REFLECTION.
INSTINCT AND HABIT _VERSUS_ REFLECTION. In the two types of
behavior already discussed, man is, as it were, "pushed from
behind." In the case of instinct he performs an action simply
because he _must_ perform it. Willy-nilly he withdraws his
hand from fire, eats when hungry, and sleeps when tired. In
the case of habits, once they are acquired, he is also largely
dominated by circumstances beyond his own control. The
bottle is to the confirmed drunkard almost an irresistible command
to drink, the alarm clock to one accustomed to it an
equally imperative and not-to-be-disregarded order to arise.
The story of the old veteran who was carrying home his dinner
and who dropped his hands to his side and his dinner to the
gutter when a practical joker called "Attention"; the pathetic
plight of the superannuated business man who is totally at a
loss away from his familiar duties, are often quoted illustrations
of how completely habit may determine a man's actions.
But while in a large portion of our daily duties we are thus
at the beck and call of the instincts which are our inheritance
and the habits which we have acquired, we may also _control_
our actions. Instead of performing actions as immediate and
automatic responses to accustomed stimuli, we may determine
our actions, single or consecutive, in the light of absent
and future results. To act thus is to act reflectively, and to
act reflectively is the only escape from random acts prompted
by instinct and routine ones prompted by habit.
To act reflectively is to delay response to an instinctive or
habitual stimulus until the various possibilities of action and
the results associated with each have been considered. An
action performed instinctively or habitually is automatic; it
is performed not on the basis of what will be the result, but
simply as an immediate response to a present stimulus. But
an act (or a series of acts) reflectively performed is performed
in the light of the results that are prophetically associated
with them. In the case of instinct and habit, the individual
almost literally does not know what he is about. In reflective
activity he does know, and the more thorough the reflective
process, the more thorough and precise is his knowledge. He
performs actions _because_ they will achieve certain results, and
he is conscious of that causal connection, both before the
action is performed when he perceives the results imaginatively,
and after it is performed when he sees them in fact.
THE ORIGIN AND NATURE OF REFLECTION. Reflection, it must be
noted in the first place, is not a thing, but a process. It is a
process whereby human beings adjust themselves to a continuously
changing environment. Our instincts and habits
suffice to adapt us to that large number of recurrent similar
situations of which our experience in no small measure exists.
In such cases the habitual response will bring the usual satisfaction.
Walking, dressing, getting to familiar places, finding
the electric button in well-known rooms, opening often-opened
combinations--these operations are all adequately
accomplished by the fixed mechanisms of habit. But we
meet as frequently with novel situations where the accustomed
or instinctive reactions will not bring the desired satisfaction.
One response or a number of responses will not
adjust the individual satisfactorily to external conditions; or
there may be a conflict between a number of impulses all
clamoring for satisfaction at once. Reflection thus begins
either in a maladjustment between the individual and his
environment or in a conflict of impulses within the same
person.
Where such a maladjustment occurs, the uneasiness, discomfort,
and frustration of action may be removed in one of
two ways. Adjustment may be achieved, as we have already
seen, through physical trial and error, through a hit-and-miss
experimentation with every possible response until the appropriate
one is made. This is the only way in which animals
can learn to modify their instinctive tendencies into habits
more adequate to their conditions. The more economical
and effective process, one peculiar to human beings, is that
of reflection. To think or to reflect means to postpone response
to a given problematic situation until the possible consequences
of the possible responses have been mentally traced
out. Instead of _actually_ making every response that occurs
to us, we make all of them _imaginatively_. Instead of consuming
time and energy in physical trial and error, we go through
the process of mental trial and error. We make no response
at all in action until we have surveyed all the possibilities of
action and their possible consequences. And when we do
make a response we make it on the basis of those foreseen
consequences.[1]
[Footnote 1: The possibilities of response that do occur to us are, on
the whole, determined by past training and native differences in
temperament. But part of the process of reflection is, as we shall see
in the chapter on "Science and Scientific Method," concerned with
deliberately enlarging the field of possible responses in the solution
of a given problem.]
