The objection gives a convenient occasion for summarizing the main points of the argument. On the one hand, the retort of the objector depends upon talking aboutthereal object. Employ the term "areal object," and the change produced by the activity characteristic of the optical apparatus is of just the same kind as that of the camera lens or that of any other physical agency. Every event in the world marks a difference made to one existence in active conjunction with some other existence. And, as for the alleged subjectivity, if subjective is used merely as an adjective to designate the specific activity of a particularexistence, comparable, say, to the term feral, applied to tiger, or metallic, applied to iron, then of course reference to subjective is legitimate. But it is also tautological. It is like saying that flesh eaters are carnivorous. But the term "subjective" is so consecrated to other uses, usually implying invidious contrast with objectivity (while subjective in the sense just suggested means specific modeofobjectivity), that it is difficult to maintain this innocent sense. Its use in any disparaging way in the situation before us—any sense implicating contrast with a real object—assumes that the organismoughtnot to make any difference when it operates in conjunction with other things. Thus we run to earth that assumption that the subject is heterogeneous from every other natural existence; it is to be the one otiose, inoperative thing in a moving world—our old assumption of the self as outside of things.10
What and where is knowledge in the case we have been considering? Not, as we have already seen, in the production of forms of light having a circular and elliptical surface. These forms are natural happenings. They may enter into knowledge or they may not, according to circumstances. Countless such refractivechanges take place without being noted.11When they become subject-matter for knowledge, the inquiry they set on foot may take on an indefinite variety of forms. One may be interested in ascertaining more about the structural peculiarities of the forms themselves; one may be interested in the mechanism of their production; one may find problems in projective geometry, or in drawing and painting—all depending upon the specific matter-of-fact context. The forms may beobjectivesof knowledge—of reflective examination—or they may be means of knowing something else. It may happen—under some circumstances it does happen—that the objective of inquiry is the nature of the geometric form which, when refracting light, gives rise to these other forms. In this case the sphere is the thing known, and in this case, the forms of light are signs or evidence of the conclusion to be drawn. There is no more reason for supposing that theyare(mis)knowledges of the sphere—that the sphere is necessarily and from the start what one is trying to know—than for supposing that the position of the mercury in the thermometer tube is a cognitive distortion of atmospheric pressure. In each case (that of the mercury and that of, say, a circular surface) the primary datum is a physical happening. In each case it may be used, upon occasion, as a sign or evidence of the nature ofthe causes which brought it about. Given the position in question, the circular form would be an intrinsicallyunreliableevidence of the nature and position of the spherical body only in case it, as the direct datum of perception, werenotwhat it is—a circular form.
I confess that all this seems so obvious that the reader is entitled to inquire into the motive for reciting such plain facts. Were it not for the persistence of the epistemological problem it would be an affront to the reader's intelligence to dwell upon them. But as long as such facts as we have been discussing furnish the subject-matter with which philosophizing is peculiarly concerned, these commonplaces must be urged and reiterated. They bear out two contentions which are important at the juncture, although they will lose special significance as soon as these are habitually recognized: Negatively, a prior and non-empirical notion of the self is the source of the prevailing belief that experience as such is primarily cognitional—a knowledge affair; positively,knowledge is always a matter of the use that is made of experienced natural events, a use in which given things are treated as indications of what will be experienced under different conditions.
Let us make one effort more to clear up these points. Suppose it is a question of knowledge of water. The thing to be known does not present itself primarily as a matter of knowledge-and-ignorance at all. It occurs as a stimulus to action and as the source of certain undergoings. It is something to react to:—to drink, to wash with, to put out fire with, and also somethingthat reacts unexpectedly to our reactions, that makes us undergo disease, suffocation, drowning. In this twofold way, water or anything else enters into experience. Such presence in experience has of itself nothing to do with knowledge or consciousness; nothing that is in the sense of depending upon them, though it has everything to do with knowledge and consciousness in the sense that the latter depends upon prior experience of this non-cognitive sort. Man's experience is what it is because his response to things (even successful response) and the reactions of things to his life, are so radically different from knowledge. The difficulties and tragedies of life, the stimuli to acquiring knowledge, lie in the radical disparity of presence-in-experience and presence-in-knowing. Yet the immense importance of knowledge experience, the fact that turning presence-in-experience over into presence-in-a-knowledge-experience is the sole mode of control of nature, has systematically hypnotized European philosophy since the time of Socrates into thinking that all experiencing is a mode of knowing, if not good knowledge, then a low-grade or confused or implicit knowledge.
When water is an adequate stimulus to action or when its reactions oppress and overwhelm us, it remains outside the scope of knowledge. When, however, the bare presence of the thing (say, as optical stimulus) ceases to operate directly as stimulus to response and begins to operate in connection with a forecast of the consequences it will effect when responded to, it begins to acquire meaning—to be known, to be an object. It is noted as something which is wet, fluid, satisfies thirst,allays uneasiness, etc. The conception that we begin with a known visual quality which is thereafter enlarged by adding on qualities apprehended by the other senses does not rest upon experience; it rests upon making experience conform to the notion that every experiencemustbe a cognitive noting. As long as the visual stimulus operates as a stimulus on its own account, there is no apprehension, no noting, of color or light at all. To much the greater portion of sensory stimuli we react in precisely this wholly non-cognitive way. In the attitude of suspended response in which consequences are anticipated, the direct stimulus becomes a sign or index of something else—and thus matter of noting or apprehension or acquaintance, or whatever term may be employed. This difference (together, of course, with the consequences which go with it) is the difference which the natural event of knowing makes to the natural event of direct organic stimulation. It is no change of a reality into an unreality, of an object into something subjective; it is no secret, illicit, or epistemological transformation; it is a genuine acquisition of new and distinctive features through entering into relations with things with which it was not formerly connected—namely, possible and future things.
But, replies some one so obsessed with the epistemological point of view that he assumes that the prior account is a rival epistemology in disguise, all this involves no change in Reality, no difference made to Reality. Water was all the time all the things it is ever found out to be. Its real nature has not been alteredby knowing it; any such alteration means a mis-knowing.
In reply let it be said,—once more and finally,—there is no assertion or implication aboutthereal object orthereal world orthereality. Such an assumption goes with that epistemological universe of discourse which has to be abandoned in an empirical universe of discourse. The change is ofareal object. An incident of the world operating as a physiologically direct stimulus is assuredly a reality. Responded to, it produces specific consequences in virtue of the response. Water is not drunk unless somebody drinks it; it does not quench thirst unless a thirsty person drinks it—and so on. Consequences occur whether one is aware of them or not; they are integral facts in experience. But let one of these consequences be anticipated and let it, as anticipated, become an indispensable element in the stimulus, and then there is a known object. It is not that knowingproducesa change, but that itisa change of the specific kind described. A serial process, the successive portions of which are as such incapable of simultaneous occurrence, is telescoped and condensed into an object, a unified inter-reference of contemporaneous properties, most of which express potentialities rather than completed data.
