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Creative Intelligence: Essays in the Pragmatic Attitude

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Title: Creative Intelligence: Essays in the Pragmatic Attitude

Author: John Dewey
        Boyd Henry Bode
        Harold Chapman Brown
        Horace Meyer Kallen
        George H. Mead
        Addison Webster Moore
        Henry Waldgrave Stuart
        James Hayden Tufts


        
Release date: September 14, 2010 [eBook #33727]

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/33727

Credits: Produced by Adrian Mastronardi, Turgut Dincer and the
        Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net
        (This file was produced from images generously made
        available by The Internet Archive/Canadian Libraries)


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK CREATIVE INTELLIGENCE: ESSAYS IN THE PRAGMATIC ATTITUDE ***




Produced by Adrian Mastronardi, Turgut Dincer and the
Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net
(This file was produced from images generously made
available by The Internet Archive/Canadian Libraries)









  CREATIVE INTELLIGENCE

  ESSAYS IN THE PRAGMATIC ATTITUDE

  BY

  JOHN DEWEY
  ADDISON W. MOORE
  HAROLD CHAPMAN BROWN
  GEORGE H. MEAD
  BOYD H. BODE
  HENRY WALDGRAVE STUART
  JAMES HAYDEN TUFTS
  HORACE M. KALLEN

  [Illustration]

  NEW YORK
  HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY


  COPYRIGHT, 1917,

  BY

  HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY

  Published January, 1917


  THE QUINN & BODEN CO. PRESS

  RAHWAY, N. J.




PREFATORY NOTE


The Essays which follow represent an attempt at intellectual
cooeperation. No effort has been made, however, to attain unanimity of
belief nor to proffer a platform of "planks" on which there is
agreement. The consensus represented lies primarily in outlook, in
conviction of what is most likely to be fruitful in method of approach.
As the title page suggests, the volume presents a unity in attitude
rather than a uniformity in results. Consequently each writer is
definitively responsible only for his own essay. The reader will note
that the Essays endeavor to embody the common attitude in application to
specific fields of inquiry which have been historically associated with
philosophy rather than as a thing by itself. Beginning with philosophy
itself, subsequent contributions discuss its application to logic, to
mathematics, to physical science, to psychology, to ethics, to
economics, and then again to philosophy itself in conjunction with
esthetics and religion. The reader will probably find that the
significant points of agreement have to do with the ideas of the
genuineness of the future, of intelligence as the organ for determining
the quality of that future so far as it can come within human control,
and of a courageously inventive individual as the bearer of a creatively
employed mind. While all the essays are new in the form in which they
are now published, various contributors make their acknowledgments to
the editors of the _Philosophical Review_, the _Psychological Review_,
and the _Journal of Philosophy, Psychology and Scientific Methods_ for
use of material which first made its appearance in the pages of these
journals.




CONTENTS


                                                                  PAGE
  THE NEED FOR A RECOVERY OF PHILOSOPHY                              3
    John Dewey, Columbia University.

  REFORMATION OF LOGIC                                              70
    Addison W. Moore, University of Chicago.

  INTELLIGENCE AND MATHEMATICS                                     118
    Harold Chapman Brown, Leland Stanford, Jr., University.

  SCIENTIFIC METHOD AND INDIVIDUAL THINKER                         176
    George H. Mead, University of Chicago.

  CONSCIOUSNESS AND PSYCHOLOGY                                     228
    Boyd H. Bode, University of Illinois.

  THE PHASES OF THE ECONOMIC INTEREST                              282
    Henry Waldgrave Stuart, Leland Stanford, Jr., University.

  THE MORAL LIFE AND THE CONSTRUCTION OF VALUES AND STANDARDS      354
    James Hayden Tufts, University of Chicago.

  VALUE AND EXISTENCE IN PHILOSOPHY, ART, AND RELIGION             409
    Horace M. Kallen, University of Wisconsin.




CREATIVE INTELLIGENCE




THE NEED FOR A RECOVERY OF PHILOSOPHY

JOHN DEWEY


Intellectual advance occurs in two ways. At times increase of knowledge
is organized about old conceptions, while these are expanded, elaborated
and refined, but not seriously revised, much less abandoned. At other
times, the increase of knowledge demands qualitative rather than
quantitative change; alteration, not addition. Men's minds grow cold to
their former intellectual concerns; ideas that were burning fade;
interests that were urgent seem remote. Men face in another direction;
their older perplexities are unreal; considerations passed over as
negligible loom up. Former problems may not have been solved, but they
no longer press for solutions.

Philosophy is no exception to the rule. But it is unusually
conservative--not, necessarily, in proffering solutions, but in clinging
to problems. It has been so allied with theology and theological morals
as representatives of men's chief interests, that radical alteration has
been shocking. Men's activities took a decidedly new turn, for example,
in the seventeenth century, and it seems as if philosophy, under the
lead of thinkers like Bacon and Descartes, was to execute an about-face.
But, in spite of the ferment, it turned out that many of the older
problems were but translated from Latin into the vernacular or into the
new terminology furnished by science.

The association of philosophy with academic teaching has reinforced this
intrinsic conservatism. Scholastic philosophy persisted in universities
after men's thoughts outside of the walls of colleges had moved in other
directions. In the last hundred years intellectual advances of science
and politics have in like fashion been crystallized into material of
instruction and now resist further change. I would not say that the
spirit of teaching is hostile to that of liberal inquiry, but a
philosophy which exists largely as something to be taught rather than
wholly as something to be reflected upon is conducive to discussion of
views held by others rather than to immediate response. Philosophy when
taught inevitably magnifies the history of past thought, and leads
professional philosophers to approach their subject-matter through its
formulation in received systems. It tends, also, to emphasize points
upon which men have divided into schools, for these lend themselves to
retrospective definition and elaboration. Consequently, philosophical
discussion is likely to be a dressing out of antithetical traditions,
where criticism of one view is thought to afford proof of the truth of
its opposite (as if formulation of views guaranteed logical exclusives).
Direct preoccupation with contemporary difficulties is left to
literature and politics.

If changing conduct and expanding knowledge ever required a willingness
to surrender not merely old solutions but old problems it is now. I do
not mean that we can turn abruptly away from all traditional issues.
This is impossible; it would be the undoing of the one who attempted it.
Irrespective of the professionalizing of philosophy, the ideas
philosophers discuss are still those in which Western civilization has
been bred. They are in the backs of the heads of educated people. But
what serious-minded men not engaged in the professional business of
philosophy most want to know is what modifications and abandonments of
intellectual inheritance are required by the newer industrial,
political, and scientific movements. They want to know what these newer
movements mean when translated into general ideas. Unless professional
philosophy can mobilize itself sufficiently to assist in this
clarification and redirection of men's thoughts, it is likely to get
more and more sidetracked from the main currents of contemporary life.

This essay may, then, be looked upon as an attempt to forward the
emancipation of philosophy from too intimate and exclusive attachment to
traditional problems. It is not in intent a criticism of various
solutions that have been offered, but raises a question _as to the
genuineness, under the present conditions of science and social life, of
the problems_.

The limited object of my discussion will, doubtless, give an exaggerated
impression of my conviction as to the artificiality of much recent
philosophizing. Not that I have wilfully exaggerated in what I have
said, but that the limitations of my purpose have led me not to say many
things pertinent to a broader purpose. A discussion less restricted
would strive to enforce the genuineness, in their own context, of
questions now discussed mainly because they have been discussed rather
than because contemporary conditions of life suggest them. It would also
be a grateful task to dwell upon the precious contributions made by
philosophic systems which as a whole are impossible. In the course of
the development of unreal premises and the discussion of artificial
problems, points of view have emerged which are indispensable
possessions of culture. The horizon has been widened; ideas of great
fecundity struck out; imagination quickened; a sense of the meaning of
things created. It may even be asked whether these accompaniments of
classic systems have not often been treated as a kind of guarantee of
the systems themselves. But while it is a sign of an illiberal mind to
throw away the fertile and ample ideas of a Spinoza, a Kant, or a Hegel,
because their setting is not logically adequate, is surely a sign of an
undisciplined one to treat their contributions to culture as
confirmations of premises with which they have no necessary connection.


I

A criticism of current philosophizing from the standpoint of the
traditional quality of its problems must begin somewhere, and the choice
of a beginning is arbitrary. It has appeared to me that the notion of
experience implied in the questions most actively discussed gives a
natural point of departure. For, if I mistake not, it is just the
inherited view of experience common to the empirical school and its
opponents which keeps alive many discussions even of matters that on
their face are quite remote from it, while it is also this view which is
most untenable in the light of existing science and social practice.
Accordingly I set out with a brief statement of some of the chief
contrasts between the orthodox description of experience and that
congenial to present conditions.

(i) In the orthodox view, experience is regarded primarily as a
knowledge-affair. But to eyes not looking through ancient spectacles, it
assuredly appears as an affair of the intercourse of a living being with
its physical and social environment. (ii) According to tradition
experience is (at least primarily) a psychical thing, infected
throughout by "subjectivity." What experience suggests about itself is a
genuinely objective world which enters into the actions and sufferings
of men and undergoes modifications through their responses. (iii) So far
as anything beyond a bare present is recognized by the established
doctrine, the past exclusively counts. Registration of what has taken
place, reference to precedent, is believed to be the essence of
experience. Empiricism is conceived of as tied up to what has been, or
is, "given." But experience in its vital form is experimental, an effort
to change the given; it is characterized by projection, by reaching
forward into the unknown; connexion with a future is its salient trait.
(iv) The empirical tradition is committed to particularism. Connexions
and continuities are supposed to be foreign to experience, to be
by-products of dubious validity. An experience that is an undergoing of
an environment and a striving for its control in new directions is
pregnant with connexions. (v) In the traditional notion experience and
thought are antithetical terms. Inference, so far as it is other than a
revival of what has been given in the past, goes beyond experience;
hence it is either invalid, or else a measure of desperation by which,
using experience as a springboard, we jump out to a world of stable
things and other selves. But experience, taken free of the restrictions
imposed by the older concept, is full of inference. There is,
apparently, no conscious experience without inference; reflection is
native and constant.

These contrasts, with a consideration of the effect of substituting the
account of experience relevant to modern life for the inherited account,
afford the subject-matter of the following discussion.

Suppose we take seriously the contribution made to our idea of
experience by biology,--not that recent biological science discovered
the facts, but that it has so emphasized them that there is no longer an
excuse for ignoring them or treating them as negligible. Any account of
experience must now fit into the consideration that experiencing means
living; and that living goes on in and because of an environing medium,
not in a vacuum. Where there is experience, there is a living being.
Where there is life, there is a double connexion maintained with the
environment. In part, environmental energies constitute organic
functions; they enter into them. Life is not possible without such
direct support by the environment. But while all organic changes depend
upon the natural energies of the environment for their origination and
occurrence, the natural energies sometimes carry the organic functions
prosperously forward, and sometimes act counter to their continuance.
Growth and decay, health and disease, are alike continuous with
activities of the natural surroundings. The difference lies in the
bearing of what happens upon future life-activity. From the standpoint
of this future reference environmental incidents fall into groups: those
favorable to life-activities, and those hostile.

The successful activities of the organism, those within which
environmental assistance is incorporated, react upon the environment to
bring about modifications favorable to their own future. The human being
has upon his hands the problem of responding to what is going on around
him so that these changes will take one turn rather than another,
namely, that required by its own further functioning. While backed in
part by the environment, its life is anything but a peaceful exhalation
of environment. It is obliged to struggle--that is to say, to employ the
direct support given by the environment in order indirectly to effect
changes that would not otherwise occur. In this sense, life goes on by
means of controlling the environment. Its activities must change the
changes going on around it; they must neutralize hostile occurrences;
they must transform neutral events into cooeperative factors or into an
efflorescence of new features.

Dialectic developments of the notion of self-preservation, of the
_conatus essendi_, often ignore all the important facts of the actual
process. They argue as if self-control, self-development, went on
directly as a sort of unrolling push from within. But life endures only
in virtue of the support of the environment. And since the environment
is only incompletely enlisted in our behalf, self-preservation--or
self-realization or whatever--is always indirect--always an affair of
the way in which our present activities affect the direction taken by
independent changes in the surroundings. Hindrances must be turned into
means.

We are also given to playing loose with the conception of adjustment, as
if that meant something fixed--a kind of accommodation once for all
(ideally at least) of the organism _to_ an environment. But as life
requires the fitness of the environment to the organic functions,
adjustment to the environment means not passive acceptance of the
latter, but acting so that the environing changes take a certain turn.
The "higher" the type of life, the more adjustment takes the form of an
adjusting of the factors of the environment to one another in the
interest of life; the less the significance of living, the more it
becomes an adjustment to a given environment till at the lower end of
the scale the differences between living and the non-living disappear.

These statements are of an external kind. They are about the conditions
of experience, rather than about experiencing itself. But assuredly
experience as it concretely takes place bears out the statements.
Experience is primarily a process of undergoing: a process of standing
something; of suffering and passion, of affection, in the literal sense
of these words. The organism has to endure, to undergo, the
consequences of its own actions. Experience is no slipping along in a
path fixed by inner consciousness. Private consciousness is an
incidental outcome of experience of a vital objective sort; it is not
its source. Undergoing, however, is never mere passivity. The most
patient patient is more than a receptor. He is also an agent--a reactor,
one trying experiments, one concerned with undergoing in a way which may
influence what is still to happen. Sheer endurance, side-stepping
evasions, are, after all, ways of treating the environment with a view
to what such treatment will accomplish. Even if we shut ourselves up in
the most clam-like fashion, we are doing something; our passivity is an
active attitude, not an extinction of response. Just as there is no
assertive action, no aggressive attack upon things as they are, which is
all action, so there is no undergoing which is not on our part also a
going on and a going through.

Experience, in other words, is a matter of _simultaneous_ doings and
sufferings. Our undergoings are experiments in varying the course of
events; our active tryings are trials and tests of ourselves. This
duplicity of experience shows itself in our happiness and misery, our
successes and failures. Triumphs are dangerous when dwelt upon or lived
off from; successes use themselves up. Any achieved equilibrium of
adjustment with the environment is precarious because we cannot evenly
keep pace with changes in the environment. These are so opposed in
direction that we must choose. We must take the risk of casting in our
lot with one movement or the other. Nothing can eliminate all risk, all
adventure; the one thing doomed to failure is to try to keep even with
the whole environment at once--that is to say, to maintain the happy
moment when all things go our way.

The obstacles which confront us are stimuli to variation, to novel
response, and hence are occasions of progress. If a favor done us by the
environment conceals a threat, so its disfavor is a potential means of
hitherto unexperienced modes of success. To treat misery as anything but
misery, as for example a blessing in disguise or a necessary factor in
good, is disingenuous apologetics. But to say that the progress of the
race has been stimulated by ills undergone, and that men have been moved
by what they suffer to search out new and better courses of action is to
speak veraciously.

The preoccupation of experience with things which are coming (are now
coming, not just to come) is obvious to any one whose interest in
experience is empirical. Since we live forward; since we live in a world
where changes are going on whose issue means our weal or woe; since
every act of ours modifies these changes and hence is fraught with
promise, or charged with hostile energies--what should experience be but
a future implicated in a present! Adjustment is no timeless state; it is
a continuing process. To say that a change takes time may be to say
something about the event which is external and uninstructive. But
adjustment of organism to environment takes time in the pregnant sense;
every step in the process is conditioned by reference to further
changes which it effects. What is going on in the environment is the
concern of the organism; not what is already "there" in accomplished and
finished form. In so far as the issue of what is going on may be
affected by intervention of the organism, the moving event is a
challenge which stretches the agent-patient to meet what is coming.
Experiencing exhibits things in their unterminated aspect moving toward
determinate conclusions. The finished and done with is of import as
affecting the future, not on its own account: in short, because it is
not, really, done with.

Anticipation is therefore more primary than recollection; projection
than summoning of the past; the prospective than the retrospective.
Given a world like that in which we live, a world in which environing
changes are partly favorable and partly callously indifferent, and
experience is bound to be prospective in import; for any control
attainable by the living creature depends upon what is done to alter the
state of things. Success and failure are the primary "categories" of
life; achieving of good and averting of ill are its supreme interests;
hope and anxiety (which are not self-enclosed states of feeling, but
active attitudes of welcome and wariness) are dominant qualities of
experience. Imaginative forecast of the future is this forerunning
quality of behavior rendered available for guidance in the present.
Day-dreaming and castle-building and esthetic realization of what is not
practically achieved are offshoots of this practical trait, or else
practical intelligence is a chastened fantasy. It makes little
difference. Imaginative recovery of the bygone is indispensable to
successful invasion of the future, but its status is that of an
instrument. To ignore its import is the sign of an undisciplined agent;
but to isolate the past, dwelling upon it for its own sake and giving it
the eulogistic name of knowledge, is to substitute the reminiscence of
old-age for effective intelligence. The movement of the agent-patient to
meet the future is partial and passionate; yet detached and impartial
study of the past is the only alternative to luck in assuring success to
passion.


II

This description of experience would be but a rhapsodic celebration of
the commonplace were it not in marked contrast to orthodox philosophical
accounts. The contrast indicates that traditional accounts have not been
empirical, but have been deductions, from unnamed premises, of what
experience _must_ be. Historic empiricism has been empirical in a
technical and controversial sense. It has said, Lord, Lord, Experience,
Experience; but in practice it has served ideas _forced into_
experience, not _gathered from_ it.

The confusion and artificiality thereby introduced into philosophical
thought is nowhere more evident than in the empirical treatment of
relations or dynamic continuities. The experience of a living being
struggling to hold its own and make its way in an environment, physical
and social, partly facilitating and partly obstructing its actions, is
of necessity a matter of ties and connexions, of bearings and uses. The
very point of experience, so to say, is that it doesn't occur in a
vacuum; its agent-patient instead of being insulated and disconnected is
bound up with the movement of things by most intimate and pervasive
bonds. Only because the organism is in and of the world, and its
activities correlated with those of other things in multiple ways, is it
susceptible to undergoing things and capable of trying to reduce objects
to means of securing its good fortune. That these connexions are of
diverse kinds is irresistibly proved by the fluctuations which occur in
its career. Help and hindrance, stimulation and inhibition, success and
failure mean specifically different modes of correlation. Although the
actions of things in the world are taking place in one continuous
stretch of existence, there are all kinds of specific affinities,
repulsions, and relative indifferencies.

Dynamic connexions are qualitatively diverse, just as are the centers of
action. _In this sense_, pluralism, not monism, is an established
empirical fact. The attempt to establish monism from consideration of
the very nature of a relation is a mere piece of dialectics. Equally
dialectical is the effort to establish by a consideration of the nature
of relations an ontological Pluralism of Ultimates: _simple and
independent beings._ To attempt to get results from a consideration of
the "external" nature of relations is of a piece with the attempt to
deduce results from their "internal" character. Some things are
relatively insulated from the influence of other things; some things are
easily invaded by others; some things are fiercely attracted to conjoin
their activities with those of others. Experience exhibits every kind
of connexion[1] from the most intimate to mere external juxtaposition.