In other words, the situation is analyzed. What is the end
or adjustment sought, what are the possible responses, and
how far is each of them suited as a means to achieving the
satisfaction sought? Instead of going through every random
course of action that suggests itself, each one is "dramatically
rehearsed." Finally, that response is made which gives most
promise in terms of its prophesied consequences of adjusting
us to our situation.
ILLUSTRATION OF THE REFLECTIVE PROCESS. A student may, for
example, be seated at his study, preparing for an examination.
A friend enters and suggests going for a walk or to the
theater. If the student were to follow this first immediate
impulse he would, before he realized it, be off for an evening's
entertainment. But instead of responding immediately,
dropping his books, reaching for his hat, opening the door,
and ringing for the elevator (a series of habitual acts initiated
by the instinctive desire for rest, variety, and companionship),
he may rehearse in imagination the various possibilities
of action. In general terms, what happens is simply this:[1]
[Footnote 1: The technique of reflection will be discussed in detail
in the chapter on "Science and Scientific Method."]
On the one hand, the gregarious instinct, the desire for rest,
native curiosity, and an acquired interest in drama may
prompt him strongly to go to the theater. On the other
hand, the habits of industry, ambition, self-assertion, and
studying in the evening urge him to stay at home and study.
The first course of action may, for the moment, be immediately
attractive and stimulating. But instead of responding
to either immediately, the student rehearses dramatically the
possibilities associated with each. On the one hand are the
immediate satisfactions of rest, amusement, and companionship.
But as further consequences of the impulse to go out
to the theater are seen--or, rather, are foreseen--failure in
the examination, the loss of a scholarship, pain to one's family
or friends, and chagrin at the frustration of one's deepest and
most permanent ideals. The second course of action, to
stay at home and study, though it is seen to have connected
with it certain immediate privations, is foreseen to involve
the further consequences of passing the examination, keeping
one's scholarship, and maintaining certain personal or intellectual
standards one has set one's self. Even if the student
decides to follow the first course of action to which an immediate
impulse has prompted him, his act is different in quality
from what it would have been if he had not reflected at all.
The student goes out fully aware of the consequences of what
he is doing; he goes _for_ the immediate pleasure and _in spite
of_ the possible failure in the examination. The very heart
of reflective behavior is thus seen to lie in the fact that present
stimuli are reacted to, not for what they are as immediate
stimuli, but for what they signify, portend, imply, in the way
of consequences or results. And a response made upon reflection
is made on the basis of these imaginatively realized consequences.
We connect what we do with the results that
flow from the doing, and control our action in the light of that
prophetically realized connection.
The process is obviously not always so simple as that described
in the above illustration. In the first place, more
than two courses of action may suggest themselves. And the
consequences of any one of them may be far more complex
and far more obscure than any suggested in the above. For
an individual to be able to decide a problem on the basis of
consequences imaginatively foreseen, it is often necessary to
institute a very elaborate system of connecting links between
an immediately suggested course of action and its not at all
obvious results. "Thinking a thing out" involves precisely
this introduction of connecting links, or "middle terms," between
what is immediately given or suggested and what
necessarily, though by no means obviously, follows. This
is illustrated in the case of any more or less theoretical problem
and its solution. To perceive, for example, the connection
between atmospheric pressure and the rise of water in a
suction pump involves the introduction of connecting links
in the form of the general law of gravitation, of which atmospheric
pressure is a special case.
But the same is true of practical problems. A young man
may be trying to decide whether or not to take a nomination
to the training course at West Point. He may be attracted
by the four years' training, and highly value the results of it.
He may think, however, that the training involves an obligation
to serve in the army; it may mean, for a long time, service
in some remote army post. His decision may be determined
by this last consideration, which required a series of
intermediate "linking" ideas to bring to light.
