
one of them for another mean?
According to my view, experience as a whole is a process in time,
whereby innumerable particular terms lapse and are superseded by others
that follow upon them by transitions which, whether disjunctive or
conjunctive in content, are themselves experiences, and must in general
be accounted at least as real as the terms which they relate. What the
nature of the event called 'superseding' signifies, depends altogether
on the kind of transition that obtains. Some experiences simply abolish
their predecessors without continuing them in any way. Others are felt
to increase or to enlarge their meaning, to carry out their purpose, or
to bring us nearer to their goal. They 'represent' them, and may fulfil
their function better than they fulfilled it themselves. But to 'fulfil
a function' in a world of pure experience can be conceived and defined
in only one possible way. In such a world transitions and arrivals (or
terminations) are the only events that happen, tho they happen by so
many sorts of path. The only function that one experience can perform is
to lead into another experience; and the only fulfilment we can speak of
is the reaching of a certain experienced end. When one experience leads
to (or can lead to) the same end as another, they agree in function. But
the whole system of experiences as they are immediately given presents
itself as a quasi-chaos through which one can pass out of an initial
term in many directions and yet end in the same terminus, moving from
next to next by a great many possible paths.
Either one of these paths might be a functional substitute for
another, and to follow one rather than another might on occasion be an
advantageous thing to do. As a matter of fact, and in a general way,
the paths that run through conceptual experiences, that is, through
'thoughts' or 'ideas' that 'know' the things in which they terminate,
are highly advantageous paths to follow. Not only do they yield
inconceivably rapid transitions; but, owing to the 'universal' character
[Footnote: Of which all that need be said in this essay is that it also
an be conceived as functional, and defined in terms of transitions, or
of the possibility of such.] which they frequently possess, and to
their capacity for association with one another in great systems, they
outstrip the tardy consecutions of the things themselves, and sweep us
on towards our ultimate termini in a far more labor-saving way than the
following of trains of sensible perception ever could. Wonderful are
the new cuts and the short-circuits the thought-paths make. Most
thought-paths, it is true, are substitutes for nothing actual; they end
outside the real world altogether, in wayward fancies, utopias, fictions
or mistakes. But where they do re-enter reality and terminate therein,
we substitute them always; and with these substitutes we pass the
greater number of our hours. [Footnote: This is why I called our
experiences, taken all together, a quasi-chaos. There is vastly more
discontinuity in the sum total of experiences than we commonly suppose.
The objective nucleus of every man's experience, his own body, is, it is
true, a continuous percept; and equally continuous as a percept (though
we may be inattentive to it) is the material environment of that body,
changing by gradual transition when the body moves. But the distant
parts of the physical world are at all times absent from us, and form
conceptual objects merely, into the perceptual reality of which our
life inserts itself at points discrete and relatively rare. Round their
several objective nuclei, partly shared and common partly discrete of
the real physical world, innumerable thinkers, pursuing their several
lines of physically true cogitation, trace paths that intersect one
another only at discontinuous perceptual points, and the rest of
the time are quite incongruent; and around all the nuclei of shared
'reality' floats the vast cloud of experiences that are wholly
subjective, that are non-substitutional, that find not even an eventual
ending for themselves in the perceptual world--the mere day-dreams and
joys and sufferings and wishes of the individual minds. These exist WITH
one another, indeed, and with the objective nuclei, but out of them it
is probable that to all eternity no inter-related system of any kind
will ever be made.]
Whosoever feels his experience to be something substitutional even while
he has it, may be said to have an experience that reaches beyond itself.
From inside of its own entity it says 'more,' and postulates reality
existing elsewhere. For the transcendentalist, who holds knowing to
consist in a salto motale across an 'epistemological chasm,' such an
idea presents no difficulty; but it seems at first sight as if it might
be inconsistent with an empiricism like our own. Have we not explained
that conceptual knowledge is made such wholly by the existence of things
that fall outside of the knowing experience itself--by intermediary
experiences and by a terminus that fulfils?
Can the knowledge be there before these elements that constitute its
being have come? And, if knowledge be not there, how can objective
reference occur?
The key to this difficulty lies in the distinction between knowing as
verified and completed, and the same knowing as in transit and on its
way. To recur to the Memorial Hall example lately used, it is only when
our idea of the Hall has actually terminated in the percept that we know
'for certain' that from the beginning it was truly cognitive of THAT.
Until established by the end of the process, its quality of knowing
that, or indeed of knowing anything, could still be doubted; and yet
the knowing really was there, as the result now shows. We were VIRTUAL
knowers of the Hall long before we were certified to have been its
actual knowers, by the percept's retroactive validating power. Just
so we are 'mortal' all the time, by reason of the virtuality of the
inevitable event which will make us so when it shall have come.
