"L I B R. A R. Y 
 
 OF THE 
 UN IVLR.5ITY 
 Of ILLINOIS 
 
 In memory of 
 
 Elijah Jordan 
 
 1875-1953 
 
 "omne immensum peragravit 
 
 mente animoque" 
 
 vTTe£ 
 
 cop. '2 
 
Digitized by the Internet Archive 
 
 in 2011 with funding from 
 
 University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign 
 
 http://www.archive.org/details/lifeofmindOOjord 
 
THE LIFE OF MIND 
 
 By 
 E. JORDAN 
 
 Professor oj Philosophy in Butler College 
 
 INDIANAPOLIS 
 
 CHARLES W. LAUT AND COMPANY 
 
 1925 
 
Copyright. 1925 
 E. JORDAN 
 
)5~0 
 
 CoP,Z 
 
 7161 
 
 PREFACE 
 
 The following pages represent an attempt, extended 
 through a number of years, to say something to 
 groups of undergraduate students about that prin- 
 ciple of unity and order in experience commonly called 
 mind. Since the majority of college students, who do 
 not "major" in professional subjects, but whose inter- 
 ests, when they have any, are governed by ideas of 
 general culture, are not prepared to deal with the 
 highly technical details of physiology, it has seemed 
 to me advisable to abandon the regular text in "psy- 
 chology." I have believed that there is something 
 real in and about the life of the mind that can hardly 
 be done justice to by a mere narrative of the life- 
 history of neurones; and, while it may be justifiable, 
 on scientific grounds, to pursue this method to the 
 point where a denial of the existence of mind becomes 
 inevitable; yet it seems to me that there are obliga- 
 tions of scientific candor involved in recognizing that 
 the non-existence of mind, while justifiable as hypoth- 
 esis, has as yet no status as a scientific judgment. It 
 is, of course, true that, after restricting the field to 
 physiological physics, the concept of mind is not 
 "needed," but it becomes at least quite convenient 
 the moment it is undertaken to make physical theory 
 consistent with the facts of life. 
 
 It has further seemed to me that these "facts of 
 life" constitute the material, the discussion of which 
 affords the only adequate means of approach to the 
 
iv PREFACE 
 
 nature and character of mind. They arc, therefore, 
 the proper subject-matter for the "science of mind"; 
 at least if these facts of general historical culture are 
 accepted as the subject-matter of a discussion of the 
 mental life, a fairly clear line of distinction may be 
 drawn between them and the subject-matter of "psy- 
 chology," and it appears that such a distinction is 
 very sadly needed at the present time. 
 
 Another very serious matter is involved at this 
 point. So long as our "science" confines itself to a 
 description of sensibly observable fact, mind will never 
 be "found." Mind, then, is either a fact of a different 
 order from physiological process, or it is unreal and 
 non-existent. But whence comes the force of such a 
 conclusion? It as a judgment is itself of the nature 
 of mind and rests upon cultural fact as known his- 
 torically; and mind as fact is an inference from the 
 total of human culture. The proper mode of discus- 
 sion, therefore, in matters involving judgments about 
 mind, including that of the non-existence of mind, 
 appears to be logic. 
 
 While I hope that I have* not done too great violence 
 to the "facts," I concede that I have been more con- 
 cerned about the meaning of mind as the medium and 
 substance of human culture. It is a simple matter 
 to correct one's mistakes in matters of fact; but an 
 unusually difficult task to undo the consequences of 
 serious errors in logic. I shall welcome such of the 
 latter as may be pointed out to me. 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 Chapter I. Introduction 1 
 
 Chapter II. Mind as Attention — The Cognitive Func- 
 tion 11 
 
 PART I. 
 ATTENTION AS KNOWING. 
 
 Chapter III. Attention as Object-Forms, or Percep- 
 tion 20 
 
 Chapter IV. (I) Feeling as Perceptive Attention 33 
 
 Chapter V. (II) Sensation as Perceptive Attention.. 56 
 
 PART II. 
 ATTENTION AS MEMORY. 
 
 Chapter VI. Memory, or Attention as Retention 85 
 
 Chapter VII. (I) Memory as Learning 94 
 
 Chapter VIII. (II) Memory as Recall 101 
 
 Chapter IX. (Ill) Memory as Recognition 107 
 
 PART III. 
 ATTENTION AS THOUGHT. 
 
 Chapter X. Inference, or Attention as Thinking US 
 
 Chapter XI. (I) Inference as Unconscious, or Implicit 123 
 Chapter XII. (II) Inference as Conscious, or Explicit 129 
 Chapter XIII. (HI) Inference as Synoptic, and Or- 
 
 c.anization 138 
 
 PART IV. 
 
 MIND AS ACTION. 
 
 Chapter XIV. Mind as Volition, or Will 145 
 
vi CONTEXTS 
 
 Chapter X\". (I) Volition as Automatic or Instinctive 140 
 
 Chapter XVI. (II) Volition as Trained Instinct, or 
 Reflex 153 
 
 Chapter XVII. (Ill) Volition as Learned Reaction, 
 
 or Habit 158 
 
 PART V. 
 
 MIND AS OBJECTIVE— THE SYNTHESIS OF 
 KNOWING AND ACTION. 
 
 Chapter XVIII. Mind as Imagination 165 
 
 Chapter XIX. (I) Imagination as Instinct 170 
 
 Chapter XX. (II) Imagination as Imitation 183 
 
 Chapter XXI. (Ill) Imagination as Complication 101 
 
 Chapter XXII. (IV) Imagination as Speculation, or 
 
 Adventure 108 
 
 Chapter XXIII. (V) Imagination as Creative 203 
 
 Chapter XXIV. (VI) Mind-Creation as Logic — Not 
 
 Physiology 210 
 
 Chapter XXV. (VII) Mind-Creation as Art 210 
 
 Chapter XXVI. (VIII) Mind-Creation as Morality... 223 
 Chapter XXVII. (IX) Imagination as Reason 230 
 
 PART VI. 
 
 MIND AS PRODUCTIVE— THE CREATION OF 
 
 INSTITUTIONAL FORMS. 
 
 Chapter XXVIII. The Practical or Producitve Lite... 236 
 
 Chapter XXIX. (I) The Practical Character 240 
 
 Chapter XXX. (II) The Social or Corporate Char- 
 acter 264 
 
 Chapter XXXI. (Ill) The Cultural Life as Ideal 201 
 
CHAPTER I. 
 
 INTRODUCTION. 
 
 Within recent years there has come a very profound 
 and general realization of the importance of psychol- 
 ogy for the practical life. So widespread is this con- 
 viction at present that there is scarcely a business or 
 profession in which psychology does not play a large 
 part. The process of application of the knowledge of 
 psychology to the requirements of practical living 
 began with the discovery that the success of the prac- 
 tical life depends upon the making use of the knowl- 
 edge of human nature. That appeal to human nature 
 was naturally first made by those interests which have 
 to do most directly with human nature; namely, poli- 
 tics, law, education, medicine, etc. But it has been 
 learned recently that psychology, as the knowledge of 
 human nature, can be applied with equal success to 
 many other kinds of interests. Thus its use in busi- 
 ness and industrial relations is becoming very exten- 
 sive, and there is no doubt that the results achieved 
 in these fields will be as important as results attained 
 by the application of psychology in other fields. 
 
 But if the application of psychology in the practical 
 life is of such tremendous importance, the most neces- 
 sary requirement of anyone who expects to succeed 
 in the practical world, is as broad a knowledge of psy- 
 chology as it is possible for him to attain. An equally 
 
2 THE LIFE OF MIND 
 
 important matter for the man who wishes to succeed 
 practically, is that his knowledge of psychology should 
 be right. Thousands of books are written upon psy- 
 chology, periodicals are established to further the 
 knowledge of it and its uses, and psychology has be- 
 come one of the outstanding topics for magazines and 
 journals of all kinds. This all means that psychology 
 will play a leading part in the practical life of the 
 future, and it means also that if anyone desires a share 
 in that leadership he must equip himself with the 
 necessary knowledge of psychology. But it is unfor- 
 tunate that not all the books and articles on psychol- 
 ogy are of equal value. Many of them are of no pos- 
 sible use, and it is unfortunate that the person begin- 
 ning the study of psychology often cannot tell what 
 sort of psychology he is most likely to get. 
 
 Since it is true that the beginner in psychology is 
 in danger of being deceived into the loss of his time, 
 it seems possible that a book on psychology might be 
 written which would be, so far as it undertook to go, 
 not only as nearly correct as possible, but also written 
 clearly enough to adapt itself to the limited time and 
 leisure of the person engaged in practical activities, no 
 less than to the more rigid requirements of students. 
 Such a work should be consistent with the principles 
 worked out by the science of psychology. But it 
 should also be consistent with the insights gained from 
 other types of contact with human nature. And it 
 should be simple and so clearly stated that it would 
 require a minimum of preparation in physiology, either 
 
THE LIFE OF MIND 3 
 
 on the part of the student or of the person who reads 
 desultorily outside of academic connections. For the 
 one group, it should be stated in the language of ordi- 
 nary life, in so far as that is possible, and in any case 
 it should be illustrated with the sort of facts and activ- 
 ities that are commonly to be recognized in practical 
 activity everywhere, and which should not have pecu- 
 liar reference to the more or less artificial and strained 
 conditions of the laboratory. Genuine human experi- 
 ences always take place under uncontrolled conditions, 
 hence are not properly represented by the hothouse 
 variety cultivated in the laboratory. 
 
 The science of human nature has worked out and 
 demonstrated three fundamental principles upon which 
 the mental life of mankind is based. These can be 
 stated so simply that anybody can understand them 
 at once and without special preparation or unneces- 
 sary effort, and it seems quite gratuitous to give them 
 their customary pretentious complicated statement. 
 They can be accurately stated in a few short sen- 
 tences; but their application to the details of the life 
 and work of the average person requires a considerable 
 volume. We can here merely state the three principles 
 in this Introduction, but their application to the prob- 
 lems of rational and cultural, or "practical," living 
 will occupy us throughout the rest of this book. Our 
 first obligation is, then, to state these principles here 
 in brief form, and to make their application as clear as 
 possible in succeeding chapters. 
 
 The first, and in many ways the most important, of 
 
4 THE LIFE OF MIND 
 
 the principles is this: Mind always acts through its 
 body, and is known only in and through its actions. 
 This principle means that mind never acts directly, 
 but can act only through the movements of the organ- 
 ism and the objects with which the organism comes 
 in contact. Then all we can ever know of the mind 
 will come through a knowledge of the objects of mind 
 and of the environment, including the human body, 
 and their movements. This principle is primarily 
 practical and cultural, since it refers us to the external 
 world of objects and relations both for any knowledge, 
 whether theoretical or practical, which we can have 
 about it. 
 
 The second principle is, that mind always acts as a 
 whole or as a unity, and is known only as such. This 
 means that whenever the mind acts it is always the 
 whole mind that acts and never a mere part of it. 
 Thus when I see a tree, my whole mind is centered 
 upon the tree and I am not seeing the tree with only 
 a part of my mind. When I think of an object, that 
 object is the point around which my mind as a whole 
 is organized. Then mind can be defined as the active 
 unity which manifests itself in and comprehends the 
 organization of objects in our world. And by objects 
 we mean primarily those things which we touch and 
 handle and eat and sell in our cultural and practical 
 relations, and not objects which are supposed by some 
 mystery to be only "in" or ''out of" the mind and 
 therefore unreal. 
 
 The third principle is the fundamental practical law 
 
THE LIFE OF MIND S 
 
 of life. It states that mind, for us, completes itself in 
 the objects of our external or practical world, and is 
 controlled only through the manipulation of the things 
 of the practical world. This is the fundamental edu- 
 cational law or principle, and it governs all the growth 
 aspects of human activity. Like the preceding prin- 
 ciple, it includes two great truths: One is, that mind 
 is complete and fully developed only when it embodies 
 itself in corporate form; that is, when it creates for 
 itself a body which is the instrument appropriate for 
 its action, or through which it can act completely. 
 This aspect of the law explains all the cultural and 
 social life. But its significance for the practical life 
 of the ordinary man lies in the fact that his mind 
 expresses and completes itself in the objects which he 
 uses and desires and which thus incorporate his inter- 
 ests and purposes. In the case of the isolated man, 
 then, mind completes itself in property. Possession is 
 then the practical act of mind as individualized. The 
 other great truth in this law is, that the control of men 
 and of human affairs generally is effected through the 
 control or manipulation of these property-objects. 
 Control is then the practical act of mind as corporately 
 individuated. Human order or organization is a mat- 
 ter of the display or disposition or layout of these 
 property-objects with respect to each other, and with 
 respect to the objects of the cultural life, among which 
 latter is the person. Thus, the person in whose hand 
 power is to lie as a matter of fact, in so far as power 
 implies the organization and control of life, is the 
 
C THE LIFE OF MIND 
 
 person who has possessory control of objects, the man 
 of property. 
 
 This latter aspect of the principle is of universal 
 application, and it states the law of control and the 
 executive function wherever executive control and organ- 
 izing intelligence are required. We are here discussing 
 the question as a matter of fact. Its aspect of right we 
 have discussed elsewhere. Here we are concerned to 
 make clear simply the practical meaning of the law 
 of the objectivity of mind-content as it governs human 
 relations. It means that control of men and of human 
 relations generally is effected through the control of 
 the things of the external world, and this refutes the 
 old superstition that men are controlled or "managed" 
 by "swaying" or "influencing" their minds. You can 
 "move" men by preaching and persuasion, but you 
 can never tell in what direction or to what end they 
 will move. If you are interested in the results of 
 men's actions, determine those results in advance by 
 controlling the objects through which they act. Their 
 life is a function of those actions, and, since their 
 minds are made up of the order of those objects, when 
 you control the objects you determine the make-up of 
 their minds, and become, for good or ill, the directing 
 influence in their lives. 
 
 The principle of control is the contribution which a 
 rational psychology makes to the sciences of economics 
 and politics. It is not asserted, naturally, that psy- 
 chology has consciously propounded this or any other 
 principle. Psychology has, in recent years, at least, 
 
THE LIFE OF MIND 7 
 
 been only slightly interested in matters of principle. 
 Or, perhaps it would be truer, if a little less generous, 
 to say that recent psychology, because of the point 
 of view and method uniformly adopted, is not compe- 
 tent to approach problems of principle; and as a con- 
 sequence the contribution which the science is making 
 to human culture, if we may require a contribution 
 in the form of an organized body of knowledge, is 
 just nothing at all. It has offered rather a confusion 
 of partial insights, and has been able to furnish no 
 suggestions of principle in connection with its chosen 
 subject-matter. Consequently the formulation of prin- 
 ciples such as those stated above depends upon an 
 interpretation of human nature which goes beyond the 
 fragmentary and partial views of strict "scientific" 
 psychology, and suggests therefore that psychology 
 is making its contacts with the whole of culture from 
 a wrong angle. It has considered its task as making 
 an interpretation of human nature considered as a 
 function of physical nature, and the result has been to 
 contribute a few hints to the sciences of physiology 
 and biology. But in the pretense that it makes, 
 namely, that the collection of these hints, stated with 
 some degree of success in the form of descriptive 
 classifications, and with constant somewhat forced 
 analogy to the form and order of biological science, 
 this, it seems clear, if we are to have any respect for 
 the common meaning which "mind" has and has 
 always had among men, is not psychology at all, and 
 if this procedure is to be strictly honest with itself 
 
8 THE LIFE OF MIND 
 
 it will adopt some such name as has been suggested in 
 the body of this text, — physiosophy. 
 
 The point of view of this physiosophy demands a 
 certain respect when apprehended from the point of 
 view of the wholeness of reality, in that it postulates 
 human nature as the mediating nexus between nature 
 on the one hand and culture on the other. But its 
 error in principle consists in the reference of human 
 nature backward to raw nature as the standard of the 
 system of judgments which is to make up the body 
 of the knowledge or science of human nature. This 
 has led to the absurdest extremes — extremes which 
 violate the sense of proportion and reality of the very 
 commonest of human common sense. It seems that 
 it ought to be a sufficient commentary and criticism 
 of these merely to state them in unadorned language, 
 since, when covered with ''scientific 1 ' terminology and 
 pruned to standardization in the classificatory systems, 
 they escape detection of their emptiness through the 
 apparent regularity and familiarity of their forms. 
 Thus in a number of famous systems human nature 
 has been explained by reducing it to the form of the 
 atom under the cover of ambiguity which the term 
 "individual" invests the atom with. Again, human 
 nature has been disposed of as the "consciousness," 
 and this has been interpreted in two ways; one of 
 which usually dressing human nature up in the vest- 
 ments of the medieval > 'soul, ,, and the other in the 
 abstraction of "function,'' which is conceived as a sort 
 of spiritualization of the scentific concept of process. 
 
THE LIFE OF MIX!) 9 
 
 And the cloak of process has covered as many different 
 types of multitudes of sins as has the term soul, and 
 with approximately the same degree of confusion. The 
 superstitious respect for process and function is at 
 present flooding the world (and the market) with a 
 various and dubious brood of "behaviorisms," and it 
 begins to be a serious question as to whether the inter- 
 est in human nature may not be completely taken over 
 by and divided between a popular form of religious 
 superstition and supernaturalism on the one hand, and 
 a crude and coarsely practical commercialism on the 
 other. 
 
 While both of these consequences are unfortunate, 
 and there is no such thing as a rational choice between 
 them, the influence of superstition is in many ways 
 preferable to that of commerce. The former, at least, 
 perhaps one should say at most, points in the direction 
 of an interpretation of human nature onward in terms 
 of culture and ends, even if its ideas of culture and 
 ends are impossibly crude; while the latter with appar- 
 ent deliberateness finds the essence and significance 
 of human nature in a backward reference to material- 
 ity and source. And, in so far as psychology, as 
 science of human nature, may pretend to offer sug- 
 gestions to politics and economics as representing ulti- 
 mate practical interests, its connection even with super- 
 stition and fanaticism has historically proved more 
 fruitful than its unholy alliance with practical "busi- 
 ness." 
 
 It is the thesis of this book that the connections 
 
10 THE LIFE OF MIND 
 
 which the study of human nature should keep in mind 
 arc those which find both matter and form in the con- 
 tent of historical culture which our total knowledge 
 provides us with. Consequently, it is believed that 
 the content of psychology is the concrete objectivity 
 of human culture and its history as precipitated pri- 
 marily in the arts and craft-practices. This is the 
 justification of the frequent and constant reference to 
 simple and popular ideas and processes as illustrations 
 of mental life. The elements, very necessary to the 
 requirements of strict "science," furnished to psycho- 
 logical content by empirical research may, it is sub- 
 mitted, be derived from the analysis of the large factor 
 which the active mind of the experimenter contributes 
 to the total result in empirical procedure. The convic- 
 tion that general culture is the proper source for both' 
 fact and interpretation with respect to mind is the 
 ground of justification for the wide latitude employed 
 in the selection of fact and illustration. This seems 
 to be a peculiarly safe procedure when the cultural 
 facts selected represent objective growing institutions, 
 and the author confesses the old-fashioned view that 
 the one indestructible evidence for the objective reality 
 of mind consists in the finding mind embodied in a 
 living and active institution. 
 
 Since this book makes no pretense to being a "tech- 
 nically scientific" work on "psychology," there remains 
 the possibility that it may be found to have said some- 
 thing about mind. 
 
CHAPTER II. 
 
 MIND AS ATTENTION THE COGNITIVE FUNCTION. 
 
 Everybody knows in a general way what is meant 
 by attention, and it is only necessary to state it in 
 simple terms in order to make the facts easily recogniz- 
 able by all. One thing is clear to begin with, that is, 
 that attention is a part of or has something to do with 
 every one of our conscious experiences, no matter by 
 what names they may be called. It seems to be just 
 that element which is common to every fact of con- 
 scious life, and because it is so common and so imme- 
 diate it escapes our habitual notice. We therefore do 
 not often have occasion to pick out or make up just 
 the sets of words that would properly describe it. 
 
 But if it is not difficult to describe, it is also not 
 difficult to instance or point out in the experiences 
 which every one of us has repeatedly every day. If 
 you tell me to "attend to my own business" you know 
 very well what you mean, and you also expect me to 
 know what you mean. You see that I am doing or 
 saying something which interferes with what you 
 regard as properly belonging to you, which pertains 
 to your special interests in such a way that you alone 
 can see to its accomplishment. And you expect me 
 to understand that there is a definite line between 
 what I do or say and what you may do or say, and 
 that when 1 cross thai line I am encroaching on what 
 
12 THE LIFE OF MIX!) 
 
 directly concerns your "attention" and directing my 
 "attention" to something outside the field of my proper 
 interests. 
 
 Or, to take another example, if you and I are look- 
 ing out of the same car window as we go to our work, 
 we will not necessarily see the same objects or the 
 objects in the same order, in spite of the fact that the 
 car window marks off or outlines one set of objects as 
 it passes them. I will perhaps see the bigness and 
 costliness of the buildings while you may see little 
 besides the ugliness and dirtiness of the whole scheme 
 of things. I am "attending" to the objects as if they 
 contribute or tend to contribute to the business life of 
 the city only, and I see the buildings as big enough 
 to house an array of business processes, or as having 
 cost enough to indicate a certain standing of the people 
 who occupy them. You "attend" to them as the per- 
 haps necessary instruments of the. process of making a 
 living, but with the element of regret that they do not 
 satisfy your sense of beauty. Or, you and I are look- 
 ing at the same picture in the gallery, or at the same 
 suit of clothes as displayed in the store window. You 
 say you do not like the color, while for the life of me 
 I cannot say what the color of the object I am looking 
 at is. I am looking at, or am absorbed in, or "attend- 
 ing to" the "cut" of the clothes or the design of the 
 picture, and the color has not yet entered my mind. 
 I have not attended to the color, or it has not yet got 
 inside the little circle which my mind throws around 
 the objects which it concentrates upon. 
 
THE LIFE OF MIND 13 
 
 Or, to take still another instance, you are standing 
 on a high hill enjoying the scenery. The country as a 
 whole has an effect upon you which you enjoy, but 
 which you cannot perhaps describe. When you attempt 
 later to tell a friend about it, all you can do is to 
 exclaim, "It was beautiful," and if he demands more 
 you will say the same thing again with adjectives that 
 intensify the term beautiful, as "very," "unusually," 
 etc. The fact is that you do not know in detail what 
 you have seen— you have merely got a rather big but 
 very indefinite impression. Your mind as a whole has 
 been filled up with what you may later analyze into 
 masses of color and form, your attention has been 
 apparently passive to the whole effect. But now take 
 your place again on the hill, but this time with a 
 friend. This time you do not merely "drink in" the 
 whole effect, but pick out, select, specify, choose some 
 objects to the neglect of others. If you find this diffi- 
 cult, ask your friend to call your attention to the 
 objects in the view that strike him as interesting. At 
 your friend's suggestion you unconsciously concentrate 
 your mind on these objects. You can then study and 
 describe in detail the objects which fill your view, they 
 have been brought within your "field of attention." 
 
 It is this figure of the field of attention which has 
 for a long time served psychologists as the simplest 
 and most direct way of describing these simple facts. 
 The car window was a rather narrowly defined "field 1 ' 
 of attention, but one made somewhat complicated by 
 the movement of the car. The objects which can be 
 
14 THE LIFE OF MIXD 
 
 seen through it make up what has often been called 
 the field of vision. It shows that the most simple and 
 immediate states of attention have to do with objects 
 of our senses, those which appear to us through the 
 functioning of our sense organs. 
 
 But attention is not restricted to merely sense fields. 
 Many of the most important facts of attention do not 
 directly involve sense facts at all; that is, are not 
 made up of the pictures of objects as the objects stand 
 before the eyes or present to the sense organ. A good 
 instance of this form of attention is the case in which 
 you "try to remember" (Part II). Trying to remem- 
 ber is of course a very different experience from that 
 of merely remembering. Merely remembering a lot of 
 details often means no more than that the details are 
 there present now in your field of attention; that is, 
 it has no specific reference to the past at all, but 
 merely does imply, beyond the present consciousness, 
 that some of the facts now in your attention carry 
 with them the peculiar feeling of familiarity. But 
 familiarity does not necessarily mean that the fact 
 that feels familiar has been experienced before; it 
 arises with many experiences which we know at the 
 time we are experiencing them that we never have had 
 before. This fact of "recognition" we must describe 
 in its proper place, but here we note that it is a factor 
 in every act of attention. We must here go on with 
 the case of attention which we noted as indicated in 
 the act of trying to remember. 
 
 You and I are discussing a certain fact when the 
 
THE LIFE OF MIND 15 
 
 question arises as to who told you of the circumstances 
 within which the fact occurred. At once and without 
 hesitancy the image of the man appears before your 
 "mind's eye," and the image persists there so plainly 
 that you could describe it in its minutest detail. You 
 say, "I know this man as well as I know myself," and 
 "I see him now as he stood at the table telling me 
 about it," but you cannot recall his name. The very 
 vividness of the picture seems to block the way to 
 the place where you know the name is to be found. 
 You know with certainty every circumstance within 
 the circle in which the name belongs, but the name 
 will not come. You say, "Let me see," and "I must 
 try to remember," and you do certain characteristic 
 things like scratching your head or putting your hand 
 up to your ear or to your nose as if to help "smell it 
 out." But what you very litterally do is to go through 
 your mind turning up now this now that familiar 
 object in the hope that somehow it will suggest the 
 missing name. That is, you know that the name 
 makes up a part of a more or less definite "field" of 
 fact which we called above the field of attention, and 
 you are trying U* build up this whole field in the mind 
 in the hope that the missing name will appear in it. 
 Here the attention is concerned wholly with 
 the object which you see only in the mind's 
 eye, and we call the situation a case of memory 
 for no other reason than that we are not concerned 
 with the mere presence of facts. Memory then refers 
 to a quality of facts as experienced, and not to any 
 
16 THE LIFE OF MIND 
 
 supposed relation of time which on analogical images 
 of space is taken to hold between the facts. Memory 
 then is a case of attention, that in which the direct 
 sense element either does not occur or does not appear 
 as necessary in the interpretation of fact. 
 
 Another and still more difficult case of attention is 
 the experience commonly called inference (Part III). 
 It can be recognized readily in many of the common 
 forms of language, and it is given fullest description 
 as an interpretation of the truth value of experience 
 in the science called logic. But the mere mental 
 machinery through which inferences are made is not 
 fully described in logic; the descriptive aspect of the 
 process is left to psychology. 
 
 We will approach this question through examples. 
 You look out the window and observe that the ground 
 is wet. You say that it must have been raining. Y'ou 
 failed to find a book where you are sure you left it, 
 and you say someone has removed it. The sun sets 
 in beautiful colors, and you feel the elation of expec- 
 tancy of a fine day tomorrow for the game or the 
 vacation trip you have planned. You find that you 
 have saved a little more money from your last pay, 
 and this directly is taken to mean that you can buy 
 the book you saw at the store and which you so much 
 wanted. In fad, any experience that is consciously 
 or unconsciously connected in certain ways with an- 
 other experience can be said to depend upon that 
 experience, and this is the real meaning of the state- 
 ment that one fact is inferred from another. The fact 
 
THE LIFE OF MIND 17 
 
 that it has rained is inferred from the fact that the 
 ground is wet. That someone has interferred with 
 your book is inferred from the fact that it is not now 
 where you left it shortly before. Now there are vari- 
 ous degrees of dependence of one fact upon another, 
 and this is expressed by saying that the relations in- 
 volved in some inferences are more direct than those 
 in others. You infer that someone has removed your 
 book because you know that the book cannot move 
 of itself. That is, the dependence of the fact of the 
 book's being gone upon removal by some person itself 
 depends upon the knowledge that books cannot move 
 of their own power. This latter relation is not clearly 
 expressed in your thought, but it would be expressed 
 fully in words if it were not a silent inference that 
 we all make and is thus not necessary to be expressed. 
 But if you are asked, "How do you know that some- 
 body has tampered with your book?" you would an- 
 swer, "Because the book could not have run away," 
 and you would be likely to give your questioner a look 
 which would mean, "You fool, you ought to know 
 that." And the meaning he would get from your look 
 would itself be an inference. 
 
 Strictly speaking, then, any experience which means 
 anything other than literally itself, or which refers 
 you or leads your thought on to something else, is an 
 inference. This is the most important fact to be found 
 in experience anywhere, and it is really universal; it 
 makes up a part of every specific experience and thus 
 a large part of the whole volume of experience which 
 
18 THE LIFE OF MIND 
 
 we know as the total of life. And life is rich or poor, 
 significant or petty, just in proportion as it abounds 
 in relations of this sort. 
 
 That the experience of inference is fundamental in 
 all life is shown by the important place which words 
 expressing it occupy in all our language. And many 
 unexpressed inferences; that is, unexpressed in words, 
 get represented to us in gestures, grimaces, facial ex- 
 pressions of all sorts and in actions generally. The 
 eyes "speak messages for which the lips can find no 
 words." -From his actions in the presence of giyen 
 circumstances you know your dog's meaning even 
 though he has no words nor any "telling glances." 
 But for human beings, particularly in the higher cul- 
 tural relations, the important bearer of meanings is 
 language. And the large number of such words as 
 because, since, yet, if, then, therefore, and of many 
 phrases such as "that being the case, then — ," "on 
 condition that," etc., indicates the importance which 
 inference has in our communication. It explains the 
 "suggestiveness" of poetic forms of expressions and 
 the tremendous power which the various forms of art 
 exercise over our lives. Inference, then, is the highest 
 form of pure attention. 
 
 But we must not forget the fact that we are dealing 
 here with the various forms oj attention, the various 
 ways by which our minds take hold of the objects 
 which make up our environment and condition our 
 lives. We have named them Perception, Memory, 
 and Inference. 
 
THE LIFE OF MIND 19 
 
 It is now our task to take up each of these singly 
 and in order, to describe the facts of experience which 
 they enable us to understand. 
 
 Each of these experience forms will get full explana- 
 tion as we go on. And the sum of our discussion will 
 give us as full an insight into the workings of mind 
 as is at present possible. We shall find that there 
 are no mysteries hidden away in dark corners, as is 
 too often supposed, and that the facts will bear just 
 as plain and cold-blooded description as will the facts 
 in any other department of science. 
 
 We do not mean that there is nothing that is un- 
 known, for the richness of the mind-life will be con- 
 tinuously unfolded to us just as long as we shall have 
 minds that think and strive to know the truth and 
 the reality of things. But we do mean that as much 
 can be known about the nature and working of mind 
 as can be definitely known about anything else. In- 
 deed, we know vastly more about mind than perhaps 
 ever will be vouchsafed to us about the inner realities 
 of mindless things or any of the other important parts 
 of this vast world. We shall begin with an account of 
 Perception. 
 
PART I. 
 
 ATTENTION AS KNOWING. 
 
 CHAPTER III. 
 
 ATTENTION AS OBJECT-EORAIS, OR PERCEPTION. 
 
 Perception, as has been said already, is the most 
 easily recognized and described of any of the forms 
 which experiences of attention ever take. It can per- 
 haps best be understood by giving first a few simple 
 illustrations of what perception means in our ordi- 
 nary experience. If I hold up before me an ordinary 
 object, say an apple, and ask you to say what it is 
 that you see, you will answer at once, "I see an 
 apple.'' But this, I might reply, is not specifying the 
 details of what you see as clearly as I had intended 
 that you should do. I then ask you to look again, 
 and you persist in saying that you see an apple. This 
 means that you have not yet learned to examine your 
 experiences as closely as you must if you are to learn 
 how to analyze them psychologically. So I go on to 
 ask you particular question to bring out the parts of 
 the experience you are having. I ask you now what 
 color the object is, and you reply that it is red. Then 
 I ask you what form it has, and you say that it is 
 round or is spherical. How you know that the object 
 is spherical or has depth or thickness may be explained 
 later on. I now ask how large the object is, and you 
 
THE LIFE OF MIND 21 
 
 reply that it is as big as your fist or as big as an 
 orange, etc. And we might go on in this way to point 
 out many other single qualities of the object. 
 
 Now let us see what exactly it is that you have seen. 
 Your first answer, "I see an apple," we find to mean 
 that a certain color, a certain shape, a certain size, 
 and so on, are taken together to mean an object which 
 you know how to put to certain common uses. That 
 is, they, all together, mean an object which you eat, 
 or have made into dumplings, or give to a child, or 
 sell at so much per pound or bushel. All these quali- 
 ties, when found together in just this combination, 
 are taken as the sign or symbol of an object which 
 you use in certain ways, or take particular attitudes 
 towards, depending upon your interests or purposes 
 at the moment. But let us determine more exactly 
 still what it is that you see. Suppose that, instead 
 of the apple, which you are familiar with, we take an 
 object you have never seen before, or something you 
 do not see clearly enough to recognize. Now to my 
 question, "What do you see?" you will probably an- 
 swer: "I see something that is darkish green in color, 
 round in one of its dimensions and cone or egg-shaped 
 in the other. It looks rough on its surface and seems 
 to be made up of layers of lumpy scales. At the 
 smaller end it has a tuft of leaflike projections. It 
 has a peculiar odor which I do not know how to de- 
 scribe." And you might go on to name as many of 
 the qualities of the thing as you could. What you 
 really see then in an object with which you are not 
 
11 THE LIFE OF MIND 
 
 familiar is a color, a shape, a size, an arrangement of 
 parts. In addition to this you smell perhaps certain 
 odors, and hear certain sounds when the object is 
 dropped on the table or is struck a blow. If you take 
 the object in your hands you get certain other experi- 
 ences from it which you name cold, rough, soft, vel- 
 vety, etc. If you move it about you say that it is 
 heavy or light, or has a certain weight as compared 
 with other objects which you know. 
 
 Xow notice that in describing these experiences we 
 use the terms "it," "the object, " '"something," etc.; 
 that is, we always speak of the experiences as forming 
 or representing a whole. And in our ordinary deal- 
 ings with it we do not refer to its qualities except by 
 way of comparing it with other things in order to 
 determine the kind of thing it is. The qualities are 
 unconsciously combined in a whole and the whole 
 named, even if we do not know any better name for 
 it than "it," "object," "thing" or "something." This 
 name then corresponds to the act of mind whereby 
 we "know" or "perceive" or "cognize" the object, and 
 this act of mind psychology calls the act of perception. 
 After it is perceived as a whole we then learn a name 
 for it, and we add the word "pineapple" to our 
 vocabulary. 
 
 The important thing to be noticed is, then, that in 
 perception certain qualities are combined and organ- 
 ized into wholes and that these wholes become the 
 more important tools by means of which we com- 
 municate with each other. You and I can talk and 
 
THE LIFE OF MIND 23 
 
 understand each other, can know each other's mental 
 processes, because we have minds that combine the 
 qualities of objects in practically the same ways. Your 
 mind and mine put together and organize the colors, 
 sounds, feels, smells, tastes, etc., of objects into the 
 same or similar forms, and we give these forms the 
 same names if we speak the same language. This 
 means that all minds have essentially the same ways 
 of going about the making use of the qualities of 
 objects, and this common way of ordering the facts 
 of experience into wholes which we can agree upon 
 is called perception. Perception is, then, this seeing 
 together, or combining simple sense qualities into the 
 units of experience. 
 
 But you say you are not aware of combining the 
 qualities of things. Ordinarily this is the case. We 
 glance up the road and say, "There comes an auto- 
 mobile," or we look across the field and say, "There is 
 a horse." We do not say, "There is an object which is 
 a little bigger than a cow, has four legs, a bushy tail, 
 a mane, is black, and moves about and eats grass." 
 This combining process has been learned and forgot- 
 ten, it is true, but it goes on in our minds neverthe- 
 less. We actually see a certain vague set of circum- 
 stances which we unconsciously accept as a whole 
 and say without hesitation, "There is a horse." Hut 
 what actually takes place is shown in cases where we 
 make mistakes. If I look across the field and say, 
 "There stands a man," you might reply that you do 
 not see a man at all, or you may laugh at my mistake 
 
24 THE LIFE OF MIND 
 
 and tell me what I see is not a man at all but a post 
 or a scarecrow. 
 
 This shows that in perception we do not really see 
 all the details, but take a certain general appearance 
 as a sign or cue to the nature of the object seen. That 
 is, a certain general form is given the meaning horse 
 or man because of an immediate interpretation which 
 we put upon it, and this meaning w r e may later see 
 to be wrong upon closer observation. In our ordinary 
 experience and in the case of familiar things percep- 
 tion does not wait for the close inspection of its 
 objects, but takes an outstanding character as the key 
 to the whole situation. As a consequence of this we 
 are spared the time and effort necessary for close 
 scrutiny, but we are also liable to give the wrong 
 meaning to the facts that we see. Perception then of 
 familiar things is the act of mind by which we give 
 full meanings to the slight cues which come to us 
 from the qualities of the objects in the environment. 
 It is the act of mind which supplies ready-made past 
 experiences as the objects that are appropriate to 
 sense qualities actually given. 
 
 There are many simple cases where w T e can explain 
 the nature of perception by these mistakes which we 
 make in perceiving objects. Take the kind of cases 
 which the psychologists call illusions. Recall that we 
 have explained perception as the act of mind which 
 gives objective meaning to a suggestive clue from some 
 sense source or sources. You would likely wish to 
 ask, "Where does the mind get this meaning which it 
 
THE LIFE OF MIND 25 
 
 gives to the sense facts?" The answer is that the 
 mind has access to and command of most of its impor- 
 tant past experiences, as we shall explain in connection 
 with memory. The moment a quality or a fact is 
 presented to it, the mind responds with an array of 
 objects which have become permanent fixtures through 
 previous experiences. When a sense suggestion finds 
 its proper object in the mind, or unifies with its 
 appropriate group of qualities which it finds already 
 in the mind, it is said to get its right meaning. When 
 it fails thus to connect with its appropriate object 
 from the mind's store, the succeeding process of mind 
 is called memory or imagination. Then the cases we 
 referred to above as mistakes are cases where there 
 is no proper contact between the sense cue and the 
 past experience-form, and the sense cue connects with 
 groups of qualities with which it does not agree. Let 
 us look for a moment at some simple illusions or mis- 
 takes in perception. 
 
 We noticed that all our direct experiences of objects 
 lack strict accuracy, if we mean by accuracy exact 
 correspondence with fact as the fact is otherwise and 
 more fully and completely determined in stored past 
 experiences. A part is taken to represent a whole, 
 and often there are cases where we take our interpreta- 
 tion as true in spite of the facts before our eyes. Thus 
 when you put a spoon in a glass full of water the 
 handle of the spoon will appear bent at the point 
 where it enters the water. But you do not allow this 
 fact to deceive you as to the straightness of the handle. 
 
26 THE LIFE OF MIND 
 
 since your previous experiences of this situation enable 
 you to make the necessary corrections. That is, you 
 do not "believe your own eyes" in this case because 
 you know from previous instances of spoons in water 
 that the handle is straight when taken out of the 
 water. You check up one experience by referring it 
 to other similar experiences, and when you fail to 
 refer them to similar experiences you will call the 
 object by the wrong name. 
 
 Some element of mistake like this is to be found 
 in all perceptual experience, and it is just this element 
 of "mistake" that makes the continuity of experiences 
 real in a whole of life of the mind. The fact therefore 
 has very important logical consequences which it would 
 be out of place to go into here. But the fact that we 
 do not get complete truth from the senses by them- 
 selves was noticed by the Greek philosophers many 
 centuries ago, and it has been one of the largest ele- 
 ments in the development of perhaps all religion with 
 its disdain of "this" world and its faith and hope in 
 "another" world. But this religious development has 
 little relation to logic and truth, in spite of the fact 
 that we have here an interesting instance of the fact 
 that truth is often derived from mistaken and incom- 
 plete and even false experiences, and it would appear 
 if we should go into the study of philosophy that all 
 the experiences that we call good or valuable rest in 
 the end upon the correction of the incompleteness of 
 our everyday immediate experiences. 
 
 There are, however, more striking and more inter- 
 
THE LIFE OF MIND 27 
 
 csting cases of illusion than that just described, and 
 many also that are still more instructive. You know 
 that the same object will look much smaller when 
 held near a similarly shaped larger object than it does 
 when held near a similar object that is much smaller 
 than itself. Place a quarter near a silver dollar. Now 
 a short distance away place another quarter near a 
 silver dime. Observe the two quarters and see if they 
 appear to be the same size. You may have difficulty 
 in seeing the illusion just because of the character of 
 perception we have already mentioned, i. e., that your 
 previous experience will tell you in advance of your 
 seeing the quarters at all that all quarters are of the 
 same size. But if you will draw circles with the coins 
 in the arrangement given you probably cannot see the 
 circles representing the quarters as the same size. This 
 shows clearly that our perception of any fact is modi- 
 fied by the whole set of facts within which it occurs, 
 and it is this relation of reference of one aspect to 
 another that accounts for our seeing sets of circum- 
 stances as wholes to which, as we have noticed, we 
 give the names of the common objects of experience. 
 Perception is then the beginning of all the order or 
 organization of the facts of life into usable groups, 
 and we shall see later that the experience we call infer- 
 ence is nothing more nor less than the same tendency 
 to order when it is working with experiences which have 
 already been refined in perception and memory. In 
 fact there is nowhere in the knowing or cognitive expe- 
 rience any further new quality than this act of the 
 
28 THE LIFE OF MIND 
 
 mind which interprets facts in perception. All other 
 knowledge functions are refinements of this simple 
 function. 
 
 This trait of perception also explains many and per- 
 haps all of the extraordinary experiences of "ghosts" 
 and "spirits" which have played so important a part 
 in the history of human culture. The perceptive func- 
 tion and its peculiar nature can be recognized easily in 
 the story told the author once by a rather intelligent 
 young man who lived in the country. The young man 
 had been accustomed to call on a friend, a girl of 
 unusual attractiveness who was also very much inter- 
 ested in religion. On this particular occasion the girl 
 talked much of the beautiful character which religion 
 produces in human beings, so that she had herself 
 become identified in the young man's mind with the 
 character created by religion. On this evening the 
 conversation turned upon the question of the beauty 
 of the Christian character as against the mere physical 
 beauty of the "good looking" person. The girl grows 
 eloquent in her portrayal of her ideal of spiritual 
 beauty as they sat in the silver moonlight which falls 
 in such soft splendor upon a country home. Natu- 
 rally the young man stayed until late in the night. 
 On his way home he must pass through a long stretch 
 of country road which was heavily wooded on both 
 sides, the trees sending their long arms out over the 
 road as if to meet in friendly handclasp when the day 
 was bright, but as if holding an ominous black pall 
 of destiny over the passer-by when the night was dark. 
 
THE LIFE OF MIND 29 
 
 On this occasion the moon with the cool brilliance of 
 an early autumn night burst through the rifts in the 
 passing clouds, and then disappeared alternately be- 
 hind a cloud mass. Our hero relaxed in his buggy seat 
 and became sleepy. But he knew that he must remain 
 awake to direct his horse, and upon casting his eyes 
 up along the road he suddenly saw hanging there in 
 the trees the form of an angel more perfect than 
 nature or art could ever produce. What was more 
 mysterious was that the form moved its body with 
 exquisite grace and harmony, and its fluffy splendor 
 of wings and its delicately shapely arms were beckon- 
 ing to him. He could even see the cherubic pinkish 
 tinge of a smile on its face. His first reaction was 
 one of fear and the impulse to drive hastily away. 
 But curiosity conquered fear and he stopped his horse. 
 As he stopped he noticed that the form became less 
 perfect, so he alighted and walked a few steps back 
 up the road. The fulness of beauty returned to the 
 form and it smiled and beckoned to him with all the 
 warmth of sainted loveliness. He walked forward 
 again and the form faded and dimmed down to the 
 dusky shimmer of a bar of moonlight which had all 
 the time been falling upon him through an irregular 
 opening between the branches above and which was 
 now obscured by a passing cloud. 
 
 What he had actually seen then was the moonlit 
 sky as it was formed into more or less similarity to 
 the human form by the opening among the branches. 
 The graceful moving and swaying of the form resulted 
 
30 THE LIFE OF MIND 
 
 from the wind slightly moving the hanging branches. 
 But it would be difficult to explain the smile by any 
 mere fact in the situation; it was clearly made by the 
 mind of the young man out of the actual smile which 
 he had felt a short time before. It is clear, of course, 
 that the "ghost" was the idealized girl as she nestled 
 so warmly in his sleepy mind. 
 
 Thus does the active mind build out the common- 
 place facts of perception until it creates out of them, 
 together with elements of its own substance, the rare 
 and fine structures of the life of values. But our ref- 
 erence to the finer value aspects of experience is merely 
 intended to show the general tendency of the mind to 
 supplement the sense facts, it being most easily shown 
 here because these experiences are common to all and 
 are most generally understood. It is equally possible 
 to show the form of perception in some of life's uglier 
 and less attractive places, although such places are 
 useful in the very portent of disease and decay which 
 they carry. A good instance of the perceptual inter- 
 pretation of the crude facts that appear is to be found 
 in the sombre coarseness of the drunken mind. In 
 the typical case of u jim-jams" the "snakes" which 
 the unfortunate victim sees are, we are told, the 
 swollen blood vessels of the eye as the perverted mind 
 builds them out with materials taken from an experi- 
 ence coarsened by fear. The sense cue then is the 
 squirming form of the blood vessels which ordinarily 
 are not seen at all, but which now become visible 
 because distended by the blood pumped into them by 
 
THE LIFE OF MIND 31 
 
 an over-stimulated heart. And a mind abused and 
 weakened by debauchery finds itself stocked with the 
 grotesque horrendous forms of ideas made unbeautiful 
 by the foul purposes of excess. You can if you like 
 enjoy the "snakes" as pleasing aspects of experience 
 and as built out by whatever beautiful imaginary 
 forms you may care to invest them with. Lie down 
 on your back some summer day and gaze absently into 
 the sky, and they will appear as the tortuous forms 
 of any type of art object you may find yourself inter- 
 ested in, and they will move either with the lingering 
 gait that is not distinguishable from stillness or with 
 the darting speed that makes them invisible. 
 
 Perception, then, is the general fact of attentive 
 experience which we described as the act of unifying 
 the immediate details of fact into meaningful forms. 
 This meaningfulness, we have seen, implies the uni- 
 versal fact of communication and all the objective 
 works of truth and art which communication creates. 
 It is thus the parent of beautiful forms in art, religion, 
 and morality, as well as of the useful and agreeable 
 in what is commonly called the practical life, but what 
 is properly called the material life. The one is the 
 sphere of action and creation in the real sense which 
 we shall describe as imagination later (Part V) ; the 
 other the realm of mere movement and manufacture 
 as exemplified in industry (Part VI). And in these 
 examples we have seen the elements that are common 
 to every perception; namely, a sensory cue which rep- 
 resents the vague indefmiteness of fact, and the whip- 
 
32 THE LIFE OF MIND 
 
 ping into shapeliness of this bald fact by the gathering 
 around it of the polished forms of past experience. 
 All the rest of our account of perception (Ch. IV, 
 Feeling, and Ch. V, Sensation) will be a further and 
 more concretely detailed description of these facts. 
 We shall call the crude element of fact, the simple 
 conscious contact of the external object with the sensi- 
 tive organism — this fact we shall call sensation, and 
 its description will follow immediately after the de- 
 scription of feeling. The other fact, the shaping of 
 sensations into meanings, will occupy our attention 
 all through the discussion of cognitive functions, but 
 it will get clearest formulation in the discussion of 
 inference as the peculiar genius of imagination. An- 
 other immediate aspect of perception we must now 
 describe. 
 
CHAPTER IV. 
 
 I. FEELING AS PERCEPTIVE ATTENTION. 
 
 If in our description of the life of the mind we 
 undertake to begin with the simplest of its activities 
 and manifestations, we shall find that we cannot at all 
 be certain as to just which of our experiences should 
 be regarded as simplest. Perhaps the fact is that 
 none of them are simple at all in the ordinary sense, 
 and if this should turn out to be true the search for 
 the simplest will not be very profitable. All our expe- 
 riences, we may find, are so intertwined with each 
 other as the web of life is spun out for us that what 
 seems to us before we examine it a more or less con- 
 sistent and beautiful pattern may turn out to be a 
 most hopeless and inextricable maze. It is, however, 
 a common feeling that many things, as they come to 
 us without any effort on our part and when we arc 
 willing to allow them to be for us just what they 
 are, have no confused multiplicity of parts and there- 
 fore do not call upon us to take our mind to pieces 
 in order to correspond to the parts it is supposed to 
 have. 
 
 The experts, however, tell us that things as they 
 come to us are not real, and become real only when 
 we, through the analytic processes of our minds, have 
 broken them up and have catalogued their parts and 
 then stuck them back together again. To see and 
 
34 THE LIFE OF MIND 
 
 appreciate a rose as it glories on its stem in the garden 
 
 is, on this view, not to ■"know" it: you only know a 
 rose when you cut it from its parent bush and with a 
 microscope and a butcher shop of horrid tools sepa- 
 rate all its members from each other and give them 
 names for which nobody in this world would care. 
 Now it may be necessary thus to mangle and shatter 
 the rose if we are interested to study the life habits 
 of the lice which sometimes infest it, or if we wish 
 to "control" the "louse-evil"; .but we should remem- 
 ber that shredding roses and catching lice is "science 1 ' 
 and not knowledge. The fact is. the fact as we know 
 it. that the rose comes into our life not because it 
 has parts or with the slightest suspicion in our mind- 
 that parts are necessary to it. but just as a rose; just 
 as the warm flash of beauty around which for the time 
 being our world collects itself in order to give em- 
 phasis to its wholeness and to make that wholeness 
 evident to us as law. 
 
 So the obvious fact is that we do not have any 
 simple experiences, and that there is no element of our 
 mind-life which can be made to stand forth as real 
 except as its very being connects it with other experi- 
 ences which must be present there. It is for this 
 reason that any description of the mind-life must 
 necessarily lack that definiteness which the so-called 
 science of the mind tries to impose upon it, and it 
 is for the same reason that "psychology" has become 
 either on the one hand physiology or on the other a 
 sort of natural historv of the movements of the 
 
THE LIFE OF MIND 35 
 
 organism which as a whole the experts call behavior. 
 If facts must be finally simple, and if they must be 
 such as maintain the deadly calm and fixity which 
 "scientific accuracy" and definiteness require, then 
 they have two chances at being real; they must in 
 general be either matter or motion, and conscious facts 
 must be either organism or behavior. But if we desire 
 a knowledge of mind we shall have to go beyond the 
 confines of scientific method where we shall not be 
 obliged to restrict our thought by this particular kind 
 of accuracy and definiteness, but may strive for ade- 
 quacy and wholeness and the fulness of being, unde- 
 fined and unlimited by the hard lines that abstract 
 mathematics draws as a dead-line beyond which spirit 
 may not transgress; we may ignore the dissecting 
 process of analysis which, in its blood-thirsty rage 
 for divisible and carvable facts, must have mere dead 
 body as its final object and end. We shall not there- 
 fore feel bound by the "laws of science," consequently 
 we shall be free to be honest with such phases of 
 reality as we may be able to find in those aspects of 
 our world which we call experience, and we shall not 
 be disturbed by any questions or doubts as to what 
 our motives are, whether science or truth or, so far as 
 we are consciously concerned, neither of them. 
 
 All of our experiences are then complex, and de- 
 scriptions of them are descriptions of total aspects 
 of masses or groups of them. No descriptive state- 
 ment is therefore final, since the mind-life must be 
 perceived in its wholeness and integrity. And, since 
 
36 THE LIFE OF MIND 
 
 it cannot be perceived through its parts one after an- 
 other; and if we are to call this mode of perception 
 by the analytic process of breaking to pieces sensa- 
 tion, then our real world is not known most directly in 
 sensation, but in feeling. 
 
 But this need not mean on that account that feel- 
 ing, because it is the most direct mode of contact with 
 our world, is also the one upon which we must place 
 highest value.' What it does mean, and the least and 
 most that it means, is that all other forms of experi- 
 ence must take account of their relation to feeling as 
 the psychological condition of their being validly true. 
 Ordinarily we assume validity to refer ultimately to 
 sensation as the ideal of definiteness in truth relations, 
 and we assume that sensation, as against feeling, must 
 be the ground of validity, since it is definite and pre- 
 cise, whereas feeling is supposed to be unstable and 
 precarious and vague. But if by definiteness we mean, 
 as we seem to mean, that a reality must have self- 
 completeness as emphatic quality, and distinctness 
 of outline as against surrounding realities, then noth- 
 ing can be more indefinite than sensation nor more 
 definite than feeling. But this means that feeling is 
 more primordial and elementary as a factor in percep- 
 tion than is sensation, and that perception is itself, 
 as the original self-conscious aspect of mind, what it 
 is just by virtue of the fact that it is the essential 
 unity within which both sensation and feeling are 
 distinguishable parts. 
 