The technique of scientific or expert thinking is, in large
part, concerned with devices for enabling the thinker more
securely to trace the obscure and remote connections between
actions and their consequences, between causes and effects.
But, whether simple or complex, the essential feature of
reflective activity is that it is action performed in the light of
consequences foreseen in imagination. Physical stimuli are
not responded to immediately with physical action. They
are responded to as symbols, signs, or portents; they are
taken as symptoms of the results that _would_ follow if they
_were_ acted upon. That is, they are, until decision is made,
reacted to imaginatively. When an actual response is finally
made, it is made on the basis of the results that have been
more or less accurately and directly anticipated in imagination.
REFLECTION AS THE MODIFIER OF INSTINCT. Reflection is
primarily a revealer of consequences. Instead of yielding to
the first impulse that occurs to him, the thinking man
considers where that impulse, if followed out, will lead. And
since man is moved by more than one impulse at a time, reflection
traces the consequences of each, and determines action
on the basis of the relative satisfactions it can prophesy after
careful inquiry into the situation. To reflect is primarily to
query a stimulus, to find out what it means in terms of its
consequences. The more alert, persistent, and careful this
inquiry, the more will instinctive tendencies be checked and
modified and adjusted to new situations.
In the discussion of the acquisition of habits, it was pointed
out that useful habits may be acquired most rapidly by an
analysis of them into their significant features. The speed
with which random instinctive actions are modified into a
series of useful habitual ones depends intimately upon how
clear and detailed is the individual's appreciation of the
results to be achieved by one action rather than another. A
large part of learning even among humans is doubtless trial
and error, random hit-or-miss attempts, until after successive
repetitions, a successful response is made and retained. But
human learning and habit-formation are so much more various
and fruitful than those of animals precisely because human
beings can check and modify instinctive responses in the
light of consequences which they can foresee. These foreseen
consequences are, of course, derived from previous experience;
that is, they are "remembered." But reflection short-circuits
the process. The more deliberate and reflective the process
of learning, the more the individual notes the connections
between the things he does and the results he gets, the fewer
repetitions will he need in order effectively to modify his
instinctive behavior into useful habits. He will anticipate
results; he will experience them in imagination. He will not
need to make every wrong move in paddling a canoe until he
finally hits upon the right one. He will not need to alienate
all his clients before learning to deal with them successfully.
In any given set of circumstances he will form the effective
habits rapidly. He will calculate, "figure out," find out in
advance. To keep one's temper under provocation, to refrain
from eating delicious and indigestible foods, to keep at
work when one would like to play, and sometimes to play
when one is engrossed in work, are familiar instances of how
our first impulses become checked, restrained, or modified in
the light of the results we have discovered to be associated
with them.
REFLECTIVE BEHAVIOR MODIFIES HABIT. The same conscious
breaking-up of a new type of action into its significant
features, the same connection of a given action with a given
result which makes the intelligent learner so much more
quickly acquire effective new habits than the one who is
mechanically drilled, leads also to a continuous criticism of
habits, and their discontinuance when they are no longer
adequate. Reflection, if it is itself a habit, is the most valuable
one of all. It is an important counterpoise to the hardening
and fossilization which repeated habitual actions bring about
in the nervous system.
In acting reflectively we subject our accustomed ways to
deliberate analysis, however immediately persuasive these
may have become, and deliberately institute new habits in
the light of the more desirable consequences they will bring.
Habits come to be regarded not as final or as good in themselves,
but as methods of accomplishing good. If they fail
to bring genuine satisfaction, reflection can indicate wherein
they are inadequate, wherein they may be changed, and
whether they should be altogether discarded.
Reflection thus makes conduct conscious; it is not the substitute
for instinct and habit; it is the guide and controller of
both. When we act thoughtfully and intelligently, we are
doing things not because we have done them that way in the
past, or because it is the first response that occurs to us, but
because, in the light of analysis, that way will bring about the
most desirable results.
THE LIMITS OF REFLECTION AS A MODIFIER OF INSTINCT AND HABIT.
