Oass 
 Book_ 
 
 COPYRIGHT DEPOSIT 
 
THE INFLUENCE OF 
 DARWIN ON PHILOSOPHY 
 
 And Other Essays in Contemporary 
 Thought 
 
 BY 
 JOHN DEWEY 
 
 Professor of Philosophy in Columbia University 
 
 NEW YORK 
 
 HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY 
 1910 
 
&<* 
 
 
 Copyright, 1910, 
 
 BY 
 
 HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY 
 
 Published April, 1910 
 
 <g CI. A 26 14 81 
 
PREFACE 
 
 An elaborate preface to a philosophic work 
 usually impresses one as a last desperate effort on 
 the part of its author to convey what he feels 
 he has not quite managed to say in the body of 
 his book. Nevertheless, a collection of essays on 
 various topics written during a series of years 
 may perhaps find room for an independent word 
 to indicate the kind of unity they seem, to their 
 writer, to possess. Probably every one acquainted 
 with present philosophic thought — found, with 
 some notable exceptions, in periodicals rather 
 than in books — would term it a philosophy of 
 transition and reconstruction. Its various repre- 
 sentatives agree in what they oppose — the ortho- 
 dox British empiricism of two generations ago and 
 he orthodox Neo-Kantian idealism of the last 
 generation — rather than in what they proffer. 
 
 The essays of this volume belong, I suppose, to 
 what has come to be known (since the earlier of 
 them were written) as the pragmatic phase of the 
 newer movement. Now a recent German critic has 
 described pragmatism as, " Epistemologically, 
 nominalism; psychologically, voluntarism; cosmo- 
 logically, energism; metaphysically, agnosticism; 
 ethically, meliorism on the basis of the Bentham- 
 
 iii 
 
iv PREFACE 
 
 Mill utilitarianism." 1 It may be that pragmatism 
 will turn out to be all of this formidable array; 
 but even should it, the one who thus defines it has 
 hardly come within earshot of it. For whatever 
 else pragmatism is or is not, the pragmatic spirit 
 is primarily a revolt against that habit of mind 
 which disposes of anything whatever — even so 
 humble an affair as a new method in Philosophy — 
 by tucking it away, after this fashion, in the 
 pigeon holes of a filing cabinet. There are other 
 vital phases of contemporary transition and revi- 
 sion; there are, for example, a new realism and 
 naturalistic idealism. When I recall that I find 
 myself more interested (even though their repre- 
 sentatives might decline to reciprocate) in such 
 phases than in the systems marked by the labels 
 of our German critic, I am confirmed in a belief 
 that after all it is better to view pragmatism quite 
 vaguely as part and parcel of a general move- 
 ment of intellectual reconstruction. For other- 
 wise we seem to have no recourse save to define 
 pragmatism — as does our German author — in 
 terms of the very past systems against which it is 
 a reaction ; or, in escaping that alternative, to re- 
 gard it as a fixed rival system making like claim to 
 
 1 The affair is even more portentous in the German with 
 its capital letters and series of muses : " Gewiss ist der 
 Pragmatismus erkenntnisstheoretisch Nominalismus, psy- 
 chologisch Voluntarismus, naturphilosophisch Energismus, 
 metaphysisch Agnosticismus, ethisch Meliorismus auf 
 Grundlage des Bentham-MUlschen Utilitarismus." 
 
PREFACE v 
 
 completeness and finality. And if, as I believe, one 
 of the marked traits of the pragmatic movement is 
 just the surrender of every such claim, how have 
 we furthered our understanding of pragmatism? 
 
 Classic philosophies have to be revised because 
 they must be squared up with the many social 
 and intellectual tendencies that have revealed 
 themselves since those philosophies matured. The 
 conquest of the sciences by the experimental 
 method of inquiry; the injection of evolutionary 
 ideas into the study of life and society; the ap- 
 plication of the historic method to religions and 
 morals as well as to institutions ; the creation of 
 the sciences of " origins " and of the cultural 
 development of mankind — how can such intellec- 
 tual changes occur and leave philosophy what it 
 was and where it was? Nor can philosophy re- 
 main an indifferent spectator of the rise of what 
 may be termed the new individualism in art and 
 letters, with its naturalistic method applied in a 
 religious, almost mystic spirit to what is primi- 
 tive, obscure, varied, inchoate, and growing in 
 nature and human character. The age of Darwin, 
 Helmholtz, Pasteur, Ibsen, Maeterlinck, Rodin, and 
 Henry James must feel some uneasiness until it 
 has liquidated its philosophic inheritance in cur- 
 rent intellectual coin. And to accuse those who 
 are concerned in this transaction of ignorant con- 
 tempt for the classic past of philosophy is to over- 
 
vi PREFACE 
 
 look the inspiration the movement of translation 
 draws from the fact that the history of philosophy 
 has become only too well understood. 
 
 Any revision of customary notions with its 
 elimination — instead of " solution " — of many 
 traditionary problems cannot hope, however, for 
 any unity save that of tendency and operation. 
 Elaborate and imposing system, the regimenting 
 and uniforming of thoughts, are, at present, evi- 
 dence that we are assisting at a stage performance 
 in which borrowed — or hired — figures are maneu- 
 vering. Tentatively and piecemeal must the re- 
 construction of our stock notions proceed. As a 
 contribution to such a revision, the present collec- 
 tion of essays is submitted. With one or two 
 exceptions, their order is that of a reversed 
 chronology, the later essays coming first. The 
 facts regarding the conditions of their first ap- 
 pearance are given in connection with each essay. 
 I wish to thank the Editors of the Philosophical 
 Review, of Mind, of the Hibbert Journal, of the 
 Journal of Philosophy, Psychology, and Scientific 
 Methods, and of the Popular Science Monthly, 
 and the Directors of the Press of Chicago and 
 Columbia Universities, respectively, for permission 
 to reprint such of the essays as appeared orig- 
 inally under their several auspices. 
 
 John Dewey 
 
 Columbia University, 
 New York City, March 1, 1910. 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 The Influence of Darwinism on Philosophy 
 
 Nature and Its Good: A Conversation . 
 
 Intelligence and Morals 
 
 The Experimental Theory of Knowledge 
 
 The Intellectualist Criterion for Truth 
 
 A Short Catechism Concerning Truth 
 
 Beliefs and Existences .... 
 
 Experience and Objective Idealism 
 
 The Postulate of Immediate Empiricism 
 
 " Consciousness " and Experience . 
 
 The Significance of the Problem of Knowl 
 edge 
 
 PAGE 
 1 
 
 20 
 
 46 / 
 
 77 
 112 
 154 
 169 
 198 
 226 
 242 
 
 271 
 
THE INFLUENCE OF DARWINISM 
 ON PHILOSOPHY x 
 
 THAT the publication of the " Origin of 
 Species " marked an epoch in the develop- 
 ment of the natural sciences is well known to the 
 layman. That the combination of the very words 
 origin and species embodied an intellectual revolt 
 and introduced a new intellectual temper is easily 
 overlooked by the expert. The conceptions that 
 had reigned in the philosophy of nature and knowl- 
 edge for two thousand years, the conceptions that 
 had become the familiar furniture of the mind, 
 rested on the assumption of the superiority of the 
 fixed and final; they rested upon treating change 
 and origin as signs of defect and unreality. In 
 laying hands upon the sacred ark of absolute 
 permanency, in treating the forms that had been 
 regarded as types of fixity and perfection as 
 
 1 A lecture in a course of public lectures on " Charles 
 Darwin and His Influence on Science," given at Columbia 
 University in the winter and spring of 1909. Reprinted 
 from the Popular Science Monthly for July, 1909. 
 
r 
 
 2 DARWINISM AND PHILOSOPHY 
 
 originating and passing away, the " Origin of 
 Species " introduced a mode of thinking that in 
 the end was bound to transform the logic of 
 knowledge, and hence the treatment of morals, 
 politics, and religion. 
 
 No wonder, then, that the publication of Dar- 
 win's book, a half century ago, precipitated a crisis. 
 The true nature of the controversy is easily con- 
 i cealed from us, however, by the theological clamor 
 that attended it. The vivid and popular features 
 of the anti-Darwinian row tended to leave the im- 
 pression that the issue was between science on one 
 side and theology on the other. Such was not the 
 case — the issue lay primarily within science itself, 
 as Darwin himself early recognized. The theolog- 
 ical outcry he discounted from the start, hardly 
 noticing it save as it bore upon the " feelings of 
 his female relatives." But for two decades before 
 final publication he contemplated the possibility 
 of being put down by his scientific peers as a fool 
 or as crazy; and he set, as the measure of his 
 success, the degree in which he should affect three 
 men of science : Lyell in geology, Hooker in botany, 
 and Huxley in zoology. 
 
 Religious considerations lent fervor to the con- 
 troversy, but they did not provoke it. Intellectu- 
 ally, religious emotions are not creative but con- 
 servative. They attach themselves readily to the 
 current view of the world and consecrate it. They 
 
DARWINISM AND PHILOSOPHY 3 
 
 steep and dye intellectual fabrics in the seething 
 vat of emotions; they do not form their warp 
 and woof. There is not, I think, an instance of 
 any large idea about the world being independently 
 generated by religion. Although the ideas that 
 rose up like armed men against Darwinism owed 
 their intensity to religious associations, their origin 
 and meaning are to be sought in science and philos- 
 ophy, not in religion. 
 
 II 
 
 Few words in our language foreshorten intel- 
 lectual history as much as does the word species. 
 The Greeks, in initiating the intellectual life of 
 Europe, were impressed by characteristic traits 
 of the life of plants and animals ; so impressed 
 indeed that they made these traits the key to 
 defining nature and to explaining mind and society. 
 And truly, life is so wonderful that a seemingly 
 successful reading of its mystery might well lead 
 men to believe that the key to the secrets of 
 heaven and earth was in their hands. The Greek 
 rendering of this mystery, the Greek formulation 
 of the aim and standard of knowledge, was in the 
 course of time embodied in the word species, and it 
 controlled philosophy for two thousand years. To 
 understand the intellectual face-about expressed 
 in the phrase " Origin of Species," we must, then, 
 
4 DARWINISM AND PHILOSOPHY 
 
 understand the long dominant idea against which it 
 is a protest. 
 
 Consider how men were impressed by the facts 
 of life. Their eyes fell upon certain things slight 
 in bulk, and frail in structure. To every appear- 
 ance, these perceived things were inert and passive. 
 Suddenly, under certain circumstances, these 
 things — henceforth known as seeds or eggs or 
 germs — begin to change, to change rapidly in size, 
 form, and qualities. Rapid and extensive changes 
 occur, however, in many things — as when wood is 
 touched by fire. But the changes in the living 
 thing are orderly ; they are cumulative ; they tend 
 constantly in one direction ; they do not, like other 
 changes, destroy or consume, or pass fruitless into 
 wandering flux ; they realize and fulfil. Each suc- 
 cessive stage, no matter how unlike its predecessor, 
 preserves its net effect and also prepares the way 
 for a fuller activity on the part of its successor. In 
 living beings, changes do not happen as they seem 
 to happen elsewhere, any which way; the earlier 
 changes are regulated in view of later results. 
 This progressive organization does not cease till 
 there is achieved a true final term, a reAot, a com- 
 pleted, perfected end. This final form exercises 
 in turn a plenitude of functions, not the least note- 
 worthy of which is production of germs like those 
 from which it took its own origin, germs capable 
 of the same cycle of self-fulfilling activity. 
 
DARWINISM AND PHILOSOPHY 5 
 
 But the whole miraculous tale is not yet told. 
 The same drama is enacted to the same destiny 
 in countless myriads of individuals so sundered in 
 time, so severed in space, that they have no oppor- 
 tunity for mutual consultation and no means of 
 interaction. As an old writer quaintly said, 
 u things of the same kind go through the same 
 formalities " — celebrate, as it were, the same 
 ceremonial rites. 
 
 This formal activity which operates throughout 
 a series of changes and holds them to a single 
 course ; which subordinates their aimless flux to its 
 own perfect manifestation; which, leaping the 
 boundaries of space and time, keeps individuals 
 distant in space and remote in time to a uniform 
 type of structure and function: this principle 
 seemed to give insight into the very nature of 
 reality itself. To it Aristotle gave the name, eidoZ. 
 This term the scholastics translated as species. 
 
 The force of this term was deepened by its 
 application to everything in the universe that ob- 
 serves order in flux and manifests constancy 
 through change. From the casual drift of daily 
 weather, through the uneven recurrence of seasons 
 and unequal return of seed time and harvest, up 
 to the majestic sweep of the heavens — the image 
 of eternity in time — and from this to the unchang- 
 ing pure and contemplative intelligence beyond na- 
 ture lies one unbroken fulfilment of ends. Nature 
 
6 DARWINISM AND PHILOSOPHY 
 
 as a whole is a progressive realization of purpose 
 strictly comparable to the realization of purpose 
 in any single plant or animal. 
 
 The conception of eidoS, species, a fixed form 
 and final cause, was the central principle of knowl- 
 edge as well as of nature. Upon it rested the 
 logic of science. Change as change is mere flux 
 and lapse; it insults intelligence. Genuinely to 
 know is to grasp a permanent end that realizes 
 itself through changes, holding them thereby with- 
 in the metes and bounds of fixed truth. Completely 
 to know is to relate all special forms to their one 
 single end and good : pure contemplative intelli- 
 gence. Since, however, the scene of nature which 
 directly confronts us is in change, nature as 
 directly and practically experienced does not sat- 
 isfy the conditions of knowledge. Human ex- 
 perience is in flux, and hence the instrumentalities 
 of sense-perception and of inference based upon 
 observation are condemned in advance. Science 
 is compelled to aim at realities lying behind and 
 beyond the processes of nature, and to carry on 
 its search for these realities by means of rational 
 forms transcending ordinary modes of perception 
 and inference. 
 
 There are, indeed, but two alternative courses. 
 We must either find the appropriate objects and 
 organs of knowledge in the mutual interactions 
 of changing things ; or else, to escape the infec- 
 
DARWINISM AND PHILOSOPHY 
 
 tion of change, we must seek them in some trans 
 cendent and supernal region. The human mind 
 deliberately as it were, exhausted the logic of the 
 changeless, the final, and the transcendent, before 
 it essayed adventure on the pathless wastes of 
 generation and transformation. We dispose all 
 too easily of the efforts of the schoolmen to in- 
 terpret nature and mind in terms of real essences, 
 hidden forms, and occult faculties, forgetful of 
 the seriousness and dignity of the ideas that lay 
 behind. We dispose of them by laughing at the 
 famous gentleman who accounted for the fact that 
 opium put people to sleep on the ground it had a 
 dormitive faculty. But the doctrine, held in our 
 own day, that knowledge of the plant that yields 
 the poppy consists in referring the peculiarities 
 of an individual to a type, to a universal form, 
 a doctrine so firmly established that any other 
 method of knowing was conceived to be unphilo- 
 sophical and unscientific, is a survival of precisely 
 the same logic. This identity of conception in 
 the scholastic and anti-Darwinian theory may well 
 suggest greater sympathy for what has become 
 unfamiliar as well as greater humility regarding 
 the further unfamiliarities that history has in 
 store. 
 
 Darwin was not, of course, the first to question 
 the classic philosophy of nature and of knowledge. 
 The beginnings of the revolution are in the phys- 
 
 ; 
 
8 DARWINISM AND PHILOSOPHY 
 
 ical science of the sixteenth and seventeenth cen- 
 turies. When Galileo said : " It is my opinion that 
 the earth is very noble and admirable by reason 
 of so many and so different alterations and gen- 
 erations which are incessantly made therein," he 
 expressed the changed temper that was coming over 
 the world; the transfer of interest from the per- 
 manent to the changing. When Descartes said: 
 I" The nature of physical things is much more 
 easily conceived when they are beheld coming grad- 
 ually into existence, than when they are only con- 
 sidered as produced at once in a finished and per- 
 fect state," the modern world became self-conscious 
 of the logic that was henceforth to control it, the 
 logic of which Darwin's " Origin of Species " is 
 the latest scientific achievement. Without the 
 methods of Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo, and their 
 successors in astronomy, physics, and chemistry, 
 Darwin would have been helpless in the organic 
 sciences. But prior to Darwin the impact of the 
 new scientific method upon life, mind, and politics, 
 had been arrested, because between these ideal or 
 moral interests and the inorganic world intervened 
 the kingdom of plants and animals. The gates of 
 the garden of life were barred to the new ideas ; 
 and only through this garden was there access 
 to mind and politics. The influence of Darwin 
 upon philosophy resides in his having conquered 
 the phenomena of life for the principle of transi- 
 
DARWINISM AND PHILOSOPHY 9 
 
 tion, and thereby freed the new logic for applica- 
 tion to mind and morals and life. When he said 
 of species what Galileo had said of the earth, 
 e pur se muove, he emancipated, once for all, 
 genetic and experimental ideas as an organon of 
 asking questions and looking for explanations, 
 
 III 
 
 The exact bearings upon philosophy of the 
 new logical outlook are, of course, as yet, un- 
 certain and inchoate. We live in the twilight 
 of intellectual transition. One must add the rash- 
 ness of the prophet to the stubbornness of the 
 partizan to venture a systematic exposition of 
 the influence upon philosophy of the Darwinian 
 method. At best, we can but inquire as to its 
 general bearing — the effect upon mental temper 
 and complexion, upon that body of half-conscious, 
 half-instinctive intellectual aversions and prefer- 
 ences which determine, after all, our more de- 
 liberate intellectual enterprises. In this vague in- 
 quiry there happens to exist as a kind of touch- 
 stone a problem of long historic currency that 
 has also been much discussed in Darwinian litera- 
 ture. I refer to the old problem of design versus 
 chance, mind versus matter, as the causal explana- 
 tion, first or final, of things. 
 
 As we have already seen, the classic notion of 
 
10 DARWINISM AND PHILOSOPHY 
 
 species carried with it the idea of purpose. In 
 all living forms, a specific type is present directing 
 the earlier stages of growth to the realization of 
 its own perfection. Since this purposive regula- 
 tive principle is not visible to the senses, it follows 
 that it must be an ideal or rational force. Since, 
 however, the perfect form is gradually approxi- 
 mated through the sensible changes, it also follows 
 that in and through a sensible realm a rational 
 ideal force is working out its own ultimate mani- 
 festation. These inferences were extended to 
 nature: (a) She does nothing in vain; but all for 
 an ulterior purpose, (b) Within natural sensible 
 events there is therefore contained a spiritual 
 causal force, which as spiritual escapes perception, 
 but is apprehended by an enlightened reason. 
 (c) The manifestation of this principle brings 
 about a subordination of matter and sense to its 
 own realization, and this ultimate fulfilment is the 
 goal of nature and of man. The design argu- 
 ment thus operated in two directions. Purpose- 
 fulness accounted for the intelligibility of nature 
 and the possibility of science, while the absolute 
 or cosmic character of this purposefulness gave 
 sanction and worth to the moral and religious en- 
 deavors of man. Science was underpinned and 
 morals authorized by one and the same principle, 
 and their mutual agreement was eternally guaran- 
 teed. 
 
DARWINISM AND PHILOSOPHY 11 
 
 This philosophy remained, in spite of sceptical 
 and polemic outbursts, the official and the regnant 
 philosophy of Europe for over two thousand years. 
 The expulsion of fixed first and final causes from 
 astronomy, physics, and chemistry had indeed given 
 the doctrine something of a shock. But, on the 
 other hand, increased acquaintance with the de- 
 tails of plant and animal life operated as a coun- 
 terbalance and perhaps even strengthened the 
 argument from design. The marvelous adapta- 
 tions of organisms to their environment, of organs 
 to the organism, of unlike parts of a complex 
 organ — like the eye — to the organ itself ; the fore- 
 shadowing by lower forms of the higher; the 
 preparation in earlier stages of growth for or- 
 gans that only later had their functioning — these 
 things were increasingly recognized with the prog- 
 ress of botany, zoology, paleontology, and embry- 
 ology. Together, they added such prestige to the 
 design argument that by the late eighteenth cen- 
 tury it was, as approved by the sciences of or- 
 ganic life, the central point of theistic and ideal- 
 istic philosophy. 
 
 The Darwinian principle of natural selection 
 cut straight under this philosophy. If all organic 
 adaptations are due simply to constant variation 
 and the elimination of those variations which are 
 harmful in the struggle for existence that is 
 brought about by excessive reproduction, there 
 
12 DARWINISM AND PHILOSOPHY 
 
 is no call for a prior intelligent causal force to 
 plan and preordain them. Hostile critics charged 
 Darwin with materialism and with making chance 
 the cause of the universe. 
 
 Some naturalists, like Asa Gray, favored the 
 Darwinian principle and attempted to reconcile 
 it with design. Gray held to what may be called 
 design on the installment plan. If we conceive 
 the " stream of variations " to be itself intended, 
 we may suppose that each successive variation was 
 designed from the first to be selected. In that 
 case, variation, struggle, and selection simply de- 
 fine the mechanism of " secondary causes " through 
 which the " first cause " acts ; and the doctrine 
 of design is none the worse off because we know 
 more of its modus operandi, 
 
 Darwin could not accept this mediating pro- 
 posal. He admits or rather he asserts that it 
 is " impossible to conceive this immense and won- 
 derful universe including man with his capacity 
 of looking far backwards and far into futurity 
 as the result of blind chance or necessity." 1 But 
 nevertheless he holds that since variations are in 
 useless as well as useful directions, and since the 
 latter are sifted out simply by the stress of the 
 conditions of struggle for existence, the design 
 argument as applied to living beings is unjustifi- 
 able; and its lack of support there deprives it 
 lu Life and Letters," Vol. L, p. 2S2; cf. 285. 
 
DARWINISM AND PHILOSOPHY 13 
 
 of scientific value as applied to nature in general. 
 If the variations of the pigeon, which under arti- 
 ficial selection give the pouter pigeon, are not pre- 
 ordained for the sake of the breeder, by what logic 
 do we argue that variations resulting in natural 
 species are pre-designed? 1 
 
 IV 
 
 So much for some of the more obvious facts 
 of the discussion of design versus chance, as causal 
 principles of nature and of life as a whole. We 
 brought up this discussion, you recall, as a crucial 
 instance. What does our touchstone indicate as 
 to the bearing of Darwinian ideas upon philoso- 
 phy? In the first place, the new logic outlaws, 
 flanks, dismisses — what you will — one type of 
 problems and substitutes for it another type. 
 Philosophy forswears inquiry after absolute origins 
 and absolute finalities in order to explore specific 
 values and the specific conditions that generate 
 them. 
 
 Darwin concluded that the impossibility of 
 assigning the world to chance as a whole and to 
 design in its parts indicated the insolubility of 
 the question. Two radically different reasons, 
 
 lu Life and Letters," Vol. II., pp. 146, 170, 245; Vol. I., 
 
 pp. 283-84. See also the closing portion of his " Variations 
 of Animals and Plants under Domestication." 
 
14 DARWINISM AND PHILOSOPHY 
 
 however, may be given as to why a problem is 
 insoluble. One reason is that the problem is too 
 high for intelligence ; the other is that the question 
 in its very asking makes assumptions that render 
 the question meaningless. The latter alternative 
 is unerringly pointed to in the celebrated case 
 of design versus chance. Once admit that the sole 
 verifiable or fruitful object of knowledge is the 
 particular set of changes that generate the object 
 of study together with the consequences that then 
 flow from it, and no intelligible question can be 
 asked about what, by assumption, lies outside. 
 To assert — as is often asserted — that specific 
 values of particular truth, social bonds and forms 
 of beauty, if they can be shown to be generated 
 by concretely knowable conditions, are meaningless 
 and in vain; to assert that they are justified only 
 when they and their particular causes and effects 
 have all at once been gathered up into some in- 
 clusive first cause and some exhaustive final goal, 
 is intellectual atavism. Such argumentation is re- 
 version to the logic that explained the extinction 
 of fire by water through the formal essence of 
 aqueousness and the quenching of thirst by water 
 through the final cause of aqueousness. Whether 
 used in the case of the special event or that of 
 life as a whole, such logic only abstracts some 
 aspect of the existing course of events in order 
 to reduplicate it as a petrified eternal principle 
 
DARWINISM AND PHILOSOPHY 15 
 
 by which to explain the very changes of which it 
 is the formalization. 
 
 When Henry Sidgwick casually remarked in a 
 letter that as he grew older his interest in what 
 or who made the world was altered into interest 
 in what kind of a world it is anyway, his voicing 
 of a common experience of our own day illustrates 
 also the nature of that intellectual transformation 
 effected by the Darwinian logic. Interest shifts 
 from the wholesale essence back of special changes 
 to the question of how special changes serve and 
 defeat concrete purposes ; shifts from an intelli- 
 gence that shaped things once for all to the 
 particular intelligences which things are even now 
 shaping; shifts from an ultimate goal of good to 
 the direct increments of justice and happiness 
 that intelligent administration of existent condi- 
 tions may beget and that present carelessness or 
 stupidity will destroy or forego. 
 
 In the second place, the classic type of logic 
 inevitably set philosophy upon proving that life 
 must have certain qualities and values — no matter 
 how experience presents the matter — because of 
 some remote cause and eventual goal. The duty 
 of wholesale justification inevitably accompanies all 
 thinking that makes the meaning of special occur- 
 rences depend upon something that once and for 
 all lies behind them. The habit of derogating 
 from present meanings and uses prevents our look- 
 
16 DARWINISM AND PHILOSOPHY 
 
 ing the facts of experience in the face ; it prevents 
 serious acknowledgment of the evils they present 
 and serious concern with the goods they promise 
 but do not as yet fulfil. It turns thought to the 
 business of finding a wholesale transcendent remedy 
 for the one and guarantee for the other. One 
 is reminded of the way many moralists and theo- 
 logians greeted Herbert Spencer's recognition of 
 an unknowable energy from which welled up the 
 phenomenal physical processes without and the 
 conscious operations within. Merely because 
 Spencer labeled his unknowable energy " God," 
 this faded piece of metaphysical goods was greeted 
 as an important and grateful concession to the 
 reality of the spiritual realm. Were it not for 
 the deep hold of the habit of seeking justification 
 for ideal values in the remote and transcendent, 
 surely this reference of them to an unknowable 
 absolute would be despised in comparison with the 
 demonstrations of experience that knowable ener- 
 gies are daily generating about us precious values. 
 The displacing of this wholesale type of philos- 
 ophy will doubtless not arrive by sheer logical dis- 
 proof, but rather by growing recognition of its 
 futility. Were it a thousand times true that 
 opium produces sleep because of its dormitive en- 
 ergy, yet the inducing of sleep in the tired, and the 
 recovery to waking life of the poisoned, would not 
 be thereby one least step forwarded. And were 
 
DARWINISM AND PHILOSOPHY 17 
 
 it a thousand times dialectically demonstrated that 
 life as a whole is regulated by a transcendent prin- 
 ciple to a final inclusive goal, none the less truth 
 and error, health and disease, good and evil, hope 
 and fear in the concrete, would remain just what 
 and where they now are. To improve our edu- 
 cation, to ameliorate our manners, to advance our 
 politics, we must have recourse to specific condi- 
 tions of generation. 
 
 Finally, the new logic introduces responsibility 
 into the intellectual life. To idealize and ration- 
 alize the universe at large is after all a confession 
 of inability to master the courses of things that 
 specifically concern us. As long as mankind suf- 
 fered from this impotency, it naturally shifted a 
 burden of responsibility that it could not carry 
 over to the more competent shoulders of the trans- 
 cendent cause. But if insight into specific con- 
 ditions of value and into specific consequences of 
 ideas is possible, philosophy must in time become 
 a method of locating and interpreting the more 
 serious of the conflicts that occur in life, and a 
 method of projecting ways for dealing with them: 
 a method of moral and political diagnosis and 
 prognosis. 
 
 The claim to formulate a priori the legisla- 
 tive constitution of the universe is by its nature 
 a claim that may lead to elaborate dialectic de- 
 velopments. But it is also one that removes 
 
18 DARWINISM AND PHILOSOPHY 
 
 these very conclusions from subjection to experi- 
 mental test, for, by definition, these results make no 
 differences in the detailed course of events. But 
 a philosophy that humbles its pretensions to the 
 work of projecting hypotheses for the education 
 and conduct of mind, individual and social, is 
 thereby subjected to test by the way in which the 
 ideas it propounds work out in practice. In hav- 
 ing modesty forced upon it, philosophy also ac- 
 quires responsibility. 
 
 Doubtless I seem to have violated the implied 
 promise of my earlier remarks and to have turned 
 both prophet and partizan. But in anticipating 
 the direction of the transformations in philosophy 
 to be wrought by the Darwinian genetic and ex- 
 perimental logic, I do not profess to speak for 
 any save those who yield themselves consciously 
 or unconsciously to this logic. No one can fairly 
 deny that at present there are two effects of the 
 Darwinian mode of thinking. On the one hand, 
 there are making many sincere and vital efforts 
 to revise our traditional philosophic conceptions 
 in accordance with its demands. On the other 
 hand, there is as definitely a recrudescence of 
 absolutistic philosophies; an assertion of a type 
 of philosophic knowing distinct from that of the 
 sciences, one which opens to us another kind of 
 reality from that to which the sciences give ac- 
 cess; an appeal through experience to something 
 
DARWINISM AND PHILOSOPHY 19 
 
 that essentially goes beyond experience. This re- 
 action affects popular creeds and religious move- 
 ments as well as technical philosophies. The very 
 conquest of the biological sciences by the new ideas 
 has led many to proclaim an explicit and rigid 
 separation of philosophy from science. 
 
 Old ideas give way slowly; for they are more 
 than abstract logical forms and categories. They 
 are habits, predispositions, deeply engrained atti- 
 tudes of aversion and preference. Moreover, the 
 conviction persists — though history shows it to be 
 a hallucination — that all the questions that the 
 human mind has asked are questions that can be 
 answered in terms of the alternatives that the ques- 
 tions themselves present. But in fact intellectual 
 progress usually occurs through sheer abandonment 
 of questions together with both of the alternatives 
 they assume — an abandonment that results from 
 their decreasing vitality and a change of urgent 
 interest. We do not solve them : we get over them. 
 Old questions are solved by disappearing, evapo- 
 rating, while new questions corresponding to the 
 changed attitude of endeavor and preference take 
 their place. Doubtless the greatest dissolvent in 
 contemporary thought of old questions, the great- 
 est precipitant of new methods, new intentions, new 
 problems, is the one effected by the scientific revo- 
 lution that found its climax in the " Origin of 
 Species." 
 
NATURE AND ITS GOOD: 
 A CONVERSATION x 
 
 A GROUP of people are scattered near one 
 another, on the sands of an ocean beach; 
 wraps, baskets, etc., testify to a day's outing. 
 Above the hum of the varied conversations are 
 heard the mock sobs of one of the party. 
 
 Various voices. What's the matter, Eaton? 
 
 Eaton. Matter enough. I was watching a 
 beautiful wave ; its lines were perfect ; at its crest, 
 the light glinting through its infinitely varied and 
 delicate curves of foam made a picture more rav- 
 ishing than any dream. And now it has gone ; it 
 will never come back. So I weep. 
 
 Grimes. That's right, Eaton ; give it to them. 
 Of course well-fed and well-read persons — with 
 their possessions of wealth and of knowledge both 
 gained at the expense of others — finally get bored ; 
 then they wax sentimental over their boredom and 
 are worried about " Nature " and its relation to 
 life. Not everybody takes it out that way, of 
 course ; some take motor cars and champagne for 
 that tired feeling. But the rest — those who aren't 
 
 1 Reprinted from the Hibbert Journal, Vol. VII., No. 4, 
 July, 1909. 
 
NATURES GOOD: A CONVERSATION 21 
 
 in that class financially, or who consider themselves 
 too refined for that kind of relief — seek a new 
 sensation in speculating why that brute old world 
 out there will not stand for what you call spiritual 
 and ideal values — for short, your egotisms. 
 
 The fact is that the whole discussion is only a 
 symptom of the leisure class disease. If you had 
 to work to the limit and beyond, to keep soul and 
 body together, and, more than that, to keep alive 
 the soul of your family in its body, you would 
 know the difference between your artificial prob- 
 lems and the genuine problem of life. Your philo- 
 sophic problems about the relation of " the uni- 
 verse to moral and spiritual good " exist only in 
 the sentimentalism that generates them. The gen- 
 uine question is why social arrangements will not 
 permit the amply sufficient body of natural re- 
 sources to sustain all men and women in security 
 and decent comfort, with a margin for the culti- 
 vation of their human instincts of sociability, love 
 of knowledge and of art. 
 
 As I read Plato, philosophy began with some 
 sense of its essentially political basis and mission — 
 a recognition that its problems were those of the 
 organization of a just social order. But it soon 
 got lost in dreams of another world ; and even those 
 of you philosophers who pride yourselves on being 
 so advanced that you no longer believe in " an- 
 other world," are still living and thinking with 
 

 22 NATURE'S GOOD: A CONVERSATION 
 
 reference to it. You may not call it supernatural ; 
 but when you talk about a realm of spiritual or 
 ideal values in general, and ask about its relation 
 to Nature in general, you have only changed the 
 labels on the bottles, not the contents in them. 
 For what makes anything transcendental — that is, 
 in common language, supernatural — is simply and 
 only aloofness from practical affairs — which af- 
 fairs in their ultimate analysis are the business of 
 making a living. 
 
 Eaton. Yes ; Grimes has about hit off the point 
 of my little parable — in one of its aspects at least. 
 In matters of daily life you say a man is " off," 
 more or less insane, when he deliberately goes on 
 looking for a certain kind of result from condi- 
 tions which he has already found to be such that 
 they cannot possibly yield it. If he keeps on look- 
 ing, and then goes about mourning because stage 
 money won't buy beefsteaks, or because he can- 
 not keep himself warm by burning the sea-sands 
 here, you dismiss him as a fool or a hysteric. If 
 you would condescend to reason with him at all, you 
 would tell him to look for the conditions that will 
 yield the results ; to occupy himself with some of 
 the countless goods of life for which, by intelli- 
 gently directed search, adequate means may be 
 found. 
 
 Well, before lunch, Moore was reiterating the 
 old tale. " Modern science ha§ completely trans- 
 
NATURE'S GOOD: A CONVERSATION 23 
 
 formed our conceptions of Nature. It has stripped 
 the universe bare not only of all the moral values 
 which it wore alike to antique pagan and to our 
 medieval ancestors, but also of any regard, any 
 preference, for such values. They are mere inci- 
 dents, transitory accidents, in her everlasting re- 
 distribution of matter in motion ; like the rise and 
 fall of the wave I lament, or like a single musical 
 note that a screeching, rumbling railway train 
 might happen to emit." This is a one-sided view ; 
 but suppose it were all so, what is the moral? 
 Surely, to change our standpoint, our angle of 
 vision; to stop looking for results among condi- 
 tions that we know will not yield them ; to turn our 
 gaze to the goods, the values that exist actually 
 and indubitably in experience; and consider by 
 what natural conditions these particular values 
 may be strengthened and widened. 
 
 Insist, if you please, that Nature as a whole 
 does not stand for good as a whole. Then, in 
 heaven's name, just because good is both so plural 
 (so " numerous ") and so partial, bend your ener- 
 gies of intelligence and of effort to selecting the 
 specific plural and partial natural conditions which 
 will at least render values that we do have more 
 secure and more extensive. Any other course is 
 the way of madness ; it is the way of the spoilt 
 child who cries at the seashore because the waves 
 do not stand still, and who cries even more f ranti- 
 
24 NATURES GOOD: A CONVERSATION 
 
 cally in the mountains because the hills do not melt 
 and flow. 
 
 But no. Moore and his school will not have it 
 so: we must "go back of the returns." All this 
 science, after all, is a mode of knowledge. Ex- 
 amine knowledge itself and find it implies a com- 
 plete all-inclusive intelligence; and then find (by 
 taking another tack) that intelligence involves 
 sentiency, feeling, and also will. Hence your very 
 physical science, if you will only criticise it, ex- 
 amine it, shows that its object, mechanical nature, 
 is itself an included and superseded element in an 
 all-embracing spiritual and ideal whole. And there 
 you are. 
 
 Well, I do not now insist that all this is mere 
 dialectic prestidigitation. No ; accept it ; let it go 
 at its face value. But what of it? Is any value 
 more concretely and securely in life than it was 
 before ? Does this perfect intelligence enable us 
 to correct one single mis-step, one paltry error, 
 here and now? Does this perfect all-inclusive 
 goodness serve to heal one disease? Does it rectify 
 one trangression? Does it even give the slightest 
 inkling of how to go to work at any of these 
 things? No; it just tells you: Never mind, for 
 they are already eternally corrected, eternally 
 healed in the eternal consciousness which alone is 
 really Real. Stop: there is one evil, one pain, 
 which the doctrine mitigates — the hysteric senti- 
 
NATURES GOOD: A CONVERSATION 25 
 
 mentalism which is troubled because the universe 
 as a whole does not sustain good as a whole. But 
 that is the only thing it alters. The " pathetic 
 fallacy " of Ruskin magnified to the nth. power is 
 the motif of modern idealism. 
 
 Moore. Certainly nobody will accuse Eaton of 
 tender-mindedness — except in his logic, which, as 
 certainly, is not tough-minded. His excitement, 
 however, convinces me that he has at least an ink- 
 ling that he is begging the question ; and like the 
 true pragmatist that he is, is trying to prevent 
 by action (to wit, his flood of speech) his false 
 logic from becoming articulate to him. The ques- 
 tion being whether the values we seem to appre- 
 hend, the purposes we entertain, the goods we pos- 
 sess, are anything more than transitory waves, 
 Eaton meets it by saying: "Oh, of course, they 
 are waves; but don't think about that — just sit 
 down hard on the wave or get another wave to but- 
 tress it with ! " No wonder he recommends action 
 instead of thinking! Men have tried this method 
 before, as a counsel of desperation or as cynical 
 pessimism. But it remained for contemporary 
 pragmatism to label the drowning of sorrow in the 
 intoxication of thoughtless action, the highest 
 achievement of philosophic method, and to preach 
 wilful restlessness as a doctrine of hope and illu- 
 mination. Meantime, I prefer to be tender-minded 
 in my attitude toward Reality, and to make 
 
26 NATURES GOOD: A CONVERSATION 
 
 that attitude more reasonable by a tough-minded 
 logic. 
 
 Eaton. I am willing to be quiet long enough 
 for you to translate your metaphor into logic, and 
 show how I have begged the question. 
 
 Moore. It is plain enough. You bid us turn 
 to the cultivation, the nurture, of certain values 
 in human life. But the question is whether these 
 are or are not values. And that is a question of 
 their relation to the Universe — to Reality. If 
 Reality substantiates them, then indeed they are 
 values; if it mocks and flouts them — as it surely 
 does if what mechanical science calls Nature be 
 ultimate and absolute — then they are not values. 
 You and your kind are really the sentimentalists, 
 because you are sheer subjectivists. You say: Ac- 
 cept the dream as real ; do not question about it ; 
 add a little iridescence to its fog and extend it 
 till it obscure even more of Reality than it natu- 
 rally does, and all is well! I say: Perhaps the 
 dream is no dream but an intimation of the 
 solidest and most ultimate of all realities ; and a 
 thorough examination of what the positivist, the 
 materialist, accepts as solid, namely, science, re- 
 veals as its own aim, standard, and presupposi- 
 tion that Reality is one all-exhaustive spiritual 
 Being. 
 
 Eaton. This is about the way I thought my 
 begging of the question would turn out. You in- 
 
NATURE'S GOOD: A CONVERSATION 27 
 
 sist upon translating my position into terms of 
 your own ; I am not then surprised to hear that it 
 would be a begging of the question for you to hold 
 my views. My point is precisely that it is only 
 as long as you take the position that some Reality 
 beyond — some metaphysical or transcendental real- 
 ity — is necessary to substantiate empirical values 
 that you can even discuss whether the latter are 
 genuine or illusions. Drop the presupposition that 
 you read into everything I say, the idea that the 
 reality of things as they are is dependent upon some- 
 thing beyond and behind, and the facts of the case 
 just stare you in the eyes: Goods are, a multitude 
 of them — but, unfortunately, evils also are; and 
 all grades, pretty much, of both. Not the con- 
 trast and relation of experience in toto to some- 
 thing beyond experience drives men to religion and 
 then to philosophy ; but the contrast within ex- 
 perience of the better and the worse, and the con- 
 sequent problem of how to substantiate the former 
 and reduce the latter. Until you set up the no- 
 tion of a transcendental reality at large, you can- 
 not even raise the question of whether goods and 
 evils are, or only seem to be. The trouble and the 
 joy, the good and the evil, is that they are; the 
 hope is that they may be regulated, guided, in- 
 creased in one direction and minimized in another. 
 Instead of neglecting thought, we (I mean the 
 pragmatists) exalt it, because we say that intelli- 
 
28 NATURE'S GOOD: A CONVERSATION 
 
 gent discrimination of means and ends is the sole 
 final resource in this problem of all problems, the 
 control of the factors of good and ill in life. We 
 say, indeed, not merely that that is what intelli- 
 gence does, but rather what it is. 
 
 Historically, it is quite possible to show how 
 under certain social conditions this human and 
 practical problem of the relation of good and in- 
 telligence generated the notion of the transcen- 
 dental good and the pure reason. As Grimes re- 
 minded us, Plato 
 
 Moore. Yes, and Protagoras — don't forget 
 him; for unfortunately we know both the origin 
 and the consequences of your doctrine that being 
 and seeming are the same. We know quite well 
 that pure empiricism leads to the identification 
 of being and seeming, and that is just why every 
 deeply moral and religious soul from the time of 
 Plato and Aristotle to the present has insisted upon 
 a transcendent reality. 
 
 Eaton. Personally I don't need an absolute to 
 enable me to distinguish between, say, the good 
 of kindness and the evil of slander, or the good of 
 health and the evil of valetudinarianism. In ex- 
 perience, things bear their own specific characters. 
 Nor has the absolute idealist as yet answered the 
 question of how the absolute reality enables him 
 to distinguish between being and seeming in one 
 single concrete case. The trouble is that for him 
 
NATURE'S GOOD: A CONVERSATION 29 
 
 all Being is on the other side of experience, and all 
 experience is seeming. 
 
 Grimes. I think I heard you mention history. 
 I wish both of you would drop dialectics and go 
 to history. You would find history to be a strug- 
 gle for existence — for bread, for a roof, for pro- 
 tected and nourished offspring. You would find 
 history a picture of the masses always going 
 under — just missing — in the struggle, because 
 others have captured the control of natural re- 
 sources, which in themselves, if not as benign as 
 the eighteenth century imagined, are at least abun- 
 dantly ample for the needs of all. But because of 
 the monopolization of Nature by a few persons, 
 most men and women only stick their heads above 
 the welter just enough to catch a glimpse of better 
 things, then to be shoved down and under. The 
 only problem of the relation of Nature to human 
 good which is real is the economic problem of the 
 exploitation of natural resources in the equal in- 
 terests of all, instead of in the unequal interests 
 of a class. The problem you two men are discuss- 
 ing has no existence — and never had any — outside 
 of the heads of a few metaphysicians. The latter 
 would never have amounted to anything, would 
 never have had any career at all, had not shrewd 
 monopolists or tyrants (with the skill that charac- 
 terizes them) have seen that these speculations 
 about reality and a transcendental world could be 
 
SO NATURE'S GOOD: A CONVERSATION 
 
 distilled into opiates and distributed among the 
 masses to make them less rebellious. That, if you 
 would know, Eaton, is the real historic origin of 
 the ideal world beyond. When you realize that, 
 you will perceive that the pragmatists are only 
 half-way over. You will see that practical ques- 
 tions are practical, and are not to be solved merely 
 by having a theory about theory different from 
 the traditional one — which is all your pragmatism 
 comes to. 
 
 Moore. If you mean that your own crass Phi- 
 listinism is all that pragmatism comes to, I fancy 
 you are about right. Forget that the only end of 
 action is to bring about an approximation to the 
 complete inclusive consciousness ; make, as the 
 pragmatists do, consciousness a means to action, 
 and one form of external activity is just as good as 
 another. Art, religion, all the generous reaches 
 of science which do not show up immediately in 
 the factory — these things become meaningless, and 
 all that remains is that hard and dry satisfaction 
 of economic wants which is Grimes's ideal. 
 
 Grimes. An ideal which exists, by the way, only 
 in your imagination. I know of no more convinc- 
 ing proof of the futile irrelevancy of idealism than 
 the damning way in which it narrows the content 
 of actual daily life in the minds of those who up- 
 hold idealism. I sometimes think I am the only 
 true idealist. If the conditions of an equitable and 
 
NATURES GOOD: A CONVERSATION 31 
 
 ample physical existence for all were once secured, 
 I, for one, have no fears as to the bloom and harvest 
 of art and science, and all the " higher " things of 
 leisure. Life is interesting enough for me; give 
 it a show for all. 
 
 Arthur. I find myself in a peculiar position in 
 respect to this discussion. An analysis of what 
 is involved in this peculiarity may throw some light 
 on the points at issue, for I have to believe that 
 analysis and definition of what exists is the essen- 
 tial matter both in resolution of doubts and in 
 steps at reform. For brevity, not from conceit, 
 I will put the peculiarity to which I refer in a 
 personal form. I do not believe for a moment in 
 some different Reality beyond and behind Nature. 
 I do not believe that a manipulation of the logical 
 implications of science can give results which are 
 to be put in the place of those which Science herself 
 yields in her direct application. I accept Nature 
 as something which is, not seems, and Science as 
 her faithful transcript. Yet because I believe 
 these things, not in spite of them, I believe in the 
 existence of purpose and of good. How Eaton can 
 believe that fulfilment and the increasing realiza- 
 tion of purpose can exist in human consciousness 
 unless they first exist in the world which is revealed 
 in that consciousness is as much beyond me as how 
 Moore can believe that a manipulation of the 
 method of knowledge can yield considerations of a 
 
32 NATURES GOOD: A CONVERSATION 
 
 totally different order from those directly obtained 
 by use of the method. If purpose and fulfilment 
 exist as natural goods, then, and only then, can 
 consciousness itself be a fulfilment of Nature, and 
 be also a natural good. Any other view is inex- 
 plicable to sound thinking — save, historically, as a 
 product of modern political individualism and lit- 
 erary romanticism which have combined to produce 
 that idealistic philosophy according to which the 
 mind in knowing the universe creates it. 
 
 The view that purpose and realization are pro- 
 foundly natural, and that consciousness — or, if 
 you will, experience — is itself a culmination and 
 climax of Nature, is not a new view. Formulated 
 by Aristotle, it has always persisted wherever the 
 traditions of sound thinking have not been ob- 
 scured by romanticism. The modern scientific doc- 
 trine of evolution confirms and specifies the meta- 
 physical insight of Aristotle. This doctrine sets 
 forth in detail, and in verified detail, as a genuine 
 characteristic of existence, the tendency toward 
 cumulative results, the definite trend of things to- 
 ward culmination and achievement. It describes 
 the universe as possessing, in terms of and by right 
 of its own subject-matter (not as an addition of 
 subsequent reflection), differences of value and im- 
 portance — differences, moreover, that exercise se- 
 lective influence upon the course of things, that is 
 to say, genuinely determine the events that occur. 
 
NATURE'S GOOD: A CONVERSATION 33 
 
 It tells us that consciousness itself is such a cumu- 
 lative and culminating natural event. Hence it is 
 relevant to the world in whkh it dwells, and its 
 determinations of value are not arbitrary, not obi- 
 ter dicta, but descriptions of Nature herself. 
 
 Recall the words of Spencer which Moore quoted 
 this morning : " There is no pleasure in the con- 
 sciousness of being an infinitesimal bubble on a 
 globe that is infinitesimal compared with the total- 
 ity of things. Those on whom the unpitying rush 
 of changes inflicts sufferings which are often with- 
 out remedy, find no consolation in the thought that 
 they are at the mercy of blind forces, — which cause 
 indifferently now the destruction of a sun and now 
 the death of an animalcule. Contemplation of a 
 universe which is without conceivable beginning or 
 end and without intelligible purpose, yields no satis- 
 faction. " I am naive enough to believe that the 
 only question is whether the object of our " con- 
 sciousness," of our " thought," of our " contempla- 
 tion," is or is not as the quotation states it to be. 
 If the statement be correct, pragmatism, like sub- 
 jectivism (of which I suspect it is only a variation, 
 putting emphasis upon will instead of idea), is an 
 invitation to close our eyes to what is, in order to 
 encourage the delusion that things are other than 
 they are. But the case is not so desperate. Speak- 
 ing dogmatically, the account given of the uni- 
 verse is just — not true. And the doctrine of evo- 
 
34 NATURE'S GOOD: A CONVERSATION 
 
 lution of which Spencer professedly made so much 
 is the evidence. A universe describable in evolu- 
 tionary terms is a universe which shows, not indeed 
 design, but tendency and purpose; which exhibits 
 achievement, not indeed of a single end, but of a 
 multiplicity of natural goods at whose apex is con- 
 sciousness. No account of the universe in terms 
 merely of the redistribution of matter in motion is 
 complete, no matter how true as far as it goes, for 
 it ignores the cardinal fact that the character of 
 matter in motion and of its redistribution is such 
 as cumulatively to achieve ends — to effect the 
 world of values we know. Deny this and you deny 
 evolution; admit it and you admit purpose in the 
 only objective — that is, the only intelligible — sense 
 of that term. I do not say that in addition to the 
 mechanism there are other ideal causes or factors 
 which intervene. I only insist that the whole story 
 be told, that the character of the mechanism be 
 noted — namely, that it is such as to produce and 
 sustain good in a multiplicity of forms. Mechan- 
 ism is the mechanism of achieving results. To ig- 
 nore this is to refuse to open our eyes to the total 
 aspects of existence. 
 
 Among these multiple natural goods, I repeat, is 
 consciousness itself. One of the ends in which Na- 
 ture genuinely terminates is just awareness of it- 
 self — of its processes and ends. For note the im- 
 plication as to why consciousness is a natural good : 
 
NATURE'S GOOD: A> CONVERSATION 35 
 
 not because it is cut off and exists in isolation, nor 
 yet because we may, pragmatically, cut off and 
 cultivate certain values which have no existence be- 
 yond it ; but because it is good that things should 
 be known in their own characters. And this view 
 carries with it a precious result : to know things as 
 they are is to know them as culminating in con- 
 sciousness ; it is to know that the universe genuinely 
 achieves and maintains its own self -manifestation. 
 
 A final word as to the bearing of this view upon 
 Grimes's position. To conceive of human history 
 as a scene of struggle of classes for domination, a 
 struggle caused by love of power or greed for gain, 
 is the very mythology of the emotions. What we 
 call history is largely non-human, but so far as it 
 is human, it is dominated by intelligence: history 
 is the history of increasing consciousness. Not 
 that intelligence is actually sovereign in life, but 
 that at least it is sovereign over stupidity, error, 
 and ignorance. The acknowledgment of things as 
 they are — that is the causal source of every step 
 in progress. Our present system of industry is not 
 the product of greed or tyrannic lust of power, 
 but of physical science giving the mastery over the 
 mechanism of Nature's energy. If the existing 
 system is ever displaced, it will be displaced not 
 by good intentions and vague sentiments, but by a 
 more extensive insight into Nature's secrets. 
 
