Part 2

(2) Definiteness, depth, and variety of meaning attach to the objects of an experience just in the degree in which they have been previously thought about, even when present in an experience in which they do not evoke inferential procedures at all. Such terms as "meaning," "significance," "value," have a double sense. Sometimes they mean a function: the office of one thing representing another, or pointing to it as implied; the operation, in short, of serving as sign. In the word "symbol" this meaning is practically exhaustive. But the terms also sometimes mean an inherent quality, a quality intrinsically characterizing the thing experienced and making it worth while. The word "sense," as in the phrase "sense of a thing" (and non-sense) is devoted to this use as definitely as are the words "sign" and "symbol" to the other. In such a pair as "import" and "importance," the first tends to select the reference to another thing while the second names an intrinsic content. In reflection, the extrinsic reference is always primary. The height of the mercury means rain; the color of the flame means sodium; the form of the curve means factors distributed accidentally. In the situation which follows upon reflection, meanings are intrinsic; they have no instrumental or subservient office, because they have no office at all. They are as much qualities of the objects in the situation as are red and black, hard and soft, square and round. And every reflective experience adds new shades of such intrinsic qualifications. In other words, while reflective knowing is instrumental to gaining control in a troubled situation (and thus has a practical or utilitarian force), it is also instrumental to the enrichment of the immediate significance of subsequent experiences. And it may well be that this by-product, this gift of the gods, is incomparably more valuable for living a life than is the primary and intended result of control, essential as is that control to having a life to live. Words are treacherous in this field; there are no accepted criteria for assigning or measuring their meanings; but if one use the term "consciousness" to denote immediate values of objects, then it is certainly true that "consciousness is a lyric cry even in the midst of business." But it is equally true that if someone else understands by consciousness the function of effective reflection, then consciousness is a business--even in the midst of writing or singing lyrics. But the statement remains inadequate until we add that knowing as a business, inquiry and invention as enterprises, as practical acts, become themselves charged with the meaning of what they accomplish as _their_ own immediate quality. There exists no disjunction between aesthetic qualities which are final yet idle, and acts which are practical or instrumental. The latter have their own delights and sorrows.

III

Speaking, then, from the standpoint of temporal order, we find reflection, or thought, occupying an intermediate and reconstructive position. It comes between a temporally prior situation (an organized interaction of factors) of active and appreciative experience, wherein some of the factors have become discordant and incompatible, and a later situation, which has been constituted out of the first situation by means of acting on the findings of reflective inquiry. This final situation therefore has a richness of meaning, as well as a controlled character lacking to its original. By it is fixed the logical validity or intellectual force of the terms and relations distinguished by reflection. Owing to the continuity of experience (the overlapping and recurrence of like problems), these logical fixations become of the greatest assistance to subsequent inquiries; they are its working means. In such further uses, they get further tested, defined, and elaborated, until the vast and refined systems of the technical objects and formulae of the sciences come into existence--a point to which we shall return later.

Owing to circumstances upon which it is unnecessary to dwell, the position thus sketched was not developed primarily upon its own independent account, but rather in the course of a criticism of another type of logic, the idealistic logic found in Lotze. It is obvious that the theory in question has critical bearings. According to it, reflection in its distinctions and processes can be understood only when placed in its intermediate pivotal temporal position--as a process of control, through reorganization, of material alogical in character. It intimates that thinking would not exist, and hence knowledge would not be found, in a world which presented no troubles or where there are no "problems of evil"; and on the other hand that a reflective method is the only sure way of dealing with these troubles. It intimates that while the results of reflection, because of the continuity of experience, may be of wider scope than the situation which calls out a particular inquiry and invention, reflection itself is always specific in origin and aim; it always has something special to cope with. For troubles are concretely specific. It intimates also that thinking and reflective knowledge are never an end-all, never their own purpose nor justification, but that they pass naturally into a more direct and vital type of experience, whether technological or appreciative or social. This doctrine implies, moreover, that logical theory in its usual sense is essentially a descriptive study; that it is an account of the processes and tools which have actually been found effective in inquiry, comprising in the term "inquiry" both deliberate discovery and deliberate invention.