Because of this change, anobjectpossesses truth or error (which the physical occurrence as such never has); it is classifiable as fact or fantasy; it is of a sort or kind, expresses an essence or nature, possesses implications, etc., etc. That is to say, it is marked byspecifiablelogicaltraits not found in physical occurrences as such. Because objective idealisms have seized upon these traits as constituting the very essence of Reality is no reason for proclaiming that they are ready-made features of physical happenings, and hence for maintaining that knowing is nothing but an appearance of things on a stage for which "consciousness" supplies the footlights. For only the epistemological predicament leads to "presentations" being regarded as cognitions of things which were previously unpresented. In any empirical situation of everyday life or of science, knowledge signifies something stated or inferred of another thing. Visible water is not a more less erroneous presentation of H2O, but H2O is a knowledge about the thing we see, drink, wash with, sail on, and use for power.
A further point and the present phase of discussion terminates. Treating knowledge as a presentative relation between the knower and object makes it necessary to regard the mechanism ofpresentationas constituting the act of knowing. Since things may be presented in sense-perception, in recollection, in imagination and in conception, and since the mechanism in every one of these four styles of presentation is sensory-cerebral the problem of knowing becomes a mind-body problem.12The psychological, or physiological, mechanism of presentation involved in seeing a chair,remembering what I ate yesterday for luncheon, imagining the moon the size of a cart wheel, conceiving a mathematical continuum is identified with the operation of knowing. The evil consequences are twofold. The problem of the relation of mind and body has become a part of the problem of the possibility of knowledge in general, to the further complication of a matter already hopelessly constrained. Meantime the actual process of knowing, namely, operations of controlled observation, inference, reasoning, and testing, the only process withintellectualimport, is dismissed as irrelevant to the theory of knowing. The methods of knowing practised in daily life and science are excluded from consideration in the philosophical theory of knowing. Hence the constructions of the latter become more and more elaborately artificial because there is no definite check upon them. It would be easy to quote from epistemological writers statements to the effect that these processes (which supply the only empirically verifiable facts of knowing) aremerelyinductive in character, or even that they are of purely psychological significance. It would be difficult to find a more complete inversion of the facts than in the latter statement, since presentation constitutes in fact the psychological affair. A confusion of logic with physiological physiology has bred hybrid epistemology, with the amazing result that the technique of effective inquiry is rendered irrelevant to the theory of knowing, and those physical events involved in the occurrence of data for knowing are treated as if they constituted the act of knowing.
What are the bearings of our discussion upon the conception of the present scope and office of philosophy? What do our conclusions indicate and demand with reference to philosophy itself? For the philosophy which reaches such conclusions regarding knowledge and mind must apply them, sincerely and whole-heartedly, to its idea of its own nature. For philosophy claims to be one form or mode of knowing. If, then, the conclusion is reached that knowing is a way of employing empirical occurrences with respect to increasing power to direct the consequences which flow from things, the application of the conclusion must be made to philosophy itself. It, too, becomes not a contemplative survey of existence nor an analysis of what is past and done with, but an outlook upon future possibilities with reference to attaining the better and averting the worse. Philosophy must take, with good grace, its own medicine.
It is easier to state the negative results of the changed idea of philosophy than the positive ones. The point that occurs to mind most readily is that philosophy will have to surrender all pretension to be peculiarly concerned with ultimate reality, or with reality as a complete (i.e., completed) whole: withthereal object. The surrender is not easy of achievement. The philosophic tradition that comes to us from classic Greek thought and that was reinforced by Christian philosophy in the Middle Ages discriminates philosophical knowing from other modes of knowing by means of analleged peculiarly intimate concern with supreme, ultimate, true reality. To deny this trait to philosophy seems to many to be the suicide of philosophy; to be a systematic adoption of skepticism or agnostic positivism.
The pervasiveness of the tradition is shown in the fact that so vitally a contemporary thinker as Bergson, who finds a philosophic revolution involved in abandonment of the traditional identification of the truly real with the fixed (an identification inherited from Greek thought), does not find it in his heart to abandon the counterpart identification of philosophy with search for the truly Real; and hence finds it necessary to substitute an ultimate and absolute flux for an ultimate and absolute permanence. Thus his great empirical services in calling attention to the fundamental importance of considerations of time for problems of life and mind get compromised with a mystic, non-empirical "Intuition"; and we find him preoccupied with solving, by means of his new idea of ultimate reality, the traditional problems of realities-in-themselves and phenomena, matter and mind, free-will and determinism, God and the world. Is not that another evidence of the influence of the classic idea about philosophy?
Even the new realists are not content to take their realism as a plea for approaching subject-matter directly instead of through the intervention of epistemological apparatus; they find it necessary first to determine the status ofthereal object. Thus they too become entangled in the problem of the possibilityof error, dreams, hallucinations, etc., in short, the problem of evil. For I take it that an uncorrupted realism would accept such things as real events, and find in them no other problems than those attending the consideration of any real occurrence—namely, problems of structure, origin, and operation.
It is often said that pragmatism, unless it is content to be a contribution to mere methodology, must develop a theory of Reality. But the chief characteristic trait of the pragmatic notion of reality is precisely that no theory of Reality in general,überhaupt, is possible or needed. It occupies the position of an emancipated empiricism or a thoroughgoing naïve realism. It finds that "reality" is adenotativeterm, a word used to designate indifferently everything that happens. Lies, dreams, insanities, deceptions, myths, theories are all of them just the events which they specifically are. Pragmatism is content to take its stand with science; for science finds all such events to be subject-matter of description and inquiry—just like stars and fossils, mosquitoes and malaria, circulation and vision. It also takes its stand with daily life, which finds that such things really have to be reckoned with as they occur interwoven in the texture of events.
The only way in which the term reality can ever become more than a blanket denotative term is through recourse to specific events in all their diversity and thatness. Speaking summarily, I find that the retention by philosophy of the notion of a Reality feudally superior to the events of everyday occurrence is the chief source of the increasing isolation of philosophyfrom common sense and science. For the latter do not operate in any such region. As with them of old, philosophy in dealing with real difficulties finds itself still hampered by reference to realities more real, more ultimate, than those which directly happen.