Empirically, then, active bonds or continuities of all kinds, together
with static discontinuities, characterize existence. To deny this
qualitative heterogeneity is to reduce the struggles and difficulties of
life, its comedies and tragedies to illusion: to the non-being of the
Greeks or to its modern counterpart, the "subjective." Experience is an
affair of facilitations and checks, of being sustained and disrupted,
being let alone, being helped and troubled, of good fortune and defeat
in all the countless qualitative modes which these words pallidly
suggest. The existence of genuine connexions of all manner of
heterogeneity cannot be doubted. Such words as conjoining, disjoining,
resisting, modifying, saltatory, and ambulatory (to use James'
picturesque term) only hint at their actual heterogeneity.

Among the revisions and surrenders of historic problems demanded by this
feature of empirical situations, those centering in the
rationalistic-empirical controversy may be selected for attention. The
implications of this controversy are twofold: First, that connexions are
as homogeneous in fact as in name; and, secondly, if genuine, are all
due to thought, or, if empirical, are arbitrary by-products of past
particulars. The stubborn particularism of orthodox empiricism is its
outstanding trait; consequently the opposed rationalism found no
justification of bearings, continuities, and ties save to refer them in
gross to the work of a hyper-empirical Reason.

Of course, not all empiricism prior to Hume and Kant was
sensationalistic, pulverizing "experience" into isolated sensory
qualities or simple ideas. It did not all follow Locke's lead in
regarding the entire content of generalization as the "workmanship of
the understanding." On the Continent, prior to Kant, philosophers were
content to draw a line between empirical generalizations regarding
matters of fact and necessary universals applying to truths of reason.
But logical atomism was implicit even in this theory. Statements
referring to empirical fact were mere quantitative summaries of
particular instances. In the sensationalism which sprang from Hume (and
which was left unquestioned by Kant as far as any strictly empirical
element was concerned) the implicit particularism was made explicit. But
the doctrine that sensations and ideas are so many separate existences
was not derived from observation nor from experiment. It was a logical
deduction from a prior unexamined concept of the nature of experience.
From the same concept it followed that the appearance of stable objects
and of general principles of connexion was but an appearance.[2]

Kantianism, then, naturally invoked universal bonds to restore
objectivity. But, in so doing, it accepted the particularism of
experience and proceeded to supplement it from non-empirical sources. A
sensory manifold being all which is really empirical in experience, a
reason which transcends experience must provide synthesis. The net
outcome might have suggested a correct account of experience. For we
have only to forget the apparatus by which the net outcome is arrived
at, to have before us the experience of the plain man--a diversity of
ceaseless changes connected in all kinds of ways, static and dynamic.
This conclusion would deal a deathblow to both empiricism and
rationalism. For, making clear the non-empirical character of the
alleged manifold of unconnected particulars, it would render unnecessary
the appeal to functions of the understanding in order to connect them.
With the downfall of the traditional notion of experience, the appeal to
reason to supplement its defects becomes superfluous.

The tradition was, however, too strongly entrenched; especially as it
furnished the subject-matter of an alleged science of states of mind
which were directly known in their very presence. The historic outcome
was a new crop of artificial puzzles about relations; it fastened upon
philosophy for a long time the quarrel about the _a priori_ and the _a
posteriori_ as its chief issue. The controversy is to-day quiescent. Yet
it is not at all uncommon to find thinkers modern in tone and intent
who regard any philosophy of experience as necessarily committed to
denial of the existence of genuinely general propositions, and who take
empiricism to be inherently averse to the recognition of the importance
of an organizing and constructive intelligence.

The quiescence alluded to is in part due, I think, to sheer weariness.
But it is also due to a change of standpoint introduced by biological
conceptions; and particularly the discovery of biological continuity
from the lower organisms to man. For a short period, Spencerians might
connect the doctrine of evolution with the old problem, and use the long
temporal accumulation of "experiences" to generate something which, for
human experience, is _a priori_. But the tendency of the biological way
of thinking is neither to confirm or negate the Spencerian doctrine, but
to shift the issue. In the orthodox position _a posteriori_ and _a
priori_ were affairs of knowledge. But it soon becomes obvious that
while there is assuredly something _a priori_--that is to say, native,
unlearned, original--in human experience, that something is _not_
knowledge, but is activities made possible by means of established
connexions of neurones. This empirical fact does not solve the orthodox
problem; it dissolves it. It shows that the problem was misconceived,
and solution sought by both parties in the wrong direction.

Organic instincts and organic retention, or habit-forming, are
undeniable factors in actual experience. They are factors which effect
organization and secure continuity. They are among the specific facts
which a description of experience cognizant of the correlation of
organic action with the action of other natural objects will include.
But while fortunately the contribution of biological science to a truly
empirical description of experiencing has outlawed the discussion of the
_a priori_ and _a posteriori_, the transforming effect of the same
contributions upon other issues has gone unnoticed, save as pragmatism
has made an effort to bring them to recognition.


III

The point seriously at issue in the notion of experience common to both
sides in the older controversy thus turns out to be the place of thought
or intelligence in experience. Does reason have a distinctive office? Is
there a characteristic order of relations contributed by it?

Experience, to return to our positive conception, is primarily what is
undergone in connexion with activities whose import lies in their
objective consequences--their bearing upon future experiences. Organic
functions deal with things as things in course, in operation, in a state
of affairs not yet given or completed. What is done with, what is just
"there," is of concern only in the potentialities which it may indicate.
As ended, as wholly given, it is of no account. But as a sign of what
may come, it becomes an indispensable factor in behavior dealing with
changes, the outcome of which is not yet determined.

The only power the organism possesses to control its own future depends
upon the way its present responses modify changes which are taking place
in its medium. A living being may be comparatively impotent, or
comparatively free. It is all a matter of the way in which its present
reactions to things influence the future reactions of things upon it.
Without regard to its wish or intent every act it performs makes some
difference in the environment. The change may be trivial as respects its
own career and fortune. But it may also be of incalculable importance;
it may import harm, destruction, or it may procure well-being.

Is it possible for a living being to increase its control of welfare and
success? Can it manage, in any degree, to assure its future? Or does the
amount of security depend wholly upon the accidents of the situation?
Can it learn? Can it gain ability to assure its future in the present?
These questions center attention upon the significance of reflective
intelligence in the process of experience. The extent of an agent's
capacity for inference, its power to use a given fact as a sign of
something not yet given, measures the extent of its ability
systematically to enlarge its control of the future.

A being which can use given and finished facts as signs of things to
come; which can take given things as evidences of absent things, can, in
that degree, forecast the future; it can form reasonable expectations.
It is capable of achieving ideas; it is possessed of intelligence. For
use of the given or finished to anticipate the consequence of processes
going on is precisely what is meant by "ideas," by "intelligence."

As we have already noted, the environment is rarely all of a kind in its
bearing upon organic welfare; its most whole-hearted support of
life-activities is precarious and temporary. Some environmental changes
are auspicious; others are menacing. The secret of success--that is, of
the greatest attainable success--is for the organic response to cast in
its lot with present auspicious changes to strengthen them and thus to
avert the consequences flowing from occurrences of ill-omen. Any
reaction is a venture; it involves risk. We always build better or worse
than we can foretell. But the organism's fateful intervention in the
course of events is blind, its choice is random, except as it can employ
what happens to it as a basis of inferring what is likely to happen
later. In the degree in which it can read future results in present
on-goings, its responsive choice, its partiality to this condition or
that, become intelligent. Its bias grows reasonable. It can
deliberately, intentionally, participate in the direction of the course
of affairs. Its foresight of different futures which result according as
this or that present factor predominates in the shaping of affairs
permits it to partake intelligently instead of blindly and fatally in
the consequences its reactions give rise to. Participate it must, and to
its own weal or woe. Inference, the use of what happens, to anticipate
what will--or at least may--happen, makes the difference between
directed and undirected participation. And this capacity for inferring
is precisely the same as that use of natural occurrences for the
discovery and determination of consequences--the formation of new
dynamic connexions--which constitutes knowledge.

The fact that thought is an intrinsic feature of experience is fatal to
the traditional empiricism which makes it an artificial by-product. But
for that same reason it is fatal to the historic rationalisms whose
justification was the secondary and retrospective position assigned to
thought by empirical philosophy. According to the particularism of the
latter, thought was inevitably only a bunching together of hard-and-fast
separate items; thinking was but the gathering together and tying of
items already completely given, or else an equally artificial untying--a
mechanical adding and subtracting of the given. It was but a cumulative
registration, a consolidated merger; generality was a matter of bulk,
not of quality. Thinking was therefore treated as lacking constructive
power; even its organizing capacity was but simulated, being in truth
but arbitrary pigeon-holing. Genuine projection of the novel,
deliberate variation and invention, are idle fictions in such a version
of experience. If there ever was creation, it all took place at a remote
period. Since then the world has only recited lessons.

The value of inventive construction is too precious to be disposed of in
this cavalier way. Its unceremonious denial afforded an opportunity to
assert that in addition to experience the subject has a ready-made
faculty of thought or reason which transcends experience. Rationalism
thus accepted the account of experience given by traditional empiricism,
and introduced reason as extra-empirical. There are still thinkers who
regard any empiricism as necessarily committed to a belief in a
cut-and-dried reliance upon disconnected precedents, and who hold that
all systematic organization of past experiences for new and constructive
purposes is alien to strict empiricism.

Rationalism never explained, however, how a reason extraneous to
experience could enter into helpful relation with concrete experiences.
By definition, reason and experience were antithetical, so that the
concern of reason was not the fruitful expansion and guidance of the
course of experience, but a realm of considerations too sublime to
touch, or be touched by, experience. Discreet rationalists confined
themselves to theology and allied branches of abtruse science, and to
mathematics. Rationalism would have been a doctrine reserved for
academic specialists and abstract formalists had it not assumed the task
of providing an apologetics for traditional morals and theology, thereby
getting into touch with actual human beliefs and concerns. It is
notorious that historic empiricism was strong in criticism and in
demolition of outworn beliefs, but weak for purposes of constructive
social direction. But we frequently overlook the fact that whenever
rationalism cut free from conservative apologetics, it was also simply
an instrumentality for pointing out inconsistencies and absurdities in
existing beliefs--a sphere in which it was immensely useful, as the
Enlightenment shows. Leibniz and Voltaire were contemporary rationalists
in more senses than one.[3]

The recognition that reflection is a genuine factor within experience
and an indispensable factor in that control of the world which secures a
prosperous and significant expansion of experience undermines historic
rationalism as assuredly as it abolishes the foundations of historic
empiricism. The bearing of a correct idea of the place and office of
reflection upon modern idealisms is less obvious, but no less certain.

One of the curiosities of orthodox empiricism is that its outstanding
speculative problem is the existence of an "external world." For in
accordance with the notion that experience is attached to a private
subject as its exclusive possession, a world like the one in which we
appear to live must be "external" to experience instead of being its
subject-matter. I call it a curiosity, for if anything seems adequately
grounded empirically it is the existence of a world which resists the
characteristic functions of the subject of experience; which goes its
way, in some respects, independently of these functions, and which
frustrates our hopes and intentions. Ignorance which is fatal;
disappointment; the need of adjusting means and ends to the course of
nature, would seem to be facts sufficiently characterizing empirical
situations as to render the existence of an external world indubitable.

That the description of experience was arrived at by forcing actual
empirical facts into conformity with dialectic developments from a
concept of a knower outside of the real world of nature is testified to
by the historic alliance of empiricism and idealism.[4] According to the
most logically consistent editions of orthodox empiricism, all that can
be experienced is the fleeting, the momentary, mental state. That alone
is absolutely and indubitably present; therefore, it alone is
cognitively certain. It alone is _knowledge_. The existence of the past
(and of the future), of a decently stable world and of other
selves--indeed, of one's own self--falls outside this datum of
experience. These can be arrived at only by inference which is
"ejective"--a name given to an alleged type of inference that jumps from
experience, as from a springboard, to something beyond experience.

I should not anticipate difficulty in showing that this doctrine is,
dialectically, a mass of inconsistencies. Avowedly it is a doctrine of
desperation, and as such it is cited here to show the desperate straits
to which ignoring empirical facts has reduced a doctrine of experience.
More positively instructive are the objective idealisms which have been
the offspring of the marriage between the "reason" of historic
rationalism and the alleged immediate psychical stuff of historic
empiricism. These idealisms have recognized the genuineness of
connexions and the impotency of "feeling." They have then identified
connexions with logical or rational connexions, and thus treated "the
real World" as a synthesis of sentient consciousness by means of a
rational self-consciousness introducing objectivity: stability and
universality of reference.

Here again, for present purposes, criticism is unnecessary. It suffices
to point out that the value of this theory is bound up with the
genuineness of the problem of which it purports to be a solution. If the
basic concept is a fiction, there is no call for the solution. The more
important point is to perceive how far the "thought" which figures in
objective idealism comes from meeting the empirical demands made upon
actual thought. Idealism is much less formal than historic rationalism.
It treats thought, or reason, as constitutive of experience by means of
uniting and constructive functions, not as just concerned with a realm
of eternal truths apart from experience. On such a view thought
certainly loses its abstractness and remoteness. But, unfortunately, in
thus gaining the whole world it loses its own self. A world already, in
its intrinsic structure, dominated by thought is not a world in which,
save by contradiction of premises, thinking has anything to do.

That the doctrine logically results in making change unreal and error
unaccountable are consequences of importance in the technique of
professional philosophy; in the denial of empirical fact which they
imply they seem to many a _reductio ad absurdum_ of the premises from
which they proceed. But, after all, such consequences are of only
professional import. What is serious, even sinister, is the implied
sophistication regarding the place and office of reflection in the
scheme of things. A doctrine which exalts thought in name while
ignoring its efficacy in fact (that is, its use in bettering life) is a
doctrine which cannot be entertained and taught without serious peril.
Those who are not concerned with professional philosophy but who are
solicitous for intelligence as a factor in the amelioration of actual
conditions can but look askance at any doctrine which holds that the
entire scheme of things is already, if we but acquire the knack of
looking at it aright, fixedly and completely rational. It is a striking
manifestation of the extent in which philosophies have been compensatory
in quality.[5] But the matter cannot be passed over as if it were simply
a question of not grudging a certain amount of consolation to one amid
the irretrievable evils of life. For as to these evils no one knows how
many are retrievable; and a philosophy which proclaims the ability of a
dialectic theory of knowledge to reveal the world as already and
eternally a self-luminous rational whole, contaminates the scope and use
of thought at its very spring. To substitute the otiose insight gained
by manipulation of a formula for the slow cooeperative work of a humanity
guided by reflective intelligence is more than a technical blunder of
speculative philosophers.

A practical crisis may throw the relationship of ideas to life into an
exaggerated Brocken-like spectral relief, where exaggeration renders
perceptible features not ordinarily noted. The use of force to secure
narrow because exclusive aims is no novelty in human affairs. The
deploying of all the intelligence at command in order to increase the
effectiveness of the force used is not so common, yet presents nothing
intrinsically remarkable. The identification of force--military,
economic, and administrative--with moral necessity and moral culture is,
however, a phenomenon not likely to exhibit itself on a wide scale
except where intelligence has already been suborned by an idealism which
identifies "the actual with the rational," and thus finds the measure of
reason in the brute event determined by superior force. If we are to
have a philosophy which will intervene between attachment to rule of
thumb muddling and devotion to a systematized subordination of
intelligence to preexistent ends, it can be found only in a philosophy
which finds the ultimate measure of intelligence in consideration of a
desirable future and in search for the means of bringing it
progressively into existence. When professed idealism turns out to be a
narrow pragmatism--narrow because taking for granted the finality of
ends determined by historic conditions--the time has arrived for a
pragmatism which shall be empirically idealistic, proclaiming the
essential connexion of intelligence with the unachieved future--with
possibilities involving a transfiguration.


IV

Why has the description of experience been so remote from the facts of
empirical situations? To answer this question throws light upon the
submergence of recent philosophizing in epistemology--that is, in
discussions of the nature, possibility, and limits of knowledge in
general, and in the attempt to reach conclusions regarding the ultimate
nature of reality from the answers given to such questions.

The reply to the query regarding the currency of a non-empirical
doctrine of experience (even among professed empiricists) is that the
traditional account is derived from a conception once universally
entertained regarding the subject or bearer or center of experience. The
description of experience has been forced into conformity with this
prior conception; it has been primarily a deduction from it, actual
empirical facts being poured into the moulds of the deductions. The
characteristic feature of this prior notion is the assumption that
experience centers in, or gathers about, or proceeds from a center or
subject which is outside the course of natural existence, and set over
against it:--it being of no importance, for present purposes, whether
this antithetical subject is termed soul, or spirit, or mind, or ego, or
consciousness, or just knower or knowing subject.

There are plausible grounds for thinking that the currency of the idea
in question lies in the form which men's religious preoccupations took
for many centuries. These were deliberately and systematically
other-worldly. They centered about a Fall which was not an event in
nature, but an aboriginal catastrophe that corrupted Nature; about a
redemption made possible by supernatural means; about a life in another
world--essentially, not merely spatially, Other. The supreme drama of
destiny took place in a soul or spirit which, under the circumstances,
could not be conceived other than as non-natural--extra-natural, if not,
strictly speaking, supernatural. When Descartes and others broke away
from medieval interests, they retained as commonplaces its intellectual
apparatus: Such as, knowledge is exercised by a power that is
extra-natural and set over against the world to be known. Even if they
had wished to make a complete break, they had nothing to put as knower
in the place of the soul. It may be doubted whether there was any
available empirical substitute until science worked out the fact that
physical changes are functional correlations of energies, and that man
is continuous with other forms of life, and until social life had
developed an intellectually free and responsible individual as its
agent.

But my main point is not dependent upon any particular theory as to the
historic origin of the notion about the bearer of experience. The point
is there on its own account. The essential thing is that the bearer was
conceived as outside of the world; so that experience consisted in the
bearer's being affected through a type of operations not found anywhere
in the world, while knowledge consists in surveying the world, looking
at it, getting the view of a spectator.

The theological problem of attaining knowledge of God as ultimate
reality was transformed in effect into the philosophical problem of the
possibility of attaining knowledge of reality. For how is one to get
beyond the limits of the subject and subjective occurrences? Familiarity
breeds credulity oftener than contempt. How can a problem be artificial
when men have been busy discussing it almost for three hundred years?
But if the assumption that experience is something set over against the
world is contrary to fact, then the problem of how self or mind or
subjective experience or consciousness can reach knowledge of an
external world is assuredly a meaningless problem. Whatever questions
there may be about knowledge, they will not be the kind of problems
which have formed epistemology.