While our impulses and habits may be subjected to the criticism
of reflection in the light of the consequences which it
can forecast, reflection is itself seriously limited by our
original impulses and our acquired habitual ones. On reflection,
we may not follow our first impulse, but to act at all is to act
on some original or acquired impulse or a combination of
them. Which original tendency we shall follow reflection can
tell us; it cannot tell us to follow none. In the illustration
already used, the student may upon reflection study rather
than go out. But the roots of his studying will also lie back
in the instincts and habits which are, for better or for worse,
his only equipment for action. They will lie back in the
tendencies to be curious, to gain the praise of other people
and to be a leader among them, in the habits of knowing work
thoroughly, of studying in the evening, of maintaining a
scholarship average to which he has been accustomed.
Reflection may weigh the relative persuasions of various
impulses; it cannot ignore them. We may think in order to
attain our desires, and may, through reflection, learn to
change them; we cannot abolish them. Whether we are
curious about our neighbors' business or about the movements
of the stars and the possible reactions of a strange
chemical element, depends on our previous training and the
extent to which inquiry itself has become a fixed and
persistent habit. But in any case we are curious. Whether we
fight in street brawls or in campaigns against tuberculosis,
we are still, as it were, born fighters.
Similarly, in the case of habit, we may upon reflection discover
that our habits of walking, writing, or speech are bad;
that we ought not to smoke, or drink, or waste time. We
may come, through reflection, to realize with the utmost
clarity the advantages to ourselves of acquiring the habits of
going to bed early, saving money, keeping our papers in order,
and persisting at work amid distractions. But the bad habits
and the good are already fixed in our nervous system, and in
physiology also possession is nine tenths of the law. We may
_intend_ to change, but by taking thought alone we cannot add
a cubit to our stature. Reflection can do no more than point
the way we should go. For unless the wrong actions are
systematically and repeatedly refrained from, and the proper
ones made habitual, thinking remains merely an impotent
summary of what can be done. Conduct is governed, it must
be repeated, by the satisfactions action can bring us, and
unless actions are made habitual they will not be performed
with satisfaction.
HOW INSTINCTS AND HABITS IMPAIR THE PROCESSES OF REFLECTION.
It is as important as it is paradoxical that thinking is impaired
in its efficiency by the instincts and habits in whose service it
arises, and whose conflicts and maladjustments it helps to
resolve. The situations of conflict or perplexity which provoke
thinking are determined by the particular tendencies
which, by nature or training, are brought into play in any
given situation. If we are committed by tradition or habitual
allegiance to a protective tariff, we will be concerned in our
thinking with details, what articles need protection and how
much do they need; the ultimate desirability of a protective
tariff will not be a problem remotely occurring to us. If we
are by training committed to capital punishment, we will be
concerned, if we think about it at all, with means and methods;
we will think about the relative merits of hanging or
electrocution; the ultimate justification or desirability of capital
punishment will not be a problem or issue for us at all.
Thus, it may be said in a sense that our thinking is determined
by what we do not think about as much as by what we do
think about. What we take for granted limits the field within
which we will inquire or reflect at all. But what we take for
granted is, on the whole, settled by our habitual reactions.
And the more settled habitual convictions we have, the narrower
becomes the field within which reflection takes place.
Force of habit may leave us blind to many situations genuinely
demanding solution. Originality in thinking consists,
in part at least, in an ability to see a problem where others,
through routine, see none. Apples have fallen on the heads
of others than Newton, but a habit-ridden rustic will not be
stirred by the falling of an apple to reflection on the problem
of falling bodies. The countryman may live all his life serenely
oblivious to a thousand problems that would pique
the curiosity and reflection of a botanist or geologist. A man
may go on for years accepting income on investments earned
in very dubious ways without ever pausing to reflect on the
sources or the justification of his wealth.[1]
[Footnote 1: According to the traditional anecdote, when Marie Antoinette
was told that the people were clamoring because they could not get any
bread, the one problem that occurred to her was why they didn't eat
cake. From the habits and conditions of life to which she was accustomed,
there had never arisen a problem as to how to get food at all; it was
merely a problem of what kind of food to eat.]