I have said that identifying the cause of philosophy with the notion of superior reality is the cause of anincreasingisolation from science and practical life. The phrase reminds us that there was a time when the enterprise of science and the moral interests of men both moved in a universe invidiously distinguished from that of ordinary occurrence. While all that happens is equally real—since it really happens—happenings are not of equal worth. Their respective consequences, their import, varies tremendously. Counterfeit money, although real (or ratherbecausereal), is really different from valid circulatory medium, just as disease is really different from health; different in specific structure and so different in consequences. In occidental thought, the Greeks were the first to draw the distinction between the genuine and the spurious in a generalized fashion and to formulate and enforce its tremendous significance for the conduct of life. But since they had at command no technique of experimental analysis and no adequate technique of mathematical analysis, they were compelled to treat the difference of the true and the false, the dependable and the deceptive, as signifying two kinds of existence, the truly real and the apparently real.
Two points can hardly be asserted with too much emphasis. The Greeks were wholly right in the feelingthat questions of good and ill, as far as they fall within human control, are bound up with discrimination of the genuine from the spurious, of "being" from what only pretends to be. But because they lacked adequate instrumentalities for coping with this difference in specific situations, they were forced to treat the difference as a wholesale and rigid one. Science was concerned with vision of ultimate and true reality; opinion was concerned with getting along with apparent realities. Each had its appropriate region permanently marked off. Matters of opinion could never become matters of science; their intrinsic nature forbade. When the practice of science went on under such conditions, science and philosophy were one and the same thing. Both had to do with ultimate reality in its rigid and insuperable difference from ordinary occurrences.
We have only to refer to the way in which medieval life wrought the philosophy of an ultimate and supreme reality into the context of practical life to realize that for centuries political and moral interests were bound up with the distinction between the absolutely real and the relatively real. The difference was no matter of a remote technical philosophy, but one which controlled life from the cradle to the grave, from the grave to the endless life after death. By means of a vast institution, which in effect was state as well as church, the claims of ultimate reality were enforced; means of access to it were provided. Acknowledgment of The Reality brought security in this world and salvation in the next. It is not necessary to report the story of the change which has since taken place. It is enoughfor our purposes to note that none of the modern philosophies of a superior reality, orthereal object, idealistic or realistic, holds that its insight makes a difference like that between sin and holiness, eternal condemnation and eternal bliss. While in its own context the philosophy of ultimate reality entered into the vital concerns of men, it now tends to be an ingenious dialectic exercised in professorial corners by a few who have retained ancient premises while rejecting their application to the conduct of life.
The increased isolation from science of any philosophy identified with the problem ofthereal is equally marked. For the growth of science has consisted precisely in the invention of an equipment, a technique of appliances and procedures, which, accepting all occurrences as homogeneously real, proceeds to distinguish the authenticated from the spurious, the true from the false, by specific modes of treatment in specific situations. The procedures of the trained engineer, of the competent physician, of the laboratory expert, have turned out to be the only ways of discriminating the counterfeit from the valid. And they have revealed that the difference is not one of antecedent fixity of existence, but one of mode of treatment and of the consequences thereon attendant. After mankind has learned to put its trust in specific procedures in order to make its discriminations between the false and the true, philosophy arrogates to itself the enforcement of the distinction at its own cost.
More than once, this essay has intimated that the counterpart of the idea of invidiously real reality isthe spectator notion of knowledge. If the knower, however defined, is set over against the world to be known, knowing consists in possessing a transcript, more or less accurate but otiose, of real things. Whether this transcript is presentative in character (as realists say) or whether it is by means of states of consciousness which represent things (as subjectivists say), is a matter of great importance in its own context. But, in another regard, this difference is negligible in comparison with the point in which both agree. Knowing is viewing from outside. But if it be true that the self or subject of experience is part and parcel of the course of events, it follows that the selfbecomesa knower. It becomes a mind in virtue of a distinctive way of partaking in the course of events. The significant distinction is no longer between the knowerandthe world; it is between different ways of being in and of the movement of things; between a brute physical way and a purposive, intelligent way.
There is no call to repeat in detail the statements which have been advanced. Their net purport is that the directive presence of future possibilities in dealing with existent conditions is what is meant by knowing; that the self becomes a knower or mind when anticipation of future consequences operates as its stimulus. What we are now concerned with is the effect of this conception upon the nature of philosophic knowing.
As far as I can judge, popular response to pragmatic philosophy was moved by two quite different considerations. By some it was thought to provide a new species of sanctions, a new mode of apologetics, for certainreligious ideas whose standing had been threatened. By others, it was welcomed because it was taken as a sign that philosophy was about to surrender its otiose and speculative remoteness; that philosophers were beginning to recognize that philosophy is of account only if, like everyday knowing and like science, it affords guidance to action and thereby makes a difference in the event. It was welcomed as a sign that philosophers were willing to have the worth of their philosophizing measured by responsible tests.
I have not seen this point of view emphasized, or hardly recognized, by professional critics. The difference of attitude can probably be easily explained. The epistemological universe of discourse is so highly technical that only those who have been trained in the history of thought think in terms of it. It did not occur, accordingly, to non-technical readers to interpret the doctrine that the meaning and validity of thought are fixed by differences made in consequences and in satisfactoriness, to mean consequences in personal feelings. Those who were professionally trained, however, took the statement to mean that consciousness or mind in the mere act of looking at things modifies them. It understood the doctrine of test of validity by consequences to mean that apprehensions and conceptions are true if the modifications affected by them were of an emotionally desirable tone.
Prior discussion should have made it reasonably clear that the source of this misunderstanding lies in the neglect of temporal considerations. The change made in things by the self in knowing is not immediate and,so to say, cross-sectional. It is longitudinal—in the redirection given to changes already going on. Its analogue is found in the changes which take place in the development of, say, iron ore into a watch-spring, not in those of the miracle of transubstantiation. For the static, cross-sectional, non-temporal relation of subject and object, the pragmatic hypothesis substitutes apprehension of a thing in terms of the results in other things which it is tending to effect. For the unique epistemological relation, it substitutes a practical relation of a familiar type:—responsive behavior which changes in time the subject-matter to which it applies. The unique thing about the responsive behavior which constitutes knowing is the specific difference which marks it off from other modes of response, namely, the part played in it by anticipation and prediction. Knowing is the act, stimulated by this foresight, of securing and averting consequences. The success of the achievement measures the standing of the foresight by which response is directed. The popular impression that pragmatic philosophy means that philosophy shall develop ideas relevant to the actual crises of life, ideas influential in dealing with them and tested by the assistance they afford, is correct.