The problem of knowledge as conceived in the industry of epistemology is
the problem of knowledge _in general_--of the possibility, extent, and
validity of knowledge in general. What does this "in general" mean? In
ordinary life there are problems a-plenty of knowledge in particular;
every conclusion we try to reach, theoretical or practical, affords such
a problem. But there is no problem of knowledge in general. I do not
mean, of course, that general statements cannot be made about knowledge,
or that the problem of attaining these general statements is not a
genuine one. On the contrary, specific instances of success and failure
in inquiry exist, and are of such a character that one can discover the
conditions conducing to success and failure. Statement of these
conditions constitutes logic, and is capable of being an important aid
in proper guidance of further attempts at knowing. But this logical
problem of knowledge is at the opposite pole from the epistemological.
Specific problems are about right conclusions to be reached--which
means, in effect, right ways of going about the business of inquiry.
They imply a difference between knowledge and error consequent upon
right and wrong methods of inquiry and testing; not a difference
between experience and the world. The problem of knowledge _ueberhaupt_
exists because it is assumed that there is a knower in general, who is
outside of the world to be known, and who is defined in terms
antithetical to the traits of the world. With analogous assumptions, we
could invent and discuss a problem of digestion in general. All that
would be required would be to conceive the stomach and food-material as
inhabiting different worlds. Such an assumption would leave on our hands
the question of the possibility, extent, nature, and genuineness of any
transaction between stomach and food.

But because the stomach and food inhabit a continuous stretch of
existence, because digestion is but a correlation of diverse activities
in one world, the problems of digestion are specific and plural: What
are the particular correlations which constitute it? How does it proceed
in different situations? What is favorable and what unfavorable to its
best performance?--and so on. Can one deny that if we were to take our
clue from the present empirical situation, including the scientific
notion of evolution (biological continuity) and the existing arts of
control of nature, subject and object would be treated as occupying the
same natural world as unhesitatingly as we assume the natural
conjunction of an animal and its food? Would it not follow that
knowledge is one way in which natural energies cooeperate? Would there be
any problem save discovery of the peculiar structure of this
cooeperation, the conditions under which it occurs to best effect, and
the consequences which issue from its occurrence?

It is a commonplace that the chief divisions of modern philosophy,
idealism in its different kinds, realisms of various brands, so-called
common-sense dualism, agnosticism, relativism, phenomenalism, have grown
up around the epistemological problem of the general relation of subject
and object. Problems not openly epistemological, such as whether the
relation of changes in consciousness to physical changes is one of
interaction, parallelism, or automatism have the same origin. What
becomes of philosophy, consisting largely as it does of different
answers to these questions, in case the assumptions which generate the
questions have no empirical standing? Is it not time that philosophers
turned from the attempt to determine the comparative merits of various
replies to the questions to a consideration of the claims of the
questions?

When dominating religious ideas were built up about the idea that the
self is a stranger and pilgrim in this world; when morals, falling in
line, found true good only in inner states of a self inaccessible to
anything but its own private introspection; when political theory
assumed the finality of disconnected and mutually exclusive
personalities, the notion that the bearer of experience is antithetical
to the world instead of being in and of it was congenial. It at least
had the warrant of other beliefs and aspirations. But the doctrine of
biological continuity or organic evolution has destroyed the scientific
basis of the conception. Morally, men are now concerned with the
amelioration of the conditions of the common lot in this world. Social
sciences recognize that associated life is not a matter of physical
juxtaposition, but of genuine intercourse--of community of experience in
a non-metaphorical sense of community. Why should we longer try to patch
up and refine and stretch the old solutions till they seem to cover the
change of thought and practice? Why not recognize that the trouble is
with the problem?

A belief in organic evolution which does not extend unreservedly to the
way in which the subject of experience is thought of, and which does not
strive to bring the entire theory of experience and knowing into line
with biological and social facts, is hardly more than Pickwickian. There
are many, for example, who hold that dreams, hallucinations, and errors
cannot be accounted for at all except on the theory that a self (or
"consciousness") exercises a modifying influence upon the "real object."
The logical assumption is that consciousness is outside of the real
object; that it is something different in kind, and therefore has the
power of changing "reality" into appearance, of introducing
"relativities" into things as they are in themselves--in short, of
infecting real things with subjectivity. Such writers seem unaware of
the fact that this assumption makes consciousness supernatural in the
literal sense of the word; and that, to say the least, the conception
can be accepted by one who accepts the doctrine of biological continuity
only after every other way of dealing with the facts has been exhausted.

Realists, of course (at least some of the Neo-realists), deny any such
miraculous intervention of consciousness. But they[6] admit the reality
of the problem; denying only this particular solution, they try to find
some other way out, which will still preserve intact the notion of
knowledge as a relationship of a general sort between subject and
object.

Now dreams and hallucinations, errors, pleasures, and pains, possibly
"secondary" qualities, do not occur save where there are organic centers
of experience. They cluster about a subject. But to treat them as things
which inhere exclusively in the subject; or as posing the problem of a
distortion of _the_ real object by a knower set over against the world,
or as presenting facts to be explained primarily as cases of
contemplative knowledge, is to testify that one has still to learn the
lesson of evolution in its application to the affairs in hand.

If biological development be accepted, the subject of experience is at
least an animal, continuous with other organic forms in a process of
more complex organization. An animal in turn is at least continuous with
chemico-physical processes which, in living things, are so organized as
really to constitute the activities of life with all their defining
traits. And experience is not identical with brain action; it is the
entire organic agent-patient in all its interaction with the
environment, natural and social. The brain is primarily an organ of a
certain kind of behavior, not of knowing the world. And to repeat what
has already been said, experiencing is just certain modes of
interaction, of correlation, of natural objects among which the organism
happens, so to say, to be one. It follows with equal force that
experience means primarily not knowledge, but ways of doing and
suffering. Knowing must be described by discovering what particular
mode--qualitatively unique--of doing and suffering it is. As it is, we
find experience assimilated to a non-empirical concept of knowledge,
derived from an antecedent notion of a spectator outside of the
world.[7]

In short, the epistemological fashion of conceiving dreams, errors,
"relativities," etc., depends upon the isolation of mind from intimate
participation with other changes in the same continuous nexus. Thus it
is like contending that when a bottle bursts, the bottle is, in some
self-contained miraculous way, exclusively responsible. Since it is the
nature of a bottle to be whole so as to retain fluids, bursting is an
abnormal event--comparable to an hallucination. Hence it cannot belong
to the "real" bottle; the "subjectivity" of glass is the cause. It is
obvious that since the breaking of glass is a case of specific
correlation of natural energies, its accidental and abnormal character
has to do with _consequences_, not with causation. Accident is
interference with the consequences for which the bottle is intended. The
bursting considered apart from its bearing on these consequences is on a
plane with any other occurrence in the wide world. But from the
standpoint of a desired future, bursting is an anomaly, an interruption
of the course of events.

The analogy with the occurrence of dreams, hallucinations, etc., seems
to me exact. Dreams are not something outside of the regular course of
events; they are in and of it. They are not cognitive distortions of
real things; they are _more_ real things. There is nothing abnormal in
their existence, any more than there is in the bursting of a bottle.[8]
But they may be abnormal, from the standpoint of their influence, of
their operation as stimuli in calling out responses to modify the
future. Dreams have often been taken as prognostics of what is to
happen; they have modified conduct. A hallucination may lead a man to
consult a doctor; such a consequence is right and proper. But the
consultation indicates that the subject regarded it as an indication of
consequences which he feared: as a symptom of a disturbed life. Or the
hallucination may lead him to anticipate consequences which in fact flow
only from the possession of great wealth. Then the hallucination is a
disturbance of the normal course of events; the occurrence is wrongly
_used_ with reference to eventualities.

To regard reference to use and to desired and intended consequences as
involving a "subjective" factor is to miss the point, for this has
regard to the future. The uses to which a bottle are put are not mental;
they do not consist of physical states; they are further correlations of
natural existences. Consequences in use are genuine natural events; but
they do not occur without the intervention of behavior involving
anticipation of a future. The case is not otherwise with an
hallucination. The differences it makes are in any case differences in
the course of the one continuous world. The important point is whether
they are good or bad differences. To use the hallucination as a sign of
organic lesions that menace health means the beneficial result of seeing
a physician; to respond to it as a sign of consequences such as actually
follow only from being persecuted is to fall into error--to be abnormal.
The persecutors are "unreal"; that is, there are no things which act as
persecutors act; but the hallucination exists. Given its conditions it
is as natural as any other event, and poses only the same kind of
problem as is put by the occurrence of, say, a thunderstorm. The
"unreality" of persecution is not, however, a subjective matter; it
means that conditions do not exist for producing the _future_
consequences which are now anticipated and reacted to. Ability to
anticipate future consequences and to respond to them as stimuli to
present behavior may well _define_ what is meant by a mind or by
"consciousness."[9] But this is only a way of saying just what kind of a
real or natural existence the subject is; it is not to fall back on a
preconception about an unnatural subject in order to characterize the
occurrence of error.

Although the discussion may be already labored, let us take another
example--the occurrence of disease. By definition it is pathological,
abnormal. At one time in human history this abnormality was taken to be
something dwelling in the intrinsic nature of the event--in its
existence irrespective of future consequences. Disease was literally
extra-natural and to be referred to demons, or to magic. No one to-day
questions its naturalness--its place in the order of natural events. Yet
it is abnormal--for it operates to effect results different from those
which follow from health. The difference is a genuine empirical
difference, not a mere mental distinction. From the standpoint of
bearing on a subsequent course of events disease is unnatural, in spite
of the naturalness of its occurrence and origin.

The habit of ignoring reference to the future is responsible for the
assumption that to admit human participation in any form is to admit the
"subjective" in a sense which alters the objective into the phenomenal.
There have been those who, like Spinoza, regarded health and disease,
good and ill, as equally real and equally unreal. However, only a few
consistent materialists have included truth along with error as merely
phenomenal and subjective. But if one does not regard movement toward
possible consequences as genuine, wholesale denial of existential
validity to all these distinctions is the only logical course. To select
truth as objective and error as "subjective" is, on this basis, an
unjustifiably partial procedure. Take everything as fixedly given, and
both truth and error are arbitrary insertions into fact. Admit the
genuineness of changes going on, and capacity for its direction through
organic action based on foresight, and both truth and falsity are alike
existential. It is human to regard the course of events which is in line
with our own efforts as the _regular_ course of events, and
interruptions as abnormal, but this partiality of human desire is itself
a part of what actually takes place.

It is now proposed to take a particular case of the alleged
epistemological predicament for discussion, since the entire ground
cannot be covered. I think, however, the instance chosen is typical, so
that the conclusion reached may be generalized.

The instance is that of so-called relativity in perception. There are
almost endless instances; the stick bent in water; the whistle changing
pitch with change of distance from the ear; objects doubled when the eye
is pushed; the destroyed star still visible, etc., etc. For our
consideration we may take the case of a spherical object that presents
itself to one observer as a flat circle, to another as a somewhat
distorted elliptical surface. This situation gives empirical proof, so
it is argued, of the difference between a real object and mere
appearance. Since there is but one object, the existence of two
_subjects_ is the sole differentiating factor. Hence the two
appearances of the one real object is proof of the intervening
distorting action of the subject. And many of the Neo-realists who deny
the difference in question, admit the case to be one of knowledge and
accordingly to constitute an epistemological problem. They have in
consequence developed wonderfully elaborate schemes of sundry kinds to
maintain "epistemological monism" intact.

Let us try to keep close to empirical facts. In the first place the two
unlike appearances of the one sphere are physically necessary because of
the laws of reaction of light. If the one sphere did _not_ assume these
two appearances under given conditions, we should be confronted with a
hopelessly irreconcilable discrepancy in the behavior of natural energy.
That the result is natural is evidenced by the fact that two cameras--or
other arrangements of apparatus for reflecting light--yield precisely
the same results. Photographs are as genuinely physical existences as
the original sphere; and they exhibit the two geometrical forms.

The statement of these facts makes no impression upon the confirmed
epistemologist; he merely retorts that as long as it is admitted that
the organism is the cause of a sphere being seen, from different points,
as a circular and as an elliptical surface, the essence of his
contention--the modification of the real object by the subject--is
admitted. To the question why the same logic does not apply to
photographic records he makes, as far as I know, no reply at all.

The source of the difficulty is not hard to see. The objection assumes
that the alleged modifications of _the_ real object are cases of
_knowing_ and hence attributable to the influence of a _knower_.
Statements which set forth the doctrine will always be found to refer to
the organic factor, to the eye, as an observer or a percipient. Even
when reference is made to a lens or a mirror, language is sometimes used
which suggests that the writer's naivete is sufficiently gross to treat
these physical factors as if they were engaged in perceiving the sphere.
But as it is evident that the lens operates as a physical factor in
correlation with other physical factors--notably light--so it ought to
be evident that the intervention of the optical apparatus of the eye is
a purely non-cognitive matter. The relation in question is not one
between a sphere and a would-be knower of it, unfortunately condemned by
the nature of the knowing apparatus to alter the thing he would know; it
is an affair of the dynamic interaction of two physical agents in
producing a third thing, an effect;--an affair of precisely the same
kind as in any physical conjoint action, say the operation of hydrogen
and oxygen in producing water. To regard the eye as primarily a knower,
an observer, of things, is as crass as to assign that function to a
camera. But unless the eye (or optical apparatus, or brain, or organism)
be so regarded, there is absolutely no problem of observation or of
knowledge in the case of the occurrence of elliptical and circular
surfaces. Knowledge does not enter into the affair at all till _after_
these forms of refracted light have been produced. About them there is
nothing unreal. Light is really, physically, existentially, refracted
into these forms. If the same spherical form upon refracting light to
physical objects in two quite different positions produced the same
geometric forms, there would, indeed, be something to marvel at--as
there would be if wax produced the same results in contact
simultaneously with a cold body and with a warm one. Why talk about _the
real_ object in relation to _a knower_ when what is given is one real
thing in dynamic connection with another real thing?

The way of dealing with the case will probably meet with a retort; at
least, it has done so before. It has been said that the account given
above and the account of traditional subjectivism differ only verbally.
The essential thing in both, so it is said, is the admission that an
activity of a self or subject or organism makes a difference in the real
object. Whether the subject makes this difference in the very process of
knowing or makes it prior to the act of knowing is a minor matter; what
is important is that the known thing has, by the time it is known, been
"subjectified."

The objection gives a convenient occasion for summarizing the main
points of the argument. On the one hand, the retort of the objector
depends upon talking about _the_ real object. Employ the term "_a_ real
object," and the change produced by the activity characteristic of the
optical apparatus is of just the same kind as that of the camera lens or
that of any other physical agency. Every event in the world marks a
difference made to one existence in active conjunction with some other
existence. And, as for the alleged subjectivity, if subjective is used
merely as an adjective to designate the specific activity of a
particular existence, comparable, say, to the term feral, applied to
tiger, or metallic, applied to iron, then of course reference to
subjective is legitimate. But it is also tautological. It is like saying
that flesh eaters are carnivorous. But the term "subjective" is so
consecrated to other uses, usually implying invidious contrast with
objectivity (while subjective in the sense just suggested means specific
mode _of_ objectivity), that it is difficult to maintain this innocent
sense. Its use in any disparaging way in the situation before us--any
sense implicating contrast with a real object--assumes that the organism
_ought_ not to make any difference when it operates in conjunction with
other things. Thus we run to earth that assumption that the subject is
heterogeneous from every other natural existence; it is to be the one
otiose, inoperative thing in a moving world--our old assumption of the
self as outside of things.[10]

What and where is knowledge in the case we have been considering? Not,
as we have already seen, in the production of forms of light having a
circular and elliptical surface. These forms are natural happenings.
They may enter into knowledge or they may not, according to
circumstances. Countless such refractive changes take place without
being noted.[11] When they become subject-matter for knowledge, the
inquiry they set on foot may take on an indefinite variety of forms. One
may be interested in ascertaining more about the structural
peculiarities of the forms themselves; one may be interested in the
mechanism of their production; one may find problems in projective
geometry, or in drawing and painting--all depending upon the specific
matter-of-fact context. The forms may be _objectives_ of knowledge--of
reflective examination--or they may be means of knowing something else.
It may happen--under some circumstances it does happen--that the
objective of inquiry is the nature of the geometric form which, when
refracting light, gives rise to these other forms. In this case the
sphere is the thing known, and in this case, the forms of light are
signs or evidence of the conclusion to be drawn. There is no more reason
for supposing that they _are_ (mis)knowledges of the sphere--that the
sphere is necessarily and from the start what one is trying to
know--than for supposing that the position of the mercury in the
thermometer tube is a cognitive distortion of atmospheric pressure. In
each case (that of the mercury and that of, say, a circular surface) the
primary datum is a physical happening. In each case it may be used, upon
occasion, as a sign or evidence of the nature of the causes which
brought it about. Given the position in question, the circular form
would be an intrinsically _unreliable_ evidence of the nature and
position of the spherical body only in case it, as the direct datum of
perception, were _not_ what it is--a circular form.

I confess that all this seems so obvious that the reader is entitled to
inquire into the motive for reciting such plain facts. Were it not for
the persistence of the epistemological problem it would be an affront to
the reader's intelligence to dwell upon them. But as long as such facts
as we have been discussing furnish the subject-matter with which
philosophizing is peculiarly concerned, these commonplaces must be urged
and reiterated. They bear out two contentions which are important at the
juncture, although they will lose special significance as soon as these
are habitually recognized: Negatively, a prior and non-empirical notion
of the self is the source of the prevailing belief that experience as
such is primarily cognitional--a knowledge affair; positively,
_knowledge is always a matter of the use that is made of experienced
natural events_, a use in which given things are treated as indications
of what will be experienced under different conditions.

Let us make one effort more to clear up these points. Suppose it is a
question of knowledge of water. The thing to be known does not present
itself primarily as a matter of knowledge-and-ignorance at all. It
occurs as a stimulus to action and as the source of certain undergoings.
It is something to react to:--to drink, to wash with, to put out fire
with, and also something that reacts unexpectedly to our reactions,
that makes us undergo disease, suffocation, drowning. In this twofold
way, water or anything else enters into experience. Such presence in
experience has of itself nothing to do with knowledge or consciousness;
nothing that is in the sense of depending upon them, though it has
everything to do with knowledge and consciousness in the sense that the
latter depends upon prior experience of this non-cognitive sort. Man's
experience is what it is because his response to things (even successful
response) and the reactions of things to his life, are so radically
different from knowledge. The difficulties and tragedies of life, the
stimuli to acquiring knowledge, lie in the radical disparity of
presence-in-experience and presence-in-knowing. Yet the immense
importance of knowledge experience, the fact that turning
presence-in-experience over into presence-in-a-knowledge-experience is
the sole mode of control of nature, has systematically hypnotized
European philosophy since the time of Socrates into thinking that all
experiencing is a mode of knowing, if not good knowledge, then a
low-grade or confused or implicit knowledge.