 But perception is the first and most elementary of 
 
THE LIFE OF MIND 37 
 
 self-conscious processes just because it is the original 
 realization or discovery of the difference between feel- 
 ing and sensation; the definition and self-identifica- 
 tion of sensation within the original ; sub-perceptual 
 process is the beginning of mind as rational, and its 
 progressive growth stages as successive determinations 
 of feeling considered as content within the sensory as 
 form, have constituted the life history of the "reason." 
 This is what is meant by ethical theories which de- 
 scribe reason as the function of "control" of "desires," 
 but it neglects the fact that reason is nothing else than 
 the definition within the sense-feeling nebula of a con- 
 creteness of reference to one of its own aspects. The 
 doctrine of the irrationality of feeling, which in some 
 form is the conviction of almost everybody that under- 
 takes to deal with human nature, is then just the 
 denial, on the part of the reason and in its own behalf, 
 of the content on a basis of which alone it can have 
 meaning or comprehend value. 
 
 So much by way of a justification of feeling, which 
 we have been obliged to do in the benefit of the experts 
 and scientists, since to nobody else would it ever have 
 occurred to doubt the reality of feeling as an original 
 and immediate aspect of perceptive experience. 
 
 What we have now to do is to describe feeling in 
 some of its capacities as original and primitive fact. 
 And, since there is no other thing in the universe like 
 it or in the same class with it, all that we can do is to 
 find and state as best we can some instances of it as 
 illustrations. We have to begin with what we know 
 
3$ THE LIFE OF MIND 
 
 in and by and for itself in order to construct our sys- 
 tems of knowledge, and what we know for itself best 
 is what appears to us in the aspect of not simple but 
 whole and undifferentiated feeling. 
 
 It would be futile to undertake a definition of feel- 
 ing, but for the benefit of those who may not know it 
 may be suggested that the attributes of feeling are 
 probably quality and persistence. This latter is not 
 duration, but a persistence that is cumulative. Feel- 
 ings do not perhaps differ from each other in intensity, 
 but only in cumulative persistence which, as fully 
 conscious and metorganic, becomes pervasive. But 
 this pervasiveness itself may very well be an aspect 
 of quality, and, if so, it means that feelings have no 
 quantitative nature at all. 
 
 It is the usual thing to say that when I see a rose 
 what actually happens is that in some cold-blooded 
 way I apprehend its qualities through the sense of 
 sight, and that my knowing the rose is nothing more 
 than a coming to awareness of these qualities through 
 my sense organs and nervous system. But the queer 
 thing about it is that as an ordinary mortal and as 
 yet uninstructed in physiology, and psychologically 
 innocent, but having a mind, I know nothing at all 
 of sense organs or nervous systems; I know nothing 
 about the distinction between various types of quali- 
 ties; yet I am as fully aware of the rose as anyone 
 whose knowledge of these physiological and scientific 
 matters is complete. Knowing the rose then has noth- 
 ing to do with such matters; and while it may demon- 
 
THE LIFE OF MIND 39 
 
 strate the wisdom or sophistication of somebody else 
 when he sagely informs me of all these things, yet his 
 lecturing me on physiology never makes any contact 
 with my experience of knowing the rose. I know as 
 much about the rose before his instruction as after 
 it, although my knowledge of physiology may have 
 been improved in the process. But even in that case, 
 the rose as meaning something to me, has gone com- 
 pletely out of my life, and the place it occupied so 
 comfortably in my interest has been rudely taken by 
 all the stuff about nerves and sense-organs; and in- 
 stead of the familiar comradeship which the rose 
 means to me without any superfluous explanations, 1 
 am asked to accept a batch of highly questionable 
 promulgations about causes. But I suppose our scien- 
 tist must be allowed to keep his mind "open," and to 
 continue to think with his hands. The rose is not a 
 cause, and all the causes in the world cannot atone 
 for the loss of the rose from the intimacy which at 
 the moment makes so large a part of my life. As well 
 take my wife away, and then tell me I have the dress- 
 maker's form over which she fits her clothes. 
 
 It is the failure to recognize that there are some 
 realities that are to me complete before any sensory 
 experiences as describable qualities enter my mind at 
 all that makes all the trouble. There is a whole world 
 of experience that is not yet sensory, and which carries 
 no immediate suggestions whatever of sense, so far 
 as the actual inwardness of its reality to me is con- 
 cerned. And this inwardness of reality to me is exactly 
 
40 THE LIFE OF .MIND 
 
 what we mean by mind and consciousness, otherwise 
 we are lost in an intricate maze of explanations that 
 explain nothing. 
 
 Before I know that the rose is red or large or sweet 
 or that it is composed of petals, etc., or has green 
 leaves and thorns — what do I, except as a scientist, 
 care for all this, anyhow? All I know or care to know 
 is the rose, and that in knowing it my universe is 
 for that moment complete and centered so near the 
 seat of my life that there can be no mere facts for 
 me. And in proportion as the rude explainer intrudes 
 with his abominable causes, and by dint and din of 
 explanation breaks the privacy of my realization, to 
 that degree the rose is lost to me, and the universe 
 begins to show dark rifts of fear and the crude and 
 ugly imperfections of unreal things. Even the rose 
 lapses in its rosiness, and its frail beauty mingles with 
 the dirt of its origin in the soil. But the destroyer 
 of truth must have his abstraction; our world must 
 be "explained" though the heavens fall. 
 
 Then, in the direct and immediate contact with the 
 world, life is realized before sensations as describable 
 facts begin, and all life's values are built solidly into 
 the structure of what is real long before there are as 
 yet either nerves or sensations as features of our 
 knowledge. The rose appears to me as a rose, a point 
 at which the truth and beauty of my w r orld converge 
 even before the questions arise that call for explana- 
 tions. If I must rend asunder the rose-reality in order 
 to explain just what part in the situation is played 
 
THE LIFE OF MIND 41 
 
 by mind, the best I can do is to say that in mind the 
 rose situation is the projected end of an attitude. And 
 if you demand the life history of the attitude as its 
 explanation, all that can be done, after warning you 
 that explanations here never explain, is to say that 
 attitudes grow up within the free universe where there 
 are at the same time many other things of great 
 variety. Among these other things are sensation quali- 
 ties—which also as such have nothing to do with 
 nerves or sense organs — but these sensation qualities 
 are no more closely related to the feelings than are 
 a lot of other things, consequently they do not any 
 more constitute an explanation of feeling affections 
 than do any of the other things. Sensation qualities 
 are not convertible into feelings, nor feelings into 
 sensation qualities; so you can't mean one of them 
 when you are talking about the other; and you can't 
 account for feelings by making them a by-product of 
 sensations. The feelings are there as objective mean- 
 ings in consciousness before sensations are known to 
 exist; and our knowledge of our world is of great 
 extent and importance before the sensory aspect of 
 it is discovered to the consciousness at all. 
 
 What we wish to say about feeling, what seems to 
 be most important in our knowledge of it, can be 
 summed up therefore in a few simple statements. 
 
 In the first place, feeling is of more primary and 
 original importance than many other forms of experi- 
 ence. It controlled our life and action, kept us out 
 of danger and led us toward things that were useful 
 
42 HIE LIFE OF MIND 
 
 and pleasant to us long before we could single out the 
 sense factors from the other elements of mind. In 
 the simple forms of pleasure and pain it to a great 
 extent determines what we even now shall do in our 
 practical lives, and to an equally great extent deter- 
 mines what we shall think. By far the larger majority 
 of people go about their daily tasks without troubling 
 their thought about them, they take their work and 
 recreation and entertainment and amusement primarily 
 from the course which their feelings of pleasure and 
 pain dictate to them, and with the vast majority of 
 people pleasure and pain not only make up for them 
 the ordinary plans of their lives, but also form their 
 ideals. When we think of our tasks for the coming 
 week most of our interest lies in finding some way to 
 get the tasks off our hands as quickly and as easily 
 as possible, and in trying to fix up some interesting 
 ways to spend the time after the tasks are done. It 
 is not here argued that there is anything wrong about 
 this: the "gospel of work'' sometimes neglects the fact 
 that most men. even the most successful and pros- 
 perous and perhaps also the most intelligent, plan 
 their work with reference to having some leisure time 
 in which they can go hunting or read a book or go to 
 the show, or to work out something that stimulates 
 their imagination. It is from this free time that most 
 real production comes; what we want to emphasize is 
 that all these effects are generally the results of men 
 being controlled by their simple feelings. We "follow 
 our nose/' as we say, even in some of the most impor- 
 
THE LIFE OF MIND 43 
 
 tant connections, and thus have our time and capaci- 
 ties free to go about the interesting and useful new 
 discoveries which all of us have to make in our own 
 lives. Thus do the simple feelings take charge of our 
 automatic life, and thus control us through a greater 
 part of the time. 
 
 Secondly, feelings are not only of great practical 
 importance, but they probably arise first in the course I 
 of the development of the life of mind. They are 
 always prominent in the lives of the lower animals, 
 and many low forms are perhaps completely at the 
 mercy of pleasure and pain. Their lives are nothing 
 more than a continuous process of dodging things 
 that are harmful and give pain, and of chasing after 
 the things which give pleasure, in the case of the 
 lower forms, mainly foods. Thus does a single-celled 
 animal zigzag its way through his world, guided in 
 his movements by pleasure-pain, and always at the 
 mercy of everything in his environment since he can 
 expect and anticipate nothing. He can make no plans 
 in advance of the appearance of his deadliest enemy. 
 Something almost like this is true of many men; hence 
 the great practical importance of a knowledge of feel- 
 ing in the life of mind. But the important thing to 
 know is that feeling operates in the life of mind as 
 active before sensation can deliver its accounts of the 
 character of our world. Often before we see that an 
 object is red we must dodge it; it is of more impor- 
 tance to know first that a brick is sometimes danger- 
 ous; later we can find out about its color. And the 
 
Z 
 
 3 
 
 44 THE LIFE OF MIND 
 
 experience of the danger of the brick is primarily a 
 matter of feeling, which must move us before sensa- 
 tion has time to report on its color. The feeling acts 
 "right now,'' while the sensation report is more or 
 less leisurely; in fact, the sensation report is often 
 postponed for considerable stretches of time. The 
 color of the rattlesnake does not come into my mind 
 first upon my seeing him; the fact is I have turned 
 my heels and am out of danger, or hope to be, by 
 the time his colors begin to dawn on my mind. I 
 perhaps strike or run first (James), then feel fear of 
 him, and the sensation of color turns up in my con- 
 sciousness a poor third. Feeling and action are then 
 the original experiences, and the sensations which lay 
 the foundation of our knowledge systems are develop- 
 ments out of undefined feeling, are modifications of 
 feelings for highly specialized purposes, and appear 
 along with the more complex processes of abstract 
 u thought 1 ' and the higher forms of planned or antici- 
 pated experiences, when in the course of evolution 
 mind faces the task of taking deliberate charge of 
 the course of its own life. 
 
 As a third consideration, feelings, in some of their 
 peculiar forms, have not only no particular names, 
 but also do not have any particular or specifiable 
 / quality. They are certainly not all either pleasures 
 or pains: besides, even if they were all either pleas- 
 ures or pains, these experiences have sometimes no 
 definitely assignable quality, for pleasures and pains 
 as feelings are often interchangeable, many of them 
 
THE LIFE OF MIND 45 
 
 can equally well be called either pain or pleasure, and 
 there are some that are neither pain nor pleasure, and 
 some that are both at once even after analysis has 
 done its best. In fact, things can have names and 
 be distinguishable only when they persist or "stay; 
 put" at least long enough or are the kind of thing 
 that can be remembered, and none of these characters 
 can with any assignable sense be applied to feelings. 
 They do not persist in time or have duration, since 
 each instant of a feeling, in so far as it is pure and 
 unmixed with other types of experience, which is rare, 
 is an eternity in itself in that it has no reference to 
 anything. It does not even have the character of 
 self-reference — -if it had it would be an idea — for 
 that is the character that distinguishes ideas from all 
 other things. Feelings cannot be ascribed positive 
 existence, for what has existence can be shown to be 
 relevant to other things, and what has relevance has 
 meaning and becomes universal. To say that sensa- 
 tions have quality means that they exist only with 
 feeling. Feelings do not have any qualities; they are 
 qualities, and their being consists in their being felt. 
 Only sensations, so far as experiences go, have quali- 
 ties, in that their existence is conditioned upon the 
 presence of feeling, and to attribute quality to other 
 forms of experience is to confuse quality with univer- 
 sality, Universality, not quality, belongs to perception, 
 and to perception alone of all things in the universe; it 
 is this that makes perception the characteristic know- 
 ing function. This is the reason that the empirical 
 
46 THE LIFE OF MIND 
 
 philosophy can never attain real universality, and 
 thus cannot arrive at truth; it concerns itself only 
 with qualities, and at a certain point abstract quality, 
 as ended, becomes quantity, or assumes the inevitable- 
 ness of the abstractly formal, which is confused with 
 the dependableness of the universal. 
 
 Proper discussion of this would take us into the 
 field of theory of art. But feeling, as unmixed, is just 
 what it is and unique, is more primitive than sensa- 
 tion, since while quality is the essence of sensation, 
 feeling has no quality. This will involve the begin- 
 nings of a theory of art when we raise the question of 
 the place of feeling in the systems of experience which 
 make up the life of mind. But at that point we shall 
 have to call the assumed feeling complexes emotions. 
 But also at the point of a theory of art it will clearly 
 have to be remembered that what we have said here 
 precludes the complete fusion of feeling with other 
 experiences, since feelings have no quality, and our 
 concepts of art will have to be formulated with refer- 
 ence to the fact that, since feeling always in a measure 
 stands off to itself, the quality of art will depend upon 
 the immediate experience of completeness which, be- 
 cause of the relative nature of the thought experience, 
 is suggested appositively by the actual and natural 
 ofn>hness of feeling. It is through some such concep- 
 tion a> this that real universality in art is achieved. 
 Perhaps diffen nee, which has such tremendous logical 
 significance, i-. after all. an aesthetic concept, and 
 the close contact which it enables knowledge in logic 
 
THE LIFE OF MIND 47 
 
 through the idea of mediation to make with the real 
 may possibly itself depend upon the immediacy of the 
 feeling experience. But it appears clear that the limi- 
 tations of mediacy, which are primarily a matter of 
 continuity and process, and which result in the host 
 of difficulties of cause as a scientific and epistemologi- 
 cal concept, and which at present make the idea of 
 evolution quite irrational, rest upon the nature of 
 quality, and it at least suggests itself that the imme- 
 diacy of feeling may be apprehended rationally 
 through the idea of qualitylessness as the meaning 
 of the logical concept of pure difference. The fact 
 that such matters cannot be comprehended by psy- 
 chology shows how far short psychology falls as an ac- 
 count of the life of mind. 
 
 These are, of course, extremely difficult matters: 
 but the life of mind would not be important if it were 
 simple, and it is perhaps the place to show the tre- 
 mendous significance for our lives of a great many 
 things which we cannot quite clearly understand, but 
 which we know represent large aspects of the truth. 
 
 Many, perhaps all, of these can be accounted for 
 en our theory of feeling, and we may state them best 
 perhaps by considering them aspects of what is popu- 
 larly called mysticism. Mystery and magic must be 
 accepted as having a place in the life of mind, even 
 in the minds of beings of the very highest orders. We 
 must see what this aspect of mind is in actual experi- 
 ence, since all of us accept mystery and magic of 
 some kind, and often a kind that is quite generally 
 
48 THE LIFE OF MIND 
 
 unintelligible. 
 
 When we undertake the discussion of mystical feel- 
 ing as a valid form of experience; that is, valid in 
 the literal sense as giving us an interpretative value 
 of certain aspects of the life of mind, it is to be under- 
 stood at the outset that we are using the terms feeling 
 in a somewhat different sense from that used in de- 
 scribing feeling as an original form of experience. 
 The mystical feeling is then an experience in which 
 wc get what we believe to be a true result of an inter- 
 pretation and synthesis of large masses of experience; 
 in which neither the details of fact which make up 
 the mass nor the methods by which an interpretation 
 of them is achieved is clearly envisaged by the mind, 
 nor can either the details of fact or the method be 
 rendered quite indubitably certain to the conscious- 
 ness. This, of course, looks like saying that we have 
 knowledge or arrive at certainty when we do not know 
 what it is that we know, and are certain when we do 
 not know how we can be certain. But there is no 
 reason why we should be alarmed or ashamed of such 
 a result, since it is one of the commonest experiences 
 to have a ''groundless" conviction, and until our 
 methods of knowledge are vastly improved over what 
 any of them at present represents, many of the most 
 important actions will have to continue to follow from 
 such uncertain and groundless convictions. Even many 
 of the most invulnerable propositions in logic or in 
 mathematics rest upon a "Let it be supposed that — ," 
 and every large generalization of science expresses 
 
THE LIFE OF MIND 49 
 
 some degree of faith where we cannot see. For in- 
 stance, it is not at present humanly possible to be 
 aware of enough data to account for the full meaning 
 of many of the principles of evolution, nor is it pos- 
 sible to hold in mind at once all the necessary logical 
 implications of method to guarantee certainty in such 
 connections. 
 
 Yet we do not doubt. There is a solid bridge of 
 truth that stretches between knowledge and faith over 
 the waters of doubt, and the end of the bridge which 
 abuts upon faith often lies under a clearer light of 
 conviction than the other. So when I feel a strong 
 attraction pulling me in a matter involving a weighty 
 choice, although I can state no facts that would justify 
 it nor any reasons which would prove it valid, still I 
 proceed by the same conviction of truth as when I 
 can lay the grounds for an implicit inference or can 
 justify my conviction by reference to an historical 
 intuition. It is not therefore unreasonable to expect 
 that when logic has perfected its methods the convic- 
 tion which arises from feeling and that arising from 
 intuition will cover the same truth as is manifested 
 now in logical method only. So if I cannot trust my 
 feelings I cannot trust my "mind," for there is in 
 each the element of universality which calls for faith, 
 for at many critical points we cannot see where we 
 have to live. 
 
 But in accepting the mystical feeling as a source of 
 truth we do not condone mystery if by mystery it is 
 implied that some things arc beyond the reach of 
 
50 THE LIFE OF MINI) 
 
 mind altogether. Nothing lies out of the way of mind, 
 and whatever is real is knowable. By mysticism then 
 we imply the resignation that is due in the presence 
 of the real to those elements of the real whose exist- 
 ence is as yet merely symbolized to us, but the sym- 
 bols for which we take as the guarantee of reality 
 which will appear fully when the symbolism is real- 
 ized as such in mind. But this is not different essen- 
 tially from thought and its validity. And, while it is 
 true that the conviction which rests upon feeling is 
 often, perhaps generally, mistaken, and, to use the 
 harsher term, false; and the conviction that rests upon 
 intuition equally often mistaken and oftener tragic 
 in its consequences; and while the practical conse- 
 quences in either case are generally such as to make 
 human life in the world appear as vain and unprofit- 
 able with respect to those values the possession of 
 which would compensate for life's inevitable and inex- 
 orable loss; — how much surer are the results which 
 follow from strict scientific research? Armed with the 
 "results of science" we reduce murder to a fine art; 
 we justify the immolation of two-thirds of the human 
 race upon the altar of the other third's greed and lust ; 
 we divert the energies of the intelligence itself to the 
 destruction of the conditions which make a life of 
 intelligence possible. 
 
 The very worship of science is itself a case of magic, 
 and the domineering spirit which science sometimes 
 shows to the ethical aspects of experience has been 
 responsible for the same kind of obscurantism and 
 
THE LIFE OF MIND 51 
 
 stagnation as ever followed from religious intolerance 
 in its most violent form. 
 
 It is then only the overconfidence of the learned 
 that llouts the feelings. We can consider the place 
 of feeling in experience as equally justified with 
 science so long as "scientific truth" claims to depend 
 upon fact. 
 
 We need therefore only to refer to certain types 
 of mysticism to illustrate the truth of our account of 
 the feelings as a ground of true interpretation. 
 
 If we take the case of religion we shall be dealing 
 with at least the most powerful if not the most refined 
 and delicate of human feelings. It is easy, of course, 
 to dash the whole question aside in contempt as a 
 tissue of lies and deception due to the universal igno- 
 rance of men. But it would be equally fair and as 
 nearly true to accept the whole system as the very 
 last word of truth on all subjects. Both are, of course, 
 utterly false. The question for us is not how much of 
 religion is true; that question might not be worth 
 answering; but how much of the truth of religion is 
 an interpretation, in terms of feeling, of the facts of 
 life. Such a question is clearly an inquiry as to how 
 much of the truth of religion is represented in the 
 lives of its devotees by ritual and liturgy, by form 
 and color and movement; how much of the truth is 
 mediated through song and dance and gesture and the 
 forms of bodily movement in general, instead of 
 through the more labored customary medium of lan- 
 guage and logical discourse, 
 
 UNIVER3I 
 
52 the: life of mind 
 
 If, naturally, we limit the terms truth to such de- 
 liverances as can be formulated in the symbolism of 
 language only, then other forms of expression are to 
 be called something else. And it is argued that only 
 forms upon which we can agree can represent truth; 
 but cannot and do not vastly more people agree on 
 other than language forms than upon language forms? 
 But.it is the agreement among the competent — but 
 this begs the whole question; the competent are those 
 who agree. Or, the truth is a matter of findings by 
 those who put their life work into the matter; but 
 why should work and continuity of interest guarantee 
 truth to those who grind out a life of toil and find — 
 illusion and unreality? Or, the truth is what all 
 rational beings are obliged to accept; but what have 
 all rational beings accepted, or who is rational? The 
 majority of educated men today accept some form of 
 symbolism as the ground of the truth of those mat- 
 ters which they think concern their souls — a sym- 
 bolism which they do not ever attempt to justify on 
 grounds of strict logic. And even "strict logic" in 
 the last resort is a matter for the most part of an 
 elaborate symbolism, even the concrete logic which 
 deals directly with the reality itself is a symbolism, 
 an inescapable symbolism, it is true, but still a sym- 
 bolism. And it, even, may be inescapable just because 
 of its hold upon your feelings rather than upon your 
 "mind." 
 
 The fact is that the most significant systems of 
 ends ever proposed as the ideal of accomplishment of 
 
THE LIFE OF MIND 53 
 
 human action have been created and given their com- 
 pulsive power by feeling, and feeling has invented the 
 forms of action through which alone their accomplish- 
 ment seems possible. The ideal of a " Kingdom of 
 God" or of a perfect state, even the utter endlessness 
 of Nirvana, the complete feelinglessness of final anni- 
 hilation, all have been forged in and through the white 
 heat of feeling on the anvil of despair with respect 
 to the possibilities of the facts of this world. So that 
 as an interpretation of fact which can obtain human 
 acceptance and approval, it would seem that the con- 
 vincingness of truth is the persausiveness of feeling, 
 and that the facts that we accept as real are those 
 which enforce their claim upon us either through the 
 warning threat or the beckoning of hope — feelings. 
 Ideas are essentially satisfying and quiescent; they 
 indicate possession and the peace of quietude. It is 
 only when an idea glows with the warmth of feeling 
 that it fires us to the pitch of action; and it is only 
 in the heat of action that the good is realized. All 
 this is essentially true whether truth appears to us 
 under the religious or the moral banner, and nothing 
 is more firmly established in ethical thinking than 
 that our ends must appeal to us if they are to be real- 
 ized or even clearly formulated in our thought. And 
 the appeal does not come from the deadly perfection 
 of a finished idea but from the often crude and unat- 
 tractive half-formed urge of envisioned action with its 
 hint of strife and pain and with its promise of loss 
 and toil, 
 
54 THE LIFE OF MIND 
 
 Rut. to rub the matter in, it is the easiest of tasks 
 to show that the very heights of which science boasts 
 are themselves attained only under the influence of 
 the final life of imagination which only feeling can 
 give to thought as thought approaches its higher goals. 
 We tend to think of science as the grub work which 
 only hacks can do with pick and spade, as the dreary 
 round of dirty toil of lowly souls who can work only 
 with their hands. We speak of the u patient" search 
 and the disappointing failure of our experimenting, 
 and we tend to form in our imagination when we 
 think of science the picture of mus^ed-up tables and 
 smelly vessels and fulsome fumes of frothing filth 
 and withal a tired and sad-eyed dirty man who has 
 given up all the comforts and joys of living, — all in 
 the pursuit of sacred truth. , 
 
 But the picture is mostly false; the real work of 
 the scientist is done in the cleanly comfort of a study 
 where he is surrounded with the thought results of all 
 time: and it is the exhiliaration which he there enjoys 
 with the progress of his mind among the realities which 
 the practical man armed with all the forces of nature 
 can never know which induces the man of intelligence 
 to court the wise but shy Athena. And, here, just as 
 in the practical life, success means excess; and having 
 attained the coveted prize the scientist resorts at once 
 to extravagant claims for the virtues of his mistress, 
 which, with all the heat and vehemence of feeling he 
 asserts to have been born full-formed out of the head 
 of the god. It is thus in the quiet exercise of the 
 
THE LIFE OF MIND 55 
 
 imagination stimulated by feeling that the significant 
 things in the life of the mind are created, and they 
 are not, as the scientist sometimes carelessly states, 
 achieved by and from the handiwork of the laboratory. 
 And many of the extravangances of science are due to 
 the fact that, when it seems necessary to discount the 
 unaided power of thought, it is assumed that science 
 can think with its hands. 
 
 Thus it seems clear that feeling in the synthetic 
 forms of some of our larger and more fundamental 
 attitudes reaches truth as directly and as surely as 
 does thought. Wei must act often where, whether we 
 cannot know or not, we at present do not know; and 
 while such assurances as we have in such cases comes 
 largely from conviction attained in thought, it is never- 
 theless true that mere conviction does not by itself 
 tie our powers and capacities to our goals, except 
 through the help of the pliant adaptableness of our 
 urgent feelings. It is feeling that gives content to 
 the abstract form of truth in all human practical in- 
 terests; and feeling furnishes not only motive force 
 but also direction for our capacities when employed 
 in the scientific pursuit of truth. There is no aspect 
 of life where feeling is not a constructive part, and 
 our understanding of any sort or type of human expe- 
 rience is conditioned upon our infusing the- percept ion 
 of the real with the warmth and glow of feeling. 
 
CHAPTER V. 
 
 II. SENSATION AS PERCEPTIVE ATTENTION. 
 
 We have already stated what we mean by sensation 
 when we referred to the element of raw fact in our 
 contacts with objects. It is an aspect of perception. 
 I put my hand upon the book that lies before me and 
 I feel its coldness, hardness, and its clothy roughness. 
 1 push it off the table and I hear the sound of its 
 striking the floor. I take an apple in my hand and 
 feel the softish smoothness of its skin, its coolness 
 pleasantly stings my touch, I smell the odors it emits, 
 and see the rosy color curving around its oval form. 
 These are the natures of experiences as they come to 
 me, and their characters have been described above 
 as fact aspects of perception. It is our purpose here 
 to split up these completed experiences which we called 
 perceptions, and thus try to find the simplest stuffs 
 of which they are composed. This does not promise 
 a pleasing prospect. By this we mean that sensations 
 by themselves are not real experiences, and we can 
 find and describe them only by breaking up the per- 
 ceptual unities in which all our experiences come to 
 us. This essential fact we must always keep in mind, 
 and if we find ourselves taking sensations as by them- 
 selves real experiences we must reflect that they are 
 only real as and when they make up parts of percep- 
 tual wholes. 
 
THE LIFE OF MIND * 57 
 
 We may say once more that sensations are the cog- 
 nitive or attentive or knowing contacts which we form 
 through the organs of our bodies with the objects of 
 the external world. But if we regard these objects 
 as complete wholes or unities, it is only as they are 
 objects of perception, and not as objects of sensation. 
 Let us look at these objects for a moment, to see what 
 it is about them that comes to us in sensation. If I 
 hold up a book before you and ask what you see, you 
 will reply at once that you see a book. But suppose 
 you are ten yards from me and the light is not good. 
 I hold up a book with a blue cover for a few moments 
 and then I exchange it for a piece of wood cut in the 
 same shape as the book and painted the same shade 
 of blue. You cannot now distinguish the one from 
 the other. What you see, then, is not a book, but an 
 object of a certain color and form. When you say 
 you see a book what you have in your mind is an 
 interpretation of the thing you actually see, and what 
 you actually see is a certain color and a certain form. 
 That is, you see the qualities of things, and the things 
 themselves, in so far as they mean anything, are com- 
 binations of qualities that imply other acts of your 
 mind than those directly concerned in sensation. We 
 are dealing with the qualities of things in so far as 
 they affect our knowledge. 
 
 The problem which we have on our hands is, there- 
 fore, one of enumerating and describing and classify- 
 ing these qualities. For it is from these qualities — 
 sense qualities, they are called — together with feeling 
 
58 THE LIFE OF MIND 
 
 already described, that all our other experiences are 
 derived. Some of the more important of our experi- 
 ences are not derived directly from these experienced 
 qualities, but are made up of them after they have 
 been, made over in various processes other than sensa- 
 tion. But sooner or later all experiences go back to 
 sense qualities and feelings as their sources. It is of 
 great importance, therefore, that we pick out and de- 
 scribe some of the more common of these sense qual- 
 ities. 
 
 Everyone, we may suppose, is familiar with the 
 popular idea that we are limited to the five senses. And 
 everybody knows them as sight, hearing, taste, touch 
 and smell. But as we shall see, popular knowledge 
 is here, as in so many other cases, quite decidedly 
 wrong, or at least incomplete. We will take up the 
 "five senses" first, and then go on to show that there 
 are several forms of sensation that cannot be included 
 within the five. And we may as well take them in the 
 order in which they are <<iven. and begin with 
 
 SIGHT. 
 
 We have defined sensation as the knowing contacts 
 which we have through the organs of our bodies with 
 the external world. Now, there are special organs for 
 each kind of sensation, organs whose only business is 
 to make the connection between the mind and the out- 
 side object, pretty much as the telephone operator 
 gives us the connection with the party we call for. It 
 blinds very simple to say that all sensations of sight 
 
THE LIFE OF MIND 59 
 
 come through the eye; but just how they come, and 
 just what kinds of mechanisms enable the eye to see 
 are very difficult to explain. We cannot go into all 
 the details in describing the eye, but we may see how 
 the eye works as a whole. There is a very common 
 mechanism that is very similar to the eye, for the 
 ordinary camera shows many of the main facts that 
 are involved in seeing. In the front of the camera, 
 as also in the eye, is a hole through which light is ad- 
 mitted. This is the small opening which you can see 
 when you look into another person's eye, and is called 
 the pupil. This opening is larger when you are in the 
 darkness than when you are in a brightly lighted room. 
 The size of the opening is controlled by muscles, just 
 as you can pucker up your mouth and reduce its size, 
 only in the case of the pupil the muscles work with- 
 out your being conscious of them. The light in pass- 
 ing the pupil enters the cornea, which as a hardened 
 skin gives shape to the front of the eye-ball. Back 
 of this, and separated from it by a liquid, is the lens, 
 which is an instrument for changing the direction of 
 the light rays. Both the cornea and the lens so bend 
 the rays of light as to make more of them fall upon a 
 given area of the curtain that lies at the back of the 
 eye, called the retina. They focus the light rays just 
 as the reading glass will collect enough of the sun's 
 rays to set afire the paper on which they fall. It is 
 in the retina that the events important for seeing take 
 place. The retina is a layer of tissue which covers 
 about half of the inner wall of the eve, the half that 
 
60 THE LIFE OF MIND 
 
 lies at the back of the eye-ball. Within the retina are 
 the organs which transform the light into some other 
 form of energy, which is carried to the brain by the 
 optic nerve. Just what happens here is not very well 
 known, but there are certain changes that take place 
 in the retina, and it is through these changes that the 
 light that comes from the object which you see is in 
 some form carried to the brain. 
 
 But this description of organs and structures is 
 physiology and not psychology. It is sufficient for our 
 purposes to say that in some way the light from the 
 object seen, after it has undergone certain changes, 
 brings about changes in the brain, and as these changes 
 in the brain take place we become conscious of the 
 quality of the object. We cannot say that the changes 
 in the brain cause the consciousness, but only that the 
 consciousness takes place along with and at the same 
 time as the changes in the brain. 
 
 The important matter is, moreover, not what takes 
 place in the brain, but what kind of qualities are recog- 
 nized by consciousness. The most important of these 
 qualities are color and brightness, and a third which 
 represents a relation between color and brightness, and 
 is called saturation. There are, as everybody knows, 
 almost an infinite number of colors, as also of degrees 
 of brightness ranging from pure white to pure black. 
 The intervening shades between white and black are 
 called the grays. 
 
 But while there are many colors, it has become cus- 
 tomary to adopt four of them as more important than 
 
THE LIFE OF MIND ol 
 
 the others, and these are called primary colors. The 
 primary colors are red, green, yellow and "blue, and 
 they are so called because the other shades and tints 
 of color can be produced by combining the primary 
 colors in the proper degrees and ways. They are re- 
 garded as primary also because when certain pairs of 
 them are combined in the right proportions, the re- 
 sult is not another color, but a gray. Thus when the 
 red and green are combined in certain proportions, the 
 result is not a reddish green nor a greenish red; it is 
 not a color at all, but a gray with no hint of color in 
 it of any sort. The same is true of blue and yellow, 
 and this fact has caused these pairs of colors to be 
 called complementary colors. These primary colors 
 also, when mixed in the right proportions, will pro- 
 duce the other colors of the spectrum. 
 
 All this great variety of colors, then, together with 
 the enormous number of brightnesses, makes up the 
 vast array of qualities which occur to the conscious- 
 ness in connection with the working of the eye. There 
 are many other aspects of experience in which sight 
 has an important part, but they are not properly to 
 be called sensations. Thus, sight is concerned in such 
 phenomena as distance, depth, size and duration of ex- 
 periences, but these involve also other facts than sensa- 
 tions, so it is common to refer these facts to percep- 
 tion since they imply that the consciousness has 
 treated the sensations it has received in some such way 
 as to modify them, that is, the consciousness has in- 
 terpreted the sensations and invested them with mean- 
 
62 THE LIFE OF MIND 
 
 ing, and this interpretation of sensation is what we 
 tailed perception. 
 
 There are, of course, many other interesting facts 
 in connection with sight that we might have mentioned, 
 but we have said enough to show the great impor- 
 tance of sight in the life of mind. For most of us the 
 qualities of our world which we get through sight 
 forms the larger bulk of our knowledge. It gives us 
 perhaps more clearly than any other sense our notion 
 of the illimitable greatness of the physical world, and 
 it is through sight that we get many of the suggestions 
 of opportunity to a larger and richer life. It is, of 
 course, true that blind persons are not altogether shut 
 out from the beauty and grandeur and vastness of our 
 common world, but it is still true of those born blind 
 that the world of those who see contains qualities of 
 which they can never be aware. Those who lack the 
 power of sight must then learn to build out the con- 
 tacts which they have with the world through the 
 other senses; and while the sharpness of sensation can 
 probably not be cultivated, the power to gather mean- 
 ings from sensations can be developed almost to an in- 
 conceivable degree of perfection. The sense which is 
 perhaps next in importance to sight is 
 
 HEARING. 
 
 As in the case of sight we may begin by discussing 
 the organs involved in the experience of hearing. This, 
 as everybody knows, is the ear; but not everybody 
 knows just how intricate and delicate are the struc- 
 
THE LIFE OF MIND 63 
 
 tures most directly concerned with hearing. Indeed, 
 there is much that is still unknown even to the most 
 expert physiologists, which is proof enough that we 
 know vastly more about the mind and its workings 
 than we do about the body. In the case of hearing, 
 there is little difficulty in giving a pretty full account 
 of the significant facts, in so far as these facts have 
 to do with consciousness or mind; the real difficulty 
 lies in the fact that we do not know a great deal about 
 the structure of the ear, and it is probable that many 
 of these structures are described, not as we know them 
 to be, but as we know they would have to be if they 
 are to be responsible for our hearing sounds. That is, 
 it is what we know of the mental facts of hearing that 
 explains the physical facts of the body, and this is true 
 in a good many other cases. 
 
 The parts of the ear that are directly responsible 
 for hearing lie inside the skull, and the parts that are 
 visible, or the ear in the ordinary sense, is useful to 
 hearing largely because it gathers the air waves and 
 pours them into the inner ear pretty much as you use 
 a funnel to pour water into a vessel. It has perhaps 
 also something to do with the perception of the direc- 
 tion from which sounds come, but that, as we know, 
 is not a sensation. The inner parts of the hearing 
 machine are two hollow places in the bones of the skull 
 which are filled with delicate instruments. The one 
 nearest the outside is a cavity filled with air through 
 a tube which connects it with the throat, it being shut 
 off from the air outside bv the drum. The drum is a 
 
64 THE LIFE OF MIND 
 
 thin rubbery curtain between the air outside and the 
 air in the inner cavity, so that when the air outside is 
 disturbed, the disturbance passes through the drum 
 into the air inside, just as when you open the window 
 the air outside bends the curtains inward and causes a 
 breeze in the room. It is this vibration movement of 
 the drum which ultimately results in hearing sounds. 
 The movement is carried from the drum to delicate 
 structures that carry the vibratory motion to the nerve 
 fibers in the inner ear. All these fibers are gathered 
 up into one nerve cord which runs to the brain. 
 
 It should be repeated that this long description is 
 again physiology, and has nothing to do with hearing 
 as a conscious fact except that it serves as an illustra- 
 tion of the process by which air waves are transformed 
 into nervous processes. But just where or just how 
 that transformation is effected, nobody knows. Let us 
 turn now to what we do know about hearing as a set 
 of objects or conscious facts. 
 
 The main qualities of sounds as conscious facts are 
 those called tones and noises. And the main reason 
 we have for distinguishing these as conscious facts is 
 that the one is pleasing to us, and the other displeas- 
 ing. We like tones and we do not like noises, and that 
 is the fundamental practical distinction among the 
 facts of hearing. Sounds, as conscious facts, are di- 
 vided into tones and noises. The physicist will tell 
 you that the difference between tones and noises is 
 one of complexity, etc., of air waves. But this has 
 nothing to do with the tones and noises which we hear, 
 
THE LIFE OF MIND 65 
 
 or as we are conscious of them. 
 
 Sounds that are tones, then, are sounds that please 
 us. Now, there are three qualities of tones that we 
 must briefly describe. One of these is called pitch, and 
 the name refers to the characters of tones we have in 
 mind when we speak of them as high or low. This 
 quality perhaps needs or can have no minute descrip- 
 tion, since it is an original fact, and for original facts 
 there is no explanation. We could tell of the differ- 
 ence between the ways in which high tones are pro- 
 duced and the ways low tones are produced, but this 
 would not explain the meaning of high and low as ap- 
 plied to tones. This meaning can only be heard, and 
 all our talk about it cannot help one who has not the 
 ear to make the distinction. 
 
 •Another quality of tones is called intensity. This 
 means simply the strength or force with which the tone 
 comes to us. And once more we are here, as in the 
 case of all real sense qualities, dealing with a fact that 
 cannot be adequately described, but must simply be 
 experienced to be understood. We could illustrate 
 after a fashion the difference between a low and a high 
 intensity by saying that the high intensity was pro- 
 duced by a stronger or larger volume of force than the 
 low intensity, but this would have nothing to do with 
 the qualities as distinguished in the mind. Anybody 
 who has any "ear" at all knows what is meant by tones 
 that are more intense and by tones that are of less in- 
 tensity, and we will let the description go at that. 
 
 The other quality of tone is the interesting and im- 
 
66 THE LIFE OF MIND 
 
 portant one called timbre or tone-color. It is that 
 which makes one tone different from another as dis- 
 tinguished from their relations of pitch and intensity. 
 What we call the "same" tone when sounded at once 
 on the piano and on the violin are quite different, and 
 that they are different is about all we can say. Each 
 may please us equally with the other; and although 
 you may have a preference for the violin tone, the 
 preference can perhaps not be explained. Like all 
 other fundamental sense qualities, timbre is unique; 
 there is nothing else in the universe like it. It is what 
 belongs to a tone which makes the tone not only dif- 
 ferent from all other tones, but also from all other 
 things in the world. It is that pleasantness of sound 
 which it is, which you can distinguish from other 
 pleasing sounds, but cannot tell how you distinguish it. 
 We have now the unpleasant task of disposing of 
 noise as a conscious fact. Noises are sounds which we 
 don't like. And while our task is to describe noise as 
 a fact, it will be impossible to make the description as 
 dry and meaningless as ''scientific accuracy" may de- 
 mand, if we accept the definition given above, which 
 makes the essential trait of noise the fact that we 
 don't like it. From a certain point of view a noise 
 is a complex lot of sounds, some of which perhaps, if 
 heard singly, would or might not be objectionable. But 
 this is hardly fair to the hearer; it puts the responsi- 
 bility for the hateful character of noise upon the in- 
 ability of the hearer to distinguish the tones involved; 
 and why should I take the trouble to rescue a tone 
 
THE LIFE OF MIND 67 
 
 from the sorry mess? 
 
 It is not necessary to go into details in connection 
 with noise, for the people who alone are living in this 
 world are only too painfully aware of the many 11 1— 
 shapen forms into which its very obtrusiveness multi- 
 plies it. There is no longer on earth a retreat from 
 its bumptious impudence, thanks to the rapid increase 
 of that spawn of the devil, the automobile. Retire to 
 the primitive wood and hill where once the chaste 1 
 spirit of solitude sang audibly through bough and fern 
 and rill. The snorting chortle of the automobile 
 drowns the sacred silence and seals its dead lips with 
 the greasy creak of smudge and iron. The noise hunter 
 is there, seeking another tickle which will spawn an- 
 other noise. 
 
 The simple elements which the mind derives from 
 the sense of hearing are first, tones, which we have 
 seen bear the original qualities of timbre, pitch and 
 intensity; and, second, noise, which we have seen de- 
 fies any orderly classification of its forms. The first 
 group of qualities combine in various ways to make 
 the beauty and the harmony into which the move- 
 ments of the physical world, as auditory objects, tend 
 to order themselves. They create music and poetry 
 and all the other forms of art when they come under 
 the influence of the pure, that is, the disinterested in- 
 telligence. When the order into which they come is 
 of the spirit or mind, they tend to the clean beauty of 
 nature and the fulness of life, but when broken by 
 irresponsible and interested purposes, the tonal move 
 
68 THE LIFE OF MIND 
 
 ments of nature fall into the tortured forms of mere 
 artifice, and they clutter man's life with the accursed 
 instruments of civilization. Allowed to grow, they be- 
 come the cultural institutions of life; prostituted to 
 mere increase, they become the destitution of the life 
 they are falsely supposed to support. 
 
 TOUCH. 
 
 The sense of touch has been found to be a mixture 
 of several sense qualities which, unlike the qualities of 
 sight and hearing, are not of the same general type, 
 nor are furnished through the same organs, but which 
 have their own organs and seem to be quite distinct. 
 The popular notion would regard touch as the general 
 sense function of the skin, while cold and warm, rough 
 and smooth, etc., would be the forms of quality into 
 which touch would divide itself. But the average per- 
 son can determine for himself whether this is the case 
 by performing certain simple experiments which the 
 psychologists have worked out. We will first state the 
 number and nature of qualities derived from the skin 
 and then show the experiments through which they 
 may be recognized. 
 
 Take an object in your hands and you will feel at 
 once that it is hard or soft, rough or smooth, cold or 
 warm, blunt or sharp, or what is more difficult to 
 state, whether it merely makes contact with the hand 
 or tends to displace the tissues of the hand. The ex- 
 periences of hard and soft and mere contact may be 
 called the contact qualities, and they may be dis- 
 
THE LIFE OF MIND 69 
 
 tinguished from each other partly by the degree of re- 
 sistence offered by the object touched. Clearly hard- 
 ness and softness are complications of mere contact 
 with bluntness or the sense of space as received 
 through the skin. The sense quality that is of the same 
 general order as contact, but which differs from it in 
 an original qualitative way, is pain. This is shown 
 by the fact that the difference between contact and 
 pain cannot be explained in terms of the intensity of 
 the stimulus, by the difference of mere force which the 
 stimulating object exerts. It is clear to anyone what 
 we mean by hard and soft, rough and smooth, etc., 
 but it seems clear that they are not simple qualities, 
 but are rather perceptual complexes. 
 
 But the fact of touch is indubitable. Take any small 
 object, say a lead pencil, and pass it lightly over the 
 surface of the skin. Notice that on surfaces that are 
 exposed to contacts with external objects, as the hands 
 or face, the light touch or feel of the pencil is quite 
 different in quality from any other sensation derived 
 from the skin, and that it is pronouncedly agreeable. 
 Now pass the pencil over the parts of the body ordi- 
 narily covered with the clothing, and you will notice 
 the same quality of feel, but with the agreeableness 
 exaggerated till it approaches the disagreeableness of 
 tickle. Here we have the pure sense of contact some- 
 what obscured by the habitual sense of bluntness, or 
 space made constant by the pressure of the clothing. 
 The disagreeableness is possibly due to the unfamiliar- 
 itv of the sense of small-area contact on these areas of 
 
70 THE LIFE OF MEND 
 
 the skin. But, however this may be, the sense of touch 
 or contact is a quite distinct and very real experience. 
 This quality we may call touch proper. 
 
 Now take a very sharp needle. Go lightly and care- 
 fully over a small portion of the skin on the back of 
 the hand, touching with the point on spots as close to- 
 gether as possible. You will notice that you will get 
 the sense of contact or touch at all points, but at some 
 points you will get the very distinct quality of pain. 
 At some spots there will be no pain, even though you 
 press the needle until it pierces the skin. You have 
 now found a "pain spot" and a spot where no pain is 
 felt. This shows clearly that pain is a pure sense 
 quality, since you can get the feel of pain without ex- 
 citing any of the other qualities, or at least without 
 exciting any except the more or less general sense of 
 contact. 
 
 There are two other qualities that we get from the 
 skin — those usually called the temperature qualities. 
 Eet your lead pencil lie for a little while where it will 
 become cool. See that it is sharpened so that the lead 
 is exposed, but not too sharp. When it has cooled, 
 pass it (the point) lightly and slowly over the skin on 
 the back of the hand, or touch it lightly on spots that 
 lie close to each other. From most of the spots you 
 will get only the feel of touch proper, but occasionally 
 you will get the pure sting of cold unmixed with any 
 other sensation. Hold the pencil lightly on the spot 
 and give your attention to the feel, and you will be 
 able to isolate in your consciousness the unmixed cold. 
 
THE LIFE OF MIND 71 
 
 If the experiment fails, try it repeatedly and test your 
 pencil to see whether it is cold. 
 
 The other temperature quality is somewhat more 
 difficult to find. Have the point of your pencil warmed 
 to slightly above the body temperature, and pass the 
 point over the back of the hand as in the experiment 
 for the determination of cold. The touch feeling will 
 perhaps be present all the time, and may confuse you. 
 But sooner or later, if you get the proper conditions, 
 you will find a spot where a perfectly distinct feeling 
 of warmth will stand out just as clearly as did the feel- 
 ing of cold in the previous experiment. The feelings 
 of hot and biting cold can be shown to be mixtures 
 of warm and cold with pain. In the cases of warmth 
 and cold, another important fact about sensation can 
 easily be shown. Put your hand in very hot water 
 (not hot enough to scald, of course), and leave it there 
 a few moments. Now take it out of the water for a 
 moment, and when you replace it in the water it will 
 feel only pleasantly warm. But sink the hand more 
 deeply in the water, and the parts covered for the first 
 time will tell you that the water is still painfully hot. 
 The fact that a sense gets "used" to its stimulus in 
 this way is called the fatigue of the sense. 
 
 In the case of the sense of touch there are, then, 
 four qualities — touch proper, or what is often called 
 pressure, and which we have at times called pure con- 
 tact; pain, warmth, and cold. Combinations of these 
 give us the various "feels" of the objects which come 
 in contact with our bodies. We are taught to regard 
 
12 THE LIFE OF MIND 
 
 sight and hearing as the "higher ,? and more important 
 senses, but this merely means that the touch qualities 
 have not been given their proper place in the life of 
 the individual. Whenever touch is emphasized it is 
 usually to say that it is fundamental for the needs 
 of the organism, but the finer aspects of experience 
 enjoyed in art are supposed to be the exclusive work 
 of sight and hearing. As a matter of fact we have 
 some of our rarest experiences by taking things into 
 our hands and allowing their delicacy of form and 
 texture to creep in through the fingers. You cannot 
 keep your hands off a saucily pretty baby, and you 
 want to stroke the fine lines of a beautiful vase, even 
 though its colors ravish the eye. It is hard to go into 
 a beautiful flower garden and refrain from fondling 
 the plants, and the rose is never so sweet to the eye 
 or nose as when you take its velvety leaves in your 
 hand, and the prick of its sharp thorn can often easily 
 be taken as a token of the familiarity which the bush 
 would like to cultivate with you. Lay your hand on 
 the ugliest of plants to do it violence, and the appeal 
 which its throbbing life makes to you to spare it for 
 the beauty which it has failed to justify to the eye 
 will find a response in the relaxing of the fingers if 
 you are not wholly bad. Even the beauty of form 
 in statuary would sometimes escape the keenest eye 
 if it were not for the suggestions of grace which come 
 from imagining your hand pausing fondly on this 
 curve or that, and if you know how to read yourself 
 you may find your arm slyly embracing the lines which 
 
THE LIFE OF MIND 73 
 
 hold the key to the symmetry to the whole. Many of 
 us have eyes and see not because we cannot touch, and 
 it is useless to hear a cadence if you do not feel the 
 swell, or imagine ourselves as sinking beneath the 
 waves of tone. Souls meet in the handshake or the 
 kiss, and the cold prude who disdains to touch his 
 brother can never know the fuller realities of the 
 larger life. 
 
 TASTE. 
 
 Another of our neglected senses is taste. It is of 
 course true with most people that they stimulate their 
 taste a-plenty with all sorts of foods and drinks, but 
 even these fail to put enough attentive interest into 
 the experience of taste to ever discover the rare quali- 
 ties it may possess. They all seem bent on stimulat- 
 ing the taste strongly or maintaining it indefinitely, 
 and as a consequence eat too much or drink too much. 
 And it is a serious question as to whether our tipplers 
 of so-called soft drinks arc not doing the race more 
 injury than their predecessors who guzzled too much 
 beer. Alcohol is not the only dangerous chemical 
 which our drinks may contain. 
 
 As in the case of touch sensations, the organs for 
 taste are not of very great importance for descriptive 
 purposes; besides we cannot too often repeat that 
 descriptions of organs have nothing to do with mind. 
 They are probably modified skin sense organs. They 
 are scattered over the surface of the tongue, on parts 
 of the throat, and in children in the insides of the 
 
74 THE LIFE OF MIND 
 
 cheeks. You can sec them as bright pink spots on 
 the tip of the tongue which stand out from the sur- 
 face in little rows of hills. These spots on the tip 
 of the tongue give us mainly the sweet tastes, while 
 on the back of the tongue are the organs which handle 
 the bitter tastes. On the sides are the organs for 
 sour, while distributed pretty evenly over the surface 
 are the organs for salt. Some of these facts you can 
 demonstrate for yourself. Put quinine on the tip 
 of the tongue but do not allow the tip to touch any 
 other part of the mouth, and you will not taste 
 bitter at all. 
 
 It is popularly supposed that there are a great many 
 tastes, but the four mentioned above, sweet, sour, bitter 
 and salt, are probably all the tastes we have. Of course 
 it is true that there is a peculiar taste to everything 
 we eat; for example, apple, sugar, ice cream, bread, 
 etc — all these seems to have tastes of their own. But 
 a few simple experiments will show that such is not 
 the case. Take some object with a pronounced taste. 
 say onion, put it in the mouth and hold the nostrils 
 closed with the fingers. Notice what you really taste. 
 Mow try an orange, waiting some time for the effects 
 of the onion taste to pass. Such experiments show 
 that what we ordinarily call tastes are really smells, 
 or are combinations of tastes with smells, tempera- 
 tures, pressures, etc. Try your coffee cold some day 
 and see the effect of the taste; or let your ice cream 
 melt and notice what it loses in taste. It is the com- 
 bination of sweet, the taste, with the coldness and a 
 
THE LIFE OF MINT) 75 
 
 certain granular velvety feel, which makes the rare 
 "taste" of ice cream. 
 
 These four qualities with their mixtures and their 
 combinations with feels, temperatures, odors, and 
 pressures make up the whole system of rare experi- 
 ences which we get from taking nourishment. But 
 unfortunately the experiences can be produced by 
 substances that do not nourish, and most any mess 
 of refuse can be doctored up with chemicals so as to 
 deceive the average person, as the refuse from a starch 
 factory may be made into ''delicious" pies. Many 
 "fruit" extracts are merely combinations of chemicals, 
 and excite the taste for the same reason, and nourish 
 the organism just as much, as an electric current 
 which will also sometimes excite the taste sensation. 
 You can make a tasty drink by mixing sugar, vinegar 
 and soda, but the food value of anything but the sugar 
 is questionable. But the really important practical 
 question in the matter of taste is one of distinguishing 
 carefully between the mere ravishment which comes 
 from intense or long continued stimulation on the 
 one hand and the cultivation of the rare taste quali- 
 ties on the other. Cornbread can be so eaten as not 
 to be a merely coarse, dry, insipid stuffy mixture, but 
 in a way such as to bring into prominence some of the 
 rarer of the sweets along with some of the finer feels. 
 I can imagine no more delectable experience than 
 crushing a bit of pineapple in the room where I sit 
 and smoke, or taking a bit of it into my mouth in 
 order to eel the full richness of the odor, but 1 should 
 
76 THE LIFE OF MIND 
 
 not care to eat the stuff. 
 