Reference to practical response suggests, however, another misapprehension. Many critics have jumped at the obvious association of the word pragmatic with practical. They have assumed that the intent is to limit all knowledge, philosophic included, to promoting "action," understanding by action either just any bodily movement, or those bodily movements which conduceto the preservation and grosser well-being of the body. James' statement, that general conceptions must "cash in" has been taken (especially by European critics) to mean that the end and measure of intelligence lies in the narrow and coarse utilities which it produces. Even an acute American thinker, after first criticizing pragmatism as a kind of idealistic epistemology, goes on to treat it as a doctrine which regards intelligence as a lubricating oil facilitating the workings of the body.
One source of the misunderstanding is suggested by the fact that "cashing in" to James meant that a general idea must always be capable of verification in specific existential cases. The notion of "cashing in" says nothing about the breadth or depth of the specific consequences. As an empirical doctrine, it could not say anything about them in general; the specific cases must speak for themselves. If one conception is verified in terms of eating beefsteak, and another in terms of a favorable credit balance in the bank, that is not because of anything in the theory, but because of the specific nature of the conceptions in question, and because there exist particular events like hunger and trade. If there are also existences in which the most liberal esthetic ideas and the most generous moral conceptions can be verified by specific embodiment, assuredly so much the better. The fact that a strictly empirical philosophy was taken by so many critics to imply ana prioridogma about the kind of consequences capable of existence is evidence, I think, of the inability of many philosophersto think in concretely empirical terms. Since the critics were themselves accustomed to get results by manipulating the concepts of "consequences" and of "practice," they assumed that even a would-be empiricist must be doing the same sort of thing. It will, I suppose, remain for a long time incredible to some that a philosopher should really intend to go to specific experiences to determine of what scope and depth practice admits, and what sort of consequences the world permits to come into being. Concepts are so clear; it takes so little time to develop their implications; experiences are so confused, and it requires so much time and energy to lay hold of them. And yet these same critics charge pragmatism with adopting subjective and emotional standards!
As a matter of fact, the pragmatic theory of intelligence means that the function of mind is to project new and more complex ends—to free experience from routine and from caprice. Not the use of thought to accomplish purposes already given either in the mechanism of the body or in that of the existent state of society, but the use of intelligence to liberate and liberalize action, is the pragmatic lesson. Action restricted to given and fixed ends may attain great technical efficiency; but efficiency is the only quality to which it can lay claim. Such action is mechanical (or becomes so), no matter what the scope of the preformed end, be it the Will of God orKultur. But the doctrine that intelligence develops within the sphere of action for the sake of possibilities not yet given is the opposite of a doctrine of mechanical efficiency. Intelligenceasintelligence is inherently forward-looking; only by ignoring its primary function does it become a mere means for an end already given. The latterisservile, even when the end is labeled moral, religious, or esthetic. But action directed to ends to which the agent has not previously been attached inevitably carries with it a quickened and enlarged spirit. A pragmatic intelligence is a creative intelligence, not a routine mechanic.
All this may read like a defense of pragmatism by one concerned to make out for it the best case possible. Such is not, however, the intention. The purpose is to indicate the extent to which intelligence frees action from a mechanically instrumental character. Intelligence is, indeed, instrumentalthroughaction to the determination of the qualities of future experience. But the very fact that the concern of intelligence is with the future, with the as-yet-unrealized (and with the given and the established only as conditions of the realization of possibilities), makes the action in which it takes effect generous and liberal; free of spirit. Just that action which extends and approves intelligence has an intrinsic value of its own in being instrumental:—the intrinsic value of being informed with intelligence in behalf of the enrichment of life. By the same stroke, intelligence becomes truly liberal: knowing is a human undertaking, not an esthetic appreciation carried on by a refined class or a capitalistic possession of a few learned specialists, whether men of science or of philosophy.
More emphasis has been put upon what philosophyis not than upon what it may become. But it is not necessary, it is not even desirable, to set forth philosophy as a scheduled program. There are human difficulties of an urgent, deep-seated kind which may be clarified by trained reflection, and whose solution may be forwarded by the careful development of hypotheses. When it is understood that philosophic thinking is caught up in the actual course of events, having the office of guiding them towards a prosperous issue, problems will abundantly present themselves. Philosophy will not solve these problems; philosophy is vision, imagination, reflection—and these functions, apart from action, modify nothing and hence resolve nothing. But in a complicated and perverse world, action which is not informed with vision, imagination, and reflection, is more likely to increase confusion and conflict than to straighten things out. It is not easy for generous and sustained reflection to become a guiding and illuminating method in action. Until it frees itself from identification with problems which are supposed to depend upon Reality as such, or its distinction from a world of Appearance, or its relation to a Knower as such, the hands of philosophy are tied. Having no chance to link its fortunes with a responsible career by suggesting things to be tried, it cannot identify itself with questions which actually arise in the vicissitudes of life. Philosophy recovers itself when it ceases to be a device for dealing with the problems of philosophers and becomes a method, cultivated by philosophers, for dealing with the problems of men.
Emphasis must vary with the stress and special impactof the troubles which perplex men. Each age knows its own ills, and seeks its own remedies. One does not have to forecast a particular program to note that the central need of any program at the present day is an adequate conception of the nature of intelligence and its place in action. Philosophy cannot disavow responsibility for many misconceptions of the nature of intelligence which now hamper its efficacious operation. It has at least a negative task imposed upon it. It must take away the burdens which it has laid upon the intelligence of the common man in struggling with his difficulties. It must deny and eject that intelligence which is naught but a distant eye, registering in a remote and alien medium the spectacle of nature and life. To enforce the fact that the emergence of imagination and thought is relative to the connexion of the sufferings of men with their doings is of itself to illuminate those sufferings and to instruct those doings. To catch mind in its connexion with the entrance of the novel into the course of the world is to be on the road to see that intelligence is itself the most promising of all novelties, the revelation of the meaning of that transformation of past into future which is the reality of every present. To reveal intelligence as the organ for the guidance of this transformation, the sole director of its quality, is to make a declaration of present untold significance for action. To elaborate these convictions of the connexion of intelligence with what men undergo because of their doings and with the emergence and direction of the creative, the novel, in the world is of itself a program which will keep philosophers busyuntil something more worth while is forced upon them. For the elaboration has to be made through application to all the disciplines which have an intimate connexion with human conduct:—to logic, ethics, esthetics, economics, and the procedure of the sciences formal and natural.
I also believe that there is a genuine sense in which the enforcement of the pivotal position of intelligence in the world and thereby in control of human fortunes (so far as they are manageable) is the peculiar problem in the problems of life which come home most closely to ourselves—to ourselves living not merely in the early twentieth century but in the United States. It is easy to be foolish about the connexion of thought with national life. But I do not see how any one can question the distinctively national color of English, or French, or German philosophies. And if of late the history of thought has come under the domination of the German dogma of an inner evolution of ideas, it requires but a little inquiry to convince oneself that that dogma itself testifies to a particularly nationalistic need and origin. I believe that philosophy in America will be lost between chewing a historic cud long since reduced to woody fiber, or an apologetics for lost causes (lost to natural science), or a scholastic, schematic formalism, unless it can somehow bring to consciousness America's own needs and its own implicit principle of successful action.