Instincts and habits, furthermore, limit the field of possible
courses of action that suggest themselves. We come, through
habit, to be alive only to certain possibilities to the practical
exclusion of all others. Thinking becomes fruitful and suggestive
when it is freed from the limited number of suggestions
that occur through force of habit. But original thinking is
rare precisely because habits do have such a compulsive
power in determining the possibilities of action that suggest
themselves to us. The man who moves in a rut of habitual
reactions will "never think" of possibilities that "stare in the
face" a less habit-ridden thinker. Inventiveness, originality,
creative intelligence, whatever one chooses to call it, consists,
in no small measure, in this ability to remain alive to a wide
variety of stimuli, to keep sensitive to all the possibilities that
are in a situation, instead of those only to which we are
immediately prompted by instinct or habit. The possibility of
using the current of a river as power is not the first possibility
that flowing water suggests.
Past training and individual differences in temperament
not only limit the possibilities that do occur to us; they
seriously distort, color, and qualify those of which we become
conscious. We forecast differently and with differing degrees
of accuracy the consequences of those possible courses of
action which do occur to us according to the influence and
stimulation which particular native traits and acquired impulses
have in our conduct. Ideally, the consequences which
we imaginatively forecast as following from a given course of
action, should tally with the consequences which genuinely
follow from it. But there is too often a sad discrepancy between
the consequences as they are foreseen by the individual
concerned and the genuine consequences that could be foreseen
by any disinterested observer. The discrepancy between
the genuine and the imagined consequences of given
ideas or suggestions is caused more than anything else by
the hopes, fears, aversions, and preferences which, by nature
or training, are controlling in a man's behavior. Facts are
weighed differently according as one or another of these
psychological influences is present. We intend unconsciously
to substitute a desired or expected consequence for the actual
one; we tend to be oblivious to consequences which we fear,
and quick to imagine those for which we hope. On the day
before an election the campaign managers on both sides, in
the glow and momentum of their activities, are confident of
the morrow's victory. The opponent of prohibition saw
nothing but drug fiends and revolution as its consequences;
its extreme advocates saw it as the salvation of mankind.
The causes of error in appraising the consequences of any
given course of action are partly individual and partly social
in character. From Francis Bacon down, there have been
various attempts to classify these factors in the distortion of
the reflective process. In connection with the particular
human traits, especially such as fear and gregariousness, we
shall have occasion to examine a few of these.
It will suffice to point out here that the aim of reflective
thinking is to discover the genuine consequences of things,
and to eliminate and discount those prejudices and preferences,
bred of early education and training, which might impair
our discovery of those consequences. To the untrained,
those things look most significant which stir their impulses
most strikingly. The beggar's sores seem much more important
and terrible than a gifted youngster deprived of education
through poverty. Instinctively we shrink back from the sight
of blood, but instinct is no safe clue in helping us to
distinguish between the poisons and the panaceas among the
brightly colored bottles of chemicals ranged along a shelf.
The whole technique of scientific method as opposed to the
shrewd but unreliable guesses of common sense is one of freeing
us from the compulsions of random habitual impulses.
It substitutes for caprice the measuring of consequences, the
detailed knowing of what we are about. That impartial judgment
has its difficulties is clear from the simple fact alone that
human beings start by being a bundle of instincts and soon
grow into a bundle of habits. To the extent to which they
can control these they are masters of themselves.
THE VALUE OF REFLECTION FOR LIFE. To many people there is
something terrifying about the idea of controlling life by
reason. Life (they point out correctly) is a vital process of
instincts which appear before thinking, and which are often
more powerful than reasoned judgments. Against advice to
live consciously, to be in control of ourselves, to know what
we are about, comes the call "Back to Nature." A life of
reflection appears chilling and arbitrary. Because reflection
so often reveals that impulses must be checked if disaster
is not to result, it has come to be associated with a metallic
and Stoic repression. To many a persuasive impulse we
must, after reflection, say, "No." Because of this a certain
school of philosophers, poets, and radicals urges us to trust
nature, to follow our impulses, which, being natural, must
be right.