 SMELL. 
 
 Much of what is important about smell has been 
 said already in connection with taste. The organs 
 are located in the upper nasal passages, and are stim- 
 ulated by substances carried in the air we breathe. 
 The qualities of smell have not yet been "isolated," or 
 singled out from the complex of experiences where 
 they occur. Consequently it seems that there are as 
 many odors as there are substances that smell, but 
 our analysis of tastes has made us doubt this. It is 
 highly probable that there are a few primary or basic 
 odors, and that the great majority of smells are due 
 to mixtures of these or to combinations of them with 
 other forms of sensation. It is well known, for 
 example, that menthol stimulates the organ for cold, 
 ammonia the organs for pain, and perhaps causes 
 certain contractions of tissues thus giving experiences 
 of feel. Perhaps then we do not "smell" menthol or 
 ammonia, any more than we may be said to smell 
 onion with our eyes when it brings the tears. There 
 are then perhaps no definite odors which we can name, 
 and the best we can do is to name the smells by the 
 substances from which they are derived, as the smell 
 of rose, musk, onion, of rubber, smoke, etc. 
 
 But this does not prevent our seeing and remarking 
 the very great importance of smell. Life would be thin 
 and dull and poor indeed without the odors of blos- 
 soming spring and of mouldering autumn. If you can 
 live near a blossoming wild crabapple life cannot be 
 
THE LIFE OF MIND 77 
 
 wholly in vain, although the tree should blossom only 
 for a few days in the year; for these few days you can 
 endure the sordid, colorless dullness and unprofitable- 
 ness of the remaining three hundred and sixty— or 
 you might even if you were not spared the boredom 
 by the honeysuckle and the rose; and you can have 
 a lily any time. There will be little reason for living, 
 anyway, when these have been overcome by the 
 stifling murk of burning gasoline or by the fumes 
 which rise from the nasty process of making a living. 
 
 OTHER SENSATIONS. 
 
 We noted above that the traditional five senses do 
 not exhaust the sources through which experiences 
 come to us. We have more holds on the ark of truth 
 than we are aware of, many more than we use either 
 to our own advantage or to that of truth or beauty. 
 We have been taught so long an abstract mess of 
 "mental" stuff in the interest of religion and morality 
 that we have been forced to forget that the life is in 
 the body. Too long have we approached truth with 
 heart and head; and we have forgotten that truth and 
 beauty and goodness only smile on us when we stimu- 
 late them with finger, eye, or ear, or tongue, and they 
 render us their secrets only through the same means. 
 But there are other instruments of the sensory kind, 
 and we must look at some of them. For they bulk 
 larger in the lives of many of us than eyes or ears, and 
 in all of us they "see" where eye and ear can no 
 longer reach. 
 
78 THE LIFE OF MIND 
 
 These are difficult to describe just because they 
 are as yet undiscovered by many persons. But every- 
 one is, for example, aware of the rich pleasure which 
 comes from the activity of abounding health, or the 
 dark depression that often goes with even slight dis- 
 turbances of the physical condition. These experi- 
 ences are of course in large measure feelings; but they 
 perhaps have their origins in sensations arising within 
 the muscular or glandular or other systems. In any 
 case there can be no doubt about this; you are aware 
 that your arm is moving when you do not see it move, 
 you know in what position it stops moving; you also 
 know without seeing or feeling through the skin that 
 the arm is stretched or strained when you carry a 
 heavy weight. Lifting a weight gives you a different 
 feeling from what you get from pressing downward 
 on something solid; you know on which foot most of 
 the body weight rests. There are many other sensa- 
 tions of the same sort. That is, the muscles, joints, 
 etc., have a feel of their own, and it is mainly the 
 whole sum of these feels from the internal parts of 
 the organism which makes up the body of our 
 "moods"; those indefinite feelings which are so im- 
 portant for our characters. In any case it is from 
 these sensory facts that our knowledge about our own 
 body comes, and this knowledge is extremely useful 
 in that it enables us to control our movements. For 
 example, we know how to walk unconsciously while 
 we are talking with a friend, just because we are 
 getting unregistered reports from all parts of the body 
 
THE LIFE OF MIND 79 
 
 involved in walking. From the point of view of con- 
 trol, then, as well as indicating the general condition 
 of the organism, these organic sensations are extremely 
 useful. Sensations having to do with the movements 
 of the body probably arise from organs located within 
 the muscles and tendons and joint ligaments, together 
 with some which come from pressure organs in the 
 skin. But in all these cases it would be very difficult 
 to give names to the qualities which these sensations 
 furnish. 
 
 Another interesting question which comes up is, how 
 the organism which weighs, say 160 pounds, is com- 
 posed of rather softish materials in the main, is on 
 the whole a somewhat pudgy, floppy sort of thing, 
 can stand upright on its small end and maintain that 
 position against all sorts of odds. We know in general 
 that it is because the muscles hold the bony skeleton 
 rigid that we do not just collapse or spill ourselves in 
 a pile; but that does not say how the muscles know 
 when to pull or how to keep our balance even when 
 the body is rigid. Perhaps you have noticed that some 
 deaf people do not walk with the same grace as people 
 who hear, that they weave from side to side somewhat 
 as a drunken man. And you have doubtless yourself 
 felt the dizzy confusion arising from a ride on the 
 merry-go-round. These cases indicate that some dis- 
 turbance somewhere might locate the source of the 
 sense of balance, and the defect in some cases of deaf- 
 ness would indicate the source in the ear. As a matter 
 of fact it is a part of the ear mechanism, though not 
 
SO I UK LIFE OF MIND 
 
 directly concerned with hearing, which enables us to 
 keep our balance. It is the structure called the semi- 
 circular canals. This structure consists of three tubes, 
 each curved in a different direction, and filled with a 
 liquid. Within the liquid there are floating particles 
 like gains of sand and a structure which carries many- 
 nerve fibers. When the body moves in any direction. 
 the liquid in some one of these tubes is disturbed, 
 the particles are thrown against the fibers and a sensa- 
 tion is set up which is reported to the brain. Here 
 once more we are not immediately conscious of any 
 peculiar sense quality; consequently, we know of the 
 existence of such "sensations" only by inference from 
 structures and relations in the organism and its 
 movements. 
 
 There are other sensations, however, which are 
 clearly felt in consciousness and which have, so far as 
 their quality is concerned, no connection with the so- 
 called five senses. Hunger is one of these. Jt is 
 usually explained as due to the contraction of the 
 walls of the stomach due to its lack of contents. But 
 (he sensation of being "full" is quite distinct from any 
 of the other sensations involving pressure, even though 
 the pressure may be within the digestive tract itself. 
 A stomach distended with gas does not give the same 
 feeling as one filled with a good dinner, so there is 
 a very definite sensation both of hunger and of satietv. 
 And T think we should here say that, altogether inde- 
 pendently of the experiences involved in taste, there 
 are a lot of fine feelings connected with the process 
 
THE LIFE OF MIND 81 
 
 of eating, and that they are as capable of cultivation 
 into the rarer and finer natures as perhaps any other 
 sensations. A person who chooses carefully his foods 
 and limits his choices to those that give him most of 
 the rarest of experiences of vigor and power and 
 capacity often gets called abstemious or merely queer, 
 just as one who eats omniverously and enjoys the 
 immediate pleasures of eating is sometimes called 
 epicurean, while both of them may be guided in the 
 most rational ways by the sensations which are the 
 perfectly rational guides just because they have not 
 been perverted by excess. 
 
 We might add to this account a number of sense 
 qualities which belong peculiarly to the sex function. 
 For purposes of strict psychology these might have 
 to be confined to the peculiar sense qualities which 
 arise from the functioning of the organs immediately 
 concerned. Here as in so many other cases we would 
 be at a loss for appropriate names for qualities, so 
 poor is language in adequate forms of expression for 
 those experiences which we know most intimately 
 that we might accept the cynical definition of lan- 
 guage as that which obscures thought, and little of a 
 strictly scientific character could be done until appro- 
 priate forms of expression were formulated. 
 
 It seems here the place to say that many of the 
 facts connected with sex in such experiences as those 
 involved in mating, courting, home-building, etc., are 
 not sensations properly so-called, but rather percep 
 lions, or interpretations built upon sensations but in- 
 
82 ' THE LIFE OF MIND 
 
 volving other processes than sensation. 
 
 SUMMARY. 
 
 It is now time to bring together in brief space the 
 fundamental facts which our discussion has brought 
 to light. We saw that in addition to the "five" senses 
 there are an indefinite number of other fields of sensa- 
 tion where definite qualities can be described. These 
 include organic sensations, strains, hunger, thirst, sex, 
 etc. In taking the five, one at a time, we saw that 
 in connection with sight there were the general facts 
 of color and brightness. There are four primary 
 colors which seem to range themselves in two pairs, 
 and an indefinite but very great number of other color 
 qualities. Also there are a great number of bright- 
 nesses or grays which seem to turn about white-black 
 as a base. Then there are other qualities which in- 
 volve relations of grays with colors. In the case of 
 hearing we saw the first distinction to be that between 
 tones and noises. And for tones we found three quali- 
 ties, pitch, timbre, and intensity, with a vast variety 
 of combinations of these. In the case of noise, the 
 nature of which we found to be essentially discordant 
 and irregular, it was as a consequence difficult to find 
 any clear lines of classification. In the case of touch 
 we found natural divisions between sensations of con- 
 tact and sensations of temperature. Of the one there 
 were two qualities, pressure, or contact, or touch 
 proper, and pain. Of the other, qualities of warmth 
 and cold. In taste we found less clearness of distinc- 
 
THE LIFE OF MINI) 83 
 
 tion between qualities, but four can be made out fairly 
 well as sweet, sour, salt, and bitter. There was least 
 definiteness in the case of smell, although the qualities 
 are as rich as in any other field, but we cannot name 
 them in any adequate way. Indefiniteness also seems 
 to be the word with respect to sensations of organic 
 origin, hunger, thirst, sex, etc., but here also we in- 
 sisted that the qualities are just as clearly known and 
 their importance just as great as in any other field 
 of sense. 
 
 We noted in passing also certain general character- 
 istics of sensations. It was observed that excess of 
 stimulation will result in fatigue of the sense, and 
 long continued excess may result in destruction of 
 the sense organ. Disease may destroy the senses by 
 destroying the organs through which they find expres- 
 sion, and it seems that certain entanglements of our 
 ideas may distort sense qualities as in insanity. Of 
 very much more consequence, however, is the fact 
 that all sense qualities take form in space and time, 
 and it is perhaps through these aspects that sensations 
 come to mean objects; that is, it is through the com- 
 plications of the space and time characters that sensa- 
 tions come into their full meanings as unities of 
 experience that we call objects. 
 
 It is with these objects that the rest of our dis- 
 cussion will be concerned. All the conscious life be- 
 yond the immediate quality-experience of sensation is 
 made up of these objects in the various relations into 
 which experience throws them. The discussion of 
 
84 THE LIFE OF MIND 
 
 them will be somewhat difficult, but anyone of ordi 
 nary capacity who possesses any degree of real interest 
 can follow if he cares to. The difficulty, in its most 
 general aspect, lies in the fact that these objects are 
 capable of two seemingly varying interpretations at 
 any and every point in the entire discussion. They 
 may, on the one hand, be regarded as external, factual, 
 extra-conscious, self-subsistent, socially instituted and 
 permanently fixed forms, to which our inner processes 
 of experience more or less roughly correspond. On the 
 other hand, they may be regarded as internal in that 
 they all carry mutual references to each other and to 
 the relations within the whole which they form; as 
 internally self-conscious and factual in that they sub- 
 sist in and through the principles which order them 
 into unity; as socially constituted as permanently 
 flexible growth-forms which do not correspond to but 
 embody the inner processes of experience in an ob- 
 jective world. 
 
PART II. 
 
 ATTENTION AS MEMORY. 
 
 CHAPTER VI. 
 
 MEMORY, OR ATTENTION AS RETENTION. 
 
 The second stage in the life of attention is memory. 
 We have seen how perception is the first stage of 
 attentive experience in that it is the experience in 
 which we are in immediate contact with the objects 
 of the external world. We saw that perception as an 
 experience has two sides which can be clearly marked 
 off from each other, the one of them being the raw 
 stuff of fact which we called sensation, and the other 
 an act of mind by which sensory facts are ordered 
 into usable shapes. This act of mind we saw to be 
 the characteristic active experience element which we 
 called feeling. Thus feeling is the active or growth 
 element in the life of mind. It is this latter which is 
 the natural function, hence we called it perception 
 proper; while to sensation we gave a place as a partial 
 element within the perceptive process, because by itself 
 it does not represent a complete experience. Percep- / 
 tion, then, is the simplest of complete experiences. 
 
 Now our question is, What is the experience which 
 is next more complete than perception? Somewhere 
 we shall have to raise a much more interesting and 
 more difficult and important question about the rela- 
 tion which holds between any two types of experi- 
 ences, and among all of them when taken together as 
 the whole of life. Let it be enough to say at this 
 point that we shall call this relation the growth rela- 
 
86 THE LIKE OF 'MIND 
 
 tion, but we shall have to take time somewhere to 
 explain what that means. The next more complete 
 experience after perception is, then, that into which 
 perception grows. And it is possible to call it by a 
 variety of names, and the psychologists differ as to 
 the appropriate one. But we, being guided by the 
 experiences of ordinary people, need only to look to 
 the facts as we find them in our own minds, and to 
 names as we find them in ordinary language. We can 
 then say that the next account which we have of a 
 percept after its first completing itself in our minds 
 is its reappearance on some other occasion without 
 any pronounced or direct connection with the sensory 
 raw material which was part of its being when it first 
 appeared. It has come back in our minds now with 
 its qualities somewhat subdued, as a rule, its color, 
 form, hardness, coldness, etc., do not now appear as 
 its very most real nature, but its qualities take a back 
 seat, as it were, in favor of the meaning of the percept 
 taken as a whole, which now stands out prominently 
 in the center of attention. It is true that the experi- 
 ence has a certain vague form of an object in space 
 for most of us, but that is merely because. most of us 
 think in terms of what we see rather than in terms 
 of what we experience in and through the other senses. 
 But regardless of which sense the experience may first 
 have come to us in, its real nature stands there in our 
 mind as a solid meaning around which the sense quali- 
 ties now drape and linger as the worn-out and thread- 
 bare garments which mark the outlines of its vague 
 
THE LIFE OF MIND 87 
 
 form. 
 
 The percept has thus grown into an image by the 
 casting off of its immediate dependence upon the 
 sensory raw fact. You have the experience now with- 
 out any direct contact with the object. It has grown 
 through a stage where what was before the very heart 
 of it has become the protective covering for its new- 
 offspring, the budding meaning. The meaning is the 
 beginning of a type of values, which along with other 
 value-types will make up the degree of worth of a 
 conscious life. / The protective skeleton or framework 
 for such experiences, the original sensory fact-solidity, 
 is protective and supportive of the value aspect in 
 that it is to it that reference must be made when 
 values tend to run confusedly together/It is this 
 growth of a percept into an image then that is meant 
 by the process called memory, and the description of 
 memory is nothing more than an account of what 
 happens to and through these images as they prepare 
 for further growth stages into other and higher forms 
 of experience./ 
 
 The image is then a common fact-form for many 
 of the higher conscious attentive processes, and in its 
 active aspects will become very important as the ele- 
 ment of imagination in inference. But so far as mem- 
 ory is concerned, and considering memory as separate 
 from imagination, which must be recognized as doing 
 violence to fact, the image is the more or less passive 
 and inert instrument through which the mind accom- 
 plishes its purposes in building up its loftier struc- 
 
88 THE LIFE OF MIND 
 
 lures. The image is then the fact of the meaning of 
 a percept, which, as a meaning, stands out so clearly 
 as to overshadow the sensory fact upon which it rests. 
 When we deal with images we may therefore ignore 
 the question as to whether the image had its birth 
 as the meaning of a visual or auditory or any other 
 sensation. Hence it is independent of any particular 
 sensory connection, even though the fact that it does 
 depend upon sense connections may be and is impor- 
 tant in many ways . But as the image lives and works 
 in consciousness it bears no striking evidence of its 
 origin in sensation at all. It has become a free fact; 
 its historical connection with sensory raw fact is unim- 
 portant to it, even though it is interesting to psychol- 
 ogists to know its natural history and its maternal 
 | ancestry. 
 
 The ordinary account of memory, therefore, which 
 appears to make of memory nothing more than the 
 shuffling about of dried-out and hardened percepts, of 
 placing and replacing meaningless counters in a still 
 more meaningless game of mental checkers, tells us 
 nothing of the work of the mind. Or, at best it merely 
 tells us of the dreary, dusty mind of the psychologist. 
 We do not mean by memory the reaching back into 
 the dark and smelly storerooms of the past and raking 
 out an old neglected form merely to blow the dust off 
 it and fit it into a place which we know in advance 
 would just exactly contain it. Memory has nothing 
 to do with the past; it is concerned with the act of 
 the mind now involved in the realizing of a percept 
 
THE LIFE OF MIND 89 
 
 as a meaning or image. The fact that the same, or, to 
 be exact, a similar, process had taken place previously 
 is not a mystery — that same thing happens every time 
 memory acts. But memory does not imply that a 
 percept once consciously in existence lost its being 
 and existence and then recovered it again. It, if lost, 
 would not be there to recover itself; the whole theory 
 of memory is contradictory, and the mind, from the 
 point of view of it, is a hopeless mystery. 
 
 We have defined memory then as the process 
 whereby a perceptual experience grows into an image. 
 In the negative aspect of the case, this is accom- 
 plished by sloughing off the hard crudeness of 
 sensation. As a positive fact, it is accomplished 
 through the perceptive unity attaining such a degree 
 of clearness as to stand forth as a meaning on its 
 own account. It does not imply "remembering/' if 
 by that we mean a lapse of time or the recovery of 
 something we haven't got. There may very well be 
 time which is passing while these events are happen- 
 ing, but it has nothing to do with the process or the 
 outcome. For consciousness, at least, time is a mere 
 spectator of life. The later end of an experience 
 does not differ from the earlier by its being in a dif- 
 ferent time. It differs by being a new fact, and the 
 distinctive memory aspect of the situation consists in 
 the new fact's carrying a reference to the old. It thus 
 implies the growth connection, and when we say that 
 what it is it just now ivas, we do not mean that what it 
 was ceased to be and there supervened the what it is. 
 
90 THE LIKE OF MIND 
 
 This is of course nonsense. The fact is that a fact 
 has shifted emphasis of its quality; what was essen- 
 tially sensation-stuff in its first appearance now is 
 meaning. The fact has universalized itself out of its 
 old skin and has left its bright color appearing essen- 
 tially not as color, but as brightness. If we insist on 
 the now-then character of memory we shall have 
 trouble later with its more complex growth stages. 
 // the shift of quality had been more leisurely and 
 deliberate, we should have been obliged to call the 
 process inference. But as it is direct and whole and 
 immediate in quality, not showing any spectral lines 
 between qualities, it is necessary to regard the process 
 as relatively simple, for when it appears as complex 
 it has other qualities and these require us to recog- 
 nize it as a further growth stage. 
 
 Let us now give an illustration of the fact of mem- 
 ory, leaving the "facts" of memory to the experts. 
 Recall the house in which you were born. A distinct 
 colored form may arise at once in your mind. Let 
 us say it is square, is two stories high, and painted 
 white. You say you see it as clearly as if it stood 
 before you in material fact. The only way it differs 
 from the experience you would have if you were within 
 fifty yards of it on a clear day is that you know that 
 the house is not present. But that, mind you, is not 
 any part of your present experience; that is, your 
 knowing that the house is not there before you is no 
 essential part of the experience of the house. That 
 is something else, maybe a mere association, perhaps 
 
THE LIFE OF MIND 91 
 
 an inference, but it is not a part of the experience of 
 the house you recall. If the clearness of the sensory 
 aspects of the house, color, form, arrangement of 
 parts, etc., were the important fact, as they are in 
 your experience now, you would, from your own point 
 of view, perceive the house, regardless of what you 
 may know of its present location when you are not 
 perceiving the house. The fact is, that your experi- 
 ence is so far perceptive, and the necessary nervous 
 and other processes will perhaps be there to maintain 
 its sensory body for you. Your experience is, so far, 
 merely another perception of the house, where the 
 original organic processes have reinstated themselves 
 through speech or other habit-forms.- The real mem- 
 ory image comes when the color, form, etc., of the 
 house begin to give way as vague personal and other 
 types of relations begin to form in your mind, and if 
 in the midst of these relations you will catch yourself 
 up, you will find that there was no house there at all 
 in terms of color and form. 
 
 Your memory has now supplied you with the house 
 as a meaning and it does not have such qualities as 
 squareness, whiteness, now. The house has grown 
 from the mere accidental and incidental sensory fact 
 into a whole of value, and it would be a profanation 
 of it now to "see" it as colored form. Or, its white- 
 ness may appear to you now as a drooping, weeping 
 angel, the house now coming to mean the "place" 
 where your mother died. This relation invests the 
 house with value, not color. But if you go very far 
 
92 THE LIFE OF MIND 
 
 from this point and in this direction you memory has 
 grown into the next higher stage of experience which 
 we would in this new aspect call imagination. 
 
 These matters are somewhat difficult, but it is neces- 
 sary to see that by memory we .do not mean the 
 stacking away of job lots of assorted images upon 
 which we may draw when we get hard up for "asso- 
 ciations." It does not mean that an image which 
 was once in my mind, but which was bumped off the 
 stage by a more aggressive or a more efficient image, 
 now reappears to claim the place again and just as 
 uncourteously kicks out the image which is now there, 
 and holds the place until frisked away again by an- 
 other still more vigorous. This sort of thing is of 
 course nonsense, but it is useful in making psychology 
 "simple.'' 
 
 What, then, are the different elements in the expe- 
 rience of memory? It is customary to describe them 
 under the names of learning, retention, recall, and 
 recognition. But if our account of the facts is any- 
 thing like true, retention is not worth much of our 
 time. It used to be asked where and how images 
 were retained during the times they were not in use. 
 They are not the sorts of things that are anywhere; 
 that is, it is of no consequence to try to describe them 
 by such phrases as imply their being put in a pigeon- 
 hole or laid upon a shelf or tied to a post. We have 
 just seen that they do not last through time as if their 
 mere persistence were somehow important, nor is their 
 reality guaranteed bv their staying where they are put. 
 
THE LIFE OF MIND 93 
 
 Time is a quality of memory; it is not the place where 
 memory romps and grows irresponsible. The whole 
 matter of retention serves only to misrepresent the 
 nature of memory, and to confuse our ideas with 
 respect to the nature of mind. We will therefore drop 
 the whole matter, since there is no fact upon which 
 we may rest. 
 
 There are then three phases of the memory process, 
 and we must take them up one at a time and show 
 how rhemory is one aspect at least of the growth of 
 the life of the mind. The other characteristically 
 growth aspect of the mind-life is imagination, which 
 we will discuss in its place. We have then in mem- 
 ory (1) learning, (2) recall, (3) recognition. 
 
CHAPTER VII. 
 
 (1) MEMORY AS LEARNING. 
 
 We arc by this time prepared to say that learning 
 is not merely getting or "having" sensations. And 
 we could go on to say, if this were the place to show 
 up the stupidity and futility of the whole educational 
 system and program, that the sooner we realize that 
 just that is what our alleged education means the 
 better for us in every way. 
 
 What we wish to do is to get on the inside of the 
 learning process to see if it can be controlled so as to 
 work to better advantage. What we have to see if 
 we are to understand it is a trait of experience that is 
 rather hard to get under our hand. Let us put off 
 for a while the naming of this trait, and see if we can 
 sort out the facts in a situation where learning is 
 going on. You set out to learn the multiplication 
 table or a poem, or how 7 to do something that involves 
 control of the hands. Let us take the latter case first, 
 that of learning how to do something with the hands, 
 although it is more abstract and difficult than the 
 others. What we shall have to take for granted is 
 that the movements and forms described by the hands 
 are just the outside faces of the ideas in our minds, 
 so intimately are our mental processes and our physi- 
 cal processes bound together. We are, let us say, 
 making a table. We have before us various pieces of 
 
THE LIFE OF MIND 95 
 
 wood, which are as yet not shaped, and as many tools 
 as we need. But already we have a start on the job, 
 since we have agreed to make a table. This already 
 means that if a given board is twelve feet long we 
 shall have to cut it into shorter lengths; that if our 
 boards are rough surfaced from the sawing we shall 
 have to dress them smooth; that if our boards are 
 all one inch in thickness we shall have to glue some of 
 them together for the thick legs; that if the boards 
 are all a foot wide some will have to be ripped into 
 four or six-inch strips, and so on. That is, the mean- 
 ing we call a table, when brought into the presence of 
 its materials, begins to build itself out by bringing 
 into prominence the sensory facts which were origi- 
 nally strong in it. The meaning becomes a pattern- 
 plan and breaks itself up into its original sensory 
 parts. This process of breaking up of course follows 
 the suggestions given by the presented materials. And 
 what happens is that soon we see the pile of boards 
 standing before us as a table, and lacking only the 
 addition of the muscular movements involved in cut- 
 ting and dressing of parts to make it as embodied fact 
 correspond exactly to the table which we "had in 
 mind." 
 
 Learning in this case is then merely a dissolving 
 of a realized meaning back into its sensation elements, 
 and the. reconstructing of these sensation elements 
 into a new form through the active muscular processes. 
 The form is a new one just because it images its quali- 
 ties more vividly or more artistically or more sub 
 
96 THE LIFE OF MIND 
 
 stantially, depending upon the general trend of pur- 
 poses which get expressed in the plan. If there is in 
 my plan a suggestion of strength, then the table top 
 becomes in my mind immediately thick and rigid, the 
 legs suddenly grow stout and heavy and straight and 
 well braced against each other. If in my plan there 
 is a hint of grace, then the top becomes light and its 
 color gay, the legs curve as if to dance to the music 
 of the violin which must lie upon the table almost as 
 a part of it. The leg sticks a toe out teasingly toward 
 the piano as if to ask that the music begin, and you 
 would not touch the keys too strongly lest the table 
 should become tipsy with the joy of its jig. 
 
 But to come now to the multiplication table. You 
 already have had some of the relations of numbers, 
 since you could not live long enough to get into school 
 without them. This of course does not mean that you 
 have merely learned to parrot the names of numbers 
 and their relations. Then all there is involved in 
 learning the multiplication table is an extension of 
 some of the aspects of mind that are already there. 
 This is the place perhaps to explain the trait men- 
 tioned above. It is a habit of the mind never to lose 
 anything that has had a meaning. For, once having 
 experienced a meaning, the mind goes forward with 
 the meaning as a basis and means to the appreciation 
 and estimation of other things. But this means that 
 the meaning becomes an element common to many 
 things and tends to throw together into kinds the 
 things among which it holds. But this means that 
 
THE LIFE OF MIND 97 
 
 experience is cumulative, that it keeps what it has 
 and organizes with, what it keeps all fitting new forms 
 that come into view. This trait of cumulativeness is 
 then the explanation of learning, not because it is a 
 mysterious cause or force, but because it is the ever- 
 present fact in every case of learning. It is the char- 
 acteristic result of the process of memory as the cumu- 
 lative tendency of mind, and is both the instrument 
 and the end of learning. Memory, then, means accum- 
 ulation, and accumulation means the unifying into 
 meanings of the facts that have become general to 
 experience. Learning, then, is the assimilation of new 
 presented fact with the mind's law of unity. The full 
 explanation of this cumulative trait is not a matter 
 for psychology, hence we pass it here. Like all other 
 ultimate questions, it is a matter for metaphysics. 
 
 Since learning is dependent upon the cumulative 
 effects of memory, it becomes primarily a question of 
 emphasizing some practical rules for dealing with the 
 stuff to be learned. The more important of these 
 suggestions follow. 
 
 ( 1 ) The greater the number of times you repeat 
 or go over the stuff you are learning the more accu- 
 rate and dependable your memory is likely to be. 
 Memory, like all other aspects of mind, is created and 
 sustained through its objects. This shows that the 
 old-fashioned way of "saying our lessons' 1 was not 
 altogether bad, and perhaps much better than some 
 modern methods which tend to lessen the effort of the 
 learner. We forget that it is only through his own 
 
98 THE LIFE OF MIND 
 
 ell oris l It (it one is educated, and that no finishing- 
 school methods of "polish'' or "culture" will ever 
 get under the hide where the character of the indi- 
 vidual can be affected. 
 
 ( 2 ) The longer the subject-matter and the more 
 difficult it is, the more times you have to "say over" 
 the lesson. This of course means that you must have 
 your mind on the work as you go over it, otherwise 
 your mere repeating it in words will not do much 
 good. The most serious difficulty in learning comes 
 from the great number of possible distractions which 
 may divide the attention. So this rule says repeat 
 and repeat and repeat, and concentrate; and ignore 
 the things you are not supposed to be learning. Repe- 
 tition keeps the general meaning present to the mind. 
 
 (3) Learning is much more successful if the mat- 
 ter to be learned is broken, up into groups. Work a 
 number of ideas into a small group of some kind, any 
 kind, and these groups will be found to be more easily 
 learned than single ideas. The reason is that the 
 relations that get fixed between images make the group 
 a whole or unity which has a definite meaning. And 
 stuff with a meaning is more successfully learned than 
 stuff that has no definite meaning. In fact, the only 
 real learning is the learning of meanings; the learning 
 of mere froms is training, and is appropriate to sol- 
 diers and animals that do not have a mind. 
 
 (4) Throw these groups into rhythmic forms by 
 giving certain parts emphasis or accent. This is the 
 natural method of learning, as you will notice in the 
 
THE LIFE OF MIND 99 
 
 case of small children learning poems by heart. Chil- 
 dren sing the material, and if they are given the free- 
 dom of movement which they should have they will 
 dance it, or represent it through swaying the body or 
 the head, or they may beat the time with their hands. 
 
 (5) Perhaps one of the most important rules is, 
 learn by wholes. This means that in repeating mate- 
 rial to be learned, go over it as a whole, say it all the 
 way through without stopping to dwell upon the inter- 
 esting or the hard parts. When through once go over 
 the whole again, and as many times as is necessary. 
 After the matter is learned as a whole you may profit- 
 ably put some emphasis upon the more difficult parts, 
 but you will find that you can learn a given material 
 in less time by the whole method. 
 
 (6) Go over the material to be learned a given 
 number of times and then leave it off for some hours, 
 or perhaps better until the next day. In any case 
 don't mull it over; don't repeat it until the repetitions 
 are mere empty sounds. Lay it away when it begins 
 to tangle, and come back to it some time later. A 
 reasonable number of repetitions today and the same 
 amount tomorrow ought to fix any ordinary material 
 in your mind as practically permanent. 
 
 (7) The rate at which you repeat should be the 
 one natural to you, and will vary somewhat with 
 different persons. Perhaps it is best to begin rather 
 slowly and deliberately and then speed up as you 
 warm up to the subject. But nothing is gained by 
 putting in too much time or effort, just as nothing is 
 
100 THE LIFE OF MIND 
 
 gained by not taking time enough. 
 
 (8) The most important rule of all is, give your 
 full attention to the stuff you are learning. It is true 
 that mere mechanical repetition and drill will do 
 something, but the learning which is to be funda- 
 mental in one's life should be that which has the 
 fullest meaning, and meanings are peculiarly questions 
 of full and undivided attention. The thing you will 
 find easiest to learn is the thing to which you give 
 your whole mind, the thing in which you develop a 
 real interest. And interest can be in a large degree 
 controlled by the individual will; so that the intention 
 to learn and the interest in learning and the will to 
 learn are almost the same thing, and together will 
 accomplish whatever lies within human power to 
 accomplish. 
 
CHAPTER VIII. 
 
 (ll) MEMORY AS RECALL. 
 
 Another aspect of memory we mentioned as recall. 
 This we will find will not require any extended dis- 
 cussion, since what we have already said and what 
 we shall have to say in connection with recognition 
 will leave the meaning of recall rather slim. 
 
 The popular idea of recall is, I suppose, that of 
 reaching back into the reserve stocks of images and 
 bringing forth the one appropriate to the occasion. 
 This has of course a very definite meaning, and there 
 would be no objection to it if we could keep our de- 
 scription from relapsing into the mere idea of shuffling 
 about of dead and inert objects. But if we remember 
 that an image is nothing if it is not living and actively 
 affecting things along with other images, such lan- 
 gauge would be seen to be not altogether false so much 
 as just inadequate and inappropriate to the real nature 
 of images. That is, such language leaves the wrong 
 impression as to the nature of images. The essential 
 nature of an image is that of a process, something that 
 is active and continuously going on, which always 
 carries the implication that something is to be accom- 
 plished. This is accordingly expressed by saying that 
 the image is dynamic, or active in nature and not a 
 static or fixed fact, that it is to be thought of as the 
 activity which makes one's whole experience hang 
 
102 THE LIFE OF MIND 
 
 together, and not a mere thing which stays eternally 
 what it is. There are no fixed and finished things 
 in the life of the mind; things get done and finished 
 only in the external world. And this is accomplished 
 only by stopping the process upon which life depends. 
 What recall really means then is the finding of 
 processes in experience which have not been making 
 themselves obtrusive, but have been going on unob- 
 served behind the screen of attention. That there 
 are real "doings" that do not appear, that there are 
 real processes which do not occupy the spotlight of 
 attention, is easily demonstrated by very many facts. 
 You sometimes just wake up and find yourself think- 
 ing about something and can give no explanation of 
 how it got into your mind, you can see no connection 
 between what is in your mind and what had just now 
 been going on there, but has disappeared. It is evi- 
 dent that you did not know all of what had been 
 going on in your mind. Some facts had been in 
 process without your knowing anything about it, and 
 often you cannot tell what they are even when you 
 stop to try to rake them up into your clear attention. 
 The natural course of your mind involves besides those 
 factors which stand out clearly many other processes 
 which possibly never get into the attention at all. 
 Think how much of the water in a flowing river per- 
 haps never comes to the top where the sunlight can 
 play upon it, but you will see that any drop of water, 
 however deeply buried in the stream it may be, may 
 come to the top if there is some reason why it should. 
 
THE LIFE OF MIND 103 
 
 The stream of mind in the same way carries many 
 undercurrents, processes which may never come to the 
 surface, but which upon the proper occasion may not 
 only reach the top but find the most prominent place 
 of all. This means, of course, that our mind is made 
 up of many, many images of many very different 
 kinds, and that any one of them may become the 
 most important of them all for any given purpose. 
 
 There are two questions about recall which we ought 
 to answer. One is, just how does an obscure and for- 
 gotten image manage to get back into the attention, 
 and the other is, just what do we mean by controlling 
 the attention, as we seem to imply when we tell some- 
 body to try to attend or "pay attention," or to recall 
 or remember something. 
 
 For the answer to the first question we simply need 
 to refer to things we have already said about images. 
 We saw that an image is itself made up of many dif- 
 ferent parts, and there is nothing to hinder that one 
 of these parts of a given image may also be a part of 
 another image at the same time. The fact that one 
 apple is red does not prevent the same redness from 
 being a quality of another apple, or the fact that one 
 man is tall does not give him a monopoly on tallness, 
 for tallness may belong also to trees. This fact we 
 describe when we take up association. But here we 
 are explaining how recall takes place. If you should 
 begin to talk to me about a very, very tall man, it 
 would be quite likely that I might think of a tree 
 which had been prominent in my mind because of 
 
104 THE LIFE OF MIND 
 
 its tallness; the image of a tall man may bring up 
 
 the image of a tall tree. Then our images are all 
 bound together in a way such that they move as 
 groups, and when one of a group is "brought into the 
 mind" the tendency is for the whole group to which 
 it belongs to follow into the full glare of attention. 
 As we have elsewhere remarked, our images come to 
 us in groups in our first experiences of them, and these 
 groups tend to remain unbroken throughout our lives 
 or until dissolved by old age or mental derangements 
 of whatever kinds. We might have defined learning 
 in the previous section as the process of determining 
 what and what kinds of groupings we wish to make 
 our images fall into, and the further process of welding 
 our images solidly together in such groups as would 
 remain permanently in our minds. 
 
 The second question is somewhat more difficult to 
 explain or to illustrate, since it seems to involve the 
 mystery of "will." But we may depend upon the 
 same fundamental facts in this case as we did in the 
 case of the other question, namely, the fact that our 
 images always tend to fall into groups when they first 
 come to us, or rather they come to us in and as groups, 
 and tend to remain in these groups afterwards. The 
 fact of attention itself means that some of the elements 
 from some of these groups make up the center around 
 which our life processes are organized at any given 
 time, and that some such center with some similar 
 organization persists throughout the whole stretch of 
 our waking life. The center is differently made up 
 
THE LIFE OF MIND 105 
 
 at different moments; that is, the elements which 
 occupy the center change and give way constantly to 
 others, but the center maintains the same general sort 
 of organization at all times, and the elements main- 
 tain their connections with the groups to which they 
 naturally belong. The result then is that each image 
 which comes into the attention has vaguely attaching 
 to it all the other members of its group. It is then 
 possible to pass from the image that is clear in my 
 attention to any of the vague elements with which it 
 is connected, and the one to which we pass will be 
 determined by the general set of logical and physical 
 conditions surrounding us. But these conditions are 
 just the facts which in part make up our environment, 
 and are under our control and we can change them, 
 for the most part, at will. As such facts they are 
 connected with the elements which make up our minds, 
 and through their control we control the facts that 
 form the make-up of our minds, we thus determine 
 what facts shall pass through the form and focus of 
 attention. To put it briefly, we control the facts 
 which occupy our attention through the connections 
 which these facts bear to other facts both in our minds 
 and within our outside environments. This matter will 
 come up again when we undertake to explain will. 
 
 One other thing we ought to notice before we pass 
 on. We have remarked that the popular theory of 
 memory implies that memory is characteristically con- 
 cerned with the past, and that its function is pri- 
 marily to dig up the past and to bring the products 
 
106 THE LIFE OF MIND 
 
 of its explorations into the consciousness of the 
 present. It is thus supposed to make connections 
 between the present and the past, and thus to tie 
 together all the phases of our experience. But we 
 have noticed that memory has to do with the past 
 only in a figurative sense, that the past in so far as 
 it is a fact of memory becomes merely a presupposi- 
 tion about the present. And since psychology does 
 not know what to do with presuppositions, does not in 
 fact comprehend the difference between a presupposi- 
 tion and a fact of a different order, this situation 
 has itself made a large part of the mystery which 
 surrounds both memory and will. The mere descrip- 
 tion of the facts of recall should, it seems, be suffi- 
 cient to explode the o!d conceptions of memory and 
 will, and it will be a very important event when both 
 of these terms can be used without the smug assump- 
 tion that the appeal to mystical "spontaneity" explains 
 the facts to which we give the names memory and 
 will. But "association" also does not explain these facts. 
 
CHAPTER IX. 
 
 (ill) MEMORY AS RECOGNITION. 
 
 We come now to what is really the most interesting 
 as well as the most important of the facts of memory, 
 important in that it shows the memory process com- 
 pleting itself in a higher form of life. And as making 
 this connection with higher forms it shows clearly 
 again the fact so often mentioned in previous pages, 
 that the life as a whole, although made up of many 
 diverse processes and facts, is yet to the very end 
 an unbroken unity. Even in those cases where the 
 unity of life seems broken, which we call abnormal or 
 diseased states, the defect perhaps most often appears 
 in the individual's capacity to recognize facts and 
 persons and relations. There is, indeed, a very signifi- 
 cant sense in which recognition may be called the 
 highest of life processes, and it is on this account that 
 it is worth while for us to try to make its meaning 
 clear in our own minds. We are accustomed, I sup- 
 pose, to think of the higher forms of reason as the 
 ultimate stage of mental growth, to believe that truth 
 comes to us in some abstract fitness of systems of 
 thoughts which in their icy hardness and distance are 
 so outside our warmly pulsing life, so objective and 
 "disinterested" and unconcerned with ordinary human 
 affairs, that in their awful presence the heart must 
 bow down and wither and the soul lie down to die. 
 
108 THE LIFE OF MIND 
 
 It is as if the poor child humanity must see the beauty 
 of spirit behind the dazzling plate glass intellectuality 
 of a world organized for business and then die of dis- 
 appointment. Accordingly we must show that recog- 
 nition, as the fulness of memory, implies the full and 
 complete identification of the truth of things with the 
 inner life of consciousness and the ideals of our hopes. 
 Let us begin with simple everyday facts. You are 
 walking on the street when you notice a man approach- 
 ing. So far you have no interest whatever in the 
 man, know nothing about him except that he is one 
 of the millions of his kind, and you go on perhaps 
 with your reflections. The man comes nearer, and 
 while you are in the midst of an intricate and diffi- 
 cult thought you feel the "wonder who that is" that 
 slips into your mind. But your reflection is so far 
 not disturbed and you go on. While you are robustly 
 thinking away at your problem a "looks like Smith 1 ' 
 passes through your mind, and this somewhat shakes 
 the thought process off its base, but you go on with 
 your thinking. Finally as he comes nearer his peculiar 
 grin or the cut of his coat or the slack of his walk 
 catches the corner of your eye and knocks your 
 thought process clear off its feet. You look up with 
 a jerk and blurt out, '"Hello, Jim," as you extend your 
 hand. Then you lie and say, "I have been thinking 
 of you all day and wondered where you had been 
 keeping yourself lately," which only means that Smith 
 has so familiar a place in your mind and is so com- 
 fortable there that you might have been thinking of 
 
■ THE LIFE OF MIXD 109 
 
 him all day, but as a matter of fact hadn't been. 
 The fact is that your thought process of a moment ago 
 is so completely out of your mind that there is noth- 
 ing in it which connects with Smith, and he and his 
 group of experiences enter your mind and completely 
 fill it. How recall is involved in these group connec- 
 tions is shown by the fact that the next thing that 
 comes into your mind to say is, "How's the wife, 
 Jim?" That is, Smith's completely filling your atten- 
 tion now means that the relations closest to him will 
 determine the course of your attention as it goes on 
 through the groups of elements which Smith means 
 to your mind. 
 
 Perhaps the simplest factor in recognition is this 
 feeling of familiarity. But it is well to notice also 
 that this smug and tidy comfortableness of some of 
 our images is merely one side of a larger and more 
 important fact. And this fact is that the transition 
 which we make from one line of images to another 
 contains a conscious suggestion of the wholeness of 
 our experience and the comforting assurance that our 
 thought is never quite completely off the track. We 
 never, therefore, or rarely, at least, get the idea that 
 we are "lost,"' unless there is emotional suddenness 
 in the transition or else the transition is made too 
 many times in quick succession so that we become 
 confused. In the instance given our familiarity and 
 "comfortableness" are not so much the results of in- 
 terest in Smith; in fact, later we may say, "What a 
 bore Smith is, I wish he had not interrupted mi 
 
110 THE LIFE OF MIND 
 
 they are natural assurances that the Smith-group of 
 meanings is one of the elements necessary to the 
 wholeness and completeness of our experience. The 
 recognition in this case is not so much a recognition 
 of Smith as of the totality and integrity of our world 
 and the safety and profit with which we may move 
 about in that world. It is not, largely, a question of 
 the type of feeling, involved, although a feeling of 
 some sort is involved in every recognition, but might 
 in the case given have been of the opposite type, as if 
 I had exclaimed, "There's that fool Smith again." 
 Or, it may have been fear or any other type. So it 
 is the realization or apprehension of real general char- 
 acters of our world as instanced in the particular 
 events of our life which makes the significant fact of 
 recognition in our memory. And we are to see that 
 it is this reference to the wholeness of experience that 
 is the core of the recognition process in whatever form 
 it may be found. 
 
 Let us take now some more complex types of recog- 
 nition. And we may take the highest forms that the 
 memory act ever assumes, for we will find them, just 
 because they are highest, the most immediate and 
 therefore really best known of any of the memory 
 experiences. It is a pity that the psychologists have 
 in general not discussed these elementary forms of 
 experience. Let us look at such high forms of recog- 
 nition as are involved in appreciation and contempla- 
 tion. For the psychologist, probably, appreciation 
 would be a "feeling," and that would therefore and 
 
THE LIFE OF MIND 111 
 
 henceforth be the end of it. 
 
 In recognition we have had the assurance, in passing 
 from one image-system to another, we shall not slip 
 into intervening darkness and outer strangeness. It 
 is therefore the condition of the executive continuity 
 of the mind's purpose to know, and is what makes the 
 mind consent to undertake the venture of speculation. 
 Without this the mind would not and could not 
 "carry on." How then does this idea of wholeness 
 and continuity relate to appreciation, and what does 
 it all have to do with recognition? 
 
 It is to be feared that too often the word recogni- 
 tion is taken to mean nothing more than the literal 
 re-knowing that was perhaps once its meaning. Any- 
 way, the idea is taken often simply to mean that 
 something that was once in the mind but which for 
 some reason was lost out of it now has come back and 
 is "known again." The emphasis is upon the sup- 
 posed fact that in now knowing the thing I am also 
 aware of my knowledge of it on a previous occasion; 
 that is, that I know it in two different times at the 
 same time. There would be no particular objection 
 to this arising from the theory of time, since time is 
 essentially the knowledge of a fact in many different 
 succession series at once; the question is rather 
 whether this properly describes the fact in connection 
 with which we use the term recognition. It would 
 certainly not explain cases of mistaken recognition, 
 or cases where we feel the wontedness of familiarity 
 in the face of circumstances which we know we never 
 
112 THE LIFE OF MIND 
 
 could have known before. And that we have the 
 "homey" feeling in situations which we know we never 
 could have known before, and which we arc aware at 
 the time that we could not have known before; and 
 since this familiarity is the characteristic fact in recog- 
 nition, we recognize things which have had no previous 
 connection with our experience at all. And, again, 
 whether we are aware of a previous experience of a 
 thing or situation has nothing the slightest to do with 
 recognition: recognition comes as often and as natu- 
 rally in connection with things never experienced be- 
 fore as with things that have become commonplace 
 in our lives. The experience we call recognition is 
 the experience of a unique quality of fact, and the 
 supposed mystery of it is just that quality of experi- 
 ence which our "scientific^ accounts overlook. You 
 cannot approach a picture or walk into a thicket of 
 brush and wild flowers with the confidence of full sym- 
 pathy (in the literal sense of the word) and comrade- 
 ship which enables you to understand the lives and 
 loves of the beings that inhabit there, if you have 
 decided in advance that all such is bosh and non- 
 sense: you will not be able to recognize a wild flower 
 you have never seen if you mean by that that you 
 have to have known it in order to know it! 
 
 What we have here then in recognition is simply a 
 rare fact, a fact so rare and its value and meaning so 
 subtle that we ordinarily do not observe it. It is, of 
 course, not a fact if values are not facts: the reply to 
 which is, of course, that facts that are not values are 
 
THE LIFE OF MIND 113 
 
 not facts at all. In recognition we have the realization 
 that a given experience puts us in sympathy with our 
 world, shows us that with this presented situation we 
 can go on living and striving, for do we not in this 
 fact see the universal end of all action and the guar- 
 antee that the end is attainable by the spirit that will 
 hold out to the end? The painter will put the gro- 
 tesque into the picture just to show the impartiality 
 of the law that relates the picture to your world; for a 
 picture composed altogether of fine color and fine form 
 would have nothing to hang on to, would make con- 
 tact enough with the end, supposedly, but would show 
 no relation of the end to you. But even this sugges- 
 tion of action and accomplishment may not be present 
 in recognition, and is not present in the fuller forms 
 of the aesthetic experience. A picture of the highest 
 value merely leads you to the smile which wilts you 
 in resignation to your mind's present content, and 
 makes no requirements of action. It is the recognition 
 of the end in the beginning, the completion of the end 
 in the presented means, the intuition of the universal 
 in the presented particular incomplete fact before you, 
 a fact whose very incompleteness is the perfect ful- 
 fillment. Naturally this is not psychology; but we are 
 trying to do justice to the facts of recognition, and 
 neither trying to justify the presuppositions of science 
 nor to maintain a psychological reputation. The 
 familiarity you feel in a wierdly uncouth church when 
 the organ has made you over and you feel your feet 
 on the rock in spite of the brawling, sprawling mass 
 
114 THE LIFE OF MIND 
 
 of superstition in wall and pew and every overt form, 
 has nothing to do with your ever having seen such a 
 place before, nor with your ever having heard those 
 tones before. You see a tone bud, swell and grow and 
 overload itself with the pure quality of being until it 
 bursts in birth to a host of angelic beauties which, al- 
 though you are now aware are there, you can have not 
 the faintest idea how they came on the scene; all you 
 know is that they represent by a thousand assurances 
 that your world is stable and your least private 
 thought composite to the whole. But these are not ex- 
 periences which I "know again." You can have the 
 inductive proof of real presence in recognition from 
 the sprightly jollity of the violin, where all the sprites 
 of sound overwhelm you with the wholeness and the 
 wholesomeness of your world; but the deduction from 
 the single fact which is also law you can get only from 
 the pipe organ through the miracle of the birth of one 
 living tone out of another. The mother tone smiles 
 and sings of beautiful forms, while colors dance the 
 soul of grace about her head; all at once and without 
 beginning, the infant wail blends its voice with the 
 melody of the whole, and the father tone speaking 
 from out the mystery of allness chants, "It is well." 
 
 Hut recognition in this sense implies feeling, and if 
 feelings are not psychologically respectable, we shall 
 have to come back to the explanation of recognition 
 as "knowing again." 
 
 Recognition is observed also in the intellectual ex- 
 perience of contemplation. This does not, of course, 
 
THE LIFE OF MIND 115 
 
 differ from recognition elsewhere. Yet we do not want 
 to insist that recognition is always a matter of these 
 so-called "higher" experiences. 
 
 When the "uncultured" man on Christmas exclaims 
 "Dandelion," he is happy to see the bloom even though 
 he does not know it again, and his world is there whole. 
 But the fact is to be found in the simplest of situa- 
 tions. When I conduct myself about my affairs among 
 cither familiar or unfamiliar objects, when I go about 
 reflexly and unthinking, it is the recognition of the 
 laws of my world in the facts hardly noticed before me 
 which makes my actions orderly and tend to issue in 
 desirable ends. Recognition is then just as fully 
 formed in the immediately taking things for granted 
 as in the rarer experiences, though for the unpracticed 
 eye they are more easily discerned in the striking case. 
 What we must see is that it is recognition that makes 
 the continuity we have in our experience, and as a 
 function of memory it makes the contact between the 
 more immediate commonplace mass of experiences and 
 the relatively rare experiences of appreciation and con- 
 templation. 
 
 But to explain recognition as it appears in contem- 
 plation. All we would have to do for the average per- 
 son here would be to say that contemplation is appre- 
 ciation with the more colorful feelings left out. Feel- 
 ing really does the thinking in appreciation, that is, it 
 really leads the mind about and shows it where the 
 significant objects lie, and suggests by color signals 
 how these objects make a world. It does not fall into 
 
116 THE LIFE OJF MIND 
 
 error as the contemplative reason does, for it attempts 
 no world where ends require gross forms of action for 
 their realization, but only where ends which are real- 
 ized in colorful form enter into its proper world. Con- 
 templation attempts the abstract world, attempts to 
 walk its compass to the ends of space, forgetting that 
 the ends of space are there where it begins, in the color 
 which the compass cannot circumscribe. Gross action 
 of contemplation creates a world only when it chooses 
 the grace action of appreciation, gropes blindly 
 through empty space until grace fills the void with 
 color; then spacelings rise as the life-center around 
 which the worlds may form. The mere geometric 
 manipulators of pure space forms people a world 
 empty with nothings, a world whose only claim to 
 recognition is the doleful clang of its emptiness. In 
 contemplation, the color of fact is there, but not as 
 embodied in particular fact; there only as the law of 
 form which stands ready to father the rawest of hues 
 and shades. We contemplate facts when we have 
 thought them through to a point where they identify 
 with the relations which connect us with our world- 
 whole; but we see the relation-system as the rare 
 framework upon which our world rests, as if its char- 
 acter of fundament were its recognizing trait. We 
 see our world as a cold harmony of icicle tones which 
 makes beauty enough, but does not connect with us in 
 any way except through the cold light of mere aware- 
 ness. It is thus the material basis of appreciation, 
 the field of truth which becomes also beauty only by 
 
THE LIFE OF MIND 117 
 
 the intervention of the warm light of feeling. But 
 the perfect knowledge results whenever we come in 
 recognition to direct contact with objects, truth unites 
 with goodness and becomes the parent of beauty. 
 
PART III. 
 
 ATTENTION AS THOUGHT. 
 
 CHAPTER X. 
 
 [NFERENCE, OR ATTENTION AS THINKING. 
 