When water is an adequate stimulus to action or when its reactions
oppress and overwhelm us, it remains outside the scope of knowledge.
When, however, the bare presence of the thing (say, as optical stimulus)
ceases to operate directly as stimulus to response and begins to operate
in connection with a forecast of the consequences it will effect when
responded to, it begins to acquire meaning--to be known, to be an
object. It is noted as something which is wet, fluid, satisfies thirst,
allays uneasiness, etc. The conception that we begin with a known visual
quality which is thereafter enlarged by adding on qualities apprehended
by the other senses does not rest upon experience; it rests upon making
experience conform to the notion that every experience _must_ be a
cognitive noting. As long as the visual stimulus operates as a stimulus
on its own account, there is no apprehension, no noting, of color or
light at all. To much the greater portion of sensory stimuli we react in
precisely this wholly non-cognitive way. In the attitude of suspended
response in which consequences are anticipated, the direct stimulus
becomes a sign or index of something else--and thus matter of noting or
apprehension or acquaintance, or whatever term may be employed. This
difference (together, of course, with the consequences which go with it)
is the difference which the natural event of knowing makes to the
natural event of direct organic stimulation. It is no change of a
reality into an unreality, of an object into something subjective; it is
no secret, illicit, or epistemological transformation; it is a genuine
acquisition of new and distinctive features through entering into
relations with things with which it was not formerly connected--namely,
possible and future things.

But, replies some one so obsessed with the epistemological point of view
that he assumes that the prior account is a rival epistemology in
disguise, all this involves no change in Reality, no difference made to
Reality. Water was all the time all the things it is ever found out to
be. Its real nature has not been altered by knowing it; any such
alteration means a mis-knowing.

In reply let it be said,--once more and finally,--there is no assertion
or implication about _the_ real object or _the_ real world or _the_
reality. Such an assumption goes with that epistemological universe of
discourse which has to be abandoned in an empirical universe of
discourse. The change is of _a_ real object. An incident of the world
operating as a physiologically direct stimulus is assuredly a reality.
Responded to, it produces specific consequences in virtue of the
response. Water is not drunk unless somebody drinks it; it does not
quench thirst unless a thirsty person drinks it--and so on. Consequences
occur whether one is aware of them or not; they are integral facts in
experience. But let one of these consequences be anticipated and let it,
as anticipated, become an indispensable element in the stimulus, and
then there is a known object. It is not that knowing _produces_ a
change, but that it _is_ a change of the specific kind described. A
serial process, the successive portions of which are as such incapable
of simultaneous occurrence, is telescoped and condensed into an object,
a unified inter-reference of contemporaneous properties, most of which
express potentialities rather than completed data.

Because of this change, an _object_ possesses truth or error (which the
physical occurrence as such never has); it is classifiable as fact or
fantasy; it is of a sort or kind, expresses an essence or nature,
possesses implications, etc., etc. That is to say, it is marked by
specifiable _logical_ traits not found in physical occurrences as such.
Because objective idealisms have seized upon these traits as
constituting the very essence of Reality is no reason for proclaiming
that they are ready-made features of physical happenings, and hence for
maintaining that knowing is nothing but an appearance of things on a
stage for which "consciousness" supplies the footlights. For only the
epistemological predicament leads to "presentations" being regarded as
cognitions of things which were previously unpresented. In any empirical
situation of everyday life or of science, knowledge signifies something
stated or inferred of another thing. Visible water is not a more less
erroneous presentation of H_{2}O, but H_{2}O is a knowledge about the
thing we see, drink, wash with, sail on, and use for power.

A further point and the present phase of discussion terminates. Treating
knowledge as a presentative relation between the knower and object makes
it necessary to regard the mechanism of _presentation_ as constituting
the act of knowing. Since things may be presented in sense-perception,
in recollection, in imagination and in conception, and since the
mechanism in every one of these four styles of presentation is
sensory-cerebral the problem of knowing becomes a mind-body problem.[12]
The psychological, or physiological, mechanism of presentation involved
in seeing a chair, remembering what I ate yesterday for luncheon,
imagining the moon the size of a cart wheel, conceiving a mathematical
continuum is identified with the operation of knowing. The evil
consequences are twofold. The problem of the relation of mind and body
has become a part of the problem of the possibility of knowledge in
general, to the further complication of a matter already hopelessly
constrained. Meantime the actual process of knowing, namely, operations
of controlled observation, inference, reasoning, and testing, the only
process with _intellectual_ import, is dismissed as irrelevant to the
theory of knowing. The methods of knowing practised in daily life and
science are excluded from consideration in the philosophical theory of
knowing. Hence the constructions of the latter become more and more
elaborately artificial because there is no definite check upon them. It
would be easy to quote from epistemological writers statements to the
effect that these processes (which supply the only empirically
verifiable facts of knowing) are _merely_ inductive in character, or
even that they are of purely psychological significance. It would be
difficult to find a more complete inversion of the facts than in the
latter statement, since presentation constitutes in fact the
psychological affair. A confusion of logic with physiological physiology
has bred hybrid epistemology, with the amazing result that the technique
of effective inquiry is rendered irrelevant to the theory of knowing,
and those physical events involved in the occurrence of data for knowing
are treated as if they constituted the act of knowing.


V

What are the bearings of our discussion upon the conception of the
present scope and office of philosophy? What do our conclusions indicate
and demand with reference to philosophy itself? For the philosophy which
reaches such conclusions regarding knowledge and mind must apply them,
sincerely and whole-heartedly, to its idea of its own nature. For
philosophy claims to be one form or mode of knowing. If, then, the
conclusion is reached that knowing is a way of employing empirical
occurrences with respect to increasing power to direct the consequences
which flow from things, the application of the conclusion must be made
to philosophy itself. It, too, becomes not a contemplative survey of
existence nor an analysis of what is past and done with, but an outlook
upon future possibilities with reference to attaining the better and
averting the worse. Philosophy must take, with good grace, its own
medicine.

It is easier to state the negative results of the changed idea of
philosophy than the positive ones. The point that occurs to mind most
readily is that philosophy will have to surrender all pretension to be
peculiarly concerned with ultimate reality, or with reality as a
complete (i.e., completed) whole: with _the_ real object. The surrender
is not easy of achievement. The philosophic tradition that comes to us
from classic Greek thought and that was reinforced by Christian
philosophy in the Middle Ages discriminates philosophical knowing from
other modes of knowing by means of an alleged peculiarly intimate
concern with supreme, ultimate, true reality. To deny this trait to
philosophy seems to many to be the suicide of philosophy; to be a
systematic adoption of skepticism or agnostic positivism.

The pervasiveness of the tradition is shown in the fact that so vitally
a contemporary thinker as Bergson, who finds a philosophic revolution
involved in abandonment of the traditional identification of the truly
real with the fixed (an identification inherited from Greek thought),
does not find it in his heart to abandon the counterpart identification
of philosophy with search for the truly Real; and hence finds it
necessary to substitute an ultimate and absolute flux for an ultimate
and absolute permanence. Thus his great empirical services in calling
attention to the fundamental importance of considerations of time for
problems of life and mind get compromised with a mystic, non-empirical
"Intuition"; and we find him preoccupied with solving, by means of his
new idea of ultimate reality, the traditional problems of
realities-in-themselves and phenomena, matter and mind, free-will and
determinism, God and the world. Is not that another evidence of the
influence of the classic idea about philosophy?

Even the new realists are not content to take their realism as a plea
for approaching subject-matter directly instead of through the
intervention of epistemological apparatus; they find it necessary first
to determine the status of _the_ real object. Thus they too become
entangled in the problem of the possibility of error, dreams,
hallucinations, etc., in short, the problem of evil. For I take it that
an uncorrupted realism would accept such things as real events, and find
in them no other problems than those attending the consideration of any
real occurrence--namely, problems of structure, origin, and operation.

It is often said that pragmatism, unless it is content to be a
contribution to mere methodology, must develop a theory of Reality. But
the chief characteristic trait of the pragmatic notion of reality is
precisely that no theory of Reality in general, _ueberhaupt_, is possible
or needed. It occupies the position of an emancipated empiricism or a
thoroughgoing naive realism. It finds that "reality" is a _denotative_
term, a word used to designate indifferently everything that happens.
Lies, dreams, insanities, deceptions, myths, theories are all of them
just the events which they specifically are. Pragmatism is content to
take its stand with science; for science finds all such events to be
subject-matter of description and inquiry--just like stars and fossils,
mosquitoes and malaria, circulation and vision. It also takes its stand
with daily life, which finds that such things really have to be reckoned
with as they occur interwoven in the texture of events.

The only way in which the term reality can ever become more than a
blanket denotative term is through recourse to specific events in all
their diversity and thatness. Speaking summarily, I find that the
retention by philosophy of the notion of a Reality feudally superior to
the events of everyday occurrence is the chief source of the increasing
isolation of philosophy from common sense and science. For the latter
do not operate in any such region. As with them of old, philosophy in
dealing with real difficulties finds itself still hampered by reference
to realities more real, more ultimate, than those which directly happen.

I have said that identifying the cause of philosophy with the notion of
superior reality is the cause of an _increasing_ isolation from science
and practical life. The phrase reminds us that there was a time when the
enterprise of science and the moral interests of men both moved in a
universe invidiously distinguished from that of ordinary occurrence.
While all that happens is equally real--since it really
happens--happenings are not of equal worth. Their respective
consequences, their import, varies tremendously. Counterfeit money,
although real (or rather _because_ real), is really different from valid
circulatory medium, just as disease is really different from health;
different in specific structure and so different in consequences. In
occidental thought, the Greeks were the first to draw the distinction
between the genuine and the spurious in a generalized fashion and to
formulate and enforce its tremendous significance for the conduct of
life. But since they had at command no technique of experimental
analysis and no adequate technique of mathematical analysis, they were
compelled to treat the difference of the true and the false, the
dependable and the deceptive, as signifying two kinds of existence, the
truly real and the apparently real.

Two points can hardly be asserted with too much emphasis. The Greeks
were wholly right in the feeling that questions of good and ill, as far
as they fall within human control, are bound up with discrimination of
the genuine from the spurious, of "being" from what only pretends to be.
But because they lacked adequate instrumentalities for coping with this
difference in specific situations, they were forced to treat the
difference as a wholesale and rigid one. Science was concerned with
vision of ultimate and true reality; opinion was concerned with getting
along with apparent realities. Each had its appropriate region
permanently marked off. Matters of opinion could never become matters of
science; their intrinsic nature forbade. When the practice of science
went on under such conditions, science and philosophy were one and the
same thing. Both had to do with ultimate reality in its rigid and
insuperable difference from ordinary occurrences.

We have only to refer to the way in which medieval life wrought the
philosophy of an ultimate and supreme reality into the context of
practical life to realize that for centuries political and moral
interests were bound up with the distinction between the absolutely real
and the relatively real. The difference was no matter of a remote
technical philosophy, but one which controlled life from the cradle to
the grave, from the grave to the endless life after death. By means of a
vast institution, which in effect was state as well as church, the
claims of ultimate reality were enforced; means of access to it were
provided. Acknowledgment of The Reality brought security in this world
and salvation in the next. It is not necessary to report the story of
the change which has since taken place. It is enough for our purposes
to note that none of the modern philosophies of a superior reality, or
_the_ real object, idealistic or realistic, holds that its insight makes
a difference like that between sin and holiness, eternal condemnation
and eternal bliss. While in its own context the philosophy of ultimate
reality entered into the vital concerns of men, it now tends to be an
ingenious dialectic exercised in professorial corners by a few who have
retained ancient premises while rejecting their application to the
conduct of life.

The increased isolation from science of any philosophy identified with
the problem of _the_ real is equally marked. For the growth of science
has consisted precisely in the invention of an equipment, a technique of
appliances and procedures, which, accepting all occurrences as
homogeneously real, proceeds to distinguish the authenticated from the
spurious, the true from the false, by specific modes of treatment in
specific situations. The procedures of the trained engineer, of the
competent physician, of the laboratory expert, have turned out to be the
only ways of discriminating the counterfeit from the valid. And they
have revealed that the difference is not one of antecedent fixity of
existence, but one of mode of treatment and of the consequences thereon
attendant. After mankind has learned to put its trust in specific
procedures in order to make its discriminations between the false and
the true, philosophy arrogates to itself the enforcement of the
distinction at its own cost.

More than once, this essay has intimated that the counterpart of the
idea of invidiously real reality is the spectator notion of knowledge.
If the knower, however defined, is set over against the world to be
known, knowing consists in possessing a transcript, more or less
accurate but otiose, of real things. Whether this transcript is
presentative in character (as realists say) or whether it is by means of
states of consciousness which represent things (as subjectivists say),
is a matter of great importance in its own context. But, in another
regard, this difference is negligible in comparison with the point in
which both agree. Knowing is viewing from outside. But if it be true
that the self or subject of experience is part and parcel of the course
of events, it follows that the self _becomes_ a knower. It becomes a
mind in virtue of a distinctive way of partaking in the course of
events. The significant distinction is no longer between the knower
_and_ the world; it is between different ways of being in and of the
movement of things; between a brute physical way and a purposive,
intelligent way.

There is no call to repeat in detail the statements which have been
advanced. Their net purport is that the directive presence of future
possibilities in dealing with existent conditions is what is meant by
knowing; that the self becomes a knower or mind when anticipation of
future consequences operates as its stimulus. What we are now concerned
with is the effect of this conception upon the nature of philosophic
knowing.

As far as I can judge, popular response to pragmatic philosophy was
moved by two quite different considerations. By some it was thought to
provide a new species of sanctions, a new mode of apologetics, for
certain religious ideas whose standing had been threatened. By others,
it was welcomed because it was taken as a sign that philosophy was about
to surrender its otiose and speculative remoteness; that philosophers
were beginning to recognize that philosophy is of account only if, like
everyday knowing and like science, it affords guidance to action and
thereby makes a difference in the event. It was welcomed as a sign that
philosophers were willing to have the worth of their philosophizing
measured by responsible tests.

I have not seen this point of view emphasized, or hardly recognized, by
professional critics. The difference of attitude can probably be easily
explained. The epistemological universe of discourse is so highly
technical that only those who have been trained in the history of
thought think in terms of it. It did not occur, accordingly, to
non-technical readers to interpret the doctrine that the meaning and
validity of thought are fixed by differences made in consequences and in
satisfactoriness, to mean consequences in personal feelings. Those who
were professionally trained, however, took the statement to mean that
consciousness or mind in the mere act of looking at things modifies
them. It understood the doctrine of test of validity by consequences to
mean that apprehensions and conceptions are true if the modifications
affected by them were of an emotionally desirable tone.

Prior discussion should have made it reasonably clear that the source of
this misunderstanding lies in the neglect of temporal considerations.
The change made in things by the self in knowing is not immediate and,
so to say, cross-sectional. It is longitudinal--in the redirection given
to changes already going on. Its analogue is found in the changes which
take place in the development of, say, iron ore into a watch-spring, not
in those of the miracle of transubstantiation. For the static,
cross-sectional, non-temporal relation of subject and object, the
pragmatic hypothesis substitutes apprehension of a thing in terms of the
results in other things which it is tending to effect. For the unique
epistemological relation, it substitutes a practical relation of a
familiar type:--responsive behavior which changes in time the
subject-matter to which it applies. The unique thing about the
responsive behavior which constitutes knowing is the specific difference
which marks it off from other modes of response, namely, the part played
in it by anticipation and prediction. Knowing is the act, stimulated by
this foresight, of securing and averting consequences. The success of
the achievement measures the standing of the foresight by which response
is directed. The popular impression that pragmatic philosophy means that
philosophy shall develop ideas relevant to the actual crises of life,
ideas influential in dealing with them and tested by the assistance they
afford, is correct.

Reference to practical response suggests, however, another
misapprehension. Many critics have jumped at the obvious association of
the word pragmatic with practical. They have assumed that the intent is
to limit all knowledge, philosophic included, to promoting "action,"
understanding by action either just any bodily movement, or those bodily
movements which conduce to the preservation and grosser well-being of
the body. James' statement, that general conceptions must "cash in" has
been taken (especially by European critics) to mean that the end and
measure of intelligence lies in the narrow and coarse utilities which it
produces. Even an acute American thinker, after first criticizing
pragmatism as a kind of idealistic epistemology, goes on to treat it as
a doctrine which regards intelligence as a lubricating oil facilitating
the workings of the body.

One source of the misunderstanding is suggested by the fact that
"cashing in" to James meant that a general idea must always be capable
of verification in specific existential cases. The notion of "cashing
in" says nothing about the breadth or depth of the specific
consequences. As an empirical doctrine, it could not say anything about
them in general; the specific cases must speak for themselves. If one
conception is verified in terms of eating beefsteak, and another in
terms of a favorable credit balance in the bank, that is not because of
anything in the theory, but because of the specific nature of the
conceptions in question, and because there exist particular events like
hunger and trade. If there are also existences in which the most liberal
esthetic ideas and the most generous moral conceptions can be verified
by specific embodiment, assuredly so much the better. The fact that a
strictly empirical philosophy was taken by so many critics to imply an
_a priori_ dogma about the kind of consequences capable of existence is
evidence, I think, of the inability of many philosophers to think in
concretely empirical terms. Since the critics were themselves accustomed
to get results by manipulating the concepts of "consequences" and of
"practice," they assumed that even a would-be empiricist must be doing
the same sort of thing. It will, I suppose, remain for a long time
incredible to some that a philosopher should really intend to go to
specific experiences to determine of what scope and depth practice
admits, and what sort of consequences the world permits to come into
being. Concepts are so clear; it takes so little time to develop their
implications; experiences are so confused, and it requires so much time
and energy to lay hold of them. And yet these same critics charge
pragmatism with adopting subjective and emotional standards!

As a matter of fact, the pragmatic theory of intelligence means that the
function of mind is to project new and more complex ends--to free
experience from routine and from caprice. Not the use of thought to
accomplish purposes already given either in the mechanism of the body or
in that of the existent state of society, but the use of intelligence to
liberate and liberalize action, is the pragmatic lesson. Action
restricted to given and fixed ends may attain great technical
efficiency; but efficiency is the only quality to which it can lay
claim. Such action is mechanical (or becomes so), no matter what the
scope of the preformed end, be it the Will of God or _Kultur_. But the
doctrine that intelligence develops within the sphere of action for the
sake of possibilities not yet given is the opposite of a doctrine of
mechanical efficiency. Intelligence _as_ intelligence is inherently
forward-looking; only by ignoring its primary function does it become a
mere means for an end already given. The latter _is_ servile, even when
the end is labeled moral, religious, or esthetic. But action directed to
ends to which the agent has not previously been attached inevitably
carries with it a quickened and enlarged spirit. A pragmatic
intelligence is a creative intelligence, not a routine mechanic.

All this may read like a defense of pragmatism by one concerned to make
out for it the best case possible. Such is not, however, the intention.
The purpose is to indicate the extent to which intelligence frees action
from a mechanically instrumental character. Intelligence is, indeed,
instrumental _through_ action to the determination of the qualities of
future experience. But the very fact that the concern of intelligence is
with the future, with the as-yet-unrealized (and with the given and the
established only as conditions of the realization of possibilities),
makes the action in which it takes effect generous and liberal; free of
spirit. Just that action which extends and approves intelligence has an
intrinsic value of its own in being instrumental:--the intrinsic value
of being informed with intelligence in behalf of the enrichment of life.
By the same stroke, intelligence becomes truly liberal: knowing is a
human undertaking, not an esthetic appreciation carried on by a refined
class or a capitalistic possession of a few learned specialists, whether
men of science or of philosophy.