All of these rebels against reason make the mistake of supposing
that the aim of reflective thinking is to quell instincts,
which, with the best will in the world, it cannot succeed in
doing. Instincts are present and powerful. In themselves
they are neither worth encouraging, nor ought they to be
repressed. The satisfaction of native desires _is_ what we want.
The importance of reflective thinking is precisely that it helps
us to secure those satisfactions. To surrender to every random
impulse or every habitual prompting is to have neither
satisfaction nor freedom. Reflection might be compared to
the traffic policeman at the junction of two crowded thoroughfares.
If everyone were to drive his car pell-mell through the
rush, if pedestrians, street cars, and automobiles were not to
abide by the rules, no one would get anywhere, and the result
would be perpetual accident and collision. In thinking we
simply control and direct our impulses in the light of the
consequences we can foresee. To thus guide and control action
makes us genuinely free.
If a man's actions are not guided by thoughtful conclusions, they
are guided by inconsiderate impulse, unbalanced appetite, caprice,
or the circumstances of the moment. To cultivate unhindered,
unreflective external activity is to foster enslavement, for it leaves the
person at the mercy of appetite, sense, and circumstance.[1]
[Footnote 1: Dewey: _How We Think_, p. 67.]
Instincts and habits are fixed responses; being placed in
such and such circumstances we _must_ do such and such things.
Only when we can vary our actions in the light of our own
thinking are we masters of our environment rather than
mechanically controlled by it.
THE SOCIAL IMPORTANCE OF REFLECTIVE BEHAVIOR. Reflection
in the life of the individual insures that he will not become the
slave of his own habits. He will regard habits as methods
to be followed when they produce good results, to be discarded
or modified when they do not. But if habit in the life of the
individual needs control lest it become dangerously controlling,
it needs it more conspicuously still in the life of the group.
Unless the individuals that compose a society are alert and
conscious of the bearings of their actions, they will be
completely and mechanically controlled by the customs to which
they have been exposed in the early periods of their lives.
What an individual regards as right or wrong, what he will
cherish or champion in industry, government, and art, depends
in large measure on his early education and training
and on the opinions and beliefs of other people with whom he
repeatedly comes in contact. A society may be democratic
in its political form and still autocratic in fact if the majority
of its citizens are merely machines which can be set off to
respond in certain determinate ways to customary stimuli of
names, leaders, and party slogans. A society becomes genuinely
democratic, precisely to the extent to which there is
on the part of its citizens participation in the important decisions
affecting all their lives. But the participation will only
be a formality if votes are decided and opinions formed on the
basis of habit alone.
REFLECTION REMOVED FROM IMMEDIATE APPLICATION--SCIENCE.
Thus far thinking has been discussed in its more practical
aspects. And thinking is in its origins a very practical matter.
Literally, most people think when they have to, and only
when they have to. Given a problem, a difficulty, a
maladjustment between the individual and his environment,
thinking occurs. If every instinctive act brought satisfaction,
thinking would be much less necessary and much less frequently
practiced. This is illustrated in the performance of
any act that once required attention and discrimination, and
has later become habitual. We do not think how to walk,
eat, and spell familiar words, how to find our way about
familiar streets or even in familiar dark rooms. We _do_ think
about where we shall spend our evenings or our summer,
which courses we shall choose at college, which profession
we shall enter. Where we are uneasy, drawn by competing
impulses, we consider alternatives, measure consequences,
and choose our course of action in the light of the results we
can forecast. But while a large proportion of reflective behavior
is thus practical in its origins and its results, it also
occurs not infrequently where there is no immediate problem
to be solved. Not all of men's energies are concerned in
purely practical concerns. And part of man's superfluous
vitality is expended in disinterested and curious inquiry
into problems whose solutions afford no immediate practical
benefits, but in the mere solving of which man finds
satisfaction.
