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Reconstruction in Philosophy

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Title: Reconstruction in Philosophy

Author: John Dewey


        
Release date: June 26, 2012 [eBook #40089]
                Most recently updated: October 23, 2024

Language: English

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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK RECONSTRUCTION IN PHILOSOPHY ***

  RECONSTRUCTION IN PHILOSOPHY




  BY
  JOHN DEWEY
  Professor of Philosophy in Columbia University


  [Illustration]


  NEW YORK.
  HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY
  1920




  COPYRIGHT, 1920,
  BY
  HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY


  The Quinn & Boden Company
  BOOK MANUFACTURERS
  RAHWAY  NEW JERSEY




PREFATORY NOTE


Being invited to lecture at the Imperial University of Japan in Tokyo
during February and March of the present year, I attempted an
interpretation of the reconstruction of ideas and ways of thought now
going on in philosophy. While the lectures cannot avoid revealing the
marks of the particular standpoint of their author, the aim is to
exhibit the general contrasts between older and newer types of
philosophic problems rather than to make a partisan plea in behalf of
any one specific solution of these problems. I have tried for the most
part to set forth the forces which make intellectual reconstruction
inevitable and to prefigure some of the lines upon which it must
proceed.

Any one who has enjoyed the unique hospitality of Japan will be
overwhelmed with confusion if he endeavors to make an acknowledgment in
any way commensurate to the kindnesses he received. Yet I must set down
in the barest of black and white my grateful appreciation of them, and
in particular record my ineffaceable impressions of the courtesy and
help of the members of the department of philosophy of Tokyo University,
and of my dear friends Dr. Ono and Dr. Nitobe.

                                                       J. D.

September, 1919.




CONTENTS


  CHAPTER                                                         PAGE

    I CHANGING CONCEPTIONS OF PHILOSOPHY                             1

        Origin of philosophy in desire and imagination.
        Influence of community traditions and authority.
        Simultaneous development of matter-of-fact knowledge.
        Incongruity and conflict of the two types.
        Respective values of each type.... Classic philosophies
        (i) compensatory, (ii) dialectically formal,
        and (iii) concerned with "superior" Reality. Contemporary
        thinking accepts primacy of matter-of-fact
        knowledge and assigns to philosophy a social
        function rather than that of absolute knowledge.

   II SOME HISTORICAL FACTORS IN PHILOSOPHICAL RECONSTRUCTION       28

        Francis Bacon exemplifies the newer spirit....
        He conceived knowledge as power. As dependent
        upon organized cooperative research.... As tested
        by promotion of social progress. The new thought
        reflected actual social changes, industrial, political,
        religious.... The new idealism.

  III THE SCIENTIFIC FACTOR IN RECONSTRUCTION OF PHILOSOPHY         53

        Science has revolutionized our conception of Nature.
        Philosophy has to be transformed because
        no longer depending upon a science which accepts
        a closed, finite world. Or, fixed species. Or,
        superiority or rest to change and motion. Contrast
        of feudal with democratic conceptions. Elimination
        of final causes. Mechanical science and the possibility
        of control of nature. Respect for matter.
        New temper of imagination. Influence thus far
        technical rather than human and moral.

   IV CHANGED CONCEPTIONS OF EXPERIENCE AND REASON                  77

        Traditional conception of nature of experience.
        Limits of ancient civilization.  Effect of classic
        idea on modern empiricism. Why a different conception
        is now possible. Psychological change emphasizes
        vital factor using environment. Effect
        upon traditional ideas of sensation and knowledge.
        Factor of organization. Socially, experience is now
        more inventive and regulative.... Corresponding
        change in idea of Reason. Intelligence is hypothetical
        and inventive. Weakness of historic Rationalism.
        Kantianism. Contrast of German and
        British philosophies. Reconstruction of empirical
        liberalism.

    V CHANGED CONCEPTIONS OF THE IDEAL AND THE REAL                103

        Idealization rooted in aversion to the disagreeable....
        This fact has affected philosophy....
        True reality is ideal, and hence changeless, complete.
        Hence contemplative knowledge is higher
        than experimental. Contrast with the modern practise
        of knowledge.... Significance of change....
        The actual or realistic signifies conditions effecting
        change.... Ideals become methods rather than
        goals. Illustration from elimination of distance.
        Change in conception of philosophy.... The
        significant problems for philosophy.... Social
        understanding and conciliation. The practical problem
        of real and ideal.

   VI THE SIGNIFICANCE OF LOGICAL RECONSTRUCTION                   132

        Present confusion as to logic. Logic is regulative
        and normative because empirical. Illustration from
        mathematics. Origin of thinking in conflicts. Confrontation
        with fact. Response by anticipation or
        prediction. Importance of hypotheses. Impartial
        inquiry. Importance of deductive function. Organization
        and classification. Nature of truth.
        Truth is adverbial, not a thing.

  VII RECONSTRUCTION IN MORAL CONCEPTIONS                          161

        Common factor in traditional theories. Every
        moral situation unique. Supremacy of the specific
        or individualized case. Fallacy of general ends.
        Worth of generalization of ends and rules is intellectual.
        Harmfulness of division of goods into
        intrinsic and instrumental. Into natural and moral.
        Moral worth of natural science. Importance of
        discovery in morals. Abolishing Phariseeism....
        Growth as the end. Optimism and pessimism. Conception
        of happiness. Criticism of utilitarianism.
        All life moral in so far as educative.

  VIII RECONSTRUCTION AS AFFECTING SOCIAL PHILOSOPHY               187

        Defects of current logic of social thought. Neglect
        of specific situations. Defects of organic concept
        of society. Evils of notion of fixed self or
        individual. Doctrine of interests. Moral and institutional
        reform. Moral test of social institutions.
        Social pluralism. Political monism, dogma
        of National State. Primacy of associations. International
        humanism. Organization a subordinate
        conception. Freedom and democracy. Intellectual
        reconstruction when habitual will affect imagination
        and hence poetry and religion.

  INDEX                                                            217




RECONSTRUCTION IN PHILOSOPHY




CHAPTER I

CHANGING CONCEPTIONS OF PHILOSOPHY


Man differs from the lower animals because he preserves his past
experiences. What happened in the past is lived again in memory. About
what goes on today hangs a cloud of thoughts concerning similar things
undergone in bygone days. With the animals, an experience perishes as it
happens, and each new doing or suffering stands alone. But man lives in
a world where each occurrence is charged with echoes and reminiscences
of what has gone before, where each event is a reminder of other things.
Hence he lives not, like the beasts of the field, in a world of merely
physical things but in a world of signs and symbols. A stone is not
merely hard, a thing into which one bumps; but it is a monument of a
deceased ancestor. A flame is not merely something which warms or burns,
but is a symbol of the enduring life of the household, of the abiding
source of cheer, nourishment and shelter to which man returns from his
casual wanderings. Instead of being a quick fork of fire which may sting
and hurt, it is the hearth at which one worships and for which one
fights. And all this which marks the difference between bestiality and
humanity, between culture and merely physical nature, is because man
remembers, preserving and recording his experiences.

The revivals of memory are, however, rarely literal. We naturally
remember what interests us and because it interests us. The past is
recalled not because of itself but because of what it adds to the
present. Thus the primary life of memory is emotional rather than
intellectual and practical. Savage man recalled yesterday's struggle
with an animal not in order to study in a scientific way the qualities
of the animal or for the sake of calculating how better to fight
tomorrow, but to escape from the tedium of today by regaining the thrill
of yesterday. The memory has all the excitement of the combat without
its danger and anxiety. To revive it and revel in it is to enhance the
present moment with a new meaning, a meaning different from that which
actually belongs either to it or to the past. Memory is vicarious
experience in which there is all the emotional values of actual
experience without its strains, vicissitudes and troubles. The triumph
of battle is even more poignant in the memorial war dance than at the
moment of victory; the conscious and truly human experience of the chase
comes when it is talked over and re-enacted by the camp fire. At the
time, attention is taken up with practical details and with the strain
of uncertainty. Only later do the details compose into a story and fuse
into a whole of meaning. At the time of practical experience man exists
from moment to moment, preoccupied with the task of the moment. As he
re-surveys all the moments in thought, a drama emerges with a beginning,
a middle and a movement toward the climax of achievement or defeat.

Since man revives his past experience because of the interest added to
what would otherwise be the emptiness of present leisure, the primitive
life of memory is one of fancy and imagination, rather than of accurate
recollection. After all, it is the story, the drama, which counts. Only
those incidents are selected which have a present emotional value, to
intensify the present tale as it is rehearsed in imagination or told to
an admiring listener. What does not add to the thrill of combat or
contribute to the goal of success or failure is dropped. Incidents are
rearranged till they fit into the temper of the tale. Thus early man
when left to himself, when not actually engaged in the struggle for
existence, lived in a world of memories which was a world of
suggestions. A suggestion differs from a recollection in that no attempt
is made to test its correctness. Its correctness is a matter of relative
indifference. The cloud suggests a camel or a man's face. It could not
suggest these things unless some time there had been an actual, literal
experience of camel and face. But the real likeness is of no account.
The main thing is the emotional interest in tracing the camel or
following the fortunes of the face as it forms and dissolves.

Students of the primitive history of mankind tell of the enormous part
played by animal tales, myths and cults. Sometimes a mystery is made out
of this historical fact, as if it indicated that primitive man was moved
by a different psychology from that which now animates humanity. But the
explanation is, I think, simple. Until agriculture and the higher
industrial arts were developed, long periods of empty leisure alternated
with comparatively short periods of energy put forth to secure food or
safety from attack. Because of our own habits, we tend to think of
people as busy or occupied, if not with doing at least with thinking and
planning. But then men were busy only when engaged in the hunt or
fishing or fighting expedition. Yet the mind when awake must have some
filling; it cannot remain literally vacant because the body is idle. And
what thoughts should crowd into the human mind except experiences with
animals, experiences transformed under the influence of dramatic
interest to make more vivid and coherent the events typical of the
chase? As men in fancy dramatically re-lived the interesting parts of
their actual lives, animals inevitably became themselves dramatized.

They were true _dramatis personæ_ and as such assumed the traits of
persons. They too had desires, hopes and fears, a life of affections,
loves and hates, triumphs and defeats. Moreover, since they were
essential to the support of the community, their activities and
sufferings made them, in the imagination which dramatically revived the
past, true sharers in the life of the community. Although they were
hunted, yet they permitted themselves after all to be caught, and hence
they were friends and allies. They devoted themselves, quite literally,
to the sustenance and well-being of the community group to which they
belonged. Thus were produced not merely the multitude of tales and
legends dwelling affectionately upon the activities and features of
animals, but also those elaborate rites and cults which made animals
ancestors, heroes, tribal figure-heads and divinities.

I hope that I do not seem to you to have gone too far afield from my
topic, the origin of philosophies. For it seems to me that the historic
source of philosophies cannot be understood except as we dwell, at even
greater length and in more detail, upon such considerations as these. We
need to recognize that the ordinary consciousness of the ordinary man
left to himself is a creature of desires rather than of intellectual
study, inquiry or speculation. Man ceases to be primarily actuated by
hopes and fears, loves and hates, only when he is subjected to a
discipline which is foreign to human nature, which is, from the
standpoint of natural man, artificial. Naturally our books, our
scientific and philosophical books, are written by men who have
subjected themselves in a superior degree to intellectual discipline and
culture. Their thoughts are habitually reasonable. They have learned to
check their fancies by facts, and to organize their ideas logically
rather than emotionally and dramatically. When they do indulge in
reverie and day-dreaming--which is probably more of the time than is
conventionally acknowledged--they are aware of what they are doing. They
label these excursions, and do not confuse their results with objective
experiences. We tend to judge others by ourselves, and because
scientific and philosophic books are composed by men in whom the
reasonable, logical and objective habit of mind predominates, a similar
rationality has been attributed by them to the average and ordinary man.
It is then overlooked that both rationality and irrationality are
largely irrelevant and episodical in undisciplined human nature; that
men are governed by memory rather than by thought, and that memory is
not a remembering of actual facts, but is association, suggestion,
dramatic fancy. The standard used to measure the value of the
suggestions that spring up in the mind is not congruity with fact but
emotional congeniality. Do they stimulate and reinforce feeling, and fit
into the dramatic tale? Are they consonant with the prevailing mood, and
can they be rendered into the traditional hopes and fears of the
community? If we are willing to take the word dreams with a certain
liberality, it is hardly too much to say that man, save in his
occasional times of actual work and struggle, lives in a world of
dreams, rather than of facts, and a world of dreams that is organized
about desires whose success and frustration form its stuff.

To treat the early beliefs and traditions of mankind as if they were
attempts at scientific explanation of the world, only erroneous and
absurd attempts, is thus to be guilty of a great mistake. The material
out of which philosophy finally emerges is irrelevant to science and to
explanation. It is figurative, symbolic of fears and hopes, made of
imaginations and suggestions, not significant of a world of objective
fact intellectually confronted. It is poetry and drama, rather than
science, and is apart from scientific truth and falsity, rationality or
absurdity of fact in the same way in which poetry is independent of
these things.

This original material has, however, to pass through at least two stages
before it becomes philosophy proper. One is the stage in which stories
and legends and their accompanying dramatizations are consolidated. At
first the emotionalized records of experiences are largely casual and
transitory. Events that excite the emotions of an individual are seized
upon and lived over in tale and pantomime. But some experiences are so
frequent and recurrent that they concern the group as a whole. They are
socially generalized. The piecemeal adventure of the single individual
is built out till it becomes representative and typical of the emotional
life of the tribe. Certain incidents affect the weal and woe of the
group in its entirety and thereby get an exceptional emphasis and
elevation. A certain texture of tradition is built up; the story becomes
a social heritage and possession; the pantomime develops into the stated
rite. Tradition thus formed becomes a kind of norm to which individual
fancy and suggestion conform. An abiding framework of imagination is
constructed. A communal way of conceiving life grows up into which
individuals are inducted by education. Both unconsciously and by
definite social requirement individual memories are assimilated to group
memory or tradition, and individual fancies are accommodated to the body
of beliefs characteristic of a community. Poetry becomes fixated and
systematized. The story becomes a social norm. The original drama which
re-enacts an emotionally important experience is institutionalized into
a cult. Suggestions previously free are hardened into doctrines.

The systematic and obligatory nature of such doctrines is hastened and
confirmed through conquests and political consolidation. As the area of
a government is extended, there is a definite motive for systematizing
and unifying beliefs once free and floating. Aside from natural
accommodation and assimilation springing from the fact of intercourse
and the needs of common understanding, there is often political
necessity which leads the ruler to centralize traditions and beliefs in
order to extend and strengthen his prestige and authority. Judea,
Greece, Rome, and I presume all other countries having a long history,
present records of a continual working over of earlier local rites and
doctrines in the interests of a wider social unity and a more extensive
political power. I shall ask you to assume with me that in this way the
larger cosmogonies and cosmologies of the race as well as the larger
ethical traditions have arisen. Whether this is literally so or not, it
is not necessary to inquire, much less to demonstrate. It is enough for
our purposes that under social influences there took place a fixing and
organizing of doctrines and cults which gave general traits to the
imagination and general rules to conduct, and that such a consolidation
was a necessary antecedent to the formation of any philosophy as we
understand that term.

Although a necessary antecedent, this organization and generalization of
ideas and principles of belief is not the sole and sufficient generator
of philosophy. There is still lacking the motive for logical system and
intellectual proof. This we may suppose to be furnished by the need of
reconciling the moral rules and ideals embodied in the traditional code
with the matter of fact positivistic knowledge which gradually grows up.
For man can never be wholly the creature of suggestion and fancy. The
requirements of continued existence make indispensable some attention to
the actual facts of the world. Although it is surprising how little
check the environment actually puts upon the formation of ideas, since
no notions are too absurd not to have been accepted by some people, yet
the environment does enforce a certain minimum of correctness under
penalty of extinction. That certain things are foods, that they are to
be found in certain places, that water drowns, fire burns, that sharp
points penetrate and cut, that heavy things fall unless supported, that
there is a certain regularity in the changes of day and night and the
alternation of hot and cold, wet and dry:--such prosaic facts force
themselves upon even primitive attention. Some of them are so obvious
and so important that they have next to no fanciful context. Auguste
Comte says somewhere that he knows of no savage people who had a God of
weight although every other natural quality or force may have been
deified. Gradually there grows up a body of homely generalizations
preserving and transmitting the wisdom of the race about the observed
facts and sequences of nature. This knowledge is especially connected
with industries, arts and crafts where observation of materials and
processes is required for successful action, and where action is so
continuous and regular that spasmodic magic will not suffice.
Extravagantly fantastic notions are eliminated because they are brought
into juxtaposition with what actually happens.

The sailor is more likely to be given to what we now term superstitions
than say the weaver, because his activity is more at the mercy of sudden
change and unforeseen occurrence. But even the sailor while he may
regard the wind as the uncontrollable expression of the caprice of a
great spirit, will still have to become acquainted with some purely
mechanical principles of adjustment of boat, sails and oar to the wind.
Fire may be conceived as a supernatural dragon because some time or
other a swift, bright and devouring flame called before the mind's eye
the quick-moving and dangerous serpent. But the housewife who tends the
fire and the pots wherein food cooks will still be compelled to observe
certain mechanical facts of draft and replenishment, and passage from
wood to ash. Still more will the worker in metals accumulate verifiable
details about the conditions and consequences of the operation of heat.
He may retain for special and ceremonial occasions traditional beliefs,
but everyday familiar use will expel these conceptions for the greater
part of the time, when fire will be to him of uniform and prosaic
behavior, controllable by practical relations of cause and effect. As
the arts and crafts develop and become more elaborate, the body of
positive and tested knowledge enlarges, and the sequences observed
become more complex and of greater scope. Technologies of this kind give
that common-sense knowledge of nature out of which science takes its
origin. They provide not merely a collection of positive facts, but they
give expertness in dealing with materials and tools, and promote the
development of the experimental habit of mind, as soon as an art can be
taken away from the rule of sheer custom.

For a long time the imaginative body of beliefs closely connected with
the moral habits of a community group and with its emotional indulgences
and consolations persists side by side with the growing body of matter
of fact knowledge. Wherever possible they are interlaced. At other
points, their inconsistencies forbid their interweaving, but the two
things are kept apart as if in different compartments. Since one is
merely super-imposed upon the other their incompatibility is not felt,
and there is no need of reconciliation. In most cases, the two kinds of
mental products are kept apart because they become the possession of
separate social classes. The religious and poetic beliefs having
acquired a definite social and political value and function are in the
keeping of a higher class directly associated with the ruling elements
in the society. The workers and craftsmen who possess the prosaic matter
of fact knowledge are likely to occupy a low social status, and their
kind of knowledge is affected by the social disesteem entertained for
the manual worker who engages in activities useful to the body. It
doubtless was this fact in Greece which in spite of the keenness of
observation, the extraordinary power of logical reasoning and the great
freedom of speculation attained by the Athenian, postponed the general
and systematic employment of the experimental method. Since the
industrial craftsman was only just above the slave in social rank, his
type of knowledge and the method upon which it depended lacked prestige
and authority.