 We have been engaged in showing how the experi- 
 ence process which begins in perception grows through 
 all the stages of memory into the very highest of the 
 forms which it reaches anywhere. We saw the curious 
 relation which sensation bears to the process all along, 
 and how sensation, instead of misleading us, as it 
 usually does, to a purely physical account of experi- 
 ence, might on a more sympathetic view become one 
 of the important elements in the make-up of the life 
 of mind. It appeared to us that experience begins in 
 the contacts which our bodies make with the objects 
 of the environment, and that the changes that take 
 place later are due largely to the refinements which 
 more and more complex objective situations require. 
 In sensation we saw the emphasis on mere abstract 
 quality, the sheer shapeless tone of feeling of which 
 we are aware through our sense organs. As such these 
 feelings had no meanings more than are involved in 
 indicating the condition of the organism, and they 
 as such give us none of the rare experiences which 
 we regard as making up the worth of life. It was 
 only when these raw feelings of color, tone, warm, 
 
THE LIFE OF MIND 119 
 
 cold, etc., were brought to some degree of order by 
 the meaning of the whole life that they make the 
 experiences which we characterize as values. And this 
 ordering of raw fact into the forms which affect our 
 lives in so many ways, the making over of mere 
 groups of sensations into the objects which we use 
 and enjoy as the instruments of the purposes that 
 may seem good to us — this process we called per- 
 ception. 
 
 But we found that wider relations still are required 
 to make the whole world of objects the permanent 
 basis for significant action and worthy thinking. 
 Objects must stay in our experience from one purpose 
 to another, must be independent of the mere sensory 
 character which makes them usable once, so that we 
 can depend upon their being there even while our pur- 
 pose is suspended in the form of a plan. What makes 
 objects permanent and dependable for experience, we 
 saw, is memory; for it is through memory that the 
 object not now being used in action may be taken 
 for granted in our plans, will stay over while attention 
 is employed with something else, and be there when 
 our plan calls for just it as a necessary part of what 
 our world at this moment requires. And in recogni- 
 tion we saw the fulfillment of our plans in the order 
 which the completest of objects suggests through the 
 relations which it bears to our world. Recognition 
 we saw to be one ultimate and universal factor in all 
 our experiences, the one which in the end shows our 
 experiences to be real. We have therefore passed 
 
120 THE LIKE OF MIND 
 
 from the discussion of qualities and "facts" and must 
 now face the difficulties which relations involve, after 
 the nature of relations has been hinted at in the dis- 
 cussion of appreciation and contemplation. 
 
 We must first, therefore, try to find and describe 
 the facts of inference. And we had a hint of them, 
 if you remember, in the discussion of perception. 
 There we said that perception involved interpretation, 
 and that we explained as the seeing of the simple 
 relations facts have to each other when they go 
 together rightly in our experience. When the yellow 
 color goes easily and smoothly with the round form 
 and softish rough surface, etc., we say the object is 
 an orange. We could be mistaken, of course, for 
 objects have a way of being very much alike. For 
 instance, if you show me a round object colored per- 
 fectly with the orange color, and the right size and all 
 that, I would likely call it an orange even though it 
 were a blistery rubber ball made to deceive me. But 
 for our purposes here the being right or wrong is not 
 the point; we want to see cases of the relation between 
 objects which makes objects go together in a world. 
 And we see in the perceptive experience a case where 
 qualities and forms fit together in recognizable objects. 
 There are then relations among the qualities of an 
 object and between the object and its uses which make 
 the basis of the movements of our thought. And the 
 movement of our thought which follows the lines of 
 the relations of things is called inference. 
 
 J. ike all other facts of experience, inference repre- 
 
THE LIFE OF MIND 121 
 
 sents a growth, and like all other forms that grow 
 it shows distinguishable stages. If we look closely at 
 the kind of experiences described above we can point 
 out the stages of growth, although an experience as 
 simple as that often represents by itself a single stage. 
 But in any complex experience, if you will watch it 
 closely from the time it begins in mere sensory sug- 
 gestion up to the point where it develops into an 
 action or the statement of a formed plan, you will 
 see three clearly marked stages. But when I say 
 clearly marked I do not mean that you will find them 
 the first time you look, any more than you could 
 find a cold spot on the back of your hand the first 
 time you tried; but you can learn to find the stages 
 which we call the types of inference. For instance, 
 that the color, form, size, and so on, should mean 
 orange is not written on the orange in big black type. 
 The meaning is not there in any shape or form until 
 the color, form, size, etc., come up in an experience 
 with a taste or feel or smell, or some still more remote 
 factor like the strength or pleasure one gets from 
 eating. Then before the meaning occurs, before the 
 relation exists that makes this connection, what is 
 the status of reference of one group of qualities to 
 the other? Where or in what condition is the rela- 
 tion before we see it, when it merely resides there as 
 a mere part of the facts? We say it is implicit, and 
 our first task is to explain what we mean by that 
 word and what are the facts it represents. When the 
 relation comes out into the open and is as evident as 
 
122 THE LIFE OF. MIND 
 
 the other aspects of fact it is said to be explicit, and 
 to understand this will be our next task. There is 
 still another stage which the relation reaches when 
 it is already evident as the purely factual parts, but 
 itself really stands out as the meaning of the whole, 
 as the thread which runs through all the parts and 
 binds them into a whole of meaning. This we call 
 the synoptic stage, and with it we reach the highest 
 point which is ever attained by cognitive or knowing 
 experience. It is highest in that the partial nature of 
 fact which is still evident and central in appreciation 
 and contemplation is here lost in the total meaning 
 of the whole. We take up these three stages of infer- 
 ence in the order named. 
 
CHAPTER XL 
 
 (i) INFERENCE AS UNCONSCIOUS, OR IMPLICIT. 
 
 Practically all that can be said in any general way 
 about implicit inference has been said already, and 
 it remains to point out the kind of experience that is 
 meant in a number of simple instances. We saw 
 above that a certain group of facts was taken to mean 
 an orange, and we can say the same thing now by 
 saying that a certain group of qualities like color, 
 shape, etc., make a connection in our mind with other 
 facts like eating, selling, etc. This connection we can 
 express by saying that color, shape, etc., imply eating, 
 selling, etc., and by this we mean that the experiences 
 on the one side come to some kind of order with the 
 experiences on the other; that is, that they come 
 together to make a whole. These wholes are given 
 the names of the common objects of experiences, as 
 e. g., orange. This fact, that a group of facts and 
 qualities involves another group of facts and quali- 
 ties, is what we mean by inference. One set of facts, 
 we say, is inferable from the other; that one is 
 implied in the other; that one is organic to the other; 
 or, in simple language, when one of them is in your 
 mind the other of necessity comes in too, because the 
 experiences belong together. But it is the necessity of 
 their belonging together that is important, and no 
 reference is made in inference to the mere chance 
 
124 THE LIFE OF MIND 
 
 coming together of facts. Not only are the facts 
 together, but they must be together, they belong 
 together, and if a case should arise where they 
 appeared to be not together we should have to say 
 that we were mistaken about the facts. Inference 
 then is the test as to whether facts are facts, and in 
 giving the meaning to facts it at the same time decides 
 whether circumstances are worth the trouble of saying 
 that meanings might attach to them. That is, what 
 we call the attribution of meanings to things, the 
 giving to sets of facts a value which invests them 
 with importance in our life, is itself an inference; 
 and the mere designating of facts with names that 
 mean the same for groups of persons already has 
 within it the rudimentary growth stages of implicit 
 inference. 
 
 But inference of the implicit sort is present even 
 when names are not used, even in places where, strictly 
 speaking, there is no expression of thought at all. If 
 I am making a table in my shop and am busy or 
 absorbed with the difficulties which arise from the 
 making of a certain joint, it can hardly be said that 
 any thinking is going on in my mind at all. There 
 is nothing going on there that can be put into definite 
 language without first consciously building it out so 
 that language forms are appropriate to it, which means 
 that in my mind there is merely a succession of 
 images, most of which are organic or motor, and that 
 the images get such order as they have (which is often 
 of a very high type) mostly from the movements of 
 
THE LIFE OF MIND 125 
 
 my hands and of the machinery and tools which I 
 use. We do, almost, think with our hands sometimes. 
 That is to say, one of the images in my experience 
 means another or implies or depends on another, 
 because of a relation that is itself below the con- 
 sciousness, and in this case inference is implicit just 
 because it does not need to be expressed in any of 
 the conventional ways. Many of the very significant 
 meanings of life are thus provided for, or as we say 
 in technical terms, mediated by, just such processes, 
 where habit and instinct take care of the systems of 
 our values. And this reference of our value-systems 
 to the more or less automatic processes of life, proc- 
 esses which are often referred to as "lower," is perhaps 
 responsible for the value-system's being saved over 
 from one generation to the next, and thus for the 
 value-systems persisting through long stretches of the 
 life of the given group in established institutions. 
 
 Inference, then, of this implicit sort, seems to take 
 place sometimes even in the physical life processes. 
 But we should remember that the physical processes, 
 while in the main automatic in nature, would not long 
 remain the successful instruments that they are if it 
 were not that somewhere consciousness has its hands 
 both on the throttle and on the brake. Such proc- 
 esses, as you know, cannot go very seriously wrong 
 until consciousness is on the job to set things right. 
 And, as you perhaps also know, just as serious con- 
 sequences might happen from the failure of these 
 processes to start or move at the right time, as from 
 
[26 THE LIFE OF MIND 
 
 their going too far or too fast or too irregularly with- 
 out some sort of check. This means that these proc- 
 esses are never quite unconscious, that in any situa- 
 tion where anything means any other thing, or tends 
 toward another thing or varies in its movements 
 because of the movement or existence of another 
 thing; in fact, whenever anything has a statable rela- 
 tion to anything else there you may take it for granted 
 that, either directly or remotely, but consciously, con- 
 sciousness is involved. If this were not true it would 
 naturally follow that such relations as we described 
 above would be mere physical relations, and the call- 
 ing them implicit inferences would explain nothing, 
 but would rather confuse the situation. But it must 
 not be understood that we are saying that a group 
 of facts consisting of blocks of wood, saws, chisels, 
 hands, eyes, etc., have a mind of their own. Not 
 philosophers, but only people who get tangled in their 
 physics, make so stupid a mistake as that. 
 
 Then the clearer cases of implicit inference are just 
 those where consciousness does avowedly get on the 
 ground. Let us take a case where, although con- 
 sciousness has very definitely emerged, it is not, in 
 the expression which it chooses to carry its meaning, 
 conscious of its dependence upon conditions which 
 lie back of it and determine the choice of expressions 
 from a number of alternatives. Suppose it is Sunday 
 and four o'clock in the afternoon of a fine summer 
 day. You have spent the day in utter listlessness, 
 read the morning paper, ate a "good" dinner, smoked 
 
THE LIFE OF MIND 127 
 
 a cigar, and then slept until four; you have been 
 resting with a vengeance. You come out at four and 
 the breeze has stopped, and the sun blisters down 
 through a murky haze and the very leaves of the 
 trees curl up as if to dodge its vicious thrusts. You 
 struggle for your breath and with what you can catch 
 you gasp, "Let's go for a drive." In this case the 
 conscious determination to go for a drive strikes you 
 as a happy thought; that is, it is not directly aware 
 of its connection with the conditions of your experi- 
 ence of previous hours. But the moment you reach 
 the decision you are aware that the drive comes as a 
 consequence of, or as dependent upon, or as connected 
 in some way with, the other experiences of the day. 
 You would then say that these weather (and other) 
 conditions are implicit in the decision to drive, or 
 that a decision to drive is implicitly contained in the 
 conditions of weather, etc., as they affect your mind 
 "unconsciously." "Drive" is what such conditions 
 mean. 
 
 In this case we may also say that there is implicit 
 in the decision to drive an implication of the coolness 
 of the air, and, negatively, of getting rid of the stuffy 
 heat. Or, there may also, in a still more unconscious 
 way, be implied in the drive the exertion of muscles 
 to which you feel driven by the stretchiness which 
 possesses you after sleeping. And again, the drive 
 may have been suggested by the hint of relief which 
 it offers from the discomfort occasioned by the "good" 
 dinner. Now in these cases you cannot be sure that 
 
128 THE LIFE OF MIND 
 
 you will get the right ''reason" for your decision if 
 you try to think it out, and it is safe to say you will 
 miss all the good reasons if your candor is affected by 
 your feelings, as is likely to be true. For instance, 
 you might confess that the dinner was a little too 
 "good'' if you are allowed to state yourself without 
 being prompted by your self-respect, but you might 
 be offended and deny it vigorously if somebody else 
 charged you with eating too much. The point is, 
 that we are not dealing with reasons, with a case 
 where relations of fact are judged in their objective 
 independence, but with covert or implicit inferences 
 where a conclusion, even though stated in full con- 
 sciousness of its meaning in some of its connections, 
 is yet not aware of its genetic connections in facts 
 which gave it its full status. Many cases could be 
 given, but this is perhaps enough to show what the 
 implicit form of inference is, and anyone may find 
 them in his own experience with a little effort. 
 
CHAPTER XII. 
 
 (il) INFERENCE AS CONSCIOUS, OR EXPLICIT. 
 
 If you go out on the street after having worked 
 indoors all day and find the ground wet, you may 
 remark that it has been raining; for, the ground is 
 wet. Or you may say that the street sprinkler has 
 passed, for you see that the ground is wet only on 
 the street and not elsewhere. There will be rain 
 tomorrow, for the sun went down behind a bank of 
 cloud, or, it will be colder, for the red of the sunset 
 reaches far into the south. In all these cases you 
 make definite statements and connect them definitely 
 with other statements. You accept certain bodies of 
 fact as having connection in the nature of things with 
 other bodies of fact, and take it for granted that 
 anyone who might be present would be obliged to 
 share the experience with you. That is, the situa- 
 tions you describe are there as part of the nature of 
 things, your mind does not seem to be acting in any 
 creative way, and you would expect everybody to 
 experience the facts just as you do. This assumed 
 solidity of the world as we see it and move about in 
 it is then the basis of our communication with each 
 other, is what in fact makes the world for man a 
 social world. It is not, then, as social theorists some- 
 times assume, the fact that we have states of mind 
 and that the states of mind of one person are like 
 
130 THE LIFE OF MIND 
 
 those of another, that gives a common world. Whether 
 our mental states are alike in the way often assumed 
 is not and perhaps never will be proved; in fact, it 
 can be shown that no such likeness ever could be 
 demonstrated in any way. It is then the objective 
 or overt or communicable or common world that gives 
 us what community of spirit we possess, and it might 
 be worth saying for the benefit of the reformers that 
 if ever they attain a "fellowship of kindred minds" 
 it will be because the outward and material conditions 
 of life are ordered in such a way as not to put a 
 premium on discord and strife. But all we mean here 
 is that the relations of dependence which hold among 
 our thoughts have their ground in the facts of the 
 external world. 
 
 Then in cases of our explicit inference it is possible 
 
 to give characteristic and fixed forms of expression, 
 
 because they represent the formed order of our world. 
 
 \ And on this account we could expect language to 
 
 1 show certain forms and certain established relations 
 
 which are themselves just as much elements of fact in 
 
 i our world as things of wood and stone. Only, since 
 
 it is always possible for forms of thought to grow and 
 
 change, we will have to find the permanent aspects 
 
 of thought in the orderly changes through which they 
 
 pass in the process of development of ends in our life. 
 
 You can depend upon the sun to make his journey 
 
 through the heavens every day and the homeward 
 
 journey every night just as precisely as you can depend 
 
 upon a mountain to stay eternally where it is. And 
 
THE LIFE OF MIND 131 
 
 to know where rivers will flow is just as fundamental 
 in our life as to know where the everlasting hills are 
 always to be found; similarly, it is just as important 
 to find the active and changing and growing aspects 
 of thought as it is to know those hardened and 
 immovable forms which mark the ends of growth 
 movements. And it is these two characters in expe- 
 rience which make up the complex fact which we call 
 explicit inference; the fixed and permanent character 
 of our thought life which inference of any kind takes 
 for granted, and the active, free-moving mind itself 
 as the law of the growth of the whole. 
 
 We should now look at some of these different 
 aspects of inference in this higher form. In dealing 
 with inference we have spoken often of the act of 
 naming a complex of fact which appears in sense. 
 Now after the name has come to be familiar to our 
 thought we can connect it with the images we have 
 of objects even where there are no objects present to 
 our senses. And possibly it is true that sooner or 
 later the name becomes so detached from the sensa- 
 tion and images that we can use it as a thing by itself 
 which carries a meaning that does not require at every 
 point to be felt as a sensory fact or seen as an image 
 form. Then we have names which stand more or less 
 solidly alone, which we can use in thought without 
 the necessity of always finding illustrations. Some- 
 times we say that the form of the name becomes a 
 sign or symbol of the meaning, but this is probably 
 not true because a sign implies that in order to have 
 
132 THE LIFE OF MIND 
 
 I a meaning at all it must be possible to change it back 
 into the facts which it signifies. But an idea, or a 
 concept, and this is what we call a name thus detached 
 from its original images, has a meaning of its own to 
 some degree independently of the images. It is true 
 that its meaning will always include the images, but 
 it will also always be something more than the images, 
 and this something more is probably the order of 
 image-content as the order refers away from the image 
 in the opposite direction toward law. This point is 
 the most difficult in the science which deals with these 
 thought forms and processes, the science called logic, 
 and we will have to leave it at this point. However, 
 the names which become fixed in experience with 
 meanings independent of direct connections with 
 images are the solid forms which we find when we 
 break up the thought process into its parts. 
 
 But we will find also that these hardened names 
 or concepts fall themselves into certain arrangements 
 corresponding to the facts and events of life. Sup- 
 pose we think of a random list of such concepts, as 
 e. g., tree, warmth, tallness, man, day, etc. These 
 represent the more or less fixed classes of things as 
 they stand in our minds. But we are going about our 
 business and the vigorous exercise of the work we are 
 doing brings out the perspiration on our brow. You 
 therefore feel or sense '"warm" and as the sensation 
 comes to your consciousness you remark, "It is a warm 
 day," or "The day is warm." But even if you only 
 exclaim "warm!" it is clear what has happened. A 
 
THE LIFE OF MIND 133 
 
 contact has formed in your mind between the fixed 
 form "warmth" as it stands in your experience and 
 the new sensation quality which forces its way into 
 attention. That is, the forms which stand there in 
 your organized experience naturally fall into arrange- 
 ments dictated by the sensations which arise from 
 the objects from the outside world. And if you are 
 not deliberately "thinking" the arrangements will 
 either follow the leads furnished by the things that 
 are before your eyes, or they will follow the orders 
 and arrangements that have been left in your mind by 
 previous sensation experiences, pretty much as the 
 balls on the billiard table will take the arrangement 
 given them by the last stroke. Then not only are 
 familiar name forms fixed more or less permanently 
 in our experience, but also the orders and arrange- 
 ments of the name-forms themselves become estab- 
 lished in such a way as to determine in some degree 
 the shape which a new experience is to take. 
 
 We have spoken in the main as if everything that 
 happens in the mind happens according to accident. 
 This is, however, not what is meant; although it would 
 be difficult to say what accident itself means. What 
 we have meant to do is to avoid the old popular idea 
 that a "will" sits over these facts and fixes their rela- 
 tionse for them. You doubtless speak as if you decide 
 what ideas you will have and just how you will arrange 
 them. And this is in a sense right. We have de- 
 scribed inference in terms of the dependence of ideas 
 upon each other, and have hinted at two or three 
 
134 THE LIFE OF MIND 
 
 ways in which these relations get established. Some 
 of them just mechanically follow the order in which 
 sensations happen to occur. Some others seem to 
 follow lines of relations already established among 
 the forms in the mind itself. And now we speak as 
 if "You" or "I" had charge of the process. This 
 matter is very difficult to state simply, but is also 
 very important. Now when we said that experiences 
 will follow the sensations as they come we did not 
 imply that the sensations would come in any hap- 
 hazard way, but it was rather implied that some sort 
 of arrangement would be in the sensations themselves, 
 just because of their correspondence with the quali- 
 ties of facts. And in the case of the forms fixed in 
 the mind by past experience, it seems that their very 
 fixity and permanence itself implies some degree of or- 
 der. And "you" would yourself, if you should take 
 charge of your mental states, want so to handle them 
 that you could give an explanation or at least a de- 
 scription afterwards. That is, in every case the fact 
 seems to be that accident has nothing to do with it, 
 nor does any irresponsible "you" have any great lot 
 to do with the order and system of experience. 
 
 What we have found, however, is that the order of 
 experience is subject to law. But we must go on for 
 a moment to show that there are two things which law 
 may mean. And we must not lose sight of the fact 
 that it is inference we are describing, and that our diffi- 
 culty comes from the very complex nature of inference 
 in its higher forms. Inference is precisely the function 
 
THE LIFE OF MIND L3S 
 
 through which order and organization get established 
 not only in the facts of mind, but also in the larger 
 world itself. We can not go into the detailed discus- 
 sion of this matter, but some understanding of the 
 question involved is necessary before psychology can 
 have much that is worth saying on a good many topics 
 that are properly psychological questions. When we 
 suggest that the concept of law means two things, we 
 imply that in so far as psychology undertakes to clas- 
 sify facts and to state the laws of their relations, it as- 
 sumes two different kinds of obligations. It may mean, 
 in the first place, merely that the relations that hold 
 among facts are those which mean that facts always 
 behave in the same ways, as e. g., fire will always 
 burn, water wet, and good pastures make fat sheep. 
 But, in the second place, it may mean that facts not 
 only take uniformly certain relations to each other, 
 but that when and after taking such relations the facts 
 thus related as wholes tend to establish a meaning in 
 some situation of fact that is not yet, it may be, or- 
 ganized at all. To put this matter simply, facts in 
 the first sense, where the law of their relations means 
 merely uniformity of behavior, have no real meanings, 
 have no suggestion to anything beyond themselves. 
 But in the second case, law means that the relations 
 of facts have a reference beyond the facts to situations 
 involving the same facts as ends. 
 
 It was noticed above that one of the cases in which 
 inference becomes explicit or fully stated so as to be 
 communicable, is the case of judgment. Here simple 
 
] 56 THE LIFE OF MIND 
 
 experiences get welded together into new and meaning- 
 ful forms. These judgments, or if we reserve the word 
 judgment to stand for the act of thought, and call the 
 expression of the thought in words the proposition, 
 these propositions also unite to form still more com- 
 plex forms. We tend to sum up our experiences in the 
 form of judgments and make these summary judg- 
 ments in a form which refers not to a particular fact 
 now before our eyes, but to all facts of a given kind. 
 For instance, we have observed that last year the pas- 
 tures w r ere good and that the sheep were fat. The year 
 before the pastures were not good and the sheep were 
 poor. Then we go back in memory (rather such facts 
 get stored in popular speech forms) to all the years 
 we can remember in which the pastures were good, and 
 we recall that the sheep were also fat. Then we shorten 
 the expression and say, "Good pastures make fat 
 sheep," and this becomes a summary of our experience 
 on the sheep question. But it also means more than 
 a mere sum of past experience; it implies that if I am 
 a farmer I can depend upon having fat sheep every 
 time the pastures are good, and that this will hold 
 good for me and everybody else in the future. Then 
 the proposition means that "In all cases where the 
 pastures are good the sheep will be fat." We have 
 reached this general truth as we say through induction. 
 But suppose I have not seen any sheep this year, but 
 know that tTiere have been plenty of rain and sun- 
 shine; then I can say, "Whenever the pastures are 
 good the sheep will be fat; the pastures are good this 
 
THE LIFE OF MIND 137 
 
 year, therefore this year we will have fat sheep/' This 
 truth we say we reach through deduction, that is, we 
 start from a general truth which we already know and 
 deduce or derive from it some statement about facts 
 as they are in this particular case. Inference then of 
 the explicit sort follows two types of method, and they 
 are called inductive inference and deductive inference. 
 
r< 
 
 CHAPTER XIII. 
 
 (Ill) INFERENCE AS SYNOPTIC, AND ORGANIZATION. 
 
 All these processes we have been describing have for 
 their purpose, we may repeat, that of showing the 
 ways in which the elements of experience go together 
 to form what appear to us as unified experiences. It 
 has been shown how the experience process begins in 
 perception, grows through memory in its various 
 stages, and then on into inference in all its intricate 
 and varying forms. It was shown that for mere pur- 
 poses of description we could analyze the process at 
 any point into original, or what appeared to be origi- 
 nal, elements, and to show precisely what this means 
 we analyzed the perceptual experience into its com- 
 ponent sensations. But then it was necessary to cau- 
 tion ourselves that these sensations were not complete 
 facts and could only be described as such largely be- 
 cause we had decided to analyze, but that when taken 
 as mere sensation facts they give us no insight into 
 the question of the nature of experience taken as a 
 whole, and in fact that there are many experiences 
 which simply are not understandable at all when we 
 try to break them up into sensations. It was the weak- 
 ness of this method of analyzing things all to pieces 
 which made us resort to the growth relations between 
 the facts of experience as furnishing the best method 
 of explaining them. And it seemed to be well enough 
 
THE LIFE OF MIXD 139 
 
 shown that the life process is one and continuous, 
 that what we call its higher stages are nothing more 
 or less than its lower stages grown into what they 
 mean. Thus a memory image is a grown-up percept; 
 when it reaches full maturity it is called a concept or 
 idea. When the same fact which we call a concept 
 makes relations with another concept or a percept, we 
 say it has grown out of its isolation and become a 
 whole involving an order of its parts in an end. It 
 is this latter fact, the tendency to the formation of 
 ordered wholes of experience, which we designate the 
 highest of the attentive processes as such, and call it 
 here by the name of Synoptic Inference. 
 
 It would have been equally possible to describe the 
 attentive process as imagination, and to have found 
 stages of imagination which would correspond to the 
 stages we marked as perception, memory, conception, 
 judgment, etc. And in a more advanced considera- 
 tion, one giving more emphasis to the intricacies of 
 detail and the refinements of distinction among con- 
 scious facts, it would have been quite in order. And 
 besides there would have been a very special reason 
 why such a procedure is absolutely necessary if 
 psychology is to make good its claim to be a descrip- 
 tion of experience and to fulfill its boast of being the 
 science of the mind. Until the life-process is described 
 in its character of image-forming creator, and all the 
 details of the various stages of the image-forming proc- 
 ess have been revealed, there can be no real knowledge 
 basis anywhere for many of the highest interests and 
 
140 THE LIFE OF MIND 
 
 purposes which make up the significance of human 
 life. There can be no organized knowledge of art, 
 however much leather and prunella there may be writ- 
 ■ten about art, until we have the life and habits of the 
 imagination pretty fully investigated within its natural 
 habitat. And it is the same with religion.' One is even 
 tempted to say that the reason that our industrial and 
 political life is so contemptibly crude and crass and 
 stupid and ugly is just because we have cultivated 
 everything, after a fashion, except the imagination. 
 How much more significant and clean these things 
 would be if we had a sense of humor as keenly sharp 
 as our sense for groceries. And if we could develop a 
 sense for beauty to the degree that we have developed 
 a thrill for jazz, our problems of immorality and 
 coarseness would largely disappear. But a sense of 
 beauty and a sense for humor can come only within a 
 mind educated to see things in their proper propor- 
 tions, and this sense of the appropriate come from a 
 development of the powers of synoptic inference. 
 
 But let us now try again to see what we mean by 
 the synoptic inference. The question is difficult 
 largely because all our language is adapted to the de- 
 scription of things taken by themselves for the most 
 part. Synoptic inference implies, on the contrary, 
 that the real meanings, the real situations that interest 
 us finally, and not those which tickle us for the mo- 
 ment, come to us only in so far as we look beyond the 
 petty details of life, whether the details be pleasing or 
 attractive or not, and can interpret our special experi- 
 
THE LIFE OF MIND 141 
 
 ences in terms of a great end which will include all 
 the worthy particulars. To illustrate. You desire, let 
 us say, to become a statesman or a "captain of indus- 
 try." But you know that you cannot become such a 
 person in a day or a week or a year, or at least you 
 should know that most failures in these large things 
 are due to the individual's desire to wake up some 
 morning and find himself famous. Then if it takes 
 time and courage, and it may be self-denial, all these 
 little wants and wishes must give way to the larger 
 end which you have embraced. But here is another 
 mistake which has come down to us through a long 
 tradition; it is the idea that if you want the one big 
 thing you must give up all the little things. On the 
 contrary, it must be made clear that the one big thing 
 that we desire is after all just the big thing that it is 
 because it is made up of all the little things. Conse- 
 quently we are not asked to give up anything that is at 
 all real, for it will be necessary in the constitution of 
 the end; but what we are required to do is to see the 
 little thing as a part of the whole, and to postpone the 
 accomplishing of it by itself until it and all the other 
 little goods are capable of being attained all at once 
 in the larger good. We are required thus to take the 
 synoptic view of the details of life. 
 
 This point is important although it is commonly 
 used merely for "moral exhortation." Human life is 
 growing ever more and more complex. Men's activi- 
 ties are tending to collect into greater and greater 
 bodies for the accomplishment of the ends of life. This 
 
142 THE LIFE OF MIND 
 
 is true everywhere, and in all departemnts of activity. 
 But nowhere is it so true and so important as in our 
 practical life in its immediate aspects as organized 
 in industry. Here what used to be done by a man 
 working alone and living in his own home, and done 
 as a whole by each man, now is done by a great group 
 of men, each doing only a small part and nothing as 
 a whole. For instance, shoes formerly were made by 
 the shoemaker in his own little shop, but now are 
 turned out by hundreds of men, each adding his little 
 bit to the process. The fact that nobody makes a 
 whole shoe, but one cuts the upper, another the sole, 
 another puts in the eyelets, etc., has had far-reaching 
 effects upon the ideas and purposes of men, and enters 
 largely into the determination of the make-up of their 
 minds. The fact that the production of anything re- 
 quires a large group of men working alongside of each 
 other, but not in any real co-operation, has brought 
 about a more or less complete reorganization of human 
 society, and is responsible for most of the imperfec- 
 tion and evil in modern life. The difficulty is that 
 these large groups of men do not work together, and 
 they are together in no sense except that they may all 
 be in the same factory. But even this is not the case, 
 for the man who makes the axle of an automobile may 
 live in one city, and the man that puts it into the ma- 
 chine may live in another. The men never see each 
 other, and where they do see each other it is often un- 
 der such conditions as make it impossible to get ac- 
 quainted. Many factories are so noisy that people 
 
THE LIFE OF MIND 143 
 
 cannot talk, and some jobs are so dangerous that if 
 the men talk they are likely to be mangled by the 
 machines they use. There is, therefore, no unity of 
 mind among the men. The difficulty is that nobody 
 sees the situation as a whole, nobody tries to make 
 the proper relations among the myriads of people who 
 work in such a place, and the work as a whole has no 
 meaning to anybody simply because it is broken up 
 into so many separate processes. 
 
 The future of ordered life, therefore, depends upon 
 the training of people who shall see that there must 
 be brought into such situations such a unity of pur- 
 pose as will enable each worker to see a meaning in 
 his work. The opportunity is then open to those who 
 will consent to pay the price of attaining a mind 
 which can take a synoptic view of such a situation. 
 How this is done we must describe later. But it 
 means that such "piece" work must give way to such 
 a reorganization as will bring men into unity with 
 each other instead of making them suspicious of each 
 other. The largest and most attractive field now open 
 to young men and women, a field which promises 
 everything which can rightly be desired, is the field of 
 industry and its need for intelligent reorganization. 
 But this of course carries a great responsibility, 
 namely that the person who undertakes it must know 
 the sorts of mind-relations that go to make up the in- 
 dustrial situation, and must know the kinds of unity 
 that can be attained in given types of mind. And 
 those who will be in possession of right principles here 
 
144 THE LIFE OF MIND 
 
 will be those who have a synoptic knowledge of human 
 nature such as is derived from a thorough study of 
 human nature. 
 
PART IV. 
 
 MIND AS ACTION. 
 
 CHAPTER XIV. 
 
 MIND AS VOLITION, OR WILL. 
 
 Up to this point we have been concerned mainly 
 with experience in so far as it is engaged in getting 
 acquaintance contacts with the external world, and in 
 organizing the objects of that world in accordance with 
 its plans. We noted that the attention experiences, 
 which we recognized as a class including several forms, 
 run all the way through all and every experience 
 which we ever have, consequently we do not have to 
 go on to another type of experience and leave the at- 
 tentive or knowing forms behind, but all the forms 
 we have so far described may be taken as present in 
 experiences of action also. We will have to take up in 
 its proper place the question of the further unity of 
 experience as a whole, and in that connection we shall 
 see that the process we described as growth is to be 
 found as the basic fact everywhere. 
 
 From the point of view of the popular mind, the life 
 of action, for this is the proper sphere of will, seems 
 simple enough. Perhaps the average person would 
 say that when you want to move your hand, your mind 
 just sets the muscles into operation and the movement 
 takes place. Nothing is required, therefore, excepl a 
 
146 THE LIFE OF MIND 
 
 mind which knows what it wants to do, a "will" which 
 is able to do what the mind wants done, and a body 
 as the instrument or tool through which the mind and 
 will work. But the simplest reflection will show that 
 the situation is not as simple as it seems. For, many 
 times you act before you know what you are doing, 
 and in many cases you act when you do not want to 
 act. You act sometimes when you are not even aware 
 of having acted even when the action is completed, 
 and if asked about it would deny it and be perfectly 
 honest in your denial. There are even times when we 
 know what we are doing, do not want to do it, yet go 
 right on and do it nevertheless. Many of the actions 
 of every day's life are done unconsciously, and it is 
 one of the purposes of culture to reduce as many of 
 the immediately necessary actions to mechanism as is 
 possible. You do not remember in what order you put 
 on the various articles of your clothing when you get 
 up in the morning, unless you happen to know that 
 you put them on in the same order every morning. 
 But in any case you are not aware of the actions at 
 the time. You perhaps do not know what you ate for 
 breakfast unless something unusual happened at the 
 time. And when we add to these kinds of actions all 
 the complicated and delicate movements involved in 
 some of our skills, as for instance in playing the piano 
 or in operating the typewriter, we are ready to ac- 
 knowledge that the life of action is not so simple as it 
 looks on first view. 
 
 Nor is it possible to overestimate the value of the 
 
THE LIFE OF MIND 147 
 
 'life of action in the syntheses of processes and per- 
 formances whereby the goods of life are created and 
 secured to us and to our posterity. It is through that 
 very great and commonplace field of action which we 
 call work that all the permanent values of life are 
 created and maintained. If we consider the many 
 changes which have been effected in our world by the 
 means of human work, the prospect is hardly con- 
 ceivable. Literally, mountains have been removed, 
 mighty rivers deflected from their courses, the interior 
 of the earth penetrated in many ways and for many 
 purposes, and there seems no part of the universe that 
 has not been compelled to yield its secret. And all this 
 when we consider merely the physical activities of 
 men. When we contemplate the vastness of the ac- 
 complishment of the mind in the realm of ideas, the 
 results are equally surprising. The sciences themselves 
 are an imposing monument to the work of mind; and 
 if we think of mind in some of its lighter, freer activi- 
 ties, there are the gayer forms of art and play and re- 
 ligion to grace the life of man. 
 
 Again, it is through the activity of the organism 
 that all the efforts of thought must seek to find ex- 
 pression, and there is no form of activity which does 
 not serve to build up in the external world some kind 
 of body which is to serve as the dwelling place of the 
 idea that creates it. It is in this way that action is 
 the means between the lifeless external world and the 
 pulsing inner life of mind. It is thus the executive proc- 
 cal forms in the external world is effected and made 
 
148 THE LIFE OF MIND 
 
 permanent. And it is equally the life of action which 
 furnishes us with many of our highest forms of pleas- 
 ure and enjoyment. Action with grace becomes art, 
 the play of the soul; and the dance and rhythmic mo- 
 tion will always be parts of the joy of assurance of 
 the integrity of our life and its world. But the deep 
 significance of action in the life of man needs no 
 elaborate argument. 
 
CHAPTER XV. 
 
 (i) VOLITION AS AUTOMATIC OR INSTINCTIVE. 
 
 Some of the activities which we described above as 
 not in our knowledge or under the control of the will 
 might have been instanced as automatic action, that is, 
 action that "causes itself" or takes place without any 
 reference to will. It is the kind of action we get from 
 purely physical forces, in the relations of physical ob- 
 jects, and perhaps oftenest refers to the tendency of 
 matter to recover its form when it has been disturbed, 
 as when a bent stick will become straight again when 
 the force is removed. We may distinguish three kinds 
 of automatic action, and they will be different in many 
 ways. They will all be alike, however, in that none 
 of them will imply movement in any part which was 
 set a-going by forces outside of the immediate system 
 to which the part belongs. Thus we may distinguish 
 (1) tropisms, or movements described in their purely 
 physical aspects; (2) reflex, or movements that can be 
 definitely referred to a specific source within the sys- 
 tem of parts where it takes place; since this relation 
 can often be isolated and the point of origin named, 
 this type of action might expressively be called cir- 
 cular; and (3) habit, or movement without an origin 
 in a definite point, but within the complex of a pre- 
 viously established organization of parts. It is the 
 outstanding case of the executive effectiveness of the 
 
150 THE LIFE OF MIND 
 
 I;h i of order or organization. Wc shall take .up these 
 forms separately for discussion. 
 
 (1) Tropistic action is a purely physical fact, or at 
 best a fact of the body, and as a consequence we are 
 interested in it only in so far as it is intimately con- 
 nected with activities which are more directly our con- 
 cern. By saying that the activity called tropism is a 
 purely physical fact means that it is as widely sep- 
 arated from the facts of mind as it is possible for a 
 fact to be in this world. It would then be identical 
 with the movements of sticks and stones, and would 
 be the pure movement which we think of as caused 
 only by the application of external force. That is, 
 movement of an .object would be thought of as caused 
 by something outside of the object. As we said al- 
 ready, this kind of movement is of only incidental in- 
 terest to us. But when we speak of tropisms as bio- 
 logical or physiological we raise a great number of 
 difficulties as well as find some interesting hints at a 
 possible explanation of this as one of the simplest 
 forms of action. In this case action takes place within 
 living tissue instead of in dead and inert matter. 
 Somehow, then, we have to think of the activity as 
 having its cause or origin within the body which 
 moves. And a body which moves itself is a very great 
 problem when you undertake to think out all of what 
 it means. Almost inevitably we tend to think of the 
 moving body as in some mysterious way two and not 
 merely one. Movement becoming action is the hard- 
 est problem a theory of unity ever has to face, That 
 
THE LIFE OF MIND 151 
 
 is, we think of the body as a bit of pure matter and 
 then explain its activity as due to some mysterious 
 agency or potency which occupies the body as its 
 "soul." But when we reflect that we find these con- 
 ditions of activity in the very lowest and least forms 
 of life, in some forms so small as not to be visible to 
 the naked eye, and in other forms so objectionably re- 
 pulsive as to make us shrink from them in horror, we 
 hesitate to think of them as having anything in any 
 way appoaching a soul. 
 
 And yet in spite of any feeling we may have on the 
 matter of the "life" of the lowly organisms, we are 
 obliged to say that in so far as can be determined the 
 life which these lowly forms display is identical with 
 the life which energizes our own bodies. x\nd if we 
 are to connect the life process in our bodies with the 
 mind processes, then we have to meet the question as 
 to whether the small form may not also have a "mind." 
 But to come to the point which specially interests us, 
 these activities of small organisms are precisely simi- 
 lar, so far as we know, to the activities of the cells of 
 our bodies. We must think of the body then as com- 
 posed of a vast number of small particles of matter 
 which have their own appropriate forms of activity. 
 Further, we must think of all these millions of cells, 
 each infused in some way with its own life, as work- 
 ing together for the accomplishment of ends which the 
 cells could not accomplish for themselves. That is, 
 the tissue particles, together with their life functions, 
 are organized; that is, they are disposed with such 
 
152 THE LIFE OF MIND 
 
 reference to each other that their separate activities 
 combine to produce an end or result for the whole. 
 It is this character of organization which distinguishes 
 the higher forms from those effected by tropisms. The 
 tropism differs from the ordinary instance of force in 
 that its combinations produce actions with reference 
 to ends, whereas the addition of instances of force will 
 never produce anything but a greater force — no new 
 quality of the life of the world will ever be explained 
 by combining forces. Tropistic actions are not there- 
 fore mere forces, but agencies of the peculiar power of 
 order which manipulates their life with reference to 
 the whole. And in the last analysis, all the higher 
 forms of activity, however ethereal or noble they may 
 be, must trust to the tropism to get themselves ex- 
 pressed in outward or material form. We see then 
 the peculiar quality of the tropism in its capacity to 
 reproduce itself in enlarged and multiplied forms in 
 beings which express its own nature. You can make 
 a living form out of living forms only; dead forms 
 may be reproduced in other and different kinds; life 
 alone is true to its kind. 
 
CHAPTER XVI. 
 
 (il) VOLITION AS TRAINED INSTINCT, OR REFLEX. 
 
 Above it was said that elementary tropisms repro- 
 duce themselves in organization. We are now to take 
 up one of the simplest forms of organized tropistic 
 body-order and show just what the organization means 
 in the complex life of the whole. It was noted that 
 the life of the element reproduces itself within its kind, 
 though with all the infinite degrees and types of dif- 
 ference, whereas with dead forms the differences are 
 external and differences of kind. Tropistic reproduc- 
 tion then is confined to degree forms, and the divisions 
 marked by degree lines are properly called differentia- 
 tions. Then in accordance with the law of degrees, 
 tropistic forms may reproduce indefinitely and yet 
 maintain a solid interconnection of parts within a sys- 
 tem, which system will represent the life of the whole. 
 We have therefore in this the condition of the work- 
 ing together of many of the elementary activities, and 
 we may expect from this long lines of activity which 
 purport an end in which the activity precipitates it- 
 self. These complex lines of action we call reflexes. 
 Aside from the theoretical interest, tropisms have only 
 the interest that comes from the fact that they help to 
 explain the structure of the reflex. But when we come 
 to discuss the movements of the organism, we shall 
 find that they are relatively simple. The importance 
 
154 THE LIFE OF MIND 
 
 of the tropisms, however, in the elementary processes 
 of digestion, nutrition, etc., leaves much research 
 necessary in the field of medicine. 
 
 The reflex is most readily described by means of 
 examples, and perhaps everybody knows in general 
 what is meant by "reflex action." You know that 
 when you touch a hot stove you jerk your hand away 
 before you have time even to think of what you are 
 doing. And if you will reflect a little you will see 
 how many of such activities there are in the ordinary 
 processes of the day's work. You wink your eyes, 
 chew your food, walk, whistle, and perform most of 
 the ordinary functions without knowing it, in fact 
 while your "knowing machine 1 ' is busy with something 
 else. You can think hard and seriously on a difficult 
 or absorbing topic while you perform accurately many 
 of the most delicate movements. When you walk 
 along the street you pay no attention as to where you 
 are going to step and may be deeply concerned in con- 
 versation with a friend or lost in your own thought. 
 Yet if you approach a cross street or meet a group of 
 people you will at once begin to "watch your step. 1 ' 
 Similarly, when you are absorbed in reading an inter- 
 esting book you will put out your hand to take up 
 your pipe or to frisk a fly off your ear without missing 
 the connection of your reading. All these movements 
 and many thousand more make up what we call our 
 reflex or routine life of every day. 
 
 We arc not concerned, however, to describe these 
 activities in detail and not interested in them at .ill 
 
THE LIFE OF MIND 155 
 
 merely as movements. We want to know how they 
 are effected through the organism, and just what they 
 have to do with the mind. Ordinarily one would be 
 held responsible for the consequences of such activi- 
 ties when their exercise involved injury, hence the 
 mind is naturally taken as having something to do 
 with their control even though they are performed un- 
 consciously. It is therefore necessary to see in some 
 detail how such activities are brought about. For 
 this purpose it is convenient to make some reference 
 to the structure of the organism. We know in a gen- 
 eral way the relations of the muscles, or, taking them 
 as a whole, the muscular system, to the system of 
 bones which gives strength and solidity to the body. 
 Action in any case is due to the muscles pulling on 
 the bones to which they arc tied by tendons or "lead- 
 ers." The direction the movement is to follow is de- 
 termined by the joint connections and by the number 
 of pulls given from different muscles pulling at the 
 same time. But what makes a muscle pull, anyway? 
 We say that an impulse, by which we ordinarily mean 
 some kind of energy or force, is sent from the brain 
 to the muscle, and that when it strikes the muscle the 
 latter contracts. Now the mind is supposed to have 
 connection in a peculiar way with these impulses 
 which the brain sends out to the muscular system. 
 What kind of connection that is we do not know, nor 
 do we need to inquire at present; it is supposed that 
 in this relation between the brain and the muscular 
 system, consciousness somehow intervenes. But con- 
 
156 THE LIFE OF MIND 
 
 sciousness does not always intervene, is not always 
 present when the brain sends its impulses out over the 
 body through the nerves. In those cases where action 
 takes place without the intervention of consciousness, 
 especially if the case is more or less complex, there is 
 the perfect type of the circular activity called reflex. 
 In these cases the stimulus arises from the contact of 
 the sense organ with the external world, as between 
 my finger and the stove. The stimulus passes along 
 a nerve until it reaches the brain, where it is aug- 
 mented and directed out over the nerve which will 
 connect it with the appropriate muscle. When the im- 
 pulse strikes the muscle it contracts and draws the 
 bones and other structures after it. Now all these 
 processes may perhaps go on without the conscious- 
 ness having any knowledge of them. They are what 
 are called mechanical activities or, better, movements. 
 It is easy to see the very important part which these 
 activities play in our daily life. It is very useful to 
 you not to be obliged to think out the place to set 
 your foot when walking every time you take a step. 
 And if you had to decide which key of the typewriter 
 to strike next you would never be able to write very 
 well. If you have used a typewriter, you know that if 
 you stop to think how a word *s spelled, you will 
 likely misspell it, and this you do just because your 
 thinking about it interferes with the reflexes already 
 fully formed. We may say then that the purpose of 
 reflex activity in the life of the organism is to per- 
 form successfully our routine processes and leave the 
 
THE LIFE OF MIND 157 
 
 mind free to go about more important matters. And 
 it is one of the tasks of education to provide the in- 
 dividual with a set of activities which will leave him a 
 free mind. But perhaps it is to be said that the mind 
 never loses completely its connection with these activi- 
 ties, and that it in some unconscious way still keeps 
 some measure of control over them. Only on a basis 
 of some such supposition can we find any explanation 
 for many common experiences. While everything is 
 going well, you are, for example, not aware of the 
 keys of the typewriter as you strike them, but once 
 you have struck the wrong hey you are aware of hav- 
 ing made a mistake. You are not conscious of these 
 processes while they are going on, but after they have 
 happened you are conscious of their having been in- 
 correctly executed. This fact would be hard to ex- 
 plain if we should take it for granted that the mind 
 had nothing to do with them while they were hap- 
 pening. It would be hard to see how the mind could 
 know they had happened even while it did not know 
 them while happening. Such cases may involve more 
 than mere reflex activities, but reflexes are a very im- 
 portant part of such situations. In any case it is not 
 difficult to see that reflex activities make up a large 
 part of the life of the organism, and that under cer- 
 tain circumstances they become parts of the life of 
 the mind. 
 
CHAPTER XVII. 
 
 (Ill) VOLITION AS LEARNED REACTION, OR HABIT. 
 
 There is another large class of activities which in- 
 volve the question of how far and to what extent and 
 in what sense the mind has control over them. These 
 are the complex systems of organized movements com- 
 monly called habits. It is perhaps true to say that 
 habits do not differ in essentials from reflexes, and the 
 important differences have to do with the degree of 
 complexity of movement involved, and with the pre- 
 cise relations which the two types of activity bear to 
 mind considered as the instrument of control. It is a 
 familiar fact that we regard ourselves as responsible 
 for our habits, especially for our "bad" ones, and yet 
 we know that in perhaps most cases habit has already 
 led us to act before "will" has made up the mind. This 
 seems to mean that there are elements both of me- 
 chanical or reflex action and of free or chosen activity, 
 and the double nature of habit is likely what gives it 
 both its very great importance and its unusual inter- 
 est. For neither its importance nor its strong appeal 
 to the imagination can very well be questioned. 
 
 From the point of view of its kinship with reflex 
 action, habit is then primarily a question of complex- 
 ity. Instead of a single simple action or movement 
 within a comparatively simple set of organic parts, a 
 habit represents a number, often a very great number. 
 
THE LIFE OF MIND 159 
 
 of movements connected with each other through a 
 larger set of organic parts. A simple reflex may in- 
 volve a single sensation as the point where it begins, 
 a single nerve line to connect the sense organ with a 
 nerve center, another nerve line to connect the center 
 with the proper muscle, the result being the simplest 
 possible arrangement of structures through which a re- 
 flex can be effected; at least this is the minimum re- 
 quirement from the point of view of theory. Thus if 
 I put my finger on a hot object, a single muscle may 
 contract to draw it away from the disturbing object. 
 But in the case of habit there are usually many move- 
 ments involved, and these may come one after an- 
 other so that the whole habit will take up a consider- 
 able time. I have a long string of movements con- 
 nected with each other in the process of writing on 
 the typewriter, and the whole string will reel itself 
 off the moment the first one takes place. If we regard 
 the first simple movement as a reflex, then we may 
 say that the first reflex serves as a stimulus for the 
 next movement, this last again to the next move- 
 ment, and so on until the whole set gets expressed 
 in a completed activity like that involved in writing 
 a complete sentence. A habit is then made up of a 
 group of reflexes so connected as to work out a com- 
 plex purpose. 
 
 Hut perhaps a more important matter is the differ- 
 ent ways in which habit and reflex are related to con- 
 sciousness. It can perhaps be said that a reflex has 
 no definable relation to consciousness, that it is its 
 
160 THE LIFE OF MIND 
 
 peculiar nature to be automatic. But this only means 
 that they are not set a-going by consciousness. It 
 does not mean, since it would not be true, that con- 
 sciousness, or, preferably, mind, is not involved in any 
 way, for in the case of many reflexes we are conscious 
 of them immediately after they have happened. I do 
 not "will" to bat my eyes, the moveVnent of the eyelids 
 does not follow because I have decided to move them, 
 although I am aware, or may be, of the movement at 
 once after it has taken place. The eyelids close when 
 something approaches which might injure the eyes, or 
 when the surface of the eyeball tends to become dry, 
 and the approaching object or the dry condition of 
 the surface is all that is needed to bring about the 
 movement. But after the movement has taken place 
 I am, or may be, conscious of it because the movement 
 of the lids has given rise to other sensations which re- 
 sult in consciousness. And it may be that the feeling 
 which comes at any time from all the sensory tracts 
 which are stimulated at that time is itself just what 
 we mean by consciousness, although there are many 
 reasons for believing that consciousness is vastly more 
 complex than this, and that it contains other than 
 sensory elements. But the sensations and feelings 
 that come from our moving members are very impor- 
 tant and perhaps constitute what we feel to be the di- 
 rect experience of "will." 
 
 Another striking feature of habit is the fact that, 
 as an organized system of reflexes, a given habit tends 
 to persist indefinitely in the life of the organism so 
 
THE LIFE OE MINI) L61 
 
 long as it is used as the expression of some purpose. 
 This tendency to "stick" is what we think of first 
 whenever habit is mentioned. Since these organized 
 groups of reflexes do tend to persist, the whole sum of 
 them tends to make up and control all the movements 
 which the individual's life represents. This suggests 
 another trait of habit, that which we think of as tend- 
 ing to determine the individual's action in a given case, 
 as if habit were some peculiar and mystical agency 
 which decides whether a proposed action may or may 
 not get expression. That is, we think of habit as it- 
 self active, as if habit were something more than just 
 the organized movements of one's life. But it is after 
 all an insight into a very important truth — namely, the 
 truth that after a large body of movements become 
 organized into a more or less fixed system, they do 
 determine the form and direction of any new move- 
 ment which may offer itself for execution. So many 
 typical paths are laid down in previous oft-repeated 
 movements that most any movement that may be sug- 
 gested will find its direction and the object in which 
 it will end already determined for it. This means, of 
 course, that sooner or later one's character gets "set" 
 so that his actions can be predicted with a reasonable 
 degree of certainty — not, however, because they are 
 "determined," but because they are prepared in ad- 
 vance in the previous organization of habitual move- 
 ments. I say organization in and of habitual move- 
 ments, not structures; it is nonsense to speak as if 
 only sensible objects were amenable to organization, 
 
162 THE LIFE OF MIND 
 
 even to organization that is "fixed." The propulsive 
 character of habit is simply a case of the general fact 
 that organization assumes an executive capacity 
 merely and solely by virtue of its organization, or the 
 fact that order becomes dynamic and creative in pro- 
 portion to its degree of completeness, completeness 
 of organization referring both to the degree of mutual- 
 ity of reference of internal parts and to the adequacy 
 of connections with other objects through external re- 
 lations. This executive trait in the life of mind cannot 
 be fully described in mere terms of habits and move- 
 ments in the organism. It involves a full discussion 
 of the nature of ideas as they appear in the higher 
 processes of reason, and as they appear under the in- 
 fluence of the higher forms of feeling experience which 
 we call emotion. Higher in this sense refers of course 
 to the completeness of organization as just now de- 
 fined. Will in the strict sense as the executive power, 
 and its relations to movements and to the objects of 
 a world, can get adequate discussion only after reason 
 and emotion have been fully understood. But then in 
 that case the ''mystery" with which will is surrounded 
 in the popular mind will have been dispelled, and will 
 itself will become an object toward which our impulses 
 to control may be profitably directed. 
 