More emphasis has been put upon what philosophy is not than upon what
it may become. But it is not necessary, it is not even desirable, to set
forth philosophy as a scheduled program. There are human difficulties of
an urgent, deep-seated kind which may be clarified by trained
reflection, and whose solution may be forwarded by the careful
development of hypotheses. When it is understood that philosophic
thinking is caught up in the actual course of events, having the office
of guiding them towards a prosperous issue, problems will abundantly
present themselves. Philosophy will not solve these problems; philosophy
is vision, imagination, reflection--and these functions, apart from
action, modify nothing and hence resolve nothing. But in a complicated
and perverse world, action which is not informed with vision,
imagination, and reflection, is more likely to increase confusion and
conflict than to straighten things out. It is not easy for generous and
sustained reflection to become a guiding and illuminating method in
action. Until it frees itself from identification with problems which
are supposed to depend upon Reality as such, or its distinction from a
world of Appearance, or its relation to a Knower as such, the hands of
philosophy are tied. Having no chance to link its fortunes with a
responsible career by suggesting things to be tried, it cannot identify
itself with questions which actually arise in the vicissitudes of life.
Philosophy recovers itself when it ceases to be a device for dealing
with the problems of philosophers and becomes a method, cultivated by
philosophers, for dealing with the problems of men.

Emphasis must vary with the stress and special impact of the troubles
which perplex men. Each age knows its own ills, and seeks its own
remedies. One does not have to forecast a particular program to note
that the central need of any program at the present day is an adequate
conception of the nature of intelligence and its place in action.
Philosophy cannot disavow responsibility for many misconceptions of the
nature of intelligence which now hamper its efficacious operation. It
has at least a negative task imposed upon it. It must take away the
burdens which it has laid upon the intelligence of the common man in
struggling with his difficulties. It must deny and eject that
intelligence which is naught but a distant eye, registering in a remote
and alien medium the spectacle of nature and life. To enforce the fact
that the emergence of imagination and thought is relative to the
connexion of the sufferings of men with their doings is of itself to
illuminate those sufferings and to instruct those doings. To catch mind
in its connexion with the entrance of the novel into the course of the
world is to be on the road to see that intelligence is itself the most
promising of all novelties, the revelation of the meaning of that
transformation of past into future which is the reality of every
present. To reveal intelligence as the organ for the guidance of this
transformation, the sole director of its quality, is to make a
declaration of present untold significance for action. To elaborate
these convictions of the connexion of intelligence with what men undergo
because of their doings and with the emergence and direction of the
creative, the novel, in the world is of itself a program which will keep
philosophers busy until something more worth while is forced upon them.
For the elaboration has to be made through application to all the
disciplines which have an intimate connexion with human conduct:--to
logic, ethics, esthetics, economics, and the procedure of the sciences
formal and natural.

I also believe that there is a genuine sense in which the enforcement of
the pivotal position of intelligence in the world and thereby in control
of human fortunes (so far as they are manageable) is the peculiar
problem in the problems of life which come home most closely to
ourselves--to ourselves living not merely in the early twentieth century
but in the United States. It is easy to be foolish about the connexion
of thought with national life. But I do not see how any one can question
the distinctively national color of English, or French, or German
philosophies. And if of late the history of thought has come under the
domination of the German dogma of an inner evolution of ideas, it
requires but a little inquiry to convince oneself that that dogma itself
testifies to a particularly nationalistic need and origin. I believe
that philosophy in America will be lost between chewing a historic cud
long since reduced to woody fiber, or an apologetics for lost causes
(lost to natural science), or a scholastic, schematic formalism, unless
it can somehow bring to consciousness America's own needs and its own
implicit principle of successful action.

This need and principle, I am convinced, is the necessity of a
deliberate control of policies by the method of intelligence, an
intelligence which is not the faculty of intellect honored in
text-books and neglected elsewhere, but which is the sum-total of
impulses, habits, emotions, records, and discoveries which forecast what
is desirable and undesirable in future possibilities, and which contrive
ingeniously in behalf of imagined good. Our life has no background of
sanctified categories upon which we may fall back; we rely upon
precedent as authority only to our own undoing--for with us there is
such a continuously novel situation that final reliance upon precedent
entails some class interest guiding us by the nose whither it will.
British empiricism, with its appeal to what has been in the past, is,
after all, only a kind of _a priorism_. For it lays down a fixed rule
for future intelligence to follow; and only the immersion of philosophy
in technical learning prevents our seeing that this is the essence of _a
priorism_.

We pride ourselves upon being realistic, desiring a hardheaded
cognizance of facts, and devoted to mastering the means of life. We
pride ourselves upon a practical idealism, a lively and easily moved
faith in possibilities as yet unrealized, in willingness to make
sacrifice for their realization. Idealism easily becomes a sanction of
waste and carefulness, and realism a sanction of legal formalism in
behalf of things as they are--the rights of the possessor. We thus tend
to combine a loose and ineffective optimism with assent to the doctrine
of take who take can: a deification of power. All peoples at all times
have been narrowly realistic in practice and have then employed
idealization to cover up in sentiment and theory their brutalities. But
never, perhaps, has the tendency been so dangerous and so tempting as
with ourselves. Faith in the power of intelligence to imagine a future
which is the projection of the desirable in the present, and to invent
the instrumentalities of its realization, is our salvation. And it is a
faith which must be nurtured and made articulate: surely a sufficiently
large task for our philosophy.




REFORMATION OF LOGIC

ADDISON W. MOORE


I

In a general survey of the development of logical theory one is struck
by the similarity, not to say identity, of the indictments which
reformers, since the days of Aristotle, have brought against it. The
most fundamental of these charges are: first, that the theory of logic
has left it formal and with little significance for the advancement of
science and the conduct of society; second, that it has great difficulty
in avoiding the predicament of logical operations that are merely
labored reproductions of non-logical activities and therefore
tautologous and trifling, or of logical operations that are so far
removed from immediate, non-logical experience that they are irrelevant;
third, that logical theory has had trouble in finding room in its own
household for both truth and error; each crowds out the other.

The identity of these indictments regardless of the general
philosophical faith, empiricism, or rationalism, realism, or idealism to
which the reformer or the logic to be reformed has belonged, suggests
that whatever the differences in the doctrines of these various
philosophic traditions, they possess a common ground from which these
common difficulties spring.

It is the conviction of a number who are at present attempting to rid
logic of these ancient disabilities that their common source is to be
found in a lack of continuity between the acts of intelligence (or to
avoid the dangers of hypostasis, intelligent acts) and other acts;
between logical conduct and other conduct. So wide, indeed, is this
breach, that often little remains of the act of knowing but the name. It
may still be called an act, but it has no describable instruments nor
technique of operation. It is an indefinable and often mystical
performance of which only the results can be stated. In recent logical
discussion this techniqueless act of knowing has been properly enough
transformed into an indefinable "external relation" in which an entity
called a knower stands to another entity called the known.

For many centuries this breach between the operations of intelligence
and other operations has been closed by various metaphysical devices
with the result that logic has been a hybrid science,--half logic, half
metaphysics and epistemology. So great has been the momentum of the
metaphysical tradition that long after we have begun to discover the
connection between logical and non-logical operations its methods remain
to plague us. Efforts to heal the breach without a direct appeal to
metaphysical agencies have been made by attempting a complete logicizing
of all operations. But besides requiring additional metaphysics to
effect it, the procedure is as fatal to continuity as is an impassable
disjunction. Continuity demands distinction as well as connection. It
requires the development, the _growth_ of old material and functions
into new forms.

Driven by the difficulties of this complete logicization, which are as
serious as those of isolation, logical theory was obliged to reinstate
some sort of distinction. This it did by resorting to the categories of
"explicit" and "implicit." All so-called non-logical operations were
regarded as "implicitly" logical. And, paradoxically, logical operations
had for their task the transformation of the implicit into the explicit.

An adequate account of the origin and continuance of this isolation of
the conduct of intelligence from other conduct is too long a story to be
told here. Suffice it to recall that in the society in which the
distinction between immediate and reflective experience, between opinion
and science, between percepts and universals was first made,
intelligence was largely the possession of a special and privileged
class removed in great measure from hand-to-hand contact with nature and
with much of society. Because it did not fully participate in the
operations of nature and society intelligence could not become fully
domesticated, i.e., fully naturalized and socialized in its world. It
was a charmed spectator of the cosmic and social drama. Doubtless when
Greek intelligence discovered the distinction between immediate and
reflective experience--possibly the most momentous discovery in
history--"the world," as Kant says of the speculations of Thales, "must
suddenly have appeared in a new light." But not recognizing the full
significance of this discovery, ideas, universals, became but a wondrous
spectacle for the eye of reason. They brought, to be sure, blessed
relief from the bewildering and baffling flux of perception. But it was
the relief of sanctuary, not of victory.

That the brilliant speculations of Greek intelligence were barren
because there was no technique for testing and applying them in detail
is an old story. But it is merely a restatement, not a solution, of the
pertinent question. This is: why did not Greek intelligence develop such
a technique? The answer lies in the fact that the technique of
intelligence is to be found precisely in the details of the operations
of nature and of human conduct from which an aristocratic intelligence
is always in large measure shut off. Intelligence cannot operate
fruitfully in a vacuum. It must be incarnate. It must, as Hegel said,
have "hands and feet." When we turn to the history of modern science the
one thing that stands out is that it was not until the point was reached
where intelligence was ready (continuing the Hegelian figure) to thrust
its hands into the vitals of nature and society that it began to acquire
a real control over its operations.

In default of such controlling technique there was nothing to be done
with this newly found instrument of intelligence--the universal--but to
retain it as an object of contemplation and of worshipful adoration.
This involved, of course, its hypostasis as the metaphysical reality of
supreme importance. With this, the only difference between "opinion" and
"science" became one of the kind of objects known. That universals were
known by reason and particulars by sense was of little more logical
significance than that sounds are known by the ear and smells by the
nose. Particulars and universals were equally given. If the latter
required some abstraction this was regarded as merely auxiliary to the
immediate vision, as sniffing is to the perception of odor. That
universals should or could be conceived as experimental, as hypotheses,
was, when translated into later theology, the sin against the Holy
Ghost.

However, the fact that the particulars in the world of opinion were the
stimuli to the "recollection" of universals and that the latter in turn
were the patterns, the forms, for the particulars, opened the way in
actual practice for the exercise of a great deal of the controlling
function of the universals. But the failure to recognize this control
value of the universal as fundamental, made it necessary for the
universal to exercise its function surreptitiously, in the disguise of a
pattern and in the clumsy garb of imitation and participation.

With perceptions, desires, and impulses relegated to the world of
opinion and shadows, and with the newly discovered instrument of
knowledge turned into an object, the knower was stripped of all his
knowing apparatus and was left an empty, scuttled entity definable and
describable only as "a knower." The knower must know, even if he had
nothing to know with. Hence the mystical almost indefinable character of
the knowing act or relation. I say "almost indefinable"; for as an act
it had, of course, to have some sort of conceptualized form. And this
form vision naturally furnished. "Naturally," because intelligence was
so largely contemplative, and vision so largely immediate, unanalyzed,
and diaphanous. There was, to be sure, the concept of effluxes. But
this was a statement of the fact of vision in terms of its results, not
of the process itself. Thus it was that the whole terminology of knowing
which we still use was moulded and fixed upon a very crude conception of
one of the constituents of its process. There can be no doubt that this
terminology has added much to the inertia against which the advance of
logical theory has worked. It would be interesting to see what would be
the effect upon logical theory of the substitution of an auditory or
olfactory terminology for visual; or of a visual terminology revised to
agree with modern scientific analysis of the _act_ of vision as
determined by its connections with other functions.

With the act of knowing stripped of its technique and left a bare,
unique, indescribable act or relation, the foundations for
epistemological and metaphysical logic were laid. That Greek logic
escaped the ravages of epistemology was due to the saving materialism in
its metaphysical conception of mind and to the steadfastness of the
aristocratic regime. But when medieval theology and Cartesian
metaphysics had destroyed the last remnant of metaphysical connection
between the knowing mind and nature, and when revolutions had torn the
individual from his social moorings, the stage for epistemological logic
was fully set. I do not mean to identify the epistemological situation
with the Cartesian disjunction. That disjunction was but the
metaphysical expression of the one which constitutes the real foundation
of epistemology--the disjunction, namely, between the act of knowing and
other acts.

From this point logic has followed one of two general courses. It has
sought continuity by attempting to reduce non-logical things and
operations to terms of logical operations, i.e., to sensations or
universals or both; or it has attempted to exclude entirely the act of
knowing from logic and to transfer logical distinctions and operations,
and even the attributes of truth and error to objects which,
significantly enough, are still composed of these same hypostatized
logical processes. The first course results in an epistemological logic
of some form of the idealistic tradition, rationalism, sensationalism,
or transcendentalism, depending upon whether universals, or sensations,
or a combination of both, is made fundamental in the constitution of the
object. The second course yields an epistemological logic of the
realistic type,--again, sensational or rationalistic (mathematical), or
a combination of the two--a sort of realistic transcendentalism. Each
type has essentially the same difficulties with the processes of
inference, with the problem of change, with truth and error, and, on the
ethical side, with good and evil.

With the processes of knowing converted into objects, and with the act
of knowing reduced to a unique and external relation between the
despoiled knower and the objects made from its own hypostatized
processes, all knowing becomes in the end immediate. All attempts at an
inference that is anything more than an elaborated and often confused
restatement of non-logical operations break down. The associational
inference of empiricism, the subsumptive inference of rationalism, the
transcendental inference of objective idealism, the analytical
inference of neo-realism--all alike face the dilemma of an inference
that is trifling or miraculous, tautologous or false. Where the knower
and its object are so constituted that the only relation in which the
latter can stand to the former is that of presence or absence, and if to
be present is to be known, how, as Plato asked, can there be any false
knowing?

For those who accept the foregoing general diagnosis the prescription is
obvious. The present task of logical theory is the restoration of the
continuity of the act and agent of knowing with other acts and agents.
But this is not to be done by merely furnishing the act of knowing with
a body and a nervous system. If the nervous system be regarded as only
an onlooking, beholding nervous system, if no connection be made between
the logical operations of a nervous system and its other operations a
nervous system has no logical advantage over a purely psychical mind.

It was to be expected that this movement toward restoration of
continuity made in the name of "instrumental" or "experimental" logic
would be regarded, alike, by the logics of rationalism and empiricism,
of idealism and of realism, as an attempt to rob intelligence of its own
unique and proper character; to reduce it to a merely "psychological"
and "existential" affair; to leave no place for genuine intellectual
interest and activity; and to make science a series of more or less
respectable adventures. The counter thesis is, that this restoration is
truly a restoration--not a despoliation of the character and rights of
intelligence; that only such a restoration can preserve the unique
function of intelligence, can prevent it from becoming merely
"existential," and can provide a distinct place for intellectual and
scientific interest and activity. It does not, however, promise to
remove the stigma of "adventure" from science. Every experiment is an
adventure; and it is precisely the experimental character of scientific
logic that distinguishes it from scholasticism, medieval or modern.


II

First it is clear that a reform of logic based upon the restoration of
knowing to its connections with other acts will begin with a chapter
containing an account of these other operations and the general
character of this connection.[13] Logical theory has been truncated. It
has tried to begin and end in the middle, with the result that it has
ended in the air. Logic presents the curious anachronism of a science
which attempts to deal with its subject-matter apart from what it comes
from and what comes from it.

The objection that such a chapter on the conditions and genesis of the
operations of knowing belongs to psychology, only shows how firmly fixed
is the discontinuity we are trying to escape. As we have seen, the
original motive for leaving this account of genesis to psychology was
that the act of knowing was supposed to originate in a purely psychical
mind. Such an origin was of course embarrassing to logic, which aimed
to be scientific. The old opposition between origin and validity was due
to the kind of origin assumed and the kind of validity necessitated by
the origin. One may well be excused for evading the question of how
ideas, originated in a purely psychical mind, can, in Kant's phrase,
"have objective validity," by throwing out the question of origin
altogether. Whatever difficulties remain for validity after this
expulsion could not be greater than those of the task of combining the
objective validity of ideas with their subjective origin.

The whole of this chapter on the connection between logical and
non-logical operations cannot be written here. But its central point
would be that these other acts with which the act of knowing must have
continuity are just the operations of our unreflective conduct. Note
that it is "unreflective," not "unconscious," nor yet merely
"instinctive" conduct. It is our perceptive, remembering, imagining,
desiring, loving, hating conduct. Note also that we do not say
"psychical" or "physical," nor "psycho-physical" conduct. These terms
stand for certain distinctions in logical conduct,[14] and we are here
concerned with the character of non-logical conduct which is to be
distinguished from, and yet kept in closest continuity with, logical
conduct.

If, here, the metaphysical logician should ask: "Are you not in this
assumption of a world of reflective and unreflective conduct and
affection, and of a world of beings in interaction, begging a whole
system of metaphysics?" the reply is that if it is a metaphysics bad
for logic, it will keep turning up in the course of logical theory as a
constant source of trouble. On the other hand, if logic encounters grave
difficulties when it attempts to get on without it, its assumption, for
the purposes of logic, has all the justification possible.

Again it will be urged that this alleged non-logical conduct, in so far
as it involves perception, memory, and anticipation, is already
cognitive and logical; or if the act of knowing is to be entirely
excluded from logic, then, in so far as what is left involves objective
"terms and relations," it, also, is already logical. And it may be
thought strange that a logic based upon the restoration of continuity
between the act of knowing and other acts should here be insisting on
distinction and separation. The point is fundamental; and must be
disposed of before we go on. First, we must observe that the unity
secured by making all conscious conduct logical turns out, on
examination, to be more nominal than real. As we have already seen, this
attempt at a complete logicizing of all conduct is forced at once to
introduce the distinction of "explicit" and "implicit," of "conscious
and unconscious" or "subconscious" logic. Some cynics have found that
this suggests dividing triangles into explicit and implicit triangles,
or into triangles and sub-triangles.

Doubtless the attempt to make all perceptions, memories, and
anticipations, and even instincts and habits, into implicit or
subconscious inference is an awkward effort to restore the continuity of
logical and non-logical conduct. Its awkwardness consists in attempting
to secure this continuity by the method of subsumptive identity, instead
of finding it in a transitive continuity of function;--instead of seeing
that perception, memory, and anticipation _become_ logical processes
when they are employed in a process of inquiry, whose purpose is to
relieve the difficulties into which these operations in their function
as direct stimuli have fallen. Logical conduct is constituted by the
cooeperation of these processes for the improvement of their further
operation. To regard perception, memory, and imagination as implicit
forms or as sub-species of logical operation is much like conceiving the
movements of our fingers and arms as implicit or imperfect species of
painting, or swimming.