From the dawn of history, when some man a little more
curious than his fellows, a little less absorbed in the hunting,
the food-getting, and the fighting which were in those early
days man's chief imperative business, first began to observe
the mysterious recurrences in the world about him, the rising
and setting of the sun, the return of the seasons, the movements
of the tides and the stars, there have been individuals
born with a marked and sometimes a passionate desire to
observe Nature and to generalize their observations. They
have noted that, given certain conditions, certain results
follow. They observe that animals with given similarities of
form and structure have certain identical ways of life, that
some substances are malleable and others not, that dew
appears at certain times in the day on certain objects and not
on others. They have generalized from these; and we now
call such generalizations law. These generalizations when
gathered into a system constitute a science.
The sciences started out with unconfirmed guesses based
on not very accurate information. As man's methods became
more precise, he controlled the conditions under which
observations were made, and the conditions under which generalizations
were drawn from them. The control of the conditions
and methods of observation constitute what is known as
induction in science. To this phase of the reflective process
belong all the instruments for precise observation which
characterize the scientific laboratory. The control of the methods
by which generalizations or theories are built up from these
facts is also part of the logic of induction, and includes all the
canons and regulations for inductive inference.
But generalizations once made must be tested, and the
elaboration of these generalizations, the analysis of them into
their precise bearings, constitute that part of the process of
reasoning known as deduction. The final verification is again
inductive, an experimental corroboration of theories by the
facts already at hand and by facts additionally sought out
and observed.
(These processes will be discussed in detail in the chapter
on "Science and Scientific Method.")
However complicated the process of inquiry may become,
the sciences remain essentially man's mode of satisfying his
disinterested curiosity about the world in which he is living.
Through the sciences man makes himself, as has been so often
said, at home in the world. He substitutes for the "blooming,
buzzing confusion" which is the world as he first knows it,
order, system, and law. Primitive man, absurd as seems to
us his belief in a world of magic, of malicious demons and
capricious gods, was trying to make sense out of the meaningless
medley in which he seemed to find himself. Through
science, modern man is likewise trying to make sense out of
his world. The more apparently disconnected and incongruous
facts that can be brought within the compass of simple
and perfectly regular law, the less threatening or capricious
seems the world in which we live. Where everything that
happens is part of a system, we do not need, like the savage
trembling in a thunderstorm, to be frightened at what will
happen next. It is like moving in familiar surroundings
among familiar people. Not all that goes on may be pleasant,
but we can within limits predict what will happen, and are
not puzzled and pained by continuous shocks and surprises.
We like order in the places in which we live, in our homes, in
our cities, in the universe.
The sciences satisfy us not only in that they bring order
into what at first seems the chaos of our surroundings, but in
that they are themselves beautiful in their spaciousness and
their simplicity. We cannot pause here to consider the
physiological facts which make us admire symmetry, but it is
fundamental in our appreciation of music, poetry, and the
plastic arts. From the sciences, likewise, we derive the
satisfaction of symmetry on a magnificent scale. There is beauty
as of a great symphony in the sweep and movement of the
solar system. There is a quiet and infinite splendor about the
changeless and comparatively simple structure which physics,
in the broadest sense, reveals beneath the seeming multiplicity
and variety of things. It is a desire for beauty as well as
a thoroughgoing scientific passion which prompts men like
Poincaré and Karl Pearson to seek for one law, one formula
which, like "one clear chord to reach the ears of God,"
expresses the whole universe.