 Habit is the essentially practical aspect of life, and 
 it is through the processes of habit formation that one 
 may hope to determine the character of his future. 
 Already enough of the nature and character of habit 
 has been disclosed, and it may be worth while to give 
 
THE LIFE OF MIND 163 
 
 in very brief form some of the rules which one may 
 adopt in order to build out completely his own or- 
 ganized life of habit. These rules can perhaps never 
 be better stated than they have been by Professor 
 James in his ''Psychology, Briefer Course", New York, 
 1905, pp. 145-150, which has become so universally 
 recognized that almost any one may have access to it 
 in a public library. We shall make here only brief 
 quotations, but we cannot do better than to refer the 
 reader to the entire passage as indicated above, and to 
 the book as a whole. 
 
 Professor James gives the first rule thus: ." ... in 
 the acquisition of a new habit, or the leaving off of an 
 old one, we must take care to launch ourselves witJi 
 as strong and decided an initiative as possible." 
 
 The second rule: ''Never suffer an exception to oc- 
 cur till the new habit is securely rooted in your life." 
 
 The third rule: "Sieze the very first possible op- 
 portunity to act on every resolution you make, and on 
 every emotional prompting you may experience in the 
 direction of the habits you aspire to gain" 
 
 As a final rule: "Keep the faculty of effort alive in 
 you by a little gratuitous exercise every day" 
 
 The short account of habit as given in the passages 
 referred to above in the "Psychology, Briefer Course", 
 pages 145-150, inclusive, should be read by every one 
 who is desirous of cultivating a power over his habits 
 in the formation for himself of a significant character, 
 and is worth more than tons of the literature which 
 comes out in every generation offering quick and pain- 
 
164 THE LIFE OF MIND 
 
 less and easy methods for the acquisition of habits and 
 the building up of character. It cannot be too strongly 
 insisted upon that the life of habit is relatively simple, 
 and that the methods of its formation lie already in 
 the capacities of the individual who has had a reason- 
 able home training and an intelligence of the order of 
 that implied in a common school education. 
 
PART V. 
 
 MIND AS OBJECTIVE — THE SYNTHESIS OF KNOWING 
 AND ACTION. 
 
 CHAPTER XVIII. 
 
 MIND AS IMAGINATION. 
 
 We have come in a number of connections to the 
 point where we seemed to be in the very presence of 
 the mystery of mind itself. Thus in describing the 
 processes of recognition and certain of the aspects of 
 perception, the peculiar nature of mind seemed to lie 
 not far distant; but yet it seemed to remain just be- 
 yond our grasp. And this will perhaps always be true; 
 for if the mind could grasp and report to us the inner 
 mysteries of the mind itself, still the act whereby the 
 mind grasped its own inner nature would itself become 
 the ultimate mystery. The reality of the mind ap- 
 pears therefore to be just beyond the reach of its own 
 powers of apprehension, and complete self-knowledge 
 seems therefore to be impossible so long as human 
 nature is constituted as it is at present. But this, we 
 shall find, is not necessarily true. Far greater things 
 than fundamental changes in human nature have hap- 
 pened in this world; even though the universal as- 
 sumption is that human nature cannot change except 
 by miracle and the intervention of extra-human pow- 
 ers; and, if we would be honest with ourselves and 
 
166 II Ii: LIFE OF MINI) 
 
 with the facts, we could see where many essential 
 changes have been effected in human nature itself. 
 
 What is really meant by reference to the mind as 
 mystery is the fact that our knowledge is not ordi- 
 narily and habitually of the mind, but is always of ex- 
 ternal objects. Even when we by psychological intro- 
 spection, or by looking directly into our own minds, 
 bring mental facts themselves into the focus of atten- 
 tion, these mental facts come there as external objects, 
 and are just as "outside" our mind as the veriest of 
 gate-posts or the dirtiest of brick-bats. Our knowl- 
 edge is therefore always of outside objects, and it 
 gives us insight into the nature of mind only as that 
 nature is disclosed within and among the relations of 
 the objects which make up the solid contents of life. 
 These objects are outside mind in the sense that they 
 form the structural frame of our practical experiences 
 and thus make up what we know as the world of 
 things. But they are outside mind in another and far 
 more important sense. If we must think of mind pri- 
 marily as the sum of these processes now at this in- 
 stant operating within me to give significance to my 
 relations to things, then certain kinds of things which 
 cannot be found within the ordinary scheme of things 
 of the practical life are outside that mind in the sense 
 thai definiteness and precision cannot be given to their 
 qualities, but they appear to the mind as the comple- 
 tion of certain aspects of the relations of things as 
 they now stand in my mind. Perhaps we can make 
 this clearer. As the things which make up my mind 
 
THE LIFE OF MIND 167 
 
 now seem never quite fixed and perfect in their forms 
 or order, but lack certain characters which my pur- 
 poses demand of them, certain objects persist in com- 
 ing in to fill up the gaps made by unfulfilled relations, 
 and they fill these gaps precisely because they do not 
 come with the definiteness of sense qualities. This is 
 not saying, of course, that they have no definiteness at 
 all, for organized definiteness of meaning is all that 
 can be found as the definition of an object. But what 
 we do mean is, that whereas the ordinary objects of 
 experience have their definiteness in sense qualities 
 as felt, there are objects of experience whose quali- 
 ties, although sensory in origin and meaning, are not 
 jtit, and are "there" without any implications of being 
 producible in the practical world as we now know it, 
 although some sort of reference to the practical world 
 is precisely what the object in all its forms means. 
 An object may therefore be an object outside the mind 
 even while all its qualities are strictly mental in na- 
 ture, and it is such precisely because it is now an ob- 
 ject which is concrete and real in every particular, but 
 which now lies in an environment which is not yet. 
 
 This of course sounds pretty much like nonsense, 
 and will be nonsense to the mind of any one who is 
 happy with the usual descriptions of the life of mind. 
 It is just of the nature of the mind to have in it ob- 
 jects whose characters include all the qualities of sense, 
 together with others which are not directly sensory in 
 origin and not sensory at all in meaning, while yet 
 those objects are not discoverable in the world of space 
 
168 THE LIFE OF MIND 
 
 and time, and which are known while they are in the 
 mind not to be existent in space and time, but yet are 
 known as real and to which the present environment 
 or world in space and time must be made to conform. 
 The mind has therefore in it now not only the objects 
 which are actual or now realizable in practical experi- 
 ence, but also objects which are impossible from the 
 >oint of view of their realization in space and time, 
 md this is true not only in and for a sentimental the- 
 ory of "ideas", but in the most hard-headed matter-of- 
 fact descriptions of things as they are. Hence it is 
 true that things and relations which are inconsistent 
 and will not fit together in our world, do fit together 
 in the world which their inconsistencies in this world 
 require to be created, and since the latter world may 
 be created now, objects and relations exist actually 
 which are both consistent and inconsistent. This in- 
 consistency in our actual world we call time, which is 
 the expression of the necessity of holding ideas and 
 objects both consistent and contradictory as the basis 
 of our obligation to action in any present case. Thus 
 we say of time both that it is the symbol of the imper- 
 fection of our world, which is a root doctrine in all 
 religion, and that "time will tell", meaning that the 
 imperfection will disappear in its opposite and be 
 shown illusory at the same time that we know that 
 its actuality is the condition of the more perfect re- 
 ality which we attribute to it because of the necessi- 
 ties of action. That is, for practical purposes, and as 
 a condition of action, affectations of mind assume ma- 
 
THE LIFE OF MIND 169 
 
 tcriality and become the real in a purposed event ante- 
 cedently to its occurrence. 
 
 It is this function in the life of mind which explains 
 not only the meaning of the distinction between past 
 and future, but also the fact that we always refer both 
 past and future to the present. For it is clear from-r 
 what was said above that past and future are mere 
 aspects of the now of present experience. This ca- 
 pacity to throw your world together and center it 
 upon a particular point, to create objects where there 
 are none but where objects are required, to order your 
 world differently from the way in which it everlast- 
 ingly is ordered and to change orders which you know 
 to be fixed, seems then to be the very genius of the 
 mind itself, and we must see more clearly how it works. 
 
 That mind can make real objects where there are 
 none, can produce types of organization of objects 
 which only exist in the future, and can make these 
 real but unrealized objects and orders the determining 
 or controlling factors in, and the foundation for the 
 life of the present, is the mystery called imagination 
 
 As a general function of mind, as perhaps the very 
 essence of mind itself, which explains all other func- 
 tions as mere adaptations of itself, it appears in our 
 experience in a variety of forms which it is our busi- 
 ness now to describe in such detail as we may find 
 possible. 
 
CHAPTER XIX. 
 
 (i) IMAGINATION AS INSTINCT. 
 
 Perhaps the simplest form of the function of imagi- 
 nation is what we ordinarily call instinct. The com- 
 mon account of instinct will tell you that it is primar- 
 ily a tendency to act and feel in characteristic ways in 
 the presence of appropriate stimuli. To this point of 
 view we can have, of course, no particular objection, 
 since it represents perhaps the customary meaning of 
 the word at the same time that it is the authoritative 
 meaning. And these two forces, custom and authority, 
 do most of our thinking for us; it is therefore impor- 
 tant to recognize the fact that they are sometimes 
 right. Besides, the statement as given is perhaps true 
 in detail, and would have to be accepted by everybody 
 for all that it means. The only question is therefore 
 whether it means all it should, whether the elements 
 of feeling and action with the organic processes 
 through which they are mediated constitute all there 
 is to describe in connection with the facts in which in- 
 stinct manifests itself. The fact that we have spoken 
 of instinct as a form of imagination shows that, as we 
 see it, the term represents facts which are neither 
 feelings nor actions, but more closely allied to the 
 facts of those systems which we vaguely designate as 
 cognitive or knowing or sensory experiences. In any 
 case, any description of instincts that is more than a 
 
THE LIFE OF MIND 171 
 
 lesson in physics or "social psychology" must finally 
 undertake to interpret action and feeling to some ex- 
 tent in terms of mind, and the mussy results that fol- 
 low the attempt seem to indicate that a better pro- 
 cedure would presuppose as important a degree of 
 "consciousness" as an element in instinct at the start. 
 For it certainly is true that you can't get conscious- 
 ness out of what is purely organic and physical, any 
 more than and for the same reason that you cannot 
 get blood out of a turnip. Instincts do have some sort 
 of necessary relation to consciousness. Besides, the 
 term feeling in all accounts is ambiguous, since it does 
 or does not imply consciousness as the theory requires. 
 But first let us see how far the theory which inter- 
 prets instinct altogether in terms of action and feeling 
 can go. And we shall see that it goes a long way to- 
 ward marking the ordinary activities of animals un- 
 derstandable when considered as machines, or as a 
 system of moving parts that implies a fixed end. We 
 have explained the relatively simple activity called 
 reflex. We saw that all it implies is an irritable or 
 sensitive organic structure in contact with the outside 
 world, a connecting structure with attachment to the 
 central nervous tissue, a connective structure leading 
 from the central nervous tissue, and a structure 
 adapted to producing motion. We say that this is 
 "all" that a "simple" reflex means! But look at the 
 simplicity for a moment. In the first place, the "or- 
 ganic structure in connection with the outside world" 
 is already almost inconcievably complex, already im- 
 
172 THE LIFE OF MINI) 
 
 plies vastly more than any instinct theory does or can 
 explain, takes for granted facts that cannot be given 
 any meaning under mechanistic principles; takes for 
 granted so much in fact and principle that just why 
 these tissues should make just the contacts they do 
 make, or any contacts at all for that matter, is not, 
 and on the theory cannot be, explained. Why there 
 should sometimes exist the consciousness of "hard" 
 when my finger touches the table, and should not 
 exist when a pencil or a tomahawk touches the table, 
 can never be explained in terms of mere activity and 
 feeling. That is, there is a thousand times more as- 
 sumed in the nature and structure of a sense organ 
 than we know, and in fact what we assumed about the 
 structure of the sense organ would be ridiculous if it 
 did not also assume something more than structure and 
 activity. Again, assuming "conductivity" as a ca- 
 pacity of all matter, why should what is conducted by 
 a nerve fiber issue in a peculiar form of activity? And 
 how and why should central nervous tissue have ca- 
 pacities and functions not possessed by other struc- 
 tures? We can say, as we do say, that these peculiar 
 forms of activity are consequences of "specialized" 
 structures, but unless we watch such a mode of ex- 
 planation pretty closely it soon becomes at best a 
 mere myth and at worst a form of magic. In fact the 
 very important concept of adaptation as used in bi- 
 ology is merely a new and modern form of the very 
 ancient mental habit of explaining a fact by the as- 
 sumption of a fact appropriate and competent to pro- 
 
THE LIFE OF MIND 173 
 
 duce the first; and in education adaptation has come 
 to mean something worse than the mere "fitting" to- 
 gether of abstractions. One of the mysteries of imagi- 
 nation lies in the fact that "mind" seldom lacks an 
 explanation ready made for cases which threaten hard 
 work and careful thought. 
 
 The fact is, that instinct is not explicable in terms 
 of structures and activities at all. And we may as well 
 give up trying to deceive ourselves with such "simple" 
 matters. So far as structure and activity go, reflex 
 and automatism are all we can ever get; and this is 
 plainly far short of instinct. 
 
 Let us see, then, if instinct is a tendency to feel. Al- 
 though it is extremely difficult to make such an ex- 
 pression intelligible at all, the "tendency to feel" evi- 
 dently refers to the fact that pretty much the same 
 active manifestations will accompany the reflex and 
 fixed reactions wherever found. But if these active or 
 feeling manifestations are to be found only in definite 
 orders in connection with movements, then they are 
 simple reactions, that is, are movements themselves, 
 and the tendency to act and the tendency to feel are, 
 as is recognized by modern psychologists, quite the 
 same thing. The difficulty comes from the ambiguity 
 of the term "act," the psychologists assuming that 
 action and reaction are the same thing; but, as oc- 
 casion requires, giving logical and even ethical impli- 
 cations to action indiscriminately with its merely 
 physiological meaning. The commonest form of this 
 fallacy at present is the assumption that the "biologi- 
 
174 THE LIFE OF MINI) 
 
 cal" represents a degree-mean between the pure physi- 
 cal reaction and the real action, which is essentially a 
 logical and ethical, and not a mechanical, concept. 
 Consequently, after the life of the organism has been 
 completely explained in terms of structure and reac- 
 tion, assuming such to be possible, the life of real 
 action has been left quite untouched; and those com- 
 plex series of apparently unconscious activities which 
 plainly have as their end the enrichment of life after 
 its mere existence and subsistence and persistence have 
 been provided for in the structure of the world, remain 
 to be explained not by psychologists, but by those who 
 possess a knowledge of mind. 
 
 It seems clear that the attempt to explain instinct in 
 terms of structure and movement, especially when the 
 emphasis is so placed as to imply that complexity of 
 structure and movement has a constitutional implica- 
 tion, is on the right track. It is of course true that 
 the given structure of an organism, together with the 
 possibilities of movement which that structure impli- 
 cates, is the ground of the life activities which give the 
 organism and its form a place in a species. And it is 
 precisely the specific value of such structures and 
 movements, that is, the characters of the structures 
 and movements which constitute the organism a mem- 
 ber of a class or species, which makes the difference 
 between mere ordered structure and movement and the 
 organized life of the organism which can properly be 
 cilled its "instincts." It is then this specific value of 
 structure and movement which we have to explain if 
 
THE LIFE OF MIND 175 
 
 we arc to understand instinct. 
 
 But we have a good beginning already made in ac- 
 cepting the structure and movement of the organism 
 as the ground of instinct. And our problem is to show 
 how that structure and movement may be effective as 
 implying the life-order both of the organism as a liv- 
 ing unit and as a type-symbol representing the con- 
 tinuity of the species life. For it is peculiarly the 
 meaning of instinct to mediate the relation of particu- 
 lar to universal, of fact to law, and thus to provide in 
 the continuity of the life process, conditioned as it is 
 upon ultimate change, the character of permanence 
 which is taken as the guaranty of the real. Accepting, | 
 then, the reference of instinct to structure and move- 
 ment as the ground fact which is to "explain" instinct; 
 and accepting instinct as the tie which makes over the 
 ordinary tact-connection between structure and move- 
 ment on the one side, and life process on the other, 
 into a dynamic and growth relation between ordered 
 permanence and organizing change; our problem be- 
 comes, specifically, one of showing how such an ab- 
 stract logical account identifies with the facts as we 
 see them. Or, to put the question more simply still, 
 how do the ordinary mechanically conditioned facts! 
 of structure and movement transform themselves into 
 organism and function in the biological plane, and on 
 into body and mind in the sphere of the completely, 
 real ? 
 
 Our answer is that these transformations are, not 
 due to, but are, in the first instance instincts, and in 
 
176 THE LIFE OF MIND 
 
 their higher manifestations, again are, imagination. 
 But this implies that the two apparently widely dif- 
 ferent facts of imagination and instinct are essentially 
 one and the same, and that their apparently very great 
 differences are merely degree relations. The principle 
 upon which such conclusions will be made to rest is 
 simple, in spite of the fact that its illustration in cases 
 of fact is very difficult. It is simply this, that order 
 as such, in its peculiar degree-form as the real, is dyna- 
 mic or constitutional or creative. Since, however, the 
 term "creative" ordinarily contains many implications 
 of the irrational, and since our principle must ulti- 
 mately rest upon scientifically demonstrated fact, and 
 be thus purely rational, we shall here drop the use of 
 the term altogether. Then order as such, that is, by 
 virtue of the fact that it is the degree-form of the re- 
 ality, is constitutionally ordered forms, forms consti- 
 tuted in species by their executive or effective con- 
 tinuity. 
 
 Let us take simple cases in order to show what our 
 principle means. And we may begin with a case where 
 "instinct" does not yet appear. A block of ice floats 
 in a pail of water. The pail stands on a solid founda- 
 tion out of reach of the wind, so the relation between 
 the water and the ice is a mere continguity, and no 
 motion results so far as perception shows. But as- 
 sume that the mere shape of the ice, as varying the 
 surface of the contact with the water, results in a more 
 rapid congelation on one side than on any of the 
 others; then the ice-floe will turn in the direction of 
 
THE LIFE OF MIND 177 
 
 the more rapid congelation, that is, movement results. 
 To say that the movement of turning is a continuation 
 of the process of distribution of heat is a mere tautol- 
 ogy, and behind it is the bogey of the infinite process 
 of "conservation of energy," which makes the situation 
 irrational. Unless there can be pointed out, or at 
 least exists, a point beyond which a given circum- 
 scribed group of phenomena, for the instance in which 
 they occur, cannot be referred without involving the 
 infinite process, the situation is irrational. Thus in 
 the case of the ice and its motion, the facts cannot be 
 referred beyond the shape of the ice-floe, as that shape 
 will effect itself within the possibilities presented to it 
 by the characters of the water and other contiguous 
 solids. That is, on the ground of physical principle, 
 no force is required to explain the fact of turning be- 
 yond the idea of force or effectiveness implied in 
 molecular motions within the ice. But the assumption 
 of antecedent molecular movement as the explanation 
 of perceptible or molar movement is merely a case of 
 reference to infinite process, and explains nothing. 
 What must be seen is that no antecedent motion is 
 required to explain the movement of the object, and 
 that if the experience of objects is to be rational the 
 infinite process must be broken somewhere by the 
 interruption of the logically permanent. In the case I 
 mentioned the irrational process, as referring move- 
 ment to movement indefinitely, is broken by the shape 
 or form of the ice, and this shape or form, just by 
 virtue of the organization internal to it which makes 
 
178 THE LIFE OF MIND 
 
 it what it is, is the origin of the movement of turning. 
 Thus pure form becomes active agency, and as pure 
 idea may be regarded as will, since its internal or- 
 ganization gives it constitutional power of effecting 
 ends without reference to anything beyond itself, as it 
 acts upon its own constitutive elements as material. 
 
 This case, we have already remarked, is evolution- 
 ally "prior" to one involving instinct. But, even here, 
 we can see where and how the mere formal organiza- 
 tion of a fact gives it powers which are constitutional 
 to still higher degrees of order, and thus we can see 
 what is meant in the universal tendency to assume a 
 productive agency as the essence of cause, and the 
 character of reality which has made the concept of 
 creation persist throughout all history. When, how- 
 ever, we go on to other and more complicated cases, 
 the speei fie or type- fact which serves as the key to the 
 apprehension of the order which maintains the sys- 
 tem of fact as a permanent body is not readily dis- 
 tinguished among the great variety of detail, as was 
 the key-fact of shape in the case mentioned above, and 
 thus the identity of order as principle with a species 
 character is not always clearly demonstrable. Hut the 
 very structure of science assumes this "specific char- 
 acter" which is explicative of the continuity of life- 
 forms in species, and which is thus the logical ground 
 of the idea of universality as the condition of all ex- 
 planation. It is because of this that, in order that 
 thought may move at all, a rational ground in stability 
 musl be assumed somewhere; or, the fact that thought 
 
THE LIFE OF MIND 179 
 
 moves, is the sufficient reason for the assumption of 
 the origin oj effective productivity in the order which 
 is the condition of the movement of thought. 
 
 Then we may say that, even in the sphere of physi- 
 cal reality, a ground as order operates in advance of 
 the fact which becomes effective as the beginning of 
 new reality. It seems also that organization as real 
 process is just the identification of effective fact with 
 its appropriate end-ground, and where this reference 
 becomes obvious theoretically in fact-forms in which 
 we recognize the identification as growth, we have 
 passed from merely ordered to organized life, and prin- 
 ciples of biological explanation begin to apply. 
 
 But where biological principles apply, the ground 
 order of the relations among facts becomes effective 
 as functions both in the life of the individual organism 
 and the life of the species. The idea of function, how- 
 ever, implies a purpose objectified in the relations of 
 the facts through which the function is expressed, that 
 is, implies control and direction in the sense that the 
 ordered wholeness which the function is to accomplish 
 now operates in advance of its existence to direct the 
 movements of the facts which are to create it. The 
 life of the organism and the elaborate and compli- 
 cated sets of functions it performs would be unitel- 
 ligible in the absence of such an assumption, and it 
 is interesting that the mere logical demand of intel- 
 ligibility is being met by empirical science in this case 
 with the concepts of order and wholeness. It is not 
 perhaps unfortunate that for the scientist, or for many 
 
ISO THE LIFE OF MIND 
 
 of them at least, the concept of order is accepted as a 
 cause; for it will necessitate his demonstration of the 
 identity of cause with ground and thus make inevitable 
 the recognition of purpose as effective order as a scien- 
 tific concept. But the possibility of fact-orders being 
 effective in advance of and antecedently to their ex- 
 istence as fact, or in advance of their being the facts 
 that they will be, is precisely what is meant by pur- 
 pose, and the attribution to a fact-order of a character 
 by which the fact-order is now affected by the form 
 which now is only implicit in its order, but which ob- 
 jectifies in the order as the end-products of growth, 
 
 lis precisely what is meant by consciousness. That is 
 to say, a fact-order which is now both what it is and 
 what it will be, and in which both what it is and what 
 
 , it will be identify in what it means now, is the con- 
 sciousness which, functioning as anticipation or fore- 
 thought, is just the executive trait which maintains 
 (continuously ''creates" or recreates) the law of the 
 iact-order which is itself, just as, functioning retro- 
 spectively as history or afterthought, it sustains the 
 fact-order which is itself. Then it is not merely that 
 we have to say that instinct is conscious, but that in- 
 stinct is the consciousness; and while we shall have to 
 explain very considerable differences between con- 
 sciousness as instinct and its other forms, yet unless 
 we understand the instinctive movements of organisms 
 as consciousness, it will be impossible to show that the 
 organism, even the human, is anything more than a 
 machine. What has alwavs been the difficultv here 
 
THE LIFE OF MIND 181 
 
 is the assumption that consciousness is merely a mat- 
 ter of increasing complication, in which case conscious- 
 ness would have to begin with some ascertainable or 
 imaginable degree of complexity in fact; it has thus 
 been assumed that to explain consciousness an origin 
 must be found in what is not conscious; and this is 
 obviously contradictory. But it must be realized that 
 the increase in complexity and intricacy, to whatever 
 extent or to whatever degree of delicacy, still leaves 
 fact as complex and intricate so far without order, and 
 that on the contrary the very existence of complexity 
 and intricacy in fact presupposes order. Order is, 
 therefore, not derivable from complexity; the deriva- 
 tion, so far as derivation and origin mean anything, 
 is the other way around. Order is will; and will is 
 not an origin, but an original. 
 
 Then functions in organisms are not the stuff out 
 of which consciousness is made. When we say that 
 functions are conscious, what we really mean is the 
 very different proposition that consciousness is a sys- 
 tem of ordered, or better, organized, functions. Then 
 the primary and characteristic thing about instinct is 
 the ordered world of mind which its existence makes 
 inevitable for thought, and which thought must pre- 
 suppose in order to make instinct intelligible at all. 
 
 Only on such a point of view, it seems, can the fact 
 of instinct be understood. The fundamental instincts 
 (if we can properly use the term in the plural) all 
 have to do with the essentially logical process of con-' 
 tinuously identifying the individual with its species. 
 
182 THE LIFE OF MIND 
 
 the process of maintaining the balance and order of 
 life in the absence of which the idea of reality 'itself 
 is unthinkable. In biological terms these instincts all 
 fall into two or three more or less distinct classes. But 
 these all clearly represent the same anticipative and 
 executive tendencies to maintain the species as the 
 end-order of the life of individuals, and can properly 
 be explained as belonging to the individual only in the 
 sense that they are the point in the individual's con- 
 stitution at which continuity with the species is main- 
 tained. They are much more simply and significantly 
 regarded as universal functions of the species-order 
 operating retrospectively in the individual as the end 
 — the object of imagination working historically in the 
 present life of the individual to make the individual 
 conscious (anticipative) of its end, that is, to show 
 the end present there as the explanation and meaning 
 of life. It is then instinct as imagination that makes 
 possible the life of meanings; and the finality of the 
 values of the life of culture, in that it shows the de- 
 pendence of the life of values upon the maintenance 
 of the universal relation of the individual to the uni- 
 versal through instinct, shows conclusively that "in- 
 stincts" are essentially forms of mind, and that feeling 
 and movement have little to do with them and are en- 
 tirely inadequate to explain the very great significance 
 which instinct has in the life of mind. 
 
CHAPTER XX. 
 
 (il) IMAGINATION AS IMITATION. 
 
 It is this same universality of the end working con- 
 sciously as imagination in every individual that is re- 
 sponsible for the uniformity of individual forms in 
 species; that is, it is because every individual is in- 
 stinctively conscious of the same end and effectively 
 strives to attain it that makes it possible for science 
 to regard the individual as the repetitive unit. But 
 "conscious" here does not imply the clearness of the 
 rational processes, but symbolizes rather the sum of 
 those instinctive functions which give the organism a 
 structural and active unity. So much alike both in 
 external features and in the inward law of their na- 
 tures do they become in anticipating their common end 
 that for descriptive purposes their uniqueness may be 
 overlooked; and il is only when the scientific motive 
 is driven beyond the necessities of description and 
 classification that science is forced to recognize, as il 
 has had to do recently with the idea of ordered whole- 
 ness, that the real nature of things lies not in their 
 factual inevitableness as represented in the persistence 
 of their repetition, but rather in the uniformity of 
 their common imitation of the orderliness of their com 
 mon attempt to execute or accomplish the whole as 
 their law. Just as in the most elementary functional 
 form instinct as consciousness works automatically, SO 
 
184 THE LIFE OF MIXD 
 
 here instinct as automaticity works consciously-, and 
 the result of this is consciously ordered habit, just as 
 in the previous case consciousness becomes uniform in 
 automatism. 
 
 This means that imagination operates in the his- 
 toric capacity of copying a pattern. So far as con- 
 sciousness is the basis of imagination in this case, it 
 is exhausted in working the present data into conform- 
 ity with the end conceived as fixed. As fixed, the end 
 is to be eternally attained by repetition, and the con- 
 tinuity of life is a matter of continuous assimilation 
 of the factual to the legal. It is through this function 
 of the imagination that the world gets the character 
 of endless multiplicity in fact and of infinite process 
 in law. Thus the scientific interest, whose ground is 
 essentially the multiplication to infinity of items whose 
 reality is exhausted in mere conformity to an arbi- 
 trarily instituted pattern, comes to its final issue (it 
 never ends) in the concept of abstract process, the 
 apotheosis of abstract plurality. It is on this fact 
 that science mistakes its aim of reducing to determin- 
 ateness the aspect of quantity as a universal, and it 
 is because of this confusion of universality with all- 
 ness that science so often finds itself blocked by what 
 seems irrational fact. But without going further into 
 the metaphysics of the case, it is readily seen that one 
 of the characteristic forms in which imagination ex- 
 presses its executive and constitutive power is that in- 
 volved in portraying the infinity of extent and quan- 
 tity of our world, and thus laying the basis for the 
 
THE LIFE OF MIND 185 
 
 limitlessness of opportunity which is presented to the 
 practical individual. 
 
 We can now remark that whatever element of prin- 
 ciple seemed to be lacking in our discussion of habit 
 and the other facts of automatism in life is supplied 
 here in the notion of imagination (while essentially 
 still an active capacity) as seeking only to retain its 
 present by endless repetition. And if we recall that 
 imagination has been described throughout as the 
 capacity of and faculty for ends, we shall have to say 
 here that bare sustenance in a uniform status of the 
 life of mind is, under conceivable circumstances, it- 
 self an end. In fact the conformity of life as a whole 
 in its external and plural aspects with the unity and 
 uniformity of its inner life aspect is precisely what we 
 mean by the substantiality of life, is what gives to 
 life its obvious quality of permanence and provides 
 for the dependableness of the world which will wait 
 with the end in suspense while action is being com- 
 pleted. 
 
 It is this aspect of conscious dependableness and 
 firmness which is responsible not only for the confi- 
 dence with which science accepts an avowedly incom- 
 plete account of reality, but also for the faith which 
 makes long-continued action rational in the absence of 
 the ends which are necessary to make the action real. 
 It is upon this dependableness that we depend when 
 we adventure upon a plan, and when we determine 
 present action with respect to what is as yet unreal- 
 ized, we rest upon the character furnished to our world 
 
186 THE LIFE OF MIND 
 
 by the imagination which merely repeats. Imagina- 
 tion as imitation is then the ground and basis for the 
 more strictly creative aspects of the mind life. It is 
 strictly the field of science in so far as science rests 
 upon the elements of method which it now accepts, 
 and as the solid and uniform smooth plane of what is 
 reproducible without effort, it is the condition and 
 passive determinant of all significant accomplishment. 
 It represents all of what we may take for granted both 
 with reference to the ordinary course of thought and 
 to the usual requirements of action. 
 
 Having thus drawn the picture of the imitative 
 aspects of imagination in the bare theoretic outlines, 
 it may perhaps suffice to thoroughness if we give a few 
 illustrations. All that monotonously distressing lot of 
 processes which make up the content of what is called 
 industry is nothing more than a myriad of repetitious 
 movements designed (when they have any design) to 
 copy infinitely a fixed pattern. Industrial process re- 
 peats itself world without end, and the only call it 
 makes upon imagination is that involved in hewing to 
 the line of the pattern, and the nearest approach to 
 originality it makes is when it negatively fears any 
 tendency to variation from type. But the repetitive 
 motive reasserts itself quickly, and any such tendency 
 as may arise smothers under the volume of repetitious 
 sameness. The "operative 1 ' (industry knows no per- 
 sons) stands in the identical attitude through his eight 
 hours and apes the movement of his machine; over 
 and over he repeats the clew which the machine fur- 
 
THE LIFE OF MIND 187 
 
 nishes him; the machine grinds and his brain whirls, 
 and neither of them produces more than a fragment of 
 a real thing. Such is the deadly lifelessness of the 
 highly specialized piece-work process in which the 
 piece produced is for the producer a piece of — nothing. 
 But let us not dwell on this sad perversion of the life 
 of mind; if it were not for the quiet persistence of 
 some of the real aspects of the repetitive imagination 
 the life of the race would quickly die away. 
 
 Among the more significant of the provinces of 
 imagination as imitation are the various departments 
 of art. But before we misunderstand, let us be sure 
 to state that, while all art in the strict sense is mere 
 repetition, yet repetition is not all of art, and art is 
 an instance of a form of reality which is sustained in 
 the richness of meaning by what is not its essential 
 element. What the essential element of art is we must 
 see in another connection; here we must show that as 
 repetitive imagination its predominant character is not 
 its essential character. By this we mean that the 
 body or the stuff of art is the vague ponderosity of 
 feeling, and that this is essentially a matter of re- 
 peated sensitive sameness; while the essential char^ 
 acter of art is rationality, a feature which generally 
 does not appear in any aspect of its matter. 
 
 To show the importance of sameness and repetition 
 in art, one need only recall that in any field there are 
 but a few characteristic forms of beauty, and that 
 these are repeated to infinity by each successive school. 
 In sculpture the human form furnishes the feeling- 
 
L88 THE LIFE OF MIND 
 
 material almost exclusively, and nearly if not quite all 
 forms of modelling in solid material may be regarded 
 as supplementations of the feeling volume which the 
 human form represents. Thus the warrior stands with 
 sword in hand, the sword having the very important 
 function of giving point to the excess and vigor of his 
 pent-up courage — it is the instrument through which 
 the artist draws off the superfluous energy of the war- 
 rior and transfers it to the observer; and it localizes 
 the point around which the figure balances just as and 
 for the same reason that the temperance reformer will 
 make the spigot the center of a picture of a barrel of 
 rum. The emotional content-stuff pours forth from 
 the horn of plenty which the goddess carries, and the 
 flickering warmth which rises from the altar maiden's 
 torch gives center to the harmony which the figure as 
 a whole carries to profusion. Thus some unimportant 
 detail with the infinity of its possible variations gives 
 the artist the means through which the human form 
 may be made to express the illimitable boundlessness 
 of human feeling, and the more stable and harshly 
 | solid his material the more sharply can he give point 
 to the concreteness and immediacy of feeling. 
 
 It might appear to be carrying the point to the verge 
 of the ridiculous to argue that architecture is a modifi- 
 catory variation of the human form, but it might also 
 be the margin of ridiculousness which makes the ap- 
 proach to the sublime. What we are arguing — we 
 must not lose sight of it— is that all art is, from the 
 point of view of the extent to which its variations of 
 
THE LIFE OF MIND 189 
 
 form are determined by the qualities of its content, a 
 repetition of a few standard types. We may agree , 
 here that it is the variation that is important in the 
 specific art-object, but for art as a universal experi- 
 ence there are only a few type-forms. It does not re- 
 quire any monstrous stretch of imagination to see the 
 summer-girl who holds on her broad sun-bonnet 
 against the heat and wind, and the mountain hut and 
 the king's palace all as variations of the same experi- 
 ence-form; and the architectural style of churches and 
 public buildings differ from the summer-girl's hat es- 
 sentially only in the numerical repetition with modifi- 
 cations of certain protective feelings and the move- 
 ments into which these feelings are characteristically 
 precipitated. 
 
 It is thus easy to see that imagination in its repeti- 
 tive or imitative function represents large areas in the 
 life of mind. It would be easy to go on to show that, 
 with the human form, two or three (perhaps) char- 
 acteristic landscapes, a few types of composite sym- 
 metry like the mathematical shapes and placings, e. g., 
 the arrangement of lines, etc., and the color arrange- 
 ments, e. g., of flowers in groupings, etc., exhaust all 
 the possible art-subjects, i. e., all the possible types of 
 objects of art. And when we add to this fact the 
 psychological phenomenon of synaesthesia, the experi- 
 ence in which qualities from one sense field are in- 
 terpreted in another, these forms, which have all been 
 typical visual objects, can be illustrated equally well 
 in the tones and auditory harmonies, and with those 
 
190 THE LIFE OF MIND 
 
 lucky individuals who have a rich imagination of the 
 non-repetitive type, the visual forms may be repro- 
 duced in muscular strains, and most if not all of the 
 other sense forms. But this point belongs properly 
 to another aspect of imagination. 
 
 Then we may say that all imagination is char- 
 acteristically a repetition of a few essential real-forms; 
 but we go on to say that repetition is not all of imagi- 
 nation. It is clear that a very large part of the life of 
 mind is invested in the repetitious multiplication of a 
 few of its appropriate embodiments, and it is this 
 maintenance feature of experience which gives to the 
 life of mind its realized permanence and final worth. 
 
CHAPTER XXI. 
 
 (hi) imagination as complication. 
 
 We mentioned in the preceding chapter that one of 
 the pronounced features of imagination as repetition 
 was the variation which maintains a type-form as an 
 object of continued interest and worth, and we re- 
 marked that it is this variation in particularity of de- 
 tail which makes the universality of art the body 
 through which the continuity of life runs its eternal 
 course. This same variation in particularity has an- 
 other important aspect which we must now describe. 
 In our discussion of imagination up to this point we 
 have seen that mind is engaged primarily in the sus- 
 tenance and maintenance of life through the repro- 
 ductive perpetuation of life's elemental forms. Thus 
 we saw in the simple forms of instinct that mind as 
 imagination is busy with the active striving with the 
 universal to make the universal concretely obvious to 
 itself in a specific form. Over and over again does 
 the instinct strive to express the wholeness of life in a 
 single mould, so imperturbably does it urge the form 
 to take on the body of particularity in a completed 
 act. It is this longing love of the lingering fleshly 
 form that embodies itself in the warm passion of in- 
 dividuality; and it is thus as imagination that mind 
 peoples the world with interest-forms as the full con- 
 sciousness which is to come later. Thus the everlast- 
 
192 THE LIFE OF MIND 
 
 ing attempt of life to attain fulness and still to retain 
 the empty hunger for abundance leads it to try a new- 
 curve or a new color on the old pattern, and to change 
 and make over the outer vestment as the urge of life 
 grows within. Let us see how these experiments or 
 adventures of life bring to its reality ever new and 
 higher products of its genius. 
 
 The expression of imagination through complication 
 is, precisely, the field of invention. But we ought to 
 observe at once that, in the life of the mind, invention 
 is not the highest form of activity, is never quite the 
 full and free risk of destiny which stands face to face 
 with reality in adventure. The inventive imagination 
 builds on the basis of the elements of novelty, which 
 have their origin in the instinctive and imitative life, 
 and the process of complication is quite simply de- 
 scribed as the bringing together of the solid elements 
 of life about their characters of variation. As the 
 characters of variation are still fluid and not quite 
 hardened to full formfulness, the groupings which rest 
 upon them are unstable, and the life which they em- 
 body is precarious and uncertain. This fact is the ex- 
 planation of two important phases of human life just 
 at the present time; the inventive imagination has left 
 on our hands a world of objective instruments not yet 
 appropriated to the life-values they were intended to 
 embody; and it leaves the moral conviction of man- 
 kind groping in uncertainty and wavering doubt as to 
 the objective end in which a life of values can be made 
 consistent with and confluent in an embodiment of 
 
THE LIFE OF MIND 193 
 
 permanent form. 
 
 The complication motive leads in science to the 
 attempted approach to the real through classification. 
 Science builds on a basis of the variants from uni- 
 formity the concpetion of a quantitative and aggrega- 
 tive conformity to an abstract and empty type. This 
 type is, for the scientist, deliberately empty, and its 
 use is conditioned upon the conscious recognition 
 that it is an unreal makeshift. Only the variants are 
 real for science, and their classes are mere products 
 of the "scientific imagination," trumped up simply as 
 a symbol to represent the multiplicity of the variants. 
 But the criticism of this sort of thing is logic, and, 
 particularly as it appears to the scientific mind that 
 logic is itself a mere manipulation of classes, neither 
 it nor psychology could qualify as aspects of the life 
 of mind. We therefore drop that aspect of the matter 
 here with the remark that for science life is a matter 
 of shifting empty species in ever new ways and 
 attempting to shake out of them the concrete forms 
 which make up life's substance, and the practical life 
 which boasts a "scientific" foundation is one vast dis- 
 play of sham and humbug and buncombe. 
 
 It is thus that imagination as invention is charac- 
 teristic of an individualistic and materialistic age. It 
 is not an accident that the individualistic age of busi- 
 ness has been rich in inventions of an instrumental 
 sort. It is also not an accident that the same period 
 has no new art-forms, no new realizations of the moral 
 significance of living, has forged out of the heat of 
 
194 THE LIFE OF MIND 
 
 religious faith no new models of the life of the spirit, 
 no new visions of the color-form of the End. It is 
 therefore necessary to find illustrations of this form 
 of imagination among the sordid, uncouth smudginess 
 of such life-relations as are conditioned upon machin- 
 ery. It is here, in machinery, that complication is at 
 its best, and the perversion of imagination at its worst. 
 For our purposes any highly complicated machine will 
 serve, and the printing press will do as well as any. 
 What we are interested in, of course, is the processes 
 of mind-life which created the printing press as their 
 embodiment, and the effects which it and its use have 
 by way of reaction upon the mind life of the user 
 and the inventor. The printing press grew out of the 
 repetitive necessity of the activities made necessary 
 in human relations by the demand for communication. 
 Since these processes are by nature incomplete, and 
 cannot be completed — if they were completed they 
 would be some form of art— they tend to repeat them- 
 selves infinitely and indefinitely; and in order to 
 relieve the monotony to mind of the process as for- 
 ever repeated, the repetition of the process becomes 
 precipitated in a part of the machine. To the press 
 is added therefore indefinitely part after part, the 
 multiplication of parts making necessary the modifi- 
 cation of them only to the extent that they be pre- 
 vented from coming in each other's way, and this 
 merely negative restriction as to form of parts results 
 in the shambling, sprawling grotesqueness of the 
 whole. The use of the imagination in its production 
 
THE LIFE OF MIND 195 
 
 is not free, but is bound by the necessity of throwing 
 together a number of processes — each of which taken 
 by itself a possible element of grace — with no more 
 real possibility of order than that dictated by speed. 
 The press is not therefore, and never can be, a whole, 
 for it is tied by its purpose and function upon the 
 rock of process repetition. The speed involved is 
 consequently the endless time-measure of a rate, the 
 attempted synthesis into wholeness of the mere splatter 
 of parts, and it does not ever approach the wholeness 
 which is always just beyond its Tantalus reach — the 
 whole-grace of motion. The wholeness of grace in 
 motion comes nearest perhaps being realized in the 
 pure continuity of the outreaching, striving desire of 
 the locomotive when you do not see its wheels and 
 piston arms as the specific moments of the continuity; 
 and would be more fully realized in the automobile 
 if its breath-moments were not so crudely covered up 
 with the sham of abstract extensity of sheet iron and 
 paint. The automobile hides too much, is too de- 
 ceptive and untrue to be beautiful in grace, either of 
 form or motion. For behind its pretense is the naked, 
 ambling sprawl of the reel of the modern harvester, 
 or the rickety falling-to-pieces of the winding blades 
 of the old-fashioned weaver. 
 
 The attempt of the inventive imagination to over- 
 come the jerk of repetitive multiplicity which results 
 in the deceptiveness of the printing press or the auto- 
 mobile, the guards and fenders of which give them 
 both dead away in spite of the pretense of protect ion 
 
196 THE LIFE OF MIXI) 
 
 to life which we falsely construct for them, is per- 
 haps best illustrated in the aeroplane. But in this 
 case a slight element of deception also enters — a de- 
 ception which, however, is not false, since it does not 
 attempt so much to hide the truth as to draw atten- 
 tion from the bareness of mere truth. But the evasion 
 of the truth, when the truth is dirty or misshapen, is 
 just the impulse toward the end which characterizes 
 creativeness, and thus itself becomes the prior con- 
 dition of there being a truth at all. It is then the 
 fact that the aeroplane aspires to come to end in the 
 perfect grace of motion, even though its attempt is 
 mediated by the obscurity of distance, and allures 
 away from the pettiness by which each degree-height 
 is attained, by covering its engines and wheels and 
 stays by the misty spread of its formless wings, — it 
 is because the ship rises above the recognition of its 
 own parts that it arrives at the throne of grace in the 
 heaven of beauty. B.ut both the locomotive and the 
 aeroplane attain the fixity of grace congealed in motion 
 through the obscurity with which distance covers their 
 invented multiplicity with the mantle of wholeness, 
 just as the painter hides the detail of a landscape 
 under the formlessness of pure color in a perfected 
 form. 
 
 But the technique which shall impose wholeness 
 upon the complex instruments of modern practical 
 activity has not yet been completed — indeed has 
 hardly yet begun to be recognizable. This means that 
 the imagination which works through complication 
 
THE LIFE OF MIND 197 
 
 has not yet found its balance with the artistic impulse, 
 has not yet found the secret of unity of use with 
 value as the harmony of means with end that imagina- 
 tion as instinct and imitation has effected in the art 
 forms of the objects of utility of a previous age. The 
 simple water-pot or vase or loom which represents the 
 complete harmony of use and end in a life adequate 
 to the individual human being has as yet no counter- 
 part in the complicated instruments of life as em- 
 bodied in human corporate wholes. The printing press 
 or locomotive represents the life-motives of no man; 
 its organization represents the successive and piece- 
 meal addition of the fragmentary motives of a social 
 body not yet reduced to wholeness in fact. Such a 
 structure lacks therefore the unity that comes from 
 a purpose seen and felt in its fulness in advance of its 
 objective expression; it represents the disunity of a 
 life not yet made concentric with its end through 
 imaginative prevision — a life whose unity is not made 
 complete in imagination. Can the imagination which 
 complicates ever attain a life that is whole? It is the 
 condition of harmony and peace in the world. 
 
CHAPTER XXII. 
 
 (IV) IMAGINATION AS SPECULATION, OR ADVENTURE. 
 
 We have seen in the previous paragraph that the 
 endless piling together of fragmentary parts by com- 
 plication never produces anything that is obviously 
 and compellingly whole. While there does appear 
 to be a certain vague wholeness of feeling represented 
 in a complicated machine, yet the feeling can be 
 traced to other motives than that which represents 
 the truth and integrity of a whole object of experi- 
 ence. There is a thrill of vastness that comes from 
 watching the monstrous power of the engine as it 
 heaves its ponderous weight up a stiff grade, but it is 
 not anticipatable. You can't feel it fully in the 
 absence of the actual engine, so it will always bear 
 the marks of its unfinishedness and can never appear 
 as the ended whole of a completed experience. The 
 engine is consequently not an object of art, it is not 
 a balanced end of action and, therefore, is not right; 
 it is not as a whole consistent with the effort and 
 meaning of its parts, is not, that is, true; it is not 
 fully real on any count. And the mind-life that 
 corresponds to the machine impulse as it culminates 
 in partiality and monstrosity is itself fragmentary and 
 monstrous. In so far as such a life is conscious of its 
 own imperfection it attempts to deny itself through 
 denunciation of its structure, it gives itself away in 
 
THE LIFE OF MIND 199 
 
 hopeless charity. And since it mistakes its end as 
 the repetitious increase of its substance, it is endless 
 with desire and the aching hunger for more and more 
 and more. It is never complete, is never filled; a 
 life which wastes itself lest it be wasted; it hopes in 
 vain for hope and faith, it cannot believe. It pre- 
 sumes to feel its own real urge in the blind process 
 of production; so bent on the mere passage toward the 
 goal, it will not stay or pause to finish any object in 
 which it might find rest. 
 
 Such a mind-life, lacking, as it does, the very im- 
 pulse to finish an object in which it could find repose, 
 becomes centered in its own inner little purpose and 
 thus isolates itself from the great human world where 
 life and art and knowledge are cultivated. It can thus 
 be called a mind-life at all only because of the acci- 
 dental fact that on occasion it becomes conscious of 
 its isolation from the world of persons and things. 
 
 Let us see how this consciousness of isolation saves 
 the mind-life of the machine world from complete 
 destruction. 
 
 So long as the mechanical mind-life remains im- 
 mersed within the blind urge to produce there is no 
 hope for it until its production of fragments clogs its 
 own process. The stream which runs down hill is 
 active and free and unperturbed. It goes from one 
 obstacle to another, lightly bounds over difficulties, 
 and recks not as to whither it may be headed. But 
 when the heap of stones and debris which it itself has 
 loosed from the hillside mounts up before it, it is 
 
200 THE LIFE OF MIND 
 
 compelled to pause and turn upon itself and become 
 deep and tread upon its own body until it lifts itself 
 where it can see over the obstruction its remaining 
 course below. But as its course lies empty of itself 
 before it, its winding, rugged endlessness begins to 
 appear hollow as the winds that head nowhere. It 
 therefore seeks the lowest place where it can collect, 
 and, as its vigor went out of it from its bounding from 
 rock to rock, it here lies down in stagnant death. The 
 mind-life of the age of machines is like the stream. It 
 is full of power as it runs down hill. When it rises 
 to the heights where it can see, its clouded vision can 
 choose only a place to lie down. Its urge downward 
 prevents its following the eagle over the mountain 
 which rises before it; in fact, the eagle it sees is the 
 shadow of the real as it gropes for rest among the 
 dark places of the mud below. How can it be made 
 to lift its eyes to the hills? How shall it be made 
 to look away from the shadow which broods darkly 
 over the low places, toward the reality which rises, 
 majestic before the background of real sunlight? 
 
 We have said that the machine mind must be made 
 aware of its own emptiness and isolation. The inven- 
 tive or repetitive mind complicates its own world until 
 it cannot find its way about in it. If it can once be 
 made to comprehend the end for which its complica- 
 tive activity strives, then the confusion of its own 
 products which hedge it about will give way before a 
 suggestion of order, and repetitive process will give 
 way before the organizing law of the world reduced 
 
THE LIFE OF MIND 201 
 
 to order and peace. But such a result is beyond the 
 power of the inventive mind which eternally pries out 
 fragments which submit to no order. Order in a 
 world of instruments begins with the operation of the 
 speculative imagination. It is this aspect of the 
 imagination which, we must see, is the real creator 
 of new reality, which brings new things and forces 
 into the world which the mere inventive imagination 
 cannot even understand. 
 
 Let us try to show the activity of the speculative 
 imagination in some of its simplest forms. This is 
 best done perhaps by contrasting its working with that 
 of the inventive imagination. The latter has to await 
 a suggestion from the facts with which it is dealing. 
 Thus the steamboat was inevitable the moment a 
 steam engine was made that would run on a moving 
 base, one all of whose parts had fast attachment to 
 the same base so that they would maintain their rela- 
 tions to one another. Then it was a simple matter to 
 put the engine on a boat, and the nature of the engine, 
 that is, the form of its motion, determined the form 
 of the instrument through which its power was applied 
 to the water. That is, the organization of the engine 
 and the consequent form of its motion determined 
 that the propeller should be some form of rotating 
 structure, some modification of the simple wheel, and 
 it remains just that and will remain that until some 
 power unit operates through some other form of 
 motion. All the possibilities of boats and engines are 
 given in the simple instances of the two facts, just 
 
202. THE LIFE OF MIND 
 
 as the fact that two sides are together greater than 
 the third is given the moment you have a triangle. 
 So invention produces indefinitely, but it gives us 
 nothing new. It combines the old in endless ways, 
 but mere endlessness is the limit beyond which it 
 cannot go. Invention is confused with speculation 
 at the point where the given suggestions are subtle 
 and are not readily traceable to their basis in the 
 given facts; but invention and the machine process 
 operate with what is given none the less. 
 
CHAPTER XXIII. 
 
 (v) IMAGINATION AS CREATIVE. 
 
 Shall we say, then, that speculation, since we have 
 contrasted it with invention, operates with what is not 
 given? Exactly so. Its real nature and source is 
 to be found in exactly what mechanism neglects. From 
 the point of view of mechanism and invention, noth- 
 ing need be present in the steamboat situation except 
 the facts of the engine and the boat, with the corollary 
 physical properties and processes which they imply. 
 I mean, given a boat and a steam engine, a steamboat 
 is just inevitable in those facts alone and will some 
 day fall out of the situation by accident, and there 
 need not be a "mind" present to record the fact. The 
 situation of fact produces the steamboat, it just leads 
 forth what is there, and mind need not have anything 
 to do with it in any peculiar way. But if you con- 
 sider the case where the painter touches a drab land- 
 scape into beauty with a few smears of color, you will 
 have to recognize that you are dealing with an entirely 
 different matter. The landscape would wait through 
 eternity for just that beauty, although it might in the 
 eternity of its mere existence have produced similar 
 colors in infinite number and variety. The facts of 
 the landscape did not lead inevitably to the painter, 
 even though you may argue that its beauty stimulated 
 the painter to paint it. If that had been all that was 
 
204 THE LIFE OF MIND 
 
 necessary, then anybody with possession of the tech- 
 nique could have produced the painting, and it would 
 have been produced a million times before our painter 
 ever saw it. The real painter adds, therefore, what 
 was not there, even in the painter; the element that 
 makes the picture that picture did not come from 
 anywhere, was not in existence until the painter touched 
 the canvas; whereupon the picture as a thing of beauty 
 sprang into existence as the creation of a reality which 
 was not there before. It would be nonsense to argue 
 that any other equally competent artist might have 
 produced the picture, for its reality depends upon its 
 being the picture that it is, painted in the way that 
 it was, out of elements that were not. It is a case 
 where the beautiful reality as order bears the value 
 reality in itself, and it comes into being as color in 
 conception identifies with color in fact. This identifi- 
 cation is the mystery of the creative mind. 
 