 Modern sentimentalism is revolted at the frank 
 
36 NATURE'S GOOL : A CONVERSATION 
 
 naturalism of Aristotle in saying that some are 
 slaves by nature and others free by nature. But 
 let socialism come to-morrow and somebody — not 
 anybody, but somebody — will be managing its ma- 
 chinery and somebody else will be managed by the 
 machinery. I do not wonder that my socialistic 
 friends always imagine themselves active in the first 
 capacity — perhaps by way of compensation for 
 doing all of the imagining and none of the executive 
 management at present. But those who are man- 
 aged, who are controlled, deserve at least a mo- 
 ment's attention. Would you not at once agree 
 that if there is any justice at all in these positions 
 of relative inferiority and superiority, it is because 
 those who are capable by insight deserve to rule, 
 and those who are incapable on account of igno- 
 rance, deserve to be ruled? If so, how do you dif- 
 fer, save verbally, from Aristotle? 
 
 Or do you think that all that men want in order 
 to be men is to have their bellies filled, with assur- 
 ance of constant plenty and without too much ante- 
 cedent labor? No; believe me, Grimes, men are 
 men, and hence their aspiration is for the divine — 
 even when they know it not ; their desire is for the 
 ruling element, for intelligence. Till they achieve 
 that they will still be discontented, rebellious, un- 
 ruly — and hence ruled — shuffle your social cards 
 as much as you may. 
 
 Grimes (after shrugging his shoulders contempt- 
 
NATURES GOOD: A CONVERSATION 37 
 
 uously, finally says): There is one thing I like 
 about Arthur: he is frank. He comes out with 
 what you in all your hearts really believe — theory, 
 supreme and sublime. All is to the good in this 
 best of all possible worlds, if only some one be 
 defining and classifying and syllogizing, accord- 
 ing to the lines already laid down. Aristotle's God 
 of pure intelligence (as he well knew) was the 
 glorification of leisure ; and Arthur's point of view, 
 if Arthur but knew it, is as much the intellectual 
 snobbery of a leisure class economy, as the luxury 
 and display he condemns are its material snobbery. 
 There is really nothing more to be said. 
 
 Moore. To get back into the game which 
 Grimes despises. Doesn't Arthur practically say 
 that the universe is good because it culminates in 
 intelligence, and that intelligence is good because 
 it perceives that the universe culminates in — itself? 
 And, on this theory, are ignorance and error, 
 and consequent evil, any less genuine achieve- 
 ments of Nature than intelligence and good? 
 And on what basis does he call by the titles of 
 achievement and end that which at best is an 
 infinitesimally fragmentary and transitory epi- 
 sode? I said Eaton begged the question. Arthur 
 seems to regard it as proof of a superior intelli- 
 gence (one which realistically takes things as they 
 are) to beg the question. What is this Nature, 
 this universe in which evil is as stubborn a fact as 
 
38 NATURE'S GOOD; -A CONVERSATION 
 
 good, in which good is constantly destroyed by the 
 very power that produces it, in which there re- 
 sides a temporary bird of passage — consciousness 
 doomed to ultimate extinction — what is such a Na- 
 ture (all that Arthur offers us) save the problem, 
 the contradiction originally in question? A com- 
 placent optimism may gloss over its intrinsic self- 
 contradictions, but a more serious mind is forced to 
 go behind and beyond this scene to a permanent 
 good which includes and transcends goods defeated 
 and hopes suborned. Not because idealists have 
 refused to note the facts as they are, but precisely 
 because Nature is, on its face, such a scene as 
 Arthur describes, idealists have always held that it 
 is but Appearance, and have attempted to mount 
 through it to Reality. 
 
 Stair. I had not thought to say anything. My 
 attitude is so different from that of any one of 
 you that it seemed unnecessary to inject another 
 varying opinion where already disagreement reigns. 
 But when Arthur was speaking, I felt that perhaps 
 this disagreement exists precisely because the solv- 
 ent word had not been uttered. For, at bottom, 
 all of you agree with Arthur, and that is the cause 
 of your disagreement with him and one another. 
 You have agreed to make reason, intellect in some 
 sense, the final umpire. But reason, intellect, is 
 the principle of analysis, of division, of discord. 
 When I appeal to feeling as the ultimate organ 
 
NATURE'S GOOD: A CONVERSATION 39 
 
 of unity, and hence of truth, you smile courteously ; 
 say — or think — mysticism; and the case for you 
 is dismissed. Words like feeling, sensation, imme- 
 diate appreciation, self-communication of Being, 
 I must indeed use when I try to tell the truth I see. 
 But I well know how inadequate the words are. 
 And why? Because language is the chosen tool 
 of intelligence, and hence inevitably bewrayeth the 
 truth it would convey. But remember that words 
 are but symbols, and that intelligence must dwell 
 in the realm of symbols, and you realize a way out. 
 These words, sensation, feeling, etc., as I utter 
 them are but invitations to woo you to put your- 
 selves into the one attitude that reveals truth — 
 an attitude of direct vision. 
 
 The beatific vision? Yes, and No. No, if you 
 mean something rare, extreme, almost abnormal. 
 Yes, if you mean the commonest and most convinc- 
 ing, the only convincing self-impartation of the ul- 
 timate good in the scale of goods ; the vision of 
 blessedness in God. For this doctrine is empirical ; 
 mysticism is the heart of all positive empiricism, 
 of all empiricism which is not more interested in 
 denying rationalism than in asserting itself. The 
 mystical experience marks every man's realization 
 of the supremacy of good, and hence measures the 
 distance that separates him from pure materialism. 
 And since the unmitigated materialist is the rarest 
 of creatures, and the man with faith in an unseen 
 
40 NATURE'S GOOD: A CONVERSATION 
 
 good the commonest, every man is a mystic — and 
 the most so in his best moments. 
 
 What an idle contradiction that Moore and Ar- 
 thur should try to adduce proofs of the supremacy 
 of ideal values in the universe ! The sole possible 
 proof is the proof that actually exists — the direct 
 unhindered realization of those values. For each 
 value brings with it of necessity its own depth of 
 being. Let the pride of intellect and the pride of 
 will cease their clamor, and in the silences Being 
 speaks its own final word, not an argument or ex- 
 ternal ground of belief, but the self-impartation of 
 itself to the soul. Who are the prophets and 
 teachers of the ages? Those who have been ac- 
 cessible at the greatest depths to these communica- 
 tions. 
 
 Grimes. I suppose that poverty — and possibly 
 disease — are specially competent ministers to the 
 spiritual vision? The moral is obvious. Economic 
 changes are purely irrelevant, because purely ma- 
 terial and external. Indeed, upon the whole, ef- 
 forts at reform are undesirable, for they distract 
 attention from the fact that the final thing, the 
 vision of good, is totally disconnected from ex- 
 ternal circumstance. I do not say, Stair, you per- 
 sonally believe this ; but is not such a quietism the 
 logical conclusion of all mysticism? 
 
 Stair. This is not so true as to say that in your 
 efforts at reform you are really inspired by the 
 
NATURE'S GOOD: A CONVERSATION 41 
 
 divine vision of justice ; and that this mystic vision 
 and not the mere increase of quantity of eatables 
 and drinkables is your animating motive. 
 
 Grimes. Well, to my mind this whole affair of 
 mystical values and experiences comes down to a 
 simple straight-away proposition. The submerged 
 masses do not occupy themselves with such ques- 
 tions as those you are discussing. They haven't 
 the time even to consider whether they want to 
 consider them. Nor does the occasional free citi- 
 zen who even now exists — a sporadic reminder and 
 prophecy of ultimate democracy — bother himself 
 about the relation of the cosmos to value. Why? 
 Not from mystic insight any more than from meta- 
 physical proof ; but because he has so many other 
 interests that are worth while. His friends, his 
 vocation and avocations, his books, his music, his 
 club — these things engage him and they reward 
 him. To multiply such men with such interests — 
 that is the genuine problem, I repeat; and it is a 
 problem to be solved only through an economic and 
 material redistribution. 
 
 Eaton. Gladly, Stair, do all of us absolve our- 
 selves from the responsibility of having to create 
 the goods that life — call it God or Nature or 
 Chance — provides. But we cannot, if we would, 
 absolve ourselves from responsibility for maintain- 
 ing and extending these goods when they have 
 happened. To find it very wonderful — as Arthur 
 
42 NATURE'S GOOD: A CONVERSATION 
 
 does — that intelligence perceives values as they are 
 is trivial, for it is only an elaborate way of saying 
 that they have happened. To invite us, ceasing 
 struggle and effort, to commune with Being through 
 the moments of insight and joy that life provides, 
 is to bid us to self-indulgence — to enjoyment at 
 the expense of those upon whom the burden of con- 
 ducting life's affairs falls. For even the mystics 
 still need to eat and drink, be clothed and housed, 
 and somebody must do these unmystic things. And 
 to ignore others in the interest of our own perfec- 
 tion is not conducive to genuine unity of Being. 
 
 Intelligence is, indeed, as you say, discrimina- 
 tion, distinction. But why? Because we have to 
 act in order to keep secure amid the moving flux 
 of circumstance, some slight but precious good that 
 Nature has bestowed ; and because, in order to act 
 successfully, we must act after conscious selection 
 — after discrimination of means and ends. Of 
 course, all goods arrive, as Arthur says, as natural 
 results, but so do all bads, and all grades of good 
 and bad. To label the results that occur culmina- 
 tions, achievements, and then argue to a quasi- 
 moral constitution of Nature because she effects 
 such results, is to employ a logic which applies to 
 the life-cycle of the germ that, in achieving itself, 
 kills man with malaria, as well as to the process of 
 human life that in reaching its fullness cuts short 
 the germ-fulfilment. It is putting the cart before 
 
NATURE'S GOOD: A CONVERSATION 43 
 
 the horse to say that because Nature is so consti- 
 tuted as to produce results of all types of value, 
 therefore Nature is actuated by regard for differ- 
 ences of value. Nature, till it produces a being 
 who strives and who thinks in order that he may 
 strive more effectively, does not know whether it 
 cares more for justice or for cruelty, more for the 
 ravenous wolf -like competition of the struggle for 
 existence, or for the improvements incidentally in- 
 troduced through that struggle. Literally it has 
 no mind of its own. Nor would the mere intro- 
 duction of a consciousness that pictured indiffer- 
 ently the scene out of which consciousness devel- 
 oped, add one iota of reason for attributing eulo- 
 gistically to Nature regard for value. But when 
 the sentient organism, having experienced natural 
 values, good and bad, begins to select, to prefer, 
 and to make battle for its preference ; and in order 
 that it may make the most gallant fight possible 
 picks out and gathers together in perception 
 and thought what is favorable to its aims and 
 what hostile, then and there Nature has at last 
 achieved significant regard for good. And this is 
 the same thing as the birth of intelligence. For 
 the holding an end in view and the selecting and or- 
 ganizing out of the natural flux, on the basis of 
 this end, conditions that are means, is intelligence. 
 Not, then, when Nature produces health or effi- 
 ciency or complexity does Nature exhibit regard 
 
44 NATURES GOOD: A CONVERSATION 
 
 for value, but only when it produces a living organ- 
 ism that has settled preferences and endeavors. 
 The mere happening of complexity, health, adjust- 
 ment, is all that Nature effects, as rightly called 
 accident as purpose. But when Nature pro- 
 duces an intelligence — ah, then, indeed Nature has 
 achieved something. Not, however, because this in- 
 telligence impartially pictures the nature which 
 has produced it, but because in human conscious- 
 ness Nature becomes genuinely partial. Because 
 in consciousness an end is preferred, is selected for 
 maintenance, and because intelligence pictures not 
 a world just as it is in toto, but images forth the 
 conditions and obstacles of the continued mainte- 
 nance of the selected good. For in an experience 
 where values are demonstrably precarious, an in- 
 telligence that is not a principle of emphasis and 
 valuation (an intelligence which defines, describes, 
 and classifies merely for the sake of knowledge,) is 
 a principle of stupidity and catastrophe. 
 
 As for Grimes, it is indeed true that problems 
 are solved only where they arise — namely, in ac- 
 tion, in the adjustments of behavior. But, for 
 good or for evil, they can be solved there only with 
 method ; and ultimately method is intelligence, and 
 intelligence is method. The larger, the more hu- 
 man, the less technical the problem of practice, the 
 more open-eyed and wide-viewing must be the cor- 
 responding method. I do not say that all things 
 
NATURE'S GOOD: A CONVERSATION 45 
 
 that have been called philosophy participate in this 
 method ; I do say, however, that a catholic and far- 
 sighted theory of the adjustment of the conflicting , 
 factors of life is — whatever it be called — philoso- 
 phy. And unless technical philosophy is to go the 
 way of dogmatic theology, it must loyally identify 
 itself with such a view of its own aim and destiny. 
 
INTELLIGENCE AND MORALS 1 
 
 "T^IXCEPT the blind forces of nature,' 5 said 
 ■*--* Sir Henry Maine, " nothing moves in this 
 world which is not Greek in its origin." And if 
 we ask why this is so, the response comes that the 
 Greek discovered the business of man to be pursuit 
 of good, and intelligence to be central in this quest. 
 The utmost to be said in praise of Plato and Aris- 
 totle is not that they invented excellent moral the- 
 ories, but that they rose to the opportunity which 
 the spectacle of Greek life afforded. For Athens 
 presented an all but complete microcosm for the 
 study of the interaction of social organization and 
 individual character. A public life of rich diver- 
 sity in concentrated and intense splendor trained 
 the civic sense. Strife of faction and the rapid 
 oscillations of types of polity provided the occasion 
 for intellectual inquiry and analysis. The careers 
 of dramatic personalities, habits of discussion, ease 
 of legislative change, facilities for personal ambi- 
 
 1 A public lecture delivered at Columbia University in 
 March, 1908, under the title of "Ethics," in a series of 
 lectures on " Science, Philosophy, and Art." Reprinted 
 from a monograph published by the Columbia University 
 Press. 
 
INTELLIGENCE AND MORALS 47 
 
 tions, distraction by personal rivalries, fixed atten- 
 tion upon the elements of character, and upon con- 
 sideration of the effect of individual character on 
 social vitality and stability. Happy exemption 
 from ecclesiastic preoccupations, susceptibility to 
 natural harmony, and natural piety conspired with 
 frank and open observation to acknowledgment of 
 the role played by natural conditions. Social in- 
 stability and shock made equally pertinent and ob- 
 vious the remark that only intelligence can confirm 
 the values that natural conditions generate, and 
 that intelligence is itself nurtured and matured 
 only in a free and stable society. 
 
 In Plato the resultant analysis of the mutual 
 implications of the individual, the social and the 
 natural, converged in the ideas that morals and 
 philosophy are one : namely, a love of that wisdom 
 which is the source of secure and social good ; that 
 mathematics and the natural sciences focused upon 
 the problem of the perception of the good furnish 
 the materials of moral science ; that logic is the 
 method of the pregnant organization of social con- 
 ditions with respect to good ; that politics and psy- 
 chology are sciences of one and the same human 
 nature, taken first in the large and then in the 
 little. So far that large and expansive vision of 
 Plato. 
 
 But projection of a better life must be based 
 upon reflection of the life already lived. The in- 
 
48 INTELLIGENCE AND MORALS 
 
 evitable limitations of the Greek city-state were in- 
 evitably wrought into the texture of moral theory. 
 
 The business of thought was to furnish a sub- 
 stitute for customs which were then relaxing from 
 the pressure of contact and intercourse without 
 and the friction of strife within. Reason was to 
 take the place of custom as a guide of life ; but it 
 was to furnish rules as final, as unalterable as those 
 of custom. In short, the thinkers were fascinated 
 by the afterglow of custom. They took for their 
 own ideal the distillation from custom of its essence 
 — ends and laws which should be rigid and invari- 
 able. Thus Morals was set upon the track which 
 it dared not leave for nigh twenty-five hundred 
 years : search for the final good, and for the single 
 moral force. 
 
 Aristotle's assertions that the state exists by na- 
 ture, and that in the state alone does the individual 
 achieve independence and completeness of life, are 
 indeed pregnant sayings. But as uttered by Aris- 
 totle they meant that, in an isolated state, the 
 Greek city-state, set a garlanded island in the 
 waste sea of barbaroi, a community indifferent 
 when not hostile to all other social groupings, in- 
 dividuals attain their full end. In a social unity 
 which signified social contraction, contempt, and 
 antagonism, in a social order which despised inter- 
 course and glorified war, is realized the life of 
 excellence ! 
 
INTELLIGENCE AND MORALS 49 
 
 There is likewise a profound saying of Aristotle's 
 that the individual who otherwise than by accident 
 is not a member of a state is either a brute or a 
 god. But it is generally forgotten that elsewhere 
 Aristotle identified the highest excellence, the chief 
 virtue, with pure thought, and identifying this with 
 the divine, isolated it in lonely grandeur from the 
 life of society. That man, so far as in him lay, 
 should be godlike, meant that he should be non- 
 social, because supra-civic. Plato the idealist had 
 shared the belief that reason is the divine ; but he 
 was also a reformer and a radical and he would 
 have those who attained rational insight descend 
 again into the civic cave, and in its obscurity labor 
 patiently for the enlightenment of its blear-eyed 
 inhabitants. Aristotle, the conservative and the 
 definer of what is, gloried in the exaltation of in- 
 telligence in man above civic excellence and social 
 need ; and thereby isolated the life of truest knowl- 
 edge from contact with social experience and from 
 responsibility for discrimination of values in the 
 course of life. 
 
 Moral theory, however, accepted from social cus- 
 tom more than its cataleptic rigidity, its exclusive 
 area of common good, and its unfructified and irre- 
 sponsible reason. The city-state was a superficial 
 layer of cultured citizens, cultured through a par- 
 ticipation in affairs made possible by relief from 
 economic pursuits, superimposed upon the dense 
 
50 INTELLIGENCE AND MORALS 
 
 mass of serfs, artizans, and laborers. For this di- 
 vision, moral philosophy made itself spiritual spon- 
 sor, and thus took it up into its own being. Plato 
 wrestled valiantly with the class problem; but his 
 outcome was the necessity of decisive demarcation, 
 after education, of the masses in whom reason was 
 asleep and appetite much awake, from the few who 
 were fit to rule because alertly wise. The most 
 generously imaginative soul of all philosophy could 
 not far outrun the institutional practices of his 
 people and his times. This might have warned his 
 successors of the danger of deserting the sober 
 path of a critical discernment of the better and the 
 worse within contemporary life for the more ex- 
 citing adventure of a final determination of abso- 
 lute good and evil. It might have taught the prob- 
 ability that some brute residuum or unrationalized 
 social habit would be erected into an apotheosis of 
 pure reason. But the lesson was not learned. 
 Aristotle promptly yielded to the besetting sin of 
 all philosophers, the idealization of the existent : he 
 declared that the class distinctions of superiority 
 and inferiority as between man and woman, master 
 and slave, liberal-minded and base mechanic, exist 
 and are justified by nature — a nature which aims 
 at embodied reason. 
 
 What, finally, is this Nature to which the philos- 
 ophy of society and the individual so bound itself? 
 It is the nature which figures in Greek customs 
 
INTELLIGENCE AND MORALS 51 
 
 and myth; the nature resplendent and adorned 
 which confronts us in Greek poetry and art: the 
 animism of savage man purged of grossness and 
 generalized by unerring esthetic taste into beauty 
 and system. The myths had told of the loves and 
 hates, the caprices and desertions of the gods, 
 and behind them all, inevitable Fate. Philosophy 
 translated these tales into formulae of the brute 
 fluctuation of rapacious change held in bounds 
 by the final and supreme end: the rational good. 
 The animism of the popular mind died to reappear 
 as cosmology. 
 
 Repeatedly in this course we have heard of sci- 
 ences which began as parts of philosophy and 
 which gradually won their independence. Another 
 statement of the same history is that both science 
 and philosophy began in subjection to mythological 
 animism. Both began with acceptance of a nature 
 whose irregularities displayed the meaningless vari- 
 ability of foolish wants held within the limits of 
 order and uniformity by an underlying movement 
 toward a final and stable purpose. And when 
 the sciences gradually assumed the task of reduc- 
 ing irregular caprice to regular conjunction, phi- 
 losophy bravely took upon itself the task of sub- 
 stantiating, under the caption of a spiritual view 
 of the universe, the animistic survival. Doubtless 
 Socrates brought philosophy to earth; but his in- 
 junction to man to know himself was incredibly 
 
52 INTELLIGENCE AND MORALS 
 
 compromised in its execution by the fact that later 
 philosophers submerged man in the world to which 
 philosophy was brought: a world which was the 
 heavy and sunken center of hierarchic heavens lo- 
 cated in their purity and refinement as remotely as 
 possible from the gross and muddy vesture of 
 earth. 
 
 The various limitations of Greek custom, its 
 hostile indifference to all outside the narrow city- 
 state, its assumption of fixed divisions of wise and 
 blind among men, its inability socially to utilize 
 science, its subordination of human intention to 
 cosmic aim — all of these things were worked into 
 moral theory. Philosophy had no active hand in 
 producing the condition of barbarism in Europe 
 from the fifth to the fifteenth centuries. By an 
 unwitting irony which would have shocked none 
 so much as the lucid moralists of Athens, their 
 philosophic idealization, under captions of Nature 
 and Reason, of the inherent limitations of Athenian 
 society and Greek science, furnished the intellectual 
 tools for defining, standardizing, and justifying all 
 the fundamental clefts and antagonisms of feudal- 
 ism. When practical conditions are not frozen in 
 men's imagination into crystalline truths, they are 
 naturally fluid. They come and go. But when 
 intelligence fixes fluctuating circumstances into 
 final ideals, petrifaction is likely to occur; and 
 philosophy gratuitously took upon itself the re- 
 
INTELLIGENCE AND MORALS 53 
 
 sponsibility for justifying the worst defects of 
 barbarian Europe by showing their necessary con- 
 nection with divine reason. 
 
 The division of mankind into the two camps of 
 the redeemed and the condemned had not needed 
 philosophy to produce it. But the Greek cleavage 
 of men into separate kinds on the basis of their 
 position within or without the city-state was used 
 to rationalize this harsh intolerance. The hier- 
 archic organization of feudalism, within church 
 and state, of those possessed of sacred rule and 
 those whose sole excellence was obedience, did not 
 require moral theory to generate or explain it. 
 But it took philosophy to furnish the intellectual 
 tools by which such chance episodes were emblaz- 
 oned upon the cosmic heavens as a grandiose 
 spiritual achievement. No ; it is all too easy to 
 explain bitter intolerance and desire for domina- 
 tion. Stubborn as they are, it was only when 
 Greek moral theory had put underneath them the 
 distinction between the irrational and the rational, 
 between divine truth and good and corrupt and 
 weak human appetite, that intolerance on system 
 and earthly domination for the sake of eternal 
 excellence were philosophically sanctioned. The 
 health and welfare of the body and the securing 
 for all of a sure and a prosperous livelihood 
 were not matters for which medieval conditions fos- 
 tered care in any case. But moral philosophy 
 
54 INTELLIGENCE AND MORALS 
 
 was prevailed upon to damn the body on principle, 
 and to relegate to insignificance as merely mun- 
 dane and temporal the problem of a just industrial 
 order. Circumstances of the times bore with suffi- 
 cient hardness upon successful scientific investiga- 
 tion ; but philosophy added the conviction that in 
 any case truth is so supernal that it must be super- 
 naturally revealed, and so important that it must 
 be authoritatively imparted and enforced. Intelli- 
 gence was diverted from the critical consideration 
 of the natural sources and social consequences 
 of better and worse into the channel of meta- 
 physical subtleties and systems, acceptance of 
 which was made essential to participation in the 
 social order and in rational excellence. Philosophy 
 bound the once erect form of human endeavor and 
 progress to the chariot wheels of cosmology and 
 theology. 
 
 Since the Renaissance, moral philosophy has re- 
 peatedly reverted to the Greek ideal of natural ex- 
 cellence realized in social life, under the fostering 
 care of intelligence in action. The return, how- 
 ever, has taken place under the influence of demo- 
 cratic polity, commercial expansion, and scientific 
 reorganization. It has been a liberation more than 
 a reversion. This combined return and emancipa- 
 tion, having transformed our practice of life in the 
 last four centuries, will not be content till it has 
 written itself clear in our theory of that practice. 
 
INTELLIGENCE AND MORALS 55 
 
 Whether the consequent revolution in moral philos- 
 ophy be termed pragmatism or be given the hap- 
 pier title of the applied and experimental habit of 
 mind is of little account. What is of moment is 
 that intelligence has descended from its lonely iso- 
 lation at the remote edge of things, whence it 
 operated as unmoved mover and ultimate good, to 
 take its seat in the moving affairs of men. Theory 
 may therefore become responsible to the practices 
 that have generated it; the good be connected 
 with nature, but with nature naturally, not meta- 
 physically, conceived, and social life be cherished 
 in behalf of its own immediate possibilities, not on 
 the ground of its remote connections with a cosmic 
 reason and an absolute end. 
 
 There is a notion, more familiar than correct, 
 that Greek thought sacrificed the individual to the 
 state. None has ever known better than the Greek 
 that the individual comes to himself and to his 
 own only in association with others. But Greek 
 thought subjected, as we have seen, both state and 
 individual to an external cosmic order ; and thereby 
 it inevitably restricted the free use in doubt, in- 
 quiry, and experimentation, of the human intelli- 
 gence. The anima libera, the free mind of the 
 sixteenth century, of Galileo and his successors, 
 was the counterpart of the disintegration of cos- 
 mology and its animistic teleology. The lecturer 
 on political economy reminded us that his subject 
 
56 INTELLIGENCE AND MORALS 
 
 began, in the Middle Ages, as a branch of ethics, 
 though, as he hastened to show, it soon got into 
 better association. Well, the same company was 
 once kept by all the sciences, mathematical and 
 physical as well as social. According to all ac- 
 counts it was the integrity of the number one and 
 the rectitude of the square that attracted the 
 attention of Pythagoras to arithmetic and geom- 
 etry as promising fields of study. Astronomy was 
 the projected picture book of a cosmic object les- 
 son in morals, Dante's transcript of which is none 
 the less literal because poetic. If physics alone re- 
 mained outside the moral fold, while noble essences 
 redeemed chemistry, occult forces blessed physi- 
 ology, and the immaterial soul exalted psychology, 
 physics is the exception that proves the rule: mat- 
 ter was so inherently immoral that no high-minded 
 science would demean itself by contact with it. 
 
 If we do not join with many in lamenting the 
 stripping from nature of those idealistic properties 
 in which animism survived, if we do not mourn the 
 secession of the sciences from ethics, it is because 
 the abandonment by intelligence of a fixed and 
 static moral end was the necessary precondition of 
 a free and progressive science of both things and 
 morals; because the emancipation of the sciences 
 from ready made, remote, and abstract values was 
 necessary to make the sciences available for creat- 
 ing and maintaining more and specific values here 
 
INTELLIGENCE AND MORALS 57 
 
 and now. The divine comedy of modern medicine 
 and hygiene is one of the human epics yet to be 
 written; but when composed it may prove no un- 
 worthy companion of the medieval epic of other 
 worldly beatific visions. The great ideas of the 
 eighteenth century, that expansive epoch of moral 
 perception which ranks in illumination and fervor 
 along with classic Greek thought, the great ideas 
 of the indefinitely continuous progress of humanity 
 and of the power and significance of freed intelli- 
 gence, were borne by a single mother — experi- 
 mental inquiry. 
 
 The growth of industry and commerce is at once 
 cause and effect of the growth in science. Democ- 
 ritus and other ancients conceived the mechanical 
 theory of the universe. The notion was not only 
 blank and repellent, because it ignored the rich 
 social material which Plato and Aristotle had or- 
 ganized into their rival idealistic views ; but it was 
 scientifically sterile, a piece of dialectics. Con- 
 tempt for machines as the accouterments of de- 
 spised mechanics kept the mechanical conception 
 aloof from these specific and controllable experi- 
 ences which alone could fructify it. This concep- 
 tion, then, like the idealistic, was translated into a 
 speculative cosmology and thrown like a vast net 
 around the universe at large, as if to keep it from 
 coming to pieces. It is from respect for the lever, 
 the pulley, and the screw that modern experimental 
 
58 INTELLIGENCE AND MORALS 
 
 and mathematical mechanics derives itself. Mo- 
 tion, traced through the workings of a machine, 
 was followed out into natural events and studied 
 just as motion, not as a poor yet necessary device 
 for realizing final causes. So studied, it was found 
 to be available for new machines and new applica- 
 tions, which in creating new ends also promoted new 
 wants, and thereby stimulated new activities, new 
 discoveries, and new inventions. The recognition 
 that natural energy can be systematically applied, 
 through experimental observation, to the satisfac- 
 tion and multiplication of concrete wants is doubt- 
 less the greatest single discovery ever imported 
 into the life of man — save perhaps the discovery of 
 language. Science, borrowing from industry, re- 
 paid the debt with interest, and has made the con- 
 trol of natural forces for the aims of life so in- 
 evitable that for the first time man is relieved from 
 overhanging fear, with its wolflike scramble to pos- 
 sess and accumulate, and is freed to consider the 
 more gracious question of securing to all an ample 
 and liberal life. The industrial life had been con- 
 demned by Greek exaltation of abstract thought 
 and by Greek contempt for labor, as representing 
 the brute struggle of carnal appetite for its own 
 satiety. The industrial movement, offspring of 
 science, restored it to its central position in morals. 
 When Adam Smith made economic activity the 
 moving spring of man's unremitting effort, from 
 
INTELLIGENCE AND MORALS 59 
 
 the cradle to the grave, to better his own lot, he 
 recorded this change. And when he made sympa- 
 thy the central spring in man's conscious moral en- 
 deavor, he reported the effect which the increasing 
 intercourse of men, due primarily to commerce, had 
 in breaking down suspicion and jealousy and in 
 liberating man's kindlier impulses. 
 
 Democracy, the crucial expression of modern 
 life, is not so much an addition to the scientific 
 and industrial tendencies as it is the perception of 
 their social or spiritual meaning. Democracy is 
 an absurdity where faith in the individual as in- 
 dividual is impossible ; and this faith is impossible 
 when intelligence is regarded as a cosmic power, 
 not an adjustment and application of individual 
 tendencies. It is also impossible when appetites 
 and desires are conceived to be the dominant factor 
 in the constitution of most men's characters, and 
 when appetite and desire are conceived to be mani- 
 festations of the disorderly and unruly principle of 
 nature. To put the intellectual center of gravity 
 in the objective cosmos, outside of men's own ex- 
 periments and tests, and then to invite the applica- 
 tion of individual intelligence to the determination 
 of society, is to invite chaos. To hold that want 
 is mere negative flux and hence requires external 
 fixation by reason, and then to invite the wants to 
 give free play to themselves in social construction 
 and intercourse, is to call down anarchy. Democ- 
 
60 INTELLIGENCE AND MORALS 
 
 l/ racy is estimable only through the changed con- 
 ception of intelligence, that forms modern science, 
 and of want, that forms modern industry. It is 
 essentially a changed psychology. The substitu- 
 tion, for a priori truth and deduction, of fluent 
 doubt and inquiry meant trust in human nature 
 in the concrete; in individual honesty, curiosity, 
 and sympathy. The substitution of moving com- 
 merce for fixed custom meant a view of wants as 
 the dynamics of social progress, not as the pathol- 
 ogy of private greed. The nineteenth century in- 
 deed turned sour on that somewhat complacent op- 
 timism in which the eighteenth century rested: the 
 ideas that the intelligent self-love of individuals 
 would conduce to social cohesion, and competition 
 among individuals usher in the kingdom of social 
 welfare. But the conception of a social harmony 
 of interests in which the achievement by each in- 
 dividual of his own freedom should contribute to 
 a like perfecting of the powers of all, through a 
 fraternally organized society, is the permanent 
 t* contribution of the industrial movement to morals 
 — even though so far it be but the contribution 
 of a problem. 
 
 Intellectually speaking, the centuries since the 
 fourteenth are the true middle ages. They mark 
 the transitional period of mental habit, as the so- 
 called medieval period represents the petrifaction, 
 under changed outward conditions, of Greek ideas. 
 
INTELLIGENCE AND MORALS 61 
 
 The conscious articulation of genuinely modern 
 tendencies has yet to come, and till it comes the 
 ethic of our own life must remain undescribed. 
 But the system of morals which has come nearest 
 to the reflection of the movements of science, de- 
 mocracy, and commerce, is doubtless the utilitarian. 
 Scientific, after the modern mode, it certainly 
 would be. Newton's influence dyes deep the moral 
 thought of the eighteenth century. The arrange- 
 ments of the solar system had been described in 
 terms of a homogeneous matter and motion, worked 
 by two opposed and compensating forces: all be- 
 cause a method of analysis, of generalization by 
 analogy, and of mathematical deduction back to 
 new empirical details had been followed. The im- 
 agination of the eighteenth century was a New- 
 tonian imagination; and this no less in social 
 than in physical matters. Hume proclaims that 
 morals is about to become an experimental science. 
 Just as, almost in our own day, Mill's interest in a 
 method for social science led him to reformulate 
 the logic of experimental inquiry, so all the great 
 men of the Enlightenment were in search for the 
 organon of morals which should repeat the physical 
 triumphs of Newton. Bentham notes that physics 
 has had its Bacon and Newton; that morals has 
 had its Bacon in Helvetius, but still awaits its 
 Newton ; and he leaves us in no doubt that at the 
 moment of writing he was ready, modestly but 
 
62 INTELLIGENCE AND MORALS 
 
 firmly, to fill the waiting niche with its missing 
 figure. 
 
 The industrial movement furnished the concrete 
 imagery for this ethical renovation. The utili- 
 tarians borrowed from Adam Smith the notion that 
 through industrial exchange in a free society the 
 individual pursuing his own good is led, under the 
 guidance of the " invisible hand," to promote the 
 general good more effectually than if he had set 
 out to do it. This idea was dressed out in the 
 atomistic psychology which Hartley built out from 
 Locke — and was returned at usurious rates to later 
 economists. 
 
 From the great French writers who had sought 
 / to justify and promote democratic individualism, 
 came the conception that, since it is perverted 
 political institutions which deprave individuals and 
 bring them into hostility, nation against nation, 
 class against class, individual against individual, 
 the great political problem is such a reform of law 
 and legislation, civil and criminal, of administra- 
 tion, and of education as will force the individual 
 to find his own interests in pursuits conducing to 
 the welfare of others. 
 
 Tremendously effective as a tool of criticism, op- 
 erative in abolition and elimination, utilitarianism 
 failed to measure up to the constructive needs of 
 the time. Its theoretical equalization of the good 
 of each with that of every other was practically 
 
INTELLIGENCE AND MORALS 63 
 
 perverted by its excessive interest in the middle 
 and manufacturing classes. Its speculative defect 
 of an atomistic psychology combined with this 
 narrowness of vision to make light of the construc- 
 tive work that needs to be done by the state, before 
 all can have, otherwise than in name, an equal 
 chance to count in the common good. Thus the 
 age-long subordination of economics to politics was 
 revenged in the submerging of both politics and 
 ethics in a narrow theory of economic profit ; and 
 utilitarianism, in its orthodox descendants, prof- 
 fered the disjointed pieces of a mechanism, with a 
 monotonous reiteration that looked at aright they 
 form a beautifully harmonious organism. 
 
 Prevision, and to some extent experience, of this 
 failure, conjoined with differing social traditions 
 and ambitions, evoked German idealism, the trans- 
 cendental morals of Kant and his successors. Ger- 
 man thought strove to preserve the traditions 
 which bound culture to the past, while revising 
 these traditions to render them capable of meeting 
 novel conditions. It found weapons at hand in the 
 conceptions borrowed by Roman law from Stoic 
 philosophy, and in the conceptions by which Prot- 
 estant humanism had re-edited scholastic Catholi- 
 cism. Grotius had made the idea of natural law, 
 natural right and obligation, the central idea of 
 German morals, as thoroughly as Locke had made 
 the individual desire for liberty and happiness the 
 
64 
 
 INTELLIGENCE AND MORALS 
 
 focus of English and then of French speculation. 
 Materialized idealism is the happy monstrosity in 
 which the popular demand for vivid imagery is 
 most easily reconciled with the equally strong de- 
 mand for supremacy of moral values ; and the com- 
 plete idealistic materialism of Stoicism has always 
 given its ideas a practical influence out of all pro- 
 portion to their theoretical vogue as a system. 
 To the Protestant, that is the German, humanist, 
 Natural Law, the bond of harmonious reason in 
 nature, the spring of social intercourse among 
 men, the inward light of individual conscience, 
 united Cicero, St. Paul, and Luther in blessed 
 union ; gave a rational, not superrational basis for 
 morals, and provided room for social legislation 
 which at the same time could easily be held back 
 from too ruthless application to dominant class in- 
 terests. 
 
 Kant saw the mass of empirical and hence irrele- 
 vant detail that had found refuge within this lib- 
 eral and diffusive reason. He saw that the idea of 
 reason could be made self-consistent only by strip- 
 ping it naked of these empirical accretions. He 
 then provided, in his critiques, a somewhat cum- 
 brous moving van for transferring the resultant 
 pure or naked reason out of nature and the ob- 
 jective world, and for locating it in new quarters, 
 with a new stock of goods and new customers. The 
 new quarters were particular subjects, individuals ; 
 
INTELLIGENCE AND MORALS 65 
 
 the stock of goods were the forms of perception and 
 the functions of thought by which empirical flux is 
 woven into durable fabrics ; the new customers were 
 a society of individuals in which all are ends in them- 
 selves. There ought to be an injunction issued 
 that Kant's saying about Hume's awakening of 
 him should not be quoted save in connection with 
 his other saying that Rousseau brought him to him- 
 self, in teaching him that the philosopher is of less 
 account than the laborer in the fields unless he con- 
 tributes to human freedom. But none the less, the 
 new tenant, the universal reason, and the old home- 
 stead, the empirical tumultuous individual, could 
 not get on together. Reason became a mere voice 
 which, having nothing in particular to say, said 
 Law, Duty, in general, leaving to the existing 
 social order of the Prussia of Frederick the Great 
 the congenial task of declaring just what was ob- 
 ligatory in the concrete. The marriage of free- 
 dom and authority was thus celebrated with the 
 understanding that sentimental primacy went to 
 the former and practical control to the latter. 
 
 The effort to force a universal reason that had 
 been used to the broad domains of the cosmos into 
 the cramped confines of individuality conceived as 
 merely " empirical," a highly particularized crea- 
 ture of sense, could have but one result : an explo- 
 sion. The products of that explosion constitute 
 the Post-Kantian philosophies. It was the work of 
 
66 INTELLIGENCE AND MORALS 
 
 Hegel to attempt to fill in the empty reason of 
 Kant with the concrete contents of history. The 
 voice sounded like the voice of Aristotle, Thomas 
 of Aquino, and Spinoza translated into Swabian 
 German ; but the hands were as the hands of Mon- 
 tesquieu, Herder, Condorcet, and the rising his- 
 torical school. The outcome was the assertion that 
 history is reason, and reason is history : the actual 
 is rational, the rational is the actual. It gave the 
 y pleasant appearance (which Hegel did not strenu- 
 ously discourage) of being specifically an idealiza- 
 tion of the Prussian nation, and incidentally a sys- 
 tematized apologetic for the universe at large. 
 But in intellectual and practical effect, it lifted the 
 idea of process above that of fixed origins and fixed 
 ends, and presented the social and moral order, as 
 well as the intellectual, as a scene of becoming, and 
 it located reason somewhere within the struggles of 
 life. 
 
 Unstable equilibrium, rapid fermentation, and a 
 succession of explosive reports are thus the chief 
 notes of modern ethics. Scepticism and tradition- 
 alism, empiricism and rationalism, crude natural- 
 isms and all-embracing idealisms, flourish side by 
 side — all the more flourish, one suspects, because 
 side by side. Spencer exults because natural science 
 reveals that a rapid transit system of evolution is 
 carrying us automatically to the goal of perfect 
 man in perfect society ; and his English idealistic 
 
INTELLIGENCE AND MORALS 67 
 
 contemporary, Green, is so disturbed by the re- 
 moval from nature of its moral qualities, that he 
 tries to show that this makes no difference, since na- 
 ture in any case is constituted and known through 
 a spiritual principle which is as permanent as na- 
 ture is changing. An Amiel genteelly laments the 
 decadence of the inner life, while his neighbor Nietz- 
 sche brandishes in rude ecstasy the banner of brute 
 survival as a happy omen of the final victory of 
 nobility of mind. The reasonable conclusion from 
 such a scene is that there is taking place a trans- 
 formation of attitude towards moral theory rather 
 than mere propagation of varieties among theories. 
 The classic theories all agreed in one regard. They 
 all alike assumed the existence of the end, the sum- 
 mum bonum, the final goal; and of the separate 
 moral force that moves to that goal. Moralists 
 have disputed as to whether the end is an aggre- 
 gate of pleasurable state of consciousness, enjoy- 
 ment of the divine essence, acknowledgment of the 
 law of duty, or conformity to environment. So they 
 have disputed as to the path by which the final 
 goal is to be reached: fear or benevolence? rever- 
 ence for pure law or pity for others? self-love or 
 altruism? But these very controversies implied 
 that there was but the one end and the one 
 means. 
 
 The transformation in attitude, to which I re- 
 ferred, is the growing belief that the proper busi- 
 
68 INTELLIGENCE AND MORALS 
 
 ness of intelligence is discrimination of multiple 
 and present goods and of the varied immediate 
 means of their realization ; not search for the one 
 remote aim. The progress of biology has accus- 
 tomed our minds to the notion that intelligence is 
 not an outside power presiding supremely but stat- 
 ically over the desires and efforts of man, but 
 is a method of adjustment of capacities and con- 
 ditions within specific situations. History, as the 
 lecturer on that subject told us, has discovered it- 
 self in the idea of process. The genetic standpoint 
 makes us aware that the systems of the past are 
 neither fraudulent impostures nor absolute revela- 
 tions ; but are the products of political, economic, 
 and scientific conditions whose change carries with 
 it change of theoretical formulations. The recog- 
 nition that intelligence is properly an organ of ad- 
 justment in difficult situations makes us aware that 
 past theories were of value so far as they helped 
 carry to an issue the social perplexities from which 
 they emerged. But the chief impact of the evo- 
 lutionary method is upon the present. Theory 
 having learned what it cannot do, is made respon- 
 sible for the better performance of what needs to 
 be done, and what only a broadly equipped intelli- 
 gence can undertake: study of the conditions out 
 of which come the obstacles and the resources of 
 adequate life, and developing and testing the ideas 
 that, as working hypotheses, may be used to dimin- 
 
 , 
 
INTELLIGENCE AND MORALS 69 
 
 ish the causes of evil and to buttress and ex- 
 pand the sources of good. This program is indeed 
 vague, but only unfamiliarity with it could lead 
 one to the conclusion that it is less vague than the 
 idea that there is a single moral ideal and a single 
 moral motive force. 
 
 From this point of view there is no separate body 
 of moral rules ; no separate system of motive pow- 
 ers ; no separate subject-matter of moral knowl- 
 edge, and hence no such thing as an isolated ethical 
 science. If the business of morals is not to specu- is 
 late upon man's final end and upon an ultimate 
 standard of right, it is to utilize physiology, an- 
 thropology, and psychology to discover all that 
 can be discovered of man, his organic powers and 
 propensities. If its business is not to search for 
 the one separate moral motive, it is to converge all 
 the instrumentalities of the social arts, of law, edu- 
 cation, economics, and political science upon the 
 construction of intelligent methods of improving 
 the common lot. 
 
 If we still wish to make our peace with the past, 
 and to sum up the plural and changing goods of 
 life in a single word, doubtless the term happiness 
 is the one most apt. But we should again ex- 
 change free morals for sterile metaphysics, if we 
 imagine that " happiness " is any less unique than 
 the individuals who experience it ; any less complex 
 than the constitution of their capacities, or any less 
 
70 INTELLIGENCE AND MORALS 
 
 variable than the objects upon which their capaci- 
 ties are directed. 
 
 To many timid, albeit sincere, souls of an earlier 
 century, the decay of the doctrine that all true 
 and worthful science is knowledge of final causes 
 seemed fraught with danger to science and to mor- 
 als. The rival conception of a wide open universe, 
 a universe without bounds in time or space, without 
 final limits of origin or destiny, a universe with the 
 lid off, was a menace. We now face in moral sci- 
 ence a similar crisis and like opportunity, as well 
 as share in a like dreadful suspense. The abolition 
 of a fixed and final goal and causal force in nature 
 did not, as matter of fact, render rational convic- 
 tion less important or less attainable. It was ac- 
 companied by the provision of a technique of per- 
 sistent and detailed inquiry in all special fields of 
 fact, a technique which led to the detection of un- 
 suspected forces and the revelation of undreamed 
 of uses. In like fashion we may anticipate that 
 the abolition of the final goal and the single motive 
 power and the separate and infallible faculty in 
 morals, will quicken inquiry into the diversity of 
 specific goods of experience, fix attention upon 
 their conditions, and bring to light values now dim 
 and obscure. The change may relieve men from 
 responsibility for what they cannot do, but it will 
 promote thoughtful consideration of what they 
 may do and the definition of responsibility for what 
 
INTELLIGENCE AND MORALS 71 
 
 they do amiss because of failure to think straight 
 and carefully. Absolute goods will fall into the 
 background, but the question of making more sure 
 and extensive the share of all men in natural and 
 social goods will be urgent, a problem not to be 
 escaped nor evaded. 
 
 Morals, philosophy, returns to its first love ; love 
 of the wisdom that is nurse, as nature is mother, 
 of good. But it returns to the Socratic principle 
 equipped with a multitude of special methods of in- 
 quiry and testing; with an organized mass of 
 knowledge, and with control of the arrangements 
 by which industry, law, and education may concen- 
 trate upon the problem of the participation by all 
 men and women, up to their capacity of absorption, 
 in all attained values. Morals may then well leave 
 to poetry and to art, the task (so unartistically 
 performed by philosophy since Plato) of gathering 
 together and rounding out, into one abiding pic- 
 ture, the separate and special goods of life. It 
 may leave this task with the assurance that the re- 
 sultant synthesis will not depict any final and all- 
 inclusive good, but will add just one more specific 
 good to the enjoyable excellencies of life. 
 
 Humorous irony shines through most of the 
 harsh glances turned towards the idea of an ex- 
 perimental basis and career for morals. Some 
 shiver in the fear that morals will be plunged into 
 anarchic confusion — a view well expressed by a 
 
72 INTELLIGENCE AND MORALS 
 
 recent writer in the saying that if the a priori and 
 transcendental basis of morals be abandoned " we 
 shall have merely the same certainty that now ex- 
 ists in physics and chemistry " ! Elsewhere lurks 
 the apprehension that the progress of scientific 
 method will deliver the purposive freedom of man 
 bound hand and foot to the fatal decrees of iron 
 necessity, called natural law. The notion that 
 laws govern and forces rule is an animistic sur- 
 vival. It is a product of reading nature in terms 
 of politics in order to turn around and then read 
 politics in the light of supposed sanctions of na- 
 ture. This idea passed from medieval theology 
 into the science of Newton, to whom the universe 
 was the dominion of a sovereign whose laws were 
 the laws of nature. From Newton it passed into 
 the deism of the eighteenth century, whence it mi- 
 grated into the philosophy of the Enlightenment, 
 to make its last stand in Spencer's philosophy of 
 the fixed environment and the static goal. 
 
 No, nature is not an unchangeable order, un- 
 winding itself majestically from the reel of law 
 under the control of deified forces. It is an in- 
 definite congeries of changes. Laws are not gov- 
 ernmental regulations which limit change, but are 
 convenient formulations of selected portions of 
 change followed through a longer or shorter period 
 of time, and then registered in statistical forms 
 that are amenable to mathematical manipulation. 
 
INTELLIGENCE AND MORALS 73 
 
 That this device of shorthand symbolization pres- 
 ages the subjection of man's intelligent effort to 
 fixity of law and environment is interesting as a 
 culture survival, but is not important for moral 
 theory. Savage and child delight in creating 
 bogeys from which, their origin and structure be- 
 ing conveniently concealed, interesting thrills and 
 shudders may be had. Civilized man in the nine- 
 teenth century outdid these bugaboos in his image 
 of a fixed universe hung on a cast-iron framework 
 of fixed, necessary, and universal laws. Knowl- v^ 
 edge of nature does not mean subjection to predes- 
 tination, but insight into courses of change; an 
 insight which is formulated in " laws," that is, 
 methods of subsequent procedure. 
 
 Knowledge of the process and conditions of phys- 
 ical and social change through experimental science 
 and genetic history has one result with a double 
 name : increase of control, and increase of responsi- 
 bility ; increase of power to direct natural change, 
 and increase of responsibility for its equitable direc- 
 tion toward fuller good. Theory located within 
 progressive practice instead of reigning statically 
 supreme over it, means practice itself made respon- 
 sible to intelligence; to intelligence which relent- 
 lessly scrutinizes the consequences of every prac- 
 tice, and which exacts liability by an equally re- 
 lentless publicity. As long as morals occupies it- 
 self with mere ideals, forces and conditions as they 
 
 y 
 
74 INTELLIGENCE AND MORALS 
 
 are will be good enough for " practical " men, 
 since they are then left free to their own devices 
 in turning these to their own account. As long as 
 moralists plume themselves upon possession of the 
 domain of the categorical imperative with its bare 
 precepts, men of executive habits will always be at 
 their elbows to regulate the concrete social condi- 
 tions through which the form of law gets its actual 
 filling of specific injunctions. When freedom is 
 conceived to be transcendental, the coercive re- 
 straint of immediate necessity will lay its harsh 
 hand upon the mass of men. 
 
 In the end, men do what they can do. They 
 refrain from doing what they cannot do. They 
 do what their own specific powers in conjunction 
 with the limitations and resources of the environ- 
 ment permit. The effective control of their powers 
 is not through precepts, but through the regula- 
 tion of their conditions. If this regulation is to 
 be not merely physical or coercive, but moral, it 
 must consist of the intelligent selection and de- 
 termination of the environments in which we act; 
 and in an intelligent exaction of responsibility for 
 the use of men's powers. Theorists inquire after 
 the " motive " to morality, to virtue and the good, 
 under such circumstances. What then, one won- 
 ders, is their conception of the make-up of human 
 nature and of its relation to virtue and to good- 
 ness? The pessimism that dictates such a ques- 
 
INTELLIGENCE AND MORALS 75 
 
 tion, if it be justified, precludes any consideration 
 of morals. 
 