Now the immensely greater part of all our knowing never gets beyond this
virtual stage. It never is completed or nailed down. I speak not merely
of our ideas of imperceptibles like ether-waves or dissociated 'ions,'
or of 'ejects' like the contents of our neighbors' minds; I speak also
of ideas which we might verify if we would take the trouble, but which
we hold for true altho unterminated perceptually, because nothing says
'no' to us, and there is no contradicting truth in sight. TO CONTINUE
THINKING UNCHALLENGED IS, NINETY-NINE TIMES OUT OF A HUNDRED, OUR
PRACTICAL SUBSTITUTE FOR KNOWING IN THE COMPLETED SENSE. As each
experience runs by cognitive transition into the next one, and we
nowhere feel a collision with what we elsewhere count as truth or fact,
we commit ourselves to the current as if the port were sure. We live, as
it, were, upon the front edge of an advancing wave-crest, and our sense
of a determinate direction in falling forward is all we cover of the
future of our path. It is as if a differential quotient should be
conscious and treat itself as an adequate substitute for a traced-out
curve. Our experience, inter alia, is of variations of rate and of
direction, and lives in these transitions more than in the journey's
end. The experiences of tendency are sufficient to act upon--what more
could we have DONE at those moments even if the later verification comes
complete?
This is what, as a radical empiricist, I say to the charge that the
objective reference which is so flagrant a character of our experiences
involves a chasm and a mortal leap. A positively conjunctive transition
involves neither chasm nor leap. Being the very original of what we
mean by continuity, it makes a continuum wherever it appears. Objective
reference is an incident of the fact that so much of our experience
comes as an insufficient and consists of process and transition. Our
fields of experience have no more definite boundaries than have our
fields of view. Both are fringed forever by a MORE that continuously
develops, and that continuously supersedes them as life proceeds. The
relations, generally speaking, are as real here as the terms are, and
the only complaint of the transcendentalist's with which I could at
all sympathize would be his charge that, by first making knowledge to
consist in external relations as I have done, and by then confessing
that nine-tenths of the time these are not actually but only virtually
there, I have knocked the solid bottom out of the whole business, and
palmed off a substitute of knowledge for the genuine thing. Only the
admission, such a critic might say, that our ideas are self-transcendent
and 'true' already; in advance of the experiences that are to terminate
them, can bring solidity back to knowledge in a world like this, in
which transitions and terminations are only by exception fulfilled.
This seems to me an excellent place for applying the pragmatic method.
What would the self-transcendency affirmed to exist in advance of
all experiential mediation or termination, be KNOWN-AS? What would it
practically result in for US, were it true?
It could only result in our orientation, in the turning of our
expectations and practical tendencies into the right path; and the right
path here, so long as we and the object are not yet face to face (or
can never get face to face, as in the case of ejects), would be the
path that led us into the object's nearest neighborhood. Where direct
acquaintance is lacking, 'knowledge about' is the next best thing, and
an acquaintance with what actually lies about the 'object, and is most
closely related to it, puts such knowledge within our grasp. Ether-waves
and your anger, for example, are things in which my thoughts will never
PERCTEPTUALLY terminate, but my concepts of them lead me to their very
brink, to the chromatic fringes and to the hurtful words and deeds which
are their really next effects.
Even if our ideas did in themselves possess the postulated
self-transcendency, it would still remain true that their putting us
into possession of such effects WOULD BE THE SOLE CASH-VALUE OF THE
SELF-TRANSCENDENCY FOR US. And this cash-value, it is needless to
say, is verbatim et liberatim what our empiricist account pays in. On
pragmatist principles therefore, a dispute over self-transcendency is a
pure logomachy. Call our concepts of ejective things self-transcendent
or the reverse, it makes no difference, so long as we don't differ about
the nature of that exalted virtue's fruits--fruits for us, of course,
humanistic fruits.
The transcendentalist believes his ideas to be self-transcendent only
because he finds that in fact they do bear fruits. Why need he quarrel
with an account of knowledge that insists on naming this effect? Why not
treat the working of the idea from next to next as the essence of its
self-transcendency? Why insist that knowing is a static relation out of
time when it practically seems so much a function of our active life?
For a thing to be valid, says Lotze, is the same as to make itself
valid. When the whole universe seems only to be making itself valid and
to be still incomplete (else why its ceaseless changing?) why, of all
things, should knowing be exempt? Why should it not be making itself
valid like everything else? That some parts of it may be already valid
or verified beyond dispute; the empirical philosopher, of course, like
any one else, may always hope.
V