 What is true here is true throughout the world of 
 value forms, and it is both true and obvious in the 
 higher forms of art. It is not so obvious, though 
 equally true, in many of the common activities of 
 life, although all life activities have in them the char- 
 caters and qualities of art. It is the fact that the 
 art which is resident in many 'iow ; ' forms of activity 
 is not only not obvious but not even discernible by 
 the actor that makes so many of human activities 
 distasteful. But it, nevertheless, can be demonstrated 
 that the meaning of all activity (one would like to 
 say motion also) is expressable finally only in the art 
 
THE LIFE OF MIND. 205 
 
 form, and we wish here to examine a "low" type of 
 activity to carry our point that the ultimate is the 
 creature of speculation. 
 
 I once enjoyed the high privilege of living on an 
 unimproved street where I was spared a good many 
 of the distractions of the "modern conveniences." But 
 civilization overtook me; men of various shades of 
 color and morality came to dig away the road that 
 honest use had leveled out between the rows of maple 
 trees. They began by setting to work a very old 
 colored man at digging a deep ditch along the side 
 of the road for the curbstone. The man was old, 
 indefinitely old, so old that he no longer knew that 
 time had blown many a rosy purpose out of his head 
 and had relieved him of the distracting futilities of 
 youth. He had thus been deprived of pride and ambi- 
 tion and want, and there was left to him only the 
 world in which the moment was to be employed in 
 the enjoyment of its present meaning. At the time 
 when I saw him, this meaning began when he stood 
 the spade upon its blade and placed his left foot upon 
 its hilt. He paused in that attitude just long enough 
 to feel the rhythm of his balance upon the movement 
 which was to follow. Then he pushed the spade in; 
 another pause to feel the cadence of movement from 
 the first attitude to this; he lifted the spade and dis- 
 charged the dirt upon the bank, paused again to feel 
 the harmony of the various attitudes together, and 
 repeated the process. I allowed the demon to con- 
 vince me that the grace of movement was in mv own 
 
206 THE LIFE OF MIND 
 
 mind and that from the old man's view all was harsh 
 and bitter in this world of work. So I went out to 
 talk with him. He did not stop or vary his rhythmic 
 movements while I asked him questions, although he 
 was glad for the opportunity to talk which he expressed 
 through a smile that entered into and expanded the 
 harmony of his movements. Not only so, but his 
 mellow old voice infused a play of colors through the 
 symphony of his movements, giving to the whole form 
 an exquisiteness of beauty that I have never seen 
 reproduced. His wife, with whom he lived alone 
 now, his children all having grown up, was "oF an' 
 po'ly now, thank yo' all," but u de good Lawd" had 
 enabled him to provide for her a warm fire and a com- 
 fortable chair and a mos' all she wants." He loved 
 to work and ''knowed dat some good man 'ud give 
 him ah inside job fo' de wintah" when the winter came. 
 'Why don't you stop and rest a moment, Uncle?" I 
 ventured. "Ah doesn't need to stop; Ah rest as Ah 
 wo'k," and then he explained to me that his move- 
 ments were so timed and varied that his strength 
 was recovered as it was portioned out to the various 
 moves, so that he was no more tired at the end of the 
 day than at the beginning. 
 
 Thus did the old man by dint of pure speculative 
 imagination create for his digging the pure art-form, 
 he created it out of what was not in the combination 
 of circumstance which was presented to him. From 
 the unimpeded flow of his meager ideas and the meas- 
 ure of his own physical movements he created the 
 
THE LIFE OF MIND 207 
 
 finish and fulfillment of his life with every clod thrown 
 out; he looked with the eye of feeling not upon his 
 work, but his working, and in each instance and at 
 every instant it pronounced itself good. So that in- 
 stead of the beauty of the situation being merely in 
 my mind, it was there as solidly objective as the rocky 
 cliff which none of my wits could enable me to scale. 
 The old man digging his ditch took his place with 
 the masterpieces of human genius; and what we must 
 see is that it was the old man himself who made the 
 picture; and it was granted me the momentary 
 glimpse of the music of his life. His speculative 
 genius had found order where there was none;^ had 
 made rhythm and symmetry where symmetry and 
 rhythm there were none. 
 
 Just how, psychologically, the speculative imagina- 
 tion works is not very clear. And the awkward fact 
 that we have to face is that the psychologists have not 
 yet discovered that there exists such a thing. Per- 
 haps the reason is that the speculative imagination is 
 a speculative fact, and is not discoverable to the 
 apparatus and clap-trap which has allowed the psy- 
 chologist to become convinced that he can think with 
 his hands. It will be a happy day for truth when the 
 psychologist ceases to be a carpenter and cobbler of 
 the soul and the huckster who deals with mind and 
 ideas as the hawker deals with cabbages on the street. 
 From the point of view of these commercial artists 
 the description of mind in terms of its appropriate 
 objects, the objects in and through which it comes to 
 
208 THE LIFE OF MIND 
 
 adequate and full self-expression, is not consistent 
 with "scientific method" — a method which, by the 
 way, they have never given any formal defmiteness 
 in expression, which seems to imply that they have 
 never given their sacred method very much considera- 
 tion themselves. But while they themselves say that 
 mind can be approached only through its outward 
 expression, they can have no case for objection against 
 anyone who cares to describe mind in terms of some 
 of its most interesting objective expressions. It is 
 at least not obvious that mind has its only expression 
 in the organism, as many of them assume; and if we 
 will leave the u behaviorists , ' to their implicit Freu- 
 dianism, the only "scientific 1 ' character left to mind 
 will be a quiver, or better a tendency to quiver, in 
 a muscle or gland or some other cadaverous nonsense. 
 Then as our guess we shall follow the suggestion 
 hinted at above. The experts have done what they 
 could, and, it seems, all they can, in the way of reduc- 
 ing mind and life to the form and structure. $1 the 
 organism. They have obeyed the ordinary injunction 
 of science to the effect that you should reduce your 
 subject matter to the simplest possible terms, and 
 they have their reward. Let us see whether some- 
 thing may not come from this aspect of mind when, if 
 not sublimated to a higher form, since in its highest 
 form already, it is at least interpreted through the 
 objects whose aesthetic quality is adequate to its full 
 expression. We may take our clue from the blunder 
 of the physiosophists, who have misread the very 
 
THE LIFE OF MIND 209 
 
 fundamental law that all mind is expressed through 
 the organism so as to make it state that all mind has 
 its expression in the organism, and this they take to 
 mean that the expression of mind is limited to the 
 possibilities of movement in the organism. Add to 
 the former what truth there is in the latter statement, 
 and you have it that mind expresses itself through 
 the organism in the objects of life and art, and this 
 we accept as the principle of explanation for the spec- 
 ulative imagination. But this is as far as possible 
 from explanation in terms of reflexes and reactions, 
 indeed it is a denial that the explanation of any fact 
 of mind is a question of physiology at all, or to which 
 physiological considerations can contribute anything 
 fundamental. It insists, however, that the explana- 
 tion of mind must be effected through a consideration 
 of the qualities of the objects of immediate experi- 
 ence, not essentially in their sensory aspects but pri- 
 marily in their imaginal characteristics. We must 
 insist, therefore, that mind is a logical entity, has its 
 primary characters expressible only in terms of the 
 relations among objects, such relations in fact as rep- 
 resent the value aspects of experience as experience 
 institutionalizes itself in the speculative and practical 
 instruments of life. The explanation of mind is there- 
 fore in the last analysis a matter of logic. 
 
CHAPTER XXIV. 
 
 (VI) MIND-CREATION AS LOGIC — NOT PHYSIOLOGY. 
 
 Those who undertake to explain mind in terms of 
 the organism can always appeal to quite inescapable 
 facts. The only question that arises is as to whether 
 the facts furnish a complete explanation of mind, and 
 whether they do not merely illustrate to the mind of 
 the person giving the explanation the particular types 
 of imagery he happens to think in. The first part 
 of the question is really not very important, since if 
 we take it for granted that the facts of the organism 
 do explain the mind, then we have to assert that cer- 
 tain other circumstances which seem to be facts really 
 are not facts at all. Then we have a lot of difficulties 
 about the nature of the difference between two kinds 
 of facts, and it is very easy in arguing this question 
 to overlook the question we start out to answer. To 
 those people, therefore, who say that mind is just 
 nothing but the performance of certain very delicate 
 types of movements by certain very delicate struc- 
 tures, there is nothing to say more than to call their 
 attention to the fact that nearly every such explana- 
 tion follows the circle between assuming that we are 
 justified in deducing activities which are not known 
 from structures which are, or that we may be sure of 
 the existence of delicate structures because we know 
 of very delicate activities. And there are cases where 
 
THE LIFE OF MIND 211 
 
 the physiologists of mind deduce both the delicate 
 structures and movements from facts whose connec- 
 tion with the strctures and activities in question is 
 quite remote and either itself unknown or when known 
 is recognized as ambiguous. Such a statement is a 
 rather summary disposal of a good many attempts to 
 show how mind works and what it is by the simple 
 process of taking for granted whatever you need to 
 justify your conclusion, and it seems to dispose of 
 most of the physiological and physiosophical discus- 
 sion contained in many of the books on psychology. 
 
 There is, however, no getting away from the fact 
 that mind is always known through activities in the 
 organism. What we insist is, that because this is true, 
 it does not warrant us in saying that the mind and 
 the organism are the same thing or that one produces 
 the other, as seems to be quite generally implied. The 
 fact is, we are here dealing with a question where our 
 scientific notions of cause and production do not help , 
 us much. Most people who have never studied psy- / 
 chology have never had to deal with the illusion that 
 mind and body are the same thing, so we can leave 
 the question to the expert physiosophists. 
 
 There are reasons for believing that those who in- 
 terpret mental facts literally in organic terms do so 
 primarily because they cannot imagine to themselves 
 mental processes except by illustrating them by and 
 in organic forms. To one whose temperament is pri- 
 marily active and muscular it is difficult to perceive 
 the real content of an image without illustrating it to 
 
212 THE LIFE OF MIND 
 
 himself through feels in ihc organism or visual Images 
 of parts of his body. Just so. an abstract idea like 
 justice appears in the mind as an indefinite and vague 
 picture of a man paying a grocer's bill, or in terms of 
 the feelings involved in putting your hand into your 
 pocket and counting out money in exchange for some- 
 thing. Or. it may appear as the visual picture or the 
 muscular picture of the goddess holding the scale, 
 where the emphasis is on the person holding the scales, 
 the scale itself not representing justice without the 
 muscular feels. It is probable that there are not many 
 ideas, if any, which do not take some such organic 
 form as they are known to the mind; but this no more 
 proves the identity of mind and organic activity than 
 it proves the identity of mind and ideas with other 
 external things; in fact, there is a sense, as it seems, 
 in which the latter can be proved. If my idea of a 
 book is not the book, then it is also not the feelings 
 of a book in my hand or the mental picture of a book 
 in my mind or my eye. 
 
 It seems then to be the right principle to illustrate 
 mental facts through the use of objects, but there is 
 no reason for emphasizing those objects we know as 
 the organism as more important than others. One's 
 ideas do not resemble organic forms in fact, but it 
 appears so only after one has been taught that way 
 by the study of psychology; they are taken rather as 
 somehow resembling the objects which they mean, as 
 is clear from the persistence of the old copy theory. 
 Then if ideas and objects are pretty much the same 
 
THE LIFE OF MIND 213 
 
 things, the important question is, what sorts of objects 
 illustrate to us best the real nature of our ideas. 
 
 We must recall to our minds once more that we 
 are trying to explain the speculative imagination, for 
 it is in this operation of our minds that we come 
 closest to the realities of things. Its distinction from 
 the reason we will make later, but we may here say 
 that the distinctive thing about the speculative imagi- 
 nation is that it is the power through which we know 
 objects as unities, whereas in the reason we know 
 unity as the principle of objects. Here we want to 
 know what sorts of objects represent to us best the 
 nature of our ideas, and if we can find an answer to 
 this question our description of these objects will be 
 the explanation of the speculative imagination as the 
 highest form of specific activity of mind. 
 
 The sorts of objects which occur to mind first when 
 their relation to mind is in question is that sort which 
 we may classify as tools or instruments. The relation 
 of our tools to our life seems to us very close and 
 direct, especially those tools upon which we depend 
 most heavily in a practical way. Thus, the carpenter's 
 saw or plane is the form which his ideas tend to take 
 when he is thinking toward a house which he is to 
 build, just as it perhaps is his model for everything 
 that comes to his mind as implying its having been 
 made. In the case of the carpenter, then, ideas as 
 representing objects as unities will be replicas of his 
 tools together with the objects which his tools relate 
 with in practical life. But it is in this latter fact that. 
 
 
214 THE LIFE OF MIND 
 
 we can see that the general classes of things as tools 
 do not represent fully the meanings of our ideas. The 
 idea of a thing as a tool always refers us beyond the 
 thing itself, on to something which in a way completes 
 the tool idea but which itself, nevertheless, carries the 
 suspicion of being a tool for something else. Thus the 
 tool idea never stops, never gives us the complete idea, 
 but always an idea which complains of its own incom- 
 pleteness by striving to reach over to encompass some- 
 thing else. It is, of course, true that the idea of tool 
 may be interpreted in a great many senses — senses 
 which sometimes exchange themselves while you are 
 arguing. But its essential purpose is to refer to some- 
 thing that means something else, and this meaning 
 something else is all that it as tool properly means. 
 The idea that speculative ideas are tools merely indi- 
 cates that we are living in a world that takes its tools 
 too seriously, the sort of thing that sometimes makes 
 a man that is using a razor in shaving unconsciously 
 and by impulse use it to cut his own throat. A prac- 
 tical age is thus inherently sophistical and skeptical, 
 and it is not the less vicious and destructive because 
 it is what it is unconsciously. There may be moral 
 obligations involved in our not being fully conscious. 
 
 Our speculative or constructive ideas are not then 
 properly represented to us as tools, even if we try 
 to refine the conception to the point where the higher 
 logical and artistic forms seem to us to exist for the 
 purpose of pointing onward to something else. 
 
 We perhaps ought to say, while so near the point, 
 
THE LIFE OF MIND 215 
 
 that the organism, by itself and as a specific biological 
 fact, and it is essentially that, does not belong in any 
 of these classes. And, while the point is a little harder 
 to carry, we shall show that the organism in no natu- 
 ral or practical sense belongs in any of these classes. 
 In fact, if this were the place to do it, it would be 
 interesting, and for the psychologist instructive, and 
 it would at the same time be relatively easy, to show 
 that the organism from a biological point of view is 
 not a tool or an instrument to something else, but in 
 its reality rests completed in its own perfection as a 
 case or instance of the universal; thus as a biological 
 hypothesis it is a concept and an organon oj logic and 
 not a scientific object at all. Then the attempt to 
 explain our ideas as always rushing onward to become 
 something other than what they are is wrong, whether 
 we try, as we must on the one assumption, to identify 
 the idea with the process which distinguishes it from 
 what is not it, or to identify the idea with the thing 
 which is so distinguished from it. 
 
 But what are these classes of the speculative imagi- 
 nation which do not compel us to recognize them as 
 the tools with which we gain other and supposedly 
 real ideas? And how do such ideas or objects lead us 
 into the very presence of mind itself and all its mys- 
 teries? And when we stand before mind, how do we 
 know whether it is ideas we have or objects, and 
 whether we have these things or are "had" by them? 
 Our question is, in brief, what is the reality of mind? 
 
 We may indicate at once the types of objects which 
 
216 THE LIFE OF MIND 
 
 we shall have to describe as what are often by meta- 
 phor called the objects of truth and beauty, and it is 
 our task to get rid of the metaphor by sober descrip- 
 tion of fact. Our first answer to these questions is 
 disappointing, for it is the old abstraction that real 
 objects are either logical or aesthetic objects. It is 
 to be kept in mind that when describing objects we 
 are delineating the forms and realities of ideas. 
 
 Again, then, we are describing objects in order to 
 understand the workings of mind, and here it is the 
 speculative power itself that we desire to understand. 
 Let us take, as the first instance of speculative mind, 
 the logical object. And we can come at it most simply 
 and directly through an example or two. In any case 
 where we are thinking to advantage we must accept 
 the results of the combinations of our ideas as them- 
 selves ideas or objects whose solidity and dependable- 
 ness are just as safe as are the solidity and depend- 
 ableness of the table which we know is in the next 
 room but do not see. That is, while I am thinking 
 about books, chairs, etc., they will all take their places 
 about the table just as really when I do not see the 
 table as when I do see it. The table as it stands in 
 the next room as the dependable basis and center for 
 other objects is a simple instance of a logical object, 
 • and by this we mean that when we think of the table 
 as the center of a group of experiences, it will help 
 us to organize our thought to the form and degree 
 where it has meaning. The psychological image which 
 is recalled has nothing, or very little, to do with the 
 
THE LIFE OF MIND 217 
 
 case as an object, i. e., as real. Again, in a practical 
 way, when we think of the table (when we do not 
 see it, when it stands in the next room) we can take 
 it for granted that if we go into the next room with 
 our arms piled high with books we shall be able to 
 put the books down on the table. That is, we can 
 take it for granted that thetable will be there for us 
 to put books on, sit by, play cards on; we can depend 
 upon it and plan our actions accordingly. If I could 
 not depend on the table I should not go into the room 
 with arms piled high with books, and when I do go 
 into the room thus laden I am taking it for granted 
 that the table, as a physical object, as an object of 
 perception, is there to to correspond more or less per- 
 fectly with the logical object table which is in my 
 mind before I enter the room. But in the experience 
 of table there is no hint of "sensations" or "reactions" 
 nor any of the other mythology of the psychologists. 
 As another example, when the farmer speaks of the 
 price of wheat, or the grocer of the price of eggs, they, 
 as well as those to whom they speak, know exactly 
 what is meant. And yet there is no such thing in the 
 world as the price of wheat if we mean by "thing" 
 something which we can touch, taste, smell, etc. The 
 price of wheat is not a perceptible object; in the point 
 of view of the psychologist, in which perception im- 
 plies sensory immediacy, a perceptible object is a con- 
 tradiction in terms; the price of wheat is a logical v ' 
 object, an expectancy, an assurance in advance oi 
 fact of the orderly stability of a world. Hut as a 
 
218 THE LIFE OF MIND 
 
 logical object it is just as important as the actual 
 bushel of wheat, and is oftener sold and traded than 
 the latter itself. 
 
 Xow not all logical objects refer directly, as the 
 foregoing examples do, to the practical objects of the 
 daily life. Some of them, even very many of them, 
 seem to have no relation to practical or perceptible 
 objects at all. Many of the ideas of the speculative 
 imagination seem to refer only to themselves, or to 
 systems which groups of them tend to create. These 
 are the most rare and the most important of all our 
 ideas, and they are properly classified as rational 
 ideas. As ideas of the reason, the logical ideas of the 
 speculative imagination, as they operate within the 
 system which they create for themselves, are the crea- 
 tive power and the source and origin as well as the 
 final meaning of the order of our world. We shall 
 describe them in the next chapter. 
 
CHAPTER XXV. 
 
 (VIl) MIND-CREATION AS ART. 
 
 But there is another class of the speculative ideas 
 of the imagination which we mentioned above. These 
 are the speculative ideas that fall under the principle 
 of beauty into the system of objects of art. But it. is 
 not the system merely of beautiful perceptible things, 
 much less is it the mass of our feelings of and for 
 beautiful things. What we mean here is that beau- 
 tiful things, as creatures of the speculative imagina- 
 tion, are not limited to objects of sense or perceptible 
 objects, but include a class of objects whose content 
 is nothing but acts of the speculative imagination 
 itself. This capacity of imagination to comprehend 
 itself within the class of real objects, and to appre- 
 hend the qualities of its own acts as objects, as quali- 
 ties themselves constituting objects with specific, i. e. 
 universal, characters, is precisely what we mean by 
 mind, is what distinguishes mind from all other things. 
 Here, then, is the point where the speculative imagi- 
 nation apprehends as objects the qualities of its own 
 acts, and as objects in the full sense as implying uni- 
 versal characters, we stand in the august presence of 
 Mind itself. This is the system of speculative ideas 
 which includes religion, morality, and art, and what- 
 ever other forms of creation are possible to mind. 
 It is by no means necessary to regard (he three classes 
 
220 THE LIFE OF MIND 
 
 named as expressing the limits of the types of ideas 
 here under description; in fact, it appears that the 
 world of political conceptions is, in the mind of the 
 moralist or Utopian, another and a still higher realm 
 than that represented by art, morality, and religion. 
 It would be absurd to say that the visions of the 
 prophet and the dreams of the seer in any field are 
 not speculative conceptions of the highest degree of 
 reality. 
 
 It is, to return to our subject, somewhat hard to 
 give examples of speculative ideas of beauty. So uni- 
 versal is the belief that all beauty has only a percep- 
 tual or sensory basis, so persistent the prejudice that 
 ideas are not real, that, even were it possible to state 
 clearly in words the essence and quality of speculative 
 ideas, they would be mistakenly apprehended by 
 almost every one as merely nothing more than their 
 nearest physical or perceptible embodiment. That 
 there ^re bodies spiritual for the higher forms of ideas 
 only those who comprehend these ideas can know; 
 to be apprehended by the unspiritual or mere imita- 
 tive imagination these ideas must be materialized into 
 practical forms. The practical life of the practical 
 man is a continuous degradation of the real therefore. 
 Consequently it is difficult to bring before his mind 
 objects which have their mental counterparts in forms 
 of consciousness that he does not have; and, w r hat is 
 hopelessly more, so far as such objects can be brought 
 before him. it turns out to be futile and altogether 
 unprofitable. 
 
THE LIFE OF MINI) 221 
 
 When we approach then the speculative concepts 
 of art we must presuppose the untrammeled mind, 
 and instances of the ultimate aesthetic then do not 
 appear as rare and unusual as does the competent 
 mind. In this case one instance is as good as many, 
 and where none are simple the one that comes readiest 
 to mind is best. Take the case where the contempla- 
 tion of beauty brings tears. Then in the absence of 
 the object through which the beauty appears and of 
 the objects which mediate the feeling, depend upon 
 the beauty as the basis and starting point for the 
 construction of some further beautiful form. Then 
 your constructive image of beauty disengages from 
 its normal objective embodiment, and becomes the 
 free plan and pattern of any object whatever that 
 may be an instance of beauty. At the instant when 
 you have just not yet selected an embodiment, but 
 hold the beauty image nude and the embodiment not 
 yet materialized, you have the constructive or crea- 
 tive connection of the pure beauty-form with the ulti- 
 mate reality as a world, and your thought as imagi- 
 nation is free; not detached from the material basis 
 ofjife^ but unattached to any of life's specific aspects, 
 a floating meaning which requires no embodiment but 
 its own substantiality. This is the simple experience 
 where the inner content of mind does not demand 
 expression in any particular form, such as that as in 
 the presence of your Father your world takes form 
 at once as the fulfillment of your life, and where the 
 precipitation of the floating meaning in any of the 
 
Ill THE LIFE OF .MIND 
 
 substantialities which we know divests the meaning of 
 precisely its meaning or universality. Such is the 
 system of moral and religious realizations, also; they 
 are unattached, circumambient and circumstantial, 
 utter, ineffable meanings, which one can illustrate 
 with a thousand instances, but to which one can give 
 no more adequate or other description than we have 
 given here. They are not substantial, but substan- 
 tialities. 
 
 As we have said before, it is with the concepts of 
 the speculative imagination that we make contact 
 with the realities of life. It remains only to say that 
 these concepts are the realities of which life itself is 
 one. How life as one of the realities fits into the 
 system of the whole is the problem of the imagina- 
 tion as it functions in the reason — the rational imagi- 
 nation. Here we shall get no new real-substance, so 
 long as we consider reality as presentable at one 
 vision or as one image to the mind. However, since 
 the form of the plurality of reals is itself an ultimate 
 idea as the basis of the speculative concept of unity, 
 the form of plurality become unity must be described 
 as the rational notion of order. 
 
CHAPTER XXVI. 
 
 (VIIl) MIND-CREATION AS MORALITY. 
 
 But before we go on to this topic it is necessary 
 to show that morality and religion fail of the com- 
 plete reality attained by art. Neither religion nor 
 morality can be found as unengaged with the speci- 
 fied. But they both make the exalted effort, both 
 strive for the freedom from the clot of inwardness 
 with which they are inextricably confused. Religion 
 attempts to extricate itself by luring the life away 
 from the interest with which life is always found 
 bound to materiality, and thus by negative suggestion 
 lift life outward toward its substantial ground. But 
 the allurement which it holds out to life is overtaken 
 in the inwardness of feeling, and it is thus caught 
 in the very deception with which it strives to beguile 
 the spirit to fulness in its appropriate embodiment. 
 It flaunts before the spirit the attractive bait of in- 
 terest, and bows to Mammon when it aspires to God. 
 It is thus caught in contradiction just at the point 
 at which it presents its clairn before reason, and, 
 confronted with its own inconsistency and its inevi- 
 table urge to disunity, shamefacedly begs the mercy 
 which is only due to interrupted feeling. Confessing 
 its weakness before the throne of reason, its unimagi- 
 nativeness can claim only the pity which weakness 
 and misery can ask as its just meed. There is nothing 
 
224 THE LIFE OF MIND 
 
 left that it can do but assert the justlessness of the 
 reason itself, and, as an unwitting skeptic, to build 
 its house upon the sands of an unreal world. Thus 
 does the assertion of interest lead to the denial of any- 
 thing as finally real, the adoption of the everlasting 
 nay as the basis of its claim to the respect which life 
 pays to the real. While religion is half conscious of 
 the object, the attainment of which would realize it in 
 its perfection of form, it fritters away its hope of 
 reaching this object in the fruitless attempt to con- 
 vince itself that the object is already attained. It 
 thus tries by methods of self-deception to identify its 
 unalterable object with the subjective fragmentariness 
 ■ of its own hope: and by the creation of hope and 
 trust in an object which it glories that it cannot see, 
 and by its elevation of this object to the station of an 
 instrument by which it hopes to see, it falls into the 
 emptiness of despair. That despair is its portion 
 here below the history of religion is the abundant 
 proof. Else there would not be the universal neces- 
 sity to convince itself of the promise of its prospect. 
 Otherwise there would be no reason for the jealousy 
 with which it guards its empty forms, and the intol- 
 erance with which it belittles the positive accomplish- 
 ments which life makes in other fields. 
 
 The case of morality is similar but more difficult to 
 describe. Religion deceives nobody: a proposition 
 which you may interpret in your own way. For the 
 practical man whose religion is useful, it means that 
 usefulness is beyond deceit fulness. For the bigot 
 
THE LIFE OF MIND 225 
 
 whose religion is true, truth lies embalmed in rigid 
 forms and is beyond meaning or deceit. For the 
 voluptuary whose religion is ''assurance," truth and 
 utility are what his feeling wills. For the aesthete 
 whose religion is spastic emotion, truth and beauty 
 and righteousness are the lurid coloring of a moment 
 that flashes in the void. But morality is real, and 
 its relation to the reality is subtle and tenuous and 
 difficult for the harsh inartistic hand to feel out in 
 the tissues of the lfe of the creative imagination. 
 Just what it is that makes morality convincing it is 
 perhaps not possible altogether to say. It is not its 
 promise of reward: it is the vacuity of religion that 
 makes the fatuity of rewards seem real. It is not its 
 assurance of a beckoning finality beyond the sphere 
 of life's living. It is not the inevitableness with which 
 logic forces upon us an inviolable truth: that may 
 leave us cold and unmoved, just as religion moves 
 us and warms us to objectless action. It seems then 
 that there is something indigenous in the life that 
 springs from the ground of morality, and it lacks but 
 one feature to make it identifiable with the reality of 
 beauty. It is that morality cannot, under conditions 
 that we know, or can know, be sustained to per- 
 petuity as can the forms of beauty. The imagination 
 which in art reaches and holds its place in the calm 
 above the winds, holds its position there by inevitable 
 right and without strain or effort, eternalizes there 
 in perfect form without support from any source. 
 The same imagination in morality maintains a pre- 
 
226 THE LIFE OF MIND 
 
 carious hold only fitfully upon the calm where life 
 flows undismayed; must by constant grasp of effort 
 keep the balance of form and symmetry which effort- 
 less art holds by inalienable right and uninterrupted; 
 it is this mortal strife which severs the life-cord be- 
 tween morality and mother art and leaves morality to 
 a competitive chance with the forces of unreason and 
 errant ugliness in a world only partly subdued and 
 reconciled to the presence of life in its midst. 
 
 And yet the good is real, blood-sister to truth, of 
 the common mother beauty. 
 
 The difficulty in the case of morality seems to come 
 from the fact that morality is action. And action, 
 under the conditions imposed upon life by truth and 
 beauty, only imperfectly comes to self-fulfillment. 
 This is due to the nature of action. While it would 
 be out of place here to go into a complete deduction 
 of the nature of action, its essential characters may be 
 pointed out. The life that consents to act confesses 
 thereby its want of wholeness. Something is lacking 
 to it which it strives to make good in attainment. But 
 in the necessity to attain, and in advance of final defi- 
 nition of the good by imaginative construction, life 
 is compelled to act often toward only a dimly outlined 
 end. This means that life-action is often blind, must 
 move by faith grounded in imperfect perception. The 
 consequence is that it quite frequently fails hope- 
 lessly in the most urgent cases, and invariably misses 
 the point of its aim in many important details. In 
 sober fact action never completely accomplishes the 
 
THE LIFE OF MIND 227 
 
 end it was designed to realize, and thus remains for- 
 ever unfinished. Life action in morality is thus end- 
 less; the eternal striving for what is never attained. 
 
 It must not be presumed that action attempts to 
 reach an end outside of and beyond itself. In this it 
 is again imperfect, since as compared with the appre- 
 ciation of beauty or the realization of truth, its end 
 must appear to come as the fulfillment of itself. But 
 whereas the sense for beauty and truth both detach 
 their objects from the process by which they reach 
 them, and establish the circumstantiality of their 
 objects in complete independence, action remains for- 
 ever tethered to its end by the weight of its ever 
 going-on. Its imperfection then taints its end with 
 fragmentariness, the badge of unreality. It may be 
 said of truth and beauty that they disappear in their 
 ends; their ends are absorbed in their realization. 
 Thus their ends as realized are disengaged from their 
 acts, and stand alone and self-supported in the life- 
 whole as defined realities. In action, on the other 
 hand, ends are distorted by life's very process, by the 
 fact that life-action is process, and, as such, visits its 
 own weakness upon its offspring. It is of the nature 
 of action never to be finished, and, while this fact 
 makes action the arbiter of the everlasting future, and 
 as such the preparer of the way for truth and beauty, 
 yet it leaves action not with where to lay its head in 
 the scheme of the life of mind. 
 
 Morality, then, as the law of the unfinished, sets 
 the stage for ever new accomplishments. While we 
 
228 THE LIFE OF MIND 
 
 have characterized it as inferior in dignity to both 
 truth and beauty, there is a sense in which it is the 
 highest aspect of the life of mind. Applying to the 
 relations of the three the merely logical test, which 
 we, of course, must respect so long as we care for the 
 agreement of other minds with ours, morality and its 
 action must be considered as prior to both truth and 
 beauty. It is thus the logical condition of the two 
 latter, they cannot exist until nature is prepared in 
 advance by action. It is thus that there is justifica- 
 tion for duty, obligation, and the other fundamentals 
 of morality; or would be if there were any guarantee 
 that after action is performed with seriousness and 
 some measure of good judgment the constitution of 
 our world permitted both truth and beauty to crown 
 the effort of action. But there is no such guarantee; 
 and this is the ground upon which the priority of 
 morality must be denied. Moral action, even when 
 calculated to the highest of ends, even the end of 
 beauty, and directed by the most rational of judg- 
 ments, often peters out in the thin air of paltry pusil- 
 animity and leaves neither a trace of the good will 
 and competent judgment of the actor, nor of any 
 objectives realized. This is the ultimate comedy of 
 the life of mind. Or, under the most competent of 
 judgment and the nicest determination of ends by 
 serious purposiveness, where the interpretation of the 
 conditions (this is the rueful truth of morality) made 
 by the reason seems favorable and propitious, the ends 
 achieved may, often are, the exact contrarv of what 
 
THE LIFE OF MIND 229 
 
 were intended, and may on occasion be the destruc- 
 tion of the actor himself. This is the tragedy of the 
 life of mind; and, as the last word of moral history, 
 this gruesome result is the typical issue; a world in 
 which the grotesquely bad is coupled by necessity with 
 good intent justified by good judgment — an irrational 
 world. 
 
 But morality is still obligatory — is obligation. We 
 have not intended to question the inescapable necessity 
 by which men are impelled to recognize the destiny 
 of fruitless action in which they are caught and held. 
 The ass must continue to grind at the mill. But while 
 we grind things may be true even though bad, and 
 beauty smiles through the Gorgon's horrid face. 
 
 Thus the speculative imagination, in defining and 
 creating the objects of truth and beauty in a world 
 exhausted with endless action, gives to the life of 
 mind the objects of its highest significance. And if 
 our world were epitomizable in any one object — the 
 mistake of the single eye of morality — then the specu- 
 lative imagination would have to be recognized as the 
 final act of the mind-life. But to the speculative 
 imagination the world is yet not one; it is partial. 
 The oneness of our world is accomplished through the 
 rational imagination. 
 
CHAPTER XXVII. 
 
 (IX) IMAGINATION AS REASON. 
 
 We have distinguished the imagination as the specu- 
 lative function from the imagination as reason by say- 
 ing that the former gives us our completest knowledge 
 of the object as a whole, while the latter gives us the 
 principles by which objects become for us unities as 
 systems. And we had assumed earlier that any under- 
 standing of experience must be in terms of objects. 
 It was as a basis of these presuppositions that mor- 
 ality as a speculative ideal turned out to be self-con- 
 tradictory in that it necessitated the synthesis of action 
 with completeness in an object considered as a unity. 
 While this result seems serious to the moralists, we 
 shall not bother about it. There is no reason why the 
 reasonable man should complain if his action, even 
 his thought action, consistently fails, so long as he 
 can demonstrate the irrationality of the world in 
 which action must take place. He can as a rational 
 being stand above such a world, and his imprecation 
 of its littleness clears his skirts of any complicity in 
 its weakness. And while he must act, the necessity 
 does not involve his freedom, since the action can be 
 shown to his own intelligence as a function of the 
 baseness of a world he never willed, and he justifies 
 and vindicates himself by his execration of that base- 
 I ness. The rational attitude to an irrational world is 
 
THE LIFE OF MIND 231 
 
 the sneer of disdain. 
 
 But while all this may be, is, necessitated by a 
 rational understanding of your world, it is not agree- 
 able to your aesthetic sense or your sense for truth. 
 Then while it is a truth guaranteed by the under- 
 standing, we cannot as rational beings accept it. But 
 since from the point of view of the ordinary under- 
 standing as conditioned upon the speculative imagi- 
 nation no solution of the irrational situation is pos- 
 sible, speculation withdraws from such a world and 
 becomes creative of the more refined realities in a 
 region detached from the actualities of life. That is, 
 speculative imagination isolates its object. But this 
 detachment, or rather unattachment, itself constitutes 
 a flaw in life which cannot be endured, and to over- 
 come the intolerable gulf left by the withdrawal of 
 art- and truth-values from the world of practical liv- 
 ing, imagination once more responds in a new form 
 to the demand of wholeness. Under these conditions 
 imagination begins to operate as reason. 
 
 The unity which speculation gives to the objects of 
 life is a unity that is internal to those objects, and de- 
 termines their constitution as units. Such a unity is 
 what the philosophers call subjective; and they seem 
 to mean by this a unity that is self-contained and in- 
 centric, a unity which organizes the parts of a thing 
 with reference to each other only and without respect 
 to anything outside the thing organized. Thus it de- 
 termines objects as self-sufficient wholes, makes them 
 perfect specimens of order as to their own constitution, 
 
2M THE LIFE OF MIND 
 
 but offers no suggestions as to how any degree of order- 
 liness can be established among a plurality of such 
 unit -iv holes. This we can see from an instance of the 
 highest form of speculation, the art object. The per- 
 fect statue is complete in itself, and makes no reference 
 to its setting until you begin to interpret it, to give it 
 meanings which it does not have. Any particular part 
 of the art-object refers to another part of the same ob- 
 ject, and the end of the art is attained when the ref- 
 erence is reciprocally balanced between the parts in 
 such a way that you do not need, nay, may not, go 
 outside the parts-relation in order to comprehend the 
 whole as the unity of beauty. This is why we may say 
 that the art-experience is complete and thus the high- 
 est form of the speculative adventure. It as creative 
 is the carving out of the void of perfection of form, 
 which is perfect because it is the form of the void — 
 the form which ignores the possible existence of con- 
 crete references beyond itself. And even while it may 
 be charged that here speculation turns upon itself as 
 contemplation, it seems to make little difference what 
 happens abstractly in the mind of the observer, or in 
 what terms such happenings may have to be described 
 psychologically; what is immediate and intuitive and 
 self-evident in the art-experience is an object which 
 appears as (which, aesthetically, means is) the inter- 
 reference of detail reduced to balance and oneness 
 without suggestion to anything beyond itself. They 
 say that a frame sets off a picture; but a picture that 
 needs a frame is one which could, and in a perfect art 
 
THE LIFE OF MIND 2M 
 
 would, be improved, and one which must be framed is 
 one that loses its art in attempting to escape the false 
 unity which the dabbler artist has forced upon it. It 
 is a bad beast that must be caged. So far, then, as 
 the speculative mind goes, it finds its completion in 
 the finish of objects which have their reality shut up 
 within their own internal skins. 
 
 If any further proof of the limitation of the specu- 
 lative mind were needed, it would be sufficient to men- 
 tion the results of the application of imagination in 
 the realm of truth. Here it produces when applied to 
 nature that monstrosity called the atom; and when ap- 
 plied to human nature that abortion of thought, the 
 "psychological individual." 
 
 Just as the speculative imagination must go beyond 
 the lower forms to complete their weakness and re- 
 pair the breaks they leave in the mind-life, so reason 
 must finish the work of speculation. We have just 
 now pointed out some of the more serious weaknesses 
 of speculation, and have indicated by hint at least how 
 the reason overcomes them. 
 
 Speculation, as has been seen, aims at the unity of 
 the object. Its work is finished when it has demon- 
 strated the object as real. Reason goes on to attempt 
 the unity of objects. Its work is, therefore, to compli- 
 cate unity with diverse plurality and then overcome 
 the confusion in a higher unity. It begins by taking 
 for granted the objects of the speculative imagination 
 — the objects of thought, art, and morality— and at- 
 tempts to weave them into higher wholes. It thus be- 
 
234 THE LIFE OF MIND 
 
 gins with the abstract whole of speculation, which is 
 a whole rendered a unity by the subjective interfer- 
 ence of parts, and constructs a concrete whole as an 
 objective unity of wholes. In the former case the law 
 which is constitutional to parts is inside the wholeness 
 involved; in the latter the law is constitutive of wholes 
 outside the immediate wholeness of objects, in their 
 relations which constitute references beyond them- 
 selves as wholes to the wholeness of a type or species. 
 Speculation is immanent to the whole; reason is ex- 
 traneous and objective to wholes, and its goal is sys- 
 tem or orderliness as such. 
 
 It is thus that the reason is the instrument of com- 
 prehension. Its peculiar capacity is to apprehend the 
 isolated wholeness of objects as taken severally and 
 then comprehend this wholeness as the unity of the 
 objects in a self-subsistent system. It is the proper 
 sphere of order, and is responsible for the systematic 
 organization of the world as known to rational beings. 
 But since a proper description of the life of reason 
 takes us beyond the life of mind as known outside of 
 metaphysics, we cannot here go further with it. But 
 we may be permitted the suggestion that, for the rea- 
 son, mind itself is taken as a speculative object, and 
 its place sought within the system of reality as a 
 whole. The life of reason is properly beyond the life 
 of mere mind; but we cannot now pursue it further. 
 The imperfection of morality and the life of action 
 presses us with too great insistence, and here we must 
 stop our account of mind as such in the interest of a 
 
THE LIFE OF MIND 235 
 
 description of the practical life. Our conclusion as to 
 the life of mind must be made practical in the guid- 
 ance of action toward successful living. 
 
PART VI. 
 
 MIND AS PRODUCTIVE — THE CREATION OF INSTITU- 
 TIONAL FORMS. 
 
 CHAPTER XXVIII. 
 
 THE PRACTICAL OR PRODUCTIVE LIFE. 
 
 The practical life is essentially the life of imagina- 
 tion. And the degree of significance or success with 
 which it is lived depends upon the type of imaginative 
 power it succeeds in developing. The practical life 
 may remain, and does so consistently for the great 
 majority of people, dependent upon the degree of 
 imaginativeness represented in the fundamental in- 
 stincts. It is not here a question of the distinction be- 
 tween the good life and the bad life, indeed that is 
 not the question we are going to consider. The dis- 
 cussion of morality has shown that the good life or 
 the bad is simply a question as to what extent life 
 succeeds in making full use of imaginative power; the 
 life that can be called good resting upon the use of 
 the imagination in the speculative and rational proc- 
 esses, the life that is bad upon the lower powers of 
 instinct, imitation and complication. The life of the 
 great mass of men lives itself out in the sphere of 
 activities which never surpass the stage of complica- 
 tion; and, since our civilization sums itself up thus in 
 complicative invention, the limit for it lies in the end- 
 
THE LIFE OF MIND 237 
 
 less process of multiplication of tools. We have thus 
 reached the "great age of invention," and of the in- 
 terests that are exhausted in the possessing the earth 
 and the fulness thereof. Instruments of life have been 
 multiplied until it is often a question whether life is 
 not lost in the confusion of instruments designed to 
 the furtherance of life; and the question forces itself 
 upon the thoughtful as to whether man may not be- 
 come the victim of the very tools he has perfeceted 
 in the interest of his welfare. Through the control of 
 steam power, man has developed a system for the dis- 
 tribution of the products of his labor to the ends of 
 the earth, so that sufficient quantities of goods may 
 be rushed so quickly to the remotest corners of the 
 earth that no being need go hungry. There is in ex- 
 istence a system of husbandry by which human want 
 may be quickly relieved in so far as the fundamentals 
 of food and shelter are concerned. Yet, with all our 
 perfected machinery, famine stalks undismayed 
 throughout the very circumference of the earth, and 
 men die of want in the midst of lavish and wanton 
 waste. Children die of cold where warmth is dissi- 
 pated to the winds; and of disease where the means 
 of prevention lie immediately at hand. The aged die 
 of starvation and hardship where the youth rot in 
 affluence and idleness. Culture suffocates in filth 
 where substance is dedicated to foulness and nasty 
 reek. Some means of control must be found for the 
 use and direction of the instruments of life. 
 
 Thus it turns out that the imagination is caught and 
 
238 THE LIFE OF MIXD 
 
 held fast in the intricacies of the very machinery 
 which itself created in the interest of its own freedom. 
 This point is often dilated upon; but in the majority 
 of cases where it is intelligently discussed, it is ac- 
 cepted as the judgment of omnipotent fate, as if there 
 were at the basis of the practical life a great mystery 
 which defied all attempts at understanding. But the 
 matter is simple. We are living on the lower levels of 
 imagination, where use and wont and automatism and 
 imitation have become the deceptions that convince 
 us that we are living the rational life. We shall know 
 what to do with our machinery when we are willing 
 to abandon it, and make the adventure of living in 
 the pure realms of imagination and thought and the 
 speculative reason. I say that as soon as we are willing 
 to abandon the machine-life our machinery will of it- 
 self and automatically fall into its proper place; as 
 soon as we will consent to think we shall not any more 
 have to grovel and grub a mere existence out of the 
 filth and refuse of a machine-made world. This does 
 not mean that the instruments of life shall require to 
 be destroyed or even that they shall fall into disuse. 
 It means that when we stop to think we shall control 
 them in the interest of real ends, and not be controlled 
 by them and compelled by them to waste the life 
 process in endless futility. It means that as rational 
 beings we are called upon to live in the higher reaches 
 of imagination where we may enjoy the beneficence of 
 culture. 
 
 How to live thr practical or productive life; this is 
 
THE LIFE OF MIND 2M) 
 
 the great question. In all the long psychological dis- 
 cusions which have preceded this question has been in 
 our minds, and it was the purpose of that discussion 
 to prepare the way for the answer which is to follow in 
 succeeding chapters. Especially was this true in our 
 discussion of imagination, for it is in and through the 
 imagination that the practical life is to be lived. We 
 live in the lower phases of the imagination a life not 
 worthy of our high estate; in the higher reaches of 
 that capacity we breathe the air of freedom and at- 
 tain the fulness of the life that is appropriate to the 
 real man that is struggling in all of us. The details 
 of the rich and successful life will be worked out and 
 made plain in the chapters that follow. The story will 
 follow closely the analysis of the life of mind which 
 we have given in preceding pages. For the real life 
 is the life of Mind; and the real Mind is the sum of 
 Imaginative power. 
 
CHAPTER XXIX. 
 
 (i) THE PRACTICAL CHARACTER. 
 
 First it will be necessary to give an analysis of the 
 practical character as that character is formed by our 
 training and breeding. We shall find it consisting of 
 a solid basis in the lower stages of imagination, upon 
 which is built the lofty structures of our ideals. Later 
 we must show how these ideals control and direct our 
 lives. 
 
 By the practical life is meant the whole life that 
 one lives from day to day. There is an erroneous 
 popular impression that the practical life consists 
 merely in the group of activities by which one makes 
 a living or makes money or gets rich and powerful. 
 The life of practice means then the actual life, the 
 whole life of the individual as it embraces his thoughts 
 and actions and purposes. As we shall describe it, 
 the practical will not only involve the individual and 
 all his interests, but it will embrace also the whole 
 scheme and system of things and persons that make 
 up what we know as the individual's environment. The 
 practical life is then the complex structure within 
 which the individual lives and moves and has his be- 
 ing. To describe it completely and in all its detail is 
 the purpose of what are called the social sciences; and 
 it is obvious that we cannot go into the detail of that 
 vast mass of learning. Yet it will be possible to state 
 
THE LIFE OF MIND 241 
 
 the principles of the practical life with sufficient ful- 
 ness that the matter will be made reasonably clear. 
 
 Let us begin with those aspects of life which as 
 practical have to do with the organization of indi- 
 vidual activities on the basis of the lower and more 
 original forms of imagination. This deals with what 
 are ordinarily called instincts, and they are described 
 commonly with a great deal of mystery. It would be 
 a commonplace to say that our human life, like that 
 of animals, begins in the exercise of a set of bodily 
 functions. The individual begins to develop his own 
 powers and capacities in the processes of eating and 
 sleeping and taking exercise which he performs, as we 
 say, by instinct. From the point of view of the or- 
 ganism the child "eats to live," that is, the purpose of 
 his eating is to recover the losses to his body oc- 
 casioned by his exercise in play, and to furnish those 
 surplus materials which make possible his growth. 
 This is the purpose which nature has in material goods 
 everywhere, to maintain life and to provide for growth. 
 And the mere question of having enough to eat and of 
 eating enough to live is looked after by those powers 
 which do not yet involve the consciousness, by the 
 forms of the imagination which are often described 
 as unconscious or subconscious. But when there arises 
 such a question as whether the boy is eating too much, 
 that is, is eating more than is necessary for the re- 
 storation of tissues worn down in play, or for the 
 proper requirements of growth, then there arises a real 
 practical question as to how the boy's eating can be 
 
242 THE LIFE OF MIND 
 
 properly adjusted to his play. Or, perhaps the boy is 
 playing too much, destroys his organism and his pow- 
 ers faster than he rebuilds them by proper eating. And 
 most likely his difficulty is not the adjustment of the 
 quantity of food to the amount of exercise, which his 
 instinct of hunger and his instinct to be active will 
 settle pretty much among themselves; but a question 
 of not getting the right amount and kind of nourish- 
 ment from the quantity of food which he eats. All 
 these matters, we say, are fairly well looked after by 
 instinct and nature; that is, each activity is looked 
 after by the appropriate instinct and is properly taken 
 care of by nature. But the one thing that nature and 
 instinct do not do is to adapt and adjust and apportion 
 the activities of life to each other and balance them 
 so as to produce the best results for the life as a whole. 
 Left to itself, any instinct will lead to excess, and to 
 excess in that form which we call vice; hunger, by it- 
 self, and as a mere instinct, leads to overeating; the 
 instinct for activity, by itself, leads to exhaustion and 
 needless waste of bodily strength. The lower imagina- 
 tive processes, that is, those dealing with life as it 
 were at its foundation, when left each to itself, is as 
 likely to destroy the life as to sustain it. Nor is there 
 anything in the instincts as mere instincts to guar- 
 antee that they will find the proper balance of their 
 activities in the interest of life as a whole. And yet, 
 somehow, we should know when we have followed the 
 eating instinct to the point where to go further would 
 endanger the proper functioning of the organism and 
 
THE LIFE OF MIND 243 
 
 thus the life of the individual. 
 
 There is then nothing in the instincts by themselves 
 to show at what point they should stop. The mere 
 perception of their object is not sufficient to control 
 their process. The mere sight of food is not enough 
 to stimulate us to eat, and it certainly does not tell 
 us when to stop eating. The control of instinct can- 
 not be left to perception as the most important of the 
 knowing or cognitive processes. People who "know 
 better" sometimes eat too much, if for no other rea- 
 son than that the food just looked so good they could 
 not resist. Nor can the control of instinct be safely 
 left to feeling. The feeling of fulness after eating can 
 be produced by drinking water or by blowing up a 
 baloon in the stomach through a tube which is passed 
 down the throat. There are in fact so many ways of 
 producing feelings that none of the feelings tell us 
 much about the life or the condition of the organism, 
 and what they seem to tell us often is wrong and 
 would lead us to harmful action just as readily as 
 beneficial action. A disturbance in the bowels often 
 is felt as a pain in the head. It often is not possible 
 to localize a feeling at all, and the doctors know of 
 many cases where a pain is referred to a part of the 
 organism which is not involved in disturbance of func- 
 tion or injury to structure at all. A young man once 
 remarked that he "did not know whether he was 
 hungry or had a back-ache," a difficulty which he 
 ascribed to his extreme slenderness. In this case the 
 young man was uncertain both as to the nature of 
 
244 THE LIFE OF MIND 
 
 the pain and as to its location; he did not know what 
 it was that he felt or where he felt it. So true is it 
 that pain or any feelings are indefinite in quality and 
 location that many good people say they are all un- 
 real and exist "only in the mind." This of course is 
 not true, but it shows how different are our interpreta- 
 tions of feelings and how unsafe they are as guides to 
 action. So instincts contain nothing in their own na- 
 ture that can control them and their application or 
 their interpretation. There is nothing in perception 
 or the ordinary processes of cognition which can suc- 
 cessfully show them their limits and bounds in the life 
 of the individual. And there is also nothing in the 
 feelings, however closely the feelings may be regarded 
 as connected with the instincts, which empowers them 
 to take charge of instinct in the interest either of the 
 mere maintenance of life or of the enrichment of life 
 which we hold to be the appropriate destiny of life. 
 We shall therefore have to look elsewhere for the type 
 of imaginative power which makes the sum of all our 
 instincts mean life and culture rather than excess and 
 quick destruction through abuse. 
 
 But before the discovery and description of the 
 powers whereby we direct instinct toward the ends of 
 life are undertaken, let us look more closely among 
 the instincts themselves. 
 
 We said by way of example that the instinct to 
 eat leads the individual to procure and devour food, 
 and that the instinct to activity leads the individual 
 to play. But since "no man liveth unto himself alone" 
 
THE LIFE OF MIND 245 
 
 the processes through which men procure food and the 
 activities in which they express the play instinct lead 
 them to think and act in concert and to enjoy the 
 results of the chase together. But the point we wish 
 to emphasize is that since the need for food and the 
 need for play occur simultaneously, and as separate 
 instincts involve pretty much the same forms of ac- 
 tion, the play process and the food-procuring proc- 
 ess become identified and the hunt becomes a game. 
 That is, the hunt for food is played out with the same 
 feeling accompaniments as is the play by itself. This 
 means that work becomes interesting, and for the first 
 time the direction which action is to take is determined 
 by the image of its end; that is, by the end as it sets 
 itself up in mind as interest previously to its accom- 
 plishment through action. In such activities we are 
 already miles beyond the simple "instincts" of eating, 
 etc., which we described above, and have got a start 
 toward an understanding of the practical life as it 
 appears in the experience of developed human beings. 
 The instincts then by virtue of the very complication 
 of our world all fall into the same types of active-ex- 
 pression, and in any thoroughgoing description the 
 breaking up of our primitive tendencies to feeling and 
 action would be altogether out of place and a falsifica- 
 tion of the facts. Once we see the influence of the 
 image of the end in the instinctive activities we are 
 prepared to understand many of the more complicated 
 experience forms. Why a bird will begin on a fine 
 spring day the activities which will keep him busy per- 
 
24h THE LIFE OF MIND 
 
 haps many days or even weeks in building a nest, the 
 "purpose" of which he does not "know"; why he 
 builds the nest invariably after a fixed pattern and in 
 the main of the same materials and in the same loca- 
 tion or kind of location; why he begins at the same 
 time to sing and to be "interested" in the perhaps 
 homely individual that will later share the nest with 
 him; why he in short carries on in a long complicated 
 process which reflective beings see to be controlled 
 throughout by purpose, and yet he himself gives no 
 evidence that he is conscious of any purpose; all this 
 on the theory of instincts is unintelligible and is the 
 proper subject matter for the song and story which 
 the "social psychologists" have spun out as its ex- 
 planation. What the psychologists have sensed by 
 their own primitive "instinct" is therefore right: It is 
 a matter of imagination. But this does not mean that 
 the psychologist should exercise and celebrate his own 
 imagination in a work of art, but should see that the 
 fact that he is trying to describe is in the bird as a 
 function of its image-forming "mind," that the fact 
 is the image or shadow which the future casts on the 
 present and which serves in the present as a plan. It 
 is beside the point to raise any questions of "con- 
 sciousness." What is there as fact is the complicated 
 situation- as-it -will-be operating now as the pattern 
 of what is becoming. To say that what as yet is not 
 does not exist or is not real, or has no effective in- 
 fluence upon what has been and what will be, is merely 
 to give expression to a very "primitive" time "in- 
 
THE LIFE OF MIND - 247 
 
 stinct." 
 