 The diversion of intelligence from discrimina- 
 tion of plural and concrete goods, from noting 
 their conditions and obstacles, and from devis- 
 ing methods for holding men responsible for their 
 concrete use of powers and conditions, has done 
 more than brute love of power to establish in- 
 equality and injustice among men. It has done 
 more, because it has confirmed with social sanc- 
 tions the principle of feudal domination. All 
 men require moral sanctions in their conduct : the 
 consent of their kind. Not getting it otherwise, 
 they go insane to feign it. No man ever lived 
 with the exclusive approval of his own conscience. 
 Hence the vacuum left in practical matters by the 
 remote irrelevancy of transcendental morals has to 
 be filled in somehow. It is filled in. It is filled in 
 with class-codes, class-standards, class-approvals 
 — with codes which recommend the practices and 
 habits already current in a given circle, set, calling, 
 profession, trade, industry, club, or gang. These 
 class-codes always lean back upon and support 
 themselves by the professed ideal code. This latter 
 meets them more than half-way. Being in its pre- 
 tense a theory for regulating practice, it must dem- 
 onstrate its practicability. It is uneasy in isolation, 
 and travels hastily to meet with compromise and 
 accommodation the actual situation in all its brute 
 
76 INTELLIGENCE AND MORALS 
 
 unrationality. Where the pressure is greatest — 
 in the habitual practice of the political and eco- 
 nomic chieftains — there it accommodates the most. 
 
 Class-codes of morals are sanctions, under the 
 caption of ideals, of uncriticised customs; they are 
 recommendations, under the head of duties, of what 
 the members of the class are already most given 
 to doing. If there are to obtain more equable and 
 cbmprehensive principles of action, exacting a 
 more impartial exercise of natural power and re- 
 source in the interests of a common good, members 
 of a class must no longer rest content in responsi- 
 bility to a class whose traditions constitute its 
 conscience, but be made responsible to a society 
 whose conscience is its free and effectively organ- 
 ized intelligence. 
 
 In such a conscience aloiie will the Socratic in- 
 junction to man to know himself be fulfilled. 
 
THE EXPERIMENTAL THEORY OF 
 KNOWLEDGE x 
 
 I*T should be possible to discern and describe a 
 -■■ knowing as one identifies any object, concern, 
 or event. It must have its own marks ; it must 
 offer characteristic features — as much so as a 
 thunder-storm, the constitution of a State, or a 
 leopard. In the search for this affair, we are first 
 of all desirous for something which is for itself, 
 contemporaneously with its occurrence, a cognition, 
 not something called knowledge by another and 
 from without — whether this other be logician, 
 psychologist, or epistemologist. The " knowl- 
 edge " may turn out false, and hence no knowl- 
 edge ; but this is an after-affair ; it may prove 
 to be rich in fruitage of wisdom, but if this 
 outcome be only wisdom after the event, it 
 does not concern us. What we want is just some- 
 thing which takes itself as knowledge, rightly or 
 wrongly. 
 
 1 Reprinted, with considerable change in the arrange- 
 ment and in the matter of the latter portion, from Mind, 
 Vol. XV., N.S., July, 1906. 
 
 77 
 
78 THE EXPERIMENTAL THEORY 
 
 This means a specific case, a sample. Yet in- 
 stances are proverbially dangerous — so naively 
 and graciously may they beg the questions at issue. 
 Our recourse is to an example so simple, so much 
 on its face as to be as innocent as may be of as- 
 sumptions. This case we shall gradually compli- 
 cate, mindful at each step to state just what new 
 elements are introduced. Let us suppose a smell, 
 just a floating odor. This odor may be anchored 
 by supposing that it moves to action; it starts 
 changes that end in picking and enjoying a rose. 
 This description is intended to apply to the course 
 of events witnessed and recounted from without. 
 What sort of a course must it be to constitute a 
 knowledge, or to have somewhere within its career 
 that which deserves this title? The smell, im- 
 primis, is there; the movements that it excites are 
 there ; the final plucking and gratification are ex- 
 perienced. But, let us say, the smell is not the 
 smell of the rose; the resulting change of the or- 
 ganism is not a sense of walking and reaching ; the 
 delicious finale is not the fulfilment of the move- 
 ment, and, through that, of the original smell ; " is 
 not," in each case meaning is " not experienced as " 
 such. We may take, in short, these experiences in 
 a brutely serial fashion. The smell, S, is replaced 
 (and displaced) by a felt movement, K, this is re- 
 
THE EXPERIMENTAL THEORY 79 
 
 placed by the gratification, G. Viewed from with- 
 out, as we are now regarding it, there is S-K-G. 
 But from within, for ; tself, it is now aS, now 
 2T, now G, and so on to the end of the chapter. 
 Nowhere is there looking before and after; 
 memory and anticipation are not born. Such 
 an experience neither is, in whole or in part, 
 a knowledge, nor does it exercise a cognitive 
 function. 
 
 Here, however, we may be halted. If there is 
 anything present in " consciousness " at all, we 
 may be told (at least we constantly are so told) 
 there must be knowledge of it as present — present, 
 at all events, in " consciousness." There is, so it 
 is argued, knowledge at least of a simple appre- 
 hensive type, knowledge of the acquaintance order, 
 knowledge that, even though not knowledge what. 
 The smell, it is admitted, does not know about any- 
 thing else, nor is anything known about the smell 
 (the same thing, perhaps) ; but the smell is known, 
 either by itself, or by the mind, or by some sub- 
 ject, some unwinking, unremitting eye. No, we 
 must reply ; there is no apprehension without some 
 (however slight) context; no acquaintance which 
 is not either recognition or expectation. Ac- 
 quaintance is presence honored with an escort; 
 presence is introduced as familiar, or an associate 
 springs up to greet it. Acquaintance always im- 
 plies a little friendliness ; a trace of re-knowing, of 
 
80 THE EXPERIMENTAL THEORY 
 
 anticipatory welcome or dread of the trait to fol- 
 low. 
 
 This claim cannot be dismissed as trivial. If 
 valid, it carries with it the distance between being 
 and knowing : and the recognition of an element of 
 mediation, that is, of art, in all knowledge. This 
 disparity, this transcendence, is not something 
 which holds of our knowledge, of finite knowledge, 
 just marking the gap between our type of con- 
 sciousness and some other with which we may con- 
 trast it after the manner of the agnostic or the 
 transcendentalist (who hold so much property in 
 joint ownership!), but exists because knowing is 
 knowing, that way of bringing things to bear upon 
 things which we call reflection — a manipulation of 
 things experienced in the light one of another. 
 
 " Feeling," I read in a recent article, " feeling 
 is immediately acquainted with its own quality, 
 with its own subjective being." * How and whence 
 this duplication in the inwards of feeling into feel- 
 
 1 1 must remind the reader again of a point already sug- 
 gested. It is the identification of presence in consciousness 
 with knowledge as such that leads to setting up a mind 
 {ego, subject) which has the peculiar property of knowing 
 (only so often it knows wrong!), or else that leads to 
 supplying " sensations " with the peculiar property of sur- 
 veying their own entrails. Given the correct feeling that 
 knowledge involves relationship, there being, by supposition, 
 no other thing to which the thing in consciousness is related, 
 it is forthwith related to a soul substance, or to its ghostly 
 offspring, a "subject," or to "consciousness" itself. 
 
THE EXPERIMENTAL THEORY 81 
 
 ing the knower and feeling the known ? into feeling 
 as being and feeling as acquaintance? Let us 
 frankly deny such monsters. Feeling is its own 
 quality; is its own specific (whence and why, once 
 more, subjective?) being. If this statement be 
 dogmatism, it is at least worth insistent declara- 
 tion, were it only by way of counter-irritant to that 
 other dogmatism which asserts that being in " con- 
 sciousness " is always presence for or in knowledge. 
 So let us repeat once more, that to be a, smell (or 
 anything else) is one thing, to be known as smell, 
 another ; to be a " feeling " one thing, to be known 
 as a " feeling " another. 1 The first is thinghood ; 
 existence indubitable, direct ; in this way all things 
 are that are in " consciousness " at all. 2 The 
 second is reflected being, things indicating and call- 
 ing for other things — something offering the possi- 
 bility of truth and hence of falsity. The first is 
 
 *Let us further recall that this theory requires either that 
 things present shall already be psychical things (feelings, 
 sensations, etc.), in order to be assimilated to the knowing 
 mind, subject to consciousness; or else translates genuinely 
 naive realism into the miracle of a mind that gets out- 
 side itself to lay its ghostly hands upon the things of an 
 external world. 
 
 2 This means that things may be present as known, just as 
 they be present as hard or soft, agreeable or disgusting, 
 hoped for or dreaded. The mediacy, or the art of interven- 
 tion, which characterizes knowledge, indicates precisely the 
 way in which known things as known are immediately 
 present. 
 
82 THE EXPERIMENTAL THEORY 
 
 genuine immediacy; the second is (in the instance 
 discussed) a pseudo-immediacy, which in the same 
 breath that it proclaims its immediacy smuggles in 
 another term (and one which is unexperienced both 
 in itself and in its relation) the subject or " con- 
 sciousness," to which the immediate is related. 1 
 
 But we need not remain with dogmatic asser- 
 tions. To be acquainted with a thing or with a 
 person has a definite empirical meaning; we have 
 only to call to mind what it is to be genuinely and 
 empirically acquainted, to have done forever with 
 this uncanny presence which, though bare and sim- 
 ple presence, is yet known, and thus is clothed 
 upon and complicated. To be acquainted with a 
 thing is to be assured (from the standpoint of the 
 experience itself) that it is of such and such a 
 character ; that it will behave, if given an oppor- 
 tunity, in such and such a way ; that the obviously 
 *and flagrantly present trait is associated with fel- 
 low traits that will show themselves, if the lead- 
 ings of the present trait are followed out. To be 
 
 1 If Hume had had a tithe of the interest in the flux of 
 perceptions and in habit — principles of continuity and of 
 organization — which he had in distinct and isolated exist- 
 ences, he might have saved us both from German Erkennt- 
 nisstheorie, and from that modern miracle play, the psychol- 
 ogy of elements of consciousness, that under the aegis of 
 science, does not hesitate to have psychical elements com- 
 pound and breed, and in their agile intangibility put to 
 shame the performances of their less acrobatic cousins, 
 physical atoms. 
 
THE EXPERIMENTAL THEORY 83 
 
 acquainted is to anticipate to some extent, on the 
 basis of prior experience. I am, say, barely ac- 
 quainted with Mr. Smith : then I have no extended 
 body of associated qualities along with those palpa- 
 bly present, but at least some one suggested trait 
 occurs ; his nose, his tone of voice, the place where 
 I saw him, his calling in life, an interesting anec- 
 dote about him, etc. To be acquainted is to know 
 what a thing is like in some particular. If one is 
 acquainted with the smell of a flower it means that 
 the smell is not just smell, but reminds one of 
 some other experienced thing which stands in con- 
 tinuity with the smell. There is thus supplied a 
 condition of control over or purchase upon what i 
 is present, the possibility of translating it into 
 terms of some other trait not now sensibly present. 
 Let us return to our example. Let us suppose 
 that S is not just displaced by K and then by G. 
 Let us suppose it persists ; and persists not as an 
 unchanged S alongside K and G, nor yet as fused 
 with them into a new further quale J. For in such 
 events, we have only the type already considered 
 and rejected. For an observer the new quale might 
 be more complex, or fuller of meaning, than the 
 original S, K> or G, but might not be experienced 
 as complex. We might thus suppose a composite 
 photograph which should suggest nothing of the 
 complexity of its origin and structure. In this 
 case we should have simply another picture. 
 
84 THE EXPERIMENTAL THEORY 
 
 But we may also suppose that the blur of the 
 photograph suggests the superimposition of pic- 
 tures and something of their character. Then we 
 get another, and for our problem, much more fruit- 
 ful kind of persistence. We will imagine that the 
 final G assumes this form: Gratification-terminat- 
 ing-movement-induced-by-smell. The smell is 
 still present ; it has persisted. It is not present in 
 its original form, but is represented with a quality, 
 an office, that of having excited activity and thereby 
 terminating its career in a certain, quale of grati- 
 fication. It is not S 9 but 2 ; that is S with an 
 increment of meaning due to maintenance and ful- 
 filment through a process. S is no longer just 
 smell, but smell which has excited and thereby se- 
 cured. 
 
 Here we have a cognitive, but not a cognitional 
 thing. In saying that the smell is finally experi- 
 enced as meaning gratification (through interven- 
 ing handling, seeing, etc.) and meaning it not in a 
 hapless way, but in a fashion which operates to 
 effect what is meant, we retrospectively attribute 
 intellectual force and function to the smell — and 
 this is what is signified by " cognitive." Yet the 
 smell is not cognitional, because it did not know- 
 ingly intend to mean this ; but is found, after the 
 event, to have meant it. Nor again is the final 
 experience, the 2 or transformed S, a knowledge. 
 
 Here again the statement may be challenged. 
 
THE EXPERIMENTAL THEORY 85 
 
 Those who agree with the denial that bare presence 
 of a quale in " consciousness " constitutes acquaint- 
 ance and simple apprehension, may now turn 
 against us, saying that experience of fulfilment of 
 meaning is just what we mean by knowledge, and 
 this is just what the 2 of our illustration is. The 
 point is fundamental. As the smell at first was 
 presence or being, less than knowing, so the fulfil- 
 ment is an experience that is more than knowing. 
 Seeing and handling the flower, enjoying the full 
 meaning of the smell as the odor of just this 
 beautiful thing, is not knowledge because it is more 
 than knowledge. 
 
 As this may seem dogmatic, let us suppose that 
 the fulfilment, the realization, experience, is a 
 knowledge. Then how shall it be distinguished 
 from and yet classed with other things called knowl- 
 edge, viz., reflective, discursive cognitions? Such 
 knowledges are what they are precisely because they 
 are not fulfilments, but intentions, aims, schemes, 
 symbols of overt fulfilment. Knowledge, perceptual 
 and conceptual, of a hunting dog is prerequisite in 
 order that I may really hunt with the hounds. The 
 hunting in turn may increase my knowledge of dogs 
 and their ways. But the knowledge of the dog, qua 
 knowledge, remains characteristically marked off 
 from the use of that knowledge in the fulfilment 
 experience, the hunt. The hunt is a realization of 
 knowledge; it alone, if you please, verifies, vali- 
 
86 THE EXPERIMENTAL THEORY 
 
 dates, knowledge, or supplies tests of truth. The 
 prior knowledge of the dog, was, if you wish, 
 hypothetical, lacking in assurance or categorical 
 certainty. The hunting, the fulfilling, realizing 
 experience alone gives knowledge, because it alone 
 completely assures ; makes faith good in works. 
 
 Now there is and can be no objection to this 
 definition of knowledge, provided it is consistently 
 adhered to. One has as much right to identify 
 knowledge with complete assurance, as I have to 
 identify it with anything else. Considerable justi- 
 fication in the common use of language, in common 
 sense, may be found for defining knowledge as com- 
 plete assurance. But even upon this definition, the 
 fulfilling experience is not, as such, complete assur- 
 ance, and hence not a knowledge. Assurance, cog- 
 nitive validation, and guaranteeship, follow from 
 it, but are not coincident with its occurrence. It 
 gives, but is not, assurance. The concrete con- 
 struction of a story, the manipulation of a machine, 
 the hunting with the dogs, is not, so far as it is 
 fulfilment, a confirmation of meanings previously 
 entertained as cognitional; that is, is not contem- 
 poraneously experienced as such. To think of 
 prior schemes, symbols, meanings, as fulfilled in a 
 subsequent experience, is reflectively to present 
 in their relations to one another both the mean- 
 ings and the experiences in which they are, as 
 a matter of fact, embodied, This reflective at- 
 
THE EXPERIMENTAL THEORY 87 
 
 titude cannot be identical with the fulfilment ex- 
 perience itself; it occurs only in retrospect when 
 the worth of the meanings, or cognitive ideas, is 
 critically inspected in the light of their fulfilment ; 
 or it occurs as an interruption of the fulfilling 
 experience. The hunter stops his hunting as 
 a fulfilment to reflect that he made a mistake 
 in his idea of his dog, or again, that his dog 
 is everything he thought he was — that his notion 
 of him is confirmed. Or, the man stops the actual 
 construction of his machine and turns back upon 
 his plan in correction or in admiring estimate of its 
 value. The fulfilling experience is not of itself 
 knowledge, then, even if we identify knowledge 
 with fulness of assurance or guarantee. More- 
 over it gives, affords, assurance only in reference 
 to a situation which we have not yet considered. 1 
 Before the category of confirmation or refuta- 
 tion can be introduced, there must be something 
 which means to mean something and which there- 
 fore can be guaranteed or nullified by the issue — 
 and this is precisely what we have not as yet found. 
 We must return to our instance and introduce a 
 further complication. Let us suppose that the 
 smell quale recurs at a later date, and that it 
 recurs neither as the original S nor yet as the 
 
 1 In other words, the situation as described is not to be 
 confused with the case of hunting on purpose to test an idea 
 regarding the dog. 
 
88 THE EXPERIMENTAL THEORY 
 
 final 2, but as an S' which is fated or charged 
 with the sense of the possibility of a fulfilment like 
 unto 2. The S' that recurs is aware of some- 
 thing else which it means, which it intends to effect 
 through an operation incited by it and without 
 which its own presence is abortive, and, so to say, 
 unjustified, senseless. Now we have an experience 
 which is cognitional, not merely cognitive; which 
 is contemporaneously aware of meaning something 
 beyond itself, instead of having this meaning as- 
 cribed by another at a later period. The odor 
 knows the rose; the rose is 'known by the odor; and 
 the import of each term is constituted by the re- 
 lationship in which it stands to the other. That 
 is, the import of the smell is the indicating and 
 demanding relation which it sustains to the enjoy- 
 ment of the rose as its fulfilling experience; while 
 this enjoyment is just the content or definition 
 of what the smell consciously meant, i.e., meant 
 to mean. Both the thing meaning and the thing 
 meant are elements in the same situation. Both 
 are present, but both are not present in the same 
 way. In fact, one is present as-wo£-present-in- 
 the-same-way-in-which-the-other-is. It is present 
 as something to be rendered present in the same 
 way through the intervention of an operation. 
 We must not balk at a purely verbal difficulty. 
 It suggests a verbal inconsistency to speak of a 
 thing present-as-absent. But all ideal contents, 
 
THE EXPERIMENTAL THEORY 89 
 
 all aims (that is, things aimed at) are present in 
 just such fashion. Things can be presented as 
 absent, just as they can be presented as hard or 
 soft, black or white, six inches or fifty rods away 
 from the body. The assumption that an ideal 
 content must be either totally absent, or else 
 present in just the same fashion as it will be 
 when it is realized, is not only dogmatic, but self- 
 contradictory. The only way in which an ideal 
 content can be experienced at all is to be presented 
 as not-present-in-the-same-way in which something 
 else is present, the latter kind of presence afford- 
 ing the standard or type of satisfactory presence. 
 When present in the same way it ceases to be an 
 ideal content. Not a contrast of bare existence 
 over against non-existence, or of present conscious- 
 ness over against reality out of present conscious- 
 ness, but of a satisfactory with an unsatisfactory 
 mode of presence makes the difference between the 
 " really " and the " ideally " present. 
 
 In terms of our illustration, handling and en- 
 joying the rose are present, but they are not 
 present in the same way that the smell is present. 
 The}? are present as going to be there in the 
 same way, through an operation which the smell 
 stands sponsor for. The situation is inherently 
 an uneasy one — one in which everything hangs 
 upon the performance of the operation indicated; 
 upon the adequacy of movement as a connecting 
 
90 THE EXPERIMENTAL THEORY 
 
 link, or real adjustment of the thing meaning and 
 the thing meant. Generalizing from the instance, 
 we get the following definition : An experience is a 
 knowledge, if in its quale there is an experienced 
 distinction and connection of two elements of the 
 following sort: one means or intends the presence 
 of the other in the same fashion in which itself is 
 already present, while the other is that which, while 
 not present in the same fashion, must become so 
 present if the meaning or intention of its com- 
 panion or yoke-fellow is to be fulfilled through the 
 operation it sets up. 
 
 II 
 
 We now return briefly to the question of knowl- 
 edge as acquaintance, and at greater length to 
 that of knowledge as assurance, or as fulfilment 
 which confirms and validates. With the recurrence 
 of the odor as meaning something beyond itself, 
 there is apprehension, knowledge^ that. One may 
 now say I know what a rose smells like; or I know 
 what this smell is like; I am acquainted with the 
 rose's agreeable odor. In short, on the basis of a 
 present quality, the odor anticipates and forestalls 
 some further trait. 
 
 We have also the conditions of knowledge of the 
 confirmation and refutation type. In the working 
 out of the situation just described, in the trans- 
 
THE EXPERIMENTAL THEORY 91 
 
 formation, self-indicated and self-demanded, of the 
 tensional into a harmonious or satisfactory situa- 
 tion, fulfilment or disappointment results. The 
 odor either does or does not fulfil itself in the rose. 
 The smell as intention is borne out by the facts, 
 or is nullified. As has already been pointed out, 
 the subsequent experience of the fulfilment type is 
 not primarily a confirmation or refutation. Its 
 import is too vital, too urgent to be reduced in 
 itself just to the value of testing an intention or 
 meaning. 1 But it gets in reflection just such veri- 
 ficatory significance. If the smell's intention is 
 unfulfilled, the discrepancy may throw one back, 
 in reflection, upon the original situation. Inter- 
 esting developments then occur. The smell meant 
 a rose; and yet it did not (so it turns out) mean 
 a rose ; it meant another flower, or something, one 
 can't just tell what. Clearly there is something 
 
 1 Dr. Moore, in an essay in " Contributions to Logical 
 Theory " has brought out clearly, on the basis of a criticism 
 of the theory of meaning and fulfilment advanced in 
 Royce's " World and Individual," the full consequences of 
 this distinction. I quote one sentence (p. 350) : " Surely there 
 is a pretty discernible difference between experience as a 
 purposive idea, and the experience which fulfils this purpose. 
 To call them both ' ideas ' is at least confusing." The text 
 above simply adds that there is also a discernible and im- 
 portant difference between experiences which, de facto, are 
 purposing and fulfilling (that is, are seen to be such ab 
 extra), and those which meant to be such, and are found to 
 be what they meant. 
 
92 THE EXPERIMENTAL THEORY 
 
 else which enters in ; something else beyond the odor 
 as it was first experienced determined the validity 
 of its meaning. Here then, perhaps, we have a 
 transcendental, as distinct from an experimental 
 reference? Only if this something else makes no 
 difference , or no detectable difference, in the smell 
 itself. If the utmost observation and reflection 
 can find no difference in the smell quales that fail 
 and those that succeed in executing their inten- 
 tions, then there is an outside controlling and dis- 
 turbing factor, which, since it is outside of the sit- 
 uation, can never be utilized in knowledge, and 
 hence can never be employed in any concrete test- 
 ing or verifying. In this case, knowing depends 
 upon an extra-experimental or transcendental fac- 
 tor. But this very transcendental quality makes 
 both confirmation and refutation, correction, criti- 
 cism, of the pretensions or meanings of things, 
 impossible. For the conceptions of truth and 
 error, we must, upon the transcendental basis, sub- 
 stitute those of accidental success or failure. 
 Sometimes the intention chances upon one, some- 
 times upon another. Why or how, the gods only 
 know — and they only if to them the extra-experi- 
 mental factor is not extra-experimental, but makes 
 a concrete difference in the concrete smell. But 
 fortunately the situation is not one to be thus de- 
 scribed. The factor that determines the success 
 or failure, does institute a difference in the thing 
 
THE EXPERIMENTAL THEORY 93 
 
 which means the object, and this difference is de- 
 tectable, once attention, through failure, has been 
 called to the need of its discovery. At the very 
 least, it makes this difference : the smell is infected 
 with an element of uncertainty of meaning — and 
 this as a part of the thing experienced, not for 
 an observer. This additional awareness at least 
 brings about an additional wariness. Meaning is 
 more critical, and operation more cautious. 
 
 But we need not stop here. Attention may be 
 fully directed to the subject of smells. Smells may 
 become the object of knowledge. They may take, 
 pro tempore* the place which the rose formerly 
 occupied. One may, that is, observe the cases in 
 which odors mean other things than just roses, may 
 voluntarily produce new cases for the sake of 
 further inspection, and thus account for the 
 cases where meanings had been falsified in the 
 issue; discriminate more carefully the peculiari- 
 ties of those meanings which the event verified, and 
 thus safeguard and bulwark to some extent the 
 employing of similar meanings in the future. Su- 
 perficially, it may then seem as if odors w T ere 
 treated after the fashion of Locke's simple ideas, 
 
 1 The association of science and philosophy with leisure, 
 with a certain economic surplus, is not accidental. It is 
 practically worth while to postpone practice; to substitute 
 theorizing, to develop a new and fascinating mode of prac- 
 tice. But it is the excess achievement of practice which 
 makes this postponement and substitution possible. 
 
9* THE EXPERIMENTAL THEORY 
 
 or Hume's " distinct ideas which are separate 
 existences." Smells apparently assume an inde- 
 pendent, isolated status during this period of in- 
 vestigation. " Sensations," as the laboratory psy- 
 chologist and the analytic psychologist generally 
 studies them, are examples of just such detached 
 things. But egregious error results if we forget 
 that this seeming isolation and detachment is the 
 outcome of a deliberate scientific device — that it is 
 simply a part of the scientific technique of an in- 
 quiry directed upon securing tested conclusions. 
 Just and only because odors (or any group of 
 qualities) are parts of a connected world are 
 they signs of things beyond themselves ; and only 
 because they are signs is it profitable and necessary 
 to study them as if they were complete, self-en- 
 closed entities. 
 
 In the reflective determination of things with 
 reference to their specifically meaning other things, 
 experiences of fulfilment, disappointment, and go- 
 ing astray inevitably play an important and recur- 
 rent role. They also are realistic facts, related in 
 realistic ways to the things that intend to mean 
 other things and to the things intended. When 
 these fulfilments and refusals are reflected upon in 
 the determinate relations in which they stand to 
 their relevant meanings, they obtain a quality which 
 is quite lacking to them in their immediate occur- 
 rence as just fulfilments or disappointments; viz., 
 
THE EXPERIMENTAL THEORY 95 
 
 the property of affording assurance and correction 
 — of confirming and refuting. Truth and falsity 
 are not properties of any experience or thing, in 
 and of itself or in its first intention ; but of things 
 where the problem of assurance consciously enters 
 in. Truth and falsity present themselves as sig- 
 nificant facts only in situations in which specific 
 meanings and their already experienced fulfilments 
 and non-fulfilments are intentionally compared and 
 contrasted with reference to the question of the 
 worth, as to reliability of meaning, of the given 
 meaning or class of meanings. Like knowledge 
 itself, truth is an experienced relation of things, 
 and it has no meaning outside of such relation, 1 any 
 more than such adjectives as comfortable applied 
 to a lodging, correct applied to speech, persuasive 
 applied to an orator, etc., have worth apart from 
 the specific things to which they are applied. It 
 would be a great gain for logic and epistemology, 
 if we were always to translate the noun " truth " 
 back into the adjective " true," and this back into 
 the adverb " truly " ; at least, if we were to do so 
 until we have familiarized ourselves thoroughly 
 
 1 It is the failure to grasp the coupling of truth of mean- 
 ing with a specific promise, undertaking, or intention ex- 
 pressed by a thing which underlies, so far as I can see, 
 the criticisms passed upon the experimental or pragmatic 
 view of the truth. It is the same failure which is re- 
 sponsible for the wholly at large view of truth which char- 
 acterizes the absolutists. 
 
96 THE EXPERIMENTAL THEORY 
 
 with the fact that " truth " is an abstract noun, 
 summarizing a quality presented by specific affairs 
 in their own specific contents. 
 
 Ill 
 
 I have attempted, in the foregoing pages, a de- 
 scription of the function of knowledge in its own 
 terms and on its merits — a description which in 
 intention is realistic, if by realistic we are content 
 to mean naturalistic, a description undertaken on 
 the basis of what Mr. Santayana has well called 
 " following the lead of the subject-matter." Un- 
 fortunately at the present time all such undertak- 
 ings contend with a serious extraneous obstacle. 
 Accomplishing the undertakirg has difficulties 
 enough of its own to reckon with ; and first attempts 
 are sure to be imperfect, if not radically wrong. 
 But at present the attempts are not, for the most 
 part, even listened to on their own account, they 
 are not examined and criticised as naturalistic at- 
 tempts. They are compared with undertakings of 
 a wholly different nature, with an epistemological 
 theory of knowledge, and the assumptions of this 
 extraneous theory are taken as a ready-made stand- 
 ard by which to test their validity. Literally of 
 course, " epistemology " means only theory of 
 knowledge; the term might therefore have been 
 employed simply as a synonym for a descriptive 
 
THE EXPERIMENTAL THEORY 97 
 
 logic; for a theory that takes knowledge as it 
 finds it and attempts to give the same kind of an 
 account of it that would be given of any other natu- 
 ral function or occurrence. But the mere mention 
 of what might have been only accentuates what is. 
 The things that pass for epistemology all assume 
 that knowledge is not a natural function or event, 
 but a mystery. 
 
 Epistemology starts from the assumption that 
 certain conditions lie back of knowledge. The 
 mystery would be great enough if knowledge were 
 constituted by non-natural conditions back of 
 knowledge, but the mystery is increased by the fact 
 that the conditions are defined so as to be incom- 
 patible with knowledge. Hence the primary 
 problem of epistemology is : How is knowledge 
 uberhaupt, knowledge at large, possible? Because 
 of the incompatibility between the concrete occur- 
 rence and function of knowledge and the conditions 
 back of it to which it must conform, a second 
 problem arises : How is knowledge in general, 
 knowledge uberhaupt, valid? Hence the complete 
 divorce in contemporary thought between epis- 
 temology as theory of knowledge and logic as an 
 account of the specific ways in which particular 
 beliefs that are better than other alternative beliefs 
 regarding the same matters are formed ; and also 
 the complete divorce between a naturalistic, a bio- 
 logical and social psychology, setting forth how 
 
98 THE EXPERIMENTAL THEORY 
 
 the function of knowledge is evolved out of other 
 natural activities, and epistemology as an account 
 of how knowledge is possible anyhow. 
 
 It is out of the question to set forth in this place 
 in detail the contrast between transcendental epis- 
 temology and an experimental theory of knowl- 
 edge. It may assist the understanding of the lat- 
 ter, however, if I point out, baldly and briefly, how, 
 out of the distinctively empirical situation, there 
 arise those assumptions which make knowledge a 
 mystery, and hence a topic for a peculiar branch 
 of philosophizing. 
 
 As just pointed out, epistemology makes the 
 possibility of knowledge a problem, because it 
 assumes back of knowledge conditions incompatible 
 with the obvious traits of knowledge as it em- 
 pirically exists. These assumptions are that the 
 organ or instrument of knowledge is not a natural 
 object, but some ready-made state of mind or con- 
 sciousness, something purely " subjective," a pecu- 
 liar kind of existence which lives, moves, and has 
 its being in a realm different from things to be 
 known; and that the ultimate goal and content 
 of knowledge is a fixed, ready-made thing which 
 has no organic connections with the origin, pur- 
 pose, and growth of the attempt to know it, some 
 kind of Ding-an-sich or absolute, extra-empirical 
 "Reality. 55 * 
 
 (1) It is not difficult to see at what point in 
 
THE EXPERIMENTAL THEORY 99 
 
 the development of natural knowledge, or the signi- 
 fying of one thing by another, there arises the 
 notion of the knowing medium as something rad- 
 ically different in the order of existence from the 
 thing to be known. It arises subsequent to the re- 
 peated experience of non-fulfilment, of frustration 
 and disappointment. The odor did not after all 
 mean the rose ; it meant something quite different ; 
 and yet its indicative function was exercised so 
 forcibly that we could not help — or at least did 
 not help — believing in the existence of the rose. 
 This is a familiar and typical kind of experience, 
 one which very early leads to the recognition that 
 " things are not what they seem." There are 
 two contrasted methods of dealing with this recog- 
 nition: one is the method indicated above (p. 93). 
 We go more thoroughly, patiently, and carefully 
 into the facts of the case. We employ all sorts 
 of methods, invented for the purpose, of examin- 
 ing the things that are signs and the things that 
 are signified, and we experimentally produce vari- 
 ous situations, in order that we may tell what smells 
 mean roses when roses are meant, what it is about 
 the smell and the rose that led us into error; and 
 that we may be able to discriminate those cases in 
 which a suspended conclusion is all that circum- 
 stances admit. We simply do the best we can to 
 regulate our system of signs so that they become as 
 instructive as possible, utilizing for this purpose 
 
100 THE EXPERIMENTAL THEORY 
 
 (as indicated above) all possible experiences of 
 success and of failure, and deliberately instituting 
 cases which will throw light on the specific em- 
 pirical causes of success and failure. 
 
 Now it so happens that when the facts of error 
 were consciously generalized and formulated, 
 namely in Greek thought, such a technique of spe- 
 cific inquiry and rectification did not exist — in fact, 
 it hardly could come into existence until after error 
 had been seized upon as constituting a funda- 
 mental anomaly. Hence the method just outlined 
 of dealing with the situation was impossible. We 
 can imagine disconsolate ghosts willing to postpone 
 any professed solution of the difficulty till subse- 
 quent generations have thrown more light on the 
 question itself; we can hardly imagine passionate 
 human beings exercising such reserve. At all 
 events, Greek thought provided what seemed a sat- 
 isfactory way out: there are two orders of ex- 
 istence, one permanent and complete, the noumenal 
 region, to which alone the characteristic of Being 
 is properly applicable, the other transitory, phe- 
 nomenal, sensible, a region of non-Being, or at 
 least of mere Coming-to-be, a region in which Be- 
 ing is hopelessly mixed with non-Being, with the 
 unreal. The former alone is the domain of knowl- 
 edge, of truth ; the latter is the territory of opinion, 
 confusion, and error. In short, the contrast with- 
 in experience of the cases in which things sue- 
 
THE EXPERIMENTAL THEORY 101 
 
 cessfully and unsuccessfully maintained and exe- 
 cuted the meanings of other things was erected into 
 a wholesale difference of status in the intrinsic 
 characters of the things involved in the two types 
 of cases. 
 
 With the beginnings of modern thought, the 
 region of the " unreal," the source of opinion and 
 error, was located exclusively in the individual. 
 The object was all real and all satisfactory, but 
 the "subject" could approach the object only 
 through his own subjective states, his " sensa- 
 tions " and " ideas." The Greek conception of 
 two orders of existence was retained, but instead 
 of the two orders characterizing the " universe " 
 itself, one was the universe, the other was the 
 individual mind trying to know that universe. 
 This scheme would obviously easily account for 
 error and hallucination ; but how could knowledge, 
 truth, ever come about such a basis? The Greek 
 problem of the possibility of error became 
 the modern problem of the possibility of knowl- 
 edge. 
 
 Putting the matter in terms that are inde- 
 pendent of history, experiences of failure, disap- 
 pointment, non-fulfilment of the function of mean- 
 ing and contention may lead the individual to the 
 path of science — to more careful and extensive 
 investigation of the things themselves, with a view 
 to detecting specific sources of error, and guard- 
 
102 THE EXPERIMENTAL THEORY 
 
 ing against them, and regulating, so far as 
 possible, the conditions under which objects are 
 bearers of meanings beyond themselves. But im- 
 patient of such slow and tentative methods (which 
 insure not infallibility but increased probability of 
 valid conclusions), by reason of disappointment 
 a person may turn epistemologist. He may then 
 take the discrepancy, the failure of the smell to 
 execute its own intended meaning, as a wholesale, 
 rather than as a specific fact: as evidence of a 
 contrast in general between things meaning and 
 things meant, instead of as evidence of the need 
 of a more cautious and thorough inspection of 
 odors and execution of operations indicated by 
 them. One may then say : Woe is me ; smells are 
 only my smells, subjective states existing in an 
 order of being made out of consciousness, while 
 roses exist in another order made out of a radically 
 different sort of stuff; or 5 odors are made out of 
 " finite " consciousness as their stuff, while the real 
 things, the objects which fulfil them, are made out 
 of an " infinite " consciousness as their material. 
 Hence some purely metaphysical tie has to be called 
 in to bring them into connection with each other. 
 And yet this tie does not concern knowledge; it 
 does not make the meaning of one odor any more 
 correct than that of another, nor enable us to 
 discriminate relative degrees of correctness. As 
 a principle of control, this transcendental connec- 
 
THE EXPERIMENTAL THEORY 103 
 
 tion is related to all alike, and hence condemns and 
 justifies all alike. 1 
 
 It is interesting to note that the transcenden- 
 talist almost invariably first falls into the psycho- 
 logical fallacy ; and then having himself taken the 
 psychologist's attitude (the attitude which is in- 
 terested in meanings as themselves self -inclosed 
 " ideas ") accuses the empiricist whom he criticises 
 of having confused mere psychological existence 
 with logical validity. That is, he begins by sup- 
 posing that the smell of our illustration (and all 
 the cognitional objects for which this is used as a 
 
 1 The belief in the metaphysical transcendence of the ob- 
 ject of knowledge seems to have its real origin in an 
 empirical transcendence of a very specific and describable 
 sort. The thing meaning is one thing; the thing meant is 
 another thing, and is (as already pointed out) a thing pre- 
 sented as not given in the same way as is the thing which 
 means. It is something to be so given. No amount of care- 
 ful and thorough inspection of the indicating and signifying 
 things can remove or annihilate this gap. The probability 
 of correct meaning may be increased in varying degrees — 
 and this is what we mean by control. But final certi- 
 tude can never be reached except experimentally — except by 
 performing the operations indicated and discovering whether 
 or no the intended meaning is fulfilled in propria persona. 
 In this experimental sense, truth or the object of any given 
 meaning is always beyond or outside of the cognitional thing 
 that means it. Error as well as truth is a necessary 
 function of knowing. But the non-empirical account of 
 this transcendent (or beyond) relationship puts all the 
 error in one place {our knowledge), and all the truth in 
 another (absolute consciousness or else a thing-in-itself). 
 
104 THE EXPERIMENTAL THEORY 
 
 symbol) is a purely mental or psychical state, 
 so that the question of logical reference or inten- 
 tion is the problem of how the merely mental can 
 " know " the extra-mental. But from a strictly 
 empirical point of view, the smell which knows is 
 no more merely mental than is the rose known. 
 We may, if we please, say that the smell when 
 involving conscious meaning or intention is " men- 
 tal," but this term " mental " does not denote some 
 separate type of existence — existence as a state of 
 consciousness. It denotes only the fact that the 
 smell, a real and non-psychical object, now exer- 
 cises an intellectual function. This new property 
 involves, as James has pointed out, an additive 
 relation — a new property possessed by a non- 
 mental object, when that object, occurring in 
 a new context, assumes a further office and 
 use. 1 To be " in the mind " means to be in a 
 situation in which the function of intending is 
 directly concerned. 2 Will not some one who be- 
 lieves that the knowing experience is ab origine a 
 strictly " mental " thing, explain how, as matter 
 of fact, it does get a specific, extra-mental refer- 
 ence, capable of being tested, confirmed, or re- 
 
 1 Compare his essay, "Does Consciousness Exist?" in 
 the Journal of Philosophy, Psychology, and Scientific 
 Methods, Vol. I., p. 480. 
 
 2 Compare the essay on the " Problem of Consciousness," 
 by Professor Woodbridge, in the Garman Memorial Volume, 
 entitled " Studies in Philosophy and Psychology." 
 
THE EXPERIMENTAL THEORY 105 
 
 futed? Or, if he believes that viewing it as 
 merely mental expresses only the form it takes 
 for psychological analysis, will he not explain 
 why he so persistently attributes the inherently 
 " mental " characterization of it to the empiricist 
 whom he criticises? An object becomes meaning 
 when used empirically in a certain way ; and, under 
 certain circumstances, the exact character and 
 worth of this meaning becomes an object of solici- 
 tude. But the transcendental epistemologist with 
 his purely psychical " meanings " and his purely 
 extra-empirical " truths " assumes a Deus ex Ma- 
 china whose mechanism is preserved a secret. And 
 as if to add to the arbitrary character of his as- 
 sumption, he has to admit that the transcendental 
 a priori faculty by which mental states get ob- 
 jective reference does not in the least help us to 
 discriminate, in the concrete, between an objective 
 reference that is false and one that is valid. 
 
 (2) The counterpart assumption to that of pure 
 aboriginal " mental states " is, of course, that of 
 an Absolute Reality, fixed and complete in itself, 
 of which our " mental states " are bare transitory 
 hints, their true meaning and their transcendent 
 goal being the Truth in rerum natura. If the 
 organ and medium of knowing is a self-inclosed 
 order of existence different in kind from the Object 
 to be known, then that Object must stand out there 
 in complete aloofness from the concrete purpc^e 
 
106 THE EXPERIMENTAL THEORY 
 
 and procedure of knowing it. But if we go back to 
 the knowing as a natural occurrence, capable of 
 description, we find that just as a smell does not 
 mean Rose in general (or anything else at large), 
 but means a specific group of qualities whose ex- 
 perience is intended and anticipated, so the func- 
 tion of knowing is always expressed in connections 
 between a given experience and a specific possible 
 wanted experience. The " rose " that is meant in a 
 particular situation is the rose of that situation. 
 When this experience is consummated, it is achieved 
 as the fulfilment of the conditions in which just 
 that intention was entertained — not as the fulfil- 
 ment of a faculty of knowledge or a meaning in 
 general. Subsequent meanings and subsequent ful- 
 filments may increase, may enrich the consummat- 
 ing experience; the object or content of the rose 
 as known may be other and fuller next time and 
 so on. But we have no right to set up " a rose " 
 at large or in general as the object of the knowing 
 odor; the object of a knowledge is always strictly 
 correlative to that particular thing which means it. 
 It is not something which can be put in a wholesale 
 way over against that which cognitively refers to 
 it, as when the epistemologist puts the " real " rose 
 (object) over against a merely phenomenal or em- 
 pirical rose which this smell happens to mean. As 
 the meaning gets more complex, fuller, more finely 
 discriminated, the object which realizes or fulfils 
 
THE EXPERIMENTAL THEORY 107 
 
 the meaning grows similarly in quality. But we 
 cannot set up a rose, an object of fullest, complete, 
 and exhaustive content as that which is really 
 meant by any and every odor of a rose, whether 
 it consciously meant to mean it or not. The test 
 of the cognitional rectitude of the odor lies in the 
 specific object which it sets out to secure. This 
 is the meaning of the statement that the import of 
 each term is found in its relationship to the other. 
 It applies to object meant as well as to the mean- 
 ing. Fulfilment, completion are always relative 
 terms. Hence the criterion of the truth or falsity 
 of the meaning, of the adequacy, of the cognitional 
 thing lies within the relationships of the situation 
 and not without. The thing that means another 
 by means of an intervening operation either suc- 
 ceeds or fails in accomplishing the operation in- 
 dicated, while this operation either gives or fails 
 to give the object meant. Hence the truth or 
 falsity of the original cognitional object. 
 
 IV 
 
 From this excursion, I return in conclusion to a 
 brief general characterization of those situations 
 in which w r e are aware that things mean other 
 things and are so critically aware of it that, in 
 order to increase the probability of fulfilment and 
 to decrease the chance of frustration, all possible 
 
108 THE EXPERIMENTAL THEORY 
 
 pains are taken to regulate the meanings that at- 
 tach to things. These situations define that type 
 of knowing which we call scientific. There are 
 things that claim to mean other experiences; in 
 which the trait of meaning other objects is not dis- 
 covered ab extra, and after the event, but is part of 
 the thing itself. This trait of the thing is as real- 
 istic, as specific, as any other of its traits. It is, 
 therefore, as open to inspection and determination 
 as to its nature, as is any other trait. Moreover, 
 since it is upon this trait that assurance (as distinct 
 from accident) of fulfilment depends, an especial 
 interest, an absorbing interest, attaches to its de- 
 termination. Hence the scientific type of knowl- 
 edge and its growing domination over other sorts. 
 We employ meanings in all intentional construc- 
 tions of experience — in all anticipations, whether 
 artistic, utilitarian or technological, social or 
 moral. The success of the anticipation is found 
 to depend upon the character of the meaning. 
 Hence the stress upon a right determination of 
 these meanings. Since they are the instruments 
 upon which fulfilment depends so far as that is 
 controlled or other than accidental, they become 
 themselves objects of surpassing interest. For all 
 persons at some times, and for one class of persons 
 (scientists) at almost all times, the determination 
 of the meanings employed in the control of ful- 
 filments (of acting upon meanings) is central. 
 
THE EXPERIMENTAL THEORY 109 
 
 The experimental or pragmatic theory of knowl- 
 edge explains the dominating importance of sci- 
 ence; it does not depreciate it or explain it away. 
 
 Possibly pragmatic writers are to blame for the 
 tendency of their critics to assume that the practice 
 they have in mind is utilitarian in some narrow 
 sense, referring to some preconceived and inferior 
 use — though I cannot recall any evidence for this 
 admission. But what the pragmatic theory has in 
 mind is precisely the fact that all the affairs of 
 life which need regulation — all values of all types 
 — depend upon utilizations of meanings. Action 
 is not to be limited to anything less than the carry- 
 ing out of ideas, than the execution, whether stren- 
 uous or easeful, of meanings. Hence the surpass- 
 ing importance which comes to attach to the care- 
 ful, impartial construction of the meanings, and to 
 their constant survey and resurvey with reference 
 to their value as evidenced by experiences of ful- 
 filment and deviation. 
 
 That truth denotes truths, that is, specific veri- 
 fications, combinations of meanings and outcomes 
 reflectively viewed, is, one may say, the central 
 point of the experimental theory. Truth, in gen- 
 eral or in the abstract, is a just name for an ex- 
 perienced relation among the things of experience : 
 that sort of relation in which intents are retro- 
 spectively viewed from the standpoint of the ful 1 
 filment which they secure through their own natural 
 
110 THE EXPERIMENTAL THEORY 
 
 operation or incitement. Thus the experimental 
 theory explains directly and simply the absolutistic 
 tendency to translate concrete true things into the 
 general relationship, Truth, and then to hyposta- 
 tize this abstraction into identity with real being, 
 Truth per se and in se, of which all transitory 
 things and events — that is, all experienced realities 
 — are only shadowy futile approximations. This 
 type of relationship is central for man's will, for 
 man's conscious endeavor. To select, to conserve, 
 to extend, to propagate those meanings which the 
 course of events has generated, to note their pecu- 
 liarities, to be in advance on the alert for them, to 
 search for them anxiously, to substitute them for 
 meanings that eat up our energy in vain, defines 
 the aim of rational effort and the goal of legitimate 
 ambition. The absolutistic theory is the transfer 
 of this moral or voluntary law of selective action 
 into a quasi-physical (that is, metaphysical) law 
 of indiscriminate being. Identify metaphysical be- 
 ing with significant excellent being — that is, with 
 those relationships of things which, in our moments 
 of deepest insight and largest survey, we would 
 continue and reproduce — and the experimentalist, 
 rather than the absolutist, is he who has a right 
 to proclaim the supremacy of Truth, and the su- 
 periority of the life devoted to Truth for its own 
 sake over that of " mere " activity. But to read 
 back into an order of things which exists without 
 
THE EXPERIMENTAL THEORY 111 
 
 the participation of our reflection and aim, the 
 quality which defines the purpose of our thought 
 and endeavor is at one and the same stroke to 
 mythologize reality and to deprive the life of 
 thoughtful endeavor of its ground for being. 
 
I 
 
 THE INTELLECTUALIST CRITERION 
 FOR TRUTH x 
 
 AMONG the influences that have worked in 
 contemporary philosophy towards distinte- 
 gration of intellectualism of the epistemological 
 type, and towards the substitution of a philosophy 
 of experience, the work of Mr. Bradley must be 
 seriously counted. One has, for example, only to 
 compare his metaphysics with the two fundamental 
 contentions of T. H. Green, namely, that reality 
 is a single, eternal, and all-inclusive system of 
 relations, and that this system of relations is one 
 in kind with that process of relating which consti- 
 tutes our thinking, to be instantly aware of a 
 changed atmosphere. Much of Bradley's writings 
 is a sustained and deliberate polemic against in- 
 tellectualism of the Neo-Kantian type. When, 
 however, we find conjoined to this criticism an 
 
 1 Reprinted, with many changes, from an article in Mind, 
 Vol. XVI., N.S., July 1907. Although the changes have 
 been made to render the article less technical, it still re- 
 mains, I fear, too technical to be intelligible to those not 
 familiar with recent discussions of logical theory. 
 
 112 
 
THE INTELLECTUALIST CRITERION 113 
 
 equally sustained contention that the philosophic 
 conception of reality must be based on an exclu- 
 sively intellectual criterion, a criterion belonging 
 to and confined to theory, we have a situation that 
 is thought-provoking. The situation grows in in- 
 terest when it is remembered that there is a general 
 and growing tendency among those who appeal in 
 philosophy to a strictly intellectualistic method of 
 defining " reality," to insist that the reality reached 
 by this method has a super-intellectual content: 
 that intellectual, afFectional, and volitional fea- 
 tures are all joined and fused in " ultimate " real- 
 ity. The curious character of the situation is that 
 Reality is an " absolute experience " of which the 
 intellectual is simply one partial and transmuted 
 moment. Yet this reality is attained unto, in philo- 
 sophic method, by exclusive emphasis upon the in- 
 tellectual aspect of present experience and by sys- 
 tematic exclusion of exactly the emotional, volitional 
 features which with respect to content are insisted 
 upon! Under such circumstances the cynically- 
 minded are moved to wonder whether this tremen- 
 dous insistence upon one factor in present ex- 
 perience at the expense of others, is not because 
 this is the only way to maintain the notion of 
 " Absolute Experience," and to prevent it from col- 
 lapsing into ordinary every-day experience. This 
 paradox is not peculiar to Mr. Bradley. Looking 
 at the Neo-Kantian movement in the broad in its 
 
114 THE INTELLECTUALIST CRITERION 
 
 modern form, one might almost say that its prom- 
 inent feature is its insistence upon reaching a 
 " Reality " that includes extra-intellectual fac- 
 tors and phases, traits that are ideal in a moral 
 and emotional sense, by an exclusive recognition of 
 the function of knowledge in its isolation. 
 
 Such being the case, an examination of Mr. 
 Bradley's method and criterion may have far- 
 reaching implications. First, let us set before 
 ourselves the general points of Mr. Bradley's in- 
 dictment of intellectualism. 1 Knowledge or judg- 
 ment works by means of thought ; it is predication 
 of idea (meaning) of existence as its subject. Its 
 final aim is to effect a complete union or harmony 
 of existence and meaning. But it is fore-doomed 
 to failure, for in realizing its end it must employ 
 means which contradict its own purpose. This 
 inherent incapacity lurks in judgment with respect 
 to subject, predicate, and copula. The predicate 
 or meaning necessary to complete the reality pre- 
 sented in the subject can be referred to the latter 
 and united with it only by being itself alienated 
 from existence. It heals the wounds or deficiencies 
 of its own subject (and in the end all deficiencies 
 are to the modern idealist discrepancies) only on 
 condition of inflicting another wound, — only by 
 sundering meaning from a prior union with exist- 
 
 1 1 fallow chiefly Chapter XV. of " Appearance and 
 Reality " — the chapter on " Thought and Reality." 
 