This need and principle, I am convinced, is the necessity of a deliberate control of policies by the method of intelligence, an intelligence which is not the facultyof intellect honored in text-books and neglected elsewhere, but which is the sum-total of impulses, habits, emotions, records, and discoveries which forecast what is desirable and undesirable in future possibilities, and which contrive ingeniously in behalf of imagined good. Our life has no background of sanctified categories upon which we may fall back; we rely upon precedent as authority only to our own undoing—for with us there is such a continuously novel situation that final reliance upon precedent entails some class interest guiding us by the nose whither it will. British empiricism, with its appeal to what has been in the past, is, after all, only a kind ofa priorism. For it lays down a fixed rule for future intelligence to follow; and only the immersion of philosophy in technical learning prevents our seeing that this is the essence ofa priorism.
We pride ourselves upon being realistic, desiring a hardheaded cognizance of facts, and devoted to mastering the means of life. We pride ourselves upon a practical idealism, a lively and easily moved faith in possibilities as yet unrealized, in willingness to make sacrifice for their realization. Idealism easily becomes a sanction of waste and carefulness, and realism a sanction of legal formalism in behalf of things as they are—the rights of the possessor. We thus tend to combine a loose and ineffective optimism with assent to the doctrine of take who take can: a deification of power. All peoples at all times have been narrowly realistic in practice and have then employed idealization to cover up in sentiment and theory their brutalities. But never, perhaps, has the tendency been sodangerous and so tempting as with ourselves. Faith in the power of intelligence to imagine a future which is the projection of the desirable in the present, and to invent the instrumentalities of its realization, is our salvation. And it is a faith which must be nurtured and made articulate: surely a sufficiently large task for our philosophy.
In a general survey of the development of logical theory one is struck by the similarity, not to say identity, of the indictments which reformers, since the days of Aristotle, have brought against it. The most fundamental of these charges are: first, that the theory of logic has left it formal and with little significance for the advancement of science and the conduct of society; second, that it has great difficulty in avoiding the predicament of logical operations that are merely labored reproductions of non-logical activities and therefore tautologous and trifling, or of logical operations that are so far removed from immediate, non-logical experience that they are irrelevant; third, that logical theory has had trouble in finding room in its own household for both truth and error; each crowds out the other.
The identity of these indictments regardless of the general philosophical faith, empiricism, or rationalism, realism, or idealism to which the reformer or the logic to be reformed has belonged, suggests that whatever the differences in the doctrines of these various philosophic traditions, they possess a common ground from which these common difficulties spring.
It is the conviction of a number who are at presentattempting to rid logic of these ancient disabilities that their common source is to be found in a lack of continuity between the acts of intelligence (or to avoid the dangers of hypostasis, intelligent acts) and other acts; between logical conduct and other conduct. So wide, indeed, is this breach, that often little remains of the act of knowing but the name. It may still be called an act, but it has no describable instruments nor technique of operation. It is an indefinable and often mystical performance of which only the results can be stated. In recent logical discussion this techniqueless act of knowing has been properly enough transformed into an indefinable "external relation" in which an entity called a knower stands to another entity called the known.
For many centuries this breach between the operations of intelligence and other operations has been closed by various metaphysical devices with the result that logic has been a hybrid science,—half logic, half metaphysics and epistemology. So great has been the momentum of the metaphysical tradition that long after we have begun to discover the connection between logical and non-logical operations its methods remain to plague us. Efforts to heal the breach without a direct appeal to metaphysical agencies have been made by attempting a complete logicizing of all operations. But besides requiring additional metaphysics to effect it, the procedure is as fatal to continuity as is an impassable disjunction. Continuity demands distinction as well as connection. It requires the development, thegrowthof old material and functions into new forms.
Driven by the difficulties of this complete logicization, which are as serious as those of isolation, logical theory was obliged to reinstate some sort of distinction. This it did by resorting to the categories of "explicit" and "implicit." All so-called non-logical operations were regarded as "implicitly" logical. And, paradoxically, logical operations had for their task the transformation of the implicit into the explicit.
An adequate account of the origin and continuance of this isolation of the conduct of intelligence from other conduct is too long a story to be told here. Suffice it to recall that in the society in which the distinction between immediate and reflective experience, between opinion and science, between percepts and universals was first made, intelligence was largely the possession of a special and privileged class removed in great measure from hand-to-hand contact with nature and with much of society. Because it did not fully participate in the operations of nature and society intelligence could not become fully domesticated, i.e., fully naturalized and socialized in its world. It was a charmed spectator of the cosmic and social drama. Doubtless when Greek intelligence discovered the distinction between immediate and reflective experience—possibly the most momentous discovery in history—"the world," as Kant says of the speculations of Thales, "must suddenly have appeared in a new light." But not recognizing the full significance of this discovery, ideas, universals, became but a wondrous spectacle for the eye of reason. They brought, to be sure, blessed relief from the bewildering and baffling flux ofperception. But it was the relief of sanctuary, not of victory.
That the brilliant speculations of Greek intelligence were barren because there was no technique for testing and applying them in detail is an old story. But it is merely a restatement, not a solution, of the pertinent question. This is: why did not Greek intelligence develop such a technique? The answer lies in the fact that the technique of intelligence is to be found precisely in the details of the operations of nature and of human conduct from which an aristocratic intelligence is always in large measure shut off. Intelligence cannot operate fruitfully in a vacuum. It must be incarnate. It must, as Hegel said, have "hands and feet." When we turn to the history of modern science the one thing that stands out is that it was not until the point was reached where intelligence was ready (continuing the Hegelian figure) to thrust its hands into the vitals of nature and society that it began to acquire a real control over its operations.
In default of such controlling technique there was nothing to be done with this newly found instrument of intelligence—the universal—but to retain it as an object of contemplation and of worshipful adoration. This involved, of course, its hypostasis as the metaphysical reality of supreme importance. With this, the only difference between "opinion" and "science" became one of the kind of objects known. That universals were known by reason and particulars by sense was of little more logical significance than that sounds are known by the ear and smells by the nose. Particularsand universals were equally given. If the latter required some abstraction this was regarded as merely auxiliary to the immediate vision, as sniffing is to the perception of odor. That universals should or could be conceived as experimental, as hypotheses, was, when translated into later theology, the sin against the Holy Ghost.