 Of course it is true that these simple facts, when 
 rightly misapprehended, make beautiful story ma- 
 terials, so readily do they take on the gorgeous dress 
 of fancy because of their imaginal basis; and the 
 psychologists, particularly the social variety, love to 
 sit in the dusky twilight under the owl and grandma 
 the rest of us into the peace and calm of intellectual 
 slumber. Perhaps they know, for they must know, 
 that good children should not be so wide awake as to 
 ask distracting questions when a good story is being 
 told, or when the story depends for its force upon its 
 continuity. But as they know, for they must know, 
 that there is a difference between the continuity of a 
 story and its continuousness; but that is a subtlety 
 which good children's minds should not be bothered 
 with. So on they go with the story of how a great 
 knight discovered yet another lurking instinct ; and an- 
 other; and how the great knight finally reflected that 
 it is easier to discover instincts by shaking the "classi- 
 fications" along with the appropriate hocus pocus, 
 since these thickets of bramble are the favorite haunts 
 of instincts and their refuge when in danger of being 
 caught. But the great knight knows not to enter the 
 thicket lest he lose his "vision," as .did the wondrous 
 wise man in our town. But it is not our purpose to 
 write a history of "mere" literature. 
 
 What we wish to assert is that the question of in- 
 stinct, when it means any intelligible thing, is a qaes- 
 lion of being careful and honest with the facts. 
 
248 - THE LIFE OF MIND 
 
 Let us now go on with the description of a more or 
 less complicated instinctive situation as it operates in 
 the life of a human being. Since the body of the in- 
 stinct in much of its area and activity lies outside the 
 human being with whom we normally connect it, our 
 description, if adequate, will be also a proper and full 
 account of the "social" aspect of instinct. We see at 
 once that the distinction between "individual" instincts 
 and "social" instincts already muddles the situation to 
 a point where no definite thing can be said about it. 
 We can therefore say what we have to say about in- 
 stinct as a basis of the practical life without any ref- 
 erence to the supposed distinction between individual 
 and social. 
 
 If this is so we can consider instinct as a fact with- 
 out giving it any locus at all. Instinct — whatever in- 
 stincts may turn out to be — is therefore simply an ob- 
 jective fact of an objective fact-order, and all the lum- 
 ber involved in connecting it with some specific aspect 
 of the life of men at some specific point has done noth- 
 ing but harm to our understanding of it as fact. Now, 
 if instinct does not require a site, or a locus, then all 
 the usual clap-trap by which its alleged operation 
 through tropism and reflex is effected is nonsense. Re- 
 flex is itself one fact within the instinct-whole, or is 
 one aspect of the fact instinct; but it is not an inert 
 mechanism through which instinct vents its mysteri- 
 ous force-agency of feeling, as is so often assumed. 
 Then, when we approach a human situation, our in- 
 dividual grows up under, and his characteristics are 
 
THE LIFE OF MIND 249 
 
 determined by, e. g., the institution of marriage and 
 the family rather than under the inner ache of sex, the 
 existence of which is discovered to him by and in the 
 institutions of life even before it as an instinct is ever 
 felt by him. Young human beings do not grow up 
 impelled by an irresistible desire or some inner in- 
 evitable urge to go seek out the opposite sex and thus 
 provide for the continuity of the race. Long before 
 the "instinct" of sex has asserted itself the boy and 
 girl have by play institutions mimicked the whole life 
 process of the race, including its idea forms, so that 
 later they enter the marriage relation largely by mere 
 habit, and, it may be, against the influence of sex "in- 
 stincts." 
 
 Then the part played by instinct in the life of man 
 is tremendously important, so important, in fact, that 
 it should be rescued from the "scientists" who know 
 nothing about it until they cut it up into bits and 
 then describe the bits in their bloody mutilation as if 
 they were the original facts. They place these bits 
 neatly end-to-end in a beautiful scheme representing 
 the life-history of either the individual, social, or "ra- 
 cial" forms — pay your money and take your choice — 
 or arrange them in attractive patterns — "action pat- 
 terns" — to represent the anatomical cross-section of 
 the life processes of either, again, the individual, social 
 "group" or race. For those who are in need of such 
 a commodity in the commerce of culture, there are na- 
 tional patterns that can be had in any color or de- 
 sign if you wish to pay the price. And, as I am told, 
 
250 THE LIFE OF MIND 
 
 assurances guaranteeing the permanence and "prepo- 
 tency" of any scheme of racial instincts or pattern 
 complexes are obtainable at so much per. This exer- 
 cising of the complicative imagination upon instinct 
 has reached a stage where, as I believe, it should be 
 recognized as one of the fine arts, and enjoyed in the 
 same way that we do not require to understand other 
 forms of artistic products; and I suggest in the inter- 
 est of "our" culture that some foundation be estab- 
 lished to protect its producers against the old age of 
 reflection which would, if they should reach it, play 
 havoc with the delicate products of their artistic 
 genius. 
 
 Instinct is then the simple fact that the life history 
 of man has become institutionally organized within 
 the process of his life. The fact that the sexes have 
 co-operated historically, and not merely biologically, 
 in the continuity of the race, is now an organized 
 necessity in the life of the individual; and, on evolu- 
 tional principles, it is because of this historical ar- 
 rangement in the species life that the sex functions 
 are an organic necessity in the lives of individual or- 
 ganisms. One aspect of the "instinct" of beauty is 
 the organization in the life of the individual of the 
 historical necessity of shelter as it operated institu- 
 tionally in building houses. Even the more "primi- 
 tive" biological ''instincts," such as fear, anger, etc., 
 as they operate in the life of a modern human being, 
 are the organized aspects of historical wont, and it is 
 the superstition which holds to the unsubstantially of 
 
THE LIFE OF MIND 251 
 
 historically determined institutions which connects 
 them with the organism rather than with the histori- 
 cally institutionalized aspects of the species. It is, j 
 therefore, nonsense to classify instincts and to try to 
 find for each a particularized point of continuity with 
 either the organism or the mind, for in such concep- 
 tions both organism and mind become abstractions be- 
 cause of the paucity of their substantial relations. If 
 instincts must be classified because we do not yet 
 know how to adapt our scientific methods to the facts, 
 then they should have to be classified according to 
 their specific, i. e., their species-indicating, characters, 
 according to the reference they make to historically 
 institutionalized aspects of the species-life. 
 
 So far as the practical character can be described in 
 terms of instincts, it is the order of species-tendencies 
 as they determine the characteristic modes of think- 
 ing, feeling, and willing in the life of the individual. 
 I say it is the order of life as it determines the modes 
 of thinking, feeling, and action; but this does not 
 mean that the life of the individual is predetermined 
 in the accidents of his past. All it means is that in 
 so far as the individual thinks, feels, acts, history has 
 already laid out the directions which he must follow, 
 otherwise there would be no possibility that the life 
 of the individual could be made practically consistent 
 with the life of other individuals, and the traditional 
 superstitions about conflict and struggle as the law 
 of life would be true; whereas the fact is that life is 
 historically adapted to the compossibility and the har- 
 
252 THE LIFE OF MIND 
 
 monious mutual carrying out of life purposes by indi- 
 viduals, and such struggle as there is — and it is too 
 crudely real — is the outcome of our theories about 
 struggle. The practical character, then, as instinctive, 
 if it must be described in terms of its fragmentary 
 parts, is the ordered whole of those tendencies to ac- 
 tion, feeling and thought which are automatically his- 
 torically organized in our life as the fundamentals of 
 the relations among individuals and their world. It 
 is the plane prepared by historical activity upon which 
 our actions may be made effectually real; it is the 
 background built up by history in its mind activities 
 against which our image-plans may be mirrored as 
 memory-forms, so that thought may be substantiated; 
 it is the mass of portent which the whole of history 
 vaguely presents as the felt undefined wholeness of 
 the world in which we think and act, the emotional 
 nebula in which thought and action carve out the 
 solid realities of life. 
 
 Instinct then means order. It means order as 
 grounded and substantiated in historic wont. But as 
 instinct, and as a separate and classifiable fact of life, 
 it is order vague and unspecified, order as yet not 
 erected in the harmony of life to the state of free sym- 
 metry and balance. It is for this reason that instinct 
 may be said to be "blind," and that there may be at- 
 tributed to it that inevitableness and fatality which 
 makes of it for the ordinary person a complete and 
 sufficient explanation of every other fact of life. Thus 
 to say of a mode of thought or behavior that it is 
 
THE LIFE OF MIND 253 
 
 "instinctive" means that ordinarily nothing else can 
 or need be said of it. It is the blind ultimate to 
 which all things are referred. It is also this fact that 
 makes the subject so difficult of strictly unprejudiced 
 discussion. It asserts itself in its own defense when 
 made the subject of discussion, and usually wins the 
 argument. As organized in the individual life it is 
 the set of general skills to which his organism and 
 his mind are predisposed by his historic position in 
 the human species. It is the heritage of race accom- 
 plishment upon which the individual stands as he 
 reaches out into the possible in the effort to make his- 
 tory actual in the concrete present, as that present is 
 presented to him in the perceptive and imaginal as- 
 pects of a world considered as environment and ma- 
 terial. It is the species operating in the individual to 
 perpetuate itself, the universal groping blindly to in- 
 dividualize itself in the particular. It is this prima 
 facie immediate aspect of the particular which appeals 
 to the scientific mind, and deceives the scientist into 
 believing that he can begin with it as crude presented 
 fact and then work backward to the universal. But 
 such procedure merely ends with the general, the ab- 
 stract average of fact which finds contact with re- 
 ality at no specific point. Hence the particular of sci- 
 ence is never individualized, and remains the abstract 
 form of the real which the scientist loves so well to 
 display in its mathematical perfection as the exact but 
 empty specimen of quantity. It is for this reason thai 
 science can never in its exact mathematical formalism 
 
254 THE LIFE OF MIND 
 
 attain to the function of a philosophy. It is for this 
 reason that a scientific account of instinct will never 
 issue in an acceptable formulation of instinct as a func- 
 tion of the life of mind. Its account of instinct will 
 remain forever a biological story of tropism and re- 
 flex; but it will never be able to make biology a com- 
 plete account of life, even of those aspects of life 
 which give form and meaning to the organism. That 
 such is recognized by biologists is shown by their re- 
 cent tendency to appeal to psychological considera- 
 tions; but to those biologists who see psychology as a 
 mere transcript of physics as applied to moving mat- 
 ter, there begins to appear the necessity to appeal to 
 the speculative logic of imagination to furnish to their 
 science the concepts with which alone it will be pos- 
 sible to make their science a valid account of life. 
 
 It is through the appeal to the practical character 
 that the real logic of reality begins to dawn upon us. 
 It was the abortive and fleeting instinctive glimpse of 
 this truth that gave pragmatism its momentary vogue. 
 But pragmatism was unwilling (to avoid the harsher 
 but truer word) to follow up this glimpse with the 
 logic which would have elevated it to the clear light 
 of the speculative imagination, where the necessity to 
 formulate it in universal terms would have disclosed 
 the philosophy of instinct in the doctrine of historic 
 institutionalism. How near it came in a few fitful 
 gleams is shown in the tremendous but tragically futile 
 effort to force the idea of the specific to do duty for 
 the universal of logic. This the greatest of the prag- 
 
THE LIFE OF MIND 255 
 
 matists, in an effort which for honesty will become a 
 model for future philosophy, but which for want of 
 synoptic imaginative vision will be cited as the tragic 
 defeat of the age of practical individualism, has at- 
 tempted in the experimental hope that universality 
 might be caught in the confines of the merely par- 
 ticular (situation) and thus be identified with the 
 ultimate simple of scientific method. But the attempt 
 overlooked the fact that specificity is an abstract sym- 
 bol, and merely isolates by negation those aspects of 
 the universal that perception and the merely cognitive 
 capacities of mind can identify with the particular. 
 What exactly was overlooked was, in positive terms, 
 the fact that the real meaning of specific is the mean- 
 ing which it carries in the philosophy of evolution, 
 that is, species forming, or species indicating; and its 
 significance as such is not to catch the universal or 
 the real in the this of presented reality, but to symbol- 
 ize the fact that the this logically implies a that as 
 the weight of imaginal suggestiveness which the par- 
 ticular carries of the whole as real or of the real as 
 wholeness. 
 
 The practical character is the Individuality. But 
 as the practical character appears here it is not the 
 wielder of tools transformative of one specific situa- 
 tion into another specific situation indefinitely; it is 
 not the apotheosis of mere process. As practical, then," 
 it does not imply use of tools, but organized control of 
 tools; not the mere utility which repeats itself indefi- 
 nitely, but the rational institutionalized usage which 
 
256 THE LIFE OF MINT) 
 
 issues in ends. The rest of this chapter will illustrate. 
 The practical character is the Person with all his 
 various sorts of capacities and powers. The long dis- 
 cussion of instinct has shown us how manifold and 
 various are the powers which the person possesses. It 
 is in a truly literal sense that we can say that the nor- 
 mal person of the present possesses all the powers ever 
 developed in the history of the race. Within the in- 
 stitutions under the influence of which he uncon- 
 sciously grows up. there are all the powers and poten- 
 cies ever developed by his ancestry, and these powers 
 are at his disposal the moment he learns to use them. 
 The development and training which the person gets 
 or should get in the training of the home, the school, 
 the shop, in all the connections which surround his 
 life as he grows up, should put at his disposal all these 
 powers, and his teaching should show him for what 
 purposes they are to be used. Preserved in the insti- 
 tutions of life are the successful ways of controlling 
 things in the interest of persons, as well as the methods 
 whereby persons may unite in the control of things in 
 the interest of the good of the whole. It is not argued 
 of course that the individual's whole life and capacity 
 are to be found ready-made for him to put on as he 
 puts on a coat, but the conditions are there at his dis- 
 posal and for his use. It is for him to learn how to 
 use them successfully, and how to know for what pur- 
 poses to use them. This indicates the importance of 
 the study of psychology and the whole of human na- 
 ture. There lies hidden in our own natures powers 
 
THE LIFE OF MIND 
 
 the existence of which we do not know, and which we 
 do not know how to use when they are discovered. It 
 is at this point that much of our training is wasted, 
 for we spend our time and energy often in the dis- 
 covery of our "inner powers/' in making ourselves 
 merely able to do a lot of things. That we should use 
 our abilities is a vigorous and intelligent way is not 
 so often taught us. Or, it often is pointed out that 
 we should, after we have discovered our capacities, 
 learn to use them vigorously for our own ends and pur- 
 poses, without as yet knowing what our real purposes 
 are. It is as important to know what purposes are 
 important as to know how to accomplish them. And 
 many a vigorous person is wasting his powers just be- 
 cause he is spending them upon purposes which will 
 do him no good whatever. A man with the capacity to 
 organize a community for the production of something 
 useful should not spend his time and energy watching 
 a peanut roaster and selling bags of peanuts to the 
 passersby. But just that happens frequently and will 
 continue to happen until human powers are more pur- 
 posefully organized in .the community life. 
 
 The secret of success, then, in so far as success de- 
 pends upon our own personal efforts, lies in knowing 
 just what our purposes are. just what we can and 
 should do with them, and the things we can do that 
 are most worth while. Psychology can do something 
 to acquaint us with our own mental powers and 
 capacities, and to suggest to us the directions within 
 which thev can be used. When we learn, for instance, 
 
258 THE LIFE OF MIND 
 
 of the existence of the power of suggestive persuasion, 
 we know that we have or can have a strong and wide 
 influence over other persons, provided that we at the 
 same time learn how to use it. But the influence may 
 be good or bad, may be for our good or for other peo- 
 ple's harm, and we should know the nature of the re- 
 sults we may expect from wielding the influence be- 
 fore we undertake to use the capacity very widely. 
 It would hardly do to create a panic in the minds of 
 a group of people when you want them to act in a 
 certain way. for the panicky state of mind may cause 
 them to act in a dozen ways that would be harmful 
 to everybody concerned. The factory operator may, 
 through suggestive influence, organize his workers to 
 a point of unheard-of efficiency, but if he does it in a 
 way to incur their fear or hatred he is planting a 
 dangerous explosive force within his factory which 
 may some day destroy the whole works. 
 
 The basis of the individual's powers lies in the mass 
 of inherited tendencies which make up the structure 
 of both his body and his mind. But these powers are 
 worse than useless unless they are organized and set 
 to work in the interest of worth-while ends. It is then 
 the intelligence that turns out to be the most impor- 
 tant of our capacities, and it is worth while to show 
 the nature of the intelligence and its work in the life 
 of the practical character. By most people, even by 
 those who claim to be expert in such matters, intelli- 
 gence is identified with that keenness or that sharp- 
 ness of wits which enables us to do delicate or intri- 
 
THE LIFE OF MIND 259 
 
 cate technical things, or else it is identified with the 
 quickness with which the individual responds to sug- 
 gestions. They would have us believe that the man 
 that understands the works of the watch and can re- 
 pair its delicate machinery is necessarily intelligent. 
 Or, the man who sticks upon some one little unimpor- 
 tant thing until he makes some money out of it is 
 said to show just by his dogged persistence a great 
 intelligence in spite of the fact that what he does is 
 of no importance. A man may know only the works 
 of the watch or how to sell hair pins in great quan- 
 tities, or to invent a lemon squeezer, and still be not 
 only ignorant of many more important things, but also 
 generally stupid on just the questions where his own 
 interests lie. If I know no more about my world than 
 is connected with selling hairpins or corkscrews, I 
 cannot possibly avoid acting stupidly and even dis- 
 astrously in some connections, for I cannot possibly 
 live in the world at all without getting involved in 
 many wider relations. This is the reason why so very 
 often the man who makes a great success of some 
 thing and gets the reputation of possessing great in- 
 telligence also gets into jail or falls into disgrace just 
 because he knows only his own little business. Then 
 it does not seem that intelligence consists in the sharp 
 and keen and narrow capacity which only knows how 
 to do its little technical thing, for this kind of knowl- 
 edge often leads to disaster, and we do not like to 
 think of the intelligence as the capacity for getting 
 into trouble. Rather we think of it as the capacity 
 
260 THE LIFE OF MIND 
 
 through which we fit ourselves into our world in such 
 a way that things all run smoothly and successfully, 
 and we get done some of the things we want to do. We 
 think of it as the capacity which shows us what to do 
 under given circumstances, but. which also shows us 
 not only in particular cases, but in general what we 
 should not do and why we should not do it. Thus it 
 gives us some notion of the comparative worth of dif- 
 ferent things, how things may be given their value 
 places in our life system as a whole. 
 
 But how does the intelligence distinguish between 
 the things we should do and the things we should not 
 do if we wish to live successful lives? Often the things 
 that occur to us as worth-while things to do are so 
 complicated and involved that we cannot make head 
 or tail of them. Many times what seems the thing to 
 do involves a thousand other things and persons over 
 which you have no control, involves so great a com- 
 plexity of circumstances that it seems impossible to 
 do it at all, even if it really ought to be done. Again, 
 a thing that occurs to you as requiring to be done 
 often involves things and events that have never hap- 
 pened, and which cannot happen for many years 
 hence, things which you perhaps cannot make happen 
 if you wanted to. Your going through with your plan 
 'may have to wait, for instance, until some child grows 
 up to be a man, or it may have to wait until two peo- 
 ple who are now enemies become friends. If you are 
 a young man making twenty dollars a week and see 
 your opportunity to take a place that will make you 
 
THE LIFE OF MIND 261 
 
 five times as much money; if you have to work six 
 months before this better job pays you anything at 
 all after you take it, and if you are supporting a 
 widowed mother or keeping a sister in school; if you 
 cannot borrow enough money to live on through the 
 first six months; when situations like that present 
 themselves to you, your knowledge of how to run a 
 peanut roaster will not tell you what to do. You can 
 of course say that you will take the better job and 
 risk finding some way to make it through the six 
 months without pay; but suppose you get sick, or 
 your mother has become disabled in trying to help 
 you, and needs a doctor. It is evident that in most 
 of the situations of life our keenness or shrewdness 
 along some narrow line will help us not one whit. 
 Every important situation in life where our mind is 
 concerned is one where we have to look before and 
 after, to judge the various possible circumstances and 
 results before they have happened, to understand re- 
 lations and things we never saw before, in fact where 
 we have to pass a general judgment upon a set of 
 facts that is so big that we can't see it all. That is 
 to say, the practical life presents us with big problems 
 which call for our knowing many things, and of being 
 able to put the multitude of things together in some 
 way that will enable us to use them. As things are 
 in this world they are not immediately useful, and 
 are made usable only by putting them together in the 
 mind into great systems upon which we can depend 
 when we have to make plans and find the means for 
 
262 THE LIFE OF MIND 
 
 carrying them out. Intelligence, then, is not the spe- 
 cialized narrow technical capacity, not the sharp lit- 
 tle power which works in a narrow groove so that it 
 can only come out in a specified place. Intelligence 
 is rather the big comprehensive capacity to put things 
 together into big systems which will help us to define 
 our ideas over big areas of fact and over long stretches 
 of time. 
 
 Intelligence then is the special capacity of the per- 
 sonality, and it does not refer to a person's capacity 
 to do one thing. The intelligent man can do many 
 things equally well, and everything he does or will 
 undertake to do he does well. So that the intelligent 
 man is rarely faced with a situation where he is lim- 
 ited to doing only one thing; the very complexity of 
 the situation suggests to his broad mind many things 
 which he can do, and he is never forced, as the "keen" 
 man often is, to do the thing he knows to be wrong 
 or things which he knows in advance will come out 
 badly. This is the reason so many successful prac- 
 tical men have something for which they must apolo- 
 gize; they know so few things that they really know 
 nothing well, consequently when a complex situation 
 is presented, they have a very narrow choice and often 
 are compelled by circumstances to do the wrong thing. 
 
 The practical character is then the intelligence 
 broadened and enlarged and expanded to the point 
 where it comprehends all sorts of capacities in one 
 great mass of power. But not only does it possess 
 many capacities and greater power, the one thing that 
 
THE LIFE OF MEN J) 263 
 
 distinguishes it above everything else in the world is 
 its capacity to know the best of a number of possible 
 things. It is the mind power which knows the long- 
 run good, the thing that is better than other things. 
 To know in this way it must know very many things 
 in their relations; it knows the best always by know- 
 ing the comparatively better. The intelligence is the 
 mind that knows the whole, and what to do to 
 alize it. 
 
 :he 
 re- 
 
CHAPTER XXX. 
 
 (II) THE SOCIAL OR CORPORATE CHARACTER. 
 
 There is no great difficulty in understanding the 
 practical or productive character so long as it is con- 
 sidered as alone in a world of things with which it 
 can do as it pleases. When we look at the practical 
 character as a Robinson Crusoe which can use in 
 whatever way it sees fit whatever it can find on its 
 island, the life-scheme for it is simple. If Robinson's 
 stool does not suit him he can throw it into the sea or 
 burn it up, and if the goat becomes unruly or inter- 
 feres with his purposes in anyway he can kill it and 
 eat it or dispose of it in any other way to suit his 
 fancy. But when Robinson had to deal with Friday 
 he found his range of action more limited, and his 
 freedom in disposing things more and more curtailed, 
 and his "will" more and more curbed by the mere 
 existence on the island of another person. He had 
 to come to some sort of terms with Friday, and even, 
 no doubt, had to make some concessions to the goat, 
 if he wanted to be sure that he would get his plans 
 all to come out as he desired that they should come 
 out in every case. When, therefore, we consider a 
 man as if he and his purposes were alone in a world 
 by themselves, and when we consider that we are un- 
 der obligations only to see that his plans all come 
 out without let or hindrance from anyone or any- 
 
THE LIFE OF MIND 265 
 
 thing, the problems of his practical life become sim- 
 ple — but unfortunately too simple. So simple indeed 
 are such accounts of the relations of the practical 
 character that they fail hopelessly in giving anything 
 like a correct account of the facts, and this failure 
 has been responsible for most of the very great deal 
 of error with which the theory of the practical life is 
 afflicted. For most purposes we suppose that an in- 
 dividual man goes about his individual affairs and 
 holds his own individual relations with other people 
 and other things, both the other things and the other 
 people being considered as just as completely indi- 
 vidualized and cut off to themselves as the man him- 
 self. And we have constructed whole systems of de- 
 scription of these supposed facts, and to each of the 
 systems we have given the exalted name of a science. 
 When our Mr. Man buys and sells and produces and 
 consumes goods, or corners them in the stock market, 
 or in the process of distribution, we tend to think of 
 him as alone in the world with his wheat or cotton 
 and as innocently tossing it here and there as a child 
 will scatter and collect its play-blocks. And just as 
 innocently we think of the mass of money which he 
 "makes" in the process as being due to a transforma- 
 tion which Mr. Man through his business "acumen" 
 has been able to bring about in the wheat, that is, we 
 think of his having presto-changed the wheat into 
 money. The stock exchange, the group of bankers, 
 the bucket-shop artists and plungers, the grain dealers' 
 association and "the" mystical farmer as producer. 
 
266 THE LIFE OF MIND 
 
 arc all in our mind merely as somehow adjuncts to 
 or conditions or qualities of the wheat which he so 
 astutely scoops into a bag of gold. In the same way 
 we think of Mr. Man's "ethics" as the way he feels 
 toward and behaves to other people, but his behavior 
 and feelings are, in our minds, just nothing but private 
 and absolute possessions of his own "character," which 
 originate in and project themselves out of his char- 
 acter in pretty much the same way that flies are born 
 in and issue forth from a can of garbage. That is, 
 we do not think of his ethics as involving real rela- 
 tions with other persons and things, but as somehow 
 belonging innately in his nature and making connec- 
 tions with other persons and things after they have 
 issued from his soul ready-made. He then as a moral 
 being is the octopus who is born in and comes to full 
 maturity in the great open sea, and after maturity of 
 his tentacles has been reached, the tentacles reach out 
 and catch onto what they will; and when they will 
 they loose themselves from one connection and attach 
 themselves in another. Mr. Man is unbound in a 
 boundless and untenanted sea. If there are other be- 
 ings of his kind in his w r orld they are treated as any 
 other object useful to him would be; he makes them 
 into food and shelter for himself; their life's blood he 
 converts into the wine of ambition for himself; their 
 souls and characters are made the instruments of his 
 whim. We fall down and worship this monstrosity 
 and call him neither Bobus nor Baal, but the great 
 Economic Man and the spiritualized Moral Individual. 
 
THE LIFE OF MIND 267 
 
 In our common everyday speech we call him the suc- 
 cessful business man. 
 
 But it is evident to anyone who has not been 
 "trained" in economic and ethical thought that such 
 a being, or rather the exalted qualities we attribute to 
 it, are a myth; not the harmless or mildly malevolent 
 sort that has grown up in other types of mere litera- 
 true, but a real giant of the ogrish type who, although 
 we do not clearly see it, takes his toll of human life 
 every day. But there will some day come the great 
 prophet who will tell the story of the Myth of the 
 Lonely Man in such plain language that we cannot 
 any longer fail to see the hideous visage and fright- 
 ful mein of man reduced to a technological instru- 
 ment who goes up and down in this world without 
 ruth or reck and destroys with the blight of his vaunted 
 goodness. The man, therefore, who gets described in 
 these connections is not the practical man, not the 
 human being as he lives and works and plays and 
 sings and worships with and among and in his fellows; 
 but the technical man, the man as he slaves and plans 
 and schemes and manufactures his little tools away 
 from and with no regard or respect to or of the other 
 manikins who occupy the parts of his world he has 
 not yet claimed for himself. The "man" who becomes 
 the hero of economic and ethical individualism is, 
 therefore, not the man of practice, the man as he ex- 
 presses himself and his world in the activities that 
 sustain and maintain him and his world, but the 
 "man" of technique, the human being stripped of 
 
268 THE LIFE OF MINI) 
 
 everything unique and human and reduced to the 
 status and condition of an instrument to the produc- 
 tion of an extra-human good. It is not in this case 
 the man who freely fashions the product and dedicates 
 it to his life and its purposes, but the product that 
 fashions and standardizes the man after the form and 
 pattern of its wooden self, man's Mfe and purposes be- 
 ing stripped off and cast aside as waste. The "man" 
 therefore from this point of view is the apotheosis of 
 the tool, the instrument specialized to the point where 
 it is instrumental only to itself — a material contra- 
 diction. It is not surprising, therefore, that the tool- 
 life should have produced its tool-philosophy and 
 have attempted to embrace the contradiction which it 
 is into the scheme of the universe. Thus does the 
 tool-philosophy strangle itself in the hard and cold life- 
 less atmosphere of abstract utility; it has believed its 
 lie and is damned. 
 
 But this ideal of the practical man does not down 
 easily even after it is choked out by the logic of con- 
 tradiction. It, like all falsity, is the truth when the 
 truth becomes dissatisfied with its plain garment of 
 universal applicability and requires the gaudy color of 
 specific appliedness. It ignores real practical usage in 
 the interest of mere phenomenal usefulness; the usage 
 which is organized into the very core of reality for the 
 merely apparent and superficial usableness of tem- 
 porary expediency. Yet it sees truly that man's 
 striving, in which his life is most readily and imme- 
 diately apparent and understandable, is the cord which 
 
THE LIFE OF MIND 269 
 
 connects him with his sustenance in the mother-uni- 
 verse. But it does not see that it is the connection 
 which maintains the cord itself, and not the cord that 
 maintains the connection, and that his striving must 
 remain within the area which this diameter lays out 
 for him; that the mere abstract striving cannot com- 
 pass the whole of his universe of purpose, and must 
 itself be determined by characters of the whole other 
 than itself. But there is no need to go into the in 
 tricacies of theory to see the suicide of the technical 
 man. He is destroying himself and the tools which 
 his world requires in that very striving by which he 
 hopes to maintain himself and his world. It is thus 
 in the facts of actual life where this aspiring striving 
 has become a divisive and driving strife that its false- 
 hood is most easily seen. 
 
 Thus, in the world of practical business which our 
 pseudo-science has built up for us in the strife-system 
 in its perfection, the very demand for life itself is con- 
 verted into both the tool to and the justification of 
 universal destruction. Under the pretense of pro- 
 ducing goods, it has become the great consumer and 
 destroyer of the good; therefore, there is no rule 
 whereby the values of goods can be determined or ap- 
 portioned to each other or to the ends of life. Its law 
 of positive and active strife has been the principle or 
 rule of distribution or apportionment by which the 
 various values of life are apportioned to the various 
 destroying whims of the monster-consumer, the mon- 
 strosity which has itself been regarded as the pro- 
 
 
270 THE LIFE OF MIND 
 
 ducing agent both of goods and of the good. The most 
 strictly organized and technical of the aspects of the 
 strife process, advertising, has become the tool whereby 
 the life-process itself has been beguiled and betrayed 
 into the destructive snare of the strife-system, and 
 there is, in the business world, only so much left of 
 the life-mind as is necessary to destroy the conditions 
 upon which it itself rests. Thus man in the interest 
 of technical safety has gone into the cave and has 
 sealed up the entrance. But where no one goes in 
 none either come out; and the fancied goods we 
 thought to preserve are buried forever. Our so-called 
 commercial system, then, instead of supplying us with 
 the instruments of life which we need, doles us out as 
 living sacrifices to the great Tool. 
 
 There is a practical life that is real and good and 
 true, and that is non-instrumental and endful and 
 personal and of the spirit; that is constituted of the 
 activities of real persons, in which human ends find 
 their fulfillment; and this practical life is consistent 
 with the real purposes of Man. 
 
 Let us try to make clear to ourselves this real prac- 
 tical life — the life in which ends are attained. We 
 have just seen that to arrive at the truth of this life 
 we must strip away the falsity and rubbish of re- 
 spectable superstition with which it has been muddled 
 into our minds. It seems queer that after preaching 
 to ourselves for two thousand years a real personal 
 philosophy of the good life we have allowed ourselves 
 to develop and believe and act upon a philosophy of 
 
THE LIFE OF MIND 271 
 
 strife. And it cannot be accredited to us if the real 
 essence of the personalized spirit persisted in main- 
 taining, even against the world of tools, the body 
 through which it sustains what of good there may yet 
 be in our world. So the personalized good even now 
 persists as the law and substance of the good, and it 
 persists without the help which it should have from 
 the intelligence of man. 
 
 What, then, is the form of the good, and how are 
 we to recognize it? How in the welter and confusion 
 of tools can we yet see the liuing person going about 
 the maintenance of the good? 
 
 The problem is one of analyzing and understand- 
 ing the fact. This assumes, of course, that the facts 
 have not been met squarely and honestly face to face, 
 but have been manhandled by our twists of mind 
 through which we have approached them. The Rob- 
 inson Crusoe theory of practical relations, taking it 
 for granted that a man lives complete in himself and 
 in his own little circumscribed world by himself is but 
 the twist of mind that makes our real world unreal. 
 Even under the impossible conditions of the Crusoe 
 island the description of the relations of persons and 
 things is false to the facts it succeeds in seeing, and 
 there are many real relations even in this simple 
 situation that the description fails to see at all. First 
 as to the mistakes which this point of view makes with 
 respect to the facts which it sees. It is true that the 
 individual man holds some kind of peculiar claim on 
 the relations which obtain between him and the things 
 
272 THE LIFE OF MIND 
 
 and persons with which they at the other end con- 
 nect. The individual can claim that these relations 
 are his. and that they proceed out of his very being 
 as an individual. And it is true that to a very im- 
 portant extent he can determine the thing or person 
 to which these relations shall attach. If I feel the 
 urge of generosity which leads me to action it is un- 
 deniably I that feel it: and I am aware that it is out 
 my life that the urge flows. And I can, under limita- 
 tion, determine the being upon whom the urge as a 
 a practical fact shall »fall, and can transfer its overt 
 expression along with its inner trend from one being 
 to another. It is these and other facts of similar sorts 
 that make up what I can claim as myself; they form 
 the center around which those assurances which fur- 
 nish me the substantiality upon which I depend as 
 an active being all converge. But this inward turn 
 of such facts toward a central unity, while it consti- 
 tutes perhaps the most important aspect of the facts. 
 in the matter of the understanding oj the practical 
 life may. nay, must, be largely ignored. The practical 
 aspects of these facts of human relations reach out- 
 ward, and while they constitute the principle of the 
 personality, it is not the isolated personality that they 
 intend, but the personality as the outivard and objee- 
 t'ree law of human unity as embodied in life-insti- 
 tutions. 
 
 That it is not the inward reference of relations in 
 personal life that constitutes the real practical char- 
 acter is shown by a few simple descriptive remarks. 
 
THE LIFE OF MIND 273 
 
 If I claim complete and exclusive interest in the gen- 
 erosity which I express toward another, then we 
 unanimously say that the relation is not generosity, 
 but selfishness in some form. If I relieve a suffering 
 pers'on just because his suffering pains me, then we 
 say that my action was not really good and generous, 
 but calculated to my own pleasure rather than to the 
 other person's good. So if I take too much interest 
 in my actions, however good the actions might in 
 themselves and otherwise be, the relations which I 
 thereby establish between myself and other persons 
 are not real personal relations, not relations which 
 we judge as right, but which tend to prevent myself 
 and other persons from coming into that agreement 
 and understanding which makes life human in this 
 world. But, on the other hand, let us consider the 
 case where it is not I that takes too much interest in 
 my action, but another person who seeks to profit spe- 
 cially in some way from my action. If another person 
 gets the benefit of my generosity and enjoys it, he 
 may not be content to accept and enjoy my good-will 
 when it pleases me to extend it to him, but may set 
 about finding the means to induce me to extend him 
 generosity. We say then that the relation is not real, 
 for the other person is trying to take advantage of me 
 in his own interest. If he can succeed in making me 
 feel generous toward him at all times, then I am in 
 his power, he has made a tool of me and will prob- 
 ably use me consistently for his own purposes. This 
 is the way that our "philanthropists," the most im- 
 
274 THE LIFE OF MIND 
 
 perious and irresponsible of the destroyers of men, 
 attain the great power which they often wield in their 
 own interest. The power is "merely" psychological, 
 exerted, that is, through our own subjective feelings 
 toward them, but it is none the less real on that 
 account, and its effects are not subjective nor psycho- 
 logical in any sense, but sufficiently objective to mean 
 annihilation and ruin to many a mind-life. 
 
 So we must not lose sight of the conclusion that is 
 forced upon us by all these considerations. It is that 
 whenever we look upon a human relation jrom the 
 point of view of either of the persons between which 
 it holds the relation becomes unreal, and shows "bad" 
 traits in the practical characters of the persons con- 
 cerned. Then we have this further striking result: 
 Human relations are not intelligible when interpreted 
 in terms of the persons involved, but must be con- 
 sidered by themselves and as if they were real when 
 they do not hold between persons at all. 
 
 It is this peculiar quality among human relations 
 by virtue of which they can stand alone and be real 
 and important even when they are considered as not 
 holding between human beings, that makes them so 
 difficult. 
 
 The essential fact of the practical life is that it is 
 constituted entirely of outside relations to and amon% 
 persons and things. When we examine these rela- 
 tions as flowing from the spontaneity of any person, 
 that person ceases to be a true and real person. In 
 the same way, when we look at practical relations 
 
THE LIFE OF MIND 275 
 
 from the point of view at which they impinge on a 
 person, that person also loses his personality and be- 
 comes an unreal tool. These relations cannot be 
 accounted for, then, by either of the persons between 
 which they hold. But they are still personal rela- 
 tions, and as such must be regarded as real. Then 
 what can be done except to detach the relation from 
 the persons and constitute it independently of its con- 
 nections in specific substantial points? 
 
 There are two ways out of the difficulty, and we 
 are going to take both of them. This implies, of 
 course, that they will both come out at the same 
 place. One way out is this: These relations stand 
 on their own feet, are real by themselves, and can be 
 described as such. The other way out is this: // 
 these relations are personal, and do not proceed from 
 either of the persons between which they hold, then, 
 there must be another person hidden somewhere which 
 we have not seen. Now since we are on the adventure 
 we are going farther into the cold gray. In the con- 
 nection with the first way out we are going to say 
 that practical relations can only be understood when 
 taken independently of ordinary natural persons. And 
 in connection with the other way, we are saying that 
 there is a superpersonal person involved in every 
 practical relation, whether that relation be selling a 
 carrot or saluting a saint.. Or, negatively, no human 
 relations involve two persons only. 
 
 The job we have on our hands now is to make clear 
 if we can what these statements mean. The state- 
 
270 THE LIFE OF MIND 
 
 merits may be reduced to two: that practical rela- 
 tions are objective although personal; that, although 
 personal, and as personal, they belong to other per- 
 sons than those commonly recognized. 
 
 With respect to the first of these propositions, 
 almost enough has been said already to carry our 
 point. It has been shown that when a personal rela- 
 tion is attributed in any special way to either of the 
 natural persons between which it holds, it turns out 
 that the person loses just those characters by virtue of 
 which we are in the habit of calling him a person. It 
 reduces a natural object to a conventional tool. Not 
 only so, but when the terms between which the rela- 
 tion holds lose their specific and characteristic qual- 
 ity, the relation itself loses its peculiar tying quality 
 as a bond among facts, and becomes an abstraction. 
 This shows that while the relation is not valid and 
 real, except in the presence of persons, yet, in the 
 presence of persons, the persons lose their distinctive 
 marks. The only way out then is to assume another 
 person. As proof of these facts we need only cite the 
 so-called economic relation as a case where the rela- 
 tion is not only meaninglessly abstract, but where 
 the persons involved, the "economic men," are simple 
 myths of the economist's imagination, in spite of the 
 efforts made to show that the relations involved in 
 such cases are "psychological" relations. Or, a still 
 more striking case is furnished by religion. Religion 
 is essentially a matter of personal relations, and such 
 in their primitive simplicity are very prominent in the 
 
THE LIFE OF MIND 277 
 
 origins of all religions. It thus seems to be of the 
 essence of religion to lie close to the inward intimacy 
 of the personality, and it is this which gives it its 
 reality and power. But when it comes, as it always 
 does come, to be interpreted as some form of special- 
 ized relation between one individual of the finite 
 world and one individual of the spiritual world, then 
 the relation takes on the abstractness of privacy and 
 invariably gets expressed in terms of the interests of 
 the parties concerned. So in the Hebrew religion the 
 first pure experience of the religious sort was in the 
 family tie; later it became a matching of interests 
 between the Hebrews and their God which got ex- 
 pressed, in terms almost as crude as those of a busi- 
 ness contract, in the covenant. In the latter case the 
 relation is a pure abstraction, is perhaps recognized 
 by -both parties as such, and evasion of it through a 
 technicality which either party could invent to pro- 
 tect its interests could very well be regarded as right 
 and necessary. Thus practical relations are not inter- 
 pretable in terms of the persons between which thev 
 hold. When the attempt is made thus to interpret 
 them, not only do the persons concerned lose their 
 characters, but the relation itself ceases to be the 
 specific thing that it must be shown to be in order to 
 serve, as it must serve, as the basis of obligation and 
 right as the standards of practical relations. 
 
 But this does not prove practical relations objec- 
 tive and self-subsistent and able to stand on their own 
 feet. This is now what we must literallv assert and 
 
278 THE LIFE OF MIND 
 
 then try to support the statement by such facts as 
 we can find. We have then literally to detach practical 
 relations from their supposed moorings in persons, 
 and then show that as detached they are not only 
 real but that their detachment is the only condition 
 of their reality. Take any simple case. I strike you 
 with a stone. This relation has, as we say, "conse- 
 quence." That is, something follows from it. And 
 while we are on practical grounds, these consequences 
 are important. I am taken into court and the fact 
 that I did strike you is establishel by the evidence. 
 Then the lawyers and the judge engage in certain 
 very sombre forms of pleasantry which, when reduced 
 to intelligibility, means something like this: A struck 
 B with a stone. Let this case go unpunished, and C 
 would strike D and E would strike F; then D and F 
 would retaliate and would turn upon C and E; that 
 is, there would be a general fight. Xow fights are 
 useful in only a few ways and harmful in many. But 
 how do we know this? Because we have the records 
 of many cases where A and B have fought and nothing 
 good came of it. We are already changing our spe- 
 cific case of "strike" into the general idea of "fight," 
 and are implying that it is indefinitely repeatable. 
 But this, it may be said, only means that we have a 
 number of specific cases, and in each the relation holds 
 between particular persons. So it seems the fight- 
 relation necessarily involves particular persons. But 
 the judge now reads the law to the effect that when- 
 ever John Doe, who is the universal for "A," strikes 
 
THE LIFE OF MIND 279 
 
 Richard Roe, who is the universal for "B," or if one 
 man strikes another — but the lawyers and judge have 
 forgotten these reasons and simply say "Fighting is 
 prohibited." So fighting is a substantial, practical 
 relation which has nothing to do with persons; and 
 will therefore fit onto persons in all sorts of ways, 
 will change its personal incidence in any way you 
 please, is independent of the persons between which 
 it holds, and stands on its own feet as the substantial 
 object through which life and mind and human things 
 in general are to be understood. 
 
 But you say that fighting here is a mere word or a 
 mere "idea"; and you say sagely that a fight never 
 takes place except there are people there fighting. To 
 which the answer is that there are "bodies physical" 
 and "bodies spirtual" and that the one is not the 
 other. Even if there are men present fighting you 
 can't take the fight and hit them on the head with 
 it, of course not. But neither can you buy or sell or 
 steal or eat or shave with the men's anger, even 
 though, if it turns upon you, you had better hide out. 
 
 Thus do practical relations stand on their own feet, 
 independently of the persons between whom, in any 
 specific way, they hold. That is, they are objective 
 and real, and have nothing to do directly with states 
 of mind, or with anything that is supposed to be 
 peculiar to the person. We saw above that it is pre- 
 cisely the attempt to find the reality of the person in 
 his states of mind that had to be given up. And when 
 that is given up then it is no longer possible to refer 
 
280 THE LIFE OF MIND 
 
 the practical relations in which a person stands to 
 the quality of his state of mind as its explanation. 
 Our states of mind, so far as their existence or any 
 existenial relations are concerned, are not very impor- 
 tant. But this is precisely the mistake that is gen- 
 erally made. A man's action, we ordinarily say, is a 
 matter of his "good-will," whether it is wise or silly, 
 or attended with good or bad consequences. I might 
 on this mode of explanation do the most asinine of 
 imaginable things and then explain it on the ground 
 that "my heart was right," just as a good intention 
 is supposed to justify or at least excuse my crudest 
 actions. But we know this is all nonsense. You never 
 do a thoughtless thing and then say, "Excuse me," 
 but you feel that the attempted excuse merely added 
 insult to injury, and you often feel contempt for the 
 other person just because he pretends that he does 
 excuse you. You would respect both him and your- 
 self more if he called you a careless brute or an igno- 
 rant ass, and if you could take a poke at his jaw you 
 could afterward shake hands with him because you 
 felt that your stupid or careless action had been really 
 explained and the explanation genuinely accepted. It 
 is then the jaw-poke that is real and that realizes the 
 states of mind involved in the situation, your anger 
 and contempt and resentment or whatever the internal 
 states may be have taken on real being only when 
 they are collected and synthesized by the overt action- 
 form. The jaw-poke as a practical relation is real 
 in and for itself, becomes an independent value, one 
 
THE LIFE OF MIND 281 
 
 that you can carry for years with intent to deliver, 
 can lose and recover, and treat in every way as you 
 can any other object. 
 
 But to come to our second point. We say that all 
 practical relations are personal. Then if the persons 
 involved are not the persons immediately concerned, 
 what persons are involved? To this we can say, the 
 persons mediately involved. All practical relations 
 involve persons, and the persons are neither of those 
 immediately concerned; the persons are then third 
 persons, and as they are neither of the "parties to 
 action," let us call the real person in practical rela- 
 tions the third neuter. 
 
 We will then have to call this third neuter into 
 court and have him give an account of himself. He 
 seems an important personage, and his nature and 
 interest and connections in life will be very funda- 
 mental to the understanding of real practical relations 
 which we have undertaken to make clear. We shall 
 want to be sure that our newcomer does not turn out 
 to be a myth, and to avoid this will be specially diffi- 
 cult since most of his real or essential characters are, 
 as is, however, true of others forms, values, although 
 in the interest of those of us who can think only with 
 fingers and require solidity and resistance we shall 
 find that our friend has a body which can be kicked 
 as well as a soul to be saved or lost. 
 
 Fortunately, in the discussion of the preceding 
 question, many of the characters which we shall find 
 to be unified in this personality appeared there as 
 
282 THE LIFE OF MIX!) 
 
 abstract and isolated qualities — qualities that appeared 
 in that connection abstract precisely because the per- 
 son in whom they essentially inhere did not appear 
 to claim them. It is now our business to get acquainted 
 with this personage as fully as we can. 
 
 We may begin with those qualities which appeared 
 in our previous negative discussion as abstract, or 
 without any apparent substantial body with which to 
 connect. Recall that in a simple case involving prac- 
 tical relations or conduct, as when two persons have 
 a difficulty that takes them to court, we found it 
 necessary to speak of law, right, justice, etc., and of 
 certain guarantees which the court puts into effect to 
 prevent a recurrence of similar difficulties. These 
 guarantees are in court practice mainly what are called 
 punishments. When John Doe hits Richard Roe on 
 the head without provocation or excuse, and thus les- 
 sens his chance as a bread winner or enjoyer of his 
 goods, the court fines John or sends him to jail or 
 inflicts other pains on him. So that we have a very 
 large and complex system of qualities which when 
 named as things we call right, wrong, justice, punish- 
 ment, etc., and the difficulty comes when we attempt 
 to find the being or beings to which these qualities 
 belong. We may say for certain purposes that ab- 
 stract right, abstract justice, or law demands that 
 John be made to suffer pains for the pains he has 
 inflicted upon Richard. But when we use such lan- 
 guage we should remember that abstract things really 
 make no demands, and if our statement is to mean 
 
THE LIFE OF MIND 283 
 
 anything we have to find out in whose name law and 
 justice demand that this or that should be done. 
 There are several answers as to what in reality it is 
 that really justifies the demands that the law makes, 
 and some of them are worth our turning our attention 
 to at this point. 
 
 The judge who sits on the bench and is busy with 
 all sorts of troubles that are brought to him for solu- 
 tion will perhaps tell us that it is the law as such 
 that is to be satisfied in such cases. So he is likely 
 to fall into the habit of merely ascertaining the facts 
 and then looking up a statement in his law books as 
 to what is to be done in such cases. It is for him 
 merely a case of "the law and the evidence," and if 
 the law says so much fine and so much time, he says 
 "Ten dollars and ten days" and the way of the trans- 
 gressor is made straight to the jail. Hut people who 
 sometimes think, I mean people who are not learned 
 in the law, may raise questions as to the justness of 
 the law itself; so that when our judge goes to the bar 
 association he has to make a speech justifying the law. 
 Here he probably says that peace and order are the 
 objects of the law, which means that the law demands 
 the infliction of punishments in the name of peace and 
 order. If it is objected that peace and order are ab- 
 stractions and thus make no demands that human 
 beings can be expected to respect (there are people 
 who are just that obstinate) then it is explained that 
 human beings cannot follow their callings and interests 
 unless there is some degree of peace and order assured. 
 
284 THE LIFE OF MIND 
 
 But then the contentious objector asks if people, indi- 
 vidual persons, and their interests, represent the object 
 in whose name the law speaks; then it begins to look 
 as if the advocate of the law was standing for privilege 
 if he names any particular persons or classes of per- 
 sons as those in whose interest the law makes its 
 demands. Finally the justifier of the law will be 
 obliged to say that the law speaks not in the name 
 of any persons, but in the name of the community, 
 its peace, prosperity, culture, welfare, and mainte- 
 nance. 
 
 This answer is probably final and therefore right. 
 Perhaps everybody will agree that the community, as 
 the guarantor of men's practical interests, as the basis 
 of their practical character, and as thus the condition 
 of their progress in the life of the mind, is the final 
 explanation of all those affairs we call public. Law, 
 right, justice, peace, order, welfare, prosperity — all 
 these are qualities that belong to the community as 
 the public body. But we said above that such quali- 
 ties are personal, were just the qualities that charac- 
 terize persons. Then is the community a person? 
 And is it the third neuter which we said is a party 
 at interest in all the activities of the practical char- 
 acter? Xonesense, you say. But let us go on with 
 the story. 
 
 We agreed that the interests protected by law are 
 not in the last resort the interests of particular per- 
 sons as human beings. The law does not, cannot, 
 speak in their name in any special way. But the law 
 
THE LIFE OF MIND 285 
 
 represents human purposes, therefore the interests of 
 human personalities. Now who or what are these 
 personalities? It would seem that we are obliged to 
 name the community as the ultimate person, and some- 
 thing like that we shall probably have to do. 
 
 But there are several characters that belong to 
 communities which seem to preclude our calling them 
 persons. To name only one, the parts or organs of 
 the community are often not so closely co-ordinated, 
 either structurally or functionally, as the parts of the 
 personalities we know as human beings. But this 
 objection can probably be overcome. We shall not 
 argue it. Again, there are several aspects or features 
 that belong to persons that can hardly be said to be 
 elements of a community. For instance, the person 
 has a distinct mind of his own, while the community, 
 presumably, has none. Such arguments as these are 
 the bones of contention for people who like abstract 
 argumentation. But we are interested in description, 
 and shall ignore them almost completely. 
 
 Let us, then, for the sake of making our description 
 less objectionable to those who might be inclined to 
 throw up the sponge, say that the community is per- 
 haps not a person, but that it discloses a personal 
 organization and this organization is mantained by a 
 personal principle. Then, whether it is a person or 
 not, most aspects of its being are at least personal. 
 