THE PRACTICAL ASPECT OF SCIENCE. But while the origins of
science may lie in man's thirst for system, simplicity, and
beauty in the world, the tremendous advance of science has
a more immediate and practical cause. To understand the
laws of Nature means to have the power of prediction; it
means to know that, given certain circumstances, certain
others follow always and inevitably; it means to discover
causes--and their effects. Man having attained through
patient inquiry this capacity to tell in advance, may take
advantage of it for his own good. The whole of modern
industry with its phenomenal control of natural powers and
resources is testimony to the use which man has found for
the facts and laws which he would never have found out
save for the curiosity which was his endowment and the
inquiry which he made his habit. "Knowledge is power,"
said Francis Bacon, and the three hundred years of science
that have made possible the whole modern world of electric
transportation, air travel between two continents, and
instantaneous communication between remote parts of the
world, have proved the aphorism. Man since his origin
has tried to control his environment for his own good. The
cave and the flint were his first rude attempts. In science
with its accurate observation of facts not apparent to the
unaided eye, and its discovery and demonstration of laws not
found by casual and unsystematic common sense, man has an
incomparably more refined instrument, and an incomparably
more effective one. Thus, paradoxically enough, man's most
disinterested and impartial activity is at the same time his
most practical asset.
THE CREATION OF BEAUTIFUL OBJECTS AND THE EXPRESSION OF
IDEAS AND FEELINGS IN BEAUTIFUL FORM. Most men spend most
of their lives necessarily in practical activity. Man's particular
equipment of instincts survived in "the struggle for existence"
precisely because they were practical, because they did
help the human creature to maintain his equilibrium in a
half-friendly, half-hostile environment. Man acquires also,
as already has been pointed out, habits that are useful to him,
that bring him satisfactions not attainable through the random
instinctive responses which are his at birth. Reflection,
too, is, for the most part, severely practical in its origins and
its responsibilities. It guides action into economical and useful
channels.
Most of man's actions are thus ways of modifying his environment
for immediately practical purposes. Man has instincts
and habits which enable him to live. But in making
those changes in the world which enable him to live better,
man, as it were by accident, makes them beautifully. Pottery
begins, for example, as a practical art, but the skilled
potter cannot help spending a little excess vitality and habitual
skill in adding a quite unnecessarily graceful curve, a
gratuitous decoration to the utilitarian vessel he is making.
In the words of Santayana, "What had to be done was, by
imaginative races, done imaginatively; what had to be spoken
or made was spoken or made fitly, lovingly, beautifully....
The ceaseless experimentation and fermentation of ideas, in
breeding what it had a propensity to breed, came sometimes
on figments that gave it delightful pause."[1]
[Footnote 1: Santayana: _Reason in Art_, p. 16.]
These accidental graces that man makes in the instinctive
and habitual control to which he subjects his environment
become the most cherished values of his experience. Men
may first have come to speak poetry accidentally, for
language arose, like other human habits, as a thing of use. But
the charming and delightful expression of feelings and ideas
came to be cherished in themselves, so that what was first an
accident in man's life, may become a deliberate practice.
When this creation of beautiful objects, or the beautiful
expression of feelings or ideas is intentional, we call it art. In
such intentional creation and cherishing of the beautiful man's
life becomes enriched and emancipated. He learns not only
to live, but to live beautifully.
In such activity men, as has been recognized by social reformers
from Plato to Bertrand Russell, are genuinely happy,
and there alone find freedom. For in the creation of beauty
man is not performing actions because he must, under the
brutal compulsion of keeping alive. He is acting simply because
action is delightful both in the process and in the result.
Whether in business, politics, or scholarship, men are happy
to the extent to which they have the sense of creation that is
peculiarly the artist's.
The products of art, moreover, are not desirable because
they bring other goods, but because they themselves are
intrinsically delightful. Men love to live in a world in which
their marble has been made into statues, in which their houses
are things of beauty rather than merely places in which to
live. Their lives are enriched by living in a society where
the thoughts and emotions which they communicate to one
another and which they must somehow express can be not
infrequently expressed with nobility and music. Through
science Nature becomes man's tool; through art it can
become a beautiful instrument to work with, and a lovely thing
in and for itself.