Moreover, this doctrine of universal logicism teaches that when that
which is perfect is come, imperfection shall be done away. This should
mean that when painting becomes completely "explicit" and perfect,
fingers and hands shall disappear. Perfect painting will be the pure
essence of painting. And this interpretation is not strained; for this
logic expressly teaches that in the perfected real system all temporal
elements are unessential to logical operations. They are, of course,
_psychologically_ necessary for finite beings, who can never have
perfectly logical experiences. But, from the standpoint of a completely
logicized experience, all finite, temporal processes are accidents, not
essentials, of logical operations.

The fact that the processes of perception, memory, and anticipation are
transformed in their logical operation into sensations and universals,
terms, and relations, and, as such, become the subject-matter of logical
theory, does not mean that they have lost their mediating character, and
have become merely objects of logical contemplation at large. Sensations
or sense-data, and ideas, terms and relations, are the subject-matter of
logical theory for the reason that they sometimes succeed and sometimes
fail in their logical operations. And it is the business of logical
theory to diagnose the conditions of this success and failure. If, in
writing, my pen becomes defective and is made an object of inquiry, it
does not therefore lose all its character as a pen and become merely an
object at large. It is _as_ an instrument of writing that it is
investigated. So, sense-data, universals, terms, and relations as
subject-matter of logic are investigated in their character _as_
mediators of the ambiguities and conflicts, of non-logical experience.

If the operations of habit, instinct, perceptions, memory, and
anticipation _become_ logical, when, instead of operating as direct
stimuli, they are employed in a process of inquiry, we must next ask:
(1) under what conditions do they pass over into this process of
inquiry? (2) what modifications of operation do they undergo, what new
forms do they take, and what new results do they produce in their
logical operations?

If the act of inquiry be not superimposed, it must arise out of some
specific condition in the course of non-logical conduct. Once more, if
the alarm be sounded at this proposal to find the origin of logical in
non-logical operations it must be summarily answered by asking if the
one who raises the cry finds it impossible to imagine that one who is
not hungry, or angry, or patriotic, or wise may become so. Non-logical
conduct is not the abstract formal contradictory of logical conduct any
more than present satiety or foolishness is the contradictory of later
hunger or wisdom, or than anger at one person contradicts cordiality to
another, or to the same person, later. The old bogie of the logical
irrelevance of origin was due to the inability to conceive continuity
except in the form of identity in which there was no place for the
notion of _growth_.

The conditions under which non-logical conduct _becomes_ logical are
familiar to those who have followed the doctrines of experimental logic
as expounded in the discussions of the past few years. The
transformation begins at the point where non-logical processes instead
of operating as direct unambiguous stimuli and response become ambiguous
with consequent inhibition of conduct. But again this does not mean that
at this juncture the non-logical processes quit the field and give place
to a totally new faculty and process called reason. They stay on the
job. But there is a change in the job, which now is to get rid of this
ambiguity. This modification of the task requires, of course,
corresponding modification and adaptation of these operations. They take
on the form of sensations and universals, terms and relations, data and
hypotheses. This modification of function and form constitutes "reason"
or, better, reasoning.

Here some one will ask, "Whence comes this ambiguity? How can a mere
perception or memory as such be ambiguous? Must it not be ambiguous to,
or for, something, or some one?" The point is well taken. But it should
not be taken to imply that the ambiguity is for a merely onlooking,
beholding psychical mind--especially when the perception is itself
regarded as an act of beholding. Nor are we any better off if we suppose
the beholding mind to be equipped with a faculty of reason in the form
of the principle of "contradiction." For this throws no light on the
origin and meaning of ambiguity. And if we seek to make all perceptions
as such ambiguous and contradictory, in order to make room for, and
justify, the operations of reason, other difficulties at once beset us.
When we attempt to remove this specific ambiguity of perceptive conduct
we shall be forced, before we are through, to appeal back to perception,
which we have condemned as inherently contradictory, both for data and
for verification.

However, the insistence that perception must be ambiguous to, or for,
something beyond itself is well grounded. And this was recognized in the
statement that it is equivocal as a stimulus in conduct. There need be
no mystery as to how such equivocation arises. That there is such a
thing as a conduct at all means that there are certain beings who have
acquired definite ways of responding to one another. It is important to
observe that these forms of interaction--instinct and habit, perception,
memory, etc.--are not to be located in either of the interacting beings
but are functions of both. The conception of these operations as the
private functions of an organism is the forerunner of the
epistemological predicament. It results in a conception of knowing as
wholly the act of a knower apart from the known. This is the beginning
of epistemology.

But to whatever extent interacting beings have acquired definite and
specific ways of behavior toward one another it is equally plain--the
theory of external relations notwithstanding--that in this process of
interaction these ways of behavior, of stimulus and response, undergo
modification. If the world consisted of two interacting beings, it is
conceivable that the modifications of behavior might occur in such close
continuity of relation to each of the interacting beings that the
adjustment would be very continuous, and there might be little or no
ambiguity and conflict. But in a world where any two interacting beings
have innumerable interactions with innumerable other beings and in all
these interactions modifications are effected, it is to be expected that
changes in the behavior of each or both will occur, so marked that they
are bound to result in breaks in the continuity of stimulus and
response--even to the point of tragedy. However, the tragedy is seldom
so great that the ambiguity extends to the whole field of conduct.
Except in extreme pathological cases (and in epistemology), complete
skepticism and aboulia do not occur. Ambiguity always falls within a
field or direction of conduct, and though it may extend much further,
and must extend some further than the point at which equivocation
occurs, yet it is never ubiquitous. An ambiguity concerning the action
of gravitation is no less specific than one regarding color or sound;
indeed, the one may be found to involve the other.

Logical conduct is, then, conduct which aims to remove ambiguity and
inhibition in unreflective conduct. The instruments of its operation are
forged from the processes of unreflective conduct by such modification
and adaptation as is required to enable them to accomplish this end.
Since these logical operations sometimes fail and sometimes succeed they
become the subject-matter of logical theory. But the technique of this
second involution of reflection is not supplied by some new and unique
entity. It also is derived from modifications of previous operations of
both reflective and non-reflective conduct.

While emphasizing the continuity between non-logical and logical
operations, we must keep in mind that their distinction is of equal
importance. Confusion at this point is fatal. A case in point is the
confusion between non-logical and logical observation. The results of
non-logical observation, e.g., looking and listening, are direct stimuli
to further conduct. But the purpose and result of _logical_ observation
are to secure data, not as direct stimuli to immediate conduct but as
stimuli to the construction or verification of hypotheses which are the
responses of the _logical_ operation of imagination to the data.
Hypotheses are anticipatory. But they differ from non-logical
anticipation in that they are tentatively, experimentally, i.e.,
logically anticipatory. The non-logical operations of memory and
anticipation lack just this tentative, experimental character. When we
confuse the logical and non-logical operations of these processes the
result is either that logical processes will merely repeat non-logical
operations in which case we have inference that is tautologous and
trifling; or the non-logical will attempt to perform logical operations,
and our inference is miraculous. If we seek to escape by an appeal to
habit, as in empiricism, or to an objective universal, as in idealism
and neo-realism, we are merely disguising, not removing the miracle.

It may be thought that this confusion would be most likely to occur in a
theory which teaches that non-logical processes are carried over into
logical operations. But this overlooks the fact that the theory
recognizes at the same time that these non-logical operations undergo
modification and adaptation to the demands of the logical enterprise. On
the other hand, those who make all perceptions, memory, and
anticipation, not to speak of habit and instinct, logical, have no basis
for the distinction between logical and non-logical results; while those
who refuse to give the operations of perception, memory, etc., any place
in logic can make no connections between logical and non-logical
conduct. Nor are they able to distinguish in a specific case truth from
error.

In all logics that fail to make this connection and distinction between
logical and non-logical operations there is no criterion for data. If
ultimate simplicity is demanded of the data, there is no standard for
simplicity except the _minimum sensibile_ or the _minimum intelligibile_
which have recently been resurrected. On the other hand, where
simplicity is waived, as in the logic of objective idealism, there is
still no criterion of logical adequacy. But if we understand by
_logical_ data not anything that happens to be given, but something
_sought_ as material for an hypothesis, i.e., a proposed solution
(proposition) of an ambiguous object of conduct and affection, then
whatever results of observation meet this requirement are logical data.
And whenever data are found from which an hypothesis is constructed that
succeeds in abolishing the ambiguity, they are simple, adequate, and
true data.

No scientist, not even the mathematician, in the specific investigations
of his field, seeks for ultimate and irreducible data at large. And if
he found them he could not use them. It is only in his metaphysical
personality that he longs for such data. The data which the scientist in
any specific inquiry seeks are the data which suggest a solution of the
question in which the investigation starts. When these data are found
they are the "irreducibles" of that problem. But they are relative to
the question and answer of the investigation. Their simplicity consists
in the fact that they are the data from which a conclusion can be made.
The term "simple data" is tautologous. That one is in need of data more
"simple" means that one is in need of new data from which an hypothesis
can be formed.

It is true that the actual working elements with which the scientist
operates are always complex in the sense that they are always something
more than elements in any specific investigation. They have other
connections and alliances. And this complexity is at once the despair
and the hope of the scientist; his despair, because he cannot be sure
when these other connections will interfere with the allegiance of his
elements to his particular undertaking; his hope, because when these
alliances are revealed they often make the elements more efficient or
exhibit capacities which will make them elements in some other
undertaking for which elements have not been found. A general resolves
his army into so many marching, eating, shooting units; but these
elements are something more than marching, shooting units. They are
husbands and fathers, brothers and lovers, protestants and catholics,
artists and artisans, etc. And the militarist can never be sure at what
point these other activities--I do not say merely external
relationships--may upset his calculations. If he could find units whose
whole and sole nature is to march and shoot, his problem would be, in
some respects, simpler, though in others more complex. As it is, he is
constantly required to ask how far these other functions will support
and at what point they will rebel at the marching and shooting.

Such, in principle, is the situation in every scientific inquiry. When
the failure of the old elements occurs it is common to say that
"simpler" elements are needed. And doubtless in his perplexity the
scientist may long for elements which have no entangling alliances,
whose sole nature and character is to be elements. But what in fact he
actually seeks in every specific investigation are elements whose nature
and functions _will not interfere_ with their serving as units in the
enterprise in hand. But from some other standpoint these new elements
may be vastly more complex than the old, as is the case with the modern
as compared with the ancient atom. When the elements are secured which
operate successfully, the non-interfering connections can be ignored and
the elements can be treated as if they did not have them,--as if they
were metaphysically simple. But there is no criterion for metaphysical
simplicity except operative simplicity. To be simple is to serve as an
element, and to serve as an element is to be simple.

It is scarcely necessary in view of the foregoing to add that the data
of science are not "sense-data," if by sense-data be meant data which
are the result of the operations of sense organs alone. Data are as much
or more the result of operations, first, of the motor system of the
scientist's own organism, and second, of all of the machinery of his
laboratory which he calls to his aid. Whether named after the way they
are obtained, or after the way they are used, data are quite as much
"motor" as "sense." Nor, on the other hand, are there any purely
intellectual data--not even for the mathematician. Some mathematicians
may insist that their symbols and diagrams are merely stimuli to the
platonic operation of pure and given universals. But until mathematics
can get on without these symbols or any substitutes the intuitionist in
mathematics will continue to have his say.

Wherever the discontinuity between logical operations and their acts
persists, all the difficulties with data have their correlative
difficulties with hypotheses. In Mill's logic the account of the origin
of hypotheses oscillates between the view that they are happy guesses
of a mind composed of states of consciousness, and the view that they
are "found in the facts" or are "impressed on the mind by the facts."
The miracle of relevancy required in the first position drives the
theory to the second. And the tautologous, useless nature of the
hypothesis in the second forces the theory back to the first view. In
this predicament, little wonder Mill finds that the easiest way out is
to make hypotheses "auxiliary" and not indigenous to inference. But this
exclusion of hypotheses as essential leaves his account of inference to
oscillate between the association of particulars of nominalism and
scholastic formalism, from both of which Mill, with the dignified zeal
of a prophet, set out to rescue logic.

Mill's rejection of hypotheses formed by a mind whose operations have no
discoverable continuity with the operations of things, or by things
whose actions are independent of the operations of ideas, is forever
sound. But his acceptance of the discontinuity between the acts of
knowing and the operation of things, and the conclusion that these two
conceptions of the origin and nature of hypotheses are the only
alternatives, were the source of most of his difficulties.


III

The efforts of classic empiricism at the reform of logic have long been
an easy mark for idealistic reformers. But it is interesting to observe
that the idealistic logic from the beginning finds itself in precisely
the same predicament regarding hypotheses;--they are trifling or false.
And in the end they are made, as in Mill, "accidents" of inference.

The part played by Kant's sense-material and the categories is almost
the reverse of those of data and hypothesis in science. Sense material
and the categories are the given elements from which objects are somehow
made; in scientific procedure data and hypothesis are derived through
logical observation and imagination from the content and operations of
immediate experience. In Kant's account of the process by which objects
are constructed we are nowhere in sight of any experimental procedure.
Indeed, the real act of knowing, the selection and application of the
category to the sense matter, is, as Kant in the end had to confess,
"hidden away in the depths of the soul." Made in the presence of the
elaborate machinery of knowing which Kant had constructed, this
confession is almost tragic; and the tragic aspect grows when we find
that the result of the "hidden" operation is merely a phenomenal object.
That this should be the case, however, is not strange. A phenomenal
object is the inevitable correlate of the "hidden" act of knowing
whether in a "transcendental" or in an "empirical" logic. In vain do we
call the act of knowing "constructive" and "synthetic" if its method of
synthesis is hidden. A transcendental unity whose method is indefinable
has no advantage over empirical association.

It was the dream of Kant as of Mill to replace the logics of
sensationalism and rationalism with a "logic of things" and of "truth."
But as Mill's things turned to states of consciousness, so Kant's are
phenomenal. Their common fate proclaims their common failure--the
failure to reestablish continuity between the conduct of intelligence
and other conduct.

One of the chief counts in Hegel's indictment of Kant's logic is that
"it had no influence on the methods of science."[15] Hegel's explanation
is that Kant's categories have no genesis; they are not constructed in
and as part of logical operations. As given, ready-made, their relevance
is a miracle. But if categories be "generated" in the process of
knowing, says Hegel, they are indigenous, and their fitness is
inevitable. In such statements Hegel raises expectations that we are at
last to have a logic which squares with the procedure of science. But
when we discover that instead of being "generated" out of all the
material involved in the scientific problem Hegel's categories are
derived from each other, misgivings arise. And when we further learn
that this "genesis" is timeless, which means that, after all, the
categories stand related to each other in a closed, eternal system of
implication, we abandon hope of a scientific--i.e., experimental--logic.

Hegel also says it is the business of philosophy "to substitute
categories or in more precise language adequate notions for the several
modes of feeling, perception, desire, and will." The word "substitute"
reveals the point at issue. If "to substitute" means that philosophy is
a complete exchange of the modes of feeling, perception, desire, and
will for a world of categories or notions, then, saying nothing of the
range of values in such a world, the problem of the meaning of
"adequate" is on our hands. What is the notion to be adequate to? But if
"to substitute" means that the modes of feeling, perception, desire, and
will, when in a specific situation of ambiguity and inhibition, go over
into, take on, the modes of data and hypothesis in the effort to get rid
of inhibiting conflict that is quite another matter. Here the "notion,"
as the scientific hypothesis, has a criterion for its adequacy. But if
the notion usurps the place of feeling, perception, desire, and will, as
many find, in the end, it does in Hegel's logic, it thereby loses all
tests for the adequacy of its function and character as a notion.

In the development of the logical doctrines of Kant and Hegel by Lotze,
Green, Sigwart, Bradley, Bosanquet, Royce, and others, there are indeed
differences. But these differences only throw their common ground into
bolder relief. This common ground is that, procedure by hypotheses, by
induction, is, in the language of Professor Bosanquet, "a transient and
external characteristic of inference."[16] And the ground of this
verdict is essentially the same as Mill's, when he rejects hypotheses
"made by the mind," namely, that such hypotheses are too subjective in
their origin and nature to have objective validity. "Objective" idealism
is trying, like Mill, to escape the subjectivism of the purely
individual and "psychical" knower. But, being unable to reconstruct the
finite knower, and being too sophisticated to make what it regards as
Mill's naive appeal to "hypotheses found in things," it transfers the
real process of inference to the "objective universal," and the process
of all thought, including inference, is now defined as "_the
reproduction, by a universal presented in a content, of contents
distinguished from the presented content which also are differences of
the same universal_."[17]

It need scarcely be said that in inference thus defined there is scant
room for hypotheses. There is nothing "hypothetical," "experimental," or
"tentative" in this process of reproduction by the objective universal
as such. As little is there any possibility of error. If there is
anything hypothetical, or any possibility of error, in inference, it is
due to the temporal, finite human being in which, paradoxically enough,
this process of "reproduction" goes on and to whom, at times, is given
an "infinitesimal" part in the operation, while at other times he is
said merely to "witness" it. But the real inference does not "proceed by
hypotheses"; it is only the finite mind in witnessing the real logical
spectacle or in its "infinitesimal" contribution to it that lamely
proceeds in this manner.

Here, again, we have the same break in continuity between the finite,
human act of knowing and the operations that constitute the real world.
When the logic of the objective universal rejects imputations of
harboring a despoiled psychical knower it has in mind, of course, the
objective universal as knower, not the finite, human act. But, if the
participations of the latter are all accidents of inference, as they are
said to be, its advantage over a purely psychical knower, or "states of
consciousness," is difficult to see. The rejection of metaphysical
dualism is of no consequence if the logical operations of the finite,
human being are only "accidents" of the real logical process. As already
remarked, the metaphysical disjunction is merely a schematism of the
more fundamental, logical disjunction.

As for tautology and miracle, the follower of Mill might well ask: how
an association of particulars, whether mental states or things, could be
more tautologous than a universal reproducing its own differences? And
if the transition from particular to particular is a miracle in which
the grace of God is disguised as "habit," why is not habit as good a
disguise for Providence as universals? Moreover, by what miracle does
the one all-inclusive universal become _a_ universal? And since
perception always presents a number of universals, what determines which
one shall perform the reproduction? Finally, since there are infinite
differences of the universal that might be reproduced, what determines
just which differences shall be reproduced? In this wise the controversy
has gone on ever since the challenge of the old rationalistic logic by
the nominalists launched the issue of empiricism and rationalism. All
the charges which each makes against the other are easily retorted upon
itself. Each side is resistless in attack, but helpless in defense.