Nevertheless, the time came when matter of fact knowledge increased to
such bulk and scope that it came into conflict with not merely the
detail but with the spirit and temper of traditional and imaginative
beliefs. Without going into the vexed question of how and why, there is
no doubt that this is just what happened in what we term the sophistic
movement in Greece, within which originated philosophy proper in the
sense in which the western world understands that term. The fact that
the sophists had a bad name given them by Plato and Aristotle, a name
they have never been able to shake off, is evidence that with the
sophists the strife between the two types of belief was the emphatic
thing, and that the conflict had a disconcerting effect upon the
traditional system of religious beliefs and the moral code of conduct
bound up with it. Although Socrates was doubtless sincerely interested
in the reconciliation of the two sides, yet the fact that he approached
the matter from the side of matter of fact method, giving its canons and
criteria primacy, was enough to bring him to the condemnation of death
as a contemner of the gods and a corrupter of youth.

The fate of Socrates and the ill-fame of the sophists may be used to
suggest some of the striking contrasts between traditional emotionalized
belief on one hand and prosaic matter of fact knowledge on the
other:--the purpose of the comparison being to bring out the point that
while all the advantages of what we call science were on the side of the
latter, the advantages of social esteem and authority, and of intimate
contact with what gives life its deeper lying values were on the side of
traditional belief. To all appearances, the specific and verified
knowledge of the environment had only a limited and technical scope. It
had to do with the arts, and the purpose and good of the artisan after
all did not extend very far. They were subordinate and almost servile.
Who would put the art of the shoemaker on the same plane as the art of
ruling the state? Who would put even the higher art of the physician in
healing the body, upon the level of the art of the priest in healing the
soul? Thus Plato constantly draws the contrast in his dialogues. The
shoemaker is a judge of a good pair of shoes, but he is no judge at all
of the more important question whether and when it is good to wear
shoes; the physician is a good judge of health, but whether it is a good
thing or not to be well or better to die, he knows not. While the
artisan is expert as long as purely limited technical questions arise,
he is helpless when it comes to the only really important questions, the
moral questions as to values. Consequently, his type of knowledge is
inherently inferior and needs to be controlled by a higher kind of
knowledge which will reveal ultimate ends and purposes, and thus put and
keep technical and mechanical knowledge in its proper place. Moreover,
in Plato's pages we find, because of Plato's adequate dramatic sense, a
lively depicting of the impact in particular men of the conflict between
tradition and the new claims of purely intellectual knowledge. The
conservative is shocked beyond measure at the idea of teaching the
military art by abstract rules, by science. One does not just fight, one
fights for one's country. Abstract science cannot convey love and
loyalty, nor can it be a substitute, even upon the more technical side,
for those ways and means of fighting in which devotion to the country
has been traditionally embodied.

The way to learn the fighting art is through association with those who
have themselves learned to defend the country, by becoming saturated
with its ideals and customs; by becoming in short a practical adept in
the Greek tradition as to fighting. To attempt to derive abstract rules
from a comparison of native ways of fighting with the enemies' ways is
to begin to go over to the enemies' traditions and gods: it is to begin
to be false to one's own country.

Such a point of view vividly realized enables us to appreciate the
antagonism aroused by the positivistic point of view when it came into
conflict with the traditional. The latter was deeply rooted in social
habits and loyalties; it was surcharged with the moral aims for which
men lived and the moral rules by which they lived. Hence it was as basic
and as comprehensive as life itself, and palpitated with the warm
glowing colors of the community life in which men realized their own
being. In contrast, the positivistic knowledge was concerned with merely
physical utilities, and lacked the ardent associations of belief
hallowed by sacrifices of ancestors and worship of contemporaries.
Because of its limited and concrete character it was dry, hard, cold.

Yet the more acute and active minds, like that of Plato himself, could
no longer be content to accept, along with the conservative citizen of
the time, the old beliefs in the old way. The growth of positive
knowledge and of the critical, inquiring spirit undermined these in
their old form. The advantages in definiteness, in accuracy, in
verifiability were all on the side of the new knowledge. Tradition was
noble in aim and scope, but uncertain in foundation. The unquestioned
life, said Socrates, was not one fit to be lived by man, who is a
questioning being because he is a rational being. Hence he must search
out the reason of things, and not accept them from custom and political
authority. What was to be done? Develop a method of rational
investigation and proof which should place the essential elements of
traditional belief upon an unshakable basis; develop a method of thought
and knowledge which while purifying tradition should preserve its moral
and social values unimpaired; nay, by purifying them, add to their power
and authority. To put it in a word, that which had rested upon custom
was to be restored, resting no longer upon the habits of the past, but
upon the very metaphysics of Being and the Universe. Metaphysics is a
substitute for custom as the source and guarantor of higher moral and
social values--that is the leading theme of the classic philosophy of
Europe, as evolved by Plato and Aristotle--a philosophy, let us always
recall, renewed and restated by the Christian philosophy of Medieval
Europe.

Out of this situation emerged, if I mistake not, the entire tradition
regarding the function and office of philosophy which till very
recently has controlled the systematic and constructive philosophies of
the western world. If I am right in my main thesis that the origin of
philosophy lay in an attempt to reconcile the two different types of
mental product, then the key is in our hands as to the main traits of
subsequent philosophy so far as that was not of a negative and heterodox
kind. In the first place, philosophy did not develop in an unbiased way
from an open and unprejudiced origin. It had its task cut out for it
from the start. It had a mission to perform, and it was sworn in advance
to that mission. It had to extract the essential moral kernel out of the
threatened traditional beliefs of the past. So far so good; the work was
critical and in the interests of the only true conservatism--that which
will conserve and not waste the values wrought out by humanity. But it
was also precommitted to extracting this moral essence in a spirit
congenial to the spirit of past beliefs. The association with
imagination and with social authority was too intimate to be deeply
disturbed. It was not possible to conceive of the content of social
institutions in any form radically different from that in which they had
existed in the past. It became the work of philosophy to justify on
rational grounds the spirit, though not the form, of accepted beliefs
and traditional customs.

The resulting philosophy seemed radical enough and even dangerous to
the average Athenian because of the difference of form and method. In
the sense of pruning away excrescences and eliminating factors which to
the average citizen were all one with the basic beliefs, it was radical.
But looked at in the perspective of history and in contrast with
different types of thought which developed later in different social
environments, it is now easy to see how profoundly, after all, Plato and
Aristotle reflected the meaning of Greek tradition and habit, so that
their writings remain, with the writings of the great dramatists, the
best introduction of a student into the innermost ideals and aspirations
of distinctively Greek life. Without Greek religion, Greek art, Greek
civic life, their philosophy would have been impossible; while the
effect of that science upon which the philosophers most prided
themselves turns out to have been superficial and negligible. This
apologetic spirit of philosophy is even more apparent when Medieval
Christianity about the twelfth century sought for a systematic rational
presentation of itself and made use of classic philosophy, especially
that of Aristotle, to justify itself to reason. A not unsimilar
occurrence characterizes the chief philosophic systems of Germany in the
early nineteenth century, when Hegel assumed the task of justifying in
the name of rational idealism the doctrines and institutions which were
menaced by the new spirit of science and popular government. The result
has been that the great systems have not been free from party spirit
exercised in behalf of preconceived beliefs. Since they have at the same
time professed complete intellectual independence and rationality, the
result has been too often to impart to philosophy an element of
insincerity, all the more insidious because wholly unconscious on the
part of those who sustained philosophy.

And this brings us to a second trait of philosophy springing from its
origin. Since it aimed at a rational justification of things that had
been previously accepted because of their emotional congeniality and
social prestige, it had to make much of the apparatus of reason and
proof. Because of the lack of intrinsic rationality in the matters with
which it dealt, it leaned over backward, so to speak, in parade of
logical form. In dealing with matters of fact, simpler and rougher ways
of demonstration may be resorted to. It is enough, so to say, to produce
the fact in question and point to it--the fundamental form of all
demonstration. But when it comes to convincing men of the truth of
doctrines which are no longer to be accepted upon the say-so of custom
and social authority, but which also are not capable of empirical
verification, there is no recourse save to magnify the signs of rigorous
thought and rigid demonstration. Thus arises that appearance of abstract
definition and ultra-scientific argumentation which repels so many from
philosophy but which has been one of its chief attractions to its
devotees.

At the worst, this has reduced philosophy to a show of elaborate
terminology, a hair-splitting logic, and a fictitious devotion to the
mere external forms of comprehensive and minute demonstration. Even at
the best, it has tended to produce an overdeveloped attachment to system
for its own sake, and an over-pretentious claim to certainty. Bishop
Butler declared that probability is the guide of life; but few
philosophers have been courageous enough to avow that philosophy can be
satisfied with anything that is merely probable. The customs dictated by
tradition and desire had claimed finality and immutability. They had
claimed to give certain and unvarying laws of conduct. Very early in its
history philosophy made pretension to a similar conclusiveness, and
something of this temper has clung to classic philosophies ever since.
They have insisted that they were more scientific than the
sciences--that, indeed, philosophy was necessary because after all the
special sciences fail in attaining final and complete truth. There have
been a few dissenters who have ventured to assert, as did William James,
that "philosophy is vision" and that its chief function is to free men's
minds from bias and prejudice and to enlarge their perceptions of the
world about them. But in the main philosophy has set up much more
ambitious pretensions. To say frankly that philosophy can proffer
nothing but hypotheses, and that these hypotheses are of value only as
they render men's minds more sensitive to life about them, would seem
like a negation of philosophy itself.

In the third place, the body of beliefs dictated by desire and
imagination and developed under the influence of communal authority into
an authoritative tradition, was pervasive and comprehensive. It was, so
to speak, omnipresent in all the details of the group life. Its pressure
was unremitting and its influence universal. It was then probably
inevitable that the rival principle, reflective thought, should aim at a
similar universality and comprehensiveness. It would be as inclusive and
far-reaching metaphysically as tradition had been socially. Now there
was just one way in which this pretension could be accomplished in
conjunction with a claim of complete logical system and certainty.

All philosophies of the classic type have made a fixed and fundamental
distinction between two realms of existence. One of these corresponds to
the religious and supernatural world of popular tradition, which in its
metaphysical rendering became the world of highest and ultimate reality.
Since the final source and sanction of all important truths and rules of
conduct in community life had been found in superior and unquestioned
religious beliefs, so the absolute and supreme reality of philosophy
afforded the only sure guaranty of truth about empirical matters, and
the sole rational guide to proper social institutions and individual
behavior. Over against this absolute and noumenal reality which could be
apprehended only by the systematic discipline of philosophy itself stood
the ordinary empirical, relatively real, phenomenal world of everyday
experience. It was with this world that the practical affairs and
utilities of men were connected. It was to this imperfect and perishing
world that matter of fact, positivistic science referred.

This is the trait which, in my opinion, has affected most deeply the
classic notion about the nature of philosophy. Philosophy has arrogated
to itself the office of demonstrating the existence of a transcendent,
absolute or inner reality and of revealing to man the nature and
features of this ultimate and higher reality. It has therefore claimed
that it was in possession of a higher organ of knowledge than is
employed by positive science and ordinary practical experience, and that
it is marked by a superior dignity and importance--a claim which is
undeniable _if_ philosophy leads man to proof and intuition of a Reality
beyond that open to day-by-day life and the special sciences.

This claim has, of course, been denied by various philosophers from
time to time. But for the most part these denials have been agnostic and
sceptical. They have contented themselves with asserting that absolute
and ultimate reality is beyond human ken. But they have not ventured to
deny that such Reality would be the appropriate sphere for the exercise
of philosophic knowledge provided only it were within the reach of human
intelligence. Only comparatively recently has another conception of the
proper office of philosophy arisen. This course of lectures will be
devoted to setting forth this different conception of philosophy in some
of its main contrasts to what this lecture has termed the classic
conception. At this point, it can be referred to only by anticipation
and in cursory fashion. It is implied in the account which has been
given of the origin of philosophy out of the background of an
authoritative tradition; a tradition originally dictated by man's
imagination working under the influence of love and hate and in the
interest of emotional excitement and satisfaction. Common frankness
requires that it be stated that this account of the origin of
philosophies claiming to deal with absolute Being in a systematic way
has been given with malice prepense. It seems to me that this genetic
method of approach is a more effective way of undermining this type of
philosophic theorizing than any attempt at logical refutation could be.

If this lecture succeeds in leaving in your minds as a reasonable
hypothesis the idea that philosophy originated not out of intellectual
material, but out of social and emotional material, it will also succeed
in leaving with you a changed attitude toward traditional philosophies.
They will be viewed from a new angle and placed in a new light. New
questions about them will be aroused and new standards for judging them
will be suggested.

If any one will commence without mental reservations to study the
history of philosophy not as an isolated thing but as a chapter in the
development of civilization and culture; if one will connect the story
of philosophy with a study of anthropology, primitive life, the history
of religion, literature and social institutions, it is confidently
asserted that he will reach his own independent judgment as to the worth
of the account which has been presented today. Considered in this way,
the history of philosophy will take on a new significance. What is lost
from the standpoint of would-be science is regained from the standpoint
of humanity. Instead of the disputes of rivals about the nature of
reality, we have the scene of human clash of social purpose and
aspirations. Instead of impossible attempts to transcend experience,
we have the significant record of the efforts of men to formulate
the things of experience to which they are most deeply and
passionately attached. Instead of impersonal and purely speculative
endeavors to contemplate as remote beholders the nature of absolute
things-in-themselves, we have a living picture of the choice of
thoughtful men about what they would have life to be, and to what ends
they would have men shape their intelligent activities.

Any one of you who arrives at such a view of past philosophy will of
necessity be led to entertain a quite definite conception of the scope
and aim of future philosophizing. He will inevitably be committed to the
notion that what philosophy has been unconsciously, without knowing or
intending it, and, so to speak, under cover, it must henceforth be
openly and deliberately. When it is acknowledged that under disguise of
dealing with ultimate reality, philosophy has been occupied with the
precious values embedded in social traditions, that it has sprung from a
clash of social ends and from a conflict of inherited institutions with
incompatible contemporary tendencies, it will be seen that the task of
future philosophy is to clarify men's ideas as to the social and moral
strifes of their own day. Its aim is to become so far as is humanly
possible an organ for dealing with these conflicts. That which may be
pretentiously unreal when it is formulated in metaphysical distinctions
becomes intensely significant when connected with the drama of the
struggle of social beliefs and ideals. Philosophy which surrenders its
somewhat barren monopoly of dealings with Ultimate and Absolute Reality
will find a compensation in enlightening the moral forces which move
mankind and in contributing to the aspirations of men to attain to a
more ordered and intelligent happiness.




CHAPTER II

SOME HISTORICAL FACTORS IN PHILOSOPHICAL RECONSTRUCTION


Francis Bacon of the Elizabethan age is the great forerunner of the
spirit of modern life. Though slight in accomplishment, as a prophet of
new tendencies he is an outstanding figure of the world's intellectual
life. Like many another prophet he suffers from confused intermingling
of old and new. What is most significant in him has been rendered more
or less familiar by the later course of events. But page after page is
filled with matter which belongs to the past from which Bacon thought he
had escaped. Caught between these two sources of easy disparagement,
Bacon hardly receives his due as the real founder of modern thought,
while he is praised for merits which scarcely belong to him, such as an
alleged authorship of the specific methods of induction pursued by
science. What makes Bacon memorable is that breezes blowing from a new
world caught and filled his sails and stirred him to adventure in new
seas. He never himself discovered the land of promise, but he proclaimed
the new goal and by faith he descried its features from afar.

The main traits of his thought put before our mind the larger features
of a new spirit which was at work in causing intellectual
reconstruction. They may suggest the social and historical forces out of
which the new spirit was born. The best known aphorism of Bacon is that
Knowledge is Power. Judged by this pragmatic criterion, he condemned the
great body of learning then extant as _not_-knowledge, as pseudo- and
pretentious-knowledge. For it did not give power. It was otiose, not
operative. In his most extensive discussion he classified the learning
of his day under three heads, delicate, fantastic and contentious. Under
delicate learning, he included the literary learning which through the
influence of the revival of ancient languages and literatures occupied
so important a place in the intellectual life of the Renaissance.
Bacon's condemnation is the more effective because he himself was a
master of the classics and of all the graces and refinements which this
literary study was intended to convey. In substance he anticipated most
of the attacks which educational reformers since his time have made upon
one-sided literary culture. It contributed not to power but to ornament
and decoration. It was ostentatious and luxurious. By fantastic learning
he meant the quasi-magical science that was so rife all over Europe in
the sixteenth century--wild developments of alchemy, astrology, etc.
Upon this he poured his greatest vials of wrath because the corruption
of the good is the worst of evils. Delicate learning was idle and vain,
but fantastic learning aped the form of true knowledge. It laid hold of
the true principle and aim of knowledge--control of natural forces. But
it neglected the conditions and methods by which alone such knowledge
could be obtained, and thus deliberately led men astray.

For our purposes, however, what he says about contentious learning is
the most important. For by this, he means the traditional science which
had come down, in scanty and distorted measure to be sure, from
antiquity through scholasticism. It is called contentious both because
of the logical method used and the end to which it was put. In a certain
sense it aimed at power, but power over other men in the interest of
some class or sect or person, not power over natural forces in the
common interest of all. Bacon's conviction of the quarrelsome,
self-displaying character of the scholarship which had come down from
antiquity was of course not so much due to Greek science itself as to
the degenerate heritage of scholasticism in the fourteenth century, when
philosophy had fallen into the hands of disputatious theologians, full
of hair-splitting argumentativeness and quirks and tricks by which to
win victory over somebody else.

But Bacon also brought his charge against the Aristotelian method
itself. In its rigorous forms it aimed at demonstration, and in its
milder forms at persuasion. But both demonstration and persuasion aim at
conquest of mind rather than of nature. Moreover they both assume that
some one is already in possession of a truth or a belief, and that the
only problem is to convince some one else, or to teach. In contrast, his
new method had an exceedingly slight opinion of the amount of truth
already existent, and a lively sense of the extent and importance of
truths still to be attained. It would be a logic of discovery, not a
logic of argumentation, proof and persuasion. To Bacon, the old logic
even at its best was a logic for teaching the already known, and
teaching meant indoctrination, discipling. It was an axiom of Aristotle
that only that which was already known could be learned, that growth in
knowledge consisted simply in bringing together a universal truth of
reason and a particular truth of sense which had previously been noted
separately. In any case, learning meant _growth_ of knowledge, and
growth belongs in the region of becoming, change, and hence is inferior
to _possession_ of knowledge in the syllogistic self-revolving
manipulation of what was already known--demonstration.