However, the fact that the particulars in the world of opinion were the stimuli to the "recollection" of universals and that the latter in turn were the patterns, the forms, for the particulars, opened the way in actual practice for the exercise of a great deal of the controlling function of the universals. But the failure to recognize this control value of the universal as fundamental, made it necessary for the universal to exercise its function surreptitiously, in the disguise of a pattern and in the clumsy garb of imitation and participation.
With perceptions, desires, and impulses relegated to the world of opinion and shadows, and with the newly discovered instrument of knowledge turned into an object, the knower was stripped of all his knowing apparatus and was left an empty, scuttled entity definable and describable only as "a knower." The knower must know, even if he had nothing to know with. Hence the mystical almost indefinable character of the knowing act or relation. I say "almost indefinable"; for as an act it had, of course, to have some sort of conceptualized form. And this form vision naturally furnished. "Naturally," because intelligence was so largely contemplative, and vision so largely immediate, unanalyzed, and diaphanous. There was, to be sure, theconcept of effluxes. But this was a statement of the fact of vision in terms of its results, not of the process itself. Thus it was that the whole terminology of knowing which we still use was moulded and fixed upon a very crude conception of one of the constituents of its process. There can be no doubt that this terminology has added much to the inertia against which the advance of logical theory has worked. It would be interesting to see what would be the effect upon logical theory of the substitution of an auditory or olfactory terminology for visual; or of a visual terminology revised to agree with modern scientific analysis of theactof vision as determined by its connections with other functions.
With the act of knowing stripped of its technique and left a bare, unique, indescribable act or relation, the foundations for epistemological and metaphysical logic were laid. That Greek logic escaped the ravages of epistemology was due to the saving materialism in its metaphysical conception of mind and to the steadfastness of the aristocratic régime. But when medieval theology and Cartesian metaphysics had destroyed the last remnant of metaphysical connection between the knowing mind and nature, and when revolutions had torn the individual from his social moorings, the stage for epistemological logic was fully set. I do not mean to identify the epistemological situation with the Cartesian disjunction. That disjunction was but the metaphysical expression of the one which constitutes the real foundation of epistemology—the disjunction, namely, between the act of knowing and other acts.
From this point logic has followed one of two general courses. It has sought continuity by attempting to reduce non-logical things and operations to terms of logical operations, i.e., to sensations or universals or both; or it has attempted to exclude entirely the act of knowing from logic and to transfer logical distinctions and operations, and even the attributes of truth and error to objects which, significantly enough, are still composed of these same hypostatized logical processes. The first course results in an epistemological logic of some form of the idealistic tradition, rationalism, sensationalism, or transcendentalism, depending upon whether universals, or sensations, or a combination of both, is made fundamental in the constitution of the object. The second course yields an epistemological logic of the realistic type,—again, sensational or rationalistic (mathematical), or a combination of the two—a sort of realistic transcendentalism. Each type has essentially the same difficulties with the processes of inference, with the problem of change, with truth and error, and, on the ethical side, with good and evil.
With the processes of knowing converted into objects, and with the act of knowing reduced to a unique and external relation between the despoiled knower and the objects made from its own hypostatized processes, all knowing becomes in the end immediate. All attempts at an inference that is anything more than an elaborated and often confused restatement of non-logical operations break down. The associational inference of empiricism, the subsumptive inference of rationalism, the transcendental inference of objective idealism, theanalytical inference of neo-realism—all alike face the dilemma of an inference that is trifling or miraculous, tautologous or false. Where the knower and its object are so constituted that the only relation in which the latter can stand to the former is that of presence or absence, and if to be present is to be known, how, as Plato asked, can there be any false knowing?
For those who accept the foregoing general diagnosis the prescription is obvious. The present task of logical theory is the restoration of the continuity of the act and agent of knowing with other acts and agents. But this is not to be done by merely furnishing the act of knowing with a body and a nervous system. If the nervous system be regarded as only an onlooking, beholding nervous system, if no connection be made between the logical operations of a nervous system and its other operations a nervous system has no logical advantage over a purely psychical mind.
It was to be expected that this movement toward restoration of continuity made in the name of "instrumental" or "experimental" logic would be regarded, alike, by the logics of rationalism and empiricism, of idealism and of realism, as an attempt to rob intelligence of its own unique and proper character; to reduce it to a merely "psychological" and "existential" affair; to leave no place for genuine intellectual interest and activity; and to make science a series of more or less respectable adventures. The counter thesis is, that this restoration is truly a restoration—not a despoliation of the character and rights of intelligence; that only such a restoration can preserve the unique functionof intelligence, can prevent it from becoming merely "existential," and can provide a distinct place for intellectual and scientific interest and activity. It does not, however, promise to remove the stigma of "adventure" from science. Every experiment is an adventure; and it is precisely the experimental character of scientific logic that distinguishes it from scholasticism, medieval or modern.
First it is clear that a reform of logic based upon the restoration of knowing to its connections with other acts will begin with a chapter containing an account of these other operations and the general character of this connection.13Logical theory has been truncated. It has tried to begin and end in the middle, with the result that it has ended in the air. Logic presents the curious anachronism of a science which attempts to deal with its subject-matter apart from what it comes from and what comes from it.
The objection that such a chapter on the conditions and genesis of the operations of knowing belongs to psychology, only shows how firmly fixed is the discontinuity we are trying to escape. As we have seen, the original motive for leaving this account of genesis to psychology was that the act of knowing was supposed to originate in a purely psychical mind. Such an originwas of course embarrassing to logic, which aimed to be scientific. The old opposition between origin and validity was due to the kind of origin assumed and the kind of validity necessitated by the origin. One may well be excused for evading the question of how ideas, originated in a purely psychical mind, can, in Kant's phrase, "have objective validity," by throwing out the question of origin altogether. Whatever difficulties remain for validity after this expulsion could not be greater than those of the task of combining the objective validity of ideas with their subjective origin.
The whole of this chapter on the connection between logical and non-logical operations cannot be written here. But its central point would be that these other acts with which the act of knowing must have continuity are just the operations of our unreflective conduct. Note that it is "unreflective," not "unconscious," nor yet merely "instinctive" conduct. It is our perceptive, remembering, imagining, desiring, loving, hating conduct. Note also that we do not say "psychical" or "physical," nor "psycho-physical" conduct. These terms stand for certain distinctions in logical conduct,14and we are here concerned with the character of non-logical conduct which is to be distinguished from, and yet kept in closest continuity with, logical conduct.
If, here, the metaphysical logician should ask: "Are you not in this assumption of a world of reflective and unreflective conduct and affection, and of a world of beings in interaction, begging a whole system of metaphysics?"the reply is that if it is a metaphysics bad for logic, it will keep turning up in the course of logical theory as a constant source of trouble. On the other hand, if logic encounters grave difficulties when it attempts to get on without it, its assumption, for the purposes of logic, has all the justification possible.