 But how do such statements mean anything? To 
 answer this question let us go back to certain aspects 
 of the life of imagination as we described them in 
 
286 THE LIFE OF MIND 
 
 previous sections. We found that the distinctive thing 
 about the life of the mind as imagination was that 
 it invariably objectifies itself. By that we meant that 
 every act of the mind-life creates, or tends to create, 
 for itself a body in which it attempts to make itself 
 permanent. Fermanence, you remember, we described 
 in terms both of material impermeability and of moral 
 dependability. Now, to apply these conceptions here, 
 those qualities which we call right, justice, etc., as 
 personal qualities are aspects of the life of mind, and 
 as such are creative, and thus they attempt to create, 
 and do create, for themselves a body in which they 
 give themselves enduring permanence and that moral 
 substantiality which gives to the mind-life its hope 
 of significant continuity. Each of these essentially 
 human, and therefore personal, qualities creates its 
 own appropriate objective form, embodies itself as 
 soul in this form, and thus helps to make the endur- 
 ing realities of life. Or, these bodies become ensouled 
 with the realities of enduring life. 
 
 These embodied souls of the mind-life we call 
 institutions. 
 
 When therefore John Doe becomes fractious and 
 violates the law, the law can and does demand in its 
 own name that some corrective measures be taken. 
 But it does not demand retribution or correction in 
 its own name alone, because it is the institution in 
 which the human purpose to guarantee the rights of 
 all institutions is embodied; so it, in speaking for 
 right and justice, is merely performing the specialized 
 
THE LIFE OF MIND 287 
 
 function which life has delegated to it. It is the 
 personal agent through which all other personal beings 
 are guaranteed the opportunity to live their appro- 
 priate lives. As one of those agencies, it does speak 
 for itself and in its own name. But when it under- 
 takes to demand justice in its own name alone, it 
 ceases to act as a personal agent, and becomes the 
 advocate of private interest, and as such is itself 
 divested of its appropriate soul and begins to live the 
 subjective life of the body. 
 
 The law, then, as an embodied center of the prac- 
 tical life, is a person, has the fundamental personal 
 characteristics. As the embodied will to justice, etc., 
 it has the corporate character, is the corporate per- 
 sonality, the corporate practical character. It cannot, 
 as objective and universal, be made the instrument or 
 tool of any private person, and when any person 
 appeals to the law for the definition and establish- 
 ment of his rights, he asks these things in the interest 
 of the mind-life, otherwise his request has no claim 
 to the respect of other persons and the law will not 
 hear it. There is no private right; right is universal 
 and personal or it is interest, which is not right. Thus 
 we see that law as a person has institutional char- 
 acter in both body and soul, the two essential features 
 of mind which gives to mind its uniqueness as end ful 
 continuity. Impersonal things are discontinuous; pri- 
 vacy or specialization is discontinuous and impersonal 
 and unreal; as active unreality it is dispersive, and 
 thus the father of strife. Law is personal as embodied 
 
288 THE LIFE OF MIND 
 
 mind as order; it is the soul of active continuity em- 
 bodied in permanence and peace. 
 
 A similar account holds of all the other human real 
 qualities. Each of them has its appropriate personal- 
 ization in a permanent institution. This describes their 
 internal constitution; as appropriate to each other 
 in the unit of life they are the community. It now 
 appears why we could ignore the question of the per- 
 sonality of the community. As the corporate whole 
 of life, the community argues its own case. 
 
 It is a result something like this that the psychol- 
 ogists, when they become sociologists, have in mind. 
 They vaguely feel (their consciousness of the situation 
 has not yet risen to the cognitive status) the presence 
 and the effects of the genius of the life of mind as it 
 expresses itself in human activities, especially in those 
 higher forms of activity commonly called cultural. 
 As the ultimate moral Praxis pervading the human 
 universe and charging it with life, its presence has 
 always been felt by religious and aesthetic natures. 
 It has been recognized therefore by the major capaci- 
 ties of men in all the essential forms which their life 
 takes on; in art and religion and politics it has been 
 accepted as the great ultimate Fact, by each of these 
 according to its lights and the necessities which their 
 purposive natures have in the different cases imposed 
 on its objectification. Each human major interest, 
 that is, objectifies the Fact after its own image; and, 
 until the development of the false concpetion of pri- 
 vacy bv modern individualism under the influence of 
 
THE LIFE OF MIND 289 
 
 perverted Christianity, these different objects appro- 
 priated themselves to each other in the harmony of 
 a complete tolerance. But this usurpation of exclu- 
 sive private right as asserted by modern science, whose 
 method is the technique of individualism and there- 
 fore false, has picked the great Fact to pieces and 
 mutilated it beyond recognition. As the Patria of 
 politics, the God of religion, the Good of morality, 
 the Beauty of art, the great Pan Praxis has had to 
 abdicate in favor of such mythical mongrels as "equal- 
 ity" in politics, blind will in relgion, utility in moral- 
 ity, impressionism in art — all of these "scientific cate- 
 gories" being nothing more than the fragmentary 
 views gained by privacy as the latter changes its 
 whim. These concepts represent, therefore, as "mind," 
 mere dismembered remnants of the whole Fact Praxis, 
 and once the great Person is torn limb from limb, 
 all the king's horses and all the king's men can never 
 succeed in getting back together again in a living form 
 the personality thus violated. Science, even as sociol- 
 ogy, can do great things; but it stops short of the 
 greatest of things. 
 
 What we want to insist on is, the great fact life as 
 humanty lives it. Until we learn to view it as a whole 
 whose essential feature is unity and order and not 
 multiplicity and complexity, this life, although the 
 most immediate of facts, and because it is the most 
 immediate of farts, will continue to be the baffling 
 mystery it is for science now. The scientific approach 
 through the method of reduction to simplicity, the 
 

 290 THE LIFE OF MIND 
 
 eternal vain search for the microcosm in a presup- 
 posed infinity of essentially worldless abstractions, is 
 defeated at the outset because of its neglect to get 
 the artist's distant and whole view. The real simple 
 is not the homogeneous but the unified; and the uni- 
 fied is not apprehended through a summation or sum- 
 mary of its disunited parts, but its unity is mediated 
 through the c omprehension of the principle by virtue 
 of which the elements become parts. These parts 
 are themselves not recurrent atoms as science would 
 have them, but self-restitutive wholes of life, and the 
 appropriation to each other of a system of such wholes 
 constitutes our human world. Politcs, religion, art, 
 science, are features of that human world; and it is 
 through the world as a principle that they are to be 
 adequately known. They are then institutions, and 
 as such are the law of the mind-life as the great Fact. 
 The mutual appropriation of these forms to each 
 other and the apprehension of them as life-content, 
 as the very stuff of the experience of living, is what 
 is called culture. We must turn now to this continua- 
 tion of the corporate life into the form in which its 
 fundamental values are created — the life of culture. 
 
CHAPTER XXXI. 
 
 (ill) THE CULTURAL LIFE AS IDEAL. 
 
 So long as we think of the life of man as lived in 
 the various individuals who make up the species, no 
 consistent account of those delicate refinements of 
 living which we call culture is possible. Refinement 
 and delicacy only come into life after the elaborate 
 structures which stand as the embodiments of the 
 interrelations of persons becomes solidly established 
 as institutions. If we insist on looking at culture 
 from the point of view of its origins or causes we may 
 say that the mere facts of personal interdependence 
 and of mutually directed activity of the various life 
 centers, embody themselves in substances which, to 
 use a far-fetched figure, are hard and permanent 
 enough to take a high polish. In any case the higher 
 aspects of culture rest upon the solidity and depend- 
 ability of the order of life-systems, and upon the 
 quality of their textures as thus constituted. The 
 question of the nature of culture is difficult; the dis- 
 cussion must avoid on the one side the assumption of 
 a culture that is so delicate and frail that it is in 
 danger of being shattered by the first harsh wind from 
 nature, and on the other it must avoid the portrayal 
 of it as so rock-ribbed and sturdy as to lose its grace 
 and attractiveness because of the gaunt and steely 
 firmness of its chill strength. On the one hand, cul- 
 
292 THE LIFE OF MIND 
 
 ture must mean the finer graces and loveliness of the 
 light and airy contacts between purposes only as yet 
 incompletely embodied, contacts between purposes 
 which quiver to the suggestiveness of the slightest of 
 embraces from strength and firmness, whose sensi- 
 tivty leaves them endangered by a too rude shock 
 toward substantiation— the raw plasma of values 
 which if forced into form too early or too harshly 
 lacerate and leave a wound from which the blood of 
 life will quickly escape. It must mean, on the other 
 hand, the stiff hardihood and vigorous rigidity which 
 alone can give to these delicate life-forms the urge 
 to endure and the self-sufficing courage which enables 
 them to endure, and thus to determine the form of 
 permanence in which the spirit of continuity can alone 
 survive. Culture must then be thought of not merely 
 as the daintiness and perfumed colorfulness of experi- 
 ence in its most unsubstantial and fleeting moments, 
 but also as the rugged stability and resistent persist- 
 ence of the framework upon which the lighter aspects 
 of experience depend. 
 
 These two aspects of culture are the two primary 
 value-systems created by the dual effectiveness of the 
 mind-life. That effectiveness comes into actuality in 
 two forms, its permanent aspects contrivng themselves 
 into the institutions of life properly so-called, and its 
 active features asserting themselves to embodiment as 
 the inner formative idea. 
 
 Our problem therefore now formulates itself as that 
 of explaining how the formative idea as the purposive 
 
THE LIFE OF MIXD 293 
 
 aspect of mind-life conspires with what is not itself 
 in order to perpetuate itself, and how the more or 
 less coarsened permanence develops the grace to enable 
 it to support and carry the tender spirit to its full 
 embodiment. We have thus to describe institutions 
 in their two types of capacity, the one as the creative 
 growth force and the other as the created body — the 
 support of the growth-idea. 
 
 With the problem thus stated, it is largely a matter 
 of showing how the three typical aspects of mental 
 capacity co-operate in the creation of a whole-of-life. 
 By this whole-of-life we do not mean the sentimental 
 "soul at one with itself" in the sence that there should 
 be an individual all of whose subjective feelings were 
 consistent or got on together amicably. It does mean, 
 of course, that there will be a subjective or internal 
 harmony of the individual's characteristic mental 
 states, but it means much more than that. It implies 
 in addition to the subjective harmony, which is 
 assumed to exist not merely in select individuals but 
 primarily in classes of individuals where it subsists in 
 each after its own kind, a harmony in order and organ- 
 ization in the world of objective fact, in the environ- 
 mental facts which are outside of and peripheral to 
 mental states. But it involves also more than these 
 two aspects of the wholeness of life. There is yet 
 to be enumerated the third and most important factor, 
 those further elements of unity which interlock the 
 subjective and the objective worlds together in a total 
 harmony. Considering these facts from the point of 
 

 294 THE LIFE OF MIND 
 
 view of the mental capacities involved most directly 
 in their creation, the order of the subjective world is 
 a matter largely of feeling-will; that of the objective 
 world, one of perception-cognition; and that of the 
 whole a function of the emotive-imagination. But in 
 any case the life of culture is that phase of the mind- 
 life in which harmony of all its factors is consciously 
 the objective, this harmony implying the relation of 
 the human aspects of life with the distinctly natural 
 in a unity of the universe. 
 
 As a cultural problem the question of attaining 
 harmony in the inner mental condition is a question 
 of self-culture. But the one thing we want to be sure 
 about first is that self-culture is not a matter of deceiv- 
 ing our selves by continually jacking-up some par- 
 ticular sort of feeling and trying to maintain it indefi- 
 nitely. Culture, neither self-culture nor any other, 
 is a matter of the existence or presence of a particular 
 type or state of mind, nor is it a question primarily 
 of the persistence of a prevailing type of state of mind. 
 If the mere presence of an exalted and beautiful feel- 
 ing constituted one a cultured person, then it would 
 be quite simply attained with a few drinks of good 
 whiskey or appropriate doses of other drugs. There 
 is no doubt that the tremendous hold which drugs 
 have on certain types of temperament is due to the 
 very rare states of feeling and the interesting ideas 
 which follow upon its use. It means perhaps that 
 people who drink do so not to drown their sensibility, 
 but to heighten it and sharpen it to the point where 
 
THE LIFE OF MIND 295 
 
 the harsh and crude realities are made to give way 
 to the more elevated types. Consequently, the drink 
 habit is not due to moral perversity or low and de- 
 graded sentiments, but more often to the pain and 
 discomfort which a highly sensitive person experi- 
 ences in the presence of the coarse crudity of the ordi- 
 nary facts and conditions of life. If this be true, it 
 is obvious that mere preaching to the erring individual 
 means that the preacher is of a lower type of sensi- 
 bility than the drunkard, and that both of them are 
 deceived by the same fallacy that culture and goodness 
 and righteousness are merely states of mind. But it is 
 true also that if the question is one of degress of sensi- 
 tivity and the crudities of outward life, the important 
 principle in the propagation of culture, even in the 
 subjective aspects of self-culture, is that the way to 
 culture is through the control of the objective circum- 
 stances of the life which we hope to cultivate. 
 
 Then if self-culture is not a matter of whooping-up 
 cur subjective states, in spite of the fact that just that 
 is what culture means to nearly everybody, then what 
 is it? I say that if we will not believe that all cul- 
 ture is merely a matter of stimulating our egotism 
 with one sort and another of hocus pocus we are going 
 contrary to the prevailing tendencies of western civili- 
 zation. If there is one prevailingly universal attitude 
 (there are no longer any convictions) among people 
 of contemporary times, it is to the effect that the 
 individual's destiny (and it is assumed that that is 
 the only possible destiny) is a matter of the states of 
 
296 THE LIFE OF MIND 
 
 mind which he can himself bring into presence in his 
 consciousness; more, it is not a matter of the quality 
 or meaning of these states, but one merely of their 
 persistence and intensity and exclusiveness and pri- 
 vacy. This is, of course, a rather sweeping charge. 
 But let us notice only for a moment a few illustra- 
 tions. And begin with the most respectable and in-, 
 sidious form of the superstition. It is a perverted 
 after-effect of the cultural development of early mod- 
 ern times, and takes its higher forms in the philosophy 
 of egotism and the literature of romanticism. Xo 
 doubt the whole movement served the very useful and 
 worthy purpose of cultivating self-respect and self- 
 confidence in the peoples of the western world after 
 their debauch in Oriental self-denunciation under the 
 influence of the church. Western peoples went through 
 the middle ages on their knees and their bellies ab- 
 jectly in the mire of barbaric superstition. But when 
 they arose out of the mud they went to the opposite 
 extreme of chestiness and cockiness which, while it has 
 given us the fruits of individualism, has also afflicted 
 us with the blights and cankers of individualism. And 
 it is this briskety perpendicularity and bumptious- 
 ness which has remained to us, and we take it as 
 uprightness and righteousness. But as a literature 
 and a philosophy it served useful purposes in that it 
 was to the spiritual and cultural aspects of the per- 
 sonal life to which in the main it so boisterously called 
 attention. , 
 
 The respectability of spiritual egotism, while of un- 
 
THE LIFE OF MIND 297 
 
 questioned cultural value, was nevertheless soon lost, 
 and the energy and interest it represented was soon 
 transferred to the natural individual. We do not need 
 to go into these matters in detail. It will suffice now 
 to give illustrations of the philosophy that self-culture 
 is a matter of anyhow inducing states of mind in the 
 individual by auto-suggestion and the other methods 
 of magic which individualism has prepared for us. 
 Of this thing most any religion of the present, in that 
 it puts the emphasis upon the "assurance" of per- 
 sonal salvation, is a good example. 
 
 Thus their self-assurance becomes expert in inter- 
 pretation of holy writ as showing that it is the pur- 
 pose of charity to cover a multitude of sins. This is 
 probably the reason for the necessity for the continu- 
 ous extension of the scope of charity; the ''needy" are 
 not the poor in the means to life, but the poor and 
 crass in spirit who need the mantle of charity to cover 
 the rotten corpulence of their bloated self-assurance. 
 But this situation is not peculiar to religion, and what 
 men do in religion is merely what they have learned 
 to do elsewhere. 
 
 Other instances are still more striking and even more 
 contemptibly immoral. The extremes to which the 
 "go-getter" type of efficiency expert carries his "self- 
 culture" in such relations as high-pressure salesman- 
 ship result merely in the transformation of his own 
 sensibility to the point where he is oblivious of any 
 of the characteristically human motives. When he 
 bull-heads his victim into giving him an order he as- 
 
298 THE LIFE OF MIND 
 
 sures himself that his "success" was all due to his own 
 self-command and the other "executive" abilities with 
 which he is so liberally endowed, which he has not by 
 nature, but by his own persistent efforts. He is 
 right; he does not have these capacities by nature; 
 nature is more kindly even with the brute, and on oc- 
 casion will make the brute sicken at the sight of blood; 
 and the brute has the capacity to know that blood is 
 being shed even though it is not visible. Our go-get- 
 ler has, it is true, a tremendous capacity — for belief 
 in his own capacity. And it is unfortunate that this 
 type is becoming fairly common in business affairs, 
 and it would almost appear that this is the type that 
 business is consciously trying to produce, if they are 
 sincere in their advertising methods. But it should 
 be kept in mind that by the development of such states 
 in an individual by his own suggestion, the individual 
 is not developing anything remotely resembling either 
 culture or capacity, but is merely allowing his acquisi- 
 tive instincts to drown his more refined sentiments. 
 And the result too often is that the individual thus 
 brutalized becomes incapable of apprehending any cul- 
 tural qualities whatever, so that the life of leisure and 
 enjoyment for him becomes degraded to the series of 
 sense-thrills which he can get only by continuously in- 
 creasing the intensity of the stimulus, with the final 
 result that in order to get any reaction of pleasure at 
 all he must resort to brutish excess. 
 
 But let us leave this desolate subject. Our prac- 
 tical system which is founded upon selfishness ac- 
 
THE LIFE OF MIND 299 
 
 cepted as the rule of right (we call it self-help, self- 
 confidence, self-respect, all of which are the blessings 
 of our principle of competition) is contradictory in its 
 own principles of constitution, and will wreck civiliza- 
 tion if it is not reorganized on sounder principles be- 
 fore the canker eats further into its vitals. It has given 
 us the self-confident, overbearing, arrogant, self-made, 
 efficient, brute; it in him has its reward. It ought to 
 be evident to anyone who thinks at all, and it would 
 be generally evident if there were many who think, 
 that the cultural life is not a matter of self-culture 
 in any sense in which it can be interpreted. The self 
 is not the center of our practical world. 
 
 But there is still the possibility that we can continue 
 to hold to our egotistical principle. It seems that if 
 we will just explain that by self-culture we mean the 
 cultivation in ourselves of interests in the refined types 
 of purpose, we can still look upon culture as being es- 
 sentially self-culture. For, are not we limited, so far 
 as ideas and purposes go, to our own ideas and pur- 
 poses? And do we not have our own minds, and know 
 them better than anyone else's? Besides, when I be- 
 gin to take an interest in the other fellow, is there not 
 always danger that I will try, perhaps unconsciously, 
 to use him for my own purposes? The answer to all 
 these questions is that they are ambiguous, and that 
 we unconsciously take advantage of their ambiguity 
 in our own interests. We know, that is, that there is 
 a certain self-evident truth implied in each of these 
 questions. The difficulty is that we do not take the 
 
300 THE LIFE OF MIND 
 
 trouble to find out just what is the truth implied, and 
 consequently give them the wrong interpretation. The 
 truth is, we are not limited to our own ideas and pur- 
 poses, which we know very well if we have ever, for 
 instance, lived in an ordinary family. We know in 
 these cases at least of family co-operation, that ideas 
 are common to groups of people, and a common pur- 
 pose is ordinarily what leads to the formation of many 
 sorts of groups. We know, further, that the degree 
 to which a person can and does enter into sympathetic 
 relations and arrangements with groups of people is 
 the final test of his culture and his character. So the 
 statement that we must necessarily be limited to our 
 own ideas is nonsense, which we never examine into 
 because of the self-conscious fear that it would turn 
 out to be false if we saw clearly what it means. 
 
 In the same way it is easy to show that the state- 
 ment that we know our own mind, and know it bet- 
 ter than other people know it, is equally ambiguous 
 and in the last analysis false. We know very well 
 that the things we know best about other people's 
 minds is what we conjecture from their behavior or 
 their habitual modes of action. We seem to know our 
 own minds directly; and we do. But the important 
 things I know about my mind are always made known 
 to me as a result of inferences from other facts. Thus 
 I say that I am convinced of the truth of a given 
 statement. But if when asked how I know it I merely 
 say "I just know it," you are doubtful whether I 
 really know it, and you are convinced that I know 
 
THE LIFE OF MIND 301 
 
 what is in my own mind only when I can give rea- 
 sons which are not merely in my mind, but are in 
 yours at the same time and in exactly the same sense. 
 The fact is that except in the case of what is merely 
 now present, if you are reasonably well trained you 
 know my mind better than I do, and better than you 
 know your own. How many times have you heard 
 somebody say that he was undecided as to what he 
 would do in. a given case, say, as to how he would 
 vote, when you knew exactly what he would do, and 
 could have told him? He sincerely believes that he 
 does not know his own mind, and in fact does not 
 know it, when you have no doubt at all as to what is 
 going on in his mind. If he has been a consistent 
 Republican for a long time he will be offended and 
 think of refusing to vote the ticket when the party 
 candidate does not suit him; he will reflect long and 
 seriously and even take counsel with his friends to 
 prove the candidate bad and wicked — and then vote 
 the ticket straight as he had unconsciously been de- 
 cided all along to do. Yet he is perfectly honest in 
 believing that he does not know what he will do. You 
 can see that he will vote the ticket straight; he 
 doesn't see it; you know his mind; he doesn't know it. 
 The other argument which we use to support self- 
 interest in the name of self-culture is more difficult 
 to state and to meet. It states that if I proceed on 
 what I know of other people's minds and ideas and 
 purposes I am likely to interpret them in my own in- 
 terests, and thus deceive myself into believing I am 
 
302 THE LIFE OF MIXD 
 
 giving due consideration to the other fellow when as 
 a matter of fact I am trying to take advantage of 
 him. We can meet this argument, and when it is 
 met the argument that culture is a matter simply of 
 self-culture is destroyed. It leads us to the view that 
 all culture is common, which we discuss later. But 
 we can go on here with another phase of the defense 
 of self-culture which is perhaps the most vicious of all 
 the attempts we ever make toward self-deception. 
 
 When stated in the simplest form this argument 
 runs something like this: Self-culture is the primary 
 object of the mind-life, but in order to achieve the 
 highest forms of self-culture I must devote my life to 
 the service of others. And this argument is presented 
 by those who count themselves individualists, and who 
 thus insist that one's first duty is to one's self: 
 
 But on what grounds can it be shown that the other 
 fellow's interests and purposes are superior and more 
 important than my own? And suppose they are, then 
 how do they become obligations for me? Suppose they 
 are lower than mine, then must I devote myself to 
 them? How can I be under obligations to purposes 
 lower than I must judge to be the best? Are they 
 higher and better because they are another's, or be- 
 cause I renounce my own in their interest? When my 
 purposes and those of another person differ, whose 
 are right? And when they are contradictory, and con- 
 flict with each other violently, how do I determine 
 whose purposes are most worthy? Similar questions 
 can be proposed indefinitely, showing that the whole 
 
THE LIFE OF MIND 303 
 
 doctrine of service to others is a mass of absurdities. 
 It is contradictory to our most fundamental concep- 
 tions; nobody believes it, for we do not and cannot in 
 the modern world think of anybody serving anybody. 
 We are committed to the principle of individual free- 
 dom, and any attempt to make freedom and service 
 to anybody consistent with each other ends and must 
 end in the shallowest sophistry. 
 
 Let us examine what this means in the simplest 
 situation we can find in the facts of life as we know 
 them. And perhaps such a situation is to be found in 
 the so-called "servant problem.'' When the good 
 housewife is ill you set about looking for a ''woman" 
 to do the housework. You cannot find anybody 
 among your friends who knows of a decent, self-re- 
 specting, industrious, honest person (and you do not 
 want any other sort of person) who does not already 
 have arrangements in which she is free to dispose of 
 her time and energy and leisure and earnings pretty 
 much as she pleases. True, in the job at the factory 
 or office she is held rigidly to the performance of 
 definite tasks, but she knew exactly what these tasks 
 were when she took the job, and she is as free as the 
 other persons with whom she associates. Besides, 
 while she is under the orders of some manager, yet 
 the orders are not special to her in any way, and they 
 represent an agreement under which her rights can be 
 protected to some extent, however benevolently irre- 
 sponsible her employer is. When the day's work is 
 done her time is her own, and she can do what she 
 
.*04 THE LIFE OF MIND 
 
 pleases with it so long as she is able to go back to 
 work the next day. Now suggest to such a person 
 that she take a place to do the drudgery of house- 
 work at the orders of a sick person's whim, tell her 
 to look after children who know that she has no au- 
 thority over them, and in whom she has no interest, 
 and she will, as you would, decline. It is queer that 
 in such cases our best friends and neighbors, though 
 all Christians, do not come to help us out: they will 
 bring a dish of food in Haviland, but they offer us no 
 sustained service, as the theory suggests that they 
 should. Service, then, in the simplest and most prom- 
 ising of cases, is exactly what it is, service, servitude, 
 slavery: and nobody wants to enter into such rela- 
 tions and will do it only under compulsion of some 
 kind. But suppose the "woman" would be much bet- 
 ter off if she took the job; better wages, better home, 
 better food, refined surroundings, real respect, every- 
 thing, in fact, than in the home she can provide for 
 herself. It does not avail; it is not her home, her 
 food, etc., and on the theory of self-culture she has a 
 right to demand these things in her own name and for 
 herself. The "servant problem" in a civilized world 
 is insoluble: there can be no ultimate good in a world 
 so long as one person works for, and on the order of, 
 and in the interest of, another; so long as such con- 
 ditions obtain in the practical world the mind is the 
 slave-mind and the life is the life of the slave. 
 
 Now if we take the question of "self-culture through 
 service 1 ' in its higher forms in social and religious life. 
 
THE LIFE OF MIND 305 
 
 we find the situation even infinitely worse, and the 
 arguments employed to support it growing weaker and 
 weaker until they become altogether contemptible. 
 This would be natural; if service is servitude, then the 
 "higher" the form the more vicious the fact. In these 
 connections the argument gives way to blatant so- 
 phistry. In social work the "uplifter" who takes one 
 unfortunate after another and tries to make them 
 over according to the notion of respectability finds, 
 when capable of finding anything, that all her efforts 
 are failing under her very eyes, and when she ex- 
 amines them she sees that they deserve to fail and 
 hence could not possibly succeed. She finds that the 
 whole uplift point of view rests upon the theory that 
 states of mind are the ultimate reality, and that the 
 whole scheme of relief work is nothing more than an 
 attempt to induce people to think things that are not 
 real and to believe things that they know to be false. 
 You cannot convince a person that goodness is real 
 in the world if for him everything in the world is bad; 
 and it is nonsense to try to tell him that things which 
 he knows better than you do are really good when he 
 knows they are bad. You merely convince him of 
 the falsity and unreality of everything, including your- 
 self and the "work" you are trying to do. The unfor- 
 tunate person knows better than you do that he is the 
 victim of circumstances over which he has no control, 
 and which cannot be controlled by good will even in 
 infinite quantities; and it makes no difference what 
 states of mind he has, the facts remain that things 
 
306 THE LIFE OF MIND 
 
 are bad. And it makes no difference even if it is true 
 that he has lost his self-respect, that if he had his 
 self-respect things would be better. His self-respect 
 is itself one of the things over which he has no con- 
 trol, and that he should have no self-respect may have 
 been determined by the conditions under which not 
 he, but his grandfather lived. 
 
 So the theory that we should employ our lives in 
 the service of others is nonsense and self-contradictory. 
 It persists not, as generally argued, because it is to 
 the interest of some people to perpetuate it, for the 
 people who are naturally benefited by it are not aware 
 of the connection which the superstition has with their 
 interests; it persists simply because of the inertia of 
 the mind, the fact that it is easier to go on accepting 
 a comforting principle though wrong than to work out 
 a right one. It is complicated by the fact that we 
 are half-conscious of its falsity and fear to think about 
 it lest we should prove it false. And if proved false 
 we know that it would leave our practical life resting 
 upon unstable foundations; the one thing we must be 
 certain about is the certainty of our moorings; even 
 though that certainty is purchased by the refusal to 
 understand the grounds of sand upon which our life 
 is supposed to be securely erected. 
 
 Once more, how does it happen that other people's 
 purposes are nobler and worthier than my own? Why 
 should I not argue that the other fellow should spend 
 his life in my service? You may say that this is not 
 what the principle means, but what I am arguing is 
 
THE LIFE OF MIND 307 
 
 that you who accept it do not know what it means, 
 and that no reasonable interpretation can possibly be 
 given for it. It is a tissue of falsehoods, and you re- 
 fuse to think about it because you are half aware that 
 it will not stand looking into. There is and can be 
 no obligation for anybody to serve anybody. Such a 
 principle has nothing to do with religion, except that 
 any genuine religion will soundly condemn it, and it 
 was never any part of the Christian scheme. It is an 
 Oriental product of personal absolutism; and if it is 
 taken up seriously by any modern cause it will destroy 
 that cause. The "others" philosophy is therefore senti- 
 mental nonsense and sophistry and buncombe. There 
 can be no genuine order in the human world so long 
 as one man works for another; men do not work and 
 strive and suffer for each other; that could never be 
 required on any moral ground; so far as they do it, it 
 is wrong and they are ignorant merely; men work with 
 each other for common ends; and in the moral world 
 there is no boss. We shall have to give up the caste 
 systems, based as it is on the philosophy of others, 
 otherwise the perpetuation of human life in this world 
 will be out of the question. 
 
 Human culture does not then rest on states of mind. 
 In so far as we hold such a theory the states of mind 
 referred to are states of feeling and will. In the ordi- 
 nary conception of service, for instance, one type of 
 person or one class of persons are supposed to possess 
 their souls in meekness, humility, self-forgetfulness, 
 in fact to cultivate in their own lives mere states of 
 
.W8 THE LIFE OF .MIND 
 
 feeling of the negative sort, and do what they are told 
 to do. The other class is supposed to cultivate fatherly 
 benevolence and charity and pity, and issue orders. 
 It is for them the will of God that they possess the 
 intelligence, and since they have thereby an advantage 
 their only obligation is to feel strongly for "others" 
 welfare. In. their life therefore benevolence and char- 
 ity become identified with states of will, their superior- 
 ity comes natively out of their own unique inherent 
 worth, and they assume the lordly function of "run- 
 ning" things in their own interest. 
 
 Culture is, nevertheless, self-culture; but it must in 
 this sense be defined out of all semblance to the ordi- 
 nary use of those words. Let us see how it is possible. 
 We may state that the difficulty that has been re- 
 sponsible for the errors recounted above is this: Our 
 theories and our practice rest upon imperfect knowl- 
 edge of what sort of being the real self is. The self 
 is not a series of mental states. That much we hope 
 we have made clear. The self is not a series of any- 
 thing, not a string of things placed end-to-end. Then 
 what else is there that it can be? The answer is, the 
 only thing other than mental states that can be real 
 —that is, objects. The self then is made up of ob- 
 jects; not a series or string of objects, but an order, 
 or orderly organization of objects. 
 
 We stated above that the order of the subjective 
 world or the world of states of mind was an order 
 established by those mental functions we call feeling 
 and will. We stated at the same time that the ob- 
 
THE LIFE OF MIND 309 
 
 jective world or the world of permanently stable 
 things is one established under the influence of the 
 perceptive-cognitive functions of mind. We have to 
 show now that this objective world of fact-things is an 
 important factor in human culture, and that it is the 
 basis of culture even when we are insisting that cul- 
 ture is essentially self-culture. That is, the world of 
 things is the basis of the nature of the self. This world 
 of things is peculiarly the world of knowledge, hence 
 the most necessary thing for us to understand here is 
 the science by which the world of things is reduced 
 to the system of knowledge. Our problem is to show 
 the dependence of culture upon logic and its world of 
 permanent things. For it is upon the permanence of 
 things that the persistence of values — and values are 
 the content of culture — depends. 
 
 The fundamental difficulty of the point of view 
 which makes culture rest upon feeling and will is that 
 our feelings and will are just as likely to attract us 
 to one type of object as to another. It is a perfectly 
 simple matter to develop feelings about an object that 
 is essentially repulsive and hideous so that we shall be 
 led to accept the object as worthy. Again, our will 
 attitudes do not distinguish one object from another, 
 and we are as likely to make an essentially objection- 
 able object the instrument of our will as we are to 
 express our will through objects that are worthy in 
 every way. It is this latter fact that often leads a per- 
 son otherwise respectable to associate with low peo- 
 ple. He can use these people as agencies through 
 
MO THE LIFE OF MIND 
 
 which he can effect his purposes, or, it may be, as in 
 the case of certain types of reformers, can use them 
 as agencies to the attainment of perfectly disinter- 
 ested and worthy ends. But the individual who works 
 with low people, regardless of the nature of the ends 
 he proposes to achieve, will find himself adopting low 
 habits and low ideas, and before he is aware of what 
 is taking place has become transformed into a low 
 character himself. It is then immaterial to mere will 
 what kinds of objects it chooses through which to ex- 
 press itself; as in the case of the soldier, who makes 
 so much the better soldier the less definitely his will 
 settles upon worth-while things. Rather, it should b? 
 said, will tends to take advantage, just as feeling 
 does, of whatever object is at hand, and will express 
 itself through good or bad objects indifferently. This 
 point cannot be too strongly insisted upon, for it is a 
 common assumption that culture, in its more delicate 
 and humane aspects, is a matter of feeling, and in its 
 more vigorous aspects a function of the strenuous will 
 which puts things through to accomplishment. Cul- 
 ture is essentially neither of these, and it may be worth 
 while to show by illustrations how and why this is so. 
 Let us take first an instance of the fact that feeling 
 is indifferent as to its object. Later we shall want to 
 show, what seems absurd on the face of it, that, even 
 in the higher realms of art, still feeling is indifferent 
 as to the object through which it is expressed. It is 
 of course true that the object must have the quality 
 or attribute appropriate to the expression of the feel- 
 
THE LIFE OF MIND 311 
 
 ing, as e. g., a statue must be made of hard material, 
 but this attribute is not determined upon by the feel- 
 ing, but is a result of cognition and choice. We may 
 then take an instance from one of the higher and more 
 noble spheres of feeling, namely, religion. It sounds 
 a little harsh to say that religion is indifferent as to 
 its object, the object through which it is to find ex- 
 pression, or is not deeply concerned as to the appro- 
 priateness of its object. But the Jesuitical principle 
 that the end justifies the means seems to indicate just 
 that. But if it is argued that this is a historic anom- 
 aly, the reply is that the fact is universal, and the 
 anomolous thing is merely that the point of view was 
 di iiherately adopted. Often the same attitude is not 
 only not deliberate, but is unconscious, as, e. g., it is 
 probably true that not one minister in twenty is aware 
 of any possible objection to having the previous Sun- 
 day's receipts displayed on the blackboard in the teeth 
 of the congregation. 
 
 The minister himself will go through the Eu- 
 charistic rite while it is in the hands of a deacon whom 
 he knows to be a crook, the assumption being ap- 
 parently that the full realization of the meaning of 
 the rite will cause its devotee to overlook the crook 
 through which the meaning is mediated. That is, it 
 seems to make no difference how you get the feeling- 
 value of the rite, the important thing is that you get 
 it; and if it happens to come to you via the crook, 
 then bless the Lord for such a crook. In evangelistic 
 zeal it has hardlv ever been the rule that you should 
 
312 THE LIFE OF MIND 
 
 look to the character of the people you bring into the 
 fold, for. once in the fold, the essential baseness of 
 the sexual debauchee or the habitual skinflint or liar 
 can be made to shine with the clear light of truth and 
 godliness. In the more delicate question of the choice 
 of material symbols, religion has been happier as a 
 rule, and the symbolism of religion has perhaps kept 
 both truth and beauty alive through many an age 
 when they could not have been self-supporting even 
 as mature. And as the fond but mistaken mother who 
 gave up her own life to protect through infancy and 
 childhood the beauty and truth which makes the one 
 little bright spot in a world of gloom, religious sym- 
 bolism still commands the bowed head. And if she 
 has not always been able to prevent the big brother 
 truth from boxing little sister's ears, she has also not 
 prevented little sister, in the glee of innocent grace, 
 from kicking brother's card house by times off its 
 foundation into kingdom come. There are, however, 
 instances in the symbolism where the choice of ob- 
 jects has been brutal. To one who has climbed head 
 first down into a well at the risk of his life to pull out 
 a lamb which in its playfulness jumped over the curb, 
 the suggestion that its blood might be appropriately 
 used to wash away the sins of the rescuer does not 
 seem peculiarly apropos. 
 
 It is equally simple to show that the will attitude is 
 indifferent as to its object also. The famous sayings 
 of great generals carry the point well enough. ''Either 
 1 will find a way or I will make one," ''Fight it out 
 
THE LIFE OF MIND 313 
 
 on this line if it takes all summer," these are the 
 words of utter irresponsibility; will expresses itself; 
 that is its function; that it expresses itself through 
 starving children or the wholesale slaughter of inno- 
 cent people makes no difference whatever. But since 
 will in this aspect is irresponsible, it is not arguable, 
 so there is no argument to meet. 
 
 Xow, to come back to our argument, culture is a 
 matter essentially of objects. The degree of culture 
 depends upon the nature and quality of the objects it 
 represents. Then the essential question of culture is 
 what objects furnish the proper subjects for the high- 
 est possible culture? The job of determining the ap- 1 
 propriateness of objects to practical ends is peculiarly 
 the problem of the cognitive life, the knowledge func- 
 tion, as it expresses itself in orderly ways in science. 
 Science, then, and its fundamental object-types, are 
 the basis of culture; and since all culture is self-cul- 
 ture, our problem as interested in the practical char- 
 acter is to determine the relation that scientific ob- 
 jects hold to the personality. 
 
 One point we want to make clear in advance. It 
 concerns a certain ambiguity in the word object. We 
 speak of our objects when we have in mind the things 
 we want some day to see done and made effective in 
 the life of men. And such a question as "What ob- 
 ject does he have in view"? is intended to ask about 
 the kind of a world the individual's thought and activi- 
 ties tend to create. It may be that his object is fame 
 or riches or what not. But in any case, whatever is 
 
314 THE LIFE OF MIND 
 
 the answer to the question, it indicates a kind of world, 
 the kind of world that the individual inquired of has 
 characteristically in mind as the medium and condi- 
 tion of his life of action. In this sense, "object" is 
 equivalent to purpose, and although we often, perhaps 
 generally, think of purpose in subjective terms as if 
 our purposes meant merely the ways we have of feel- 
 ing about things, we really know when we come down 
 to it that purposes are always combinations of systems 
 of objects. This we know because when we reflect we 
 see that purposes are essentially objective because 
 they can be held in common by many people, while 
 states of mind cannot be shared. The word object 
 then means purpose, a system of objects which shows 
 the effects of elements of order which have been put 
 into it by thought and action. If my object is a home, 
 it means bricks and stones and lumber and concrete, 
 ordered into form by thought and action, and as I 
 see the house now in my mind there is not only the 
 forms and colors of materials in my mind, but I am 
 also conscious of raising the bricks up on the wall or 
 of sitting on the porch. It is in this way that sub- 
 jective elements become parts of objects. 
 
 The other meaning of object is really only slightly 
 different from object as purpose. In fact it may very 
 well be described as a stage of purpose. In ordinary 
 terms, it means- the reference to, the mere indication 
 of, some thing which so far has no particular qualities 
 to identify it, but as merely recognized from its rela- 
 tion to the activity of one's mind. That is, it is what 
 
THE LIFE OF MIND 315 
 
 simply and merely lies out there, separate and apart 
 from what I feel in my own consciousness. It is in 
 this sense that we say an object lies at the roadside, 
 or that an object moves over the hill. In such a case 
 we say, "a stone or something," or a "horse or some- 
 thing," indicating that so far as our interest and in- 
 formation go, the object in the one case is mere bulk 
 and position, and in the other perhaps mere indefinite 
 color and movement. The essential element of the ob- 
 ject in this case is its outsideness. Yet it is probable 
 that the aspect of outsideness would not be there if 
 it were not for some rudimentary glimpses we have 
 of the object as being used or put into some kind of 
 order that depends upon the purposes of our practical 
 life. 
 
 Our point now is, that these objects, as the materials 
 of science, are also the determinants of the degree, 
 nature, and quality, of culture, not only in general 
 and for the race, but also for the culture of the indi- 
 vidual which we call self-culture. 
 
 We have said that our two classes of objects were 
 not really different kinds. The object which is merely 
 "out there" becomes, the moment we turn our atten- 
 tion to it, a thing which is no longer a mere "some- 
 thing," but one which we are aware we can use in 
 some way, one we can incorporate and embody in our 
 life and its purposes. What really distinguishes it is 
 the degree to which we do incorporate it or absorb it 
 within our living purposes. Some of these objects 
 we merely erect into more or less abstract structures 
 
316 THE LIFE OF MIND 
 
 on the basis of their vaguer qualities, and we call 
 these structures systems of knowledge. From the point 
 of view of these systems the objects are indifferent 
 to our more active purposes, but they are perfected 
 as objects for us by their having been given a place 
 in the knowledge structure. We say we are through 
 with them when we "know" them, or that our inter- 
 est in them is merely theoretical. But the interest 
 may become at any moment active, and I be led to 
 ask myself into which of the systems I intend to build 
 this particular object will fit as a constituent part. 
 These objects, then, in this abstract sense, or as be- 
 ing determined in their importance by the place they 
 occupy in the classificatory system in my mind, are 
 the objects of "science." More strictly these objects 
 are the stuff of theoretical or pure science, of the sci- 
 ence which has no purpose further than the acquisi- 
 tion of knowledge, what we ordinarily call natural 
 science. 
 
 But when objects are constructed into a more ab- 
 stract system, as they are by science pretty much as 
 bricks are laid out on the ground in more or less regu- 
 lar piles, they are, like the piles of bricks, found to be 
 further useful just because they are neatly piled and 
 arranged. That is, a brick that would be just so much 
 space with so much dull murky color as it lies on the 
 ground alone, would be and does, when piled with 
 others in a neat arrangement, become the suggestion 
 of a house just because it is piled up. Then the bricks 
 as mere "outside" objects become the house as a high 
 
THE LIFE OF MIXD 317 
 
 and complicated purpose. So the scientific knowledge 
 becomes the basis and suggestion of their practical 
 conversion into purposes. Now when we tend to neg- 
 lect or forget the lowly origin of these objects in our 
 sense contacts and to reconstruct them along the lines 
 of purpose these objects become values. And as we 
 work these values into systems in the elaborate edi- 
 fices of politics, government, education, recreation, 
 etc., we say we are dealing with objects as human or 
 universal purposes, and we give to the systems of 
 these the names of normative sciences. This only 
 means that our objects have by familiarity become 
 such as will serve as types or standards, and we use 
 them now as representative of objects which intention 
 reserves for the future to convert through thought and 
 action into the instruments and content of culture. 
 
 Thus these objects, which began by being vague 
 outside meaningless masses, get worked into the very 
 tissue of thought and feeling, so intimately connected 
 with mind, in fact, that it is no longer possible com- 
 pletely to distinguish "mind" from its "object." This 
 intimacy grows so close in many cases, and it is espe- 
 cially true of the immediate objects of culture, that 
 the very best you can do when you want to describe 
 the essence of mind is to describe it in terms of a cer- 
 tain order of objects. That is, the mind, as the basis 
 of the personality or the self, is literally made up of 
 objects ordered in peculiar ways, so that we can now 
 repeat without fear of ridicule the proposition that cul- 
 ture is essentially a matter of objects and not of states 
 
318 THE LIFE OF MIND 
 
 of mind, and that culture is self-culture and the func- 
 tion of the personality. And we can do so now because 
 the self or personality is itself made up of systems of 
 objects ordered in definite and peculiar ways. 
 
 Then the life of culture, even the life of self-culture, 
 is a matter of the most significant handling and ar- 
 rangement of objects that intelligence can make pos- 
 sible. It is a question as to how objects as goods in 
 this world are disposed. It is a question of property. 
 Not, however, one of how property is disposed of, it is 
 not, God knows, a '^business proposition," but one of 
 how property is disposed as the instrument of use and 
 enjoyment. 
 
 The close relation between culture and property has 
 always been recognized; but unfortunately what has 
 often been noticed is the mere closeness of the rela- 
 tion, so that the question of the exact nature of the 
 relation has seldom been approached. And yet noth- 
 ing can be more important in human life. We can 
 give here only the barest outlines of the relation, and 
 this is perhaps best done through two or three illustra- 
 tions. 
 
 Life itself is a system of objects. Its dissolution as 
 an individuality means merely the unloosing of the 
 bonds that hold the objects together. Unfortunately 
 we take such statements too literally. Life is a sys- 
 tem not of natural, but of cultural objects. Its dis- 
 solution is the withdrawal from fragmentary private 
 incentric organization and the throwing the objects 
 of which it is composed back into the public body as 
 
THE LIFE OF MIND 319 
 
 a higher individuality. There is thus no death or dis- 
 solution of the cultural body or of the life that it em- 
 bodies. But it must be understood that all cultural 
 objects are natural objects as those objects are or- 
 dered with respect to the higher types of purposes. 
 Life, then, is property, and property is the circulatory 
 or distributive function of life. 
 
 Then our problem is to describe property in its dis- 
 tributive function as the cultural object, and to point 
 out the consequences of its perversion as such. 
 
 By property as the cultural object we mean the or- 
 dered system of means through which the cultural life 
 expresses itself in the process of achieving ends. And 
 as indispensable means it is the condition of there be- 
 ing a cultural life at all. The significance of the life 
 to which it gives form depends upon the real perma- 
 nence and stability of the objective forms which it 
 takes; and the degree of life significance depends 
 upon the degree of adequacy with which the object- 
 means is appropriated to the life-ends. Since there is 
 no inevitable destiny which determines that its forms 
 shall be uniformly high, the probability that there 
 shall be high forms of property is the task of intelli- 
 gence. Heretofore the form which the property life 
 should take has been left to feeling-will ; with the con- 
 sequence that, since the feeling-will is indifferent as 
 to its objects, the property object has taken uniformly 
 low forms as determined by utility in the sphere of 
 physical necessity. And the mind life that has been 
 embodied in this low object form has been the irra- 
 
J20 THE LIFE OF MIND 
 
 tional feeling-will life of indiscriminate choice of ob- 
 jects which, since they represent no principle of or- 
 ganization, has left life a chaos of strife and dis- 
 persive dissimulation. In the interest of the cultural 
 life, then, what is to be ordered is the indiscriminate 
 and endless mass of negatively determined property- 
 objects, which, as such, are indifferent as to their 
 permanent form, and the form of the organization is 
 indicated by the principle of life as a whole. 
 
 But this means that the system of property-objects, 
 as indifferent to their type of order or form, should 
 be the exhaustless opportunity of free choice of means 
 to the good life as determined by intelligence and not 
 by the accident-impulse of feeling-will. Or, literally, 
 it means that each active life-center should have un- 
 failing access to the material in and through which it 
 may give itself permanent and stable form. The de- 
 mand that it have the means to permanent and stable 
 form is conditioned upon the requirement of continu- 
 ity in the whole-good. That is, the ultimate dependa- 
 bility of the whole-good, which is the source from 
 which the life center draws both material and inspira- 
 tion, itself reciprocally depends upon the contribution 
 to it of the end-product of the individual life. This 
 mutuality of dependence is the ground of continuity 
 between the individual life-form and the species-whole, 
 and this ground is laid solid and substantial in the 
 system of property objects. 
 
 So much for the abstract statement. What it means 
 to any individual is something like this. Heretofore 
 
THE LIFE OF MIND 321 
 
 the individual has been left in "free" feeling- will com- 
 petition with not only other individuals on terms of 
 more or less effective equality, an equality, however, 
 based upon the negative indiscriminability of two 
 zeros; but he has been also left to compete, under 
 terms which bear no relation to his freedom, with 
 superindividuals who enter the game with the cards 
 stacked in their favor. Without going into the causes 
 which produced this situation, which are relatively 
 simple historical matters which any one may find if 
 he wishes, the fact is that the individual finds the 
 means to the embodiment of his purposes withheld 
 from him by the superindividual (who, let us say, is 
 the symbol of the private-property system). But the 
 individual is not conscious of any reason why he 
 should be balked, nor is it possible to give any rea- 
 son which intelligence is bound to respect. So a life 
 of cultural accomplishment is denied to the individual 
 because the means thereto are withheld from him by 
 persons who not only do not make any use of them, 
 but literally destroy them or pervert them to the uses 
 of vice and lust. So one man is jree to be wicked; 
 the other is not jree to be good. But it is not a ques- 
 tion of anybody's wicked "will." It is merely a ques- 
 tion of culture objects and their organization, left to 
 the chance aggregations effected by feeling-will op- 
 erating as accident, and having become so confused 
 that they are free and available for nobody's use. 
 
 It is the practical task of intelligence to free the 
 matted and clotted mass of means-objects and to make 
 
322 THE LIFE OF MIND 
 
 of them the uniform opportunity to good for all men. 
 
 But intelligence as it operates as the pure cognitive 
 function in the interest of constructing abstract sys- 
 tems cannot incorporate objects as values into stable 
 wholes. And property-objects as means to life are 
 values. We saw that just as the feeling-will can 
 under no circumstances by itself create order among 
 objects, so the perceptive-cognition cannot of itself 
 order objects as values. But, just as no order was 
 possible among objects until distinction had done the 
 work of analysis, which was accomplished by feeling- 
 will; so no order of values is possible until after cog- 
 nition has drawn the abstract forms of values in ob- 
 jects considered as types. Thus, feeling-will gives 
 raw particularity; while perceptive-cognition con- 
 tributes abstract universality. It is thus left for emo- 
 tive-imagination to reconstruct value-objects into con- 
 crete individualities. 
 
 The full explanation of this process would require 
 a volume by itself. Here we can only say what would 
 be introductory to such a work. The work of emotion 
 (Ch. V) and that of imagination (Chs. XVII to 
 XXII) have been described separately. Now we must 
 show the effects of their combined influence as it op- 
 erates upon objects after they have been reflectively 
 ordered by cognitive intelligence. These objects as 
 we have noticed are the results of the work of science. 
 They represent truth; they are true realities. But 
 they are indifierently true, and their truth as yet lacks 
 significance. It is a tautology to say that they possess 
 
THE LIFE OF MIND 323 
 
 cognitive or knowledge or scientific significance; these 
 uses imply value, it is true; but they imply technical 
 or hypothetical value, that is, they have value for 
 something beyond themselves, or their value is bound 
 up in their continuity with other things. What we 
 require here is jree value, significance which rests in 
 its own completeness and does not refer for its ful- 
 fillment to something beyond. This free value the 
 cognitive intelligence cannot reach; even truth as a 
 value is not attained by the sheer intelligence, but 
 comes through the tempering enrichment which the 
 intelligence in its speculative use derives from the 
 imagination. There we have the idea and at the same 
 time the objective reality of a value when the latter 
 feature is drawn by the cognitive intelligence and the 
 former breathed in by the imagination, both functions 
 operating independently of conditions as the specula- 
 tive capacity. Operating thus as a unitary speculative 
 capacity with the dual function of formulating the 
 object as permanent stability, and at the same time 
 of infusing the object with not only effective but 
 effected continuity, mind reaches its highest form in 
 its sufficient self-creation and objectification. 
 
 This final result the mind-life attains only in art. 
 Or, it has up to now only attained self-perfection in 
 art. Is it likely that in other interests a similar per- 
 fection will ever be possible? One shudders at the 
 question. For, so far as we can see, the irrational 
 element of feeling-will strikes through our practical 
 life-forms as the sharp sword which never misses a 
 
324 THE LIFE OF MIND 
 
 vital point. Religion, government, education, moral- 
 ity, all our major interests seem infected with the 
 dread canker of irrational feeling-will; and there ap- 
 pears as yet no prophet who can exorcise the demon. 
 It may to the temperamentally optimistic appear 
 hopeful that the disease is diagnosed, even though as 
 yet the physician who makes the diagnosis is put to 
 death by violence and in shame. There is no possi- 
 bility of doubt that tne seat of the difficulty lies in 
 the segregation and withdrawal of large masses of 
 property objects from their active function in the 
 body- whole of the mind-life. It is as if a cancer be- 
 gins in a harmless irritation of a local structure and 
 gradually involves all the adjacent structures in de- 
 cay and dysfunction; just as the caterpillar starts on 
 one leaf and gradually draws the whole life form of 
 the plant into its deadly web. The aggregation of 
 property objects into large functional units is prob- 
 ably a necessity of the mode of organization of human 
 practical affairs; but the segregation of these aggre- 
 gates and setting them and their purposes against the 
 life whole in the institution of private ownership is 
 the disease that will destroy civilization. 
 
 The question of the persistence of culture seems 
 hopeless, then, from the point of view of our inter- 
 ests. And interest has taken complete charge of hu- 
 man affairs. Only those apparently bodiless purposes 
 such as are represented in art seem to escape the 
 withering blighting grasp of interest. How long will 
 the real arts hold out? 
 
V