In contrast with this point of view, Bacon eloquently proclaimed the
superiority of discovery of new facts and truths to demonstration of the
old. Now there is only one road to discovery, and that is penetrating
inquiry into the secrets of nature. Scientific principles and laws do
not lie on the surface of nature. They are hidden, and must be wrested
from nature by an active and elaborate technique of inquiry. Neither
logical reasoning nor the passive accumulation of any number of
observations--which the ancients called experience--suffices to lay hold
of them. Active experimentation must force the apparent facts of nature
into forms different to those in which they familiarly present
themselves; and thus make them tell the truth about themselves, as
torture may compel an unwilling witness to reveal what he has been
concealing. Pure reasoning as a means of arriving at truth is like the
spider who spins a web out of himself. The web is orderly and elaborate,
but it is only a trap. The passive accumulation of experiences--the
traditional empirical method--is like the ant who busily runs about and
collects and piles up heaps of raw materials. True method, that which
Bacon would usher in, is comparable to the operations of the bee who,
like the ant, collects material from the external world, but unlike that
industrious creature attacks and modifies the collected stuff in order
to make it yield its hidden treasure.

Along with this contrast between subjugation of nature and subjection of
other minds and the elevation of a method of discovery above a method of
demonstration, went Bacon's sense of progress as the aim and test of
genuine knowledge. According to his criticisms, the classic logic, even
in its Aristotelian form, inevitably played into the hands of inert
conservatism. For in accustoming the mind to think of truth as already
known, it habituated men to fall back on the intellectual attainments of
the past, and to accept them without critical scrutiny. Not merely the
medieval but the renaissance mind tended to look back to antiquity as a
Golden Age of Knowledge, the former relying upon sacred scriptures, the
latter upon secular literatures. And while this attitude could not
fairly be charged up against the classic logic, yet Bacon felt, and with
justice, that any logic which identified the technique of knowing with
demonstration of truths already possessed by the mind, blunts the spirit
of investigation and confines the mind within the circle of traditional
learning.

Such a logic could not avoid having for its salient features definition
of what is already known (or thought to be known), and its
systematization according to recognized canons of orthodoxy. A logic of
discovery on the other hand looks to the future. Received truth it
regards critically as something to be tested by new experiences rather
than as something to be dogmatically taught and obediently received. Its
chief interest in even the most carefully tested ready-made knowledge is
the use which may be made of it in further inquiries and discoveries.
Old truth has its chief value in assisting the detection of new truth.
Bacon's own appreciation of the nature of induction was highly
defective. But his acute sense that science means invasion of the
unknown, rather than repetition in logical form of the already known,
makes him nevertheless the father of induction. Endless and persistent
uncovering of facts and principles not known--such is the true spirit of
induction. Continued progress in knowledge is the only sure way of
protecting old knowledge from degeneration into dogmatic doctrines
received on authority, or from imperceptible decay into superstition and
old wives' tales.

Ever-renewed progress is to Bacon the test as well as the aim of genuine
logic. Where, Bacon constantly demands, where are the works, the fruits,
of the older logic? What has it done to ameliorate the evils of life, to
rectify defects, to improve conditions? Where are the inventions that
justify its claim to be in possession of truth? Beyond the victory of
man over man in law courts, diplomacy and political administration, they
are nil. One had to turn from admired "sciences" to despised arts to
find works, fruits, consequences of value to human kind through power
over natural forces. And progress in the arts was as yet intermittent,
fitful, accidental. A true logic or technique of inquiry would make
advance in the industrial, agricultural and medical arts continuous,
cumulative and deliberately systematic.

If we take into account the supposed body of ready-made knowledge upon
which learned men rested in supine acquiescence and which they recited
in parrot-like chorus, we find it consists of two parts. One of these
parts is made up of the errors of our ancestors, musty with antiquity
and organized into pseudo-science through the use of the classic logic.
Such "truths" are in fact only the systematized mistakes and prejudices
of our ancestors. Many of them originated in accident; many in class
interest and bias, perpetuated by authority for this very reason--a
consideration which later actuated Locke's attack upon the doctrine of
innate ideas. The other portion of accepted beliefs comes from
instinctive tendencies of the human mind that give it a dangerous bias
until counteracted by a conscious and critical logic.

The mind of man spontaneously assumes greater simplicity, uniformity and
unity among phenomena than actually exists. It follows superficial
analogies and jumps to conclusions; it overlooks the variety of details
and the existence of exceptions. Thus it weaves a web of purely internal
origin which it imposes upon nature. What had been termed science in the
past consisted of this humanly constructed and imposed web. Men looked
at the work of their own minds and thought they were seeing realities
in nature. They were worshipping, under the name of science, the idols
of their own making. So-called science and philosophy consisted of these
"anticipations" of nature. And the worst thing that could be said about
traditional logic was that instead of saving man from this natural
source of error, it had, though attributing to nature a false
rationality of unity, simplicity and generality, sanctioned these
sources of delusion. The office of the new logic would be to protect the
mind against itself: to teach it to undergo a patient and prolonged
apprenticeship to fact in its infinite variety and particularity: to
obey nature intellectually in order to command it practically. Such was
the significance of the new logic--the new tool or organon of learning,
so named in express opposition to the organon of Aristotle.

Certain other important oppositions are implied. Aristotle thought of
reason as capable of solitary communion with rational truth. The
counterpart of his celebrated saying that man is a political animal, is
that Intelligence, _Nous_, is neither animal, human nor political. It is
divinely unique and self-enclosed. To Bacon, error had been produced and
perpetuated by social influences, and truth must be discovered by social
agencies organized for that purpose. Left to himself, the individual can
do little or nothing; he is likely to become involved in his own
self-spun web of misconceptions. The great need is the organization of
co-operative research, whereby men attack nature collectively and the
work of inquiry is carried on continuously from generation to
generation. Bacon even aspired to the rather absurd notion of a method
so perfected that differences in natural human ability might be
discounted, and all be put on the same level in production of new facts
and new truths. Yet this absurdity was only the negative side of his
great positive prophecy of a combined and co-operative pursuit of
science such as characterizes our own day. In view of the picture he
draws in his New Atlantis of a State organized for collective inquiry,
we readily forgive him his exaggerations.

Power over nature was not to be individual but collective; the Empire,
as he says, of Man over Nature, substituted for the Empire of Man over
Man. Let us employ Bacon's own words with their variety of picturesque
metaphor: "Men have entered into the desire of learning and
knowledge,... seldom sincerely to give a true account of their gift of
reason, to the benefit and use of men, but as if they sought in
knowledge a couch whereon to rest a searching and wandering spirit; or a
terrace for a wandering and variable mind to walk up and down with a
fair prospect; or a tower for a proud mind to raise itself upon; or a
fort or commanding ground for strife and contention; or a shop for
profit and sale; and not a rich storehouse for the glory of the creator
and the relief of man's estate." When William James called Pragmatism a
New Name for an Old Way of Thinking, I do not know that he was thinking
expressly of Francis Bacon, but so far as concerns the spirit and
atmosphere of the pursuit of knowledge, Bacon may be taken as the
prophet of a pragmatic conception of knowledge. Many misconceptions of
its spirit would be avoided if his emphasis upon the social factor in
both the pursuit and the end of knowledge were carefully observed.

This somewhat over-long résumé of Bacon's ideas has not been gone into
as a matter of historic retrospect. The summary is rather meant to put
before our minds an authentic document of the new philosophy which may
bring into relief the social causes of intellectual revolution. Only a
sketchy account can be here attempted, but it may be of some assistance
even barely to remind you of the direction of that industrial, political
and religious change upon which Europe was entering.

Upon the industrial side, it is impossible, I think, to exaggerate the
influence of travel, exploration and new commerce which fostered a
romantic sense of adventure into novelty; loosened the hold of
traditional beliefs; created a lively sense of new worlds to be
investigated and subdued; produced new methods of manufacture, commerce,
banking and finance; and then reacted everywhere to stimulate invention,
and to introduce positive observation and active experimentation into
science. The Crusades, the revival of the profane learning of antiquity
and even more perhaps, the contact with the advanced learning of the
Mohammedans, the increase of commerce with Asia and Africa, the
introduction of the lens, compass and gunpowder, the finding and opening
up of North and South America--most significantly called The New
World--these are some of the obvious external facts. Contrast between
peoples and races previously isolated is always, I think, most fruitful
and influential for change when psychological and industrial changes
coincide with and reinforce each other. Sometimes people undergo
emotional change, what might almost be called a metaphysical change,
through intercourse. The inner set of the mind, especially in religious
matters, is altered. At other times, there is a lively exchange of
goods, an adoption of foreign tools and devices, an imitation of alien
habits of clothing, habitation and production of commodities. One of
these changes is, so to speak, too internal and the other too external
to bring about a profound intellectual development. But when the
creation of a new mental attitude falls together with extensive material
and economic changes, something significant happens.

This coincidence of two kinds of change was, I take it, characteristic
of the new contacts of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Clash of
customs and traditional beliefs dispelled mental inertia and
sluggishness; it aroused a lively curiosity as to different and new
ideas. The actual adventure of travel and exploration purged the mind of
fear of the strange and unknown: as new territories geographically and
commercially speaking were opened up, the mind was opened up. New
contacts promoted the desire for still more contacts; the appetite for
novelty and discovery grew by what it fed upon. Conservative adherence
to old beliefs and methods underwent a steady attrition with every new
voyage into new parts and every new report of foreign ways. The mind
became used to exploration and discovery. It found a delight and
interest in the revelations of the novel and the unusual which it no
longer took in what was old and customary. Moreover, the very act of
exploration, of expedition, the process of enterprising adventure into
the remote, yielded a peculiar joy and thrill.

This psychological change was essential to the birth of the new point of
view in science and philosophy. Yet alone it could hardly have produced
the new method of knowing. But positive changes in the habits and
purposes of life gave objective conformation and support to the mental
change. They also determined the channels in which the new spirit found
exercise. Newfound wealth, the gold from the Americas and new articles
of consumption and enjoyment, tended to wean men from preoccupation
with the metaphysical and theological, and to turn their minds with
newly awakened interest to the joys of nature and this life. New
material resources and new markets in America and India undermined the
old dependence upon household and manual production for a local and
limited market, and generated quantitative, large scale production by
means of steam for foreign and expanding markets. Capitalism, rapid
transit, and production for exchange against money and for profit,
instead of against goods and for consumption, followed.

This cursory and superficial reminder of vast and complicated events may
suggest the mutual interdependence of the scientific revolution and the
industrial revolution. Upon the one hand, modern industry is so much
applied science. No amount of desire to make money, or to enjoy new
commodities, no amount of mere practical energy and enterprise, would
have effected the economic transformation of the last few centuries and
generations. Improvements in mathematical, physical, chemical and
biological science were prerequisites. Business men through engineers of
different sorts, have laid hold of the new insights gained by scientific
men into the hidden energies of nature, and have turned them to account.
The modern mine, factory, railway, steamship, telegraph, all of the
appliances and equipment of production, and transportation, express
scientific knowledge. They would continue unimpaired even if the
ordinary pecuniary accompaniments of economic activity were radically
altered. In short, through the intermediary of invention, Bacon's
watchword that knowledge is power and his dream of continuous empire
over natural forces by means of natural science have been actualized.
The industrial revolution by steam and electricity is the reply to
Bacon's prophecy.

On the other hand, it is equally true that the needs of modern industry
have been tremendous stimuli to scientific investigation. The demands of
progressive production and transportation have set new problems to
inquiry; the processes used in industry have suggested new experimental
appliances and operations in science; the wealth rolled up in business
has to some extent been diverted to endowment of research. The
uninterrupted and pervasive interaction of scientific discovery and
industrial application has fructified both science and industry, and has
brought home to the contemporary mind the fact that the gist of
scientific knowledge is control of natural energies. These four facts,
natural science, experimentation, control and progress have been
inextricably bound up together. That up to the present the application
of the newer methods and results has influenced the means of life rather
than its ends; or, better put, that human aims have so far been affected
in an accidental rather than in an intelligently directed way,
signifies that so far the change has been technical rather than human
and moral, that it has been economic rather than adequately social. Put
in the language of Bacon, this means that while we have been reasonably
successful in obtaining command of nature by means of science, our
science is not yet such that this command is systematically and
pre-eminently applied to the relief of human estate. Such applications
occur and in great numbers, but they are incidental, sporadic and
external. And this limitation defines the specific problem of
philosophical reconstruction at the present time. For it emphasizes the
larger social deficiencies that require intelligent diagnosis, and
projection of aims and methods.

It is hardly necessary to remind you however that marked political
changes have already followed upon the new science and its industrial
applications, and that in so far some directions of social development
have at least been marked out. The growth of the new technique of
industry has everywhere been followed by the fall of feudal
institutions, in which the social pattern was formed in agricultural
occupations and military pursuits. Wherever business in the modern sense
has gone, the tendency has been to transfer power from land to financial
capital, from the country to the city, from the farm to factory, from
social titles based on personal allegiance, service and protection, to
those based on control of labor and exchange of goods. The change in
the political centre of gravity has resulted in emancipating the
individual from bonds of class and custom and in producing a political
organization which depends less upon superior authority and more upon
voluntary choice. Modern states, in other words, are regarded less as
divine, and more as human works than they used to be; less as necessary
manifestations of some supreme and over-ruling principles, and more as
contrivances of men and women to realize their own desires.

The contract theory of the origin of the state is a theory whose falsity
may easily be demonstrated both philosophically and historically.
Nevertheless this theory has had great currency and influence. In form,
it stated that some time in the past men voluntarily got together and
made a compact with one another to observe certain laws and to submit to
certain authority and in that way brought the state and the relation of
ruler and subject into existence. Like many things in philosophy, the
theory, though worthless as a record of fact, is of great worth as a
symptom of the direction of human desire. It testified to a growing
belief that the state existed to satisfy human needs and could be shaped
by human intention and volition. Aristotle's theory that the state
exists by nature failed to satisfy the thought of the seventeenth
century because it seemed by making the state a product of nature to
remove its constitution beyond human choice. Equally significant was
the assumption of the contract theory that individuals by their personal
decisions expressing their personal wishes bring the state into
existence. The rapidity with which the theory gained a hold all over
western Europe showed the extent to which the bonds of customary
institutions had relaxed their grip. It proved that men had been so
liberated from absorption in larger groups that they were conscious of
themselves as individuals having rights and claims on their own account,
not simply as members of a class, guild or social grade.

Side by side with this political individualism went a religious and
moral individualism. The metaphysical doctrine of the superiority of the
species to the individual, of the permanent universal to the changing
particular, was the philosophic support of political and ecclesiastical
institutionalism. The universal church was the ground, end and limit of
the individual's beliefs and acts in spiritual matters, just as the
feudal hierarchical organization was the basis, law and fixed limit of
his behavior in secular affairs. The northern barbarians had never
completely come under the sway of classic ideas and customs. That which
was indigenous where life was primarily derived from Latin sources was
borrowed and more or less externally imposed in Germanic Europe.
Protestantism marked the formal breaking away from the domination of
Roman ideas. It effected liberation of individual conscience and worship
from control by an organized institution claiming to be permanent and
universal. It cannot truly be said that at the outset the new religious
movement went far in promoting freedom of thought and criticism, or in
denying the notion of some supreme authority to which individual
intelligence was absolutely in bonds. Nor at first did it go far in
furthering tolerance or respect for divergency of moral and religious
convictions. But practically it did tend to disintegration of
established institutions. By multiplying sects and churches it
encouraged at least a negative toleration of the right of individuals to
judge ultimate matters for themselves. In time, there developed a
formulated belief in the sacredness of individual conscience and in the
right to freedom of opinion, belief and worship.

It is unnecessary to point out how the spread of this conviction
increased political individualism, or how it accelerated the willingness
of men to question received ideas in science and philosophy--to think
and observe and experiment for themselves. Religious individualism
served to supply a much needed sanction to initiative and independence
of thought in all spheres, even when religious movements officially were
opposed to such freedom when carried beyond a limited point. The
greatest influence of Protestantism was, however, in developing the
idea of the personality of every human being as an end in himself. When
human beings were regarded as capable of direct relationship with God,
without the intermediary of any organization like the Church, and the
drama of sin, redemption and salvation was something enacted within the
innermost soul of individuals rather than in the species of which the
individual was a subordinate part, a fatal blow was struck at all
doctrines which taught the subordination of personality--a blow which
had many political reverberations in promoting democracy. For when in
religion the idea of the intrinsic worth of every soul as such was
proclaimed, it was difficult to keep the idea from spilling over, so to
say, into secular relationships.

The absurdity is obvious of trying in a few paragraphs to summarize
movements in industry, politics and religion whose influence is still
far from exhausted and about which hundreds and thousands of volumes
have been written. But I shall count upon your forbearance to recall
that these matters are alluded to only in order to suggest some of the
forces that operated to mark out the channels in which new ideas ran.
First, there is the transfer of interest from the eternal and universal
to what is changing and specific, concrete--a movement that showed
itself practically in carrying over of attention and thought from
another world to this, from the supernaturalism characteristic of the
Middle Ages to delight in natural science, natural activity and natural
intercourse. Secondly, there is the gradual decay of the authority of
fixed institutions and class distinctions and relations, and a growing
belief in the power of individual minds, guided by methods of
observation, experiment and reflection, to attain the truths needed for
the guidance of life. The operations and results of natural inquiry
gained in prestige and power at the expense of principles dictated from
high authority.

Consequently principles and alleged truths are judged more and more by
criteria of their origin in experience and their consequences of weal
and woe in experience, and less by criteria of sublime origin from
beyond everyday experience and independent of fruits in experience. It
is no longer enough for a principle to be elevated, noble, universal and
hallowed by time. It must present its birth certificate, it must show
under just what conditions of human experience it was generated, and it
must justify itself by its works, present and potential. Such is the
inner meaning of the modern appeal to experience as an ultimate
criterion of value and validity. In the third place, great store is set
upon the idea of progress. The future rather than the past dominates the
imagination. The Golden Age lies ahead of us not behind us. Everywhere
new possibilities beckon and arouse courage and effort. The great
French thinkers of the later eighteenth century borrowed this idea from
Bacon and developed it into the doctrine of the indefinite
perfectibility of mankind on earth. Man is capable, if he will but
exercise the required courage, intelligence and effort, of shaping his
own fate. Physical conditions offer no insurmountable barriers. In the
fourth place, the patient and experimental study of nature, bearing
fruit in inventions which control nature and subdue her forces to social
uses, is the method by which progress is made. Knowledge is power and
knowledge is achieved by sending the mind to school to nature to learn
her processes of change.