Again it will be urged that this alleged non-logical conduct, in so far as it involves perception, memory, and anticipation, is already cognitive and logical; or if the act of knowing is to be entirely excluded from logic, then, in so far as what is left involves objective "terms and relations," it, also, is already logical. And it may be thought strange that a logic based upon the restoration of continuity between the act of knowing and other acts should here be insisting on distinction and separation. The point is fundamental; and must be disposed of before we go on. First, we must observe that the unity secured by making all conscious conduct logical turns out, on examination, to be more nominal than real. As we have already seen, this attempt at a complete logicizing of all conduct is forced at once to introduce the distinction of "explicit" and "implicit," of "conscious and unconscious" or "subconscious" logic. Some cynics have found that this suggests dividing triangles into explicit and implicit triangles, or into triangles and sub-triangles.
Doubtless the attempt to make all perceptions, memories, and anticipations, and even instincts and habits, into implicit or subconscious inference is an awkward effort to restore the continuity of logical and non-logicalconduct. Its awkwardness consists in attempting to secure this continuity by the method of subsumptive identity, instead of finding it in a transitive continuity of function;—instead of seeing that perception, memory, and anticipationbecomelogical processes when they are employed in a process of inquiry, whose purpose is to relieve the difficulties into which these operations in their function as direct stimuli have fallen. Logical conduct is constituted by the coöperation of these processes for the improvement of their further operation. To regard perception, memory, and imagination as implicit forms or as sub-species of logical operation is much like conceiving the movements of our fingers and arms as implicit or imperfect species of painting, or swimming.
Moreover, this doctrine of universal logicism teaches that when that which is perfect is come, imperfection shall be done away. This should mean that when painting becomes completely "explicit" and perfect, fingers and hands shall disappear. Perfect painting will be the pure essence of painting. And this interpretation is not strained; for this logic expressly teaches that in the perfected real system all temporal elements are unessential to logical operations. They are, of course,psychologicallynecessary for finite beings, who can never have perfectly logical experiences. But, from the standpoint of a completely logicized experience, all finite, temporal processes are accidents, not essentials, of logical operations.
The fact that the processes of perception, memory, and anticipation are transformed in theirlogical operation into sensations and universals, terms, and relations, and, as such, become the subject-matter of logical theory, does not mean that they have lost their mediating character, and have become merely objects of logical contemplation at large. Sensations or sense-data, and ideas, terms and relations, are the subject-matter of logical theory for the reason that they sometimes succeed and sometimes fail in their logical operations. And it is the business of logical theory to diagnose the conditions of this success and failure. If, in writing, my pen becomes defective and is made an object of inquiry, it does not therefore lose all its character as a pen and become merely an object at large. It isasan instrument of writing that it is investigated. So, sense-data, universals, terms, and relations as subject-matter of logic are investigated in their characterasmediators of the ambiguities and conflicts, of non-logical experience.
If the operations of habit, instinct, perceptions, memory, and anticipationbecomelogical, when, instead of operating as direct stimuli, they are employed in a process of inquiry, we must next ask: (1) under what conditions do they pass over into this process of inquiry? (2) what modifications of operation do they undergo, what new forms do they take, and what new results do they produce in their logical operations?
If the act of inquiry be not superimposed, it must arise out of some specific condition in the course of non-logical conduct. Once more, if the alarm be sounded at this proposal to find the origin of logical in non-logical operations it must be summarily answered byasking if the one who raises the cry finds it impossible to imagine that one who is not hungry, or angry, or patriotic, or wise may become so. Non-logical conduct is not the abstract formal contradictory of logical conduct any more than present satiety or foolishness is the contradictory of later hunger or wisdom, or than anger at one person contradicts cordiality to another, or to the same person, later. The old bogie of the logical irrelevance of origin was due to the inability to conceive continuity except in the form of identity in which there was no place for the notion ofgrowth.
The conditions under which non-logical conductbecomeslogical are familiar to those who have followed the doctrines of experimental logic as expounded in the discussions of the past few years. The transformation begins at the point where non-logical processes instead of operating as direct unambiguous stimuli and response become ambiguous with consequent inhibition of conduct. But again this does not mean that at this juncture the non-logical processes quit the field and give place to a totally new faculty and process called reason. They stay on the job. But there is a change in the job, which now is to get rid of this ambiguity. This modification of the task requires, of course, corresponding modification and adaptation of these operations. They take on the form of sensations and universals, terms and relations, data and hypotheses. This modification of function and form constitutes "reason" or, better, reasoning.
Here some one will ask, "Whence comes this ambiguity? How can a mere perception or memory assuch be ambiguous? Must it not be ambiguous to, or for, something, or some one?" The point is well taken. But it should not be taken to imply that the ambiguity is for a merely onlooking, beholding psychical mind—especially when the perception is itself regarded as an act of beholding. Nor are we any better off if we suppose the beholding mind to be equipped with a faculty of reason in the form of the principle of "contradiction." For this throws no light on the origin and meaning of ambiguity. And if we seek to make all perceptions as such ambiguous and contradictory, in order to make room for, and justify, the operations of reason, other difficulties at once beset us. When we attempt to remove this specific ambiguity of perceptive conduct we shall be forced, before we are through, to appeal back to perception, which we have condemned as inherently contradictory, both for data and for verification.
However, the insistence that perception must be ambiguous to, or for, something beyond itself is well grounded. And this was recognized in the statement that it is equivocal as a stimulus in conduct. There need be no mystery as to how such equivocation arises. That there is such a thing as a conduct at all means that there are certain beings who have acquired definite ways of responding to one another. It is important to observe that these forms of interaction—instinct and habit, perception, memory, etc.—are not to be located in either of the interacting beings but are functions of both. The conception of these operations as the private functions of an organism is the forerunnerof the epistemological predicament. It results in a conception of knowing as wholly the act of a knower apart from the known. This is the beginning of epistemology.
But to whatever extent interacting beings have acquired definite and specific ways of behavior toward one another it is equally plain—the theory of external relations notwithstanding—that in this process of interaction these ways of behavior, of stimulus and response, undergo modification. If the world consisted of two interacting beings, it is conceivable that the modifications of behavior might occur in such close continuity of relation to each of the interacting beings that the adjustment would be very continuous, and there might be little or no ambiguity and conflict. But in a world where any two interacting beings have innumerable interactions with innumerable other beings and in all these interactions modifications are effected, it is to be expected that changes in the behavior of each or both will occur, so marked that they are bound to result in breaks in the continuity of stimulus and response—even to the point of tragedy. However, the tragedy is seldom so great that the ambiguity extends to the whole field of conduct. Except in extreme pathological cases (and in epistemology), complete skepticism and aboulia do not occur. Ambiguity always falls within a field or direction of conduct, and though it may extend much further, and must extend some further than the point at which equivocation occurs, yet it is never ubiquitous. An ambiguity concerning the action of gravitation is noless specific than one regarding color or sound; indeed, the one may be found to involve the other.