In a conception of inference in which both data and hypothesis are
regarded as the tentative, experimental results of the processes of
perception, memory, and constructive imagination engaged in the special
task of removing conflict, ambiguity, and inhibition, and in which these
processes are not conceived as the functions of a private mind nor of an
equally private brain and nervous system, but as functions of
interacting beings,--in such a conception there is no ground for anxiety
concerning the simplicity of data, nor the objectivity of hypotheses.
Simplicity and objectivity do not have to be secured through elaborate
and labored metaphysical construction. The data are simple and the
hypothesis objective in so far as they accomplish the work
where unto they are called--the removal of conflict, ambiguity, and
inhibition in conduct and affection.

In the experimental conception of inference it is clear that the
principles of formal logic must play their role wholly inside the course
of logical operations. They do not apply to relations _between_ these
operations and "reality"; nor to "reality" itself. Formal identity and
non-contradiction signify, in experimental logic, the complete
correlativity of data and hypothesis. They mean that _in_ the logical
procedure data must not be shifted without a corresponding change in the
hypothesis and conversely. The doctrine that "theoretically" there may
be any number of hypotheses for "the same facts" is, when these multiple
hypotheses are anything more than different names or symbols, nothing
less than the very essence of formal contradiction. It doubtless makes
little difference whether a disease be attributed to big or little,
black or red, demons or whether the cause be represented by a, b, or c,
etc. But where data and hypotheses are such as are capable of
verification, i.e., of mutually checking up each other, a change in one
without a corresponding modification of the other is the principle of
all formal fallacies.[18]

With this conception of the origin, nature, and functions of logical
operations little remains to be said of their truth and falsity. If the
whole enterprise of logical operation, of the construction and
verification of hypothesis, is in the interest of the removal of
ambiguity, and inhibition in conduct, the only relevant truth or falsity
they can possess must be determined by their success or failure in that
undertaking. The acceptance of this view of truth and error, be it said
again, depends on holding steadfastly to the conception of the
operations of knowing as _real acts_, which, though having a distinct
character and function, are yet in closest continuity with other acts of
which indeed they are but modifications and adaptations in order to meet
the logical demand.

Here, perhaps, is the place for a word on truth and satisfaction. The
satisfaction which marks the truth of logical operations--"intellectual
satisfaction"--is the satisfaction which attends the accomplishment of
their task, viz., the removal of ambiguity in conduct, i.e., in our
interaction with other beings. It does not mean that this satisfaction
is bound to be followed by wholly blissful consequences. All our
troubles are not over when the distress of ambiguity is removed. It may
be indeed that the verdict of the logical operation is that we must face
certain death. Very well, we must have felt it to be "good to know the
worst," or no inquiry would have been started. We should have deemed
ignorance bliss and sat with closed eyes waiting for fate to overtake us
instead of going forward to meet it and in some measure determine it.
Death anticipated and accepted is _realiter_ very different from death
that falls upon us unawares, however we may estimate that difference. If
this distinction in the _foci_ of satisfaction is kept clear it must do
away with a large amount of the hedonistic interpretations of
satisfaction in which many critics have indulged.

But hereupon some one may exclaim, as did a colleague recently: "Welcome
to the ranks of the intellectualists!" If so, the experimentalist is
bound to reply that he is as willing, and as unwilling, to be welcomed
to the ranks of intellectualism as to those of anti-intellectualism. He
wonders, however, how long the welcome would last in either. Among the
intellectualists the welcome would begin to cool as soon as it should be
discovered that the ambiguity to which logical operations are the
response is not regarded by the experimentalist as a purely intellectual
affair. It is an ambiguity in conduct with all the attendant affectional
values that may be at stake.[19] It is, to be sure, the fact of
ambiguity, and the effort to resolve it, that adds the intellectual,
logical character to conduct and to affectional values. But if the
logical interest attempts entirely to detach itself it will soon be
without either subject-matter or criterion. And if it sets itself up as
supreme, we shall be forced to say that our quandaries of affection, our
problems of life and death are merely to furnish occasions and material
for logical operations.

On the other hand, the welcome of the anti-intellectualists is equally
sure to wane when the experimentalist asserts that the doctrine that
logical operations mutilate the wholeness of immediate experience
overlooks the palpable fact that it is precisely these immediate
experiences--the experiences of intuition and instinct--that get into
conflict and inhibit and mutilate one another, and as a consequence are
obliged to go into logical session to patch up the mutilation and
provide new and better methods of cooeperation.

At this point the weakness in Bergson's view of logical operations
appears. Bergson, too, is impressed by the break in continuity between
logical operations and the rest of experience. But with Mr. Bradley he
believes this breach to be essentially incurable, because the
mutilations and disjunctions are due to and introduced by logical
operations. Just why the latter are introduced remains in the end a
mystery. Both, to be sure, believe that logical operations are valuable
for "practical" purposes,--for action. But, aside from the question of
_how_ operations essentially mutilative can be valuable for action,
immediate intuitional experience being already in unity with Reality,
why should there be any practical need for logical operations--least of
all such as introduce disjunction and mutilation?

The admission of a demand for logical operations, whether charged to
matter, the devil, or any other metaphysical adversary, is, of course, a
confession that conflict and ambiguity are as fundamental in experience
as unity and immediacy and that logical operations are therefore no less
indigenous. The failure to see this implication is responsible for the
paradox that in the logic of Creative Evolution the operations of
intelligence are neither creative nor evolutional. They not only have no
constructive part but are positively destructive and devolutional.

Since, moreover, these logical operations, like those of the objective
universal, and like Mill's association of particulars, can only
reproduce in fragmentary form what has already been done, it is
difficult to see how they can meet the demands of action. For here no
more than in Mill, or in the logic of idealism, is there any place for
constructive hypotheses or any technique by which they can become
effective. Whatever "Creative Evolution" may be, there is no place in
its logic for "Creative Intelligence."


IV

The prominence in current discussion of the logical reforms proposed by
the "analytic logic" of the neo-realistic movement and the enthusiastic
optimism of its representatives over the prospective results of these
reforms for logic, science, and practical life are the warrant for
devoting a special section to their discussion.

There are indeed some marked differences of opinion among the
expounders of the "new logic" concerning the results which it is
expected to achieve. Some find that it clears away incredible
accumulations of metaphysical lumber; others rejoice that it is to
restore metaphysics, "once the queen of the sciences, to her ancient
throne."

But whatever the difference among the representatives of analytical
logic all seem agreed at the outset on two fundamental reforms which the
"new logic" makes. These are: first, that analytic logic gets rid
entirely of the _act_ of knowing, the retention of which has been the
bane of all other logics; second, in its discovery of "terms and
relations," "sense-data and universals" as the simple elements not only
of logic but of the world, it furnishes science at last with the simple
neutral elements at large which it is supposed science so long has
sought, and "mourned because it found them not."

Taking these in order, we are told that "realism frees logic as a study
of objective fact from all accounts of the states and operations of
mind." ... "Logic and mathematics are sciences which can be pursued
quite independently of the study of knowing."[20] "The new logic
believes that it deals with no such entities as thoughts, ideas, or
minds, but with entities that merely are."[20]

The motive for the banishment of the act of knowing from logic is that
as an _act_ knowing is "mental," "psychological," and "subjective."[21]
All other logics have indeed realized this subjective character of the
_act_ of knowing, but have neither dared completely to discard it nor
been able sufficiently to counteract its effects even with such agencies
as the objective universal to prevent it from infecting logic with its
subjectivity. Because logic has tolerated and attempted to compromise
with this subjective act of knowing, say these reformers, it has been
forced constantly into epistemology and has become a hybrid science. Had
logic possessed the courage long ago to throw overboard this subjective
Jonah it would have been spared the storms of epistemology and the reefs
of metaphysics.

Analytic logic is the first attempt in the history of modern logical
theory at a deliberate, sophisticated exclusion of the act of knowing
from logic. Other logics, to be sure, have tried to neutralize the
effects of its presence, but none has had the temerity to cast it bodily
overboard. The experiment, therefore, is highly interesting.

We should note at the outset that in regarding the act of knowing as
incurably "psychical" and "subjective" analytic logic accepts a
fundamental premise of the logics of rationalism, empiricism, and
idealism which it seeks to reform. It is true that it is the bold
proposal of analytic logic to keep logic out of the pit of epistemology
by excluding the act of knowing from logic. Nevertheless analytic logic
still accepts the subjective character of this act; and if it excludes
it from its logic it welcomes it in its psychology. This is a dangerous
situation. Can the analytic logician prevent all osmosis between his
logic and his psychology?[22] If not, and if the psychological act is
subjective, woe then to his logic. Had the new logic begun with a bold
challenge of the psychical character of the act of knowing, the prospect
of a logic free from epistemology would have been much brighter.

With the desire to rid logic of the epistemological taint the
"experimental logic" of the pragmatic movement has the strongest
sympathy. But the proposal to effect this by the excision of the act of
knowing appears to experimental logic to be a case of heroic but fatal
surgery. _Prima facie_ a logic with no act of knowing presents an
uncanny appearance. What sort of logical operations are possible in such
a logic and of what kind of truth and falsity are they capable?

Before taking up these questions in detail it is worth while to note the
character of the entities that "merely are" with which analytic logic
proposes exclusively to deal. In their general form they are "terms" and
"propositions," "sense-data" and universals. We are struck at once by
the fact that these entities bear the names of logical operations. They
are, to be sure, disguised as entities and have been baptised in a
highly dilute solution of objectivity called "subsistence." But this
does not conceal their origin, nor does it obscure the fact that if it
is possible for any entities that "merely are" to have logical character
those made from hypostatized processes of logical operations should be
the most promising. They might be expected to retain some vestiges of
logical character even after they have been torn from the process of
inquiry and converted into "entities that merely are." Also it is not
surprising that having stripped the act of knowing of its constituent
operations analytic logic should feel that it can well dispense with the
empty shell called "mind" and, as Professor Dewey says, "wish it on
psychology." But if the analytic logician be also a philosopher and
perchance a lover of his fellow-man, it is hard to see how he can have a
good conscience over this disposition of the case.

Turning now to the character of inference and of truth and falsity which
are possible in a logic which excludes the operation of knowing and
deals only with "entities that are," all the expounders seem to agree
that in such a logic inference must be purely deductive. All alleged
induction is either disguised deduction or a lucky guess. This raises
apprehension at the start concerning the value of analytic logic for
other sciences. But let us observe what deduction in analytic logic is.

We begin at once with a distinction which involves the whole issue.[23]
We are asked to carefully distinguish "logical" deduction from
"psychological" deduction. The latter is the vulgar meaning of the term,
and is "the thinker's name for his own act of conforming his thought" to
the objective and independent processes that constitute the real logical
process. This act of conforming the mind is a purely "psychological"
affair. It has no logical function whatever. In what the "conforming"
consists is not clear. It seems to be merely the act of turning the
"psychological" eye on the objective logical process. "One beholds it
(the logical process) as one beholds a star, a river, a character in a
play.... The novelist and the dramatist, like the mathematician and
logician, are onlookers at the logical spectacle."[24] On the other
hand, the term "conforming" suggests a task, with the possibilities of
success and failure. Have we, then, two wholly independent possibilities
of error--one merely "psychological," the other "logical"? The same
point may be made even more obviously with reference to the term
"beholding." The term is used as if beholding were a perfectly simple
act, having no problems and no possibilities of mistakes--as if there
could be no mis-beholding.[25]

But fixing our psychological eye on the "logical spectacle," what does
it behold? A universal generating an infinite series of identical
instances of itself--i.e., instances which differ only in "logical
position." If in a world of entities that "merely are" the term
"generation" causes perplexity, the tension is soon relieved; for this
turns out to be a merely subsistential non-temporal generation which,
like Hegel's generation of the categories, in no way compromises a world
of entities that "merely are."

Steering clear of the thicket of metaphysical problems that we here
encounter, let us keep to the logical trail. First it is clear that
logical operations are of the same reproductive repetitive type that we
have found in the associational logic of empiricism, and in the logic of
the objective universal. Indeed, after objective idealism has conceded
that the finite mind merely "witnesses" or at most contributes only in
an "infinitesimal" degree to the logical activity of the objective
universal, what remains of the supposed gulf between absolute idealism
and analytic realism?

It follows, of course, that there can be no place in analytic logic for
"procedure by hypotheses." However, it is to the credit of some analytic
logicians that they see this and frankly accept the situation instead of
attempting to retain hypotheses by making them "accidents" or mere
"auxiliaries" of inference. On the other hand, others find that the
chief glory of analytic logic is precisely that it "gives thought
wings"[26] for the free construction of hypotheses. In his lectures on
"Scientific Methods in Philosophy" Mr. Russell calls some of the most
elemental and sacred entities of analytic logic "convenient fictions."
This retention of hypotheses at the cost of cogency is of course in
order to avoid a break with science. Those who see that there is no
place in analytic logic for hypotheses are equally anxious to preserve
their connections with science. Hence they boldly challenge the
"superstition" that science has anything to do with hypotheses. Newton's
"_Hypotheses non fingo_" should be the motto of every conscientious
scientist who dares "trust his own perceptions and disregard the ukase
of idealism." "The theory of mental construction is the child of
idealism, now put out to service for the support of its parents."
"Theory is no longer regarded in science as an hypothesis added to the
observed facts," but a law which is "found in the facts."[27] The
identity of this with Mill's doctrine of hypotheses as "found in things"
is obvious.

As against the conception of hypotheses as "free," "winged,"
constructions of a psychical, beholding, gossiping mind we may well take
our stand with those who would exclude such hypotheses from science. And
this doubtless was the sort of mind and sort of hypotheses Newton meant
when he said "_Hypotheses non fingo_."[28] But had Newton's mind really
been of the character which he, as a physicist, had learned from
philosophers to suppose it to be, and had he really waited to find his
hypotheses ready-made in the facts, there never would have been any
dispute about who discovered the calculus, and we should never have been
interested in what Newton said about hypotheses or anything else. What
Newton did is a much better source of information on the part hypotheses
play in scientific method than what he said about them. The former
speaks for itself; the latter is the pious repetition of a metaphysical
creed made necessary by the very separation of mind from things
expressed in the statement quoted.

Logically there is little to choose between hypotheses found ready-made
in the facts and those which are the "winged" constructions of a purely
psychical mind. Both are equally useless in logic and in science. One
makes logic and science "trifling," the other makes them "miraculous."
But if hypotheses be conceived not as the output of a cloistered
psychical entity but as the joint product of all the beings and
operations involved in the specific situation in which logical inquiry
originates, and more particularly in all those involved in the
operations of the inquiry itself (including all the experimental
material and apparatus which the inquiry may require), we shall have
sufficient continuity between hypotheses and things to do away with
miracle, and sufficient reconstruction to avoid inference that is
trifling.

It is, however, the second contribution of analytic logic that is the
basis of the enthusiasm over its prospective value for other sciences.
This is the discovery that terms and propositions, sense-data, and
universals, are not only elements of logical operation but are the
simple, neutral elements at large which science is supposed to have been
seeking. "As the botanist analyzes the structures of the vegetable
organism and finds chemical compounds of which they are built so the
ordinary chemist analyzes these compounds into their elements, but does
not analyze these. The physical chemist analyzes these elemental atoms,
as now appears, into minuter components _which he in turn must leave to
the mathematicians and logicians further to analyze_."[29]

Again it is worth noting that this mutation of logical into ontological
elements seems to differ only "in position" from the universal logicism
of absolute idealism.

What are these simple elements into which the mathematician and logician
are to analyze the crude elements of the laboratory? And how are these
elements to be put into operation in the laboratory? Let us picture an
analytic logician meeting a physical scientist at a moment when the
latter is distressed over the unmanageable complexity of his elements.
Will the logician say to the scientist: "Your difficulty is that you are
trusting too much to your mundane apparatus. The kingdom of truth cometh
not with such things. Forsake your microscopes, test tubes, refractors
and resonators, and follow me, and you shall behold the truly simple
elements of which you have dreamed."? And when the moment of revelation
arrives and the expectant scientist is solemnly told that the "simple
elements" which he has sought so long are "terms and propositions,"
sense-data and universals, is it surprising that he does not seem
impressed? Will he not ask: "What am I to do with these in the specific
difficulties of my laboratory? Shall I say to the crude and complex
elements of my laboratory operations: 'Be ye resolved into terms and
propositions, sense-data and universals'; and will they forthwith obey
this incantation and fall apart so that I may locate and remove the
hidden source of my difficulty? Are you not mocking me and deceiving
yourself with the old ontological argument? Your 'simple' elements--are
they anything but the hypostatized process by which elements may be
found?"[30]

The expounders as well as the critics of analytic logic have agreed that
it reaches its most critical junction when it faces the problem of truth
and error. There is no doubt that the logic of objective idealism, in
other respects so similar to analytic logic, has at this point an
advantage; for it retains just enough of the finite operation of
knowing--an "infinitesimal" part will answer--to furnish the culture
germs of error. But analytic logic having completely sterilized itself
against this source of infection is in serious difficulty.

Here again it is Professor Holt who has the courage to follow--or shall
we say "behold"?--his theory as it "generates" the doctrine that error
is a given objective opposition of forces entirely independent of any
such thing as a process of inquiry and all that such a process
presupposes. "All collisions between bodies, all inference between
energies, all process of warming and cooling, of starting and stopping,
of combining and separating, all counterbalancings, as in cantilevers
and gothic vaultings, are contradictory forces which can be stated only
in propositions that manifestly contradict each other."[31] But the
argument proves too much. For in the world of forces to which we have
here appealed there is no force which is not opposed by others and no
particle which is not the center of opposing forces. Hence error is
ubiquitous. In making error objective we have made all objectivity
erroneous. We find ourselves obliged to say that the choir of
Westminster Abbey, the Brooklyn bridge, the heads on our shoulders are
all supported by logical errors!

Following these illustrations of ontological contradictions there is
indeed this interesting statement: "Nature is so full of these mutually
negative processes that we are moved to admiration when a few forces
cooeperate long enough to form what we call an organism."[32] The
implication is, apparently, that as an "opposition" of forces is error,
"cooeperation" of forces is truth. But what is to distinguish
"opposition" from "cooeperation"? In the illustration it is clear that
opposing forces--error--do not interfere with cooeperative forces--truth.
Where should we find more counterbalancing, more starting and stopping,
warming and cooling, combining and separating than in an organism? And
if these processes can be stated only in propositions that are
"manifestly contradictory," are we to understand that truth has errors
for its constituent elements? Such paradoxes have always delighted the
soul of absolute idealism. But, as we have seen, only the veil of an
infinitesimal finitude intervenes between the logic of the objective
universal of absolute idealism and the objective logic of analytic
realism.

It is, of course, this predicament regarding objective truth and error
that has driven most analytic logicians to recall the exiled
psychological, "mental" act of knowing. It had to be recalled to provide
some basis of distinction between truth and error, but, this act having
already been conceived as incurably "subjective," the result is only an
exchange of dilemmas. For the reinstatement of this act _ipso facto_
reinstates the epistemological predicament to get rid of which it was
first banished from logic.