In this lecture as in the previous one, I can hardly close better than
by reference to the new responsibilities imposed upon philosophy and the
new opportunities opened to it. Upon the whole, the greatest effect of
these changes up to date has been to substitute an Idealism based on
epistemology, or the theory of knowledge, for the Idealism based on the
metaphysics of classic antiquity.

Earlier modern philosophy (even though unconsciously to itself) had the
problem of reconciling the traditional theory of the rational and ideal
basis, stuff and end of the universe with the new interest in individual
mind and the new confidence in its capacities. It was in a dilemma. On
the one hand, it had no intention of losing itself in a materialism
which subordinated man to physical existence and mind to
matter--especially just at the moment when in actual affairs man and
mind were beginning to achieve genuine rule over nature. On the other
hand, the conception that the world as it stood was an embodiment of a
fixed and comprehensive Mind or Reason was uncongenial to those whose
main concern was with the deficiencies of the world and with an attempt
to remedy them. The effect of the objective theological idealism that
had developed out of classic metaphysical idealism was to make the mind
submissive and acquiescent. The new individualism chafed under the
restrictions imposed upon it by the notion of a universal reason which
had once and for all shaped nature and destiny.

In breaking away from antique and medieval thought, accordingly, early
modern thought continued the older tradition of a Reason that creates
and constitutes the world, but combined it with the notion that this
Reason operates through the human mind, individual or collective. This
is the common note of idealism sounded by all the philosophies of the
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, whether belonging to the British
school of Locke, Berkeley and Hume or the Continental school of
Descartes. In Kant as everybody knows the two strains came together; and
the theme of the formation of the knowable world by means of a thought
that operated exclusively through the human knower became explicit.
Idealism ceased to be metaphysical and cosmic in order to become
epistemological and personal.

It is evident that this development represents merely a transitional
stage. It tried, after all, to put the new wine in the old bottles. It
did not achieve a free and unbiased formulation of the meaning of the
power to direct nature's forces through knowledge--that is, purposeful,
experimental action acting to reshape beliefs and institutions. The
ancient tradition was still strong enough to project itself
unconsciously into men's ways of thinking, and to hamper and compromise
the expression of the really modern forces and aims. Essential
philosophic reconstruction represents an attempt to state these causes
and results in a way freed from incompatible inherited factors. It will
regard intelligence not as the original shaper and final cause of
things, but as the purposeful energetic re-shaper of those phases of
nature and life that obstruct social well-being. It esteems the
individual not as an exaggeratedly self-sufficient Ego which by some
magic creates the world, but as the agent who is responsible through
initiative, inventiveness and intelligently directed labor for
re-creating the world, transforming it into an instrument and possession
of intelligence.

The train of ideas represented by the Baconian Knowledge is Power thus
failed in getting an emancipated and independent expression. These
become hopelessly entangled in standpoints and prepossessions that
embodied a social, political and scientific tradition with which they
were completely incompatible. The obscurity, the confusion of modern
philosophy is the product of this attempt to combine two things which
cannot possibly be combined either logically or morally. Philosophic
reconstruction for the present is thus the endeavor to undo the
entanglement and to permit the Baconian aspirations to come to a free
and unhindered expression. In succeeding lectures we shall consider the
needed reconstruction as it affects certain classic philosophic
antitheses, like those of experience and reason, the real and the ideal.
But first we shall have to consider the modifying effect exercised upon
philosophy by that changed conception of nature, animate and inanimate,
which we owe to the progress of science.




CHAPTER III

THE SCIENTIFIC FACTOR IN RECONSTRUCTION OF PHILOSOPHY


Philosophy starts from some deep and wide way of responding to the
difficulties life presents, but it grows only when material is at hand
for making this practical response conscious, articulate and
communicable. Accompanying the economic, political and ecclesiastical
changes which were alluded to in an earlier lecture, was a scientific
revolution enormous in scope and leaving unchanged almost no detail of
belief about nature, physical and human. In part this scientific
transformation was produced by just the change in practical attitude and
temper. But as it progressed, it furnished that change an appropriate
vocabulary, congenial to its needs, and made it articulate. The advance
of science in its larger generalizations and in its specific detail of
fact supplied precisely that intellectual equipment of ideas and
concrete fact that was needed in order to formulate, precipitate,
communicate and propagate the new disposition. Today, accordingly, we
shall deal with those contrasting conceptions of the structure and
constitution of Nature, which when they are accepted on the authority
of science (alleged or real), form the intellectual framework of
philosophy.

_Contrasting_ conceptions of ancient and modern science have been
selected. For I see no way in which the truly philosophic import of the
picture of the world painted by modern science can be appreciated except
to exhibit it in contrast with that earlier picture which gave classic
metaphysics its intellectual foundation and confirmation. The world in
which philosophers once put their trust was a closed world, a world
consisting internally of a limited number of fixed forms, and having
definite boundaries externally. The world of modern science is an open
world, a world varying indefinitely without the possibility of
assignable limit in its internal make-up, a world stretching beyond any
assignable bounds externally. Again, the world in which even the most
intelligent men of olden times thought they lived was a fixed world, a
realm where changes went on only within immutable limits of rest and
permanence, and a world where the fixed and unmoving was, as we have
already noted, higher in quality and authority than the moving and
altering. And in the third place, the world which men once saw with
their eyes, portrayed in their imaginations and repeated in their plans
of conduct, was a world of a limited number of classes, kinds, forms,
distinct in quality (as kinds and species must be distinct) and
arranged in a graded order of superiority and inferiority.

It is not easy to recall the image of the universe which was taken for
granted in the world tradition. In spite of its dramatic rendering (as
in Dante), of the dialectical elaborations of Aristotle and St. Thomas,
in spite of the fact that it held men's minds captive until the last
three hundred years, and that its overthrow involved a religious
upheaval, it is already dim, faded and remote. Even as a separate and
abstract thing of theory it is not easy to recover.

As something pervasive, interwoven with all the details of reflection
and observation, with the plans and rules of behavior, it is impossible
to call it back again. Yet, as best we can, we need to put before our
minds a definitely enclosed universe, something which can be called a
universe in a literal and visible sense, having the earth at its fixed
and unchanging centre and at a fixed circumference the heavenly arch of
fixed stars moving in an eternal round of divine ether, hemming in all
things and keeping them forever at one and in order. The earth, though
at the centre, is the coarsest, grossest, most material, least
significant and good (or perfect) of the parts of this closed world. It
is the scene of maximum fluctuation and vicissitude. It is the least
rational, and therefore the least notable, or knowable; it offers the
least to reward contemplation, provoke admiration and govern conduct.
Between this grossly material centre and the immaterial, spiritual and
eternal heavens lie a definite series of regions of moon, planets, sun,
etc., each of which gains in rank, value, rationality and true being as
it is farther from earth and nearer the heavens. Each of these regions
is composed of its own appropriate stuff of earth, water, air, fire in
its own dominant degree, until we reach the heavenly firmament which
transcends all these principles, being constituted, as was just said, of
that immaterial, inalterable energy called ether.

Within this tight and pent in universe, changes take place of course.
But they are only of a small number of fixed kinds; and they operate
only within fixed limits. Each kind of stuff has its own appropriate
motion. It is the nature of earthly things to be heavy, since they are
gross, and hence to move downward. Fire and superior things are light
and hence move upward to their proper place; air rises only to the plane
of the planets, where it then takes its back and forth motion which
naturally belongs to it, as is evident in the winds and in respiration.
Ether being the highest of all physical things has a purely circular
movement. The daily return of the fixed stars is the closest possible
approximation to eternity, and to the self-involved revolution of mind
upon its own ideal axis of reason. Upon the earth in virtue of its
earthly nature--or rather its lack of virtue--is a scene of mere
change. Mere flux, aimless and meaningless, starts at no definite point
and arrives at nothing, amounts to nothing. Mere changes of quantity,
all purely mechanical changes, are of this kind. They are like the
shiftings of the sands by the sea. They may be sensed, but they cannot
be "noted" or understood; they lack fixed limits which govern them. They
are contemptible. They are casual, the sport of accident.

Only changes which lead to some defined or fixed outcome of form are of
any account and can have any account--any _logos_ or reason--made of
them. The growth of plants and animals illustrates the highest kind of
change which is possible in the sublunary or mundane sphere. They go
from one definite fixed form to another. Oaks generate only oaks,
oysters only oysters, man only man. The material factor of mechanical
production enters in, but enters in as accident to prevent the full
consummation of the type of the species, and to bring about the
meaningless variations which diversify various oaks or oysters from one
another; or in extreme cases to produce freaks, sports, monsters,
three-handed or four-toed men. Aside from accidental and undesirable
variations, each individual has a fixed career to pursue, a fixed path
in which to travel. Terms which sound modern, words like potentiality
and development abound in Aristotelian thought, and have misled some
into reading into his thought modern meanings. But the significance of
these words in classic and medieval thought is rigidly determined by
their context. Development holds merely of the course of changes which
takes place within a particular member of the species. It is only a name
for the predetermined movement from the acorn to the oak tree. It takes
place not in things generally but only in some one of the numerically
insignificant members of the oak species. Development, evolution, never
means, as in modern science, origin of new forms, a mutation from an old
species, but only the monotonous traversing of a previously plotted
cycle of change. So potentiality never means, as in modern life, the
possibility of novelty, of invention, of radical deviation, but only
that principle in virtue of which the acorn becomes the oak.
Technically, it is the capacity for movement between opposites. Only the
cold can become hot; only the dry can become wet; only the babe can
become a man; the seed the full-grown wheat and so on. Potentiality
instead of implying the emergence of anything novel means merely the
facility with which a particular thing repeats the recurrent processes
of its kind, and thus becomes a specific case of the eternal forms in
and through which all things are constituted.

In spite of the almost infinite numerical diversity of individuals,
there are only a limited number of species, kinds or sorts. And the
world is essentially a world which falls into sorts; it is pre-arranged
into distinct classes. Moreover, just as we naturally arrange plants and
animals into series, ranks and grades, from the lower to the highest, so
with all things in the universe. The distinct classes to which things
belong by their very nature form a hierarchical order. There are castes
in nature. The universe is constituted on an aristocratic, one can truly
say a feudal, plan. Species, classes do not mix or overlap--except in
cases of accident, and to the result of chaos. Otherwise, everything
belongs in advance to a certain class, and the class has its own fixed
place in the hierarchy of Being. The universe is indeed a tidy spot
whose purity is interfered with only by those irregular changes in
individuals which are due to the presence of an obdurate matter that
refuses to yield itself wholly to rule and form. Otherwise it is a
universe with a fixed place for everything and where everything knows
its place, its station and class, and keeps it. Hence what are known
technically as final and formal causes are supreme, and efficient causes
are relegated to an inferior place. The so-called final cause is just a
name for the fact that there is some fixed form characteristic of a
class or sort of things which governs the changes going on, so that they
tend toward it as their end and goal, the fulfilment of their true
nature. The supralunar region is the end or final cause of the proper
movements of air and fire; the earth of the motions of crass, heavy
things; the oak of the acorn; the mature form in general of the
germinal.

The "efficient cause," that which produces and instigates a movement is
only some external change as it accidentally gives a kind of push to an
immature, imperfect being and starts it moving toward its perfected or
fulfilled form. The final cause is the perfected form regarded as the
_explanation or reason_ of prior changes. When it is not taken in
reference to the changes completed and brought to rest in it, but in
itself it is the "formal cause": The inherent _nature_ or character
which "makes" or constitutes a thing _what it is_ so far as it truly
_is_, namely, what it is so far as it does not change. Logically and
practically all of the traits which have been enumerated cohere. Attack
one and you attack all. When any one is undermined, all go. This is the
reason why the intellectual modification of the last few centuries may
truly be called a revolution. It has substituted a conception of the
world differing at every point. It makes little matter at what point you
commence to trace the difference, you find yourself carried into all
other points.

Instead of a closed universe, science now presents us with one infinite
in space and time, having no limits here or there, at this end, so to
speak, or at that, and as infinitely complex in internal structure as
it is infinite in extent. Hence it is also an open world, an infinitely
variegated one, a world which in the old sense can hardly be called a
universe at all; so multiplex and far-reaching that it cannot be summed
up and grasped in any one formula. And change rather than fixity is now
a measure of "reality" or energy of being; change is omnipresent. The
laws in which the modern man of science is interested are laws of
motion, of generation and consequence. He speaks of law where the
ancients spoke of kind and essence, because what he wants is a
correlation of changes, an ability to detect one change occurring in
correspondence with another. He does not try to define and delimit
something remaining constant _in_ change. He tries to describe a
constant order _of_ change. And while the word "constant" appears in
both statements, the meaning of the word is not the same. In one case,
we are dealing with something constant in _existence_, physical or
metaphysical; in the other case, with something constant in _function_
and operation. One is a form of independent being; the other is a
formula of description and calculation of interdependent changes.

In short, classic thought accepted a feudally arranged order of classes
or kinds, each "holding" from a superior and in turn giving the rule of
conduct and service to an inferior. This trait reflects and parallels
most closely the social situation we were considering at the last hour.
We have a fairly definite notion of society as organized upon the feudal
basis. The family principle, the principle of kinship is strong, and
especially is this true as we ascend in the social scale. At the lower
end, individuals may be lost more or less in the mass. Since all are
parts of the common herd, there is nothing especial to distinguish their
birth. But among the privileged and ruling class the case is quite
different. The tie of kinship at once marks a group off externally and
gives it distinction, and internally holds all its members together.
Kinship, kind, class, genus are synonymous terms, starting from social
and concrete facts and going to the technical and abstract. For kinship
is a sign of a common nature, of something universal and permanent
running through all particular individuals, and giving them a real and
objective unity. Because such and such persons are kin they are
_really_, and not merely conventionally, marked off into a class having
something unique about it. All contemporary members are bound into an
objective unity which includes ancestors and descendants and excludes
all who belong to another kin or kind. Assuredly this parcelling out of
the world into separate kinds, each having its qualitatively distinct
nature in contrast with other species, binding numerically distinct
individuals together, and preventing their diversities from exceeding
fixed bounds, may without exaggeration be called a projection of the
family principle into the world at large.

In a feudally organized society, moreover, each kinship group or species
occupies a definite place. It is marked by the possession of a specific
_rank_ higher or lower with respect to other grades. This position
confers upon it certain privileges, enabling it to enforce certain
claims upon those lower in the scale and entailing upon it certain
services and homage to be rendered to superiors. The relationship of
causation, so to speak, is up and down. Influence, power, proceeds from
above to below; the activities of the inferior are performed with
respect, quite literally, to what is above. Action and reaction are far
from being equal and in opposite directions. All action is of one sort,
of the nature of lordship, and proceeds from the higher to the lower.
Reaction is of the nature of subjection and deference and proceeds from
lower to higher. The classic theory of the constitution of the world
corresponds point by point to this ordering of classes in a scale of
dignity and power.

A third trait assigned by historians to feudalism is that the ordering
of ranks centres about armed service and the relationship of armed
defense and protection. I am afraid that what has already been said
about the parallelism of ancient cosmology with social organization may
seem a fanciful analogy; and if a comparison is also drawn in this last
regard, there will be no doubt in your minds that a metaphor is being
forced. Such is truly the case if we take the comparison too literally.
But not so, if we confine our attention to the notion of rule and
command implied in both. Attention has already been called to the
meaning that is now given the term law--a constant relationship among
changes. Nevertheless, we often hear about laws which "govern" events,
and it often seems to be thought that phenomena would be utterly
disorderly were there not laws to keep them in order. This way of
thinking is a survival of reading social relationships into nature--not
necessarily a feudal relationship, but the relation of ruler and ruled,
sovereign and subject. Law is assimilated to a command or order. If the
factor of personal will is eliminated (as it was in the best Greek
thought) still the idea of law or universal is impregnated with the
sense of a guiding and ruling influence exerted from above on what is
naturally inferior to it. The universal governs as the end and model
which the artisan has in mind "governs" his movements. The Middle Ages
added to this Greek idea of control the idea of a command proceeding
from a superior will; and hence thought of the operations of nature as
if they were a fulfilment of a task set by one who had authority to
direct action.

The traits of the picture of nature drawn by modern science fairly
spring by contrast into high relief. Modern science took its first step
when daring astronomers abolished the distinction of high, sublime and
ideal forces operating in the heavens from lower and material forces
actuating terrestrial events. The supposed heterogeneity of substances
and forces between heaven and earth was denied. It was asserted that the
same laws hold everywhere, that there is homogeneity of material and
process everywhere throughout nature. The remote and esthetically
sublime is to be scientifically described and explained in terms of
homely familiar events and forces. The material of direct handling and
observation is that of which we are surest; it is the better known.
Until we can convert the grosser and more superficial observations of
far-away things in the heavens into elements identical with those of
things directly at hand, they remain blind and not understood. Instead
of presenting superior worth, they present only problems. They are not
means of enlightenment but challenges. The earth is not superior in rank
to sun, moon and stars, but it is equal in dignity, and its occurrences
give the key to the understanding of celestial existences. Being _at_
hand, they are also capable of being brought _under_ our hand; they can
be manipulated, broken up, resolved into elements which can be managed,
combined at will in old and new forms. The net result may be termed, I
think, without any great forcing, the substitution of a democracy of
individual facts equal in rank for the feudal system of an ordered
gradation of general classes of unequal rank.

One important incident of the new science was the destruction of the
idea that the earth is the centre of the universe. When the idea of a
fixed centre went, there went with it the idea of a closed universe and
a circumscribing heavenly boundary. To the Greek sense, just because its
theory of knowing was dominated by esthetic considerations, the finite
was the perfect. Literally, the finite was the finished, the ended, the
completed, that with no ragged edges and unaccountable operations. The
infinite or limitless was lacking in character just because it was
in-finite. Being everything, it was nothing. It was unformed and
chaotic, uncontrolled and unruly, the source of incalculable deviations
and accidents. Our present feeling that associates infinity with
boundless power, with capacity for expansion that knows no end, with the
delight in a progress that has no external limit, would be
incomprehensible were it not that interest has shifted from the esthetic
to the practical; from interest in beholding a harmonious and complete
scene to interest in transforming an inharmonious one. One has only to
read the authors of the transition period, say Giordano Bruno, to
realize what a pent-in, suffocating sensation they associated with a
closed, finite world, and what a feeling of exhilaration, expansion and
boundless possibility was aroused in them by the thought of a world
infinite in stretch of space and time, and composed internally of
infinitesimal infinitely numerous elements. That which the Greeks
withdrew from with repulsion they welcomed with an intoxicated sense of
adventure. The infinite meant, it was true, something forever
untraversed even by thought, and hence something forever unknown--no
matter how great attainment in learning. But this "forever unknown"
instead of being chilling and repelling was now an inspiring challenge
to ever-renewed inquiry, and an assurance of inexhaustible possibilities
of progress.