Logical conduct is, then, conduct which aims to remove ambiguity and inhibition in unreflective conduct. The instruments of its operation are forged from the processes of unreflective conduct by such modification and adaptation as is required to enable them to accomplish this end. Since these logical operations sometimes fail and sometimes succeed they become the subject-matter of logical theory. But the technique of this second involution of reflection is not supplied by some new and unique entity. It also is derived from modifications of previous operations of both reflective and non-reflective conduct.
While emphasizing the continuity between non-logical and logical operations, we must keep in mind that their distinction is of equal importance. Confusion at this point is fatal. A case in point is the confusion between non-logical and logical observation. The results of non-logical observation, e.g., looking and listening, are direct stimuli to further conduct. But the purpose and result oflogicalobservation are to secure data, not as direct stimuli to immediate conduct but as stimuli to the construction or verification of hypotheses which are the responses of thelogicaloperation of imagination to the data. Hypotheses are anticipatory. But they differ from non-logical anticipation in that they are tentatively, experimentally, i.e., logically anticipatory. The non-logical operations of memory and anticipation lack just this tentative, experimental character. When we confuse the logical and non-logicaloperations of these processes the result is either that logical processes will merely repeat non-logical operations in which case we have inference that is tautologous and trifling; or the non-logical will attempt to perform logical operations, and our inference is miraculous. If we seek to escape by an appeal to habit, as in empiricism, or to an objective universal, as in idealism and neo-realism, we are merely disguising, not removing the miracle.
It may be thought that this confusion would be most likely to occur in a theory which teaches that non-logical processes are carried over into logical operations. But this overlooks the fact that the theory recognizes at the same time that these non-logical operations undergo modification and adaptation to the demands of the logical enterprise. On the other hand, those who make all perceptions, memory, and anticipation, not to speak of habit and instinct, logical, have no basis for the distinction between logical and non-logical results; while those who refuse to give the operations of perception, memory, etc., any place in logic can make no connections between logical and non-logical conduct. Nor are they able to distinguish in a specific case truth from error.
In all logics that fail to make this connection and distinction between logical and non-logical operations there is no criterion for data. If ultimate simplicity is demanded of the data, there is no standard for simplicity except theminimum sensibileor theminimum intelligibilewhich have recently been resurrected. On the other hand, where simplicity is waived, as in the logic of objective idealism, there isstill no criterion of logical adequacy. But if we understand bylogicaldata not anything that happens to be given, but somethingsoughtas material for an hypothesis, i.e., a proposed solution (proposition) of an ambiguous object of conduct and affection, then whatever results of observation meet this requirement are logical data. And whenever data are found from which an hypothesis is constructed that succeeds in abolishing the ambiguity, they are simple, adequate, and true data.
No scientist, not even the mathematician, in the specific investigations of his field, seeks for ultimate and irreducible data at large. And if he found them he could not use them. It is only in his metaphysical personality that he longs for such data. The data which the scientist in any specific inquiry seeks are the data which suggest a solution of the question in which the investigation starts. When these data are found they are the "irreducibles" of that problem. But they are relative to the question and answer of the investigation. Their simplicity consists in the fact that they are the data from which a conclusion can be made. The term "simple data" is tautologous. That one is in need of data more "simple" means that one is in need of new data from which an hypothesis can be formed.
It is true that the actual working elements with which the scientist operates are always complex in the sense that they are always something more than elements in any specific investigation. They have other connections and alliances. And this complexity is at once the despair and the hope of the scientist; his despair, because he cannot be sure when these other connections will interfere with the allegiance of his elements to his particular undertaking; his hope, because when these alliances are revealed they often make the elements more efficient or exhibit capacities which will make them elements in some other undertaking for which elements have not been found. A general resolves his army into so many marching, eating, shooting units; but these elements are something more than marching, shooting units. They are husbands and fathers, brothers and lovers, protestants and catholics, artists and artisans, etc. And the militarist can never be sure at what point these other activities—I do not say merely external relationships—may upset his calculations. If he could find units whose whole and sole nature is to march and shoot, his problem would be, in some respects, simpler, though in others more complex. As it is, he is constantly required to ask how far these other functions will support and at what point they will rebel at the marching and shooting.
Such, in principle, is the situation in every scientific inquiry. When the failure of the old elements occurs it is common to say that "simpler" elements are needed. And doubtless in his perplexity the scientist may long for elements which have no entangling alliances, whose sole nature and character is to be elements. But what in fact he actually seeks in every specific investigation are elements whose nature and functionswill not interferewith their serving as units in the enterprise in hand. But from some other standpoint these new elements may be vastly more complexthan the old, as is the case with the modern as compared with the ancient atom. When the elements are secured which operate successfully, the non-interfering connections can be ignored and the elements can be treated as if they did not have them,—as if they were metaphysically simple. But there is no criterion for metaphysical simplicity except operative simplicity. To be simple is to serve as an element, and to serve as an element is to be simple.
It is scarcely necessary in view of the foregoing to add that the data of science are not "sense-data," if by sense-data be meant data which are the result of the operations of sense organs alone. Data are as much or more the result of operations, first, of the motor system of the scientist's own organism, and second, of all of the machinery of his laboratory which he calls to his aid. Whether named after the way they are obtained, or after the way they are used, data are quite as much "motor" as "sense." Nor, on the other hand, are there any purely intellectual data—not even for the mathematician. Some mathematicians may insist that their symbols and diagrams are merely stimuli to the platonic operation of pure and given universals. But until mathematics can get on without these symbols or any substitutes the intuitionist in mathematics will continue to have his say.
Wherever the discontinuity between logical operations and their acts persists, all the difficulties with data have their correlative difficulties with hypotheses. In Mill's logic the account of the origin of hypotheses oscillates between the view that they are happy guesses ofa mind composed of states of consciousness, and the view that they are "found in the facts" or are "impressed on the mind by the facts." The miracle of relevancy required in the first position drives the theory to the second. And the tautologous, useless nature of the hypothesis in the second forces the theory back to the first view. In this predicament, little wonder Mill finds that the easiest way out is to make hypotheses "auxiliary" and not indigenous to inference. But this exclusion of hypotheses as essential leaves his account of inference to oscillate between the association of particulars of nominalism and scholastic formalism, from both of which Mill, with the dignified zeal of a prophet, set out to rescue logic.