Earnest efforts to escape this outcome have been made by attaching the
act of knowing to the nervous system, and this is a move in the right
direction. But so far the effort has been fruitless because no
connection has been made between the knowing function of the nervous
system and its other functions. The result is that the cognitive
operation of the nervous system, as of the "psychical" mind, is that of
a mere spectator; and the epistemological problem abides. An onlooking
nervous system has no advantage over an "onlooking" mind. Onlooking,
beholding may indeed be a part of a genuine act of knowing. But in that
act it is always a stimulus or response to other acts. It is one of
them;--never a mere spectator of them. It is when the act of knowing is
cut off from its connection with other acts and finds itself adrift that
it seeks metaphysical lodgings. And this it may find either in an empty
psychical mind or in an equally empty body.[33]

If, in reinstating the act of knowing as a function of the nervous
system, neo-realism had recognized the logical significance of the fact
that the nervous system of which knowing is a function is the same
nervous system of which loving and hating, desiring and striving are
functions and that the transition from these to the operations of
inquiry and knowing is not a capricious jump but a transition motived by
the loving and hating, desiring and striving--if this had been
recognized the logic of neo-realism would have been spared its
embarrassments over the distinction of truth and error. It would have
seen that the passage from loving and hating, desiring and striving to
inquiry and knowing is made in order to renew and reform specific
desires and strivings which, through conflict and consequent
equivocation, have become fruitless and vain; and it must have seen that
the results of the inquiry are true or false as they succeed or fail in
this reformation and renewal.

But once more, it must steadily be kept in view that while the loving
and hating, desiring and striving, which the logical operations are
reforming and renewing, are functions of the nervous system, they are
not functions of the nervous system alone, else the door of subjectivism
again closes upon us. Loving and hating, desiring and striving have
their "objects." Hence any reformation of these functions involves no
less a reformation of their objects. When therefore we say that truth
and error are relevant to desires and strivings, this means relevant to
them as including their objects, not as entitized processes (such are
the pitfalls of language) inclosed in a nervous system or mind. With
this before us the relevance of truth and error to desires and strivings
can never be made the basis for the charge of subjectivism. The
conception of desires as peculiarly individual and subjective is a
survival of the very isolation which is the source of the difficulty
with truth and error. Hence the appeal to this isolation, made alike by
idealism and realism, in charging instrumental logic with subjectivism
is an elementary _petitio_.

Doubtless it will be urged again that the act of knowing is motived
by an independent desire and striving of its own. This is of course
consonant with the neo-realistic atomism, however inconsonant it may be
with the conception of implication which it employs. If we take a small
enough, isolated segment of experience we can find meaning for this
notion, as we may for the idea that the earth is flat and that the sun
moves around the earth. But as consequences accrue we find as great
difficulties with the one as with the other. If the course of events did
not bring us to book, if we could get off with a mere definition of
truth and error we might go on piling up subsistential definitional
logics world without end. But sublime adventurers, logically
unregenerate and uninitiated, will go on sailing westward to the
confusion and confounding of all definitional systems that leave them
out of account.

The conclusion is plain. If logic is to have room in its household for
both truth and error, if it is to avoid the old predicament of knowledge
that is trifling or miraculous, tautologous or false, if it is to have
no fear of the challenge of other sciences or of practical life, it must
be content to take for its subject-matter the operations of intelligence
conceived as real acts on the same metaphysical plane and in strictest
continuity with other acts. Such a logic will not fear the challenge of
science, for it is precisely this continuity that makes possible
experimentation, which is the fundamental characteristic of scientific
procedure. Science without experiment is indeed a strange apparition. It
is a [Greek: logos] with no [Greek: legein], a science with no _scire_;
and this spells dogmatism. How necessary such continuity is to
experimentation is apparent when we recall that there is no limit to the
range of operations of every sort which scientific experiment calls into
play; and that unless there be thoroughgoing continuity between the
logical demand of the experiment and all the materials and devices
employed in the process of the experiment, the operations of the latter
in the experiment will be either miraculous or ruinous.

Finally, if this continuity of the operations of intelligence with
other operations be essential to science, its relation to "practical"
life is _ipso facto_ established. For science is "practical" life
aware of its problems and aware of the part that experimental--i.e.,
creative--intelligence plays in the solution of those problems.




INTELLIGENCE AND MATHEMATICS

HAROLD CHAPMAN BROWN


Herbart is said to have given the deathblow to faculty psychology. Man
no longer appears endowed with volition, passion, desire, and reason;
and logic, deprived of its hereditary right to elucidate the operations
of inherent intelligence, has the new problem of investigating forms of
intelligence in the making. This is no inconsequential task. "If man
originally possesses only capacities which after a given amount of
education will produce ideas and judgments" (Thorndike, _Educational
Psychology_, Vol. I, p. 198), and if these ideas and judgments are to be
substituted for a mythical intelligence it follows that tracing their
development and observing their functioning renders clearer our
conception of their nature and value and brings us nearer that exact
knowledge of what we are talking about in which the philosopher at least
aspires to equal the scientist, however much he may fall below his
ideal.

For contemporary thought concerning the mathematical sciences this
altered point of view generates peculiarly pressing problems.
Mathematicians have weighed the old logic and found it wanting. They
have builded themselves a new logic more adequate to their ends. But
they have not whole-heartedly recognized the change that has come about
in psychology; hence they have retained the faculty of intelligence
knit into certain indefinables such as implication, relation, class,
term, and the like, and have transported the faculty from the human soul
to a mysterious realm of subsistence whence it radiates its ghostly
light upon the realm of existence below. But while they reproach the old
logic, often bitterly, their new logic merely furnishes a more adequate
show-case in which already attained knowledge may be arranged to set off
its charms for the observer in the same way that specimens in a museum
are displayed before an admiring world. This statement is not a sweeping
condemnation, however, for such a setting forth is not useless. It
resembles the classificatory stage of science which, although not itself
in the highest sense creative, often leads to higher stages by bringing
under observation relations and facts that might otherwise have escaped
notice. And in the realm of pure mathematics, the new logic has
undoubtedly contributed in this manner to such discoveries. Danger
appears when the logician attains Cartesian intoxication with the beauty
of logico-mathematical form and tries to infer from the form itself the
real nature of the formed material. The realm of subsistence too often
has armed Indefinables with metaphysical myths whose attack is valiant
when the doors of reflection are opened. It may be possible, however, to
arrive at an understanding of mathematics without entering the kingdom
of these warriors.

It is the essence of science to make prediction possible. The value of
prediction lies in the fact that through this function man can control
his environment, or, at worst, fortify himself to meet its vagaries. To
attain such predictions, however, the world need not be grasped in its
full concreteness. Hence arise processes of abstraction. While all other
symptoms remain unnoticed, the temperature and pulse may mark a disease,
or a barometer-reading the weather. The physicist may work only in terms
of quantity in a world which is equally truly qualitative. All that is
necessary is to select the elements which are most effective for
prediction and control. Such selection gives the principle that
dominates all abstractions. Progress is movement from the less abstract
to the more abstract, but it is progress only because the more abstract
is as genuinely an aspect of the concrete starting-point as anything is.
Moreover, the outcome of progress of this sort cannot be definitely
foreseen at the beginnings. The simple activities of primitive men have
to be spontaneously performed before their value becomes evident. Only
afterwards can they be cultivated for the sake of their value, and then
only can the self-conscious cultivation of a science begin. The process
remains full not only of perplexities, but of surprises; men's
activities lead to goals far other than those which appear at the start.
These goals, however, never deny the method by which the start is made.
Developed intelligence is nothing but skill in using a set of concepts
generated in this manner. In this sense the histories of all human
endeavors run parallel.

Where the empirical bases of a science are continually in the
foreground, as in physics or chemistry, the foregoing formulation of
procedure is intelligible and acceptable to most men. Mathematics seem,
however, to stand peculiarly apart. Many, with Descartes, have delighted
in them "on account of the certitude and evidence of their reasonings"
and recognized their contribution to the advancement of mechanical arts.
But since the days of Kant even this value has become a problem, and
many a young philosophic student has the question laid before him as to
why it is that mathematics, "a purely conceptual science," can tell us
anything about the character of a world which is, apparently at least,
free from the idiosyncrasies of individual mind. It may be that
mathematics began in empirical practice, such philosophers admit, but
they add that, somehow, in its later career, it has escaped its lowly
origin. Now it moves in the higher circles of postulated relations and
arbitrarily defined entities to which its humble progenitors and
relatives are denied the entree. Parvenus, however, usually bear with
them the mark of history, and in the case of this one, at least, we may
hope that the history will be sufficient to drag it from the
affectations of its newly acquired set and reinstate it in its proper
place in the workaday world. For the sake of this hope, we shall take
the risk of being tedious by citing certain striking moments of
mathematical progress; and then we shall try to interpret its genuine
status in the world of working truths.


I

BEGINNINGS OF ARITHMETIC AND GEOMETRY

The most primitive mathematical activity of man is counting, but here
his first efforts are lost in the obscurity of the past. The lower
races, however, yield us evidence that is not without value. Although
the savage mind is not identical with the mind of primitive man, there
is much in the activities of undeveloped races that can throw light upon
the behavior of peoples more advanced. We must be careful in our
inferences, however. Among the Australians and South Americans there are
peoples whose numerical systems go little, or not at all, beyond the
first two or three numbers. "It has been inferred from this," writes
Professor Boas (_Mind of Primitive Man_, pp. 152-53), "that the people
speaking these languages are not capable of forming the concept of
higher numbers.... People like the South American Indians, ... or like
the Esquimo ... are presumably not in need of higher numerical
expressions, because there are not many objects that they have to count.
On the other hand, just as soon as these same people find themselves in
contact with civilization, and when they acquire standards of value that
have to be counted, they adopt with perfect ease higher numerals from
other languages, and develop a more or less perfect system of
counting.... It must be borne in mind that counting does not become
necessary until objects are considered in such generalized form that
their individualities are entirely lost sight of. For this reason it is
possible that even a person who owns a herd of domesticated animals may
know them by name and by their characteristics, without even desiring to
count them."

And there is one other false interpretation to be avoided. Man does not
feel the need of counting and then develop a system of numerals to meet
the need. Such an assumption is as ridiculous as to assume prehistoric
man thinking to himself: "I must speak," and then inventing voice
culture and grammar to make speaking pleasant and possible. Rather, when
powers of communication are once attained, presumably in their
beginnings also without forethought, man being still more animal than
man, there were gradually dissociated communications of a kind
approaching what numbers mean to us. But the number is not yet a symbol
apart from that of the things numbered. Picture writing, re-representing
the things meant, preceded developmentally any kind of symbolization
representing the number by mere one-one correspondence with
non-particularized symbols. It is plausible, although I have no
anthropological authority for the statement, that the prevalence of
finger words as number symbols (cf. infra) is originally a consequence
of the fact that our organization makes the hand the natural instrument
of pointing.

The difficulty of passing from concrete representations to abstract
symbols has been keenly stated by Conant (_The Number Concept_, pp.
72-73), although his terminology is that of an old psychology and the
limitations implied for the primitive mind are limitations of practice
rather than of capacity as Mr. Conant seems to believe. "An abstract
conception is something quite foreign to the essentially primitive mind,
as missionaries and explorers have found to their chagrin. The savage
can form no mental concept of what civilized man means by such a word as
_soul_; nor would his idea of the abstract number 5 be much clearer.
When he says _five_, he uses, in many cases at least, the same word that
serves him when he wishes to say _hand_; and his mental concept when he
says _five_ is a hand. The concrete idea of a closed fist, of an open
hand with outstretched fingers, is what is uppermost in his mind. He
knows no more and cares no more about the pure number 5 than he does
about the law of conservation of energy. He sees in his mental picture
only the real, material image, and his only comprehension of the number
is, "these objects are as many as the fingers on my hand." Then, in the
lapse of the long interval of centuries which intervene between lowest
barbarism and highest civilization, the abstract and concrete become
slowly dissociated, the one from the other. First the actual hand
picture fades away, and the number is recognized without the original
assistance furnished by the derivation of the word. But the number is
still for a long time a certain number _of objects_, and not an
independent concept."

An excellent fur trader's story, reported to me by Mr. Dewey, suggests a
further impulse to count besides that given by the need of keeping a
tally, namely, the need of making one thing correspond to another in a
business transaction. The Indian laid down one skin and the trader two
dollars; if he proposed to count several skins at once and pay for all
together, the former replied "too much cheatem." The result, however,
demanded a tally either by the fingers, a pebble, or a mark made in the
sand, and as the magnitude of such transactions grows the need of a
specific number symbol becomes ever more acute.

The first obstacle, then, to overcome--and it has already been
successfully passed by many primitive peoples--is the need of fortuitous
attainment of a numerical symbol, which is not the mere repeated symbol
of the things numbered. Significantly, this symbol is usually derived
from the hand, suggesting gestures of tallying, and not from the words
of already developed language. Consequently, number words relate
themselves for the most part to the hand, and written number symbols,
which are among the earliest writings of most peoples, tend to depict it
as soon as they have passed beyond the stage mentioned above of merely
repeating the symbol of the things numbered. W. C. Eells, in writing of
the Number Systems of the North American Indians (_Am. Math. Mo._, Nov.,
1913; pp. 263-72), finds clear linguistic evidence for a digital origin
in about 40% of the languages examined. Of the non-digital instances, 1
was sometimes connected with the first personal pronoun, 2 with roots
meaning separation, 3, rarely, meaning more, or plural as distinguished
from the dual, just as the Greek uses a plural as well as a dual in
nouns and verbs, 4 is often the perfect, complete right. It is often a
sacred number and the base of a quarternary system. Conant (_loc. cit._
p. 98) also gives a classification of the meanings of simple number
words for more advanced languages; and even in them the hand is
constantly in evidence, as in 5, the hand; 10, two hands, half a man,
when fingers and toes are both considered, or a man, when the hands
alone are considered; 20, one man, two feet. The other meanings hang
upon the ideas of existence, piece, group, beginning, for 1; and
repetition, division, and collection for higher numerals.

A peculiar difficulty lies in the fact that when once numbering has
become a self-conscious effort, the collection of things to be numbered
frequently tends to exceed the number of names that have become
available. Sometimes the difficulty is met by using a second man when
the fingers and toes of the first are used up, sometimes by a method of
repetition with the record of the number of the repetition itself added
to the numerical significance of the whole process. Hence arise the
various systems of bases that occur in developed mathematics. But the
inertia to be overcome in the recognition of the base idea is nowhere
more obvious than in the retention by the comparatively developed
Babylonian system of a second base of 60 to supplement the decimal one
for smaller numbers. Among the American Indians (Eells, _loc. cit._) the
system of bases used varies from the cumbersome binary scale, that
exercised such a fascination over Leibniz (_Opera_, _III_, p. 346),
through the rare ternary, and the more common quarternary to the
"natural" quinary, decimal, and vigesimal systems derived from the
use of the fingers and toes in counting. The achievement of a number
base and number words, however, does not always open the way to
further mathematical development. Only too often a complexity of
expression is involved that almost immediately cuts off further
progress. Thus the Youcos of the Amazon cannot get beyond the number
three, for the simplest expression for the idea in their language is
"pzettarrarorincoaroac" (Conant, _loc. cit._, pp. 145, 83, 53). Such
names as "99, tongo solo manani nun solo manani" (i.e., 10, understood,
5 plus 4 times, and 5 plus 4) of the Soussous of Sierra Leone; "399,
caxtolli onnauh poalli ipan caxtolli onnaui" (15 plus 4 times 20 plus 15
plus 4) of the Aztec; "29, wick a chimen ne nompah sam pah nep e chu
wink a" (Sioux), make it easy to understand the proverb of the Yorubas
of Abeokuta, "You may be very clever, but you can't tell 9 times 9."

Almost contemporaneously with the beginnings of counting various
auxiliary devices were introduced to help out the difficult task. In
place of many men, notched sticks, knotted strings, pebbles, or finger
pantomime were used. In the best form, these devices resulted in the
abacus; indeed, it was not until after the introduction of arabic
numerals and well into the Renaissance period that instrumental
arithmetic gave way to graphical in Europe (D. E. Smith, _Rara
Arithmetica_, under "Counters"). "In eastern Europe," say Smith and
Mikami (_Japanese Mathematics_, pp. 18-19), "it"--the abacus--"has never
been replaced, for the tschotue is used everywhere in Russia to-day, and
when one passes over into Persia the same type of abacus is common in
all the bazaars. In China the swan-pan is universally used for the
purposes of computation, and in Japan the soroban is as strongly
entrenched as it was before the invasion of western ideas."

Given, then, the idea of counting, and a mechanical device to aid
computation, it still remains necessary to obtain some notation in which
to record results. At the early dawn of history the Egyptians seem to
have been already possessed of number signs (cf. Cantor, _Gesch. de.
Math._, p. 44) and the Phoenicians either wrote out their number words
or used a few simple signs, vertical, horizontal, and oblique lines, a
process which the Arabians perpetuated up to the beginning of the
eleventh century (Fink, p. 15); the Greeks, as early as 600 B. C., used
the initial letters of words for numbers. But speaking generally,
historical beginnings of European number signs are too obscure to
furnish us good material.

Our Indians have few number symbols other than words, but when they
occur (cf. Eells, _loc. cit._) they usually take the form of pictorial
presentation of some counting device such as strokes, lines dotted to
suggest a knotted cord, etc. Indeed, the smaller Roman numerals were
probably but a pictorial representation of finger symbols. However, a
beautiful concrete instance is furnished us in the Japanese mathematics
(cf. Smith and Mikami, Ch. III). The earliest instrument of reckoning in
Japan seems to have been the rod, Ch'eou, adapted from the Chinese under
the name of Chikusaku (bamboo rods) about 600 A. D. At first relatively
large (measuring rods?), they became reduced to about 12 cm., but from
their tendency to roll were quickly replaced by the sangi (square
prisms, about 7 mm. thick and 5 cm. long) and the number symbols were
evidently derived from the use of these rods:

                           _  __  ___  ____
  |, ||, |||, ||||, |||||, |, ||, |||, ||||.

For the sake of clearness, tens, hundreds, etc., were expressed in the
even place by horizontal instead of vertical lines and vice versa; thus
1267 would be formed

         __
  - || | ||.
       -

The rods were arranged on a sort of chessboard called the swan-pan. Much
later the lines were transferred to paper, and a circle used to denote
the vacant square. The use of squares, however, rendered it unnecessary
to arrange the even places differently from the odd, so numbers like
38057 came to be written

  +-------+-------+-------+-------+------+
  |       |  ___  |       |       |  __  |
  |  |||  |  |||  |       | ||||| |  ||  |
  |       |       |       |       |      |
  +-------+-------+-------+-------+------+

instead of

  +-------+-------+-------+-------+------+
  |       |       |       |       |      |
  |       |       |       |   -   |      |
  |       |   |   |       |   -   |  __  |
  |  |||  |   -   |       |   -   |  ||  |
  |       |   -   |       |   -   |      |
  |       |   -   |       |   -   |      |
  |       |       |       |       |      |
  +-------

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