The student of history knows well that the Greeks made great progress in
the science of mechanics as well as of geometry. At first sight, it
appears strange that with this advance in mechanics so little advance
was made in the direction of modern science. The seeming paradox impels
us to ask why it was that mechanics remained a separate science, why it
was not used in description and explanation of natural phenomena after
the manner of Galileo and Newton. The answer is found in the social
parallelism already mentioned. Socially speaking, machines, tools, were
devices employed by artisans. The science of mechanics had to do with
the kind of things employed by human mechanics, and mechanics were base
fellows. They were at the lower end of the social scale, and how could
light on the heavens, the highest, be derived from them? The application
of considerations of mechanics to natural phenomena would moreover have
implied an interest in the practical control and utilization of
phenomena which was totally incompatible with the importance attached to
final causes as fixed determiners of nature. All the scientific
reformers of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries strikingly agree in
regarding the doctrine of final causes as _the_ cause of the failure of
science. Why? Because this doctrine taught that the processes of nature
are held in bondage to certain fixed ends which they must tend to
realize. Nature was kept in leading strings; it was cramped down to
production of a limited number of stereotyped results. Only a
comparatively small number of things could be brought into being, and
these few must be similar to the ends which similar cycles of change had
effected in the past. The scope of inquiry and understanding was limited
to the narrow round of processes eventuating in the fixed ends which the
observed world offered to view. At best, invention and production of new
results by use of machines and tools must be restricted to articles of
transient dignity and bodily, not intellectual, use.

When the rigid clamp of fixed ends was taken off from nature,
observation and imagination were emancipated, and experimental control
for scientific and practical purposes enormously stimulated. Because
natural processes were no longer restricted to a fixed number of
immovable ends or results, anything might conceivably happen. It was
only a question of what elements could be brought into juxtaposition so
that they would work upon one another. Immediately, mechanics ceased to
be a separate science and became an organ for attacking nature. The
mechanics of the lever, wheel, pulley and inclined plane told accurately
what happens when things in space are used to move one another during
definite periods of time. The whole of nature became a scene of pushes
and pulls, of cogs and levers, of motions of parts or elements to which
the formulae of movements produced by well-known machines were directly
applicable.

The banishing of ends and forms from the universe has seemed to many an
ideal and spiritual impoverishment. When nature was regarded as a set of
mechanical interactions, it apparently lost all meaning and purpose. Its
glory departed. Elimination of differences of quality deprived it of
beauty. Denial to nature of all inherent longings and aspiring
tendencies toward ideal ends removed nature and natural science from
contact with poetry, religion and divine things. There seemed to be left
only a harsh, brutal despiritualized exhibition of mechanical forces. As
a consequence, it has seemed to many philosophers that one of their
chief problems was to reconcile the existence of this purely mechanical
world with belief in objective rationality and purpose--to save life
from a degrading materialism. Hence many sought to re-attain by way of
an analysis of the process of knowing, or epistemology, that belief in
the superiority of Ideal Being which had anciently been maintained on
the basis of cosmology. But when it is recognized that the mechanical
view is determined by the requirements of an experimental control of
natural energies, this problem of reconciliation no longer vexes us.
Fixed forms and ends, let us recall, mark fixed limits to change. Hence
they make futile all human efforts to produce and regulate change except
within narrow and unimportant limits. They paralyze constructive human
inventions by a theory which condemns them in advance to failure. Human
activity can conform only to ends already set by nature. It was not till
ends were banished from nature that purposes became important as factors
in human minds capable of reshaping existence. A natural world that does
not subsist for the sake of realizing a fixed set of ends is relatively
malleable and plastic; it may be used for this end _or_ that. That
nature can be known through the application of mechanical formulae is
the prime condition of turning it to human account. Tools, machines are
means to be utilized. Only when nature is regarded as mechanical, is
systematic invention and construction of machines relevant to nature's
activities. Nature is subdued to human purpose because it is no longer
the slave of metaphysical and theological purpose.

Bergson has pointed out that man might well be called _Homo Faber_. He
is distinguished as the tool-making animal. This has held good since man
was man; but till nature was construed in mechanical terms, the making
of tools with which to attack and transform nature was sporadic and
accidental. Under such circumstances it would not have occurred even to
a Bergson that man's tool-making capacity was so important and
fundamental that it could be used to define him. The very things that
make the nature of the mechanical-physical scientist esthetically blank
and dull are the things which render nature amenable to human control.
When qualities were subordinated to quantitative and mathematical
relationships, color, music and form disappeared from the object of the
scientist's inquiry as such. But the remaining properties of weight,
extension, numerable velocity of movement and so on were just the
qualities which lent themselves to the substitution of one thing for
another, to the conversion of one form of energy into another; to the
effecting of transformations. When chemical fertilizers can be used in
place of animal manures, when improved grain and cattle can be
purposefully bred from inferior animals and grasses, when mechanical
energy can be converted into heat and electricity into mechanical
energy, man gains power to manipulate nature. Most of all he gains power
to frame _new_ ends and aims and to proceed in regular system to their
actualization. Only indefinite substitution and convertibility
regardless of quality render nature manageable. The mechanization of
nature is the condition of a practical and progressive idealism in
action.

It thus turns out that the old, old dread and dislike of matter as
something opposed to mind and threatening it, to be kept within the
narrowest bounds of recognition; something to be denied so far as
possible lest it encroach upon ideal purposes and finally exclude them
from the real world, is as absurd practically as it was impotent
intellectually. Judged from the only scientific standpoint, what it does
and how it functions, matter means conditions. To respect matter means
to respect the conditions of achievement; conditions which hinder and
obstruct and which have to be changed, conditions which help and further
and which can be used to modify obstructions and attain ends. Only as
men have learned to pay sincere and persistent regard to matter, to the
conditions upon which depends negatively and positively the success of
all endeavor, have they shown sincere and fruitful respect for ends and
purposes. To profess to have an aim and then neglect the means of its
execution is self-delusion of the most dangerous sort. Education and
morals will begin to find themselves on the same road of advance that
say chemical industry and medicine have found for themselves when they
too learn fully the lesson of wholehearted and unremitting attention to
means and conditions--that is, to what mankind so long despised as
material and mechanical. When we take means for ends we indeed fall into
moral materialism. But when we take ends without regard to means we
degenerate into sentimentalism. In the name of the ideal we fall back
upon mere luck and chance and magic or exhortation and preaching; or
else upon a fanaticism that will force the realization of preconceived
ends at any cost.

I have touched in this lecture upon many things in a cursory way. Yet
there has been but one point in mind. The revolution in our conceptions
of nature and in our methods of knowing it has bred a new temper of
imagination and aspiration. It has confirmed the new attitude generated
by economic and political changes. It has supplied this attitude with
definite intellectual material with which to formulate and justify
itself.

In the first lecture it was noted that in Greek life prosaic matter of
fact or empirical knowledge was at a great disadvantage as compared with
the imaginative beliefs that were bound up with special institutions
and moral habitudes. Now this empirical knowledge has grown till it has
broken its low and limited sphere of application and esteem. It has
itself become an organ of inspiring imagination through introducing
ideas of boundless possibility, indefinite progress, free movement,
equal opportunity irrespective of fixed limits. It has reshaped social
institutions, and in so far developed a new morale. It has achieved
ideal values. It is convertible into creative and constructive
philosophy.

Convertible, however, rather than already converted. When we consider
how deeply embedded in customs of thought and action the classic
philosophy came to be and how congenial it is to man's more spontaneous
beliefs, the throes that attended its birth are not to be wondered at.
We should rather wonder that a view so upsetting, so undermining, made
its way without more persecutions, martyrdoms and disturbances. It
certainly is not surprising that its complete and consistent formulation
in philosophy has been long delayed. The main efforts of thinkers were
inevitably directed to minimizing the shock of change, easing the
strains of transition, mediating and reconciling. When we look back upon
almost all of the thinkers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries,
upon all excepting those who were avowedly sceptical and revolutionary,
what strikes us is the amount of traditional subject-matter and method
that is to be found even among those who were regarded as most advanced.
Men cannot easily throw off their old habits of thinking, and never can
throw off all of them at once. In developing, teaching and receiving new
ideas we are compelled to use some of the old ones as tools of
understanding and communication. Only piecemeal, step-by-step, could the
full import of the new science be grasped. Roughly speaking, the
seventeenth century witnessed its application in astronomy and general
cosmology; the eighteenth century in physics and chemistry; the
nineteenth century undertook an application in geology and the
biological sciences.

It was said that it has now become extremely difficult to recover the
view of the world which universally obtained in Europe till the
seventeenth century. Yet after all we need only recur to the science of
plants and animals as it was before Darwin and to the ideas which even
now are dominant in moral and political matters to find the older order
of conceptions in full possession of the popular mind. Until the dogma
of fixed unchangeable types and species, of arrangement in classes of
higher and lower, of subordination of the transitory individual to the
universal or kind had been shaken in its hold upon the science of life,
it was impossible that the new ideas and method should be made at home
in social and moral life. Does it not seem to be the intellectual task
of the twentieth century to take this last step? When this step is taken
the circle of scientific development will be rounded out and the
reconstruction of philosophy be made an accomplished fact.




CHAPTER IV

CHANGED CONCEPTIONS OF EXPERIENCE AND REASON


What is experience and what is Reason, Mind? What is the scope of
experience and what are its limits? How far is it a sure ground of
belief and a safe guide of conduct? Can we trust it in science and in
behavior? Or is it a quagmire as soon as we pass beyond a few low
material interests? Is it so shaky, shifting, and shallow that instead
of affording sure footing, safe paths to fertile fields, it misleads,
betrays, and engulfs? Is a Reason outside experience and above it needed
to supply assured principles to science and conduct? In one sense, these
questions suggest technical problems of abstruse philosophy; in another
sense, they contain the deepest possible questionings regarding the
career of man. They concern the criteria he is to employ in forming his
beliefs; the principles _by_ which he is to direct his life and the ends
_to_ which he is to direct it. Must man transcend experience by some
organ of unique character that carries him into the super-empirical?
Failing this, must he wander sceptical and disillusioned? Or is human
experience itself worth while in its purposes and its methods of
guidance? Can it organize itself into stable courses or must it be
sustained from without?

We know the answers of traditional philosophy. They do not thoroughly
agree among themselves, but they agree that experience never rises above
the level of the particular, the contingent, and the probable. Only a
power transcending in origin and content any and all conceivable
experience can attain to universal, necessary and certain authority and
direction. The empiricists themselves admitted the correctness of these
assertions. They only said that since there is no faculty of Pure Reason
in the possession of mankind, we must put up with what we have,
experience, and make the most possible out of it. They contented
themselves with sceptical attacks upon the transcendentalist, with
indications of the ways in which we might best seize the meaning and
good of the passing moment; or like Locke, asserted that in spite of the
limitation of experience, it affords the light needed to guide men's
footsteps modestly in conduct. They affirmed that the alleged
authoritative guidance by a higher faculty had practically hampered men.

It is the function of this lecture to show how and why it is now
possible to make claims for experience as a guide in science and moral
life which the older empiricists did not and could not make for it.

Curiously enough, the key to the matter may be found in the fact that
the old notion of experience was itself a product of experience--the
only kind of experience which was then open to men. If another
conception of experience is now possible, it is precisely because the
quality of experience as it may now be lived has undergone a profound
social and intellectual change from that of earlier times. The account
of experience which we find in Plato and Aristotle is an account of what
Greek experience actually was. It agrees very closely with what the
modern psychologist knows as the method of learning by trial and error
as distinct from the method of learning by ideas. Men tried certain
acts, they underwent certain sufferings and affections. Each of these in
the time of its occurrence is isolated, particular--its counterpart is
transient appetite and transient sensation. But memory preserves and
accumulates these separate incidents. As they pile up, irregular
variations get cancelled, common features are selected, reinforced and
combined. Gradually a habit of action is built up, and corresponding to
this habit there forms a certain generalized picture of an object or
situation. We come to know or note not merely this particular which as a
particular cannot strictly be known at all (for not being classed it
cannot be characterized and identified) but to recognize it as man,
tree, stone, leather--an individual of a certain kind, marked by a
certain universal form characteristic of a whole species of thing.
Along with the development of this common-sense knowledge, there grows
up a certain regularity of conduct. The particular incidents fuse, and a
_way_ of acting which is general, as far as it goes, builds up. The
skill develops which is shown by the artisan, the shoemaker, the
carpenter, the gymnast, the physician, who have regular ways of handling
cases. This regularity signifies, of course, that the particular case is
not treated as an isolated particular, but as one of a kind, which
therefore demands a _kind_ of action. From the multitude of particular
illnesses encountered, the physician in learning to class some of them
as indigestion learns also to treat the cases of the class in a common
or general way. He forms the rule of recommending a certain diet, and
prescribing a certain remedy. All this forms what we call experience. It
results, as the illustration shows, in a certain general insight and a
certain organized ability in action.

But needless to insist, the generality and the organization are
restricted and fallible. They hold, as Aristotle was fond of pointing
out, usually, in most cases, as a rule, but not universally, of
necessity, or as a principle. The physician is bound to make mistakes,
because individual cases are bound to vary unaccountably: such is their
very nature. The difficulty does not arise in _a_ defective experience
which is capable of remedy in some better experience. Experience
itself, as such, is defective, and hence default is inevitable and
irremediable. The only universality and certainty is in a region above
experience, that of the rational and conceptual. As the particular was a
stepping-stone to image and habit, so the latter may become a
stepping-stone to conceptions and principles. But the latter leave
experience behind, untouched; they do not react to rectify it. Such is
the notion which still lingers in the contrast of "empirical" and
"rational" as when we say that a certain architect or physician is
empirical, not scientific in his procedures. But the difference between
the classic and the modern notion of experience is revealed in the fact
that such a statement is now a charge, a disparaging accusation, brought
against _a_ particular architect or physician. With Plato, Aristotle and
the Scholastic, it was a charge against the callings, since they were
modes of experience. It was an indictment of all practical action in
contrast with conceptual contemplation.

The modern philosopher who has professed himself an empiricist has
usually had a critical purpose in mind. Like Bacon, Locke, Condillac and
Helvetius, he stood face to face with a body of beliefs and a set of
institutions in which he profoundly disbelieved. His problem was the
problem of attack upon so much dead weight carried uselessly by
humanity, crushing and distorting it. His readiest way of undermining
and disintegrating was by appealing to experience as a final test and
criterion. In every case, active reformers were "empiricists" in the
philosophical sense. They made it their business to show that some
current belief or institution that claimed the sanction of innate ideas
or necessary conceptions, or an origin in an authoritative revelation of
reason, had in fact proceeded from a lowly origin in experience, and had
been confirmed by accident, by class interest or by biased authority.

The philosophic empiricism initiated by Locke was thus disintegrative in
intent. It optimistically took it for granted that when the burden of
blind custom, imposed authority, and accidental associations was
removed, progress in science and social organization would spontaneously
take place. Its part was to help in removing the burden. The best way to
liberate men from the burden was through a natural history of the origin
and growth in the mind of the ideas connected with objectionable beliefs
and customs. Santayana justly calls the psychology of this school a
malicious psychology. It tended to identify the history of the formation
of certain ideas with an account of the things to which the ideas
refer--an identification which naturally had an unfavorable effect on
the things. But Mr. Santayana neglects to notice the social zeal and aim
latent in the malice. He fails to point out that this "malice" was
aimed at institutions and traditions which had lost their usefulness; he
fails to point out that to a large extent it was true of them that an
account of their psychological origin was equivalent to a destructive
account of the things themselves. But after Hume with debonair
clarity pointed out that the analysis of beliefs into sensations
and associations left "natural" ideas and institutions in the
same position in which the reformers had placed "artificial" ones,
the situation changed. The rationalists employed the logic of
sensationalistic-empiricism to show that experience, giving only a heap
of chaotic and isolated particulars, is as fatal to science and to moral
laws and obligations as to obnoxious institutions; and concluded that
"Reason" must be resorted to if experience was to be furnished with any
binding and connecting principles. The new rationalistic idealism of
Kant and his successors seemed to be necessitated by the totally
destructive results of the new empirical philosophy.

Two things have rendered possible a new conception of experience and a
new conception of the relation of reason to experience, or, more
accurately, of the place of reason _in_ experience. The primary factor
is the change that has taken place in the actual nature of experience,
its contents and methods, as it is actually lived. The other is the
development of a psychology based upon biology which makes possible a
new scientific formulation of the nature of experience.

Let us begin with the technical side--the change in psychology. We are
only just now commencing to appreciate how completely exploded is the
psychology that dominated philosophy throughout the eighteenth and
nineteenth centuries. According to this theory, mental life originated
in sensations which are separately and passively received, and which are
formed, through laws of retention and association, into a mosaic of
images, perceptions, and conceptions. The senses were regarded as
gateways or avenues of knowledge. Except in combining atomic sensations,
the mind was wholly passive and acquiescent in knowing. Volition,
action, emotion, and desire follow in the wake of sensations and images.
The intellectual or cognitive factor comes first and emotional and
volitional life is only a consequent conjunction of ideas with
sensations of pleasure and pain.

The effect of the development of biology has been to reverse the
picture. Wherever there is life, there is behavior, activity. In order
that life may persist, this activity has to be both continuous and
adapted to the environment. This adaptive adjustment, moreover, is not
wholly passive; is not a mere matter of the moulding of the organism by
the environment. Even a clam acts upon the environment and modifies it
to some extent. It selects materials for food and for the shell that
protects it. It does something to the environment as well as has
something done to itself. There is no such thing in a living creature as
mere conformity to conditions, though parasitic forms may approach this
limit. In the interests of the maintenance of life there is
transformation of some elements in the surrounding medium. The higher
the form of life, the more important is the active reconstruction of the
medium. This increased control may be illustrated by the contrast of
savage with civilized man. Suppose the two are living in a wilderness.
With the savage there is the maximum of accommodation to given
conditions; the minimum of what we may call hitting back. The savage
takes things "as they are," and by using caves and roots and occasional
pools leads a meagre and precarious existence. The civilized man goes to
distant mountains and dams streams. He builds reservoirs, digs channels,
and conducts the waters to what had been a desert. He searches the world
to find plants and animals that will thrive. He takes native plants and
by selection and cross-fertilization improves them. He introduces
machinery to till the soil and care for the harvest. By such means he
may succeed in making the wilderness blossom like the rose.