THE INTELLECTUALIST CRITERION 115 
 
 ence in some other phase. This latter existence, 
 therefore, is always left out in the cold. It is as 
 if we wanted to get all the cloth in the world into 
 one garment and our only way of accomplishing 
 this were to tear off a portion from one piece of 
 goods in order to patch it on to another. 
 
 The subject of the judgment, moreover, as well 
 as the predicate, stands in the way of judgment 
 fulfilling its own task. It has " sensuous infini- 
 tude " and it has " immediacy," but these two 
 traits contradict each other. The details of the 
 subject always go beyond itself, being indefinitely 
 related to something beyond. " In its given con- 
 tent it has relations which do not terminate within 
 that content" (ibid., p. 176), while in its imme- 
 diacy it presents an undivided union of existence 
 and meaning. No subject can be mere existence 
 any more than it can be mere meaning. It is al- 
 ways existent or embodied meaning. As such it 
 claims individuality or the character of a single 
 subsistent whole. But this indispensable claim is 
 inconsistent with its ragged-edged character, its 
 indefinite external reference, which is indispensable 
 to it as subject that it may require and receive 
 further meaning from predication. 
 
 With respect to the copula the following quo- 
 tation from the " Principles " of Logic (p. 10) 
 may serve : " Judgment proper is the act which 
 refers the ideal content (recognized as such) to the 
 
116 THE INTELLECTUALIST CRITERION 
 
 reality beyond the act." In other words, judg- 
 ment as act (and it is the act which is expressed 
 in the copula) must always fall outside of 
 the content of knowledge as such; yet since this 
 act certainly falls within reality, it would have to 
 be recognized and stated by any knowledge pre- 
 tending to competency with respect to reality as a 
 whole. These considerations, stated in this way, 
 are highly technical and presuppose a knowledge 
 not merely of Mr. Bradley's own logic, but also of 
 the logical analysis of knowledge initiated by Kant 
 and carried on by Herbart, Lotze, and others. 
 Their main import may, however, be stated in 
 comparatively non-technical form. Human ex- 
 perience is full of discrepancies. Were experience 
 purely a matter of brute existence (such as we some- 
 times imagine the animals' experience to be) it 
 would be totally lacking in meaning and there 
 would be no problems, no thinking, no occasion for 
 thinking, and hence no philosophy. On the other 
 hand, if experience were a complete, tight- jointed 
 union of existence and meaning, there would be 
 no dissatisfaction, no problems, no cause for efforts 
 to patch up defects and contradictions. Existences, 
 things, would embody all the meanings that they 
 suggest; while abstract meanings, values that are 
 merely ideal, that are projected or thought of 
 but not fulfilled, would be totally unheard of. But 
 our experience stands in marked contrast to both 
 
THE INTELLECTUALIST CRITERION 117 
 
 these types of experience. It is neither an affair 
 of meaningless existence nor of existence self-lumi- 
 nous with fulfilled meaning. All things that we 
 experience have some meaning, but that meaning 
 is always so partially embodied in things that we 
 cannot rest in them. They point beyond them- 
 selves ; they indicate meanings which they do not 
 fulfil; they suggest values which they fail to em- 
 body, and when we go to other things for the 
 fruition of what is denied, we either find the same 
 situation of division over again, or we find even 
 more positive disappointment and frustration — we 
 find contrary meanings set up. Now all thinking 
 grows out of this discrepancy between existence 
 and the meaning which it partially embodies and 
 partially refuses, which it suggests but declines to 
 express. Yet thinking, the mode of bringing ex- ♦ 
 istence and meaning into harmony with each other, 
 always works by selection, by abstraction; it sets 
 up and projects meanings which are ideal only, % 
 footless, in the air, matters of thought only, not of 
 sentiency or immediate existence. It emphasizes 
 the ideal of a completed union of existence and 
 meaning, but is helpless to effect it. And this 
 helplessness (according to Mr. Bradley) is not due 
 to external pressure but to the very structure of 
 thought itself. 
 
 From every point of view knowledge operates 
 under conditions, (and these not externally imposed 
 
118 THE INTELLECTUALIST CRITERION 
 
 but inherent in its own nature as judgment,) that 
 render it incapable of realizing its aim of complete 
 * union of existence and meaning. Granted the 
 argument, and it is difficult to imagine a more 
 serious indictment against the pretensions of phi- 
 losophy to reach " Reality " ma the exclusive path 
 of knowledge. 
 
 The presence of contradiction is Mr. Bradley's 
 criterion for " appearance," just as its absence 
 is his criterion for " reality." It thus goes with- 
 out saying that knowledge and truth which we can 
 attain are matters of appearance. Contradiction 
 between existence and meaning is its last word. 
 This is not merely a logical deduction from Mr. 
 Bradley's position, but is expressly stated by him. 
 " Thus the truth belongs to existence, but it does 
 not as such exist. . . . Truth shows a dis- 
 section but never an actual life " (" Appearance 
 and Reality," p. 167). Again, " every truth is 
 appearance since in it we have divorce of quality 
 from being" (ibid., p. 187). "Even absolute 
 truth seems in the end to turn out erroneous. 
 . . . Internal discrepancy belongs irremovably 
 to truth's proper character. . . . Truth is 
 one aspect of experience and is therefore made im- 
 perfect and limited by what it fails to include " 
 (ibid., pp. 544-545). Nothing could be more 
 explicit as to the inherently contradictory char- 
 acter of truth, both as an ideal and as an accom- 
 
THE INTELLECTS ALIST CRITERION 119 
 
 plished fact ; nothing more positive as to the un- 
 reality or appearance-character of truth. We 
 cannot, on Mr. Bradley's method, stop here. Not 
 only is knowledge — working as it does through 
 thought which is always partial, selective, abstrac- 
 tive — doomed to failure in accomplishing its task, 
 but the existence of the contradiction between the 
 suggestion of meanings by existence and this reali- 
 zation in existence is itself due to thought. 
 
 Speaking of thought he says : " The relational 
 form is a compromise on which thought stands and 
 which it develops." And all the particular anti- 
 nomies which he discusses are interpreted as having 
 their basis in the category of relation (ibid., 
 p. 180). In his section on Appearance he goes 
 through various aspects and distinctions of the 
 world, such as primary and secondary qualities, 
 substance and its properties, relation and qualita- 
 tive elements, space and time, motion and change, 
 causation, etc., pointing out irreconcilable discrep- 
 ancies in them. He does not, in a generalized way, 
 expressly refer them to any common source or root. 
 But it seems a fair inference that the relational 
 character of thought is at the bottom of the whole 
 trouble: so that we have in the cases mentioned 
 precisely the same situation in concreto which 
 is set forth in abstracto in the discussion of 
 thought. The contradictions brought up are in 
 every case resolved into the fundamental discrep- 
 
120 THE INTELLECTUALIST CRITERION 
 
 ancy supposed to exist between relations and ele- 
 ments related. In each case there is the ideal of 
 a final unity in which relations and elements as 
 such disappear, while in every case the nature of 
 relation is such as to prevent the desired con- 
 summation. In at least one place, it is expressly 
 declared that it is the knowledge function which is 
 responsible for the degradation of reality to ap- 
 pearance. " We do not suggest that the thing 
 always itself is an appearance. We mean its 
 character is such that it becomes one as soon as 
 we judge it. And this character we have seen 
 throughout our work, is ideality. Appearance 
 consists in the looseness of content from existence. 
 . . . And we have found that everywhere 
 throughout the world such ideality prevails " 
 {ibid., p. 486, italics not in the original). It 
 is not then strictly true that the divorce of mean- 
 ing and existence instigates thought; rather 
 thought is the unruly member that creates the 
 divorce and then engages in the task (in which it 
 is self-condemned to failure) of trying to establish 
 the unity which it has gratuitously destroyed. 
 Thinking, self-consciousness, is disease of the naive 
 unity of thoughtless experience. 
 
 On the one hand there is a systematic discredit- 
 ing of the ultimate claims of the knowledge func- 
 tion, and this not from external physiological or 
 psychological reasons such as are sometimes alleged 
 
THE INTELLECTUALIST CRITERION 121 
 
 against its capacity, but on the basis of its own 
 interior logic. But on the other hand, a strictly 
 logical criterion is deliberately adopted and em- 
 ployed as the fundamental and final criterion for 
 the philosophic conception of reality. Long fa- 
 miliarity has not dulled my astonishment at finding 
 exactly the same set of considerations which in 
 the earlier portion of the book are employed to 
 condemn things as experienced by us to the region 
 of Appearance, employed in the latter portion of 
 the book to afford a triumphant demonstration of 
 the existence and character of Absolute Reality. 
 The argument I take up first on its formal side, 
 and then with reference to material considerations. 1 
 The positive conception of Reality is reached 
 by the conception that " ultimate reality must be 
 such that it does not contradict itself; here is an 
 absolute criterion. And it is proved absolute by 
 the fact that either in endeavoring to deny it or 
 even in attempting to doubt it, we tacitly assume 
 its validity 55 (ibid., pp. 136-137). That is to 
 say, when one sets out to think one must avoid self- 
 contradiction ; this avoidance, or, put positively, 
 the attainment of consistency, harmony, is the basic 
 law of all thinking. Since in thinking we set out 
 to attain reality, it follows that reality itself 
 must be self-consistent, and that its self-consistency 
 
 1 The crux of the argument is contained in Chapters XIII. 
 and XIV., on the " General Nature of Reality." 
 
122 THE INTELLECTUALIST CRITERION 
 
 determines the law of thought. Or, as Mr. Brad- 
 ley again puts the matter, " In order to think at 
 all you must subject yourself to the standard, a 
 standard which implies an absolute knowledge of 
 reality ; and while you doubt this, you accept it, 
 and obey, while you rebel" (ibid., p. 153). 
 The absolute knowledge referred to is, of course, 
 the knowledge of the thoroughly self-consistent, 
 non-contradictory character of reality. Every 
 reader of Mr. Bradley's book knows how he goes 
 on from this point to supply positive content to 
 reality ; to give an outline sketch of the characters 
 it must possess and the way in which it must possess 
 them in order to maintain its thoroughly self- 
 consistent character. It is, however, only the 
 strictly formal aspect of the matter that I am 
 here concerned with. 
 
 On this side we reach, I think, the heart of the 
 matter by asking, in reference to the first quota- 
 tion: Absolute for what? Surely absolute for the 
 process under consideration, that is absolute for 
 thought. But the significance of this absolute for 
 thought is, one may say, " absolutely" (since we 
 are here confessedly in the realm just of thought) 
 determined by the nature of thought itself. Now 
 this nature has been already referred by considera- 
 tions " belonging irremovably to truth's proper 
 character," to the world of appearance and of in- 
 ternal discrepancy. Yes, one may say (speaking 
 
THE INTELLECTUAL1ST CRITERION 123 
 
 formally), the criterion of thought is absolute — ■ 
 that is to say absolute or final for thought ; but 
 how can one imagine that this in any way alters 
 the essential nature and value of thought? If 
 knowledge works by thought, and thought institutes 
 appearance over against reality, any further fact 
 about thought — such as a statement of its criterion 
 — falls wholly within the limits of this situation. 
 It is comical to suppose that a special trait of 
 thought can be employed to alter the fundamental 
 and essential nature of thought. The criterion of 
 thought must be infected by the nature of thought, 
 instead of being a redeeming angel which at a 
 critical juncture transforms the fragile creature, 
 thought, into an ambassador with power plenipo- 
 tentiary to the court of the Absolute. 
 
 There really seems to be ground for supposing 
 that the whole argument turns on an ambiguity 
 in the use of the word " absolute." Keeping 
 strictly within the limits of the argument, it means 
 nothing more than that thinking has a certain 
 principle, a law of its own ; that it has an appro- 
 priate mode of procedure which must not be vio- 
 lated. It means, in short, whatever is finally con- 
 trolling for the thought-function. But Mr. Brad- 
 ley immediately takes the word to mean absolute 
 in the sense of describing a reality which by its very 
 nature is totally contradistinguished from appear- 
 ance — that is to say, from the realm of thought. 
 
\ 
 
 124 THE INTELLECTUALIST CRITERION 
 
 Upon the ambiguity of a word, the systematic in- 
 dictment of intellectualism becomes the corner- 
 stone of a systematically intellectualistic method of 
 conceiving reality! 
 
 Mr. Bradley has himself recognized the seeming 
 contradiction between his indictment of thought 
 and his use of the criterion of thought as the ex- 
 clusive path to a philosophic notion of the real. 
 In dealing with it, he (to my mind) comes within 
 an ace of stating a truer doctrine, and also ex- 
 hibits even more clearly the weakness of his own 
 position. He goes so far as to put the follow- 
 ing words into the mouth of an objector, and to 
 accept their general import : " All axioms, as a 
 matter of fact, are practical . . . for none of 
 them in the end can amount to more than the im- 
 pulse to behave in a certain way. And they can- 
 not express more than this impulse, together with 
 the impossibility of satisfaction unless it is com- 
 plied with" (p. 151). After accepting this (p. 
 152) he goes on to say: "Take for example the 
 law of avoiding contradiction. When two elements 
 will not remain quietly together, but collide and 
 struggle, we cannot rest satisfied with that state. 
 Our impulse is to alter it and, on the theoretical 
 side, to bring the content to such shape that the 
 variety remains peaceably in one. And this in- 
 ability to rest otherwise and this tendency to alter 
 in a certain way and direction is, when reflected 
 
THE INTELLECTUALIST CRITERION 125 
 
 upon and made explicit, our axiom and our in- 
 tellectual standard " (p. 152; italics mine). 
 
 The retort is obvious : if the intellectual cri- 
 terion, the principle of non-contradiction on which 
 his whole Absolute Reality rests, is itself a prac- 
 tical principle, then surely the ultimate criterion 
 for regulating intellectual undertakings is prac- 
 tical. To this obvious answer Mr. Bradley makes 
 reply as follows : " You may call the intellect, if 
 you like, a mere tendency to a movement, but you 
 must remember that it is a movement of a very 
 special hi/nd. . . . Thinking is the attempt 
 to satisfy a special impulse, and the attempt im- 
 plies an assumption about reality. . . . But 
 why, it may be objected, is this assumption better 
 than what holds for practice? Why is the theo- 
 retical to be superior to the practical end? I have 
 never said that this is so, only here, that is, in meta- 
 physics, I must be allowed to reply, we are acting 
 theoretically. . . . The theoretical standard 
 within theory must surely be absolute " (p. 153. 
 The italics again are mine ; compare with the quo- 
 tation this, from p. 485 : " Our attitude, however, 
 in metaphysics must be theoretical." So, also, p. 
 154, " Since metaphysics is mere theory and since 
 theory from its nature must be made by the intel- 
 lect, it is here the intellect alone which is to be 
 satisfied "). 
 
 Grant that intellect is a special movement or 
 
126 THE INTELLECTUALIST CRITERION 
 
 mode of practice; grant that we are not merely 
 acting (are we ever merely acting?) but are " spe- 
 cially occupied and therefore subject to special con- 
 ditions," and the problem remains what special kind 
 of activity is thinking? what is its experienced 
 differentia from other kinds ? what is its commerce 
 with them? When the problem is what special kind 
 of an activity is thinking and of what nature is the 
 consistency which is its criterion, somehow we do 
 not get forward by being told that thinking is a 
 special mode of practice and that its criterion is 
 consistency. The unquestioned presupposition of 
 Mr. Bradley is that thinking is such a wholly sep- 
 arate activity (the " intellect alone " which has to 
 be satisfied), that to give it autonomy is to say 
 that it, and its criterion, have nothing to do with 
 other activities ; that it is " independent " as to 
 criterion, in a way which excludes interdependence 
 in function and outcome. Unless the term " spe- 
 cial " be interpreted to mean isolated, to say that 
 thinking is a special mode of activity no more nulli- 
 fies the proposition that it arises in a practical con- 
 test and operates for practical ends, than to say 
 that blacksmithing is a special activity, negates its 
 being one connected mode of industrial activity. 
 His underlying presupposition of the separate 
 character of thought comes out in the passage last 
 quoted. " Our impulse," he says, " is to alter the 
 conflicting situation and, on the theoretical side. 
 
THE INTELLECTUALIST CRITERION 127 
 
 to bring its contents into peaceable unity." If 
 one substitutes for the word " on " the word 
 " through," one gets a conception of theory and 
 of thinking that does justice to the autonomy 
 of the operation and yet so connects it with other 
 activities as to give it a serious business, real pur- 
 pose, and concrete responsibility and hence testi- 
 bility. From this point of view the theoretical 
 activity is simply the form that certain practical * 
 activities take after colliding, as the most effective 
 and fruitful way of securing their own harmoniza- 
 tion. The collision is not theoretical; the issue in 
 " peaceable unity " is not theoretical. But theory 
 names the type of activity by which the trans- 
 formation from war to peace is most amply and 
 securely effected. 1 
 
 Admit, however, the force of Mr. Bradley's 
 contention on its own terms and see how futile is 
 
 1 The same point comes out in Mr. Bradley's treatment 
 of the way in which the practical demand for the good or 
 satisfaction is to be taken account of in a philosophical con- 
 ception of the nature of reality. He admits that it comes 
 in; but holds that it enters not directly, but because if left 
 outside it indirectly introduces a feature of " discontent " 
 on the intellectual side (see p. 155). This, as an argument 
 for the supremacy of the isolated theoretical standard, loses 
 all its force if we cease to conceive of intellect as from 
 the start an independent function, and realize that intel- 
 lectual discontent is the practical conflict becoming deliber- 
 ately aware of itself as the most effective means of its own 
 rectification. 
 
I 
 
 128 THE INTELLECTUALIST CRITERION 
 
 the result. It is quite true, as Mr. Bradley says 
 (p. 153), that if a man sits down to play the meta- 
 physical game, he must abide by the rules of think- 
 ing; but if thinking be already, with respect to 
 reality, an idle and futile game, simply abiding 
 by the rules does not give additional value to its 
 stakes. Grant the premises as to the character 
 of thought, and the assertion of the final character 
 of the theoretical standard within metaphysics — 
 since metaphysics is a form of theory — is a warn- 
 ing against metaphysics. If the intellect involves 
 self-contradiction, it is either impossible that it 
 should be satisfied, or else self-contradiction is its 
 satisfaction. 
 
 II 
 
 Let us, however, turn from Mr. Bradley's formal 
 proof that the criterion of philosophic truth must 
 be exclusively a canon of formal thought. Let 
 us ignore the contradiction involved in first making 
 the work of thought to be the producing of 
 appearance and then making the law of this 
 thought the law of an Absolute Reality. What 
 about the intellectualist criterion ? The intellectu- 
 alism of Mr. Bradley's philosophy is represented 
 in the statement that it is " the theoretical stand- 
 ard which guarantees that reality is a self-consist- 
 ent system " (p. 148). But how can the fact that 
 
THE INTELLECTUALIST CRITERION 129 
 
 the criterion of thinking is consistency be employed 
 to determine the nature of the consistency of its 
 object? Consistency in one sense, consistency of 
 reasoning with itself, we know; but what is the 
 nature of the consistency of reality which this con- 
 sistency necessitates? Thinking without doubt 
 must be logical; but does it follow from this that 
 the reality about which one thinks, and about which 
 one must think consistently if one is to think to any 
 purpose, must itself be already logical? The pivot 
 of the argument is, of course, the old ontological 
 argument, stripped of all theological irrelevancies 
 and reduced to its fighting weight as a metaphys- 
 ical proposition. Those who question this basic 
 principle of intellectualism will, of course, question 
 it here. They will urge that, instead of the con- 
 sistency of " reality " resting on the basis of 
 consistency in the reasoning process the latter de- 
 rives its meaning from the material consistency at 
 which it aims. They will say that the definition 
 of the nature of the consistency which is the end 
 of thinking and which prescribes its technique is 
 to be reached from inquiry into such questions as 
 these: What sort of an activity in the concrete is 
 thinking? what are the specific conditions which it 
 has to fulfil? what is its use; its relevancy; its 
 purport in present concrete experiences? The 
 more it is insisted that the theoretical standard — 
 consistency — is final within theory, the more ger- 
 
I 
 
 130 THE INTELLECTUALIST CRITERION 
 
 mane and the more urgent is the question: What 
 then in the concrete is theory? and of what nature 
 is the material consistency which is the test of its 
 formal consistency ? 1 
 
 Take the instance of a man who wishes to deny 
 the criterion of self-consistency in thinking. Is 
 he refuted by pointing to the " fact " that eternal 
 reality is eternally self-consistent? Would not his 
 obvious answer to such a mode of refutation be: 
 " What of it ? What is the relevancy of that 
 proposition to my procedure in thinking here and 
 now? Doubtless absolute reality may be a great 
 number of things, possibly very sublime and pre- 
 cious things ; but what I am concerned with is a 
 particular job of thinking, and until you show me 
 the intermediate terms which link that job to the 
 asserted self-consistent character of absolute real- 
 ity, I fail to see what difference this doubtless 
 
 1 This suggests that many of the stock arguments against 
 pragmatism fail to take its contention seriously enough. 
 They proceed from the assumption that it is an account 
 of truth which leaves untouched current notions of the 
 nature of intelligence. But the essential point of prag- 
 matism is that it bases its changed account of truth on a 
 changed conception of the nature of intelligence, both as 
 to its objective and its method. Now this different account 
 of intelligence may be wrong, but controversy which leaves 
 standing the conventionally current theories about thought 
 and merely discusses " truth " will not go far. Since truth 
 is the adequate fulfilment of the function of intelligence, the 
 question turns on the nature of the latter. 
 
THE INTELLECTUALIST CRITERION 131 
 
 wholly amiable trait of reality has to make in what 
 I am here and now concerned with. You might as 
 well quote any other irrelevant fact, such as the 
 height of the Empress of China." We take an- 
 other tack in dealing with the man in question. 
 We call his attention to his specific aim in the situ- 
 ation with reference to which he is thinking, and 
 point out the conditions that have to be observed 
 if that aim is to fulfil itself. We show that if he 
 does not observe the conditions imposed by his aim 
 his thinking will go on so wildly as to defeat it- 
 self. It is to consistency of means with the end 
 of the concrete activity that we appeal. " Try 
 thinking," we tell such a man, " experiment with 
 it, taking pains sometimes to have your reasonings 
 consistent with one another, and at other times 
 deliberately introducing inconsistencies ; then see 
 what you get in the two cases and how the result 
 reached is related to your purpose in thinking." 
 We point out that since that purpose is to reach a 
 settled conclusion, that purpose will be defeated un- 
 less the steps of reasoning are kept consistent with 
 one another. We do not appeal from the mere con- 
 sistency of the reasoning process — the intellectual 
 aspect of the matter — to an absolute self-con- 
 sistent reality; but we appeal from the material 
 character of the end to be reached to the type of 
 the formal procedure necessary to accomplish it. 
 With all our heart, then, the standard of think- 
 
132 THE INTELLECTUALIST CRITERION 
 
 ing is absolute (that is final) within thinking. 
 But what is thinking? The standard of black- 
 smithing must be absolute within blacksmithing, 
 but what is blacksmithing? No prejudice pre- 
 vents acknowledging that blacksmithing is one 
 practical activity existing as a distinct and rele- 
 vant member of a like system of activities : that it 
 is because men use horses to transport persons and 
 goods that horses need to be shod. The ultimate 
 criterion of blacksmithing is producing a good 
 shoe, but the nature of a good shoe is fixed, 
 not by blacksmithing, but by the activities in 
 which horses are used. The end is ultimate (abso- 
 lute) for the operation, but this very finality is 
 evidence that the operation is not absolute and 
 self-inclosed, but is related and responsible. Why 
 must the fact that the end of thinking is ultimate 
 for thought stand on any different footing? 
 
 Let us then, by way of experiment, follow this 
 suggestion. Let us assume that among real objects 
 in their values and significances, real oppositions 
 and incompatibilities exist; that these conflicts are 
 both troublesome in themselves, and the source of 
 all manner of further difficulties — so much so that 
 they may be suspected of being the source of all 
 man's woe, of all encroachment upon and destruc- 
 tion of value, of good. Suppose that thinking 
 is, not accidentally but essentially, a way, and the 
 only way that proves adequate, of dealing with 
 
THE INTELLECTUALIST CRITERION 133 
 
 these predicaments — that being " in a hole," in « 
 difficulty, is the fundamental " predicament " of in- 
 telligence. Suppose when effort is made in a brute 
 way to remove these oppositions and to secure an 
 arrangement of things which means satisfaction, 
 fulfilment, happiness, that the method of brute at- 
 tack, of trying directly to force warrings into 
 peace fails ; suppose then an effort to effect the 
 transformation by an indirect method — by inquiry ■ 
 into the disordered state of affairs and by framing 
 views, conceptions, of what the situation would be 
 educed to harmonious order. Finally, 
 t upon this basis a plan of action 
 out, and that this plan, when carried into 
 succeeds infinitely better than the 
 of attack in bringing about the de- 
 an cd uuiiaummation. Suppose again this indirec- 
 tion of activity is precisely what we mean by think- 
 ing. Would it not hold that harmony is the end 
 and the test of thinking? that observations are per- 
 tinent and ideas correct just in so far as, overtly 
 acted upon, they succeed in removing the unde- 
 sirable, the inconsistent. 
 
 But, it is said, the very process of thinking makes 
 a certain assumption regarding the nature of real- 
 ity, viz., that reality is self-consistent. This state- 
 ment puts the end for the beginning. The assump- 
 tion is not that " reality " is self-consistent, but 
 that by thinking it may, for some special purpose,' 
 
134 THE INTELLECTUALIST CRITERION 
 
 or as respects some concrete problem, attain 
 greater consistency. Why should the assump- 
 tion regarding " reality " be other than that 
 specific realities with which thought is concerned 
 are capable of receiving harmonization? To say 
 that thought must assume, in order to go on, that 
 reality already possesses harmony is to say that 
 thought must begin by contradicting its own direct 
 data, and by assuming that its concrete aim is vain 
 and illusory. Why put upon thought the onus of 
 introducing discrepancies into reality in order just 
 to give itself exercise in the gymnastic of removing 
 them? The assumption that concrete thinking 
 makes about " reality " is that things just as they 
 exist may acquire through activity, guided by 
 thinking, a certain character which it is excellent 
 for them to possess ; and may acquire it more lib- 
 erally and effectively than by other methods. 
 One might as well say that the blacksmith could 
 not think to any effect concerning iron, without a 
 Platonic archetypal horseshoe, laid up in the 
 heavens. His thinking also makes an assumption 
 about present, given reality, viz., that this piece 
 of iron, through the exercise of intelligently di- 
 rected activity, may be shaped into a satisfactory 
 horseshoe. The assumption is practical: the as- 
 sumption that a specific thing may take on in a 
 specific way a specific needed value. The test, 
 moreover, of this assumption is practical; it con- 
 
THE INTELLECTUALIST CRITERION 135 
 
 sists in acting upon it to see if it will do what 
 it pretends it can do, namely, guide activities to 
 the required result. The assumption about reality 
 is not something in addition to the idea, which an 
 idea already in existence makes ; some assumption 
 about the possibility of a change in the state of 
 things as experienced is the idea — and its test or 
 criterion is whether this possible change can be 
 effected when the idea is acted upon in good 
 faith. 
 
 In any case, how much simpler the case becomes 
 when we stick by the empirical facts. According 
 to them there is no wholesale discrepancy of ex- 
 istence and meaning ; there is simply a " loosen- 
 ing " of the two when objects do not fulfil our 
 plans and meet our desires; or when we project 
 inventions and cannot find immediately the means 
 for their realization. The " collisions " are neither 
 physical, metaphysical, nor logical ; they are moral 
 and practical. They exist between an aim and 
 the means of its execution. Consequently the 
 object of thinking is not to effect some wholesale 
 and " Absolute " reconciliation of meaning and 
 existence, but to make a specific adjustment of 
 things to our purposes and of our purposes to 
 things at just the crucial point of the crisis. Mak- 
 ing the utmost concessions to Mr. Bradley's ac- 
 count of the discrepancy of meaning and existence 
 in our experience, to his statement of the relation 
 
136 THE INTELLECTUALIST CRITERION 
 
 of this to the function of judgment (as involving 
 namely an explicit statement at once of the actual 
 sundering and the ideal union) and to his account 
 of consistency as the goal and standard, there is 
 still not a detail of the account that is not met 
 amply and with infinitely more empirical warrant 
 by the conception that the " collision " in which 
 thinking starts and the " consistency " in which it 
 terminates are practical and human. 
 
 Ill 
 
 This brings us explicitly to the question of 
 truth, " truth " being confessedly the end and 
 standard of thinking. I confess to being much 
 at a loss to realize just what the intellectualists 
 conceive to be the relation of truth to ideas on one 
 side and to " reality " on the other. My difficulty 
 occurs, I think, because they describe so little in 
 analytical detail; in writing of truth they seem 
 rather to be under a strong emotional influence — 
 as if they were victims of an uncritical pragma- 
 tism — which leaves much of their thought to be 
 guessed at. The implication of their discussions 
 assigns three distinct values to the term " truth." 
 On the one hand, truth is something which char- 
 acterizes ideas, theories, hypotheses, beliefs, judg- 
 ments, propositions, assertions, etc., — anything 
 whatsoever involving intellectual statement. From 
 
THE INTELLECTUALIST CRITERION 137 
 
 this standpoint a criterion of truth means the test 
 of the worth of the intellectual intent, import, or 
 claim of any intellectual statement as intellectual. 
 This is an intelligible sense of the term truth. In 
 the second place, it seems to be assumed that a 
 certain kind of reality is already, apart from ideas 
 or meanings, Truth, and that this Truth is the 
 criterion of that lower and more unworthy kind 
 of truth that may be possessed or aimed at by 
 ideas. But we do not stop here. The conception 
 that all truth must have a criterion haunts the 
 intellectualist, so that the reality, which, as con- 
 trasted with ideas, is taken to be The Truth (and 
 the criterion of their truth) is treated as if it itself 
 had to have support and warrant from some other 
 Reality, lying back of it, which is its criterion. 
 This, then, gives the third type of truth, The 
 Absolute Truth, (Just why this process should 
 not go on indefinitely is not clear, but the neces- 
 sity of infinite regress may be emotionally pre- 
 vented by always referring to this last type of 
 truth as Absolute). Now this scheme may be 
 " true," but it is not self-explanatory or even 
 easily apprehensible. In just what sense, truth is 
 (1) that to which ideas as ideas lay claim and yet 
 is (2) Reality which as reality is the criterion of 
 truth of ideas, and yet again is (3) a Reality 
 which completely annuls and transcends all refer- 
 ence to ideas, is not in the least clear to me : nor, 
 
138 THE INTELLECTUALIST CRITERION 
 
 till better informed^ shall I believe it to be clear 
 to any one. 
 
 In his more strictly logical discussions, Mr. 
 Bradley sets out from the notion that truth refers 
 to intellectual statements and positions as such. 
 But the Truth soon becomes a sort of transcen- 
 dent essence on its own account. The identifica- 
 tion of reality and truth on page 146 may be a 
 mere casual phrase, but the distinction drawn be- 
 tween validity and absolute truth (p. 362), and the 
 discussion of Degrees of Truth and Reality, in- 
 volve assumptions of an identity of truth and 
 reality. Truth in this sense turns out to be the 
 criterion for the truth, the truth, that is, of ideas. 
 But, again (p. 545), a distinction is made between 
 " Finite Truth," that is, a view of reality which 
 would completely satisfy intelligence as such, and 
 " Absolute Truth," which is obtained only by 
 passing beyond intelligence — only when intelligence 
 as such is absorbed in some Absolute in which it 
 loses its distinctive character. 
 
 It would advance the state of discussion, I am 
 sure, if there were more explicit statements regard- 
 ing the relations of " true idea," " truth," " the 
 criterion of truth " and " reality," to one an- 
 other. A more explicit exposition also of the view 
 that is held concerning the relation of verification 
 and truth could hardly fail to be of value. Not 
 infrequently the intellectualist admits that the 
 
THE INTELLECTUALIST CRITERION 139 
 
 process of verification is experimental, consisting 
 in setting on foot various activities that express 
 the intent of the idea and confirm or refute it ac- 
 cording to the changes effected. This seems to 
 mean that truth is simply the tested or verified 
 belief as such. But then a curious reservation is 
 introduced; the experimental process finds, it is 
 said, that an idea is true, while the error of the 
 pragmatist is to take the process by which truth 
 is found as one by which it is made. The claim 
 of " making truth " is treated as blasphemy 
 against the very notion of truth : such are the con- 
 sequences of venturing to translate the Latin 
 " verification " into the English " making true." 
 If we face the bogie thus called up, it will be 
 found that the horror is largely sentimental. Sup- 
 pose we stick to the notion that truth is a char- 
 acter which belongs to a meaning so far as tested 
 through action that carries it to successful comple- 
 tion. In this case, to make an idea true is to 
 modify and transform it until it reaches this suc- 
 cessful outcome : until it initiates a mode of response 
 which in its issue realizes its claim to be the method 
 of harmonizing the discrepancies of a given situa- 
 tion. The meaning is remade by constantly acting 
 upon it, and by introducing into its content such 
 characters as are indicated by any resulting fail- 
 ures to secure harmony. From this point of view, 
 verification and truth are two names for the same 
 
140 THE INTELLECTUALIST CRITERION 
 
 thing. We call it " verification " when we regard 
 it as process ; when the development of the idea is 
 strung out and exposed to view in all that makes 
 it true. We call it " truth " when we take it as 
 product, as process telescoped and condensed. 
 
 Suppose the idea to be an invention, say of the 
 telephone. In this case, is not the verification of 
 the idea and the construction of the device which 
 carries out its intent one and the same? In this 
 case, does the truth of the idea mean anything 
 else than that the issue proves the idea can be 
 carried into effect? There are certain intellectu- 
 alists who are not of the absolutist type; who do 
 not believe that all of men's aims, designs, projects, 
 that have to do with action, whether industrial, 
 social, or moral in scope, have been from all 
 eternity registered as already accomplished in real- 
 ity. How do such persons dispose of this prob- 
 lem of the truth of practical ideas ? 
 
 Is not the truth of such ideas an affair of mak- 
 ing them true by constructing, through appropri- 
 ate behavior, a condition that satisfies the re- 
 quirements of the case? If, in this case, truth 
 means the effective capacity of the idea " to make 
 good," what is there in the logic of the case to 
 forbid the application of analogous considerations 
 to any idea? 
 
 I hear a noise in the street. It suggests as its 
 meaning a street-car. To test this idea I go to 
 
THE INTELLECTUALIST CRITERION 141 
 
 the window and through listening and looking in- 
 tently — the listening and the looking being modes 
 of behavior — organize into a single situation ele- 
 ments of existence and meaning which were previ- 
 ously disconnected. In this way an idea is made 
 true; that which was a proposal or hypothesis is 
 no longer merely a propounding or a guess. If I 
 had not reacted in a way appropriate to the idea 
 it would have remained a mere idea ; at most a 
 candidate for truth that, unless acted upon upon 
 the spot, would always have remained a theory. 
 Now in such a case — where the end to be accom- 
 plished is the discovery of a certain order of facts 
 — would the intellectualist claim that apart from 
 the forming and entertaining of some interpreta- 
 tion, the category of truth has either existence or 
 meaning? Will he claim that without an original 
 practical uneasiness introducing a practical aim of 
 inquiry there must have been, whether or no, an 
 idea? Must the world for some purely intellectual 
 reason be intellectually reduplicated? Could not 
 that occurrence which I now identify as a noisy 
 street-car have retained, so far as pure intelligence 
 is concerned, its unidentified status of being mere 
 physical alteration in a vast unidentified complex 
 of matter-in-motion ? Was there any intellectual 
 necessity that compelled the event to arouse just 
 this judgment, that it meant a street-car? Was 
 there any physical or metaphysical necessity? 
 
142 THE INTELLECTUALIST CRITERION 
 
 Was there any necessity save a need of characteriz- 
 ing it for some purpose of our own? And why 
 should we be mealy-mouthed about calling this 
 need practical? If the necessity which led to the 
 formation and development of an intellectual judg- 
 ment was purely objective (whether physical or 
 metaphysical) why should not the thing have also to 
 be characterized in countless millions of other ways ; 
 for example, as to its distance from some crater in 
 the moon, or its effect upon the circulation of my 
 blood, or upon my irascible neighbor's temper, or 
 bearing upon the Monroe Doctrine? In short, do 
 not intellectual positions and statements mean new 
 and significant events in the treatment of things? 
 It is perhaps dangerous to attempt to follow 
 the inner workings of the processes by which truth 
 is first identified with some superior type of Real- 
 ity, and then this Truth is taken as the criterion 
 of the truth of ideas ; while all the time it is held 
 that truth is something already possessed by ideas 
 as purely intellectual. But there seems to be some 
 ground for believing that this identification is due 
 to a twofold confusion, one having to do with ideas, 
 and the other with things. As to the first point : 
 After an idea is made true, we naturally say, in 
 retrospect, " it was true all the time." Now this 
 truism is quite innocuous as a truism, being just a 
 restatement of the fact that the idea has, as matter 
 of fact, worked successfully. But it may be re- 
 
THE INTELLECTUALIST CRITERION 143 
 
 garded not as a truism but as furnishing some ad- 
 ditional knowledge ; as if it were, indeed, the dawn- 
 ing of a revelation regarding truth. Then it is 
 said that the idea worked or was verified because 
 it was already inherently, just as idea, the truth; 
 the pragmatist, so it is said, making the error 
 of supposing that it is true because it works. If 
 one remembers that what the experimentalist means 
 is that the effective working of an idea and its 
 truth are one and the same thing — this working 
 being neither the cause nor the evidence of truth 
 but its nature — it is hard to see the point of this 
 statement. A man under peculiarly precarious 
 circumstances has been rescued from drowning. A 
 by-stander remarks that now he is a saved man. 
 " Yes," replies some one, " but he was a saved man 
 all the time, and the process of rescuing, while it 
 gives evidence of that fact, does not constitute it." 
 Now even such a statement as pure tautology, 
 as characterizing the entire process in terms of its 
 issue, is objectionable only in the fact that, like 
 all tautology, it seems to say something but does 
 not. But if it be regarded as revealing the earlier 
 condition of affairs, apart from the active process 
 by which it was carried to a happy conclusion, such 
 a statement would be monstrously false ; and would 
 declare its falsity in the fact that, if acted upon, 
 the man would have been left to drown. In like 
 fashion, to say, after the event, that a given idea 
 
144 THE INTELLECTUALIST CRITERION 
 
 was true all the time, is to lose sight of what makes 
 an idea an idea, its hypothetical character; and 
 thereby deliberately to transform it into brute 
 dogma — something to which no canon of verifica- 
 tion can ever be applied. The intellectualist al- 
 most always treats the pragmatic account as if it 
 were, from the standpoint of the pragmatist as well 
 as from his own, a denial of the existence of truth, 
 while it is nothing but a statement of its nature. 
 When the intellectualist realizes this, he will, I hope, 
 ask himself : What, then, on the pragmatic basis is 
 meant by the proposition that an idea is true all 
 the time? If the statement that an idea was true 
 all the time has no meaning except that the idea 
 was one which as matter of fact succeeded through 
 action in achieving its intent, mere reiteration that 
 the idea was true all the time or it could not have 
 succeeded, does not take us far. 1 
 
 1 Such a statement as, for example, Mr. Bradley's (Mind, 
 Vol. XIII., No. 51, N.S., p. 3, article on "Truth and 
 Practice ") " The idea works . . . but is able to work 
 because I have chosen the right idea" surely loses any 
 argumentative force it may seem to have, when it is recalled 
 that, upon the theory argued against, ability to work and 
 Tightness are one and the same thing. If the wording is 
 changed to read " The idea is able to work because I have 
 chosen an idea which is able to work" the question- 
 begging character of the implied criticism is evident. The 
 change of phraseology also may suggest the crucial and 
 pregnant question: How does any one know that an idea 
 is able to work excepting by setting it at work? 
 
THE INTELLECTUALIST CRITERION 145 
 
 On the side of things, reality is identified with 
 truth; then on the principle that two things 
 that are equal to the same thing are equal to 
 each other, truth as idea and truth as reality are 
 taken to be one and the same thing. Wherever 
 there is an improved or tested idea, an idea which 
 has made good, there is a concrete existence in the 
 way of a completed or harmonized situation. The 
 same activity which proves the idea constructs an 
 inherently satisfied situation out of an inherently 
 dissentient one, — for it is precisely the capacity 
 of the idea as an aim and method of action to 
 determine such transformation that is the cri- 
 terion of its truth. Now unless all the elements 
 in the situation are held steadily in view, the specific 
 way in which the harmonized reality affords the 
 criterion of truth (namely, through its function 
 of being the last term of a process of active de- 
 termination) is lost from sight; and the achieved 
 existence in its merely existent character, apart 
 from its practical or fulfilment character, is treated 
 as The Truth. But when the reality is thus sepa- 
 rated from the process by which it is achieved, 
 when it is taken just as given, it is neither truth 
 nor a criterion of truth. It is a state of facts like 
 any other. The achieved telephone is a criterion 
 of the validity of a certain prior idea in so far 
 as it is the fulfilment of activities that embody 
 the nature of that idea, but just as telephone, as 
 
146 THE INTELLECTUALIST CRITERION 
 
 a machine actually in existence, it is no more truth 
 nor criterion of truth than is a crack in the wall 
 or a cobble-stone on the street. 
 
 The intervening term that mediates and com- 
 pletes the confusion of truth with ideas on one 
 hand and " reality " on the other, is, I think, the 
 fact that ideas after they have been tested in action 
 are employed in the development and grounding of 
 further beliefs. There are cases in which an idea 
 ceases to exist as idea as soon as it is made true ; 
 this is so as matter of fact and it is impossible to 
 conceive any reason why it should not be so in point 
 of theory. Such is the case, I take it, with a large 
 part — possibly the major portion — of the ideas 
 that mediate the smaller and transient crises of 
 daily practice. I cannot imagine the situation in 
 which the truth to which I have referred above — 
 the verification of a certain idea about a certain 
 noise — would ever function again as truth — save 
 as I have given it a function in this paper by using 
 it as a corroboration of a certain theory. Such 
 ideas mostly cease, giving way to a matter-of- 
 fact status : say, the perception of the noisy street- 
 car. One at the time may say " My idea re- 
 garding that noise was a true idea w ; or one may 
 not even go so far as that, he may just stop with 
 the eventual perception. But the tested idea need 
 not ever recur as a factor of proof in any other 
 problem. Such, however, is conspicuously not 
 
THE INTELLECTUALIST CRITERION 147 
 
 the case with our scientific ideas. In its first 
 value, the idea or hypothesis of gravitation en- 
 tertained by Newton, stood, when verified, on 
 exactly the same level as the hypothesis regard- 
 ing the noise in the street. Theoretically, that 
 truth might have been so isolated that its truth 
 character would disappear from thought as 
 soon as a certain factual condition was ascer- 
 tained. But practically quite the opposite has 
 happened. The idea operates in many other in- 
 quiries, and operates no longer as mere idea, but 
 as proved idea. Such truths get an " eternal " 
 status — one irrespective of application just now 
 and here, because there are so many nows and heres 
 in which they are useful. Just as to say an idea 
 was true all the time is a way of saying in retro- 
 spect that it has come out in a certain fashion, 
 so to say that an idea is " eternally true " is to 
 indicate prospective modes of application which 
 are indefinitely anticipated. Its meaning, there- 
 fore, is strictly pragmatic. It does not indicate 
 a property inherent in the idea as intellectualized 
 existence, but denotes a property of use and 
 employment. Always at hand when needed is 
 a good enough eternal for reasonably minded 
 persons. 
 
148 THE INTELLECTUALIST CRITERION 
 
 IV 
 
 I have gone from the very general considerations 
 which occupied us in the earlier portions of this 
 article to matters which relatively at least are 
 specific. I conclude with a summary in the hope 
 that it may bind together the earlier and the later 
 parts of this paper. 
 
 1. The condition which antecedes and provokes 
 any particular exercise of reflective knowing is al- 
 ways one of discrepancy, struggle, " collision." 
 This condition is practical, for it involves the habits 
 and interests of the organism, an agent. This 
 does not mean that the struggle is merely personal, 
 or subjective, or psychological. The agent or 
 individual is one factor in the situation — not the 
 situation something subsisting in the individual. 
 The individual has to be identified in the situation, 
 before any situation can be referred — as in psy- 
 chology — to the individual. But the discrepancy 
 calls out and controls reflective knowing only as 
 * the fortunes of an agent are implicated in the 
 crisis. Certain elements stand out as obstacles, as 
 interferences, as deficiencies — in short as unsatis- 
 factory and as requiring something for their com- 
 pletion. Other elements stand out as wanted — as 
 required, as a satisfaction which does not exist. 
 This clash (an accompaniment of all desire) be- 
 tween the given and the wanted, between the pres- 
 
THE INTELLECTUALIST CRITERION 149 
 
 ent and the absent, is at once the root and the 
 type of that peculiar paradoxical relation between 
 existence and meaning which Bradley insists upon 
 as the essence of judgment. It is not irrational 
 in the sense that we are dealing with appearance 
 wholesale, but it is non-rational — an evidence that 
 we are dealing with a practical affair. 
 
 2. The intellectual or reflective and logical is a 
 statement of this conflict : an attempt to describe * 
 and define it. It is, as it were, the practical clash 
 held off at arm's length for inspection and in- 
 vestigation. In this way brute blind reaction 
 against the unsatisfactoriness of the situation is 
 suspended. Action is turned into the channel of 
 observing, of inferring, of reasoning, or defining 
 means and end. It is this change in the quality 
 of activity, from directly overt, to indirect, or in- 
 quiring with view to stating, that constitutes the 
 specific nature of reflective practice to which Mr. 
 Bradley calls attention. The discovery of the na- 
 ture of the conflict supplies materials for the fact 
 or existence side of the judgment. The concep- 
 tion or projection of the object in which the con- 
 flict would be terminated furnishes material for 
 the meaning side of the judgment. It is ideal 
 because anticipatory, just as the fact side is 
 existential, because reminiscent or recording. 
 Hence the two are necessarily both distin- 
 guished from and yet referred to each other : only 
 
150 THE INTELLECTUALIST CRITERION 
 
 through location of a problem can a solution be 
 conceived ; only in reference to the intent of finding 
 a solution can the elements of a problem be 
 selected and interpreted. In origin and in destiny, 
 this correlative determination of existence and 
 meaning is tentative and experimental. The aim 
 of the subject of the judgment is not to include all 
 possible reality, but to select those elements of a 
 
 « reality that are useful in locating the source and 
 nature of the difficulty in hand. The aim of the 
 predicate is not to bunch all possible meaning and 
 refer it in one final act indiscriminately to all ex- 
 istence, but to state the standpoint and method 
 through which the difficulty of the particular situa- 
 tion may most effectively be dealt with. The selec- 
 tion of what is relevant to the characterization of 
 the problem and the projection of the method of 
 dealing with it are theoretic, hypothetic, intel- 
 lectual: — that is, they are tentative ways of view- 
 ing the matter for the sake of guiding, economiz- 
 ing, and freeing the activities through which it may 
 really be dealt with. 
 
 3. The criterion of the worth of the idea is thus 
 the capacity of the idea (as a definition of the end 
 or outcome in terms of what is likely to be service- 
 able as a method) to operate in fulfilling the object 
 for the sake of which it was projected. Capacity 
 of operation in this fashion is the test, measure, or 
 
 - criterion of truth. Hence the criterion is practi- 
 
THE INTELLECTUALIST CRITERION 151 
 
 cal in the most overt sense of that term. We 
 may, if we choose, regard the object in which the 
 idea terminates through its use in guiding action, 
 as the criterion; but if we so choose, it is at our 
 peril that we forget that this object serves as 
 criterion in its capacity of fulfilment and not as 
 sheer objective existence. 
 
 4. Difficulties overlap ; problems recur which re- 
 semble each other in the kind of treatment they 
 demand for solution. Various modes of activity 
 with their respective ends, going on at some time 
 more or less independently, get organized into 
 single comprehensive systems of behavior. The so- 
 lution of one problem is found to create difficulties 
 elsewhere ; or the truth that is made in the solu- • 
 tion of one problem is found to afford an effective 
 method of dealing with questions arising appar- 
 ently from unallied sources. Thus certain tested 
 ideas in performing a constant or recurrent func- * 
 tion secure a certain permanent status. The pro- 
 spective use of such truths, the satisfaction that 
 we anticipate in their employ, the assurance of 
 control that we feel in their possession, becomes 
 relatively much more important than the circum- 
 stances under which they were first made true. In 
 becoming permanent resources, such tested ideas - 
 get a generalized energy of position. They are 
 truths in general, truths " in themselves " or in the 
 abstract, truths to which positive value is assigned 
 
152 THE INTELLECTUALIST CRITERION 
 
 on their own account. Such truths are the " eter- 
 nal truths " of current discussion. They naturally 
 and properly add to their intellectual and to their 
 practical worth a certain esthetic quality. They 
 are interesting to contemplate, and their con- 
 templation arouses emotions of admiration and 
 reverence. To make these emotions the basis of 
 assigning peculiar inherent sanctity to them apart 
 from their warrant in use, is simply to give way 
 to that mood which in primitive man is the cause 
 of attributing magical efficacy to physical things. 
 Esthetically such truths are more than instrumen- 
 talities. But to ignore both the instrumental and 
 the esthetic aspect, and to ascribe values due to an 
 instrumental and esthetic character to some in- 
 terior and a priori constitution of truth is to make 
 fetishes of them. 
 
 We may not exaggerate the permanence and 
 stability of such truths with respect to their re- 
 curring and prospective use. It is only relatively 
 that they are unchanging. When applied to new 
 cases, used as resources for coping with new diffi- 
 culties, the oldest of truths are to some extent 
 remade. Indeed it is only through such applica- 
 tion and such remaking that truths retain their 
 freshness and vitality. Otherwise they are rele- 
 gated to faint reminiscences of an antique tradi- 
 tion. Even the truth that two and two make four 
 has gained a new meaning, has had its truth in 
 
 
THE INTELLECTUALIST CRITERION 153 
 
 some degree remade, in the development of the 
 modern theory of number. If we put ourselves in 
 the attitude of a scientific inquirer in asking what 
 is the meaning of truth per se, there spring up 
 before us those ideas which are actively employed 
 in the mastery of new fields, in the organization 
 of new materials. This is the essential difference 
 between truth and dogma ; between the living and 
 the dead and decaying. Above all, it is in the 
 region of moral truth that this perception stands 
 out. Moral truths that are not recreated in appli- ' 
 cation to the urgencies of the passing hour, no mat- 
 ter how true in the place and time of their origin, 
 are pernicious and misleading, i.e., false. And it 
 is perhaps through emphasizing this fact, embodied 
 in one form or another in every system of morals 
 and in every religion of moral import, that one 
 most readily realizes the character of truth. 
 