Such transformation scenes are so familiar that we overlook their
meaning. We forget that the inherent power of life is illustrated in
them. Note what a change this point of view entails in the traditional
notions of experience. Experience becomes an affair primarily of doing.
The organism does not stand about, Micawber-like, waiting for something
to turn up. It does not wait passive and inert for something to impress
itself upon it from without. The organism acts in accordance with its
own structure, simple or complex, upon its surroundings. As a
consequence the changes produced in the environment react upon the
organism and its activities. The living creature undergoes, suffers, the
consequences of its own behavior. This close connection between doing
and suffering or undergoing forms what we call experience. Disconnected
doing and disconnected suffering are neither of them experiences.
Suppose fire encroaches upon a man when he is asleep. Part of his body
is burned away. The burn does not perceptibly result from what he has
done. There is nothing which in any instructive way can be named
experience. Or again there is a series of mere activities, like
twitchings of muscles in a spasm. The movements amount to nothing; they
have no consequences for life. Or, if they have, these consequences are
not connected with prior doing. There is no experience, no learning, no
cumulative process. But suppose a busy infant puts his finger in the
fire; the doing is random, aimless, without intention or reflection. But
something happens in consequence. The child undergoes heat, he suffers
pain. The doing and undergoing, the reaching and the burn, are
connected. One comes to suggest and mean the other. Then there is
experience in a vital and significant sense.

Certain important implications for philosophy follow. In the first
place, the interaction of organism and environment, resulting in some
adaptation which secures utilization of the latter, is the primary fact,
the basic category. Knowledge is relegated to a derived position,
secondary in origin, even if its importance, when once it is
established, is overshadowing. Knowledge is not something separate and
self-sufficing, but is involved in the process by which life is
sustained and evolved. The senses lose their place as gateways of
knowing to take their rightful place as stimuli to action. To an animal
an affection of the eye or ear is not an idle piece of information about
something indifferently going on in the world. It is an invitation and
inducement to act in a needed way. It is a clue in behavior, a directive
factor in adaptation of life in its surroundings. It is urgent not
cognitive in quality. The whole controversy between empiricism and
rationalism as to the intellectual worth of sensations is rendered
strangely obsolete. The discussion of sensations belongs under the head
of immediate stimulus and response, not under the head of knowledge.

As a _conscious_ element, a sensation marks an interruption in a course
of action previously entered upon. Many psychologists since the time of
Hobbes have dwelt upon what they call the relativity of sensations. We
_feel_ or sense cold in transition from warmth rather than absolutely;
hardness is sensed upon a background of less resistance; a color in
contrast with pure light or pure dark or in contrast with some other
hue. A continuously unchanged tone or color cannot be attended to or
sensed. What we take to be such monotonously prolonged sensations are in
truth constantly interrupted by incursions of other elements, and
represent a series of excursions back and forth. This fact was, however,
misconstrued into a doctrine about the nature of knowledge. Rationalists
used it to discredit sense as a valid or high mode of knowing things,
since according to it we never get hold of anything _in itself_ or
intrinsically. Sensationalists used it to disparage all pretence at
absolute knowledge.

Properly speaking, however, this fact of the relativity of sensation
does not in the least belong in the sphere of knowing. Sensations of
this sort are emotional and practical rather than cognitive and
intellectual. They are shocks of change, due to interruption of a prior
adjustment. They are signals to redirections of action. Let me take a
trivial illustration. The person who is taking notes has no sensation of
the pressure of his pencil on the paper or on his hand as long as it
functions properly. It operates merely as stimulus to ready and
effective adjustment. The sensory activity incites automatically and
unconsciously its proper motor response. There is a preformed
physiological connection, acquired from habit but ultimately going back
to an original connection in the nervous system. If the pencil-point
gets broken or too blunt and the habit of writing does not operate
smoothly, there is a conscious shock:--the feeling of something the
matter, something gone wrong. This emotional change operates as a
stimulus to a needed change in operation. One looks at his pencil,
sharpens it or takes another pencil from one's pocket. The sensation
operates as a pivot of readjusting behavior. It marks a break in the
prior routine of writing and the beginning of some other mode of action.
Sensations are "relative" in the sense of marking transitions in habits
of behavior from one course to another way of behaving.

The rationalist was thus right in denying that sensations as such are
true elements of knowledge. But the reasons he gave for this conclusion
and the consequences he drew from it were all wrong. Sensations are not
parts of _any_ knowledge, good or bad, superior or inferior, imperfect
or complete. They are rather provocations, incitements, challenges to an
act of inquiry which is to _terminate_ in knowledge. They are not ways
of knowing things inferior in value to reflective ways, to the ways
that require thought and inference, because they are not ways of knowing
at all. They are stimuli to reflection and inference. As interruptions,
they raise the questions: What does this shock mean? What is happening?
What is the matter? How is my relation to the environment disturbed?
What should be done about it? How shall I alter my course of action to
meet the change that has taken place in the surroundings? How shall I
readjust my behavior in response? Sensation is thus, as the
sensationalist claimed, the beginning of knowledge, but only in the
sense that the experienced shock of change is the necessary stimulus to
the investigating and comparing which eventually produce knowledge.

When experience is aligned with the life-process and sensations are seen
to be points of readjustment, the alleged atomism of sensations totally
disappears. With this disappearance is abolished the need for a
synthetic faculty of super-empirical reason to connect them. Philosophy
is not any longer confronted with the hopeless problem of finding a way
in which separate grains of sand may be woven into a strong and coherent
rope--or into the illusion and pretence of one. When the isolated and
simple existences of Locke and Hume are seen not to be truly empirical
at all but to answer to certain demands of their theory of mind, the
necessity ceases for the elaborate Kantian and Post-Kantian machinery
of _a priori_ concepts and categories to synthesize the alleged stuff of
experience. The true "stuff" of experience is recognized to be adaptive
courses of action, habits, active functions, connections of doing and
undergoing; sensori-motor co-ordinations. Experience carries principles
of connection and organization within itself. These principles are none
the worse because they are vital and practical rather than
epistemological. Some degree of organization is indispensable to even
the lowest grade of life. Even an amoeba must have some continuity in
time in its activity and some adaptation to its environment in space.
Its life and experience cannot possibly consist in momentary, atomic,
and self-enclosed sensations. Its activity has reference to its
surroundings and to what goes before and what comes after. This
organization intrinsic to life renders unnecessary a super-natural and
super-empirical synthesis. It affords the basis and material for a
positive evolution of intelligence as an organizing factor within
experience.

Nor is it entirely aside from the subject to point out the extent in
which social as well as biological organization enters into the
formation of human experience. Probably one thing that strengthened the
idea that the mind is passive and receptive in knowing was the
observation of the helplessness of the human infant. But the observation
points in quite another direction. Because of his physical dependence
and impotency, the contacts of the little child with nature are mediated
by other persons. Mother and nurse, father and older children, determine
what experiences the child shall have; they constantly instruct him as
to the meaning of what he does and undergoes. The conceptions that are
socially current and important become the child's principles of
interpretation and estimation long before he attains to personal and
deliberate control of conduct. Things come to him clothed in language,
not in physical nakedness, and this garb of communication makes him a
sharer in the beliefs of those about him. These beliefs coming to him as
so many facts form his mind; they furnish the centres about which his
own personal expeditions and perceptions are ordered. Here we have
"categories" of connection and unification as important as those of
Kant, but empirical not mythological.

From these elementary, if somewhat technical considerations, we turn to
the change which experience itself has undergone in the passage from
ancient and medieval to modern life. To Plato, experience meant
enslavement to the past, to custom. Experience was almost equivalent to
established customs formed not by reason or under intelligent control
but by repetition and blind rule of thumb. Only reason can lift us above
subjection to the accidents of the past. When we come to Bacon and his
successors, we discover a curious reversal. Reason and its bodyguard of
general notions is now the conservative, mind-enslaving factor.
Experience is the liberating power. Experience means the new, that which
calls us away from adherence to the past, that which reveals novel facts
and truths. Faith in experience produces not devotion to custom but
endeavor for progress. This difference in temper is the more significant
because it was so unconsciously taken for granted. Some concrete and
vital change must have occurred in actual experience as that is lived.
For, after all, the thought of experience follows after and is modelled
upon the experience actually undergone.

When mathematics and other rational sciences developed among the Greeks,
scientific truths did not react back into daily experience. They
remained isolated, apart and super-imposed. Medicine was the art in
which perhaps the greatest amount of positive knowledge was obtained,
but it did not reach the dignity of science. It remained an art. In
practical arts, moreover, there was no conscious invention or purposeful
improvement. Workers followed patterns that were handed down to them,
while departure from established standards and models usually resulted
in degenerate productions. Improvements came either from a slow,
gradual, and unacknowledged accumulation of changes or else from some
sudden inspiration, which at once set a new standard. Being the result
of no conscious method, it was fittingly attributed to the gods. In the
social arts, such a radical reformer as Plato felt that existing evils
were due to the absence of such fixed patterns as controlled the
productions of artisans. The ethical purport of philosophy was to
furnish them, and when once they were instituted, they were to be
consecrated by religion, adorned by art, inculcated by education and
enforced by magistrates so that alteration of them would be impossible.

It is unnecessary to repeat what has been so often dwelt upon as to the
effect of experimental science in enabling man to effect a deliberate
control of his environment. But since the impact of this control upon
the traditional notion of experience is often overlooked, we must point
out that when experience ceased to be empirical and became experimental,
something of radical importance occurred. Aforetime man employed the
results of his prior experience only to form customs that henceforth had
to be blindly followed or blindly broken. Now, old experience is used to
suggest aims and methods for developing a new and improved experience.
Consequently experience becomes in so far constructively
self-regulative. What Shakespeare so pregnantly said of nature, it is
"made better by no mean, but nature makes that mean," becomes true of
experience. We do not merely have to repeat the past, or wait for
accidents to force change upon us. We _use_ our past experiences to
construct new and better ones in the future. The very fact of experience
thus includes the process by which it directs itself in its own
betterment.

Science, "reason" is not therefore something laid from above upon
experience. Suggested and tested in experience, it is also employed
through inventions in a thousand ways to expand and enrich experience.
Although, as has been so often repeated, this self-creation and
self-regulation of experience is still largely technological rather than
truly artistic or human, yet what has been achieved contains the
guaranty of the possibility of an intelligent administering of
experience. The limits are moral and intellectual, due to defects in our
good will and knowledge. They are not inherent metaphysically in the
very nature of experience. "Reason" as a faculty separate from
experience, introducing us to a superior region of universal truths
begins now to strike us as remote, uninteresting and unimportant.
Reason, as a Kantian faculty that introduces generality and regularity
into experience, strikes us more and more as superfluous--the
unnecessary creation of men addicted to traditional formalism and to
elaborate terminology. Concrete suggestions arising from past
experiences, developed and matured in the light of the needs and
deficiencies of the present, employed as aims and methods of specific
reconstruction, and tested by success or failure in accomplishing this
task of readjustment, suffice. To such empirical suggestions used in
constructive fashion for new ends the name intelligence is given.

This recognition of the place of active and planning thought within the
very processes of experience radically alters the traditional status of
the technical problems of particular and universal, sense and reason,
perceptual and conceptual. But the alteration is of much more than
technical significance. For reason is experimental intelligence,
conceived after the pattern of science, and used in the creation of
social arts; it has something to do. It liberates man from the bondage
of the past, due to ignorance and accident hardened into custom. It
projects a better future and assists man in its realization. And its
operation is always subject to test in experience. The plans which are
formed, the principles which man projects as guides of reconstructive
action, are not dogmas. They are hypotheses to be worked out in
practice, and to be rejected, corrected and expanded as they fail or
succeed in giving our present experience the guidance it requires. We
may call them programmes of action, but since they are to be used in
making our future acts less blind, more directed, they are flexible.
Intelligence is not something possessed once for all. It is in constant
process of forming, and its retention requires constant alertness in
observing consequences, an open-minded will to learn and courage in
re-adjustment.

In contrast with this experimental and re-adjusting intelligence, it
must be said that Reason as employed by historic rationalism has tended
to carelessness, conceit, irresponsibility, and rigidity--in short
absolutism. A certain school of contemporary psychology uses the term
"rationalization" to denote those mental mechanisms by which we
unconsciously put a better face on our conduct or experience than facts
justify. We excuse ourselves to ourselves by introducing a purpose and
order into that of which we are secretly ashamed. In like fashion,
historic rationalism has often tended to use Reason as an agency of
justification and apologetics. It has taught that the defects and evils
of actual experience disappear in the "rational whole" of things; that
things _appear_ evil merely because of the partial, incomplete nature of
experience. Or, as was noted by Bacon, "reason" assumes a false
simplicity, uniformity and universality, and opens for science a path of
fictitious ease. This course results in intellectual irresponsibility
and neglect:--irresponsibility because rationalism assumes that the
concepts of reason are so self-sufficient and so far above experience
that they need and can secure no confirmation in experience. Neglect,
because this same assumption makes men careless about concrete
observations and experiments. Contempt for experience has had a tragic
revenge _in_ experience; it has cultivated disregard for fact and this
disregard has been paid for in failure, sorrow and war.

The dogmatic rigidity of Rationalism is best seen in the consequences of
Kant's attempt to buttress an otherwise chaotic experience with pure
concepts. He set out with a laudable attempt at restricting the
extravagant pretensions of Reason apart from experience. He called his
philosophy critical. But because he taught that the understanding
employs fixed, _a priori_, concepts, in order to introduce connection
into experience and thereby make known _objects_ possible (stable,
regular relationships of qualities), he developed in German thought a
curious contempt for the living variety of experience and a curious
overestimate of the value of system, order, regularity for their own
sakes. More practical causes were at work in producing the peculiarly
German regard for drill, discipline, "order" and docility.

But Kant's philosophy served to provide an intellectual justification or
"rationalization" of subordination of individuals to fixed and
ready-made universal, "principles," laws. Reason and law were held to be
synonyms. And as reason came into experience from without and above, so
law had to come into life from some external and superior authority.
The practical correlate to absolutism is rigidity, stiffness,
inflexibility of disposition. When Kant taught that some conceptions,
and these the important ones, are _a priori_, that they do not arise in
experience and cannot be verified or tested in experience, that without
such ready-made injections into experience the latter is anarchic and
chaotic, he fostered the spirit of absolutism, even though technically
he denied the possibility of absolutes. His successors were true to his
spirit rather than his letter, and so they taught absolutism
systematically. That the Germans with all their scientific competency
and technological proficiency should have fallen into their tragically
rigid and "superior" style of thought and action (tragic because
involving them in inability to understand the world in which they lived)
is a sufficient lesson of what may be involved in a systematical denial
of the experimental character of intelligence and its conceptions.

By common consent, the effect of English empiricism was sceptical where
that of German rationalism was apologetic; it undermined where the
latter justified. It detected accidental associations formed into
customs under the influence of self- or class-interest where German
rational-idealism discovered profound meanings due to the necessary
evolution of absolute reason. The modern world has suffered because in
so many matters philosophy has offered it only an arbitrary choice
between hard and fast opposities: Disintegrating analysis _or_ rigid
synthesis; complete radicalism neglecting and attacking the historic
past as trivial and harmful, _or_ complete conservatism idealizing
institutions as embodiments of eternal reason; a resolution of
experience into atomic elements that afford no support to stable
organization _or_ a clamping down of all experience by fixed categories
and necessary concepts--these are the alternatives that conflicting
schools have presented.

They are the logical consequences of the traditional opposition of Sense
and Thought, Experience and Reason. Common sense has refused to follow
both theories to their ultimate logic, and has fallen back on faith,
intuition or the exigencies of practical compromise. But common sense
too often has been confused and hampered instead of enlightened and
directed by the philosophies proffered it by professional intellectuals.
Men who are thrown back upon "common sense" when they appeal to
philosophy for some general guidance are likely to fall back on routine,
the force of some personality, strong leadership or on the pressure of
momentary circumstances. It would be difficult to estimate the harm that
has resulted because the liberal and progressive movement of the
eighteenth and earlier nineteenth centuries had no method of
intellectual articulation commensurate with its practical aspirations.
Its heart was in the right place. It was humane and social in
intention. But it had no theoretical instrumentalities of constructive
power. Its head was sadly deficient. Too often the logical import of its
professed doctrines was almost anti-social in their atomistic
individualism, anti-human in devotion to brute sensation. This
deficiency played into the hands of the reactionary and obscurantist.
The strong point of the appeal to fixed principles transcending
experience, to dogmas incapable of experimental verification, the strong
point of reliance upon _a priori_ canons of truth and standards of
morals in opposition to dependence upon fruits and consequences in
experience, has been the unimaginative conception of experience which
professed philosophic empiricists have entertained and taught.

A philosophic reconstruction which should relieve men of having to
choose between an impoverished and truncated experience on one hand and
an artificial and impotent reason on the other would relieve human
effort from the heaviest intellectual burden it has to carry. It would
destroy the division of men of good will into two hostile camps. It
would permit the co-operation of those who respect the past and the
institutionally established with those who are interested in
establishing a freer and happier future. For it would determine the
conditions under which the funded experience of the past and the
contriving intelligence which looks to the future can effectually
interact with each other. It would enable men to glorify the claims of
reason without at the same time falling into a paralyzing worship of
super-empirical authority or into an offensive "rationalization" of
things as they are.




CHAPTER V

CHANGED CONCEPTIONS OF THE IDEAL AND THE REAL


It has been noted that human experience is made human through the
existence of associations and recollections, which are strained through
the mesh of imagination so as to suit the demands of the emotions. A
life that is humanly interesting is, short of the results of discipline,
a life in which the tedium of vacant leisure is filled with images that
excite and satisfy. It is in this sense that poetry preceded prose in
human experience, religion antedated science, and ornamental and
decorative art while it could not take the place of utility early
reached a development out of proportion to the practical arts. In order
to give contentment and delight, in order to feed present emotion and
give the stream of conscious life intensity and color, the suggestions
which spring from past experiences are worked over so as to smooth out
their unpleasantnesses and enhance their enjoyableness. Some
psychologists claim that there is what they call a natural tendency to
obliviscence of the disagreeable--that men turn from the unpleasant in
thought and recollection as they do from the obnoxious in action. Every
serious-minded person knows that a large part of the effort required in
moral discipline consists in the courage needed to acknowledge the
unpleasant consequences of one's past and present acts. We squirm,
dodge, evade, disguise, cover up, find excuses and palliations--anything
to render the mental scene less uncongenial. In short, the tendency of
spontaneous suggestion is to idealize experience, to give it in
consciousness qualities which it does not have in actuality. Time and
memory are true artists; they remould reality nearer to the heart's
desire.

As imagination becomes freer and less controlled by concrete
actualities, the idealizing tendency takes further flights unrestrained
by the rein of the prosaic world. The things most emphasized in
imagination as it reshapes experience are things which are absent in
reality. In the degree in which life is placid and easy, imagination is
sluggish and bovine. In the degree in which life is uneasy and troubled,
fancy is stirred to frame pictures of a contrary state of things. By
reading the characteristic features of any man's castles in the air you
can make a shrewd guess as to his underlying desires which are
frustrated. What is difficulty and disappointment in real life becomes
conspicuous achievement and triumph in revery; what is negative in fact
will be positive in the image drawn by fancy; what is vexation in
conduct will be compensated for in high relief in idealizing
imagination.