A SHORT CATECHISM CONCERNING 
 TRUTH x 
 
 PUPIL. I am desirous, respected teacher, of 
 forming an independent judgment concern- 
 ing the novel theory of truth that you are said 
 to profess. My eagerness is whetted because the 
 theory as expounded to me by my old teacher, 
 Professor Purus Intellectus, so obviously contra- 
 venes common sense, science, and philosophy that I 
 do not understand how it can be advanced in good 
 faith by any reasonable man. 
 
 Teacher. As you are already somewhat ac- 
 quainted with the theory (or at least with what 
 it purports to be) , perhaps if you will set forth in 
 order your objections, it will appear that the 
 theory that you are acquainted with is not ad- 
 vanced by any reasonable persons, and that by 
 understanding the theory as it is you will also be 
 led to embrace it. 
 
 Pupil: Objection One. Pragmatism makes 
 truth a subjective affair, namely the satisfaction 
 afforded individuals by ideas, while everybody 
 
 1 A paper read in the spring of 1909 before the Philo- 
 sophical Club of Smith College and not previously published. 
 
 154 
 
 
A CATECHISM CONCERNING TRUTH 155 
 
 knows that the truth of ideas depends upon their 
 relation to things. 
 
 Teacher: Reply. If I were to reply that I 
 hold to existences independent of ideas, existences 
 prior to, synchronous with, and subsequent to ideas, 
 that might seem to you to express only my personal 
 opinion and to have no logical connection with 
 pragmatism. So I beg to remind you that, ac- 
 cording to pragmatism, ideas (judgments and 
 reasonings being included for convenience in this 
 term) are attitudes of response taken toward ex- 
 tra-ideal, extra-mental things. Instinct and habit 
 express, for instance, modes of response, but modes 
 inadequate for a progressive being, or for adapta- 
 tion to an environment presenting novel and un- 
 mastered features. Under such conditions, ideas 
 are their surrogates. The origin of an idea is thus 
 in some empirical, extra-mental situation which 
 provokes ideas as modes of response, while their 
 meaning is found in the modifications — the " differ- 
 ences " — they make in this extra-mental situation. 
 Their validity is in turn measured by their capac- 
 ity to effect the transformation they intend. 
 Origin, content, and value — all alike are extra- 
 ideational. The satisfaction upon which the 
 pragmatist dwells is just the better adjustment of 
 living beings to their environment effected by 
 transformations of the environment through form- 
 ing and applying ideas. 
 
156 A CATECHISM CONCERNING TRUTH 
 
 Pupil: Objection Two. But, as I understand 
 it and as you have yourself confessed in your lan- 
 guage, these external things, while they may be 
 external to the particular idea in question, are em- 
 pirical; they are just other experiences and so 
 mental after all. You hold, I have been informed, 
 that truth is an experienced relation, instead of 
 a relation between experience and what transcends 
 it; why then be mealy-mouthed (pardon my eager- 
 ness if it leads me astray) in admitting that the 
 whole business is intra-mental? 
 
 Teacher: Reply. Your objection combines and 
 confuses two things. To disentangle them is to 
 answer the objection. (1) The notion of trans- 
 cendence has a double meaning; first, it denotes 
 that which lies inherently and essentially beyond 
 experience. It is interesting to note that the op- 
 ponents of pragmatism have been forced by the 
 exigencies of their hostility to resuscitate a doc- 
 trine supposedly dead: the doctrine of unexperi- 
 enceable, unknowable " Things in Themselves. 5 ' 
 And as if this were not enough, they identify Truth 
 with relationship to this unknowable. Thereby 
 in behalf of the notion of Truth in general, they 
 land in scepticism with reference to the possibility 
 of any truth in particular. The pragmatist is 
 bound to deny such transcendence. (2) That he is 
 thereby landed in pure subjectivism or the reduc- 
 tion of every existence to the purely mental, follows 
 
A CATECHISM CONCERNING TRUTH 157 
 
 only if experience means only mental states. The 
 critic appears to hold the Humian doctrine that 
 experience is made up of states of mind, of sensa- 
 tions and ideas. It is then for him to decide how, 
 on his basis, he escapes subjective idealism, or 
 " mentalism." The pragmatist starts from a much 
 more commonplace notion of experience, that of 
 the plain man who never dreams that to experience 
 a thing is first to destroy the thing and then to 
 substitute a mental state for it. More particu- 
 larly, the pragmatist has insisted that experience 
 is a matter of functions and habits, of active ad- 
 justments and re-adjustments, of co-ordinations 
 and activities, rather than of states of conscious- 
 ness. To criticise the pragmatist by reading into 
 him exactly the notion of experience that he denies 
 and replaces, may be psychological and unregener- 
 ately " pragmatic," but it is hardly " intellectual." 
 Pupil: Objection Three. You remind me, curi- 
 ously enough, of a contention of my old instructor 
 to the effect that the pragmatist, when criticised, 
 always shifts his ground. To avoid solipsism and 
 subjectivism, he falls back on things independent 
 of ideas, adducing them in order to pass upon the 
 truth or falsity of the latter. But thereby he only 
 covertly recognizes the intellectualistic standard. 
 Thus he swings unevenly between a denial of sci- 
 ence and a clamorous reiteration, in new phrase- 
 ology, of what all philosophers hold. 
 
158 A CATECHISM CONCERNING TRUTH 
 
 Teacher: Reply. Your words have indeed a 
 familiar sound. Apparently, the average intel- 
 lectualist has got so accustomed to taking truth 
 as a Relation at Large, without specification or 
 analysis, that any attempt at a concrete statement 
 of just what the relationship is appears to be a 
 denial of the relation itself; in which case, he in- 
 terprets an occasional reminder from the prag- 
 matist that the latter is, after all, attempting to 
 specify the nature of the relation, to be a sur- 
 render of the pragmatist's own case, since it ad- 
 mits after all that there is some relation ! 
 
 However that may be, the pragmatist holds that 
 the relation in question is one of correspondence 
 between existence and thought ; but he holds that 
 correspondence instead of being an ultimate and 
 unanalyzable mystery, to be defined by iteration, 
 is precisely a matter of cor-respondence in its 
 plain, familiar sense. A condition of dubious and 
 conflicting tendencies calls out thinking as a method 
 of handling it. This condition produces its own 
 appropriate consequences, bearing its own fruits 
 of weal and woe. The thoughts, the estimates, 
 intents, and projects it calls out, just because 
 they are attitudes of response and of attempted 
 adjustment {not mere " states of consciousness "), 
 produce their effects also. The kind of interlock- 
 ing, of inter adjustment that then occurs between 
 these two sorts of consequences constitutes the 
 
A CATECHISM CONCERNING TRUTH 159 
 
 correspondence that makes truth, just as failure to 
 respond to each other, to work together, consti- 
 tutes mistake and error — mishandling and wan- 
 dering. This account may, of course, be wrong — 
 may involve a maladjustment of consequences — 
 but the error in the account, if it exists, must be 
 specific and empirical, and cannot be located by 
 general epistemological accusations. 
 
 Pupil: Objection Four. Well, even admitting 
 this version of pragmatism, you cannot deny it 
 still contravenes common sense ; for, according to 
 you, the correspondence that constitutes truth does 
 not exist till after ideas have worked, while common 
 sense perceives and knows that it is the antecedent 
 agreement of the ideas with reality that enables 
 them to work. If you make the truth of the ex- 
 istence of a Carboniferous age, or the landing of 
 Columbus in 1492, depend upon a future working 
 of an idea about them, you commit yourself to the 
 most fantastic of philosophies. 
 
 Teacher: Reply. May I recall to your atten- 
 tion the accusation of " shifting ground " when 
 hard pressed? The intellectualist began, if I re- 
 member correctly, with conceiving truth as a re- 
 lation of thought and existence ; has he not, in your 
 last objection, substituted for this conception an 
 identification of the bare existence or event with 
 truth? Which does he mean? How will he have 
 it? The existence of the Carboniferous age, the 
 
160 A CATECHISM CONCERNING TRUTH 
 
 discovery of America by Columbus are not truths ; 
 they are events. Some conviction, some belief, 
 some judgment with reference to them is necessary 
 to introduce the category of truth and falsity. 
 And since the conviction, the judgment, is as mat- 
 ter of fact subsequent to the event, how can its 
 truth consist in the kind of blank, wholesale rela- 
 tionship the intellectualist contends for? How 
 can the present belief jump out of its present 
 skin, dive into the past, and land upon just the 
 one event (that as past is gone forever) which, by 
 definition, constitutes its truth? I do not wonder 
 the intellectualist has much to say about " trans- 
 cendence " when he comes to dealing with the truth 
 of judgments about the past; but why does he 
 not tell us how we manage to know when one 
 thought lands straight on the devoted head of 
 something past and gone, while another thought 
 comes down on the wrong thing in the past? 
 
 Pupil. Well, of course, knowledge of the past 
 is very mysterious, but how is the pragmatist 
 any better off? 
 
 Teacher. The reply to that may be inferred 
 from what has already been said. The past event 
 has left effects, consequences, that are present 
 and that will continue in the future. Our belief 
 about it, if genuine, must also modify action in 
 some way and so have objective effects. If these 
 two sets of effects interlock harmoniously, then the 
 
A CATECHISM CONCERNING TRUTH 161 
 
 judgment is true. If perchance the past event 
 had no discoverable consequences or our thought of 
 it can work out to no assignable difference any- 
 where, then there is no possibility of genuine judg- 
 ment. 
 
 Pupil. You have, perhaps, anticipated my next 
 objection, which was that upon the pragmatic 
 theory (by which truth is constituted by future 
 consequences) there are no truths about what is 
 past and gone, since in respect to that ideas can 
 make no difference. For, I suppose, you would 
 say that the difference made is in the effects that 
 continue, since ideas may work out to facilitate or 
 to confuse our relations to these effects. Never- 
 theless, I am not quite satisfied. For when I say 
 it is true that it rained yesterday, surely the 
 object of my judgment is something past, not 
 future, while pragmatism makes all objects of 
 judgment future. 
 
 Teacher: Reply. You confuse the content of 
 a judgment with the reference of that content. 
 The content of any idea about yesterday's rain 
 certainly involves past time, but the distinctive 
 or characteristic aim of judgment is none the 
 less to give this content a future reference and 
 function. 
 
 Pupil: Objection Five. But your argument re- 
 quires an absurd identification of truth and veri- 
 fication. To verify ideas is to find out that they 
 
162 A CATECHISM CONCERNING TRUTH 
 
 were already true ; or possessed of the truth rela- 
 tion prior to its discovery in verification. But the 
 pragmatist holds that the act of finding out that 
 ideas are true creates the thing that is found. 
 In short, you confuse the psychology of finding 
 out with the reality found out. 
 
 Teacher: Reply. Many intellectualists have 
 now gone so far as to admit that verification is 
 the testing of a judgment by the consequence it 
 imports, the difference it makes — its working. But 
 they still deny any organic connection between the 
 " antecedent " truth property of ideas and the 
 verification (or " making true ") process. Surely 
 they admit either too much or too little, (i) If 
 an idea about a past event is already true because 
 of some mysterious static correspondence that 
 it possesses to that past event, how in the world 
 can its truth be proved by the future consequences 
 of that idea? Why is it that the intellectualist 
 has not produced any positive theory about the 
 relation of verification to his notion of truth? 
 (ii) Moreover, if verification consists in the ex- 
 perimental working out of a belief, the intellectu- 
 alist thereby admits that his own theory of truth 
 can be known to be true only as it is verified by its 
 workings. But if the theory that truth is a ready- 
 made static property of judgments is true, how 
 in the world can it be verified by making any spe- 
 cific differences in the course of events? Every- 
 
A CATECHISM CONCERNING TRUTH 163 
 
 where we have to proceed as if the pragmatic 
 theory were the right one. (iii) If he admits 
 that the pragmatic theory of verification is true, 
 what meaning remains to the statement that the 
 idea had the truth property in advance? Why, 
 simply that it had the property of ability to work 
 — an ability revealed by its actual working. How 
 can a given fact be an objection to the pragmatic 
 theory when that fact has a definitely assignable 
 meaning on the pragmatic theory, while upon the 
 anti-pragmatic theory it just has to be accepted 
 as an ultimate, unanalyzable fact? 
 
 As to your remark about verification being 
 merely psychological, I have something to say. 
 Colleagues of mine are steadily at work in various 
 laboratories on various researches, forming 
 hypotheses, experimenting, testing, corroborating, 
 refuting, modifying ideas. One of them, for ex- 
 ample, recently put an immense pendulum in place 
 in order to repeat and test Foucault's experiment 
 with reference to the earth's rotation. Do you re- 
 gard such verification processes as merely psycho- 
 logical? 
 
 Pupil. I don't know. Why do you ask? 
 
 Teacher. Because if the objector means that 
 such experimental provings are merely psycholog- 
 ical, he has of course relegated to the merely psy- 
 chological (wherever that may be) all the tech- 
 nique of all the physical sciences — a rather high 
 
164 A CATECHISM CONCERNING TRUTH 
 
 price to pay for the confutation of the pragma- 
 tist. The intellectualist is thus in the dilemma 
 either of conceding to the pragmatist the whole 
 sphere of concrete scientific logic or else of himself 
 regarding all science as merely subjective? Which 
 horn does he choose? 
 
 Pupil: Objection Six. I noticed a moment 
 ago that you spoke of the pragmatic theory of 
 truth being true. Surely the pragmatist does not 
 live up to his reputation of having a sense of 
 humor when he claims assent to his theory on the 
 ground that it is true. What is this but to admit 
 intellectualism ? 
 
 Teacher: Reply. My son, we are evidently 
 nearing the end. Naturally, the pragmatist claims 
 his theory to be true in the pragmatic sense of 
 truth: it works, it clears up difficulties, removes 
 obscurities, puts individuals into more experi- 
 mental, less dogmatic, and less arbitrarily sceptical 
 relations to life ; aligns philosophic with scientific 
 method; does away with self-made problems of 
 epistemology ; clarifies and reorganizes logical the- 
 ory, etc. He is quite content to have the truth 
 of his theory consist in its working in these various 
 ways, and to leave to the intellectualist the proud 
 possession of a static, unanalyzable, unverifiable, 
 unworking property. 
 
 Pupil: Objection Seven. Nevertheless, the prag- 
 matist is always appealing to the judgments of 
 
A CATECHISM CONCERNING TRUTH 165 
 
 others to corroborate his own judgment. Surely 
 this admits the principle of a judgment that is 
 correct, true, in se. 
 
 Teacher: Reply. The pragmatist says that 
 judgment is pragmatic, i.e., originated under con- 
 ditions of need for a survey and statement, and 
 tested by efficiency in meeting this need. And 
 then you think you have refuted him by saying 
 that any appeal to judgment is intellectualistic ! 
 Such begging of the question convinces me that 
 the radical difficulty of the intellectualist is that 
 he conceives of the pragmatist as beginning with 
 a theory of truth, when in reality the latter begins 
 with a theory about judgments and meanings of 
 which the theory of truth is a corollary. 
 
 Pupil: Objection Eight. Nevertheless, you are 
 endeavoring to convert your opponent to a certain 
 theory. Surely that is an intellectual undertak- 
 ing, and in theory (at least) the theoretical cri- 
 terion, as Mr. Bradley has well said, must be 
 supreme. 
 
 Teacher: Reply. A little reflection will convince 
 you that you are going around in the same old 
 circle. Since men have to act together, since the 
 individual subsists in social bonds and activities, 
 to convert another to a certain way of looking 
 at things is to make social ties and functions better 
 adapted, more prosperous in their workings. Only 
 if the pragmatist held the intellectualisfs position, 
 
166 A CATECHISM CONCERNING TRUTH 
 
 would he appeal to other than what is ultimately 
 a practical need and a practical criterion in en- 
 deavoring to convert others. 
 
 Pupil: Objection Nine. Still the pragmatic 
 criterion, being satisfactory working, is purely 
 personal and subjective. Whatever works so as 
 to please me is true. Either this is your result (in 
 which case your reference to social relations only 
 denotes at bottom a number of purely subjectivistic 
 satisfactions) or else you unconsciously assume an 
 intellectual department of our nature that has 
 to be satisfied; and whose satisfaction is truth. 
 Thereby you admit the intellectualistic criterion. 
 Teacher: Reply. We seem to have got back 
 to our starting-point, the nature of satisfaction. 
 The intellectualist seems to think that because the 
 pragmatist insists upon the factor of human want, 
 purpose, and realization in the making and testing 
 of judgments, the impersonal factor is therefore 
 denied. But what the pragmatist does is to insist 
 that the human factor must work itself out in 
 I co-operation with the environmental factor, and 
 that their co-adaptation is both " correspondence " 
 and " satisfaction." As long as the human factor 
 is ignored and denied, or is regarded as merely 
 psychological (whatever, once more, that means), 
 this human factor will assert itself in irresponsible 
 ways. So long as, particularly in philosophy, a 
 flagrantly unchastened pragmatism reigns, we 
 
A CATECHISM CONCERNING TRUTH 167 
 
 shall find, as at present, the most ambitious intel- 
 lectualistic systems accepted simply because of the 
 personal comfort they yield those who contrive 
 and accept them. Once recognize the human fac- 
 tor, and pragmatism is at hand to insist that the 
 believer must accept the full consequences of his 
 beliefs, and that his beliefs must be tried out, 
 through acting upon them, to discover what is 
 their meaning or consequence. Till so tested, he 
 insists that beliefs, no matter how noble and seem- 
 ingly edifying, are dogmas, not truths. Till the 
 testing has been worked out very completely and 
 patiently, he holds his beliefs as but provisional, 
 as working hypotheses, as methods : — and he recog- 
 nizes the probability that, as additional modes of 
 testing develop, more and more so-called truths 
 will be relegated to the category of working hypo- 
 theses — till the dogmatic mind is crowded out and 
 starved out. At present, the ignoring by philos- 
 ophers of the part played by personal education, 
 temperament, and preference in their philosophies 
 is the chief source of pretentiousness and insin- 
 cerity in their systems, and is the ground of the 
 popular disregard for them. 
 
 Pupil. What you say calls to mind something 
 of Chesterton's that I read recently : " I agree with 
 the pragmatists that apparent objective truth is 
 not the whole matter ; that there is an authoritative 
 need to believe the things that are necessary to 
 
168 A CATECHISM CONCERNING TRUTH 
 
 the human mind. But I say that one of those 
 necessities precisely is a belief in objective truth. 
 Pragmatism is a matter of human needs and one 
 of the first of human needs is to be something more 
 than a pragmatist." You would say, if I under- 
 stand you aright, that to fall back upon a sup- 
 posed necessity of the " human mind " to believe 
 in certain absolute truths, is to evade a proper 
 demand for testing the human mind and all its 
 works. 
 
 Teacher. My son, I am glad to leave the last 
 word with you. This enfant terrible of intellectu- 
 alism has revealed that the chief objection of abso- 
 lutists to the pragmatic doctrine of the personal 
 (or "subjective") factor in belief is that the 
 pragmatist has spilled the personal milk in the 
 absolutist's cocoanut. 
 
BELIEFS AND EXISTENCES 
 
 BELIEFS look both ways, towards persons and 
 toward things. They are the original Mr. 
 Facing-both-ways. They form or judge — justify 
 or condemn — the agents who entertain them and 
 who insist upon them. They are of things whose 
 immediate meanings form their content. To be- 
 lieve is to ascribe value, impute meaning, assign 
 import. The collection and interaction of these' 
 appraisals and assessments is the world of the 
 common man, — that is, of man as an individual 
 and not as a professional being or class specimen. 
 Thus things are characters, not mere entities ; they 
 
 1 Read as the Presidential Address at the fifth annual 
 meeting of the American Philosophical Association, at Cam- 
 bridge, December 28, 1905, and reprinted with verbal re- 
 visions from the Philosophical Review, Vol. XV., March, 
 1906. The substitution of the word "Existences" for the 
 word " Realities " (in the original title) is due to a sub- 
 sequent recognition on my part that the eulogistic historic 
 associations with the word " Reality " (against which the 
 paper was a protest) infected the interpretation of the 
 paper itself, so that the use of some more colorless word 
 was desirable. 
 
 169 
 
170 BELIEFS AND EXISTENCES 
 
 behave and respond and provoke. In the behavior 
 that exemplifies and tests their character, they 
 help and hinder ; disturb and pacify ; resist and 
 comply; are dismal and mirthful, orderly and 
 deformed, queer and commonplace ; they agree and 
 disagree ; are better and worse. 
 
 Thus the human world, whether or no it have 
 core and axis, has presence and transfiguration. 
 It means here and now, not in some transcendent 
 sphere. It moves, of itself, to varied incremental 
 meaning, not to some far off event, whether divine 
 or diabolic. Such movement constitutes conduct, 
 for conduct is the working out of the commitments 
 of belief. That believed better is held to, asserted, 
 affirmed, acted upon. The moments of its crucial 
 fulfilment are the natural " transcendentals " ; the 
 decisive, the critical, standards of further estima- 
 tion, selection, and rejection. That believed worse 
 is fled, resisted, transformed into an instrument for 
 the better. Characters, in being condensations of 
 belief, are thus at once the reminders and the 
 prognostications of weal and woe ; they concrete 
 and they regulate the terms of effective apprehen- 
 sion and appropriation of things. This general 
 regulative function is what we mean in calling 
 them characters, forms. 
 
 For beliefs, made in the course of existence, 
 reciprocate by making existence still farther, by 
 developing it. Beliefs are not made by existence 
 
BELIEFS AND EXISTENCES 171 
 
 in a mechanical or logical or psychological sense. 
 " Reality " naturally instigates belief. It ap- 
 praises itself and through this self-appraisal man- 
 ages its affairs. As things are surcharged valua- 
 tions, so " consciousness " means ways of believing 
 and disbelieving. It is interpretation ; not merely 
 existence aware of itself as fact, but existence dis- 
 cerning, judging itself, approving and disapprov- 
 ing. 
 
 This double outlook and connection of belief, its 
 implication, on one side, with beings who suffer 
 and endeavor, and, its complication on the other, 
 with the meanings and worths of things, is its glory 
 or its unpardonable sin. We cannot keep con- 
 nection on one side and throw it away on the 
 other. We cannot preserve significance and de- 
 cline the personal attitude in which it is inscribed 
 and operative, any more than we can succeed in 
 making things " states " of a " consciousness " 
 whose business is to be an interpretation of things. 
 Beliefs are personal affairs, and personal affairs 
 are adventures, and adventures are, if you please, 
 shady. But equally discredited, then, is the uni- 
 verse of meanings. For the world has meaning 
 as somebody's, somebody's at a juncture, taken for 
 better or worse, and you shall not have completed 
 your metaphysics till you have told whose world 
 is meant and how and what for — in what bias and 
 to what effect. Here is a cake that is had only 
 
172 BELIEFS AND EXISTENCES 
 
 by eating it, just as there is digestion only for 
 life as well as by life. 
 
 So far the standpoint of the common man. 
 But the professional man, the philosopher, has been 
 largely occupied in a systematic effort to discredit 
 the standpoint of the common man, that is, to 
 disable belief as an ultimately valid principle. Phi- 
 losophy is shocked at the frank, almost brutal, 
 evocation of beliefs by and in natural existence, 
 like witches out of a desert heath — at a mode of 
 production which is neither logical, nor physical, 
 nor psychological, but just natural, empirical. 
 For modern philosophy is, as every college senior 
 recites, epistemology ; and epistemology, as per- 
 haps our books and lectures sometimes forget to tell 
 the senior, has absorbed Stoic dogma. Passionless 
 imperturbability, absolute detachment, complete 
 subjection to a ready-made and finished reality — 
 physical it may be, mental it may be, logical it may 
 be — is its professed ideal. Forswearing the reality 
 of affection, and the gallantry of adventure, the 
 genuineness of the incomplete, the tentative, it has 
 taken an oath of allegiance to Reality, objective, 
 universal, complete; made perhaps of atoms, per- 
 haps of sensations, perhaps of logical meanings. 
 This ready-made reality, already including every- 
 thing, must of course swallow and absorb belief, 
 must produce it psychologically, mechanically, or 
 logically, according to its own nature ; must in any 
 
BELIEFS AND EXISTENCES 173 
 
 case, instead of acquiring aid and support from 
 belief, resolve it into one of its own preordained 
 creatures, making a desert and calling it harmony, 
 unity, totality. 1 
 
 Philosophy has dreamed the dream of a knowl- 
 edge which is other than the propitious outgrowth 
 of beliefs that shall develop aforetime their ul- 
 terior implications in order to recast them, to 
 rectify their errors, cultivate their waste places, 
 heal their diseases, fortify their feeblenesses : — the 
 dream of a knowledge that has to do with objects 
 having no nature save to be known. 
 
 Not that their philosophers have admitted the 
 concrete realizability of their scheme. On the 
 
 1 Since writing the above I have read the following words 
 of a candidly unsympathetic friend of philosophy: " Neither 
 philosophy nor science can institute man's relation to the 
 universe, because such reciprocity must have existed before 
 any kind of science or philosophy can begin; since each 
 investigates phenomena by means of the intellect, and in- 
 dependent of the position and feeling of the investigator; 
 whereas the relation of man to the universe is defined, not 
 by the intellect alone, but by his sensitive perception aided 
 by all his spiritual powers. However much one may assure 
 and instruct a man that all real existence is an idea, that 
 matter is made up of atoms, that the essence of life is cor- 
 porality or will, that heat, light, movement, electricity, are 
 different manifestations of one and the same energy, one 
 cannot thereby explain to a being with pains, pleasures, 
 hopes, and fears his position in the universe." Tolstoi, essay 
 on " Religion and Morality," in " Essays, Letters, and Mis- 
 cellanies." 
 
174 BELIEFS AND EXISTENCES 
 
 contrary, the assertion of the absolute " Reality M 
 of what is empirically unrealizable is a part of the 
 scheme; the ideal of a universe of pure, cogni- 
 tional objects, fixed elements in fixed relations. 
 Sensationalist and idealist, positivist and trans- 
 cendentalist, materialist and spiritualist, defining 
 this object in as many differing ways as they have 
 different conceptions of the ideal and method of 
 knowledge, are at one in their devotion to an iden- 
 tification of Reality with something that connects 
 monopolistically with passionless knowledge, belief 
 purged of all personal reference, origin, and out- 
 look. 1 
 
 What is to be said of this attempt to sever the 
 cord which naturally binds together personal atti- 
 tudes and the meaning of things? This much at 
 least : the effort to extract meanings, values, from 
 the beliefs that ascribe them, and to give the 
 former absolute metaphysical validity while the 
 latter are sent to wander as scapegoats in the wil- 
 
 1 Hegel may be excepted from this statement. The habit 
 of interpreting Hegel as a Neo-Kantian, a Kantian en- 
 larged and purified, is a purely Anglo-American habit. 
 This is no place to enter into the intricacies of Hegelian 
 exegesis, but the subordination of both logical meaning and 
 of mechanical existence to Geistj to life in its own develop- 
 ing movement, would seem to stand out in any unbiased 
 view of Hegel. At all events, I wish to recognize my own 
 personal debt to Hegel for the view set forth in this paper, 
 without, of course, implying that it represents Hegel's own 
 intention. 
 
BELIEFS AND EXISTENCES 175 
 
 derness of mere phenomena, is an attempt, which, 
 as long as " our interest's on the dangerous edge 
 of things," will attract an admiring, even if sus- 
 picious, audience. Moreover, we may admit that 
 the attempt to catch the universe of immediate 
 experience, of action and passion, coming and 
 going, to damn it in its present body in order ex- 
 pressly to glorify its spirit to all eternity, to vali- 
 date the meaning of beliefs by discrediting their 
 natural existence, to attribute absolute worth to 
 the intent of human convictions just because of 
 the absolute worthlessness of their content — that 
 the performance of this feat of virtuosity has 
 developed philosophy to its present wondrous, if 
 formidable, technique. 
 
 But can we claim more than a succes d'estime? 
 Consider again the nature of the effort. The 
 world of immediate meanings, of the world em- 
 pirically sustained in beliefs, is to be sorted out 
 into two portions, metaphysically discontinuous, 
 one of which shall alone be good and true " Real- 
 ity," the fit material of passionless, beliefless knowl- 
 edge ; while the other part, that which is excluded, 
 shall be referred exclusively to belief and treated 
 as mere appearance, purely subjective, impressions 
 or effects in consciousness, or as that ludicrously 
 abject modern discovery — an epiphenomenon. 
 And this division into the real and the unreal is 
 accomplished by the very individual whom his own 
 
176 BELIEFS AND EXISTENCES 
 
 " absolute " results reduce to phenomenality, in 
 terms of the very immediate experience which is 
 infected with worthlessness, and on the basis of 
 preference, of selection that are declared to be 
 unreal ! Can the thing be done ? 
 
 Anyway, the snubbed and excluded factor may 
 always reassert itself. The very pushing it out 
 of " Reality " may but add to its potential energy, 
 and invoke a more violent recoil. When affections 
 and aversions, with the beliefs in which they record 
 themselves and the efforts they exact, are re- 
 duced to epiphenomena, dancing an idle attendance 
 upon a reality complete without them, to which 
 they vainly strive to accommodate themselves by 
 mirroring, then may the emotions flagrantly burst 
 forth with the claim that, as a friend of mine puts 
 - it, reason is only a fig leaf for their nakedness. 
 When one man says that need, uncertainty, choice, 
 novelty, and strife have no place in Reality, which 
 is made up wholly of established things behaving 
 by foregone rules, then may another man be pro- 
 voked to reply that all such fixities, whether named 
 atoms or God, whether they be fixtures of a sensa- 
 tional, a positivistic, or an idealistic system, have 
 existence and import only in the problems, needs, 
 struggles, and instrumentalities of 'conscious 
 agents and patients. For home rule may be found 
 in the unwritten efficacious constitution of ex- 
 perience. 
 
BELIEFS AND EXISTENCES 177 
 
 That contemporaneously we are in the presence 
 of such a reaction is apparent. Let us, in pursuit 
 of our topic, inquire how it came about and why 
 it takes the form that it takes. This considera- 
 tion may not only occupy the hour, but may help 
 diagram some future parallelogram of forces. 
 The account calls for some sketching (1) of the 
 historical tendencies which have shaped the situa- 
 tion in which a Stoic theory of knowledge claims 
 metaj'iysical monopoly, and (2) of the tendencies 
 that have furnished the despised principle of be- 
 lief opportunity and means of reassertion. 
 
 II 
 
 Imagination readily travels to a period when a 
 gospel of intense, and, one may say, deliberate 
 passionate disturbance appeared to be conquering 
 the Stoic ideal of passionless reason ; when the de- 
 mand for individual assertion by faith against the 
 established, embodied objective order was seem- 
 ingly subduing the idea of the total subordination 
 of the individual to the universal. By what course 
 of events came about the dramatic reversal, in 
 which an ethically conquered Stoicism became the 
 conqueror, epistemologically, of Christianity? 
 
 How are our imaginations haunted by the idea 
 of what might have happened if Christianity had 
 
178 BELIEFS AND EXISTENCES 
 
 found ready to its hand intellectual formula- 
 tions corresponding to its practical proclama- 
 tions ! 
 
 That the ultimate principle of conduct is affec- 
 tional and volitional ; that God is love ; that access 
 to the principle is by faith, a personal attitude; 
 that belief, surpassing logical basis and warrant, 
 works out through its own operation its own ful- 
 filling evidence : such was the implied moral meta- 
 physic of Christianity. But this implication needed 
 to become a theory, a theology, a formulation; 
 and in this need, it found no recourse save to 
 philosophies that had identified true existence with 
 the proper object of logical reason. For, in 
 Greek thought, after the valuable meanings, the 
 meanings of industry and art that appealed to sus- 
 tained and serious choice, had given birth and 
 status to reflective reason, reason denied its an- 
 cestry of organized endeavor, and proclaimed itself 
 in its function of self-conscious logical thought to 
 be the author and warrant of all genuine things. 
 Yet how nearly Christianity had found prepared 
 for it the needed means of its own intellectual 
 statement ! We recall Aristotle's account of moral 
 knowing, and his definition of man. Man as man, 
 he tells us, is a principle that may be termed 
 either desiring thought or thinking desire. Not 
 as pure intelligence does man know, but as an 
 organization of desires effected through reflection 
 
BELIEFS AND EXISTENCES 179 
 
 upon their own conditions and consequences. What 
 if Aristotle had only assimilated his idea of theo- 
 retical to his notion of practical knowledge ! Be- 
 cause practical thinking was so human, Aristotle 
 rejected it in favor of pure, passionless cognition, 
 something superhuman. Thinking desire is ex- 
 perimental, is tentative, not absolute. It looks to 
 the future and to the past for help in the future. 
 It is contingent, not necessary. It doubly relates 
 to the individual: to the individual thing as ex- 
 perienced by an individual agent ; not to the uni- 
 versal. Hence desire is a sure sign of defect, of 
 privation, of non-being, and seeks surcease in 
 something which knows it not. Hence desiring 
 reason culminating in beliefs relating to imperfect 
 existence, stands forever in contrast with passion- 
 less reason functioning in pure knowledge, logic- 
 ally complete, of perfect being. 
 
 I need not remind you how through Neo-Platon- 
 ism, St. Augustine, and the Scholastic renaissance, 
 these conceptions became imbedded in Christian 
 philosophy ; and what a reversal occurred of the 
 original practical principle of Christianity. Be- 
 lief is henceforth important because it is the mere 
 antecedent in a finite and fallen world, a temporal 
 and phenomenal world infected with non-being, of 
 true knowledge to be achieved only in a world 
 of completed Being. Desire is but the self-con- 
 sciousness of defect striving to its own termination 
 
180 BELIEFS AND EXISTENCES 
 
 in perfect possession, through perfect knowledge of 
 perfect being. I need not remind you that the 
 prima facie subordination of reason to authority, 
 of knowledge to faith, in the medieval code, is, after 
 all, but the logical result of the doctrine that man 
 as man (since only reasoning desire) is merely 
 phenomenal; and has his reality in God, who as 
 God is the complete union of rational insight and 
 being — the term of man's desire, and the fulfilment 
 of his feeble attempts at knowing. Authority, 
 " faith " as it then had to be conceived, meant just 
 that this Being comes externally to the aid of man, 
 otherwise hopelessly doomed to misery in long 
 drawn out error and non-being, and disciplines 
 him till, in the next world under more favoring 
 auspices, he may have his desires stilled in good, 
 and his faith may yield to knowledge: — for we 
 forget that the doctrine of immortality was not an 
 appendage, but an integral part of the theory that 
 since knowledge is the true function of man, happi- 
 ness is attained only in knowledge, which itself 
 exists only in achievement of perfect Being or God. 
 For my part, I can but think that medieval 
 absolutism, with its provision for authoritative 
 supernatural assistance in this world and assertion 
 of supernatural realization in the next, was more 
 logical, as well as more humane, than the modern 
 absolutism, that, with the same logical premises, 
 bids man find adequate consolation and support in 
 
BELIEFS AND EXISTENCES 181 
 
 the fact that, after all, his strivings are already 
 eternally fulfilled, his errors already eternally 
 transcended, his partial beliefs already eternally 
 comprehended. 
 
 The modern age is marked by a refusal to be 
 satisfied with the postponement of the exercise and 
 function of reason to another and supernatural 
 sphere, and by a resolve to practise itself upon its 
 present object, nature, with all the joys thereunto 
 appertaining. The pure intelligence of Aristotle, 
 thought thinking itself, expresses itself as free 
 inquiry directed upon the present conditions of its 
 own most effective exercise. The principle of the 
 inherent relation of thought to being was pre- 
 served intact, but its practical locus was moved 
 down from the next world to this. Spinoza's 
 " God or Nature " is the logical outcome ; as is also 
 his strict correlation of the attribute of matter with 
 the attribute of thought; while his combination 
 of thorough distrust of passion and faith with 
 complete faith in reason and all-absorbing passion 
 for knowledge is so classic an embodiment of the 
 whole modern contradiction that it may awaken ad- 
 miration where less thorough-paced formulations 
 call out irritation. 
 
 In the practical devotion of present intelligence 
 to its present object, nature, science was born, 
 and also its philosophical counterpart, the theory 
 of knowledge. Epistemology only generalized in 
 
182 BELIEFS AND EXISTENCES 
 
 its loose, although narrow and technical way, the 
 question practically urgent in Europe: How is 
 science possible? How can intelligence actively 
 and directly get at its object? 
 
 Meantime, through Protestantism the values, 
 the meanings formerly characterizing the next life 
 (the opportunity for full perception of perfect 
 being), were carried over into present-day emo- 
 tions and responses. 
 
 The dualism between faith authoritatively sup- 
 ported as the principle of this life, and knowledge 
 supernaturally realized as the principle of the next, 
 was transmuted into the dualism between intelli- 
 gence now and here occupied with natural things, 
 and the affections and accompanying beliefs, now 
 and here realizing spiritual worths. For a time 
 this dualism operated as a convenient division of 
 labor. Intelligence, freed from responsibility for 
 and preoccupation with supernatural truths, could 
 occupy itself the more fully and efficiently with the 
 world that now is ; while the affections, charged 
 with the values evoked in the medieval discipline, 
 entered into the present enjoyment of the delecta- 
 tions previously reserved for the saints. Direct- 
 ness took the place of systematic intermediation; 
 the present of the future; the individual's emo- 
 tional consciousness of the supernatural institu- 
 tion. Between science and faith, thus conceived, a 
 bargain was struck. Hands off; each to his own, 
 
BELIEFS AND EXISTENCES 183 
 
 was the compact ; the natural world to intelligence, 
 the moral, the spiritual world to belief. This 
 (natural) world for knowledge; that (supernatu- 
 ral) world for belief. Thus the antithesis, unex- 
 pressed, ignored, within experience, between belief 
 and knowledge, between the purely objective values 
 of thought and the personal values of passion and 
 volition, was more fundamental, more determining, 
 than the opposition, explicit and harassing, within 
 knowledge, between subject and object, mind and 
 matter. 
 
 This latent antagonism worked out into the 
 open. In scientific detail, knowledge encroached 
 upon the historic traditions and opinions with 
 which the moral and religious life had identified 
 itself. It made history to be as natural, as much 
 its spoil, as physical nature. It turned itself upon 
 man, and proceeded remorselessly to account for 
 his emotions, his volitions, his opinions. Knowl- 
 edge, in its general theory, as philosophy, went 
 the same way. It was pre-committed to the old 
 notion: the absolutely real is the object of knowl- 
 edge, and hence is something universal and im- 
 personal. So, whether by the road of sensational- 
 ism or rationalism, by the path of mechanicalism or 
 objective idealism, it came about that concrete 
 selves, specific feeling and willing beings, were 
 relegated with the beliefs in which they declare 
 themselves to the " phenomenal." 
 
184 BELIEFS AND EXISTENCES 
 
 III 
 
 So much for the situation against which some 
 contemporary tendencies are a deliberate protest. 
 
 What of the positive conditions that give us 
 not mere protest, like the unreasoning revolt of 
 heart against head found at all epochs, but some- 
 thing articulate and constructive? The field is 
 only too large, and I shall limit myself to the 
 evolution of the knowledge standpoint itself. I 
 shall suggest, first, that the progress of intelligence 
 directed upon natural materials has evolved a pro- 
 cedure of knowledge that renders untenable the 
 inherited conception of knowledge; and, secondly, 
 that this result is reinforced by the specific results 
 of some of the special sciences. 
 
 1. First, then, the very use of the knowledge 
 standpoint, the very expression of the knowledge 
 preoccupation, has produced methods and tests 
 that, when formulated, intimate a radically differ- 
 ent conception of knowledge, and of its relation to 
 existence and belief, than the orthodox one. 
 
 The one thing that stands out is that thinking 
 is inquiry, and that knowledge as science is the 
 outcome of systematically directed inquiry. For 
 a time it was natural enough that inquiry should 
 be interpreted in the old sense, as just change of 
 subjective attitudes and opinions to make them 
 square up with a " reality " that is already there 
 
BELIEFS AND EXISTENCES 185 
 
 in ready-made, fixed, and .finished form. The 
 rationalist had one notion of the reality, i.e., that it 
 was of the nature of laws, genera, or an ordered 
 system, and so thought of concepts, axioms, etc., 
 as the indicated modes of representation. The 
 empiricist, holding reality to be a lot of little dis- 
 crete particular lumps, thought of disjointed sen- 
 sations as its appropriate counterpart. But 
 both alike were thorough conformists. If " real- 
 ity " is already and completely given, and if knowl- 
 edge is just submissive acceptance, then, of course, 
 inquiry is only a subjective change in the human 
 " mind " or in " consciousness," — these being sub- 
 jective and "unreal." 
 
 But the very development of the sciences served 
 to reveal a peculiar and intolerable paradox. 
 Epistemology, having condemned inquiry once for 
 all to the region of subjectivity in an invidious 
 sense, finds itself in flat opposition in principle and 
 in detail to the assumption and to the results of the 
 sciences. Epistemology is bound to deny to the 
 results of the special sciences in detail any ulterior 
 objectivity just because they always are in a proc- 
 ess of inquiry — in solution. While a man may not 
 be halted at being told that his mental activities, 
 since his, are not genuinely real, many men will 
 draw violently back at being told that all the dis- 
 coveries, conclusions, explanations, and theories of 
 the sciences share the same fate, being the products 
 
186 BELIEFS AND EXISTENCES 
 
 of a discredited mind. And, in general, epistemol- 
 ogy, in relegating human thinking as inquiry to a 
 merely phenomenal region, makes concrete approx- 
 imation and conformity to objectivity hopeless. 
 Even if it did square itself up to and by " reality " 
 it never could be sure of it. The ancient myth of 
 Tantalus and his effort to drink the water before 
 him seems to be ingeniously prophetic of modern 
 epistemology. The thirstier, the needier of truth 
 the human mind, and the intenser the efforts put 
 forth to slake itself in the ocean of being just 
 beyond the edge of consciousness, the more surely 
 the living waters of truth recede ! 
 
 When such self-confessed sterility is joined with 
 consistent derogation of all the special results of 
 the special sciences, some one is sure to raise the cry 
 of " dog in the manger," or of " sour grapes." A 
 revision of the theory of thinking, of inquiry, would 
 seem to be inevitable ; a revision which should cease 
 trying to construe knowledge as an attempted ap- 
 proximation to a reproduction of reality under con- 
 ditions that condemn it in advance to failure; a 
 revision which should start frankly from the fact 
 of thinking as inquiring, and purely external re- 
 alities as terms in inquiries, and which should con- 
 strue validity, objectivity, truth, and the test and 
 system of truths, on the basis of what they actu- 
 ally mean and do within inquiry. 
 
 Such a standpoint promises ample revenge for 
 
BELIEFS AND EXISTENCES 187 
 
 the long damnation and longer neglect to which 
 the principle of belief has been subjected. The 
 whole procedure of thinking as developed in those 
 extensive and intensive inquiries that constitute 
 the sciences, is but rendering into a systematic 
 technique, into an art deliberately and delightfully 
 pursued, the rougher and cruder means by which 
 practical human beings have in all ages worked 
 out the implications of their beliefs, tested them, 
 and endeavored in the interests of economy, effi- 
 ciency, and freedom, to render them coherent with 
 one another. Belief, sheer, direct, unmitigated 
 belief, reappears as the working hypothesis ; 
 action that at once develops and tests belief re- 
 appears in experimentation, deduction, demon- 
 stration ; while the machinery of universals, axioms, 
 a priori truths, etc., becomes a systematization of 
 the way in which men have always worked out, in 
 anticipation of overt action, the implications of 
 their beliefs, with a view to revising them, in the 
 interests of obviating unfavorable, and securing 
 welcome consequences. Observation, with its ma- 
 chinery of sensations, measurements, etc., is the 
 resurrection of the way in which agents have always 
 faced and tried to define the problems that face 
 them ; truth is the union of abstract postulated 
 meanings and of concrete brute facts in a way 
 that circumvents the latter by judging them from 
 a new standpoint, while it tests concepts by using 
 
188 BELIEFS AND EXISTENCES 
 
 them as methods in the same active experience. 
 It all comes to experience personally conducted 
 and personally consummated. 
 
 Let consciousness of these facts dawn a little 
 more brightly over the horizon of epistemological 
 prejudices, and it will be seen that nothing pre- 
 vents admitting the genuineness both of thinking 
 activities and of their characteristic results, ex- 
 cept the notion that belief itself is not a genuine 
 ingredient of existence — a notion which itself is not 
 only a belief, but a belief which, unlike the convic- 
 tions of the common man and the hypotheses of 
 science, finds its proud proof in the fact that it 
 does not demean itself so unworthily as to work. 
 
 Once believe that beliefs themselves are as 
 " real " as anything else can ever be, and we have 
 a world in which uncertainty, doubtfulness, really 
 inhere; and in which personal attitudes and re- 
 sponses are real both in their own distinctive ex- 
 istence, and as the only ways in which an as yet 
 undetermined factor of reality takes on shape, 
 meaning, value, truth. If " to wilful men the in- 
 juries that they themselves procure, must be their 
 schoolmasters " — and all beliefs are wilful — then 
 by the same token the propitious evolutions of 
 meaning, which wilful men secure to an expectant 
 universe, must be their compensation and their 
 justification. In a doubtful and needy universe 
 elements must be beggarly, and the development 
 
BELIEFS AND EXISTENCES 189 
 
 of personal beliefs into experimentally executed 
 systems of actions, is the organized bureau of 
 philanthropy which confers upon a travailing uni- 
 verse the meaning for which it cries out. The 
 apostrophe of the poet is above all to man the 
 thinker, the inquirer, the knower: 
 
 O Dreamer! O Desirer, goer down 
 Unto untraveled seas in untried ships, 
 O crusher of the unimagined grape, 
 On unconceived lips. 
 
 2. Biology, psychology, and the social sciences 
 proffer an imposing body of concrete facts that 
 also point to the rehabilitation of belief — to the 
 interpretation of knowledge as a human and prac- 
 tical outgrowth of belief, not to belief as the state 
 to which knowledge is condemned in a merely finite 
 and phenomenal world. I need not, as I cannot, 
 here summarize the psychological revision which 
 the notions of sensation, perception, conception, 
 cognition in general have undergone, all to one in- 
 tent. " Motor " is writ large on their face. The 
 testimony of biology is unambiguous to the effect 
 that the organic instruments of the whole intel- 
 lectual life, the sense-organs and brain and their 
 connections, have been developed on a definitely 
 practical basis and for practical aims, for the 
 purpose of such control over conditions as will 
 sustain and vary the meanings of life. The his- 
 
190 BELIEFS AND EXISTENCES 
 
 toric sciences are equally explicit in their evidence 
 that knowledge as a system of information and 
 instruction is a cooperative social achievement, 
 at all times socially toned, sustained, and directed ; 
 and that logical thinking is a reweaving through 
 individual activity of this social fabric at such 
 points as are indicated by prevailing needs and 
 aims. 
 
 This bulky and coherent body of testimony is 
 not, of course, of itself philosophy. But it sup- 
 plies, at all events, facts that have scientific back- 
 ing, and that are as worthy of regard as the facts 
 pertinent to any science. At the present time these 
 facts seem to have some peculiar claim just be- 
 cause they present traits largely ignored in prior 
 philosophic formulations, while those belonging to 
 mathematics and physics have so largely wrought 
 their sweet will on systems. Again, it would seem 
 as if in philosophies built deliberately upon the 
 knowledge principle, any body of known facts 
 should not have to clamor for sympathetic atten- 
 tion. 
 
 Such being the case, the reasons for ruling 
 psychology and sociology and allied sciences out of 
 competency to give philosophic testimony have 
 more significance than the bare denial of juris- 
 diction. They are evidences of the deep-rooted 
 preconception that whatever concerns a particular 
 conscious agent, a wanting, struggling, satisfied 
 
BELIEFS AND EXISTENCES 191 
 
 and dissatisfied being, must of course be only " phe- 
 nomenal " in import. 
 
 This aversion is the more suggestive when the 
 professed idealist appears as the special champion 
 of the virginity of pure knowledge. The idealist, 
 so content with the notion that consciousness de- 
 termines reality, provided it be done once for all, 
 at a jump and in lump, is so uneasy in presence 
 of the idea that empirical conscious beings genu- 
 inely determine existences now and here! One is 
 reminded of the story told, I think, by Spencer. 
 Some committee had organized and contended, 
 through a long series of parliaments, for the 
 passage of a measure. At last one of their meet- 
 ings was interrupted with news of success. Con- 
 sternation was the result. What was to become 
 of the occupation of the committee? So, one asks, 
 what is to become of idealism at large, of the 
 wholesale unspecifiable determination of " reality " 
 by or in " consciousness," if specific conscious be- 
 ings, John Smiths, and Susan Smiths (to say noth- 
 ing of their animal relations), beings with bowels 
 and brains, are found to exercise influence upon 
 the character and existence of reals? 
 
 One would be almost justified in construing 
 idealism as a Pickwickian scheme, so willing is it to 
 idealize the principle of intelligence at the expense 
 of its specific undertakings, were it not that this 
 reluctance is the necessary outcome of the Stoic 
 
I 
 
 192 BELIEFS AND EXISTENCES 
 
 basis and tenor of idealism — its preoccupation 
 with logical contents and relations in abstraction 
 from their situs and function in conscious living 
 beings. 
 
 IV 
 
 I have suggested to you the naive conception of 
 the relation of beliefs to realities : that beliefs are 
 themselves real without discount, manifesting their 
 reality in the usual proper way, namely, by modify- 
 ing and shaping the reality of other things, so that 
 they connect the bias, the preferences and affec- 
 tions, the needs and endeavors of personal lives 
 with the values, the characters ascribed to things : 
 — the latter thus becoming worthy of human ac- 
 quaintance and responsive to human intercourse. 
 This was followed by a sketch of the history of 
 thought, indicating how beliefs and all they in- 
 sinuate were subjected to preconceived notions of 
 knowledge and of " reality " as a monopolistic pos- 
 session of pure intellect. Then I traced some of 
 the motifs that make for reconsideration of the 
 supposed uniquely exclusive relation of logical 
 knowledge and " reality " ; motifs that make for a 
 less invidiously superior attitude towards the con- 
 victions of the common man. 
 
 In concluding, I want to say a word or two to 
 mitigate — for escape is impossible — some misun- 
 
BELIEFS AND EXISTENCES 193 
 
 derstandings. And, to begin with, while possible 
 doubts inevitably troop with actual beliefs, the doc- 
 trine in question is not particularly sceptical. The 
 radical empiricist, the humanist, the pragmatist, 
 label him as you will, believes not in fewer but in 
 more " realities " than the orthodox philosophers 
 warrant. He is not concerned, for example, in 
 discrediting objective realities and logical or uni- 
 versal thinking; he is interested in such a reinter- 
 pretation of the sort of " reality " which these 
 things possess as will accredit, without deprecia- 
 tion, concrete empirical conscious centers of action 
 and passion. 
 