These considerations apply beyond mere personal psychology. They are
decisive for one of the most marked traits of classic philosophy:--its
conception of an ultimate supreme Reality which is essentially ideal in
nature. Historians have more than once drawn an instructive parallel
between the developed Olympian Pantheon of Greek religion and the Ideal
Realm of Platonic philosophy. The gods, whatever their origin and
original traits, became idealized projections of the selected and
matured achievements which the Greeks admired among their mortal selves.
The gods were like mortals, but mortals living only the lives which men
would wish to live, with power intensified, beauty perfected, and wisdom
ripened. When Aristotle criticized the theory of Ideas of his master,
Plato, by saying that the Ideas were after all only things of sense
eternalized, he pointed out in effect the parallelism of philosophy with
religion and art to which allusion has just been made. And save for
matters of merely technical import, is it not possible to say of
Aristotle's Forms just what he said of Plato's Ideas? What are they,
these Forms and Essences which so profoundly influenced for centuries
the course of science and theology, save the objects of ordinary
experience with their blemishes removed, their imperfections eliminated,
their lacks rounded out, their suggestions and hints fulfilled? What
are they in short but the objects of familiar life divinized because
reshaped by the idealizing imagination to meet the demands of desire in
just those respects in which actual experience is disappointing?

That Plato, and Aristotle in somewhat different fashion, and Plotinus
and Marcus Aurelius and Saint Thomas Aquinas, and Spinoza and Hegel all
taught that Ultimate Reality is either perfectly Ideal and Rational in
nature, or else has absolute ideality and rationality as its necessary
attribute, are facts well known to the student of philosophy. They need
no exposition here. But it is worth pointing out that these great
systematic philosophies defined perfect Ideality in conceptions that
express the opposite of those things which make life unsatisfactory and
troublesome. What is the chief source of the complaint of poet and
moralist with the goods, the values and satisfactions of experience?
Rarely is the complaint that such things do not exist; it is that
although existing they are momentary, transient, fleeting. They do not
stay; at worst they come only to annoy and tease with their hurried and
disappearing taste of what might be; at best they come only to inspire
and instruct with a passing hint of truer reality. This commonplace of
the poet and moralist as to the impermanence not only of sensuous
enjoyment, but of fame and civic achievements was profoundly reflected
upon by philosophers, especially by Plato and Aristotle. The results of
their thinking have been wrought into the very fabric of western ideas.
Time, change, movement are signs that what the Greeks called Non-Being
somehow infect true Being. The phraseology is now strange, but many a
modern who ridicules the conception of Non-Being repeats the same
thought under the name of the Finite or Imperfect.

Wherever there is change, there is instability, and instability is proof
of something the matter, of absence, deficiency, incompleteness. These
are the ideas common to the connection between change, becoming and
perishing, and Non-Being, finitude and imperfection. Hence complete and
true Reality must be changeless, unalterable, so full of Being that it
always and forever maintains itself in fixed rest and repose. As
Bradley, the most dialectially ingenious Absolutist of our own day,
expresses the doctrine "Nothing that is perfectly real moves." And while
Plato took, comparatively speaking, a pessimistic view of change as mere
lapse and Aristotle a complacent view of it as tendency to realization,
yet Aristotle doubted no more than Plato that the fully realized
reality, the divine and ultimate, is changeless. Though it is called
Activity or Energy, the Activity knew no change, the energy did nothing.
It was the activity of an army forever marking time and never going
anywhere.

From this contrast of the permanent with the transient arise other
features which mark off the Ultimate Reality from the imperfect
realities of practical life. Where there is change, there is of
necessity numerical plurality, multiplicity, and from variety comes
opposition, strife. Change is alteration, or "othering" and this means
diversity. Diversity means division, and division means two sides and
their conflict. The world which is transient _must_ be a world of
discord, for in lacking stability it lacks the government of unity. Did
unity completely rule, these would remain an unchanging totality. What
alters has parts and partialities which, not recognizing the rule of
unity, assert themselves independently and make life a scene of
contention and discord. Ultimate and true Being on the other hand, since
it is changeless is Total, All-Comprehensive and One. Since it is One,
it knows only harmony, and therefore enjoys complete and eternal Good.
It _is_ Perfection.

Degrees of knowledge and truth correspond with degrees of reality point
by point. The higher and more complete the Reality the truer and more
important the knowledge that refers to it. Since the world of becoming,
of origins and perishings, is deficient in true Being, it cannot be
known in the best sense. To know it means to neglect its flux and
alteration and discover some permanent form which limits the processes
that alter in time. The acorn undergoes a series of changes; these are
knowable only in reference to the fixed form of the oak which is the
same in the entire oak species in spite of the numerical diversity of
trees. Moreover, this form limits the flux of growth at both ends, the
acorn coming from the oak as well as passing into it. Where such
unifying and limiting eternal forms cannot be detected, there is mere
aimless variation and fluctuation, and knowledge is out of the question.
On the other hand, as objects are approached in which there is no
movement at all, knowledge becomes really demonstrative, certain,
perfect--truth pure and unalloyed. The heavens can be more truly known
than the earth, God the unmoved mover than the heavens.

From this fact follows the superiority of contemplative to practical
knowledge, of pure theoretical speculation to experimentation, and to
any kind of knowing that depends upon changes in things or that induces
change in them. Pure knowing is pure beholding, viewing, noting. It is
complete in itself. It looks for nothing beyond itself; it lacks nothing
and hence has no aim or purpose. It is most emphatically its own excuse
for being. Indeed, pure contemplative knowing is so much the most truly
self-enclosed and self-sufficient thing in the universe that it is the
highest and indeed the only attribute that can be ascribed to God, the
Highest Being in the scale of Being. Man himself is divine in the rare
moments when he attains to purely self-sufficient theoretical insight.

In contrast with such knowing, the so-called knowing of the artisan is
base. He has to bring about changes in things, in wood and stone, and
this fact is of itself evidence that his material is deficient in Being.
What condemns his knowledge even more is the fact that it is not
disinterestedly for its own sake. It has reference to results to be
attained, food, clothing, shelter, etc. It is concerned with things that
perish, the body and its needs. It thus has an ulterior aim, and one
which itself testifies to imperfection. For want, desire, affection of
every sort, indicate lack. Where there is need and desire--as in the
case of all practical knowledge and activity--there is incompleteness
and insufficiency. While civic or political and moral knowledge rank
higher than do the conceptions of the artisan, yet intrinsically
considered they are a low and untrue type. Moral and political action is
practical; that is, it implies needs and effort to satisfy them. It has
an end beyond itself. Moreover, the very fact of association shows lack
of self-sufficiency; it shows dependence upon others. Pure knowing is
alone solitary, and capable of being carried on in complete,
self-sufficing independence.

In short, the measure of the worth of knowledge according to Aristotle,
whose views are here summarized, is the degree in which it is purely
contemplative. The highest degree is attained in knowing ultimate Ideal
Being, pure Mind. This is Ideal, the Form of Forms, because it has no
lacks, no needs, and experiences no change or variety. It has no desires
because in it all desires are consummated. Since it is perfect Being, it
is perfect Mind and perfect Bliss;--the acme of rationality and
ideality. One point more and the argument is completed. The kind of
knowing that concerns itself with this ultimate reality (which is also
ultimate ideality) is philosophy. Philosophy is therefore the last and
highest term in pure contemplation. Whatever may be said for any other
kind of knowledge, philosophy is self-enclosed. It has nothing to do
beyond itself; it has no aim or purpose or function--except to be
philosophy--that is, pure, self-sufficing beholding of ultimate reality.
There is of course such a thing as philosophic _study_ which falls short
of this perfection. Where there is learning, there is change and
becoming. But the function of study and learning of philosophy is, as
Plato put it, to convert the eye of the soul from dwelling contentedly
upon the images of things, upon the inferior realities that are born and
that decay, and to lead it to the intuition of supernal and eternal
Being. Thus the mind of the knower is transformed. It becomes
assimilated to what it knows.

Through a variety of channels, especially Neo-Platonism and St.
Augustine, these ideas found their way into Christian theology; and
great scholastic thinkers taught that the end of man is to know True
Being, that knowledge is contemplative, that True Being is pure
Immaterial Mind, and to know it is Bliss and Salvation. While this
knowledge cannot be achieved in this stage of life nor without
supernatural aid, yet so far as it is accomplished it assimilates the
human mind to the divine essence and so constitutes salvation. Through
this taking over of the conception of knowledge as Contemplative into
the dominant religion of Europe, multitudes were affected who were
totally innocent of theoretical philosophy. There was bequeathed to
generations of thinkers as an unquestioned axiom the idea that knowledge
is intrinsically a mere beholding or viewing of reality--the spectator
conception of knowledge. So deeply engrained was this idea that it
prevailed for centuries after the actual progress of science had
demonstrated that knowledge is power to transform the world, and
centuries after the practice of effective knowledge had adopted the
method of experimentation.

Let us turn abruptly from this conception of the measure of true
knowledge and the nature of true philosophy to the existing practice of
knowledge. Nowadays if a man, say a physicist or chemist, wants to know
something, the last thing he does is merely to contemplate. He does not
look in however earnest and prolonged way upon the object expecting
that thereby he will detect its fixed and characteristic form. He does
not expect any amount of such aloof scrutiny to reveal to him any
secrets. He proceeds to _do_ something, to bring some energy to bear
upon the substance to see how it reacts; he places it under unusual
conditions in order to induce some change. While the astronomer cannot
change the remote stars, even he no longer merely gazes. If he cannot
change the stars themselves, he can at least by lens and prism change
their light as it reaches the earth; he can lay traps for discovering
changes which would otherwise escape notice. Instead of taking an
antagonistic attitude toward change and denying it to the stars because
of their divinity and perfection, he is on constant and alert watch to
find some change through which he can form an inference as to the
formation of stars and systems of stars.

Change in short is no longer looked upon as a fall from grace, as a
lapse from reality or a sign of imperfection of Being. Modern science no
longer tries to find some fixed form or essence behind each process of
change. Rather, the experimental method tries to break down apparent
fixities and to induce changes. The form that remains unchanged to
sense, the form of seed or tree, is regarded not as the key to knowledge
of the thing, but as a wall, an obstruction to be broken down.
Consequently the scientific man experiments with this and that agency
applied to this and that condition until something begins to happen;
until there is, as we say, something doing. He assumes that there is
change going on all the time, that there is movement within each thing
in seeming repose; and that since the process is veiled from perception
the way to know it is to bring the thing into novel circumstances until
change becomes evident. In short, the thing which is to be accepted and
paid heed to is not what is originally given but that which emerges
after the thing has been set under a great variety of circumstances in
order to see how it behaves.

Now this marks a much more general change in the human attitude than
perhaps appears at first sight. It signifies nothing less than that the
world or any part of it as it presents itself at a given time is
accepted or acquiesced in only as _material_ for change. It is accepted
precisely as the carpenter, say, accepts things as he finds them. If he
took them as things to be observed and noted for their own sake, he
never would be a carpenter. He would observe, describe, record the
structures, forms and changes which things exhibit to him, and leave the
matter there. If perchance some of the changes going on should present
him with a shelter, so much the better. But what makes the carpenter a
_builder_ is the fact that he notes things not just as objects in
themselves, but with reference to what he wants to do to them and with
them; to the end he has in mind. Fitness to effect certain special
changes that he wishes to see accomplished is what concerns him in the
wood and stones and iron which he observes. His attention is directed to
the changes they undergo and the changes they make other things undergo
so that he may select that combination of changes which will yield him
his desired result. It is only by these processes of active manipulation
of things in order to realize his purpose that he discovers what the
properties of things are. If he foregoes his own purpose and in the name
of a meek and humble subscription to things as they "really are" refuses
to bend things as they "are" to his own purpose, he not only never
achieves his purpose but he never learns what the things themselves are.
They _are_ what they can do and what can be done with them,--things that
can be found by deliberate trying.

The outcome of this idea of the right way to know is a profound
modification in man's attitude toward the natural world. Under differing
social conditions, the older or classic conception sometimes bred
resignation and submission; sometimes contempt and desire to escape;
sometimes, notably in the case of the Greeks, a keen esthetic curiosity
which showed itself in acute noting of all the traits of given objects.
In fact, the whole conception of knowledge as beholding and noting is
fundamentally an idea connected with esthetic enjoyment and
appreciation where the environment is beautiful and life is serene, and
with esthetic repulsion and depreciation where life is troubled, nature
morose and hard. But in the degree in which the active conception of
knowledge prevails, and the environment is regarded as something that
has to be changed in order to be truly known, men are imbued with
courage, with what may almost be termed an aggressive attitude toward
nature. The latter becomes plastic, something to be subjected to human
uses. The moral disposition toward change is deeply modified. This loses
its pathos, it ceases to be haunted with melancholy through suggesting
only decay and loss. Change becomes significant of new possibilities and
ends to be attained; it becomes prophetic of a better future. Change is
associated with progress rather than with lapse and fall. Since changes
are going on anyway, the great thing is to learn enough about them so
that we be able to lay hold of them and turn them in the direction of
our desires. Conditions and events are neither to be fled from nor
passively acquiesced in; they are to be utilized and directed. They are
either obstacles to our ends or else means for their accomplishment. In
a profound sense knowing ceases to be contemplative and becomes
practical.

Unfortunately men, educated men, cultivated men in particular, are still
so dominated by the older conception of an aloof and self-sufficing
reason and knowledge that they refuse to perceive the import of this
doctrine. They think they are sustaining the cause of impartial,
thorough-going and disinterested reflection when they maintain the
traditional philosophy of intellectualism--that is, of knowing as
something self-sufficing and self-enclosed. But in truth, historic
intellectualism, the spectator view of knowledge, is a purely
compensatory doctrine which men of an intellectual turn have built up to
console themselves for the actual and social impotency of the calling of
thought to which they are devoted. Forbidden by conditions and held back
by lack of courage from making their knowledge a factor in the
determination of the course of events, they have sought a refuge of
complacency in the notion that knowing is something too sublime to be
contaminated by contact with things of change and practice. They have
transformed knowing into a morally irresponsible estheticism. The true
import of the doctrine of the operative or practical character of
knowing, of intelligence, is objective. It means that the structures and
objects which science and philosophy set up in contrast to the things
and events of concrete daily experience do not constitute a realm apart
in which rational contemplation may rest satisfied; it means that they
represent the selected obstacles, material means and ideal methods of
giving direction to that change which is bound to occur anyway.

This change of human disposition toward the world does not mean that man
ceases to have ideals, or ceases to be primarily a creature of the
imagination. But it does signify a radical change in the character and
function of the ideal realm which man shapes for himself. In the classic
philosophy, the ideal world is essentially a haven in which man finds
rest from the storms of life; it is an asylum in which he takes refuge
from the troubles of existence with the calm assurance that it alone is
supremely real. When the belief that knowledge is active and operative
takes hold of men, the ideal realm is no longer something aloof and
separate; it is rather that collection of imagined possibilities that
stimulates men to new efforts and realizations. It still remains true
that the troubles which men undergo are the forces that lead them to
project pictures of a better state of things. But the picture of the
better is shaped so that it may become an instrumentality of action,
while in the classic view the Idea belongs ready-made in a noumenal
world. Hence, it is only an object of personal aspiration or
consolation, while to the modern, an idea is a suggestion of something
to be done or of a way of doing.

An illustration will, perhaps, make the difference clear. Distance is an
obstacle, a source of trouble. It separates friends and prevents
intercourse. It isolates, and makes contact and mutual understanding
difficult. This state of affairs provokes discontent and restlessness;
it excites the imagination to construct pictures of a state of things
where human intercourse is not injuriously affected by space. Now there
are two ways out. One way is to pass from a mere dream of some heavenly
realm in which distance is abolished and by some magic all friends are
in perpetual transparent communication, to pass, I say, from some idle
castle-building to philosophic reflection. Space, distance, it will then
be argued, is merely phenomenal; or, in a more modern version,
subjective. It is not, metaphysically speaking, real. Hence the
obstruction and trouble it gives is not after all "real" in the
metaphysical sense of reality. Pure minds, pure spirits, do not live in
a space world; for them distance is not. Their relationships in the true
world are not in any way affected by special considerations. Their
intercommunication is direct, fluent, unobstructed.

Does the illustration involve a caricature of ways of philosophizing
with which we are all familiar? But if it is not an absurd caricature,
does it not suggest that much of what philosophies have taught about the
ideal and noumenal or superiorly real world, is after all, only casting
a dream into an elaborate dialectic form through the use of a speciously
scientific terminology? Practically, the difficulty, the trouble,
remains. Practically, however it may be "metaphysically," space is
still real:--it acts in a definite objectionable way. Again, man dreams
of some better state of things. From troublesome fact he takes refuge in
fantasy. But this time, the refuge does not remain a permanent and
remote asylum.

The idea becomes a standpoint from which to examine existing occurrences
and to see if there is not among them something which gives a hint of
how communication at a distance can be effected, something to be
utilized as a medium of speech at long range. The suggestion or fancy
though still ideal is treated as a possibility capable of realization
_in_ the concrete natural world, not as a superior reality apart from
that world. As such, it becomes a platform from which to scrutinize
natural events. Observed from the point of view of this possibility,
things disclose properties hitherto undetected. In the light of these
ascertainments, the idea of some agency for speech at a distance becomes
less vague and floating: it takes on positive form. This action and
reaction goes on. The possibility or idea is employed as a method for
observing actual existence; and in the light of what is discovered the
possibility takes on concrete existence. It becomes less of a mere idea,
a fancy, a wished-for possibility, and more of an actual fact. Invention
proceeds, and at last we have the telegraph, the telephone, first
through wires, and then with no artificial medium. The concrete
environment is transformed in the desired direction; it is idealized in
fact and not merely in fancy. The ideal is realized through its own use
as a tool or method of inspection, experimentation, selection and
combination of concrete natural operations.

Let us pause to take stock of results. The division of the world into
two kinds of Being, one superior, accessible only to reason and ideal in
nature, the other inferior, material, changeable, empirical, accessible
to sense-observation, turns inevitably into the idea that knowledge is
contemplative in nature. It assumes a contrast between theory and
practice which was all to the disadvantage of the latter. But in the
actual course of the development of science, a tremendous change has
come about. When the practice of knowledge ceased to be dialectical and
became experimental, knowing became preoccupied with changes and the
test of knowledge became the ability to bring about certain changes.
Knowing, for the experimental sciences, means a certain kind of
intelligently conducted doing; it ceases to be contemplative and becomes
in a true sense practical. Now this implies that philosophy, unless it
is to undergo a complete break with the authorized spirit of science,
must also alter its nature. It must assume a practical nature; it must
become operative and experimental. And we have pointed out what an
enormous change this transformation of philosophy entails in the two
conceptions which have played the greatest rôle in historic
philosophizing--the conceptions of the "real" and "ideal" respectively.
The former ceases to be something ready-made and final; it becomes that
which has to be accepted as the material of change, as the obstructions
and the means of certain specific desired changes. The ideal and
rational also ceased to be a separate ready-made world incapable of
being used as a lever to transform the actual empirical world, a mere
asylum from empirical deficiencies. They represent intelligently
thought-out possibilities _of_ the existent world which may be used as
methods for making over and improving it.

Philosophically speaking, this is the great difference involved in the
change from knowledge and philosophy as contemplative to operative. The
change does not mean the lowering in dignity of philosophy from a lofty
plane to one of gross utilitarianism. It signifies that the prime
function of philosophy is that of rationalizing the _possibilities_ of
experience, especially collective human experience. The scope of this
change may be realized by considering how far we are from accomplishing
it. In spite of inventions which enable men to use the energies of
nature for their purposes, we are still far from habitually treating
knowledge as the method of active control of nature and of experience.
We tend to think of it after the model of a spectator viewing a finished
picture rather than after that of the artist producing the painting.
Thus there arise all the questions of epistemology with which the
technical student of philosophy is so familiar, and which have made
modern philosophy in especial so remote from the understanding of the
everyday person and from the results and processes of science. For these
questions all spring from the assumption of a merely beholding mind on
one side and a foreign and remote object to be viewed and noted on the
other. They ask how a mind and world, subject and object, so separate
and independent can by any possibility come into such relationship to
each other as to make true knowledge possible. If knowing were
habitually conceived of as active and operative, after the analogy of
experiment guided by hypothesis, or of invention guided by the
imagination of some possibility, it is not too much to say that the
first effect would be to emancipate philosophy from all the
epistemological puzzles which now perplex it. For these all arise from a
conception of the relation of mind and world, subject and object, in
knowing, which assumes that to know is to seize upon what is already in
existence.

Modern philosophic thought has been so preoccupied with these puzzles of
epistemology and the disputes between realist and idealist, between
phenomenalist and absolutist, that many students are at a loss to know
what would be left for philosophy if there were removed both the
metaphysical task of distinguishing between the noumenal and phenomenal
worlds and the epistemological task of telling how a separate subject
can know an independent object. But would not the elimination of these
traditional problems permit philosophy to devote itself to a more
fruitful and more needed task? Would it not encourage philosophy to face
the great social and moral defects and troubles from which humanity
suffers, to concentrate its attention upon clearing up the causes and
exact nature of these evils and upon developing a clear idea of better
social possibilities; in short upon projecting an idea or ideal which,
instead of expressing the notion of another world or some far-away
unrealizable goal, would be used as a method of understanding and
rectifying specific social ills?

This is a vague statement. But note in the first place that such a
conception of the proper province of philosophy where it is released
from vain metaphysics and idle epistemology is in line with the origin
of philosophy sketched in the first hour. And in the second place, note
how contemporary society, the world over, is in need of more general and
fundamental enlightenment and guidance than it now possesses. I have
tried to show that a radical change of the conception of knowledge from
contemplative to active is the inevitable result of the way in which
inquiry and invention are now conducted. But in claiming this, it must
also be conceded, or rather asserted, that so far the change has
influenced for the most part only the more technical side of human life.
The sciences have created new industrial arts. Man's physical command of
natural energies has been indefinitely multiplied. There is control of
the sources of material wealth and prosperity. What would once have been
miracles are now daily performed with steam and coal and electricity and
air, and with the human body. But there are few persons optimistic
enough to declare that any similar command of the forces which control
man's social and moral welfare has been achieved.

Where is the moral progress that corresponds to our economic
accomplishments? The latter is the direct fruit of the revolution that
has been wrought in physical science. But where is there a corresponding
human science and art? Not only has the improvement in the method of
knowing remained so far mainly limited to technical and economic
matters, but this progress has brought with it serious new moral
disturbances. I need only cite the late war, the problem of capital and
labor, the relation of economic classes, the fact that while the new
science has achieved wonders in medicine and surgery, it has also
produced and spread occasions for diseases and weaknesses. These
considerations indicate to us how undeveloped are our politics, how
crude and primitive our education, how passive and inert our morals.
The causes remain which brought philosophy into existence as an attempt
to find an intelligent substitute for blind custom and blind impulse as
guides to life and conduct. The attempt has not been successfully
accomplished. Is there not reason for believing that the release of
philosophy from its burden of sterile metaphysics and sterile
epistemology instead of depriving philosophy of problems and
subject-matter would open a way to questions of the most perplexing and
the most significant sort?

Let me specify one problem quite directly suggested by certain points in
this lecture. It has been pointed out that the really fruitful
application of the contemplative idea was not in science but in the
esthetic field. It is difficult to imagine any high development of the
fine arts except where there is curious and loving interest in forms and
motions of the world quite irrespective of any use to which they may be
put. And it is not too much to say that every people that has attained a
high esthetic development has been a people in which the contemplative
attitude has flourished--as the Greek, the Hindoo, the medieval
Christian. On the other hand, the scientific attitude that has actually
proved itself in scientific progress is, as has been pointed out, a
practical attitude. It takes forms as disguises for hidden processes.
Its interest in change is in what it leads to, what can be done with it,
to what use it can be put. While it has brought nature under control,
there is something hard and aggressive in its attitude toward nature
unfavorable to the esthetic enjoyment of the world. Surely there is no
more significant question before the world than this question of the
possibility and method of reconciliation of the attitudes of practical
science and contemplative esthetic appreciation. Without the former, man
will be the sport and victim of natural forces which he cannot use or
control. Without the latter, mankind might become a race of economic
monsters, restlessly driving hard bargains with nature and with one
another, bored with leisure or capable of putting it to use only in
ostentatious display and extravagant dissipation.

Like other moral questions, this matter is social and even political.
The western peoples advanced earlier on the path of experimental science
and its applications in control of nature than the oriental. It is not,
I suppose wholly fanciful, to believe that the latter have embodied in
their habits of life more of the contemplative, esthetic and
speculatively religious temper, and the former more of the scientific,
industrial and practical. This difference and others which have grown up
around it is one barrier to easy mutual understanding, and one source of
misunderstanding. The philosophy which, then, makes a serious effort to
comprehend these respective attitudes in their relation and due
balance, could hardly fail to promote the capacity of peoples to profit
by one another's experience and to co-operate more effectually with one
another in the tasks of fruitful culture.

Indeed, it is incredible that the question of the relation of the "real"
and the "ideal" should ever have been thought to be a problem belonging
distinctively to philosophy. The very fact that this most serious of all
human issues has been taken possession of by philosophy is only another
proof of the disasters that follow in the wake of regarding knowledge
and intellect as something self-sufficient. Never have the "real" and
the "ideal" been so clamorous, so self-assertive, as at the present
time. And never in the history of the world have they been so far apart.
The world war was carried on for purely ideal ends:--for humanity,
justice and equal liberty for strong and weak alike. And it was carried
on by realistic means of applied science, by high explosives, and
bombing airplanes and blockading marvels of mechanism that reduced the
world well nigh to ruin, so that the serious-minded are concerned for
the perpetuity of those choice values we call civilization. The peace
settlement is loudly proclaimed in the name of the ideals that stir
man's deepest emotions, but with the most realistic attention to details
of economic advantage distributed in proportion to physical power to
create future disturbances.

It is not surprising that some men are brought to regard all idealism as
a mere smoke-screen behind which the search for material profit may be
more effectually carried on, and are converted to the materialistic
interpretation of history. "Reality" is then conceived as physical force
and as sensations of power, profit and enjoyment; any politics that
takes account of other factors, save as elements of clever propaganda
and for control of those human beings who have not become realistically
enlightened, is based on illusions. But others are equally sure that the
real lesson of the war is that humanity took its first great wrong step
when it entered upon a cultivation of physical science and an
application of the fruits of science to the improvement of the
instruments of life--industry and commerce. They will sigh for the
return of the day when, while the great mass died as they were born in
animal fashion, the few elect devoted themselves not to science and the
material decencies and comforts of existence but to "ideal" things, the
things of the spirit.

Yet the most obvious conclusion would seem to be the impotency and the
harmfulness of any and every ideal that is proclaimed wholesale and in
the abstract, that is, as something in itself apart from the detailed
concrete existences whose moving possibilities it embodies. The true
moral would seem to lie in enforcing the tragedy of that idealism which
believes in a spiritual world which exists in and by itself, and the
tragic need for the most realistic study of forces and consequences, a
study conducted in a more scientifically accurate and complete manner
than that of the professed _Real-politik_. For it is not truly realistic
or scientific to take short views, to sacrifice the future to immediate
pressure, to ignore facts and forces that are disagreeable and to
magnify the enduring quality of whatever falls in with immediate desire.
It is false that the evils of the situation arise from absence of
ideals; they spring from wrong ideals. And these wrong ideals have in
turn their foundation in the absence in social matters of that methodic,
systematic, impartial, critical, searching inquiry into "real" and
operative conditions which we call science and which has brought man in
the technical realm to the command of physical energies.

Philosophy, let it be repeated, cannot "solve" the problem of the
relation of the ideal and the real. That is the standing problem of
life. But it can at least lighten the burden of humanity in dealing with
the problem by emancipating mankind from the errors which philosophy has
itself fostered--the existence of conditions which are real apart from
their movement into something new and different, and the existence of
ideals, spirit and reason independent of the possibilities of the
material and physical. For as long as humanity is committed to this
radically false bias, it will walk forward with blinded eyes and bound
limbs. And philosophy can effect, if it will, something more than this
negative task. It can make it easier for mankind to take the right steps
in action by making it clear that a sympathetic and integral
intelligence brought to bear upon the observation and understanding of
concrete social events and forces, can form ideals, that is aims, which
shall not be either illusions or mere emotional compensations.




CHAPTER VI

THE SIGNIFICANCE OF LOGICAL RECONSTRUCTION


Logic--like philosophy itself--suffers from a curious oscillation. It is
elevated into the supreme and legislative science only to fall into the
trivial estate of keeper of such statements as A is A and the scholastic
verses for the syllogistic rules. It claims power to state the laws of
the ultimate structure of the universe, on the ground that it deals with
the laws of thought which are the laws according to which Reason has
formed the world. Then it limits its pretensions to laws of correct
reasoning which is correct even though it leads to no matter of fact, or
even to material falsity. It is regarded by the modern objective
idealist as the adequate substitute for ancient ontological metaphysics;
but others treat it as that branch of rhetoric which teaches proficiency
in argumentation. For a time a superficial compromise equilibrium was
maintained wherein the logic of formal demonstration which the Middle
Ages extracted from Aristotle was supplemented by an inductive logic of
discovery of truth that Mill extracted from the practice of scientific
men. But students of German philosophy, of mathematics, and of
psychology, no matter how much they attacked one another, have made
common cause in attack upon the orthodox logics both of deductive proof
and inductive discovery.

Logical theory presents a scene of chaos. There is little agreement as
to its subject-matter, scope or purpose. This disagreement is not formal
or nominal but affects the treatment of every topic. Take such a
rudimentary matter as the nature of judgment. Reputable authority can be
quoted in behalf of every possible permutation of doctrine. Judgment is
the central thing in logic; and judgment is not logical at all, but
personal and psychological. If logical, it is the primary function to
which both conception and inference are subordinate; and it is an
after-product from them. The distinction of subject and predicate is
necessary, and it is totally irrelevant; or again, though it is found in
some cases, it is not of great importance. Among those who hold that the
subject-predicate relationship is essential, some hold that judgment is
an analysis of something prior into them, and others assert that it is a
synthesis of them into something else. Some hold that reality is always
the subject of judgment, and others that "reality" is logically
irrelevant. Among those who deny that judgment is the attribution of
predicate to subject, who regard it as a relation of elements, some
hold that the relation is "internal," some that it is "external," and
others that it is sometimes one and sometimes the other.

Unless logic is a matter of some practical account, these contrarieties
are so numerous, so extensive, and so irreconcilable that they are
ludicrous. If logic is an affair of practical moment, then these
inconsistencies are serious. They testify to some deep-lying cause of
intellectual disagreement and incoherency. In fact, contemporary logical
theory is the ground upon which all philosophical differences and
disputes are gathered together and focussed. How does the modification
in the traditional conception of the relation of experience and reason,
the real and ideal affect logic?

It affects, in the first place, the nature of logic itself. If thought
or intelligence is the means of intentional reconstruction of
experience, then logic, as an account of the procedure of thought, is
not purely formal. It is not confined to laws of formally correct
reasoning apart from truth of subject-matter. Neither, on the contrary,
is it concerned with the inherent thought structures of the universe, as
Hegel's logic would have it; nor with the successive approaches of human
thought to this objective thought structure as the logic of Lotze,
Bosanquet, and other epistemological logicians would have it. If
thinking is the way in which deliberate reorganization of experience is
secured, then logic is such a clarified and systematized formulation of
the procedures of thinking as will enable the desired reconstruction to
go on more economically and efficiently. In language familiar to
students, logic is both a science and an art; a science so far as it
gives an organized and tested descriptive account of the way in which
thought actually goes on; an art, so far as on the basis of this
description it projects methods by which future thinking shall take
advantage of the operations that lead to success and avoid those which
result in failure.

Thus is answered the dispute whether logic is empirical or normative,
psychological or regulative. It is both. Logic is based on a definite
and executive supply of empirical material. Men have been thinking for
ages. They have observed, inferred, and reasoned in all sorts of ways
and to all kinds of results. Anthropology, the study of the origin of
myth, legend and cult; linguistics and grammar; rhetoric and former
logical compositions all tell us how men have thought and what have been
the purposes and consequences of different kinds of thinking.
Psychology, experimental and pathological, makes important contributions
to our knowledge of how thinking goes on and to what effect. Especially
does the record of the growth of the various sciences afford instruction
in those concrete ways of inquiry and testing which have led men astray
and which have proved efficacious. Each science from mathematics to
history exhibits typical fallacious methods and typical efficacious
methods in special subject-matters. Logical theory has thus a large,
almost inexhaustible field of empirical study.

The conventional statement that experience only tells us how men have
thought or _do_ think, while logic is concerned with norms, with how men
_should_ think, is ludicrously inept. Some sorts of thinking are shown
_by_ experience to have got nowhere, or worse than nowhere--into
systematized delusion and mistake. Others have proved in manifest
experience that they lead to fruitful and enduring discoveries. It is
precisely in experience that the different consequences of different
methods of investigation and ratiocination are convincingly shown. The
parrot-like repetition of the distinction between an empirical
description of what is and a normative account of what should be merely
neglects the most striking fact about thinking as it empirically
is--namely, its flagrant exhibition of cases of failure and
success--that is, of good thinking and bad thinking. Any one who
considers this empirical manifestation will not complain of lack of
material from which to construct a _regulative_ art. The more study that
is given to empirical records of actual thought, the more apparent
becomes the connection between the specific features of thinking which
have produced failure and success. Out of this relationship of cause and
effect as it is empirically ascertained grow the norms and regulations
of an art of thinking.

Mathematics is often cited as an example of purely normative thinking
dependent upon _a priori_ canons and supra-empirical material. But it is
hard to see how the student who approaches the matter historically can
avoid the conclusion that the status of mathematics is as empirical as
that of metallurgy. Men began with counting and measuring things just as
they began with pounding and burning them. One thing, as common speech
profoundly has it, led to another. Certain ways were successful--not
merely in the immediately practical sense, but in the sense of being
interesting, of arousing attention, of exciting attempts at improvement.
The present-day mathematical logician may present the structure of
mathematics as if it had sprung all at once from the brain of a Zeus
whose anatomy is that of pure logic. But, nevertheless, this very
structure is a product of long historic growth, in which all kinds of
experiments have been tried, in which some men have struck out in this
direction and some in that, and in which some exercises and operations
have resulted in confusion and others in triumphant clarifications and
fruitful growths; a history in which matter and methods have been
constantly selected and worked over on the basis of empirical success
and failure.

The structure of alleged normative _a priori_ mathematics is in truth
the crowned result of ages of toilsome experience. The metallurgist who
should write on the most highly developed method of dealing with ores
would not, in truth, proceed any differently. He too selects, refines,
and organizes the methods which in the past have been found to yield the
maximum of achievement. Logic is a matter of profound human importance
precisely because it is empirically founded and experimentally applied.
So considered, the problem of logical theory is none other than the
problem of the possibility of the development and employment of
intelligent method in inquiries concerned with deliberate reconstruction
of experience. And it is only saying again in more specific form what
has been said in general form to add that while such a logic has been
developed in respect to mathematics and physical science, intelligent
method, logic, is still far to seek in moral and political affairs.

Assuming, accordingly, this idea of logic without argument, let us
proceed to discuss some of its chief features. First, light is thrown by
the _origin_ of thinking upon a logic which shall be a method of
intelligent guidance of experience. In line with what has already been
said about experience being a matter primarily of behavior, a
sensori-motor matter, is the fact that thinking takes its departure from
specific conflicts in experience that occasion perplexity and trouble.
Men do not, in their natural estate, think when they have no troubles
to cope with, no difficulties to overcome. A life of ease, of success
without effort, would be a thoughtless life, and so also would a life of
ready omnipotence. Beings who think are beings whose life is so hemmed
in and constricted that they cannot directly carry through a course of
action to victorious consummation. Men also do not tend to think when
their action, when they are amid difficulties, is dictated to them by
authority. Soldiers have difficulties and restrictions in plenty, but
_qua soldiers_ (as Aristotle would say) they are not notorious for being
thinkers. Thinking is done for them, higher up. The same is too true of
most workingmen under present economic conditions. Difficulties occasion
thinking only when thinking is the imperative or urgent way out, only
when it is the indicated road to a solution. Wherever external authority
reigns, thinking is suspected and obnoxious.

Thinking, however, is not the only way in which a personal solution of
difficulties is sought. As we have seen, dreams, reveries, emotional
idealizations are roads which are taken to escape the strain of
perplexity and conflict. According to modern psychology, many
systematized delusions and mental disorders, probably hysteria itself,
originate as devices for getting freedom from troublesome conflicting
factors. Such considerations throw into relief some of the traits
essential to thinking as a way of responding to difficulty. The
short-cut "solutions" alluded to do not get rid of the conflict and
problems; they only get rid of the feeling of it. They cover up
consciousness of it. Because the conflict remains in fact and is evaded
in thought, disorders arise.

The first distinguishing characteristic of thinking then is facing the
facts--inquiry, minute and extensive scrutinizing, observation. Nothing
has done greater harm to the successful conduct of the enterprise of
thinking (and to the logics which reflect and formulate the undertaking)
than the habit of treating observation as something outside of and prior
to thinking, and thinking as something which can go on in the head
without _including_ observation of new facts as part of itself. Every
approximation to such "thinking" is really an approach to

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