 My second remark is to the opposite effect. The 
 intent is not especially credulous, although it starts 
 from and ends with the radical credulity of all 
 knowledge. To suppose that because the sciences 
 are ultimately instrumental to human beliefs, we 
 are therefore to be careless of the most exact possi- 
 ble use of extensive and systematic scientific 
 methods, is like supposing that because a watch is 
 made to tell present time, and not to be an exem- 
 plar of transcendent, absolute time, watches might 
 as well be made of cheap stuffs, casually wrought 
 andclumsily put together. It is the task of telling 
 present time, with all its urgent implications, that 
 brings home, steadies, and enlarges the responsi- 
 bility for the best possible use of intelligence, the 
 instrument. 
 
194 BELIEFS AND EXISTENCES 
 
 For one, I have no interest in the old, old scheme 
 of derogating from the worth of knowledge in 
 order to give an uncontrolled field for some special 
 beliefs to run riot in, — be these beliefs even faith 
 in immortality, in some special sort of a Deity, 
 or in some particular brand of freedom. Any one 
 of our beliefs is subject to criticism, revision, and 
 even ultimate elimination through the development 
 of its own implications by intelligently directed 
 action. Because reason is a scheme of working out 
 the meanings of convictions in terms of one an- 
 other and of the consequences they import in 
 further experience, convictions are the more, not 
 the less, amenable and responsible to the full exer- 
 cise of reason. 1 
 
 Thus we are put on the road to that most de- 
 
 1 There will of course come in time with the development 
 of this point of view an organon of beliefs. The signs of 
 a genuine as against a simulated belief will be studied; 
 belief as a vital personal reaction will be discriminated from 
 habitual, incorporate, unquestioned (because unconsciously 
 exercised) traditions of social classes and professions. In 
 his " Will to Believe " Professor James has already laid 
 down two traits of genuine belief (viz., " forced option," 
 and acceptance of responsibility for results) which are 
 almost always ignored in criticisms (really caricatures) of 
 his position. In the light of such an organon, one might 
 come to doubt whether belief in, say, immortality (as dis- 
 tinct from hope on one side and a sort of intellectual bal- 
 ance of probability of opinion on the other) can genuinely 
 exist at all. 
 
BELIEFS AND EXISTENCES 195 
 
 sirable thing, — the union of acknowledgment of 
 moral powers and demands with thoroughgoing 
 naturalism. No one really wants to lame man's 
 practical nature; it is the supposed exigencies of 
 natural science that force the hand. No one 
 really bears a grudge against naturalism for the 
 sake of obscurantism. It is the need of some sacred 
 reservation for moral interests that coerces. We" 
 all want to be as naturalistic as we can be. But 
 the " can be " is the rub. If we set out with a 
 fixed dualism of belief and knowledge, then the 
 uneasy fear that the natural sciences are going to 
 encroach and destroy " spiritual values " haunts 
 us. So we build them a citadel and fortify it ; 
 that is, we isolate, professionalize, and thereby 
 weaken beliefs. But if beliefs are the most natu- 
 ral, and in that sense, the most metaphysical of 
 all things, and if knowledge is an organized tech- 
 nique for working out their implications and in- 
 terrelations, for directing their formation and em- 
 ploy, how unnecessary, how petty the fear and the 
 caution. Because freedom of belief is ours, free 
 thought may exercise itself; the freer the thought 
 the more sure the emancipation of belief. Hug 
 some special belief and one fears knowledge; be- 
 lieve in belief and one loves and cleaves to knowl- 
 edge. 
 
 We have here, too, the possibility of a common 
 understanding, in thought, in language, in outlook, 
 
196 BELIEFS AND EXISTENCES 
 
 of the philosopher and the common man. What 
 would not the philosopher give, did he not have 
 to part with some of his common humanity in order 
 to join a class? Does he not always, when chal- 
 lenged, justify himself with the contention that all 
 men naturally philosophize, and that he but does 
 in a conscious and orderly way what leads to 
 harm when done in an indiscriminate and irreg- 
 ular way? If philosophy be at once a natural his- 
 tory and a logic — an art — of beliefs, then its tech- 
 nical justification is at one with its human justi- 
 fication. The natural attitude of man, said Emer- 
 son, is believing ; " the philosopher, after some 
 struggle, having only reasons for believing." Let 
 the struggle then enlighten and enlarge beliefs ; 
 let the reasons kindle and engender new beliefs. 
 
 Finally, it is not a solution, but a problem which 
 is presented. As philosophers, our disagreements 
 as to conclusions are trivial compared with our dis- 
 agreement as to problems. To see the problem 
 another sees, in the same perspective and at the 
 same angle — that amounts to something. Agree- 
 ment in solutions is in comparison perfunctory. 
 To experience the same problem another feels — 
 that perhaps is agreement. In a world where dis- 
 tinctions are as invidious as comparisons are odi- 
 ous, and where intellect works only by comparison 
 and distinction, pray what is one to do? 
 
 But beliefs are personal matters, and the person, 
 
BELIEFS AND EXISTENCES 197 
 
 we may still believe, is social. To be a man is to 
 be thinking desire ; and the agreement of desires is 
 not in oneness of intellectual conclusion, but in the 
 sympathies of passion and the concords of action : 
 — and yet significant union in affection and be- 
 havior may depend upon a consensus in thought 
 that is secured only by discrimination and com- 
 parison. 
 
EXPERIENCE AND OBJECTIVE 
 IDEALISM x 
 
 IDEALISM as a philosophic system stands in 
 such a delicate relation to experience as to in- 
 vite attention. In its subjective form, or sensa- 
 tionalism, it claims to be the last word of empiri- 
 cism. In its objective, or rational form, it claims 
 to make good the deficiencies of the subjective type, 
 by emphasizing the work of thought that supplies 
 the factors of objectivity and universality lacking 
 in sensationalism. With reference to experience 
 as it now is, such idealism is half opposed to em- 
 piricism and half committed to it, — antagonistic, 
 so far as existing experience is regarded as tainted 
 with a sensational character; favorable, so far as 
 this experience is even now prophetic of some final, 
 all-comprehensive, or absolute experience, which 
 in truth is one with reality. 
 
 That this combination of opposition to present 
 experience with devotion to the cause of experience 
 
 1 Reprinted, with slight verbal changes, from the Flftilo- 
 sophical Review, Vol. XV. (1906). 
 
 198 
 
EXPERIENCE AND IDEALISM 199 
 
 in the abstract leaves objective idealism in a posi- 
 tion of unstable equilibrium from which it can find 
 release only by euthanasia in a thorough-going 
 empiricism seems evident. Some of the reasons for 
 this belief may be readily approached by a sum- 
 mary sketch of three historic episodes in which have 
 emerged important conceptions of experience and 
 its relation to reason. The first takes us to classic 
 Greek thought. Here experience means the preser- 
 vation, through memory, of the net result of a mul- 
 tiplicity of particular doings and sufferings ; a 
 preservation that affords positive skill in main- 
 taining further practice, and promise of success in 
 new emergencies. The craft of the carpenter, the 
 art of the physician are standing examples of its 
 nature. It differs from instinct and blind routine 
 or servile practice because there is some knowledge 
 of materials, methods, and aims, in their adjust- 
 ment to one another. Yet the marks of its passive, 
 habitual origin are indelibly stamped upon it. On 
 the knowledge side it can never aspire beyond opin- 
 ion, and if true opinion be achieved, it is only by 
 happy chance. On the active side it is limited to 
 the accomplishment of a special work or a particu- 
 lar product, following some unjustified, because 
 assumed, method. Thus it contrasts with the true * 
 knowledge of reason, which is direct apprehension, 
 self-revealing and self-validating, of an eternal 
 and harmonious content. The regions in winch 
 
200 EXPERIENCE AND IDEALISM 
 
 experience and reason respectively hold sway are 
 thus explained. Experience has to do with pro- 
 duction, which, in turn, is relative to decay. It 
 deals with generation, becoming, not with finality, 
 being. Hence it is infected with the trait of rela- 
 tive non-being, of mere imitativeness ; hence its 
 multiplicity, its logical inadequacy, its relativity 
 to a standard and end beyond itself. Reason, per 
 contra, has to do with meaning, with significance 
 (ideas, forms), that is eternal and ultimate. Since 
 the meaning of anything is the worth, the good, 
 the end of that thing, experience presents us with 
 partial and tentative efforts to achieve the em- 
 bodiment of purpose, under conditions that doom 
 the attempt to inconclusiveness. It has, how- 
 ever, its meed of reality in the degree in which 
 its results participate in meaning, the good, 
 reason. 
 
 From this classic period, then, comes the an- 
 tithesis of experience as the historically achieved 
 embodiments of meaning, partial, multiple, inse- 
 , cure, to reason as the source, author, and con- 
 " tainer of meaning, permanent, assured, unified. 
 Idealism means ideality, experience means brute 
 and broken facts. That things exist because of 
 and for the sake of meaning, and that experience 
 gives us meaning in a servile, interrupted, and 
 inherently deficient way — such is the standpoint. 
 Experience gives us meaning in process of be- 
 
EXPERIENCE AND IDEALISM 201 
 
 coming; special and isolated instances in which it 
 happens, temporally, to appear, rather than mean- 
 ing pure, undefiled, independent. Experience pre- 
 sents purpose, the good, struggling against obsta- " 
 cles, "involved in matter." 
 
 Just how much the vogue of modern neo-Kan- 
 tian idealism, professedly built upon a strictly epis- 
 temological instead of upon a cosmological basis, 
 is due, in days of a declining theology, to a vague 
 sense that affirming the function of reason in the 
 constitution of a knowable world (which in its own 
 constitution as logically knowable may be, morally 
 and spiritually, anything you please), carries with 
 it an assurance of the superior reality of the good ^ 
 and the beautiful as well as of the " true," it would 
 be hard to say. Certainly unction seems to have 
 descended upon epistemology, in apostolic succes- 
 sion, from classic idealism ; so that neo-Kantianism 
 is rarely without a tone of edification, as if feeling 
 itself the patron of man's spiritual interests in 
 contrast to the supposed crudeness and insensitive- 
 ness of naturalism and empiricism. At all events, 
 we find here one element in our problem : Ex- 
 perience considered as the summary of past epi- 
 sodic adventures and happenings in relation to ful- 
 filled and adequately expressed meaning. 
 
 The second historic event centers about the con- 
 troversy of innate ideas, or pure concepts. The 
 issue is between empiricism and rationalism as the- 
 
202 EXPERIENCE AND IDEALISM 
 
 ories of the origin and validation of scientific 
 knowledge. The empiricist is he who feels that 
 the chief obstacle which prevents scientific method 
 from making way is the belief in pure thoughts, 
 not derived from particular observations and hence 
 not responsible to the course of experience. His 
 objection to the "high a priori road" is that it 
 introduces in irresponsible fashion a mode of pre- 
 sumed knowledge which may be used at any turn 
 to stand sponsor for mere tradition and prejudice, 
 and thus to nullify the results of science resting 
 upon and verified by observable facts. Experi- 
 ence thus comes to mean, to use the words of 
 Peirce, " that which is forced upon a man's recog- 
 nition will-he, nill-he, and shapes his thoughts to 
 something quite different from what they natur- 
 ally would have taken." 1 The same definition is 
 found in James, in his chapter on Necessary 
 Truths : " Experience means experience of some- 
 thing foreign supposed to impress us whether 
 spontaneously or in consequence of our own ex- 
 ertions and acts." 2 As Peirce points out, this 
 notion of experience as the foreign element that 
 forces the hand of thought and controls its 
 efficacy, goes back to Locke. Experience is " ob- 
 servation employed either about external sensible 
 objects, or about the internal operations of our 
 
 1 C. S. Peirce, Monist, Vol. XVI., p. 150. 
 2 Psychology, Vol. II., p. 618. 
 
EXPERIENCE AND IDEALISM 203 
 
 minds " 1 — as furnishing in short all the valid data 
 and tests of thinking and knowledge. This meaning, 
 thinks Peirce, should be accepted " as a landmark 
 which it would be a crime to disturb or displace." 
 The contention of idealism, here bound up with 
 rationalism, is that perception and observation 
 cannot guarantee knowledge in its honorific sense 
 (science) ; that the peculiar differentia of scientific 
 knowledge is a constancy, a universality, and neces- 
 sity that contrast at every point with perceptual 
 data, and that indispensably require the function 
 of conception. 2 In short, qualitative transforma- 
 tion of facts (data of perception), not their me- 
 chanical subtraction and recombination, is the dif- 
 ference between scientific and perceptual knowl- 
 edge. Here the problem which emerges is, of 
 course, the significance of perception and of con- 
 ception in respect to experience. 3 
 
 1 " Essay concerning Human Understanding," Book II., 
 Chapter II., § 2. Locke doubtless derived this notion from 
 Bacon. 
 
 2 It is hardly necessary to refer to the stress placed upon 
 mathematics, as well as upon fundamental propositions in 
 logic, ethics, and cosmology. 
 
 3 Of course there are internal historic connections between 
 experience as effective " memory," and experience as " ob- 
 servation." But the motivation and stress, the problem, has 
 quite shifted. It may be remarked that Hobbes still writes 
 under the influence of the Aristotelian conception. " Ex- 
 perience is nothing but Memory " ("Elements of Philosophy," 
 Part I., Chapter I., §2), and hence is opposed to science. 
 
204 EXPERIENCE AND IDEALISM 
 
 The third episode reverses in a curious man- 
 ner (which confuses present discussion) the notion 
 of experience as a foreign, alien, coercive material. 
 It regards experience as a fortuitous association, 
 by merely psychic connections, of individualistic 
 states of consciousness. This is due to the Humian 
 development of Locke. The " objects " and " op- 
 erations," which to Locke were just given and 
 secured in observation, become shifting complexes 
 of subjective sensations and ideas, whose apparent 
 permanency is due to discoverable illusions. This, 
 of course, is the empiricism which made Kant so 
 uneasily toss in his dogmatic slumbers (a tossing 
 that he took for an awakening) ; and which, by re- 
 action, called out the conception of thought as a 
 function operating both to elevate perceptual 
 data to scientific status, and also to confer ob- 
 jective status, or knowable character, upon even 
 sensational data and their associative combina- 
 tions. 1 Here emerges the third element in our 
 problem: The function of thought as furnishing 
 
 1 There are, of course, anticipations of Hume in Locke. 
 But to regard Lockeian experience as equivalent to Humian 
 is to pervert history. Locke s as he was to himself and to 
 the century succeeding him, was not a sub j ectivist, but in the 
 main a common sense obj ectivist. It was this that gave him 
 his historic influence. But so completely has the Hume- 
 Kant controversy dominated recent thinking that it is con- 
 stantly projected backward. Within a few weeks I have 
 seen three articles, all insisting that the meaning of the 
 
EXPERIENCE AND IDEALISM 205 
 
 objectivity to any experience that claims cognitive 
 reference or capacity. 
 
 Summing up the matter, idealism stands forth 
 with its assertion of thought or reason as (1) the 
 sponsor for all significance, ideality, purpose, in 
 experience, — the author of the good and the beauti- 
 ful as well as the true; (2) the power, located in 
 pure conceptions, required to elevate perceptive or 
 observational material to the plane of science ; and 
 (3) the constitution that gives objectivity, even 
 the semblance of order, system, connection, mutual 
 reference, to sensory data that without its assist- 
 ance are mere subjective flux. 
 
 term experience must be subjective, and stating or implying 
 that those who take the term objectively are subverters of 
 established usage! But a casual study of the dictionary 
 will reveal that experience has always meant " what is ex- 
 perienced," observation as a source of knowledge, as well as 
 the act, fact, or mode of experiencing. In the Oxford Dic- 
 tionary, the (obsolete) sense of "experimental testing," of 
 actual " observation of facts and events," and " the fact of 
 being consciously affected by an act " have almost con- 
 temporaneous datings, viz., 1384, 1377, and 1382 respectively. 
 A usage almost more objective than the second, the Baconian 
 use, is "what has been experienced; the events that have 
 taken place within the knowledge of an individual, a com- 
 munity, mankind at large, either during a particular period 
 or generally." This dates back to 1607. Let us have no 
 more captious criticisms and plaints based on ignorance of 
 linguistic usage. [This pious wish has not been met. J. D., 
 1909.] 
 
206 EXPERIENCE AND IDEALISM 
 
 II 
 
 I begin the discussion with the last-named func- 
 tion. Thought is here conceived as a priori, not 
 in the sense of particular innate ideas, but of a 
 function that constitutes the very possibility of 
 any objective experience, any experience involving 
 reference beyond its own mere subjective happen- 
 ing. I shall try to show that idealism is con- 
 demned to move back and forth between two in- 
 consistent interpretations of this a priori thought. 
 It is taken to mean both the organized, the regu- 
 lated, the informed, established character of ex- 
 perience, an order immanent and constitutional; 
 * and an agency which organizes, regulates, forms, 
 synthesizes, a power operative and constructive. 
 And the oscillation between and confusion of these 
 two diverse senses is necessary to Neo-Kantian 
 idealism. 
 
 When Kant compared his work in philosophy to 
 that of the men who introduced construction into 
 geometry, and experimentation into physics and 
 chemistry, the point of his remarks depends upon 
 taking the a priori worth of thought in a regula- 
 tive, directive, controlling sense, thought as con- 
 sciously, intentionally, making an experience differ- 
 ent in a determinate sense and manner. But the 
 point of his answer to Hume consists in taking the 
 a priori in the other sense, as something which 
 
EXPERIENCE AND IDEALISM 207 
 
 is already immanent in any experience, and which 
 accordingly makes no determinate difference to any- 
 one experience as compared with any other, or with 
 any past or future form of itself. The concept is 
 treated first as that which makes an experience 
 actually different, controlling its evolution towards 
 consistency, coherency, and objective reliability; 
 then, it is treated as that which has already effected 
 the organization of any and every experience that 
 comes to recognition at all. The fallacy from 
 which he never emerges consists in vibrating be- 
 tween the definition of a concept as a rule of con- 
 structive synthesis in a differential sense, and the 
 definition of it as a static endowment lurking in 
 " mind," and giving automatically a hard and fixed 
 law for the determination of every experienced 
 object. The a priori conceptions of Kant as im- 
 manent fall, like the rain, upon the just and the 
 unjust; upon error, opinion, and hallucination. 
 But Kant slides into these a priori functions the 
 preferential values exercised by empirical reflect- 
 ive thought. The concept of triangle, taken geo- 
 metrically, means doubtless a determinate method 
 of construing space elements ; but to Kant it also 
 means something that exists in the mind prior to * 
 all such geometrical constructions and that un- 
 consciously lays down the law not only for their 
 conscious elaboration, but also for any space per- 
 ception, even for that which takes a rectangle to 
 
208 EXPERIENCE AND IDEALISM 
 
 be a triangle. The first of the meanings is intelli- 
 gible, and marks a definite contribution to the logic 
 of science. But it is not "objective idealism"; 
 it is a contribution to a revised empiricism. The 
 second is a dark saying. 
 
 That organization of some sort exists in every 
 experience I make no doubt. That isolation, dis- 
 crepancy, the fragmentary, the incompatible, are 
 brought to recognition and to logical function only 
 with reference to some prior existential mode of 
 organization seems clear. And it seems equally 
 clear that reflection goes on with profit only be- 
 cause the materials with which it deals have al- 
 ready some degree of organization, or exemplify 
 various relationships. As against Hume, or even 
 Locke, we may be duly grateful to Kant for en- 
 forcing acknowledgment of these facts. But the 
 acknowledgment means simply an improved and 
 revised empiricism. 
 
 For, be it noted, this organization, first, is not 
 the work of reason or thought, unless " reason " be 
 stretched beyond all identification; and, secondly, 
 it has no sacrosanct or finally valid and worth- 
 f ul character. ( 1 ) Experience always carries with 
 it and within it certain systematized arrangements, 
 certain classifications (using the term without in- 
 tellectualistic prejudice), coexistent and serial. If 
 we attribute these to " thought " then the structure 
 of the brain of a Mozart which hears and combines 
 
EXPERIENCE AND IDEALISM 209 
 
 sounds in certain groupings, the psycho-physical 
 visual habit of the Greek, the locomotor apparatus 
 of the human body in the laying-out and plotting 
 of space is " thought." Social institutions, es- 
 tablished political customs, effect and perpetuate 
 modes of reaction and of perception that compel 
 a certain grouping of objects, elements, and values. 
 A national constitution brings about a definite 
 arrangement of the factors of human action which 
 holds even physical things together in certain 
 determinate orders. Every successful economic 
 process, with its elaborate divisions and adjust- 
 ments of labor, of materials and instruments, is 
 just such an objective organization. Now it is one 
 thing to say that thought has played a part in 
 the origin and development of such organizations, 
 and continues to have a role in their judicious em- 
 ployment and application ; it is another to say that 
 these organizations are thought, or are its ex- 
 clusive product. Thought that functions in these 
 ways is distinctively reflective thought, thought as 
 practical, volitional, deliberately exercised for spe- 
 cific aims — thought as an act, an art of skilled 
 mediation. As reflective thought, its end is to 
 terminate its own first and experimental forms, and 
 to secure an organization which, while it may evoke 
 new reflective thinking, puts an end to the think- 
 ing that secured the organization. As organiza- 
 tions, as established, effectively controlling ar- 
 
i 
 
 210 EXPERIENCE AND IDEALISM 
 
 rangements of objects in experience, their mark 
 is that they are not thoughts, but habits, customs 
 of action. 1 
 
 Moreover, such reflective thought as does inter- 
 vene in the formation and maintenance of these 
 practical organizations harks back to prior prac- 
 tical organizations, biological and social in nature. 
 It serves to valuate organizations already existent 
 as biological functions and instincts, while, as itself 
 a biological activity, it redirects them to new con- 
 ditions and results. Recognize, for example, that 
 a geometric concept is a practical locomotor 
 function of arranging stimuli in reference to main- 
 tenance of life activities brought into consciousness, 
 and then serving as a center of reorganization of 
 such activities to freer, more varied flexible and 
 valuable forms ; recognize this, and we have the 
 truth of the Kantian idea, without its excrescences 
 and miracles. The concept is the practical activ- 
 ity doing consciously and artfully what it had 
 aforetime done blindly and aimlessly, and thereby 
 >not only doing it better but opening up a freer 
 world of significant activities. Thought as such a 
 reorganization of natural functions does naturally 
 
 1 The relationship of organization and thought is precisely 
 that which we find psychologically typified by the rhythmic 
 functions of habit and attention, attention being always, 
 ab quo, a sign of the failure of habit, and, ad quern, a recon- 
 structive modification of habit. 
 
EXPERIENCE AND IDEALISM 211 
 
 what Kantian forms and schematizations do only 
 supernaturally. In a word, the constructive or 
 organizing activity of " thought " does not inhere 
 in thought as a transcendental function, a form or 
 mode of some supra-empirical ego, mind, or con- 
 sciousness, but in thought as itself vital activity. 
 And in any case we have passed to the idea of 
 thought as reflectively reconstructive and direc- 
 tive, and away from the notion of thought as 
 immanently constitutional and organizational. 
 To make this passage and yet to ignore its 
 existence and import is essential to objective 
 idealism. 
 
 (2) No final or ultimate validity attaches to 
 these original arrangements and institutionaliza- 
 tions in any case. Their value is teleological and 
 experimental, not fixedly ontological. " Law and 
 order " are good things, but not when they become 
 rigidity, and create mechanical uniformity or rou- 
 tine. Prejudice is the acme of the a priori. Of 
 the a priori in this sense we may say what is always 
 to be said of habits and institutions : They are good 
 servants, but harsh and futile masters. Organi- 
 zation as already effected is always in danger of 
 becoming a mortmain; it may be a way of sacri- 
 ficing novelty, flexibility, freedom, creation to 
 static standards. The curious inefficiency of ideal- 
 ism at this point is evident in the fact that genuine 
 thought, empirical reflective thought, is required 
 
212 EXPERIENCE AND IDEALISM 
 
 precisely for the purpose of re-forming established 
 and set formations. 
 
 In short, (a) a priori character is no exclusive 
 function of thought. Every biological function, 
 every motor attitude, every vital impulse as the 
 carrying vehicle of experience is thus apriority 
 regulative in prospective reference; what we call 
 apperception, expectation, anticipation, desire, de- 
 mand, choice, are pregnant with this constitu- 
 tive and organizing power. (6) In so far as 
 " thought " does exercise such reorganizing power, 
 it is because thought is itself still a vital function, 
 (c) Objective idealism depends not only upon ig- 
 noring the existence and capacity of vital func- 
 tions, but upon a profound confusion of the con- 
 stitutional a priori, the unconsciously dominant, 
 with empirically reflective thought. In the sense 
 in which the a priori is worth while as an attribute 
 of thought, thought cannot be what the objective 
 idealist defines it as being. Plain, ordinary, every- 
 day empirical reflections, operating as centers of 
 inquiry, of suggestion, of experimentation, exer- 
 cise the valuable function of regulation, in an 
 auspicious direction, of subsequent experiences. 
 
 The categories of accomplished systematization 
 cover alike the just and the unjust, the false and 
 the true, while (unlike God's rain) they exercise 
 no specific or differential activity of stimulation 
 and control. Error and inefficiency, as well as 
 
EXPERIENCE AND IDEALISM 213 
 
 value and energy, are embodied in our objective 
 institutional classifications. As a special favor, 
 will not the objective idealist show how, in some 
 one single instance, his immanent " reason " makes 
 any difference as respects the detection and elimi- 
 nation of error, or gives even the slightest assist- 
 ance in discovering and validating the truly worth- 
 ful? This practical work, the life blood of in- 
 telligence in everyday life and in critical science, is 
 done by the despised and rejected matter of con- 
 crete empirical contexts and functions. General- 
 izing the issue: If the immanent organization be' 
 ascribed to thought, why should its work be such 
 as to demand continuous correction and revision? 
 If specific reflective thought, as empirical, be sub- . 
 ject to all the limitations supposed to inhere in 
 experience as such, how can it assume the burden 
 of making good, of supplementing, reconstruct- 
 ing, and developing meanings? The logic of the 
 case seems to be that Neo-Kantian idealism gets 
 its status against empiricism by first accepting 
 the Humian idea of experience, while the express 
 import of its positive contribution is to show the 
 non-existence (not merely the cognitive invalidity) 
 of anything describable as mere states of subjective 
 consciousness. Thus in the end it tends to destroy 
 itself and to make way for a more adequate em- 
 piricism. 
 
214 EXPERIENCE AND IDEALISM 
 
 III 
 
 In the above discussion, I have unavoidably an- 
 ticipated the second problem: the relation of con- 
 ceptual thought to perceptual data. A distinct 
 aspect still remains, however. Perception, as well 
 as apriority, is a term harboring a fundamental 
 ambiguity. It may mean (1) a distinct type of 
 activity, predominantly practical in character, 
 though carrying at its heart important cognitive 
 and esthetic qualities; or (2) a distinctively cog- 
 nitional experience, the function of observation as 
 explicitly logical — a factor in science qua science. 
 
 In the first sense, as recent functional empiricism 
 (working in harmony with psychology, but not 
 itself peculiarly psychological) has abundantly 
 shown, perception is primarily an act of adjust- 
 ment of organism and environment, differing from 
 a mere reflex or instinctive adaptation in that, in 
 order to compensate for the failure of the instinc- 
 tive adjustment, it requires an objective or dis- 
 criminative presentation of conditions of action: 
 the negative conditions or obstacles, and the posi- 
 tive conditions or means and resources. 1 This, of 
 
 1 Compare, for example, Dr. Stuart's paper in the " Studies 
 in Logical Theory," pp. 253-256. I may here remark that I 
 remain totally unable to see how the interpretation of ob- 
 jectivity to mean controlling conditions of action (nega- 
 tive and positive as above) derogates at all from its naive 
 
EXPERIENCE AND IDEALISM 215 
 
 course, is its cognitive phase. In so far as the 
 material thus presented not only serves as a direct 
 cue to further successful activity (successful in 
 the overcoming of obstacles to the maintenance of 
 the function entered upon) but presents auxiliary 
 collateral objects and qualities that give addi- 
 tional range and depth of meaning to the activity 
 of adjustment, perceiving is esthetic as well as 
 intellectual. 1 
 
 Now such perception cannot be made antithetical 
 to thought, for it may itself be surcharged with 
 any amount of imaginatively supplied and reflect- 
 ively sustained ideal factors — such as are needed 
 to determine and select relevant stimuli and to 
 suggest and develop an appropriate plan and 
 course of behavior. The amount of such saturat- 
 ing intellectual material depends upon the com- 
 plexity and maturity of the behaving agent. Such 
 perception, moreover, is strictly teleological, since 
 it arises from an experienced need and functions to 
 fulfil the purpose indicated by this need. The 
 cognitional content is, indeed, carried by affec- ' 
 tional and intentional contexts. 
 
 objectivity, or how it connotes cognitive subjectivity, or is 
 in any way incompatible with a common-sense realistic 
 theory of perception. 
 
 1 For this suggested interpretation of the esthetic as sur- 
 prising, or unintended, gratuitous collateral reinforcement, 
 gee Gordon, " Psychology of Meaning." 
 
216 EXPERIENCE AND IDEALISM 
 
 Then we have perception as scientific observa- 
 tion. This involves the deliberate, artful exclu- 
 sion of affectional and purposive factors as exer- 
 cising mayhap a vitiating influence upon the cog- 
 nitive or objective content ; or, more strictly speak- 
 ing, a transformation of the more ordinary or 
 " natural " emotional and purposive concomitants, 
 into what Bain calls "neutral" emotion, and a 
 purpose of finding out what the present conditions 
 of the problem are. (The practical feature is not 
 thus denied or eliminated, but the overweening in- 
 fluence of a present dominating end is avoided, so 
 that change of the character of the end may be 
 effected, if found desirable.) Here observation 
 may be opposed to thought, in the sense that exact 
 and minute description may be set over against 
 interpretation, explanation, theorizing, and infer- 
 ence. In the wider sense of thought as equaling 
 reflective process, the work of observation and de- 
 scription forms a constituent division of labor 
 within thought. The impersonal demarcation and 
 accurate registration of what is objectively there 
 or present occurs for the sake (a) of eliminating 
 meaning which is habitually but uncritically re- 
 ferred, and (6) of getting a basis for a meaning 
 (at first purely inferential or hypothetical) that 
 may be consistently referred; and that (c), rest- 
 ing upon examination and not upon mere a priori 
 custom, may weather the strain of subsequent ex- 
 
EXPERIENCE AND IDEALISM 217 
 
 periences. But in so far as thought is identified 
 with the conceptual phase as such of the entire 
 logical function, observation is, of course, set over 
 against thought: deliberately, purposely, and art- 
 fully so. 
 
 It is not uncommon to hear it said that the 
 Lockeian movement was all well enough for psy- 
 chology, but went astray because it invaded the 
 field of logic. If we mean by psychology a natu- 
 ral history of what at any time passes for knowl- 
 edge, and by logic conscious control in the direc- 
 tion of grounded assurance, this remark appears 
 to reverse the truth. As a natural history of 
 knowledge in the sense of opinion and belief, 
 Locke's account of discrete, simple ideas or mean- 
 ings, which are compounded and then distributed, 
 does palpable violence to the facts. But every 
 line of Locke shows that he was interested in knowl- 
 edge in its honorific sense — controlled certainty, 
 or, where this is not feasible, measured probability. 
 And to logic as an account of the way in which 
 we by art build up a tested assurance, a rational- 
 ized conviction, Locke makes an important positive 
 contribution. The pity is that he inclined to 
 take it for the whole of the logic of science, 1 not 
 seeing that it was but a correlative division of 
 
 1 This, however, is not strictly true, since Locke goes far to 
 supply the means of his own correction in his account of the 
 " workmanship of the understanding." 
 
218 EXPERIENCE AND IDEALISM 
 
 labor to the work of hypotheses or inference ; and 
 that he tended to identify it with a natural his- 
 tory or psychology. The latter tendency exposed 
 Locke to the Humian interpretation, and perma- 
 nently sidetracked the positive contribution of his 
 theory to logic, while it led to that confusion of 
 an untrue psychology with a logic valid within 
 limits, of which Mill is the standard example. 
 
 In analytic observation, it is a positive object 
 to strip off all inferential meaning so far as may 
 be — to reduce the facts as nearly as may be to 
 derationalized data, in order to make possible a 
 new and better rationalization. In and because of 
 this process, the perceptual data approach the 
 limit of a disconnected manifold, of the brutely 
 given, of the merely sensibly present; while mean- 
 ing stands out as a searched for principle of uni- 
 fication and explanation, that is, as a thought, a 
 concept, an hypothesis. The extent to which this 
 is carried depends wholly upon the character of 
 the specific situation and problem; but, speaking 
 generally, or of limiting tendencies, one may say 
 it is carried to mere observation, pure brute de- 
 scription, on the one side, and to mere thought, 
 that is hypothetical inference, on the other. 
 
 So far as Locke ignored this instrumental char- 
 acter of observation, he naturally evoked and 
 strengthened rationalistic idealism ; he called forth 
 its assertion of the need of reason, of concepts, of 
 
EXPERIENCE AND IDEALISM 219 
 
 universals, to constitute knowledge in its eulogistic 
 sense. But two contrary errors do not make a 
 truth, although they suggest and determine the 
 nature of some relevant truth. This truth is the 
 empirical origin, in a determinate type of situa- 
 tion, of the contrast of observation and concep- 
 tion; the empirical relevancy and the empirical 
 worth of this contrast in controlling the character 
 of subsequent experiences. To suppose that per- 
 ception as it concretely exists, either in the early 
 experiences of the animal, the race, or the in- 
 dividual, or in its later refined and expanded ex- 
 periences, is identical with the sharply analyzed, 
 objectively discriminated and internally disinte- 
 grated elements of scientific observation, is a per- 
 version of experience; a perversion for which, in- 
 deed, professed empiricists set the example, but 
 which idealism must perpetuate if it is not to find 
 its end in an improved, functional empiricism. 1 
 
 IV 
 
 We come now to the consideration of the third 
 element in our problem; ideality, important and 
 
 1 Plato, especially in his " Theaetetus," seems to have 
 begun the procedure of blasting the good name of per- 
 ceptive experience by identifying a late and instrumental 
 distinction, having to do with logical control, with all ex- 
 perience whatsoever. 
 
220 EXPERIENCE AND IDEALISM 
 
 normative value, in relation to experience ; the an- 
 tithesis of experience as a tentative, fragmentary, 
 and ineffectual embodiment of meaning over 
 against the perfect, eternal system of meanings 
 which experience suggests even in nullifying and 
 mutilating. 
 
 That from the memory standpoint experience 
 presents itself as a multiplicity of episodic events 
 with just enough continuity among them to sug- 
 gest principles true " on the whole " or usually, 
 but without furnishing instruction as to their ex- 
 act range and bearing, seems obvious enough. 
 Why should it not? The motive which leads to 
 reflection on past experience could be satisfied in 
 no other way. Continuities, connecting links, dy- 
 namic transitions drop out because, for the pur- 
 pose of the recollection, they w T ould be hindrances 
 if now repeated ; or because they are now available 
 only when themselves objectified in definite terms 
 and thus given a quasi independent, a quasi atom- 
 istic standing of their own. This is the only alter- 
 native to what the psychologists term " total rem- 
 iniscence," which, so far as total, leave us with 
 an elephant on our hands. Unless we are going 
 to have a wholesale revivification of the past, giv- 
 ing us just another embarrassing present experi- 
 ence, illusory because irrelevant, memory must 
 work by retail — by summoning distmct cases, 
 events, sequences, precedents. Dis-membering is 
 
EXPERIENCE AND IDEALISM 221 
 
 a positively necessary part of re-membering. But 
 the resulting disjecta membra are in no sense 
 experience as it was or is ; they are simply elements 
 held apart, and yet tentatively implicated together, 
 in present experience for the sake of its most favor- 
 able evolution ; evolution in the direction of the 
 most excellent meaning or value conceived. If the 
 remembering is efficacious and pertinent, it reveals 
 the possibilities of the present; that is to say, it 
 clarifies the transitive, transforming character 
 that belongs inherently to the present. The dis- 
 membering of the vital present into the discon- 
 nected past is correlative to an anticipation, an 
 idealization of the future. 
 
 Moreover, the contingent character of the prin- 
 ciple or rule that emerges from a survey of cases, 
 instances, as distinct from a fixed or necessary 
 character, secures just what is wanted in the ex- 
 igency of a prospective idealization, or refinement 
 of excellence. It is just this character that 
 secures flexibility and variety of outlook, that 
 makes possible a consideration of alternatives and 
 an attempt to select and to execute the more 
 worthy among them. The fixed or necessary law 
 would mean a future like the past — a dead, an 
 unidealized future. It is exasperating to imagine 
 how completely different would have been Aris- 
 totle's valuation of " experience " with respect to 
 its contingency, if he had but once employed the 
 
) 
 
 222 EXPERIENCE AND IDEALISM 
 
 function of developing and perfecting value, in- 
 stead of the function of knowing an unalterable 
 object, as the standard by which to estimate and 
 measure intelligence. 
 
 The one constant trait of experience from its 
 crudest to its most mature forms is that its con- 
 tents undergo change of meaning, and of meaning 
 in the sense of excellence, value. Every experi- 
 ence is in-course, 1 in course of becoming worse or 
 better as to its contents, or in course of conscious 
 endeavor to sustain some satisfactory level of 
 value against encroachment or lapse. In this ef- 
 fort, both precedent, the reduction of the present 
 idealization, the anticipation of the possible, 
 though doubtful, future, emerge. Without ideal- 
 ization, that is, without conception of the favor- 
 able issue that the present, defined in terms of 
 precedents, may portend in its transition, the 
 recollection of precedents, and the formulation of 
 tentative rules is nonsense. But without the identi- 
 fication of the present in terms of elements sug- 
 gested by the past, without recognition, the ideal, 
 
 1 Compare James, " Continuous transition is one sort of 
 conjunctive relation; and to be a radical empiricist means to 
 hold fast to this conjunctive relation of all others, for this 
 is the strategic point, the position through which, if a hole 
 be made, all the corruptions of dialectics and all the meta- 
 physical fictions pour into our philosophy." — Journal of 
 Philosophy, Psychology, and Scientific Methods, Vol. I., p. 
 536. 
 
EXPERIENCE AND IDEALISM 223 
 
 the value projected as end, remains inert, helpless, 
 sentimental, without means of realization. Re- 
 sembling cases and anticipation, memory and ideal- 
 ization, are the corresponding terms in which a 
 present experience has its transitive force analyzed 
 into reciprocally pertinent means and ends. 
 
 That an experience will change in content and 
 value is the one thing certain. How it will change 
 is the one thing naturally uncertain. Hence the 
 import of the art of reflection and invention. Con- 
 trol of the character of the change in the direction 
 of the worthful is the common business of theory 
 and practice. Here is the province of the episodic 
 recollection of past history and of the idealized 
 foresight of possibilities. The irrelevancy of an 
 objective idealism lies in the fact that it totally 
 ignores the position and function of ideality in « 
 sustained and serious endeavor. Were values auto- 
 matically injected and kept in the world of ex- 
 perience by any force not reflected in human mem- 
 ories and projects, it would make no difference 
 whether this force were a Spencerian environment 
 or an Absolute Reason. Did purpose ride in a 
 cosmic automobile toward a predestined goal, it 
 would not cease to be physical and mechanical in 
 quality because labeled Divine Idea, or Perfect 
 Reason. The moral would be " let us eat, drink, 
 and be merry," for to-morrow — or if not this to- 
 morrow, then upon some to-morrow, unaffected by 
 
224 EXPERIENCE AND IDEALISM 
 
 our empirical memories, reflections, inventions, 
 and idealizations — the cosmic automobile arrives. 
 Spirituality, ideality, meaning as purpose, would 
 be the last things to present themselves if objective 
 idealism were true. Values cannot be both ideal 
 and given, and their " given " character is em- 
 phasized, not transformed, when they are called 
 eternal and absolute. But natural values become 
 ideal the moment their maintenance is dependent 
 upon the intentional activities of an empirical 
 agent. To suppose that values are ideal because 
 they are so eternally given is the contradiction in 
 which objective idealism has intrenched itself. Ob- 
 jective ontological teleology spells machinery. Re- 
 flective and volitional, experimental teleology alone 
 spells ideality. 1 Objective, rationalistic idealism 
 breaks upon the fact that it can have no intermedi- 
 ary between a brutally achieved embodiment of 
 meaning (physical in character or else of that pecu- 
 liar quasi-physical character which goes generally 
 by the name of metaphysical) and a total opposition 
 of the given and the ideal, connoting their mutual 
 indifference and incapacity. An empiricism that 
 acknowledges the transitive character of experi- 
 ence, and that acknowledges the possible control 
 
 1 One of the not least of the many merits of Santayana's 
 " Life of Reason " is the consistency and vigor with which 
 is upheld the doctrine that significant idealism means ideal- 
 ization. 
 
 
EXPERIENCE AND IDEALISM 225 
 
 of the character of the transition by means of 
 intelligent effort, has abundant opportunity to 
 celebrate in productive art, genial morals, and 
 impartial inquiry the grace and the severity of 
 the ideal. 
 
) 
 
 THE POSTULATE OF IMMEDIATE 
 EMPIRICISM x 
 
 THE criticisms made upon that vital but still 
 unformed movement variously termed radical 
 empiricism, pragmatism, humanism, functionalism, 
 according as one or another aspect of it is upper- 
 most, have left me with a conviction that the 
 fundamental difference is not so much in matters 
 overtly discussed as in a presupposition that re- 
 mains tacit : a presupposition as to what experience 
 is and means. To do my little part in clearing 
 up the confusion, I shall try to make my own 
 presupposition explicit. The object of this paper 
 is, then, to set forth what I understand to be the 
 postulate and the criterion of immediate empiri- 
 
 1 Reprinted, with very slight change, from the Journal of 
 Philosophy, Psychology, and Scientific Methods, Vol. II., No. 
 15, July, 1905. 
 
 2 All labels are, of course, obnoxious and misleading. I 
 hope, however, the term will be taken by the reader in the 
 sense in which it is forthwith explained, and not in some 
 more usual and familiar sense. Empiricism, as herein used, 
 is as antipodal to sensationalistic empiricism, as it is to 
 transcendentalism, and for the same reason. Both of these 
 systems fall back on something which is denned in non- 
 226 
 
THE POSTULATE OF EMPIRICISM 227 
 
 Immediate empiricism postulates that things — 
 anything, everything, in the ordinary or non- 
 technical use of the term " thing " — are what they 
 are experienced as. Hence, if one wishes to de- 
 scribe anything truly, his task is to tell what it is 
 experienced as being. If it is a horse that is to 
 be described, or the equus that is to be defined, 
 then must the horse-trader, or the jockey, or the 
 timid family man who wants a " safe driver,' 5 or 
 the zoologist or the paleontologist tell us what the 
 horse is which is experienced. If these accounts 
 turn out different in some respects, as well as con- 
 gruous in others, this is no reason for assuming 
 the content of one to be exclusively " real," and 
 that of others to be " phenomenal " ; for each ac- 
 count of what is experienced will manifest that it is 
 the account of the horse-dealer, or of the zoologist, 
 and hence will give the conditions requisite 
 for understanding the differences as well as the 
 agreements of the various accounts. And the 
 principle varies not a whit if we bring in the psy- 
 chologist's horse, the logician's horse, or the meta- 
 physician's horse. 
 
 directly-experienced terms in order to justify that which is 
 directly experienced. Hence I have criticised such empiri- 
 cism (Philosophical Review, Vol. XL, No. 4, p. 364) as es- 
 sentially absolutistic in character; and also (" Studies in 
 Logical Theory," pp. 30, 58) as an attempt to build up ex- 
 perience in terms of certain methodological checks and cues 
 of attaining certainty. 
 
228 THE POSTULATE OF EMPIRICISM 
 
 In each case, the nub of the question is, what 
 sort of experience is denoted or indicated: a con- 
 crete and determinate experience, varying, when it 
 varies, in specific real elements, and agreeing, when 
 it agrees, in specific real elements, so that we have 
 a contrast, not between a Reality, and various 
 approximations to, or phenomenal representations 
 of Reality, but between different reals of experi- 
 ence. And the reader is begged to bear in mind 
 that from this standpoint, when " an experience " 
 or " some sort of experience " is referred to, " some 
 thing " or " some sort of thing " is always 
 meant. 
 
 Now, this statement that things are what they 
 are experienced to be is usually translated into 
 the statement that things (or, ultimately, Reality, 
 Being) are only and just what they are known to 
 be or that things are, or Reality is, what it is for 
 a conscious knower — whether the knower be con- 
 ceived primarily as a perceiver or as a thinker be- 
 ing a further, and secondary, question. This is 
 the root-paralogism of all idealisms, whether sub- 
 jective or objective, psychological or epistemolog- 
 ical. By our postulate, things are what they are 
 experienced to be ; and, unless knowing is the sole 
 and only genuine mode of experiencing, it is falla- 
 cious to say that Reality is just and exclusively 
 what it is or would be to an all-competent all- 
 knower ; or even that it is, relatively and piece- 
 
THE POSTULATE OF EMPIRICISM 229 
 
 meal, what it is to a finite and partial knower. Or, 
 put more positively, knowing is one mode of ex- 
 periencing, and the primary philosophic demand 
 (from the standpoint of immediatism) is to find out 
 what sort of an experience knowing is — or, con- 
 cretely how things are experienced when they are 
 experienced as known things. 1 By concretely is 
 meant, obviously enough (among other things), 
 such an account of the experience of things as 
 known that will bring out the characteristic traits 
 and distinctions they possess as things of a know- 
 ing experience, as compared with things experi- 
 enced esthetically, or morally, or economically, or 
 technologically. To assume that^ because from 
 the standpoint of the knowledge experience things 
 are what they are known to be, therefore, meta- 
 physically, absolutely, without qualification, every- 
 thing in its reality (as distinct from its " appear- 
 ance," or phenomenal occurrence) is what a knower 
 would find it to be, is, from the immediatist's stand- 
 point, if not the root of all philosophic evil, at 
 least one of its main roots. For this leaves out 
 
 1 1 hope the reader will not therefore assume that from 
 the empiricist's standpoint knowledge is of small worth 
 or import. On the contrary, from the empiricist's stand- 
 point it has all the worth which it is concretely experienced 
 as possessing — which is simply tremendous. But the exact 
 nature of this worth is a thing to be found out in describing 
 what we mean by experiencing objects as known — the actual 
 differences made or found in experience. 
 
230 THE POSTULATE OF EMPIRICISM 
 
 of account what the knowledge standpoint is itself 
 experienced as. 
 
 I start and am flustered by a noise heard. Em- 
 pirically, that noise is fearsome; it really is, not 
 merely phenomenally or subjectively so. That is 
 what it is experienced as being. But, when I ex- 
 perience the noise as a known thing, I find it to 
 be innocent of harm. It is the tapping of a shade 
 against the window, owing to movements of the 
 wind. The experience has changed; that is, the 
 thing experienced has changed — not that an un- 
 reality has given place to a reality, nor that 
 some transcendental (unexperienced) Reality has 
 changed, 1 not that truth has changed, but just 
 and only the concrete reality experienced has 
 changed. I now feel ashamed of my fright; and 
 the noise as fearsome is changed to noise as a wind- 
 curtain fact, and hence practically indifferent to 
 my welfare. This is a change of experienced ex- 
 istence effected through the medium of cognition. 
 
 1 Since the non-empiricist believes in things-in-themselves 
 (which he may term " atoms," " sensations," transcendental 
 unities, a priori concepts, an absolute experience, or what- 
 ever), and since he finds that the empiricist makes much of 
 change (as he must, since change is continuously experi- 
 enced) he assumes that the empiricist means his own non- 
 empirical Realities are in continual flux, and he naturally 
 shudders at having his divinities so violently treated. But, 
 once recognize that the empiricist doesn't have any such 
 Realities at all, and the entire problem of the relation of 
 change to reality takes a very different aspect. 
 
THE POSTULATE OF EMPIRICISM 231 
 
 The content of the latter experience cognitively re- 
 garded is doubtless truer than the content of the 
 earlier ; but it is in no sense more real. To call it 
 truer, moreover, must, from the empirical stand- 
 point, mean a concrete difference in actual things 
 experienced. 1 Again, in many cases, only in retro- 
 spect is the prior experience cognitionally regarded 
 at all. In such cases, it is only in regard to con- 
 trasted content in a subsequent experience that 
 the determination " truer " has force. 
 
 Perhaps some reader may now object that as 
 matter of fact the entire experience is cognitive, 
 but that the earlier parts of it are only imperfectly 
 so, resulting in a phenomenon that is not real; 
 while the latter part, being a more complete cog- 
 nition, results in what is relatively, at least, more 
 real. 2 In short, a critic may say that, when I was 
 
 1 It would lead us aside from the point to try to tell 
 just what is the nature of the experienced difference we call 
 truth. Professor James's recent articles may well be con- 
 sulted. The point to bear in mind here is just what sort 
 of a thing the empiricist must mean by true, or truer (the 
 noun Truth is, of course, a generic name for all cases of 
 "Trues"). The adequacy of any particular account is not 
 a matter to be settled by general reasoning, but by finding 
 out what sort of an experience the truth-experience actually 
 is. 
 
 2 1 say " relatively," because the transcendentalist still 
 holds that finally the cognition is imperfect, giving us only 
 some symbol or phenomenon of Reality (which is only in 
 the Absolute or in some Thing-in-Itself) — otherwise the 
 
232 THE POSTULATE OF EMPIRICISM 
 
 frightened by the noise, I knew I was frightened; 
 otherwise there would have been no experience at 
 all. At this point, it is necessary to make a dis- 
 tinction so simple and yet so all-fundamental that 
 I am afraid the reader will be inclined to pooh- 
 pooh it away as a mere verbal distinction. But 
 to see that to the empiricist this distinction is not 
 verbal, but genuine, is the precondition of any un- 
 derstanding of him. The immediatist must, by his 
 postulate, ask what is the fright experienced as. 
 Is what is actually experienced, I-know-I-am- 
 frightened, or I-am-i rightened ? I see absolutely 
 no reason for claiming that the experience must 
 be described by the former phrase. In all proba- 
 bility (and all the empiricist logically needs is just 
 one case of this sort) the experience is simply and 
 just of fright-at-the-noise. Later one may (or 
 may not) have an experience describable as I- 
 know-I-am- (or-was) and improperly or properly, 
 frightened. But this is a different experience — 
 that is, a different thing. And if the critic goes 
 on to urge that the person " really " must have 
 known that he was frightened, I can only point 
 out that the critic is shifting the venue. He may 
 be right, but, if so, it is only because the " really " 
 
 curtain-wind fact would have as much ontological reality as 
 the existence of the Absolute itself: a conclusion at which 
 the non-empiricist perhorresces, for no reason obvious to 
 me — save that it would put an end to his transcendentalism. 
 
THE POSTULATE OF EMPIRICISM 233 
 
 is something not concretely experienced (whose na- 
 ture accordingly is the critic's business) ; and this 
 is to depart from the empiricist's point of view, 
 to attribute to him a postulate he expressly 
 repudiates. 
 
 The material point may come out more clearly 
 if I say that we must make a distinction between 
 a thing as cognitive, and one as cognized. 1 I 
 should define a cognitive experience as one that 
 has certain bearings or implications which induce, 
 and fulfil themselves in, a subsequent experience 
 in which the relevant thing is experienced as cog- 
 nized, as a known object, and is thereby trans- 
 formed, or reorganized. The fright-at-the-noise 
 in the case cited is obviously cognitive, in this sense. 
 By description, it induces an investigation or in- 
 quiry in which both noise and fright are objectively 
 stated or presented — the noise as a shade-wind 
 fact, the fright as an organic reaction to a sudden 
 acoustic stimulus, a reaction that under the given 
 circumstances was useless or even detrimental, a 
 maladaptation. Now, pretty much all of experi- 
 ence is of this sort (the " is " meaning, of course, 
 is experienced as), and the empiricist is false to his 
 principle if he does not duly note this fact. 2 But 
 
 1 In general, I think the distinction between -ive and -ed 
 one of the most fundamental of philosophic distinctions, and 
 one of the most neglected. The same holds of -Hon and -ing. 
 
 2 What is criticised, now as " geneticism " (if I may coin 
 
234< THE POSTULATE OF EMPIRICISM 
 
 he is equally false to his principle if he permits 
 himself to be confused as to the concrete differences 
 in the two things experienced. 
 
 There are two little words through explication 
 of which the empiricist's position may be brought 
 out — " as " and " that." We may express his 
 presupposition by saying that things are what they 
 are experienced as being; or that to give a just 
 account of anything is to tell what that thing is 
 experienced to be. By these words I want to in- 
 dicate the absolute, final, irreducible, and inex- 
 pugnable concrete quale which everything experi- 
 enced not so much has as is. To grasp this aspect 
 of empiricism is to see what the empiricist means 
 by objectivity, by the element of control. Sup- 
 pose we take, as a crucial case for the empiricist, 
 an out and out illusion, say of Zollner's lines. 
 These are experienced as convergent; they are 
 " truly " parallel. If things are what they are 
 experienced as being, how can the distinction be 
 drawn between illusion and the true state of the 
 case? There is no answer to this question except 
 by sticking to the fact that the experience of the 
 lines as divergent is a concrete qualitative thing or 
 that. It is that experience which it is, and no 
 
 the word) and now as "pragmatism" is, in its truth, just 
 the fact that the empiricist does take account of the ex- 
 perienced " drift, occasion, and contexture " of things experi- 
 enced — to use Hobbes's phrase. 
 
THE POSTULATE OF EMPIRICISM 235 
 
 othey. And if the reader rebels at the iteration of 
 such obvious tautology, I can only reiterate that 
 the realization of the meaning of this tautology is 
 the key to the whole question of the objectivity of 
 experience, as that stands to the empiricist. The 
 lines of that experience are divergent ; not merely 
 seem so. The question of truth is not as to 
 whether Being or Non-Being, Reality or mere 
 Appearance, is experienced, but as to the worth of 
 a certain concretely experienced thing. The only 
 way of passing upon this question is by sticking 
 in the most uncompromising fashion to that ex- / 
 perience_ as r eal. That experience is that two 
 lines with certain cross-hatchings are apprehended 
 as convergent; only by taking that experience as 
 real and as fully real, is there any basis for, or 
 way of going to, an experienced knowledge that 
 the lines are parallel. It is in the concrete thing 
 as experienced that all the grounds and clues to 
 its own intellectual or logical rectification are con- 
 tained. It is because this thing, afterwards ad- 
 judged false, is a concrete that, that it develops 
 into a corrected experience (that is, experience of 
 a corrected thing — we reform things just as we 
 reform ourselves or a bad boy) whose full content 
 is not a whit more real^ but which is true or truer. 1 
 
 1 Perhaps the point would be clearer if expressed in this 
 way: Except as subsequent estimates of worth are intro- 
 duced, " real " means only existent. The eulogistic connota- 
 
236 THE POSTULATE OF EMPIRICISM 
 
 If any experience, then a determinate experi- 
 ence; and this determinateness is the only, a:id is 
 the adequate, principle of control, or " objectiv- 
 ity." The experience may be of the vaguest sort. 
 I may not see anything which I can identify as a 
 familiar object — a table, a chair, etc. It may be 
 dark ; I may have only the vaguest impression that 
 there is something which looks like a table. Or I 
 may be completely befogged and confused, as when 
 one rises quickly from sleep in a pitch-dark room. 
 But this vagueness, this doubtfulness, this confu- 
 sion is the thing experienced, and, qua real, is as 
 " good a reality as the self-luminous vision of 
 an Absolute. It is not just vagueness, doubtful- 
 ness, confusion, at large or in general. It is this 
 vagueness, and no other ; absolutely unique, abso- 
 lutely what it is. 1 Whatever gain in clearness, in 
 fullness, in trueness of content is experienced must 
 grow out of some element in the experience of this 
 experienced as what it is. To return to the illu- 
 sion: If the experience of the lines as convergent 
 is illusory, it is because of some elements in the 
 
 tion that makes the term Reality equivalent to true or 
 genuine being has great pragmatic significance, but its con- 
 fusion with reality as existence is the point aimed at in the 
 above paragraph. 
 
 1 One does not so easily escape medieval Realism as one 
 thinks. Either every experienced thing has its own deter- 
 minateness, its own unsubstitutable, unredeemable reality, or 
 else " generals " are separate existences after all. 
 
THE POSTULATE OF EMPIRICISM 237 
 
 thing as experienced, not because of something de- 
 fined in terms of externality to this particular ex- 
 perience. If the illusoriness can be detected, it is 
 because the thing experienced is real, having within 
 its experienced reality elements whose own mutual 
 tension effects its reconstruction. Taken con- 
 cretely, the experience of convergent lines con- 
 tains within itself the elements of the transforma- 
 tion of its own content. It is this thing, and not 
 some separate truth, that clamors for its own 
 reform. There is, then, from the empiricist's point 
 of view, no need to search for some aboriginal that 
 to which all successive experiences are attached, 
 and which is somehow thereby undergoing continu- 
 ous change. Experience is always of thats; and 
 the most comprehensive and inclusive experience 
 of the universe that the philosopher himself can 
 obtain is the experience of a characteristic that. * 
 From the empiricist's point of view, this is as true 
 of the exhaustive and complete insight of a hypo- 
 thetical all-knower as of the vague, blind experi- 
 ence of the awakened sleeper. As reals, they stand 
 on the same level. As trues, the latter has by 
 definition the better of it ; but if this insight is in 
 any way the truth of the blind awakening, it is 
 because the latter has, in its own determinate quale, 
 elements of real continuity with the former ; it is, 
 ex hypothesis transformable through a series of 
 experienced reals without break of continuity, into 
 
238 THE POSTULATE OF EMPIRICISM 
 
 the absolute thought-experience. There is no need 
 of logical manipulation to effect the transforma- 
 tion, nor could any logical consideration effect it. 
 If effected at all it is just by immediate experiences, 
 each of which is just as real (no more, no less) 
 as either of the two terms between which they lie. 
 Such, at least, is the meaning of the empiricist's 
 contention. So, when he talks of experience, he 
 does not mean some grandiose, remote affair that 
 is cast like a net around a succession of fleeting 
 experiences ; he does not mean an indefinite total, 
 comprehensive experience which somehow engirdles 
 an endless flux; he means that things are what 
 they are experienced to be, and that every experi- 
 ence is some thing. 
 
 From the postulate of empiricism, then (or, what 
 is the same thing, from a general consideration of 
 the concept of experience), nothing can be deduced, 
 not a single philosophical proposition. 1 The reader 
 
 1 Excepting, of course, some negative ones. One could 
 say that certain views are certainly not true, because, by 
 hypothesis, they refer to nonentities, i.e., non-empiricals. 
 But even here the empiricist must go slowly. From his 
 own standpoint, even the most professedly transcendental 
 statements are, after all, real as experiences, and hence 
 negotiate some transaction with facts. For this reason, he 
 cannot, in theory, reject them in toto, but has to show con- 
 cretely how they arose and how they are to be corrected. 
 In a word, his logical relationship to statements that pro- 
 fess to relate to things-in-themselves, unknowables, inexperi- 
 enced substances, etc., is precisely that of the psychologist 
 to the Zbllner lines. 
 
THE POSTULATE OF EMPIRICISM 239 
 
 may hence conclude that all this just comes to the 
 truism that experience is experience, or is what it is. 
 If one attempts to draw conclusions from the bare 
 concept of experience, the reader is quite right. 
 But the real significance of the principle is that of 
 a method of philosophical analysis — a method iden-* 
 tical in kind (but differing in problem and hence 
 in operation) with that of the scientist. If you 
 wish to find out what subjective, objective, phys- 
 ical, mental, cosmic, psychic, cause, substance, pur- 
 pose, activity, evil, being, quality — any philo- 
 sophic term, in short — means, go to experience and 
 see what the thing is experienced as. 
 
 Such a method is not spectacular ; it permits of 
 no offhand demonstrations of God, freedom, im- 
 mortality, nor of the exclusive reality of matter, 
 or ideas, or consciousness, etc. But it supplies a 
 way of telling what all these terms mean. It may 
 seem insignificant, or chillingly disappointing, but 
 only upon condition that it be not worked. Philo- 
 sophic conceptions have, I believe, outlived their 
 usefulness considered as stimulants to emotion, or 
 as a species of sanctions ; and a larger, more fruit- 
 ful and more valuable career awaits them consid- 
 ered as specifically experienced meanings. 
 
 [Note: The reception of this essay proved that I was un- 
 reasonably sanguine in thinking that the foot-note of warn- 
 ing, appended to the title, would forfend radical mis- 
 apprehension. I see now that it was unreasonable to expect 
 that the word " immediate " in a philosophic writing could 
 
240 THE POSTULATE OF EMPIRICISM 
 
 be generally understood to apply to anything except knowl- 
 edge, even though the body of the essay is a protest 
 against such limitation. But I venture to repeat that the 
 essay is not a denial of the necessity of " mediation," or re- 
 flection, in knowledge, but is an assertion that the inferential 
 factor must exist, or must occur, and that all existence is 
 direct and vital, so that philosophy can pass upon its nature 
 — as upon the nature of all of the rest of its subject-matter 
 — only by first ascertaining what it exists or occurs as. 
 
 I venture to repeat also another statement of the text: 
 I do not mean by " immediate experience " any aboriginal 
 stuff out of which things are evolved, but I use the term 
 to indicate the necessity of employing in philosophy the 
 direct descriptive method that has now made its way in 
 all the natural sciences, with such modifications, of course, 
 as the subject itself entails. 
 
 There is nothing in the text to imply that things exist in 
 experience atomically or in isolation. When it is said that a 
 thing as cognized is different from an earlier non-cognition- 
 ally experienced thing, the saying no more implies lack of 
 continuity between the things, than the obvious remark 
 that a seed is different from a flower or a leaf denies their 
 continuity. The amount and kind of continuity or dis- 
 creteness that exists is to be discovered by recurring to 
 what actually occurs in experience. 
 
 Finally, there is nothing in the text that denies the 
 existence of things temporally prior to human experiencing 
 of them. Indeed, I should think it fairly obvious that we 
 experience most things as temporally prior to our ex- 
 periencing of them. The import of the article is to the 
 effect that we are not entitled to draw philosophic (as dis- 
 tinct from scientific) conclusions as to the meaning of prior 
 temporal existence till we have ascertained what it is to J 
 experience a thing as past. These four disclaimers cover, 
 I think, all the misapprehensions disclosed in the four or 
 five controversial articles (noted below) that the original 
 essay evoked. One of these articles (that of Professor 
 
THE POSTULATE OF EMPIRICISM 241 
 
 Woodbridge), raised a point of fact, holding that cogni- 
 tional experience tells us, without alteration, just what the 
 things of other types of experience are, and in that sense 
 transcends other experiences. This is too fundamental an 
 issue to discuss in a note, and I content myself with re- 
 marking that with respect to it, the bearing of the article 
 is that the issue must be settled by a careful descriptive 
 survey of things as experienced, to see whether modifica- 
 tions do not occur in existences when they are experienced as 
 known; i.e., as true or false in character. The reader 
 interested in following up this discussion is referred to 
 the following articles: Vol. II. of the Journal of Philosophy, 
 Psychology, and Scientific Methods, two articles by Bake- 
 well, p. 520 and p. 687; one by Bode, p. 658; one by Wood- 
 bridge, p. 573; Vol. III. of the same Journal, by Leighton, 
 p. 174.] 
 
"CONSCIOUSNESS" AND EXPERIENCE 1 
 
 EVERY science in its final standpoint and work- 
 ing aims is controlled by conditions lying out- 
 side itself — conditions that subsist in the practi- 
 cal life of the time. With no science is this as 
 obviously true as with psychology. Taken with- 
 out nicety of analysis, no one would deny that psy- 
 chology is specially occupied with the individual; 
 that it wishes to find out those things that proceed 
 peculiarly from the individual, and the mode of 
 their connection with him. Now, the way in which 
 the individual is conceived, the value that is attrib- 
 uted to him, the things in his make-up that arouse 
 interest, are not due at the outset to psychology. 
 The scientific view regards these matters in a re- 
 flected, a borrowed, medium. They are revealed 
 in the light of social life. An autocratic, an 
 aristocratic, a democratic society propound such 
 different estimates of the worth and place of 
 individuality; they procure for the individual as 
 an individual such different sorts of experience; 
 
 1 Delivered as a public address before the Philosophic 
 Union of the University of California, with the title 
 " Psychology and Philosophic Method," May, 1899, and pub- 
 lished in the University Chronicle for August, 1899. Re- 
 printed, with slight verbal changes, mostly excisions. 
 
 242 
 
CONSCIOUSNESS AND EXPERIENCE 243 
 
 they aim at arousing such different impulses and at 
 organizing them according to such different pur- 
 poses, that the psychology arising in each must 
 show a different temper. 
 
 In this sense, psychology is a political science. 
 While the professed psychologist, in his conscious 
 procedure, may easily cut his subject-matter loose 
 from these practical ties and references, yet the 
 starting point and goal of his course are none the 
 less socially set. In this conviction I venture to 
 introduce to an audience that could hardly be 
 expected to be interested in the technique of psy- 
 chology, a technical subject, hoping that the 
 human meaning may yet appear. 
 
 There is at present a strong, apparently a grow- 
 ing tendency to conceive of psychology as an ac- 
 count of the consciousness of the individual, con- 
 sidered as something in and by itself; conscious- 
 ness, the assumption virtually runs, being of such 
 an order that it may be analyzed, described, and 
 explained in terms of just itself. The statement, 
 as commonly made, is that psychology is an ac- 
 count of consciousness, qua consciousness ; and the 
 phrase is supposed to limit psychology to a certain 
 definite sphere of fact that may receive adequate 
 discussion for scientific purposes, without troubling 
 itself with what lies outside. Now if this concep- 
 tion be true, there is no intimate, no important 
 connection of psychology and philosophy at large. 
 
244 CONSCIOUSNESS AND EXPERIENCE 
 
 That philosophy, whose range is comprehensive, 
 whose problems are catholic, should be held down 
 by a discipline whose voice is as partial as its 
 material is limited, is out of the range of intelli- 
 gent discussion. 
 
 But there is another possibility. If the indi- 
 vidual of whom psychology treats be, after all, a 
 social individual, any absolute setting off and 
 apart of a sphere of consciousness as, even for sci- 
 entific purposes, self-sufficient, is condemned in ad- 
 vance. All such limitation, and all inquiries, 
 descriptions, explanations that go with it, are only 
 preliminary. " Consciousness " is but a symbol, 
 an anatomy whose life is in natural and social 
 operations. To know the symbol, the psychical 
 letter, is important ; but its necessity lies not within 
 itself, but in the need of a language for reading 
 the things signified. If this view be correct, we 
 cannot be so sure that psychology is without large 
 philosophic significance. Whatever meaning the 
 individual has for the social life that he both in- 
 corporates and animates, that meaning has psy- 
 chology for philosophy. 
 
 This problem is too important and too large to 
 suffer attack in an evening's address. Yet I ven- 
 ture to consider a portion of it, hoping that such 
 things as appear will be useful clues in enter- 
 ing wider territory. We may ask what is the effect 
 upon psychology of considering its material as 
 
CONSCIOUSNESS AND EXPERIENCE 245 
 
 something so distinct as to be capable of treatment 
 without involving larger issues. In this inquiry 
 we take as representative some such account of the 
 science as this: Psychology deals with conscious- 
 ness " as such " in its various modes and processes. 
 It aims at an isolation of each such as will permit 
 accurate description: at statement of its place in 
 the serial order such as will enable us to state the 
 laws by which one calls another into being, or as 
 will give the natural history of its origin, matur- 
 ing, and dissolution. It is both analytic and syn- 
 thetic — analytic in that it resolves each state into 
 its constituent elements ; synthetic in that it dis- 
 covers the processes by which these elements com- 
 bine into complex wholes and series. It leaves 
 alone — it shuts out — questions concerning the 
 validity, the objective import of these modifica- 
 tions : of their value in conveying truth, in effect- 
 ing goodness, in constituting beauty. For it is 
 just w r ith such questions of worth, of validity, that 
 philosophy has to do. 
 
 Some such view as this is held by the great 
 majority of working psychologists to-day. A va- 
 riety of reasons have conspired to bring about 
 general acceptance. Such a view seems to enroll 
 one in the ranks of the scientific men rather than 
 of the metaphysicians — and there are those who 
 distrust the metaphysicians. Others desire to take 
 problems piecemeal and in detail, avoiding that ex- 
 
246 CONSCIOUSNESS AND EXPERIENCE 
 
 cursion into ultimates, into that never-ending pan- 
 orama of new questions and new possibilities that 
 seems to be the fate of the philosopher. While no 
 temperate mind can do other than sympathize with 
 this view, it is hardly more than an expedient. 
 For, as Mr. James remarks, after disposing of the 
 question of free-will by relegating it to the domain 
 of the metaphysician : — " Metaphysics means only 
 an unusually obstinate attempt to think clearly and 
 consistently " — and clearness and consistency are 
 not things to be put off beyond a certain point. 
 When the metaphysician chimes in with this new- 
 found modesty of the psychologist, so different 
 from the disposition of Locke and Hume and the 
 Mills, salving his metaphysical conscience with the 
 remark — it hardly possesses the dignity of a con- 
 viction — that the partial sciences, just because they 
 are partial, are not expected to be coherent with 
 themselves nor with one another; when the meta- 
 physician, I say, praises the psychologist for stick- 
 ing to his last, we are reminded that another mo- 
 tive is also at work. There is a half-conscious 
 irony in this abnegation of psychology. It is not 
 the first time that science has assumed the work 
 of Cinderella; and, since Mr. Huxley has happily 
 reminded her, she is not altogether oblivious, in her 
 modesty, of a possible future check to the pride 
 of her haughty sister, and of a certain coronation 
 that shall mark her coming to her own. 
 
CONSCIOUSNESS AND EXPERIENCE 247 
 
 But, be the reasons as they may, there is little 
 doubt of the fact. Almost all our working psy- 
 chologists admit, nay, herald this limitation of 
 their work. I am not presumptuous enough to 
 set myself against this array. I too proclaim 
 myself of those who believe that psychology has to 
 do (at a certain point, that is) with "conscious- 
 ness as such." But I do not believe that the limi- 
 tation is final. Quite the contrary: if " conscious- 
 ness " or " state of consciousness " be given in- 
 telligible meaning, I believe that this conception is 
 the open gateway into the fair fields of philosophy. 
 For, note you, the phrase is an ambiguous one. It 
 may mean one thing to the metaphysician who 
 proclaims : Here finally we have psychology rec- 
 ognizing her due metes and bounds, giving bonds 
 to trespass no more. It may mean quite another 
 thing to the psychologist in his work — whatever 
 he may happen to say about it. It may be that 
 the psychologist deals with states of consciousness 
 as the significant, the analyzable and describable 
 form, to which he reduces the things he is study- 
 ing. Not that they are that existence, but that 
 they are its indications, its clues, in shape for 
 handling by scientific methods. So, for example, 
 does the paleontologist work. Those curiously 
 shaped and marked forms to which he is devoted 
 are not life, nor are they the literal termini of his 
 endeavor; but through them as signs and records 
 
248 CONSCIOUSNESS AND EXPERIENCE 
 
 he construes a life. And again, the painter-artist 
 might well say that he is concerned only with 
 colored paints as such. Yet none the less through 
 them as registers and indices, he reveals to us 
 the mysteries of sunny meadow, shady forest, and 
 twilight wave. These are the things-in-themselves 
 of which the oils on his palette are phenomena. 
 
 So the preoccupation of the psychologist with 
 states of consciousness may signify that they are 
 the media, the concrete conditions to which he 
 purposely reduces his material, in order, through 
 them, as methodological helps, to get at and under- 
 stand that which is anything but a state of con- 
 sciousness. To him, however, who insists upon the 
 fixed and final limitation of psychology, the state 
 of consciousness is not the shape some fact takes 
 from the exigency of investigation; it is literally 
 the full fact itself. It is not an intervening term ; 
 it bounds the horizon. Here, then, the issue de- 
 fines itself. I conceive that states of conscious- 
 ness (and I hope you will take the phrase broadly 
 enough to cover all the specific data of psy- 
 chology) have no existence before the psychologist 
 begins to work. He brings them into existence. 
 What we are really after is the process of ex- 
 perience, the way in which it arises and behaves. 
 We want to know its course, its history, its laws. 
 We want to know its various typical forms; how 
 each originates ; how it is related to others ; the 
 
CONSCIOUSNESS AND EXPERIENCE 249 
 
 part it plays in maintaining an inclusive, expand- 
 ing, connected course of experience. Our problem 
 as psychologists is to learn its modus operandi, its 
 method. 
 
 The paleontologist is again summoned to our 
 aid. In a given district he finds a great number 
 and variety of footprints. From these he goes to 
 work to construct the structure and the life habits 
 of the animals that made them. The tracks exist 
 undoubtedly ; they are there ; but yet he deals with 
 them not as final existences but as signs, phe- 
 nomena in the literal sense. Imagine the hearing 
 that the critic would receive who should inform the 
 paleontologist that he is transcending his field of 
 scientific activity; that his concern is with foot- 
 prints as such, aiming to describe each, to analyze 
 it into its simplest forms, to compare the different 
 kinds with one another so as to detect common ele- 
 ments, and finally, thereby, to discover the laws 
 of their arrangement in space ! 
 
 Yet the immediate data are footprints, and foot- 
 prints only. The paleontologist does in a way do 
 all these things that our imaginary critic is urging 
 upon him. The difference is not that he arbitrarily 
 lugs in other data ; that he invents entities and 
 faculties that are not there. The difference is 
 in his standpoint. His interest is in the animals, 
 and the data are treated in whatever way seems 
 likely to serve this interest. So with the psycholo- 
 
250 CONSCIOUSNESS AND EXPERIENCE 
 
 gist. He is continually and perforce occupied 
 with minute and empirical investigation of special 
 facts — states of consciousness, if you please. But 
 these neither define nor exhaust his scientific prob- 
 lem. They are his footprints, his clues through 
 which he places before himself the life-process he is 
 studying — with the further difference that his foot- 
 prints are not after all given to him, but are de- 
 veloped by his investigation. 1 
 
 The supposition that these states are somehow 
 existent by themselves and in this existence provide 
 the psychologist with ready-made material is just 
 the supreme case of the " psychological fallacy " : 
 the confusion of experience as it is to the one ex- 
 periencing with what the psychologist makes out 
 of it with his reflective analysis. 
 
 The psychologist begins with certain operations, 
 acts, functions as his data. If these fall out of 
 
 1 This is a fact not without its bearings upon the question 
 of the nature and value of introspection. The objection that 
 introspection " alters " the reality and hence is untrust- 
 worthy, most writers dispose of by saying that, after all, it 
 need not alter the reality so very much — not beyond repair — 
 and that, moreover, memory assists in restoring the ruins. 
 It would be simpler to admit the fact: that the purpose 
 of introspection is precisely to effect the right sort of altera- 
 tion. If introspection should give us the original experi- 
 ence again, we should just be living through the experience 
 over again in direct fashion; as psychologists we should not 
 be forwarded one bit. Reflection upon this obvious proposi- 
 tion may bring to light various other matters worthy of note. 
 
CONSCIOUSNESS AND EXPERIENCE 251 
 
 sight in the course of discussion, it is only because 
 having been taken for granted, they remain to 
 control the whole development of the inquiry, and 
 to afford the sterling medium of redemption. Acts 
 such as perceiving, remembering, intending, lov- 
 ing give the points of departure; they alone are 
 concrete experiences. To understand these ex- 
 periences, under what conditions they arise, and 
 what effects they produce, analysis into states of 
 consciousness occurs. And the modes of conscious- 
 ness that are figured remain unarranged and un- 
 important, save as they may be translated back 
 into acts. 
 
 To remember is to do something, as much as 
 to shoe a horse, or to cherish a keepsake. To pro- 
 pose, to observe, to be kindly affectioned, are terms 
 of value, of practice, of operation; just as diges- 
 tion, respiration, locomotion express functions, not 
 observable "objects." But there is an object 
 that may be described: lungs, stomach, leg-mus- 
 cles, or whatever. Through the structure we pre- 
 sent to ourselves the function; it appears laid out 
 before us, spread forth in detail — objectified in a 
 word. The anatomist who devotes himself to this 
 detail may, if he please (and he probably does 
 please to concentrate his devotion) ignore the 
 function: to discover what is there, to analyze, to 
 measure, to describe, gives him outlet enough. 
 But nevertheless it is the function that fixed the 
 
252 CONSCIOUSNESS AND EXPERIENCE 
 
 point of departure, that prescribed the problem 
 and that set the limits, physical as well as intel- 
 lectual, of subsequent investigation. Reference to 
 function makes the details discovered other than a 
 jumble of incoherent trivialities. One might as 
 well devote himself to the minute description of a 
 square yard of desert soil were it not for this trans- 
 lation. States of consciousness are the morphol- 
 ogy of certain functions. 1 What is true of anal- 
 ysis, of description, is true equally of classifica- 
 tion. Knowing, willing, feeling, name states of 
 consciousness not in terms of themselves, but in 
 terms of acts, attitudes, found in experience. 2 
 
 1 Thus to divorce " structure psychology " from " function 
 psychology " is to leave us without possibility of scientific 
 comprehension of function, while it deprives us of all 
 standard of reference in selecting, observing, and explaining 
 the structure. 
 
 2 The following answer may fairly be anticipated: "This 
 is true of the operations cited, but only because complex 
 processes have been selected. Such a term as 'knowing' 
 does of course express a function involving a system of 
 intricate references. But, for that very reason, we go back 
 to the sensation which is the genuine type of the ' state 
 of consciousness ' as such, pure and unadulterate and un- 
 sophisticated." The point is large for a footnote, but the 
 following considerations are instructive: (1) The same 
 psychologist will go on to inform us that sensations, as 
 we experience them, are networks of reference — they are 
 perceptual, and more or less conceptual even. From which 
 it would appear that whatever else they are or are not, 
 the sensations, for which self -inclosed existence is claimed, 
 are not states of consciousness. And (2) we are told that 
 
CONSCIOUSNESS AND EXPERIENCE 253 
 
 Explanation, even of an " empirical sort " is as 
 impossible as determination of a " state " and its 
 classification, when we rigidly confine ourselves to 
 modifications of consciousness as a self-existent. 
 Sensations are always defined, classified, and ex- 
 plained by reference to conditions which, according 
 to the theory, are extraneous — sense-organs and 
 stimuli. The whole physiological side assumes a 
 ludicrously anomalous aspect on this basis. 1 
 While experimentation is retained, and even made 
 much of, it is at the cost of logical coherence. To 
 experiment with reference to a bare state of con- 
 sciousness is a performance of which one cannot 
 imagine the nature, to say nothing of doing it ; 
 while to experiment with reference to acts and the 
 conditions of their occurrence is a natural and 
 straightforward undertaking. Such simple proc- 
 esses as association are concretely inexplicable when 
 
 these are reached by scientific abstraction in order to ac- 
 count for complex forms. From which it would appear 
 that they are hypothecated as products of interpretation 
 and for purposes of further interpretation. Only the delu- 
 sion that the more complex forms are just aggregates (in- 
 stead of being acts, like seeing, hoping, etc.) prevents 
 recognition of the point in question — that the "state of 
 consciousness " is an instrument of inquiry or method- 
 ological appliance. 
 
 1 On the other hand, if what we are trying to get at is 
 just the course and procedure of experiencing, of course 
 any consideration that helps distinguish and make com- 
 prehensible that process is thoroughly pertinent. 
 
254 CONSCIOUSNESS AND EXPERIENCE 
 
 we assume states of consciousness as existences by 
 themselves. As recent psychology testifies, we 
 again have to resort to conditions that have no 
 place nor calling on the basis of the theory — the 
 principle of habit, of neural action, or else some 
 connection in the object.- 1 
 
 We have only to note that there are two oppos- 
 ing schools in psychology to see in what an un- 
 scientific status is the subject. We have only to 
 consider that these two schools are the result of 
 assuming states of consciousness as existences per 
 se to locate the source of the scientific scandal. 
 No matter what the topic, whether memory or 
 association or attention or effort, the same dual- 
 isms present themselves, the same necessity of 
 choosing between two schools. One, lost in the dis- 
 tinctions that it has developed, denies the func- 
 tion because it can find objectively presented only 
 states of consciousness. So it abrogates the func- 
 tion, regarding it as a mere aggregate of such 
 states, or as a purely external and factitious re- 
 
 1 It may avoid misunderstanding if I anticipate here 
 a subsequent remark: that my point is not in the least that 
 " states of consciousness " require some " synthetic unity " 
 or faculty of substantial mind to effect their association. 
 Quite the contrary; for this theory also admits the "states 
 of consciousness " as existences in themselves also. My 
 contention is that the " state of consciousness " as such is 
 always a methodological product, developed in the course 
 and for the purposes of psychological analysis. 
 
CONSCIOUSNESS AND EXPERIENCE 255 
 
 lation between them. The other school, recogniz- 
 ing that this procedure explains away rather than ^J 
 explains, the values of experience, attempts to even 
 up by declaring that certain functions are them- 
 selves immediately given data of consciousness, ex- 
 isting side by side with the " states," but indefi- 
 nitely transcending them in worth, and appre- 
 hended by some higher organ. So against the 
 elementary contents and external associations of 
 the analytic school in psychology, we have the 
 complicated machinery of the intellectualist school, 
 with its pure self-consciousness as a source of ulti- 
 mate truths, its hierarchy of intuitions, its ready- 
 made faculties. To be sure, these " spiritual fac- 
 ulties " are now largely reduced to some one com- 
 prehensive form — Apperception, or Will, or Atten- 
 tion, or whatever the fashionable term may be. 
 But the principle remains the same ; the assumption 
 of a function as a given existent, distinguishable 
 in itself and acting upon other existences — as if 
 the functions digestion and vision were regarded 
 as separate from organic structures, somehow act- 
 ing upon them from the outside so as to bring co- 
 operation and harmony into them ! 1 This division 
 into psychological schools is as reasonable as would 
 be one of botanists into rootists and flowerists ; of 
 
 1 The " functions " are in truth ordinary everyday acts 
 and attitudes: seeing, smelling, talking, listening, remember- 
 ing, hoping, loving, fearing. 
 
256 CONSCIOUSNESS AND EXPERIENCE 
 
 those proclaiming the root to be the rudimentary 
 and essential structure, and those asserting that 
 since the function of seed-bearing is the main thing, 
 the flower is really the controlling " synthetic " 
 principle. Both sensationalist and intellectualist 
 suppose that psychology has some special sphere 
 of " reality " or of experience marked off for it 
 within which the data are just lying around, self- 
 existent and ready-made, to be picked up and 
 assorted as pebbles await the visitor on the beach. 
 Both alike fail to recognize that the psychologist 
 first has experience to deal with; the same experi- 
 ence that the zoologist, geologist, chemist, mathe- 
 matician, and historian deal with, and that what 
 characterizes his specialty is not some data or ex- 
 istences which he may call uniquely his own ; but 
 the problem raised — the problem of the course of 
 the acts that constitute experiencing. 
 
 Here psychology gets its revenge upon those who 
 would rule it out of possession of important philo- 
 sophical bearing. As a matter of fact, the larger 
 part of the questions that are being discussed in 
 current epistemology and what is termed meta- 
 physic of logic and ethic arise out of (and are 
 hopelessly compromised by) this original assump- 
 tion of " consciousness as such " — in other words, 
 are provoked by the exact reason that is given 
 for denying to psychology any essential meaning 
 for epistemology and metaphysic. Such is the 
 
CONSCIOUSNESS AND EXPERIENCE 257 
 
 irony of the situation. The epistemologist's prob- 
 lem is, indeed, usually put as the question of how 
 the subject can so far "transcend" itself as to 
 get valid assurance of the objective world. The 
 very phraseology in which the problem is put re- 
 veals the thoroughness of the psychologist's re- 
 venge. Just and only because experience has been 
 reduced to " states of consciousness " as independ- 
 ent existences, does the question of self-transcend- 
 ence have any meaning. The entire epistemolog- 
 ical industry is one — shall I say it — of a Sisyphean 
 nature. Mutatis mutandis, the same holds of the 
 metaphysic of logic, ethic, and esthetic. In each 
 case, the basic problem has come to be how a mere 
 state of consciousness can be the vehicle of a system 
 of truth, of an objectively valid good, of beauty 
 which is other than agreeable feeling. We may, in- 
 deed, excuse the psychologist for not carrying on 
 the special inquiries that are the business of log- 
 ical, ethical, and esthetical philosophy ; but can we 
 excuse ourselves for forcing his results into such 
 a shape as to make philosophic problems so arbi- 
 trary that they are soluble only by arbitrarily 
 wrenching scientific facts? 
 
 Undoubtedly we are between two fires. In plac- 
 ing upon psychology the responsibility of discov- 
 ering the method of experience, as a sequence of 
 acts and passions, do we not destroy just that 
 limitation to concrete detail which now constitutes 
 
258 CONSCIOUSNESS AND EXPERIENCE 
 
 it a science? Will not the psychologist be the 
 first to repudiate this attempt to mix him up in 
 matters philosophical? We need only to keep in 
 mind the specific facts involved in the term Course 
 or Process of Experience to avoid this danger. 
 The immediate preoccupation of the psychologist 
 is with very definite and empirical facts — questions 
 like the limits of audition, of the origin of pitch, 
 of the structure and conditions of the musical scale, 
 etc. Just so the immediate affair of the geologist 
 is with particular rock-structures, of the botanist 
 with particular plants, and so on. But through 
 the collection, description, location, classification 
 of rocks the geologist is led to the splendid story 
 of world-forming. The limited, fixed, and sepa- 
 rate piece of work is dissolved away in the fluent 
 and dynamic drama of the earth. So, the plant 
 leads with inevitableness to the whole process of 
 life and its evolution. 
 
 In form, the botanist still studies the genus, 
 the species, the plant — hardly, indeed, that ; rather 
 the special parts, the structural elements, of the 
 plant. In reality, he studies life itself; the 
 structures are the indications, the signature 
 through which he renders transparent the mystery 
 of life growing in the changing world. It was 
 doubtless necessary for the botanist to go through 
 the Linnean period — the period of engagement 
 with rigid detail and fixed classifications ; of tear- 
 
CONSCIOUSNESS AND EXPERIENCE 259 
 
 ing apart and piecing together; of throwing all 
 emphasis upon peculiarities of number, size, and 
 appearance of matured structure; of regarding 
 change, growth, and function as external, more or 
 less interesting, attachments to form. Examina- 
 tion of this period is instructive; there is much in 
 contemporary investigation and discussion that is 
 almost unpleasantly reminiscent in its suggestive- 
 ness. The psychologist should profit by the inter- 
 vening history of science. The conception of evo- 
 lution is not so much an additional law as it is a 
 face-about. The fixed structure, the separate 
 form, the isolated element, is henceforth at best a 
 mere stepping-stone to knowledge of process, and 
 when not at its best, marks the end of comprehen- 
 sion, and betokens failure to grasp the problem. 
 
 With the change in standpoint from self-in- 
 cluded existence to including process, from struc- 
 tural unit of composition to controlling unity of 
 function, from changeless form to movement in 
 growth, the whole scheme of values is transformed. 
 Faculties are definite directions of development ; 
 elements are products that are starting-points for 
 new processes ; bare facts are indices of change ; 
 static conditions are modes of accomplished ad- 
 justment. Not that the concrete, empirical phe- 
 nomenon loses in worth, much less that unverifiable 
 " metaphysical " entities are impertinently intro- 
 duced; but that our aim is the discovery of a 
 
260 CONSCIOUSNESS AND EXPERIENCE 
 
 process of actions in its adaptations to circum- 
 stance. If we apply this evolutionary logic in 
 psychology, where shall we stop? Questions of 
 limits of stimuli in a given sense, say hearing, are 
 in reality questions of temporary arrests, adjust- 
 ments marking the favorable equilibrium of the 
 whole organism ; they connect with the question of 
 the use of sensation in general and auditory sensa- 
 tions in particular for life-habits ; of the origin 
 and use of localized and distinguished perception ; 
 and this, in turn, involves within itself the whole 
 question of space and time recognition; the signi- 
 ficance of the thing-and-quality experience, and 
 so on. And when we are told that the question of 
 the origin of space experience has nothing at all 
 to do with the question of the nature and signifi- 
 cance of the space experienced, the statement is 
 simply evidence that the one who makes it is still 
 at the static standpoint; he believes that things, 
 that relations, have existence and significance 
 apart from the particular conditions under which 
 they come into experience, and apart from the 
 special service rendered in those particular con- 
 ditions. 
 
 Of course, I am far from saying that every psy- 
 chologist must make the whole journey. Each in- 
 dividual may contract, as he pleases, for any sec- 
 tion or subsection he prefers ; and undoubtedly the 
 well-being of the science is advanced by such divi- 
 
CONSCIOUSNESS AND EXPERIENCE 261 
 
 sion of labor. But psychology goes over the whole 
 ground from detecting every distinct act of ex- 
 periencing, to seeing what need calls out the special 
 organ fitted to cope with the situation, and discov- 
 ering the machinery through which it operates to 
 keep a-going the course of action. 
 
 But, I shall be told, the wall that divides psy- 
 chology from philosophy cannot be so easily 
 treated as non-existent. Psychology is a matter 
 of natural history, even though it may be admitted 
 that it is the natural history of the course of ex- 
 perience. But philosophy is a matter of values; 
 of the criticism and justification of certain validi- 
 ties. One deals, it is said, with genesis, with con- 
 ditions of temporal origin and transition ; the other 
 with analysis, with eternal constitution. I shall 
 have to repeat that just this rigid separation of 
 genesis and analysis seems to me a survival from a 
 pre-evolutionary, a pre-historic age. It indicates 
 not so much an assured barrier between philosophy 
 and psychology as the distance dividing philos- 
 ophy from all science. For the lesson that 
 mathematicians first learned, that physics and 
 chemistry pondered over, in which the biological 
 disciplines were finally tutored, is that sure and 
 delicate analysis is possible only through the pa- 
 tient study of conditions of origin and development. 
 The method of analysis in mathematics is the 
 method of construction. The experimental method 
 
262 CONSCIOUSNESS AND EXPERIENCE 
 
 is the method of making, of following the history 
 of production; the term " cause " that has (when 
 taken as an existent entity) so hung on the heels 
 of science as to impede its progress, has universal 
 meaning when read as condition of appearance in 
 a process. And, as already intimated, the concep- 
 tion of evolution is no more and no less the dis- 
 covery of a general law of life than it is the gen- 
 eralization of all scientific method. Everywhere 
 analysis that cannot proceed by examining the suc- 
 cessive stages of its subject, from its beginning 
 up to its culmination, that cannot control this 
 examination by discovering the conditions under 
 which successive stages appear, is only prelimi- 
 nary. It may further the invention of proper tools 
 of inquiry, it may help define problems, it may 
 serve to suggest valuable hypotheses. But as 
 science it breathes an air already tainted. There 
 is no way to sort out the results flowing from the 
 subject-matter itself from those introduced by the 
 assumptions and presumptions of our own reflec- 
 tion. Not so with natural history when it is 
 worthy of its name. Here the analysis is the un- 
 folding of the existence itself. Its distinctions are 
 not pigeon-holes of our convenience; they are 
 stakes that mark the parting of the ways in the 
 process itself. Its classifications are not a grasp 
 at factors resisting further analysis ; they are 
 the patient tracings of the paths pursued. Noth- 
 
CONSCIOUSNESS AND EXPERIENCE 263 
 
 ing is more out of date than to suppose that 
 interest in genesis is interest in reducing higher 
 forms to cruder ones : it is interest in locating the 
 exact and objective conditions under which a 
 given fact appears, and in relation to which ac- 
 cordingly it has its meaning. Nothing is more 
 naive than to suppose that in pursuing " natural 
 history " (term of scorn in which yet resides 
 the dignity of the world-drama) we simply learn 
 something of the temporal conditions under which 
 a given value appears, while its own eternal 
 essential quality remains as opaque as before. Na- 
 ture knows no such divorce of quality and circum- 
 stance. Things come when they are wanted and 
 as they are wanted ; their quality is precisely the 
 response they give to the conditions that call for 
 them, while the furtherance they afford to the 
 movement of their whole is their meaning. The 
 severance of analysis and genesis, instead of serv- 
 ing as a ready-made test by which to try out the 
 empirical, temporal events of psychology from the 
 rational abiding constitution of philosophy, is a 
 brand of philosophic dualism: the supposition 
 that values are externally obtruded and statically 
 set in irrelevant rubbish. 
 
 There are those who will admit that " states of 
 consciousness " are but the cross-sections of flow of 
 behavior, arrested for inspection, made in order 
 that we may reconstruct experience in its life- 
 
264 CONSCIOUSNESS AND EXPERIENCE 
 
 history. Yet in the knowledge of the course and 
 method of our experience, they will hold that we 
 are far from the domain proper of philosophy. 
 Experience, they say, is just the historic achieve- 
 ment of finite individuals ; it tells the tale of ap- 
 proach to the treasures of truth, of partial vic- 
 tory, but larger defeat, in laying hold of the 
 treasure. But, they say, reality is not the path 
 to reality, and record of devious wanderings in the 
 path is hardly a safe account of the goal. Psychol- 
 ogy, in other words, may tell us something of how 
 we mortals lay hold of the world of things and 
 truths; of how we appropriate and assimilate its 
 contents ; and of how we react. It may trace the 
 issues of such approaches and apprehensions upon 
 the course of our own individual destinies. But it 
 cannot wisely ignore nor sanely deny the distinc- 
 tion between these individual strivings and achieve- 
 ments, and the " Reality " that subsists and sup- 
 ports its own structure outside these finite futilities. 
 The processes by which we turn over The Reality 
 into terms of our fragmentary unconcluded, in- 
 conclusive experiences are so extrinsic to the Real- 
 ity itself as to have no revealing power with refer- 
 ence to it. There is the ordo ad universum, the 
 subject of philosophy; there is the ordo ad 'm- 
 dividuum, the subject of psychology. 
 
 Some such assumption as this lies latent, I am 
 convinced, in all forswearings of the kinship of 
 
CONSCIOUSNESS AND EXPERIENCE 265 
 
 psychology and philosophy. Two conceptions 
 hang together. The opinion that psychology is an 
 account only and finally of states of consciousness, 
 and therefore can throw no light upon the objects 
 with which philosophy deals, is twin to the doctrine 
 that the whole conscious life of the individual is 
 not organic to the world. The philosophic basis 
 and scope of this doctrine lie beyond examination 
 here. But even in passing one cannot avoid re- 
 marking that the doctrine is almost never consist- 
 ently held ; the doctrine logically carried out leads 
 so directly to intellectual and moral scepticism that 
 the theory usually prefers to work in the dark 
 background as a disposition and temper of thought 
 rather than to make a frank statement of itself. 
 Even in the half-hearted expositions of the process 
 of human experience as something merely annexed 
 to the reality of the universe, we are brought face 
 to face to the consideration with which we set out : 
 the dependence of theories of the individual upon 
 the position at a given time of the individual prac- 
 tical and social. The doctrine of the acci- 
 dental, futile, transitory significance of the indi- 
 vidual's experience as compared with eternal real- 
 ities ; the notion that at best the individual is simply 
 realizing for and in himself what already has fixed 
 completeness in itself is congruous only with a 
 certain intellectual and political scheme and must 
 modify itself as that shifts. When such re- 
 
266 CONSCIOUSNESS AND EXPERIENCE 
 
 arrangement comes, our estimate of the nature 
 and importance of psychology will mirror the 
 change. 
 
 When man's command of the methods that con- 
 trol action was precarious and disturbed; when 
 the tools that subject the world of things and 
 forces to use and operation were rare and clumsy, 
 it was unavoidable that the individual should sub- 
 mit his perception and purpose blankly to the 
 blank reality beyond. Under such circumstances, 
 external authority must reign ; the belief that hu- 
 man experience in itself is approximate, not in- 
 trinsic, is inevitable. Under such circumstances, 
 reference to the individual, to the subject, is a re- 
 sort only for explaining error, illusion, and uncer- 
 tainty. The necessity of external control and ex- 
 ternal redemption of experience reports itself in a 
 low valuation of the self, and of all the factors and 
 phases of experience that spring from the self. 
 That the psychology of medievalism should appear 
 only as a portion of its theology of sin and salva- 
 tion is as obvious as that the psychology of the 
 Greeks should be a chapter of cosmology. 
 
 As against all this, the assertion is ventured 
 that psychology, supplying us with knowledge of 
 the behavior of experience, is a conception of de- 
 mocracy. Its postulate is that since experience 
 fulfils itself in individuals, since it administers 
 itself through their instrumentality, the account of 
 
CONSCIOUSNESS AND EXPERIENCE 267 
 
 the course and method of this achievement is a 
 significant and indispensable affair. 
 
 Democracy is possible only because of a change 
 in intellectual conditions. It implies tools for get- 
 ting at truth in detail, and day by day, as we go 
 along. Only such possession justifies the surrender 
 of fixed, all-embracing principles to which, as uni- 
 versal, all particulars and individuals are subject 
 for valuation and regulation. Without such pos- 
 session, it is only the courage of the fool that 
 would undertake the venture to which democracy 
 has committed itself — the ordering of life in re- 
 sponse to the needs of the moment in accordance 
 with the ascertained truth of the moment. Modern 
 life involves the deification of the here and the 
 now; of the specific, the particular, the unique, 
 that which happens once and has no measure of 
 value save such as it brings with itself* Such dei- 
 fication is monstrous fetishism, unless the deity be 
 there ; unless the universal lives, moves, and has its 
 being in experience as individualized. 1 This con- 
 
 1 This is perhaps a suitable moment to allude to the ab- 
 sence, in this discussion, of reference to what is some- 
 times termed rational psychology — the assumption of a 
 separate, substantialized ego, soul, or whatever, existing 
 side by side with particular experiences and " states of con- 
 sciousness," acting upon them and acted upon by them. In 
 ignoring this and confining myself to the " states of con- 
 sciousness " theory and the " natural history " theory, I 
 may appear not only to have unduly narrowed the concerns 
 
268 CONSCIOUSNESS AND EXPERIENCE 
 
 viction of the value of the individualized finds its 
 further expression in psychology, which undertakes 
 to show how this individualization proceeds, and in 
 what aspect it presents itself. 
 
 Of course, such a conception means something 
 for philosophy as well as for psychology ; possibly 
 it involves for philosophy the larger measure of 
 transformation. It involves surrender of any claim 
 on the part of philosophy to be the sole source 
 of some truths and the exclusive guardian of some 
 
 at issue, but to have weakened my own point, as this doc- 
 trine seems to offer a special vantage ground whence to 
 defend the close relationship of psychology and philosophy. 
 The " narrowing," if such it be, will have to pass — from 
 limits of time and other matters. But the other point 
 I cannot concede. The independently existing soul restricts 
 and degrades individuality, making of it a separate thing 
 outside of the full flow of things, alien to things experi- 
 enced and consequently in either mechanical or miraculous 
 relations to them. It is vitiated by just the quality already 
 objected to — that psychology has a separate piece of reality 
 apportioned to it, instead of occupying itself with the 
 manifestation and operation of any and all existences in 
 reference to concrete action. From this point of view, the 
 " states of consciousness " attitude is a much more hopeful 
 and fruitful one. It ignores certain considerations, to be 
 sure; and when it turns its ignoring into denial, it leaves 
 us with curious hieroglyphics. But after all, there is a key; 
 these symbols can be read; they may be translated into 
 terms of the course of experience. When thus translated, 
 selfhood, individuality, is neither wiped out nor set up as a 
 miraculous and foreign entity; it is seen as the unity of 
 reference and function involved in all things when fully 
 experienced — the pivot about which they turn. 
 
CONSCIOUSNESS AND EXPERIENCE 269 
 
 values. It means that philosophy be a method; 
 not an assurance company, nor a knight errant. 
 It means an alignment with science. Philosophy 
 may not be sacrificed to the partial and superficial 
 clamor of that which sometimes officiously and pre- 
 tentiously exhibits itself as Science. But there is 
 a sense in which philosophy must go to school to 
 the sciences ; must have no data save such as it 
 receives at their hands ; and be hospitable to no 
 method of inquiry or reflection not akin to those in 
 daily use among the sciences. As long as it claims 
 for itself special territory of fact, or peculiar 
 modes of access to truth, so long must it occupy a 
 dubious position. Yet this claim it has to make 
 until psychology comes to its own. There is some- 
 thing in experience, something in things, which the 
 physical and the biological sciences do not touch; 
 something, moreover, which is not just more ex- 
 periences or more existences ; but without which 
 their materials are inexperienced, unrealized. Such 
 sciences deal only with what might be experienced ; 
 with the content of experience, provided and as- 
 sumed there be experience. It is psychology which 
 tells us how this possible experience loses its barely 
 hypothetical character, and is stamped with cate- 
 gorical unquestioned experiencedness ; how, in a 
 word, it becomes here and now in some uniquely 
 individualized life. Here is the necessary transi- 
 tion of science into philosophy; a passage that 
 
270 CONSCIOUSNESS AND EXPERIENCE 
 
 carries the verified and solid body of the one into the 
 large and free form of the other. 
 
 [Note: I have let this paper stand much as written, though 
 Inow conscious that much more is crowded into it than could 
 properly be presented in one paper. The drift of the ten 
 years from '99 to '09 has made, I venture to believe, for in- 
 creased clearness in the main positions of the paper: The 
 revival of a naturalistic realism, the denial of the existence 
 of " consciousness," the development of functional and 
 dynamic psychology (accompanied by aversion to interpre- 
 tation of functions as faculties of a soul-substance) — all of 
 these tendencies are sympathetic with the aim of the paper. 
 There is another reason for letting it stand: the new func- 
 tional and pragmatic empiricism proffered in this volume 
 has been constantly objected to on the ground that its con- 
 ceptions of knowledge and verification lead only to sub- 
 jectivism and solipsism. The paper may indicate that the 
 identification of experience with bare states of consciousness 
 represents the standpoint of the critic, not of the empiricism 
 criticised, and that it is for him, not for me, to fear the 
 subjective implications of such a position. The paper also 
 clearly raises the question as to how far the isolation of 
 " consciousness " from nature and social life, which charac- 
 terizes the procedure of many psychologists of to-day, is 
 responsible for keeping alive quite unreal problems in phi- 
 losophy.] 
 
THE SIGNIFICANCE OF THE PROBLEM 
 OF KNOWLEDGE 1 
 
 TT is now something over a century since Kant 
 * called upon philosophers to cease their discus- 
 sion regarding the nature of the world and the 
 principles of existence until they had arrived at 
 some conclusion regarding the nature of the know- 
 ing process. But students of philosophy know 
 that Kant formulated the question " how knowl- 
 edge is possible " rather than created it. As mat- 
 ter of fact, reflective thought for two centuries 
 before Kant had been principally interested in just 
 this problem, although it had not generalized its 
 own interest. Kant brought to consciousness the 
 controlling motive. The discussion, both in Kant 
 himself and in his successors, often seems scholas- 
 tic, lost in useless subtlety, scholastic argument, 
 and technical distinctions. Within the last decade 
 in particular there have been signs of a growing 
 weariness as to epistemology, and a tendency to 
 
 1 Delivered before the Philosophical Club of the Univer- 
 sity of Michigan, in the winter of 1897, and reprinted with 
 slight change from a monograph in the " University of Chi- 
 cago Contributions to Philosophy," 1897. 
 
 271 
 
272 THE PROBLEM OF KNOWLEDGE 
 
 turn away to more fertile fields. The interest 
 shows signs of exhaustion. 
 
 Students of philosophy will recognize what I 
 mean when I say that this growing conviction of 
 futility and consequent distaste are associated with 
 the outcome of the famous dictum of Kant, that 
 perception without conception is blind, while con- 
 ception without perception is empty. The whole 
 course of reflection since Kant's time has tended to 
 justify this remark. The sensationalist and the 
 rationalist have worked themselves out. Pretty 
 much all students are convinced that we can reduce 
 knowledge neither to a set of associated sensations, 
 nor yet to a purely rational system of relations of 
 
 ♦ thought. Knowledge is judgment, and judgment 
 requires both a material of sense perception and 
 an ordering, regulating principle, reason ; so much 
 seems certain, but we do not get any further. 
 Sensation and thought themselves seem to stand 
 out more rigidly opposed to each other in their 
 own natures than ever. Why both are necessary, 
 and how two such opposed factors cooperate in 
 bringing about the unified result of science, be- 
 
 » comes more and more of a mystery. It is the 
 continual running up against this situation which 
 accounts for the flagging of interest and the desire 
 to direct energy where it will have more outcome. 
 
 This situation creates a condition favorable to 
 taking stock of the question as it stands; to in- 
 
THE PROBLEM OF KNOWLEDGE 273 
 
 quiring what this interest, prolonged for over three * 
 centuries, in the possibility and nature of knowl- 
 edge, stands for; what the conviction as to the 
 necessity of the union of sensation and thought, 
 together with the inability to reach conclusions re- 
 garding the nature of the union, signifies. 
 
 I propose then to raise this evening precisely 
 this question : What is the meaning of the problem 
 of knowledge? What is its meaning, not simply 
 for reflective philosophy or in terms of epistemol- 
 ogy itself, but what is its meaning in the historical 
 movement of humanity and as a part of a larger 
 and more comprehensive experience? My thesis 
 is perhaps sufficiently indicated in the mere taking 
 of this point of view. It implies that the abstract- 
 ness of the discussion of knowledge, its remoteness 
 from everyday experience, is one of form, rather 
 than of substance. It implies that the problem of 
 knowledge is not a problem that has its origin, its 
 value, or its destiny within itself. The problem is 
 one which social life, the organized practice of man-* v 
 kind, has had to face. The seemingly technical and 
 abstruse discussion of the philosophers results from 
 the formulation and statement of the question. 
 
 I suggest that the problem of the possibility of 
 knowledge is but an aspect of the question of the 
 relation of knowing to acting, of theory to prac- . 
 tice. The distinctions which the philosophers raise, 
 the oppositions which they erect, the weary tread-- 
 
274 THE PROBLEM OF KNOWLEDGE 
 
 mill which they pursue between sensation and 
 thought, subject and object, mind and matter, are 
 not invented ad hoc, but are simply the concise re- 
 ports and condensed formula of points of view and 
 practical conflicts having their source in the very 
 nature of modern life, conflicts which must be met 
 and solved if modern life is to go on its way un- 
 troubled, with clear consciousness of what it is 
 about. As the philosopher has received his prob- 
 lem from the world of action, so he must return 
 his account there for auditing and liquidation. 
 
 More especially, I suggest that the tendency of 
 all the points at issue to precipitate in the opposi- 
 tion of sensationalism and rationalism is due to the 
 fact that sensation and reason stand for the two 
 forces contending for mastery in social life: the 
 radical and the conservative. The reason that the 
 contest does not end, the reason for the necessity 
 of the combination of the two in the resultant state- 
 ment, is that both factors are necessary in action ; 
 one stands for stimulus, for initiative ; the other for 
 control, for direction. 
 
 I cannot hope, in the time at my command this 
 evening, to justify these wide and sweeping asser- 
 tions regarding either the origin, the work, or the 
 final destiny of philosophic reflection. I simply 
 hope, by reference to some of the chief periods of 
 the development of philosophy, to illustrate to you 
 something of what I mean. 
 
THE PROBLEM OF KNOWLEDGE 275 
 
 At the outset we take a long scope in our survey 
 and present to ourselves the epoch when philosophy 
 was still consciously, and not simply by implica- 
 tion, human, when reflective thought had not devel- 
 oped its own technique of method, and was in no 
 danger of being caught in its own machinery — the 
 time of Socrates. What does the assertion of 
 Socrates that an unexamined life is not one fit to 
 be led by man; what does his injunction " Know 
 thyself" mean? It means that the corporate 
 motives and guarantees of conduct are breaking * 
 down. We have got away from the time when the 
 individual could both regulate and justify his 
 course of life by reference to the ideals incarnate 
 in the habits of the community of which he is a 
 member. The time of direct and therefore uncon- 
 scious union with corporate life, finding therein 
 stimuli, codes, and values, has departed. The de- 
 velopment of industry and commerce, of war and 
 politics, has brought face to face communities with 
 different aims and diverse habits ; the development 
 of myth and animism into crude but genuine scien- 
 tific observation and imagination has transformed 
 the physical widening of the horizon, brought 
 about by commerce and intercourse, into an in- 
 tellectual and moral expansion. The old supports 
 fail precisely at the time when they are most needed 
 — before a widening and more complex scene of 
 action. Where, then, shall the agent of action 
 
276 THE PROBLEM OF KNOWLEDGE 
 
 turn? The " Know thyself " of Socrates is the re- 
 ply to the practical problem which confronted 
 Athens in his day. Investigation into the true 
 ends and worths of human life, sifting and test- 
 ing of all competing ends, the discovery of a 
 method which should validate the genuine and 
 dismiss the spurious, had henceforth to do for 
 man what consolidated and incorporate custom 
 had hitherto presented as a free and precious 
 
 gift. 
 
 With Socrates the question is as direct and prac- 
 tical as the question of making one's living or of 
 governing the state ; it is indeed the same question 
 put in its general form. It is a question that the 
 flute player, the cobbler, and the politician must 
 face no more and no less than the reflective philos- 
 opher. The question is addressed by Socrates to 
 every individual and to every group with which he 
 comes in contact. Because the question is practi- 
 cal it is individual and direct. It is a question 
 which every one must face and answer for himself, 
 just as in the Protestant scheme every individual 
 must face and solve for himself the question of his 
 final destiny. 
 
 Yet the very attitude of Socrates carried with it 
 the elements of its own destruction. Socrates could 
 only raise the question, or rather demand of every 
 individual that he raise it for himself. Of the 
 answer he declared himself to be as ignorant as 
 
THE PROBLEM OF KNOWLEDGE 277 
 
 was any one. The result could be only a shifting 
 of the center of interest. If the question is so all- 
 important, and yet the wisest of all men must con- 
 fess that he onty knows his own ignorance as to its 
 answer, the inevitable point of further considera- 
 tion is the discovery of a method which shall enable 
 the question to be answered. This is the signifi- 
 cance of Plato. The problem is the absolutely in- 
 evitable outgrowth of the Socratic position; and 
 yet it carried with it just as inevitably the separa- 
 tion of philosopher from shoemaker and statesman, 
 and the relegation of theory to a position remote 
 for the time being from conduct. 
 
 If the Socratic command, " Know thyself," runs 
 against the dead wall of inability to conduct this 
 knowledge, some one must take upon himself the 
 discovery of how the requisite knowledge may be 
 obtained. A new profession is born, that of the 
 thinker. At this time the means, the discovery of 
 how the aims and worths of the self may be known 
 and measured, becomes, for this class, an end in 
 itself. Theory is ultimately to be applied to prac- 
 tice ; but in the meantime the theory must be worked 
 out as theory or else no application. This repre- 
 sents the peculiar equilibrium and the peculiar 
 point of contradiction in the Platonic system. All 
 philosophy is simply for the sake of the organiza- I 
 tion and regulation of social life ; and yet the phi- 
 losophers must be a class by themselves, working 
 
278 THE PROBLEM OF KNOWLEDGE 
 
 out their peculiar problems with their own partic- 
 ular tools. 
 
 With Aristotle the attempted balance failed. 
 Social life is disintegrating beyond the point of 
 hope of a successful reorganization, and thinking 
 is becoming a fascinating pursuit for its own sake. 
 The world of practice is now the world of com- 
 promise and of adjustment. It is relative to par- 
 tial aims and finite agents. The sphere of abso- 
 lute and enduring truth and value can be reached 
 only in and through thought. The one who acts 
 compromises himself with the animal desire that 
 inspires his action and with the alien material that 
 forms its stuff. In two short generations the 
 divorce of philosophy from life, the isolation of 
 reflective theory from practical conduct, has com- 
 pleted itself. So great is the irony of history that 
 this sudden and effective outcome was the result 
 of the attempt to make thought the instrument of 
 action, and action the manifestation of truth 
 reached by thinking. 
 
 But this statement must not be taken too liter- 
 ally. It is impossible that men should really sepa- 
 rate their ideas from their acts. If we look ahead 
 a few centuries we find that the philosophy of 
 Plato and Aristotle has accomplished, in an in- 
 direct and unconscious way, what perhaps it could 
 never have effected by the more immediate and 
 practical method of Socrates. Philosophy became 
 
THE PROBLEM OF KNOWLEDGE 279 
 
 an organ of vision, an instrument of interpreta- 
 tion ; it furnished the medium through which the 
 world was seen and the course of life estimated. 
 Philosophy died as philosophy, to rise as the set 
 and bent of the human mind. Through a thousand 
 and devious and roundabout channels, the thoughts 
 of the philosophers filtered through the strata of 
 human consciousness and conduct. Through the 
 teachings of grammarians, rhetoricians, and a va- 
 riety of educational schools, they were spread in 
 diluted form through the whole Roman Empire 
 and were again precipitated in the common forms 
 of speech. Through the earnestness of the moral 
 propaganda of the Stoics they became the working 
 rules of life for the more strenuous and earnest 
 spirits. Through the speculations of the Sceptics 
 and Epicureans they became the chief reliance and 
 consolation of a large number of highly cultured 
 individuals amid social turmoil and political dis- 
 integration. All these influences and many more 
 finally summed themselves up in the two great 
 media through which Greek philosophy finally 
 fixed the intellectual horizon of man, determined 
 the values of its perspective, and meted out the 
 boundaries and divisions of the scene of human + 
 action. 
 
 These two influences were the development of 
 Christian theology and moral theory, and the or- 
 ganization of the system of Roman jurisprudence. 
 
280 THE PROBLEM OF KNOWLEDGE 
 
 There is perhaps no more fascinating chapter in 
 the history of humanity than the slow and tortu- 
 ous processes by which the ideas set in motion by 
 that Athenian citizen who faced death as serenely 
 as he conversed with a friend, finally became the 
 intellectually organizing centers of the two great 
 movements that bridge the span between ancient 
 civilization and modern. As the personal and im- 
 mediate force and enthusiasm of the movement 
 initiated by Jesus began to grow fainter and the 
 commanding influence of his own personality com- 
 menced to dim, the ideas of the world and of 
 life, of God and of man, elaborated in Greek 
 philosophy, served to transform moral enthusiasm 
 and personal devotion to the redemption of hu- 
 manity, into a splendid and coherent view of the 
 universe ; a view that resisted all disintegrating in- 
 fluences and gathered into itself the permanent 
 ideas and progressive ideals thus far developed in 
 the history of man. 
 
 We have only a faint idea of how this was ac- 
 complished, or of the thoroughness of the work 
 done. We have perhaps even more inadequate 
 conceptions of the great organizing and central- 
 izing work done by Greek thought in the political 
 sphere. When the military and administrative 
 genius of Rome brought the whole world in sub- 
 jection to itself, the most pressing of practical 
 problems was to give unity of practical aim and 
 
THE PROBLEM OF KNOWLEDGE 281 
 
 harmony of working machinery to the vast and ■ 
 confused mass of local custom and tradition, re- 
 ligious, social, economic, and intellectual, as well 
 as political. In this juncture the great adminis- 
 trators and lawyers of Rome seized with avidity 
 upon the results of the intellectual analysis of so- 
 cial and political relations elaborated in Greek 
 philosophy. Caring naught for these results in 
 their reflective and theoretical character, they saw 
 in them the possible instrument of introducing or- 
 der into chaos and of transforming the confused 
 and conflicting medley of practice and opinion 
 into a harmonious social structure. Roman law, 
 that formed the vertebral column of civilization 
 for a thousand years, and which articulated the 
 outer order of life as distinctly as Christianity 
 controlled the inner, was the outcome. 
 
 Thought was once more in unity with action, 
 philosophy had become the instrument of conduct. - 
 Mr. Bosanquet makes the pregnant remark " that 
 the weakness of medieval science and philosophy 
 are connected rather with excess of practice than 
 with excess of theory. The subordination of phi- 
 losophy to theology is a subordination of science to 
 a formulated conception of human welfare. Its 
 essence is present, not wherever there is metaphys- 
 ics but wherever the spirit of truth is subordinated 
 to any preconceived practical intent." (" His- 
 tory of Esthetics," p. 146.) 
 
282 THE PROBLEM OF KNOWLEDGE 
 
 Once more the irony of history displays itself. 
 Thought has become practical, it has become the 
 regulator of individual conduct and social organi- 
 zation, but at the expense of its own freedom and 
 power. The defining characteristic of medieval- 
 ism in state and in church, in political and spiritual 
 life, is that truth presents itself to the individual 
 only through the medium of organized authority. 
 
 There was a historical necessity on the external 
 as well as the internal side. We have not the re- 
 motest way of imagining what the outcome would 
 finally have been if, at the time when the intellectual 
 structure of the Christian church and the legal 
 structure of the Roman Empire had got themselves 
 thoroughly organized, the barbarians had not made 
 their inroads and seized upon all this accumulated 
 and consolidated wealth as their own legitimate 
 prey. But this was what did happen. As a re- 
 sult, truths originally developed by the freest 
 possible criticism and investigation became exter- 
 nal, and imposed themselves upon the mass of in- 
 dividuals by the mere weight of authoritative 
 law. The external, transcendental, and super- 
 natural character of spiritual truth and of social 
 control during the Middle Ages is naught but the 
 mirror, in consciousness, of the relation existing 
 between the eager, greedy, undisciplined horde of 
 barbarians on one side, and the concentrated 
 achievements of ancient civilization on the other. 
 
THE PROBLEM OF KNOWLEDGE 283 
 
 There was no way out save that the keen barbarian 
 whet his appetite upon the rich banquet spread 
 before him. But there was equally no way out so 
 far as the continuity of civilization was concerned 
 save that the very fullness and richness of this 
 banquet set limits to the appetite, and finally, when 
 assimilated and digested, it be transformed into the 
 flesh and blood, the muscles and sinew of him who 
 sat at the feast. Thus the barbarian ceased to be 
 a barbarian and a new civilization arose. 
 
 But the time came when the work of absorption 
 was fairly complete. The northern barbarians 
 had eaten the food and drunk the wine of Graeco- 
 Roman civilization. The authoritative truth em- 
 bodied in medieval state and church succeeded, in 
 principle, in disciplining the untrained masses. 
 Its very success issued its own death warrant. To 
 say that it had succeeded means that the new 
 people had finally eaten their way into the heart 
 of the ideas offered them, had got from them 
 what they wanted, and were henceforth prepared 
 to go their own way and make their own living. 
 Here a new rhythm of the movement of thought 
 and action begins to show itself. 
 
 The beginning of this change in the swing of 
 thought and action forms the transition from the 
 Middle Ages to the modern times. It is the epoch 
 of the Renaissance. The individual comes to a 
 new birth and asserts his own individuality and 
 
284 THE PROBLEM OF KNOWLEDGE 
 
 demands his own rights in the way of feeling, do- 
 ing, and knowing for himself. Science, art, re- 
 ligion, political life, must all be made over on the 
 basis of recognizing the claims of the individual. 
 Pardon me these commonplaces, but they are 
 necessary to the course of the argument. By his- 
 toric fallacy we often suppose, or imagine that we 
 suppose, that the individual had been present as a 
 possible center of action all through the Middle 
 Ages, but through some external and arbitrary in- 
 terference had been weighted down by political and 
 intellectual despotism. All this inverts the true 
 order of the case. The very possibility of the 
 individual making such unlimited demands for him- 
 self, claiming to be the legitimate center of all 
 action and standard for all organization, was de- 
 pendent, as I have already indicated, upon the in- 
 tervening medievalism. Save as having passed 
 through this period of tremendous discipline, and 
 having gradually worked over into his own habits 
 and purposes the truths embodied in the church 
 and state that controlled his conduct, the individ- 
 ual could be only a source of disorder and a dis- 
 turber of civilization. The very maintenance of 
 the spiritual welfare of mankind was bound up in 
 the extent to which the claim of truth and reality 
 to be universal and objective, far above all indi- 
 vidual feeling and thought, could make itself valid. 
 The logical realism and universalism of scholastic 
 
THE PROBLEM OF KNOWLEDGE 285 
 
 philosophy simply reflect the actual subjection of 
 the individual to that associated and corporate life * 
 which, in conserving the past, provided the princi- 
 ple of control. 
 
 But the eager, hungry barbarian was there, im- 
 plicated in this universalism. He must be active 
 in receiving and in absorbing the truth authorita- 
 tively doled out to him. Even the most rigid forms 
 of medieval Christianity could not avoid postulat- 
 ing the individual will as having a certain initiative 
 with reference to its own salvation. The impulses, 
 the appetite, the instinct of the individual were all 
 assumed in medieval morals, religion, and politics. 
 The imagined medieval tyranny took them for 
 granted as completely as does the modern herald 
 of liberty and equality. But the medieval civil- 
 ization knew that the time had not come when 
 these appetites and impulses could be trusted to 
 work themselves out. They must be controlled by 
 the incorporate truths inherited from Athens and 
 Rome. 
 
 The very logic of the relationship, however, re- 
 quired that the time come when the individual 
 makes his own the objective and universal truths. 
 He is now the incorporation of truth. He now has 
 the control as well as the stimulus of action within 
 himself. He is the standard and the end, as well 
 as the initiator and the effective force of execution. 
 Just because the authoritative truth of medieval- 
 
286 THE PROBLEM OF KNOWLEDGE 
 
 ism has succeeded, has fulfilled its function, the 
 individual can begin to assert himself. 
 
 Contrast this critical period, finding its expres- 
 sion equally in the art of the Renaissance, the re- 
 vival of learning, the Protestant Reformation, and 
 political democracy, with Athens in the time of 
 Socrates. Then individuals felt their own social 
 life disintegrated, dissolving under their very feet. 
 The problem was how the value of that social life 
 was to be maintained against the external and in- 
 ternal forces that were threatening it. The prob- 
 lem was on the side neither of the individual nor of 
 progress ; save as the individual was seen to be an 
 1 intervening instrument in the reconstruction of the 
 social unity. But with the individual of the four- 
 teenth century, it was not his own intimate com- 
 munity life which was slipping away from him. It 
 was an alien and remote life which had finally be- 
 come his own ; which had passed over into his own 
 inner being. The problem was not how a unity 
 of social life should be conserved, but what the in- 
 dividual should do with the wealth of resources of 
 which he found himself the rightful heir and ad- 
 ministrator. The problem looked out upon the 
 future, not back to the past. It was how to create 
 a new order, both of modes of individual conduct 
 and forms of social life that should be the appro- 
 priate manifestations of the vigorous and richly 
 endowed individual. 
 
THE PROBLEM OF KNOWLEDGE 287 
 
 Hence the conception of progress as a rul- 
 ing idea; the conception of the individual as 
 the source and standard of rights ; and the problem 
 of knowledge, were all born together. Given the 
 freed individual, who feels called upon to create a 
 new heaven and a new earth, and who feels himself 
 gifted with the power to perform the task to which 
 he is called: — and the demand for science, for a 
 method of discovering and verifying truth, becomes 
 imperious. The individual is henceforth to supply 
 control, law, and not simply stimulation and initia- 
 tion. What does this mean but that instead of 
 any longer receiving or assimilating truth, he is 
 now to search for and create it? Having no 
 longer the truth imposed by authority to rely upon, 
 there is no resource save to secure the authority 
 of truth. The possibility of getting at and utiliz- 
 ing this truth becomes therefore the underlying* 
 and conditioning problem of modern life. Strange 
 as it may sound, the question which was formulated 
 by Kant as that of the possibility of knowledge, 
 is the fundamental political problem of modern 
 life. 
 
 Science and metaphysics or philosophy, though 
 seeming often to be at war, with their respective 
 adherents often throwing jibes and slurs at each 
 other, are really the most intimate allies. The 
 philosophic movement is simply the coming to con- 
 sciousness of this claim of the individual to be able 
 
288 THE PROBLEM OF KNOWLEDGE 
 
 to discover and verify truth for himself, and 
 thereby not only to direct his own conduct, but to 
 become an influential and decisive factor in the or- 
 ganization of life itself. Modern philosophy is the 
 formulation of this creed, both in general and in 
 its more specific implications. We often forget 
 that the technical problem " how knowledge is pos- 
 sible," also means " how knowledge is possible " ; 
 how, that is, shall the individual be able to back 
 himself up by truth which has no authority save 
 that of its own intrinsic truthfulness. Science, on 
 the other hand, is simply this general faith or creed 
 asserting itself in detail; it is the practical faith 
 at work engaged in subjugating the foreign terri- 
 tory of ignorance and falsehood step by step. If 
 the ultimate outcome depends upon this detailed 
 and concrete work, we must not forget that the 
 earnestness and courage, as well as the intelligence 
 and clearness with which the task has been under- 
 taken, have depended largely upon the wider, even 
 if vaguer, operation of philosophy. 
 
 But the student of philosophy knows more than 
 that the problem of knowledge has been with in- 
 creasing urgency and definiteness the persistent 
 and comprehensive problem. So conscious is he of 
 the two opposed theories regarding the nature of 
 science, that he often forgets the underlying 
 bond of unity of which we have been speaking. 
 These two opposing schools are those which we 
 
THE PROBLEM OF KNOWLEDGE 289 
 
 know as the sensationalist and the intellectualist, 
 the empiricist and the rationalist. Admitting that 
 the dominance of the question of the possibility 
 and nature of knowledge is at bottom a funda- 
 mental question of practice and of social direc- * 
 tion, is this distinction anything more than the 
 clash of scholastic opinions, a rivalry of ideas 
 meaningless for conduct? 
 
 I think it is. Having made so many sweeping 
 assertions I must venture one more. Fanciful and 
 forced as it may seem, I would say that the sensa- 
 tional and empirical schools represent in conscious 
 and reflective form the continuation of the princi- 
 ple of the northern and barbarian side of medieval 
 life; while the intellectualist and the rationalist 
 stand for the conscious elaboration of the principle 
 involved in the Graeco-Roman tradition. 
 
 Once more, as I cannot hope to prove, let me 
 expand and illustrate. The sensationalist has 
 staked himself upon the possibility of explaining 
 and justifying knowledge by conceiving it as the 
 grouping and combination of the qualities directly 
 given us in sensation. The special reasons ad- 
 vanced in support of this position are sufficiently 
 technical and remote. But the motive which has 
 kept the sensationalist at work, which animated 
 Hobbes and Locke, Hume and John Stuart Mill, 
 Voltaire and Diderot, was a human not a scholastic 
 one. It was the belief that only in sensation do 
 
290 THE PROBLEM OF KNOWLEDGE 
 
 we get any personal contact with reality, and 
 hence, any genuine guarantee of vital truth. 
 Thought is pale, and remote from the concrete 
 stuff of knowledge and experience. It only formu- 
 lates and duplicates ; it only divides and recombines 
 that fullness of vivid reality got directly and at 
 first Tiand in sense experience. Reason, compared 
 with sense, is indirect, emasculate, and faded. 
 
 Moreover, reason and thought in their very 
 generality seem to lie beyond and outside the in- 
 dividual. In this remoteness, when they claim any 
 final value, they violate the very first principle of 
 the modern consciousness. What is the distin- 
 guishing characteristic of modern life, unless it be 
 precisely that the individual shall not simply get, 
 and reason about, truth in the abstract, but shall 
 make it his own in the most intimate and personal 
 way? He has not only to know the truth in the 
 sense of knowing about it, but he must feel it. 
 What is sensation but the answer to this demand 
 for the most individual and intimate contact with 
 reality? Show me a sensationalist and I will show 
 you not only one who believes that he is on the 
 side of concreteness and definiteness, as against 
 washed-out abstractions and misty general no- 
 tions : but also one who believes that he is identified 
 with the cause of the individual as distinct from 
 that of external authority. We have only to go 
 to our Locke and our Mill to see that opposition 
 
THE PROBLEM OF KNOWLEDGE 291 
 
 to the innate and the a priori was felt to be oppo- 
 sition to the deification of hereditary prejudice and 
 to the reception of ideas without examination or 
 criticism. Personal contact with reality through 
 sensation seemed to be the only safeguard from v 
 opinions which, while masquerading in the guise of 
 absolute and eternal truth, were in reality but the 
 prejudices of the past become so ingrained as to 
 insist upon being standards of truth and action. 
 
 Positively as well as negatively, the sensational- 
 ists have felt themselves to represent the side of 
 progress. In its supposed eternal character, a 
 general notion stands ready made, fixed forever, 
 without reference to time, without the possibility 
 of change or diversity. As distinct from this, the 
 sensation represents the never-failing eruption of 
 the new. It is the novel, the unexpected, that 
 which cannot be reasoned out in eternal formula, 
 but must be hit upon in the ever-changing flow of 
 our experience. It thus represents stimulation, 
 excitation, momentum onwards. It gives a con- 
 stant protest against the assumption of any theory 
 or belief to possess finality; and it supplies the 
 ever-renewed presentation of material out of which 
 to build up new objects and new laws. 
 
 The sensationalist appears to have a good case. 
 He stands for vividness and definiteness against 
 abstraction ; for the engagement of the individual 
 in experience as against the remote and general 
 
292 THE PROBLEM OF KNOWLEDGE 
 
 thought about experience; and for progress and 
 for variety against the eternal fixed monotony of 
 the concept. But what says the rationalist? 
 What value has experience, he inquires, if it is sim- 
 ply a chaos of disintegrated and floating debris? 
 What is the worth of personality and individuality 
 when they are reduced to crudity of brute feeling 
 and sheer intensity of impulsive reaction? What 
 is there left in progress that we should desire it, 
 when it has become a mere unregulated flux of 
 transitory sensations, coming and going without 
 reasonable motivation or rational purpose? 
 
 Thus the intellectualist has endeavored to frame 
 the structure of knowledge as a well-ordered econ- 
 omy, where reason is sovereign, where the perma- 
 nent is the standard of reference for the changing, 
 and where the individual may always escape from 
 his own mere individuality and find support and 
 reinforcement in a system of relations that lies 
 outside of and yet gives validity to his own passing 
 states of consciousness. Thus the rationalists hold 
 that we must find in a universal intelligence a 
 source of truth and guarantee of value that is 
 sought in vain in the confused and flowing mass 
 of sensations. 
 
 The rationalist, in making the concept or gen- 
 eral idea the all-important thing in knowledge, be- 
 lieves himself to be asserting the interests of order 
 as against destructive caprice and the license of 
 
 t, 
 
THE PROBLEM OF KNOWLEDGE 293 
 
 momentary whim. He finds that his cause is 
 bound up with that of the discovery of truth as 
 the necessary instrument and method for action. 
 Only by reference to the general and the rational 
 can the individual find perspective, secure direc- 
 tion for his appetites and impulses, and escape from 
 the uncontrolled and ruinous reactions of his own 
 immediate tendency. 
 
 The concept, once more, in its very generality, 
 in its elevation above the intensities and conflicts of 
 momentary passions and interests, is the conserver 
 of the experience of the past. It is the wisdom of 
 the past put into capitalized and funded form to 
 enable the individual to get away from the stress • 
 and competition of the needs of the passing mo- 
 ment. It marks the difference between barbarism 
 and civilization, between continuity and disintegra- 
 tion, between the sequence of tradition that is the 
 necessity of intelligent thought and action, and 
 the random and confused excitation of the hour. ° 
 
 When we thus consider not the details of the 
 positions of the sensationalist and rationalist, but 
 the motives that have induced them to assume 
 these positions, we discover what is meant in saying 
 that the question is still a practical, a social one, » 
 and that the two schools stand for certain one- 
 sided factors of social life. If we have on one side 
 the demand for freedom, for personal initiation 
 into experience, for variety and progress, we have 
 
294 THE PROBLEM OF KNOWLEDGE 
 
 on the other side the demand for general order, 
 for continuous and organized unity, for the con- 
 servation of the dearly bought resources of the 
 past. This is what I mean by saying that the 
 sensationalist abstracts in conscious form the 
 position and tendency of the Germanic element in 
 modern civilization, the factor of appetite and im- 
 pulse, of keen enjoyment and satisfaction, of stim- 
 ulus and initiative. Just so the rationalist erects 
 into conscious abstraction the principle of the 
 Graeco-Roman world, that of control, of system, 
 of order and authority. 
 
 . That the principles of freedom and order, of 
 past and future, or conservation and progress, of 
 incitement to action and control of that incitation, 
 are correlative, I shall not stop to argue. It may 
 be worth while, however, to point out that exactly 
 the same correlative and mutually implicating con- 
 nection exists between sensationalism and rational- 
 ism, considered as philosophical accounts of the 
 origin and nature of knowledge. 
 
 The strength of each school lies in the weakness 
 of its opponent. The more the sensationalist ap- 
 pears to succeed in reducing knowledge to the as- 
 sociations of sensation, the more he creates a de- 
 mand for thought to introduce background and 
 relationship. The more consistent the sensational- 
 ist, the more openly he reveals the sensation in its 
 own nakedness crying aloud for a clothing of 
 
THE PROBLEM OF KNOWLEDGE 295 
 
 value and meaning which must be borrowed from 
 reflective and rational interpretation. On the 
 other hand, the more reason and the system of 
 relations that make up the functioning of reason 
 are magnified, the more is felt the need of sensa- 
 tion to bring reason into some fruitful contact 
 with the materials of experience. Reason must 
 have the stimulus of this contact in order to be 
 incited to its work and to get materials to operate 
 with. The cause, then, why neither school can 
 come to rest in itself is precisely that each ab- 
 stracts one essential factor of conduct. ■ 
 
 This suggests, finally, that the next move in 
 philosophy is precisely to transfer attention from 
 the details of the position assumed, and the argu- 
 ments used in these two schools, to the practical 
 motives that have unconsciously controlled the 
 discussion. The positions have been sufficiently 
 elaborated. Within the past one hundred years, 
 within especially the last generation, each has suc- 
 ceeded in fully stating its case. The result, if we 
 remain at this point, is practically a deadlock. 
 Each can make out its case against the other. To 
 stop at such a point is a patent absurdity. If we 
 are to get out of the cul-de-sac it must be by bring- 
 ing into consciousness the tacit reference to action 
 that all the time has been the controlling factor. 
 
 In a word, another great rhythmic movement is 
 seen to be approaching its end. The demand for 
 
296 THE PROBLEM OF KNOWLEDGE 
 
 science and philosophy was the demand for truth 
 and a sure standard of truth which the new-born 
 individual might employ in his efforts to build up 
 a new world to afford free scope to the powers 
 stirring within him. The urgency and acuteness 
 of this demand caused, for the time being, the 
 transfer of attention from the nature of practice 
 *to that of knowledge. The highly theoretical and 
 abstract character of modern epistemology, com- 
 bined with the fact that this highly abstract and 
 theoretic problem has continuously engaged the 
 attention of thought for more than three centuries, 
 is, to my mind, proof positive that the question of 
 knowledge was for the time being the point in which 
 the question of practice centered, and through 
 which it must find outlet and solution. 
 
 We return, then, to our opening problem: the 
 meaning of the question of the possibility of knowl- 
 edge raised by Kant a century ago, and of his 
 assertion that sensation without thought is blind, 
 thought without sensation empty. Once more I 
 recall to the student of philosophy how this asser- 
 tion of Kant has haunted and determined the course 
 of philosophy in the intervening years — how his 
 solution at once seems inevitable and unsatisfac- 
 tory. It is inevitable in that no one can fairly 
 deny that both sense and reason are implicated in 
 every fruitful and significant statement of the 
 world; unconvincing because we are after all left 
 
THE PROBLEM OF KNOWLEDGE 297 
 
 with these two opposed things still at war with 
 each other, plus the miracle of their final combina- 
 tion. 
 
 When I say that the only way out is to place the 
 whole modern industry of epistemology in relation 
 to the conditions that gave it birth and the func- 
 tion it has to fulfil, I mean that the unsatisfactory 
 character of the entire neo-Kantian movement lies 
 in its assumption that knowledge gives birth to it- 
 self and is capable of affording its own justifica- 
 tion. The solution that is always sought and 
 never found so long as we deal with knowledge as 
 a self-sufficing purveyor of reality, reveals itself 
 when we conceive of knowledge as a statement of 
 action, that statement being necessary, moreover, 
 to the successful ongoing of action. 
 
 The entire problem of medieval philosophy is 
 that of absorption, of assimilation. The result 
 was the creation of the individual. Hence the prob- 
 lem of modern life is that of reconstruction, re- 
 form, reorganization. The entire content of ex- 
 perience needs to be passed through the alembic 
 of individual agency and realization. The indi- 
 vidual is to be the bearer of civilization ; but this 
 involves a remaking of the civilization that he 
 bears. Thus we have the dual question : How can 
 the individual become the organ of corporate ac- 
 tion? How can he make over the truth authorita- 
 tively embodied in institutions of church and state 
 
298 THE PROBLEM OF KNOWLEDGE 
 
 into frank, healthy, and direct expressions of the 
 simple act of free living? On the other hand, how 
 can civilization preserve its own integral value and 
 import when subordinated to the agency of the 
 individual instead of exercising supreme sway over 
 him? 
 
 The question of knowledge, of the discovery and 
 statement of truth, gives the answer to this ques- 
 tion; and it alone gives the answer. Admitting 
 that the practical problem of modern life is the 
 
 • maintenance of the moral values of civilization 
 through the medium of the insight and decision of 
 the individual, the problem is foredoomed to futile 
 failure save as the individual in performing his 
 task can work with a definite and controllable tool. 
 
 *This tool is science. But this very fact, constitut- 
 ing the dignity of science and measuring the im- 
 portance of the philosophic theory of knowledge, 
 conferring upon them the religious value once at- 
 taching to dogma and the disciplinary significance 
 once belonging to political rules, also sets their 
 limit. The servant is not above his master. 
 
 When a theory of knowledge forgets that its 
 value rests in solving the problem out of which it 
 has arisen, viz., that of securing a method of action ; * 
 when it forgets that it has to work out the condi- 
 tions under which the individual may freely direct 
 himself without loss to the historic values of civili- 
 zation — when it forgets these things it begins to 
 
THE PROBLEM OF KNOWLEDGE 299 
 
 cumber the ground. It is a luxury, and hence a 
 social nuisance and disturber. Of course, in the 
 very nature of things, every means or instrument 
 will for a while absorb attention so that it becomes 
 the end. Indeed it is the end when it is an indis- 
 pensable condition of onward movement. But 
 when once the means have been worked out they 
 must operate as such. When the nature and 
 method of knowledge are fairly understood, then 
 interest must transfer itself from the possibility 
 of knowledge to the possibility of its application 
 to life. 
 
 The sensationalist has played his part in bring- 
 ing to effective recognition the demand in valid 
 knowledge for individuality of experience, for per- 
 sonal participation in materials of knowledge. 
 The rationalist has served his time in making it 
 clear once for all that valid knowledge requires 
 organization, and the operation of a relatively per- 
 manent and general factor. The Kantian episte- 
 mologist has formulated the claims of both schools 
 in defining judgment as the relation of percep- 
 tion and conception. But when it goes on to state 
 that this relation is itself knowledge, or can be found 
 in knowledge, it stultifies itself. Knowledge can 
 define the percept and elaborate the concept, but 
 their union can be found only in action. The ex- 
 perimental method of modern science, its erection 
 into the ultimate mode of verification, is simply this 
 
300 THE PROBLEM OF KNOWLEDGE 
 
 fact obtaining recognition. Only action can rec- 
 oncile the old, the general, and the permanent with 
 the changing, the individual, and the new. It is 
 action as progress, as development, making over 
 the wealth of the past into capital with which to 
 do an enlarging and freer business, that alone can 
 find its way out of the cul-de-sac of the theory of 
 knowledge. Each of the older movements passed 
 away because of its own success, failed because it 
 did its work, died in accomplishing its purpose. 
 So also with the modern philosophy of knowledge ; 
 there must come a time when we have so much 
 knowledge in detail, and understand so well its 
 method in general, that it ceases to be a problem. 
 It becomes a tool. If the problem of knowledge 
 is not intrinsically meaningless and absurd it must 
 in course of time be solved. Then the dominating 
 interest becomes the use of knowledge; the condi- 
 tions under which and ways in which it may be 
 most organically and effectively employed to direct 
 conduct. 
 
 Thus the Socratic period recurs ; but recurs with 
 the deepened meaning of the intervening weary 
 years of struggle, confusion, and conflict in the 
 growth of the recognition of the need of patient 
 and specific methods of interrogation. So, too, the 
 authoritative and institutional truth of scholasti- 
 cism recurs, but recurs borne up upon the vigorous 
 and conscious shoulders of the freed individual who 
 
THE PROBLEM OF KNOWLEDGE 301 
 
 is aware of his own intrinsic relations to truth, 
 and who glories in his ability to carry civilization 
 — not merely to carry it, but to carry it on. 
 Thus another swing in the rhythm of theory and 
 practice begins. 
 
 How does this concern us as philosophers? For 
 the world it means that philosophy is henceforth 
 a method and not an original fountain head of 
 truth, nor an ultimate standard of reference. But 
 what is involved for philosophy itself in this 
 change? I make no claims to being a prophet, 
 but I venture one more and final unproved state- 
 ment, believing, with all my heart, that it is justi- 
 fied both by the moving logic of the situation, and 
 by the signs of the times. I refer to the growing 
 transfer of interest from metaphysics and the the- 
 ory of knowledge to psychology and social ethics — 
 including in the latter term all the related concrete 
 social sciences, so far as they may give guidance 
 to conduct. 
 
 There are those who see in psychology only a 
 particular science which they are pleased to term 
 purely empirical (unless it happen to restate in 
 changed phraseology the metaphysics with which 
 they are familiar). They see in it only a more 
 or less incoherent mass of facts, interesting be- 
 cause relating to human nature, but below the natu- 
 ral sciences in point of certainty and definiteness, 
 as also far below pure philosophy as to con.pre- 
 
302 THE PROBLEM OF KNOWLEDGE 
 
 hensiveness and ability to deal with fundamental 
 issues. But if I may be permitted to dramatize a 
 little the position of the psychologist, he can well 
 afford to continue patiently at work, unmindful 
 of the occasional supercilious sneers of the episte- 
 mologist. The cause of modern civilization stands 
 and falls with the ability of the individual to 
 serve as its agent and bearer. And psychology 
 is naught but the account of the way in which 
 individual life is thus progressively maintained 
 and reorganized. Psychology is the attempt to 
 state in detail the machinery of the individual 
 considered as the instrument and organ through 
 which social action operates. It is the answer 
 to Kant's demand for the formal phase of ex- 
 perience — how experience as such is constituted. 
 Just because the whole burden and stress, both 
 of conserving and advancing experience is more and 
 # more thrown upon the individual, everything which 
 sheds light upon how the individual may weather 
 the stress and assume the burden is precious and 
 imperious. 
 
 Social ethics in inclusive sense is the correla- 
 tive science. Dealing not with the form or mode 
 or machinery of action, it attempts rather to make 
 out its filling and make up the values that are 
 necessary to constitute an experience which is 
 worth while. The sociologist, like the psycholo- 
 gist, often presents himself as a camp follower of 
 
THE PROBLEM OF KNOWLEDGE 303 
 
 genuine science and philosophy, picking up scraps 
 here and there and piecing them together in some- 
 what of an aimless fashion — fortunate indeed, if 
 not vague and over-ambitious. Yet social ethics 
 represents the attempt to translate philosophy 
 from a general and therefore abstract method into" 
 a working and specific method; it is the change 
 from inquiring into the nature of value in general 
 to inquiring as to the particular values that ought 
 to be realized in the life of every one, and as to the 
 conditions which render possible this realization. 
 
 There are those who will see in this conception of 
 the outcome of a four-hundred-year discussion con- 
 cerning the nature and possibility of knowledge a 
 derogation from the high estate of philosophy. 
 There are others who will see in it a sign that phi- 
 losophy, after wandering aimlessly hither and yon 
 in a wilderness without purpose or outcome, has 
 finally come to its senses — has given up metaphys- 
 ical absurdities and unverifiable speculations, and 
 become a purely positive .science of phenomena. 
 But there are yet others who w T ill see in this move- 
 ment the fulfilment of its vocation, the clear con- 
 sciousness of a function that it has always striven 
 to perform; and who will welcome it as a justifica- 
 tion of the long centuries when it appeared to sit 
 apart, far from the common concerns of man, 
 busied with discourse of essence and cause, ab- 
 sorbed in argument concerning subject and object, 
 
304 THE PROBLEM OF KNOWLEDGE 
 
 reason and sensation. To such this outcome will 
 appear the inevitable sequel of the saying of Soc- 
 rates that " an unexamined life is not one fit to 
 be led by man " ; and a better response to his in- 
 junction "Know thyself. 55 
 
 THE END 
 
INDEX 
 
INDEX 
 
 Absolutism, 18, 25, 98, 102, 
 109-110, 121-123, 130-132; 
 Essay IV., 142-153, 176, 
 180-181 
 
 Acquaintance, and knowl- 
 edge, 79-82 
 
 Action, and problem of 
 knowledge, Essay XL, 
 271-304 
 
 A priori, 206-213, 292-294 
 
 Appearance, and reality, 26- 
 28, 118-121 
 
 Aristotle, referred to, 5, 32, 
 35, 37, 48, 50, 78, 221, 278 
 
 Assurance, 85-88 
 
 Awareness, 93 
 
 Behavior, and intelligence, 
 
 44 
 Belief, Essay VI., 169-197 
 Bosanquet, B., 281 
 Bradley, F. H., Essay IV., 
 
 112-153 
 
 Change, its supposed un- 
 reality, 1; in modern 
 science, 8-9; and law, 72; 
 and thought, 133; of 
 truth, 153; of experience, 
 222-224, 259-260 
 
 Christianity, metaphysic of, 
 178 
 
 Cognitive, 84-85, 230-233 
 
 Conflict, and thinking, 116- 
 117, 126-127, 132, 148-149 
 
 Consistency, as criterion, 
 128-136 
 
 Consciousness, as end of 
 nature, 34-35; is partial, 
 43; and knowledge, 79- 
 80, 102, 171; Essay X., 
 242-270; non-existence of, 
 247-248 
 Correspondence, 158 
 Cosmology, and morals, 54 
 Custom, as background of 
 morals, 48, 52 
 
 Darwin, his influence on 
 philosophy, Essay I., 1-19; 
 quoted, 2, 12 
 
 Democracy, moral meaning 
 of, 59-60, 266-267 
 
 Descartes, 8 
 
 Design, see Teleology 
 
 Economic Struggle, 21, 29, 
 
 35, 41, 50 
 Economics, influences on 
 
 morals, 57-59 
 Empiricism, 200-202; Essay 
 
 IX., 226-241, 289-291 
 Epistemology, versus logic, 
 
 95-107, 172, 185, 201, 296- 
 
 298 
 Error, and becoming, 100 
 Evolution, of species, 1, 8; 
 
 and design, 12-13; and 
 
 teleology, 32-35; and in- 
 telligence, 42-43 
 Experience, Essay VII., 
 
 198-225 
 Experiment, and knowledge, 
 
 Essay IV., 77-111 
 
 307 
 
308 
 
 INDEX 
 
 Feeling, 80-81 
 Final Cause, see Teleology 
 Functions, true data of 
 psychology, 250-255 
 
 Galileo, 8 
 
 Genesis, and value, 261-264 
 
 Good, is concrete and plural, 
 15-17, 23, 27; of Nature, 
 Essay II., 20-45; and evo- 
 lution, 31-35, 43; and 
 mysticism, 39, 42; Greek 
 view of, 46-50; medieval 
 view of, 52-54; as fixed, 
 67 
 
 Gordon, K., 215 n. 
 
 Gray, Asa, on evolution and 
 design, 12 
 
 Happiness, nature of, 69 
 Hegel, 65, 174 n. 
 Hobbes, 203 n. 
 Hume, 82 n. ; 204 n. 
 
 Idealism, 28, 38, 191, Essay 
 VII., 198-225, 228 
 
 Ideality, 89, 120, 219-225 
 
 Ideas, nature of, 134, 155; 
 their verification, 141 ff.; 
 are hypothetical, 144, 150- 
 151, 187 
 
 Individual, 244, 265-68, 285, 
 297 
 
 Intellectualism, Essay IV., 
 112-153, 159 
 
 Intelligence, is discrimina- 
 tive, 39, 42, 75; is the 
 good of nature, 44; and 
 Morals, Essay III., 46-76; 
 cosmic and personal, 55, 
 59; as biological instru- 
 ment, 68; indirection of 
 activity, 133, 149 
 
 Introspection, 250 n. 
 
 James, Wm„ 104, 194 n., 202, 
 
 222 n., 246 
 Judgment, Bradley's theory 
 
 of, 114-117; of the past, 
 
 160-61, 165; Kant's theory 
 
 of, 272 
 
 Kant, 63-65, 206-213, 271 
 Knowledge, its proper ob- 
 ject, 6, 10, 14; and nature, 
 41; and freedom, 73; The 
 Experimental Theory of, 
 Essay IV., 77-111; de- 
 fined, 90; and inquiry, 
 184-189; Essay XI., prob- 
 lem of, 271-304 
 
 Locke, 93, 202-204, 217-218 
 
 Maine, Sir Henry, quoted, 
 
 46 
 Meaning, and knowledge, 87- 
 
 90; and judgment, 116- 
 
 117, 200 
 Mechanism, 23, 34, 57 
 Memory, 220 
 Moore, A. W„ 91 n. 
 Morals, Essay III., 46-76 
 Mysticism, 38-40, 42 
 
 Naturalism, 195 
 
 Nature, teleology of, 10; 
 The Good of, Essay II, 
 20-45; animistic character 
 of, 51; change in, 72 
 
 Newton, influence of, 61, 72 
 
 Organization, of experience, 
 
 208-211 
 
 Perception, ambiguity of 
 
 term, 214-219 
 Philosophy, changes in, 14- 
 
 19; political nature of, 21; 
 
 defined 45; and science, 
 
INDEX 
 
 309 
 
 51; and psychology, 189- 
 191; Essay X., 242-270 
 
 Plato, 21, 47, 49, 72, 219 n., 
 278 
 
 Pragmatism, 25, 31, 33, 55, 
 95 n., 109, 130 n., 144; Es- 
 say V., 154-168, 193 
 
 Psychical, 81 n., 104 
 
 Psychology, and philosophy, 
 Essay X., 242-270, 301 
 
 Rationalism, Essay XI. ,271- 
 
 304 
 "Reality," 98, 105, 113, 129, 
 
 169 n., 172, 228, 264 
 Relation, and appearance, 
 
 119-120 
 
 Santayana, G., 96, 224 n. 
 
 Sciences, developed out of 
 morals, 56, and industry, 
 57-58; as mode of knowl- 
 edge, 108; and philosophy, 
 268-270, 287 
 
 Sensation, 94, 262 n. 
 
 Sensationalism, Essay XL, 
 271-304 
 
 Social Ethics, 302-304 
 
 Socrates, 51, 76, 275, 304 
 
 Species, equivalent to 
 scholastic form, 3-4; as 
 eternal and teleological, 4- 
 5; basis of knowledge, 6-7 
 
 Spencer, Herbert, 16, 33, 66 
 
 Spinoza, 181 
 
 Stoicism, 172, 279 
 Stuart, H. W., 214 n. 
 Subjective, 98, 155, 204 n., 
 270 
 
 Teleology, of life, 4; of 
 nature, 10, 32; basis of 
 idealism, 11; concrete, 15, 
 22; and evolution, 32-35; 
 subjective, 223-224 
 
 Theory, 124-127 
 
 Thinking, practical charac- 
 ter of, 124-127 
 
 Tolstoi, 173 n. 
 
 Transcendence, of knowl- 
 edge, 103 n., 156-157 
 
 Transcendental, and super- 
 natural, 22, 29, 282; view 
 of knowledge, 24, 27; 
 freedom, 74 
 
 Truth, criterion of, 92, 95, 
 107-111; Essay IV., 112- 
 153; absolute, 137; iden- 
 tified with existence, 138, 
 145; eternal, 147, 152; 
 Essay V ., 154-168; 230- 
 231, 237, 282 
 
 Utilitarianism, 62 
 
 Verification, making true, 
 139 ff., 162-164 
 
 Woodbridge, F. J. E., 104 n., 
 240 n. 
 

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DEWEY AND TUFTS'S ETHICS 
 
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