Since the doctrine was propounded in an intellectual environment where such statements were not commonplaces, where in fact a logic was reigning which challenged these convictions at every point, it is not surprising that it was put forth with a controversial coloring, being directed particularly at the dominant idealistic logic. The point of contact and hence the point of conflict between the logic set forth and the idealistic logic are not far to seek. The logic based on idealism had, as a matter of fact, treated knowledge from the standpoint of an account of thought--of thought in the sense of conception, judgment, and inferential reasoning. But while it had inherited this view from the older rationalism, it had also learned from Hume, via Kant, that direct sense or perceptual material must be taken into account. Hence it had, in effect, formulated the problem of logic as the problem of the connection of logical thought with sense-material, and had attempted to set forth a metaphysics of reality based upon various ascending stages of the completeness of the rationalization or idealization of given, brute, fragmentary sense material by synthetic activity of thought. While considerations of a much less formal kind were chiefly influential in bringing idealism to its modern vogue, such as the conciliation of a scientific with a religious and moral point of view and the need of rationalizing social and historic institutions so as to explain their cultural effect, yet this logic constituted the _technique_ of idealism--its strictly intellectual claim for acceptance.

The point of contact, and hence of conflict, between it and such a doctrine of logic and reflective thought as is set forth above is, I repeat, fairly obvious. Both fix upon thinking as the key to the situation. I still believe (what I believed when I wrote the essays) that under the influence of idealism valuable analyses and formulations of the work of reflective thought, in its relation to securing knowledge of objects, were executed. But--and the but is one of exceptional gravity--the idealistic logic started from the distinction between immediate plural data and unifying, rationalizing meanings as a distinction ready-made in experience, and it set up as the goal of knowledge (and hence as the definition of true reality) a complete, exhaustive, comprehensive, and eternal system in which plural and immediate data are forever woven into a fabric and pattern of self-luminous meaning. In short, it ignored the temporally intermediate and instrumental place of reflection; and because it ignored and denied this place, it overlooked its essential feature: control of the environment in behalf of human progress and well-being, the effort at control being stimulated by the needs, the defects, the troubles, which accrue when the environment coerces and suppresses man or when man endeavors in ignorance to override the environment. Hence it misconstrued the criterion of the work of intelligence; it set up as its criterion an Absolute and Non-temporal reality at large, instead of using the criterion of specific temporal achievement of consequences through a control supplied by reflection. And with this outcome, it proved faithless to the cause which had generated it and given it its reason for being: the magnification of the work of intelligence in our actual physical and social world. For a theory which ends by declaring that everything is, really and eternally, thoroughly ideal and rational, cuts the nerve of the specific demand and work of intelligence.

From this general statement, let me descend to the technical point upon which turns the criticism of idealistic logic by the essays. Grant, for a moment, as a hypothesis, that thinking starts neither from an implicit force of rationality desiring to realize itself completely in and through and against the limitations which are imposed upon it by the conditions of our human experience (as all idealisms have taught), nor from the fact that in each human being is a "mind" whose business it is just to "know"--to theorize in the Aristotelian sense; but, rather, that it starts from an effort to get out of some trouble, actual or menacing. It is quite clear that the human race has tried many another way out besides reflective inquiry. Its favorite resort has been a combination of magic and poetry, the former to get the needed relief and control; the latter to import into imagination, and hence into emotional consummation, the realizations denied in fact. But as far as reflection does emerge and gets a working foothold, the nature of its job is set for it. On the one hand, it must discover, it must find out, it must detect; it must inventory what is there. All this, or else it will never know what the matter is; the human being will not find out what "struck him," and hence will have no idea of where to seek for a remedy--for the needed control. On the other hand, it must invent, it must project, it must bring to bear upon the given situation what is not, as it exists, given as a part of it.

This seems to be quite empirical and quite evident. The essays submitted the thesis that this simple dichotomization of the practical situation of power and enjoyment, when menaced, into what is there (whether as obstacle or as resource), and into suggested inventions--projections of something else to be brought to bear upon it, ways of dealing with it--is the explanation of the time-honored logical determinations of brute fact, datum and meaning or ideal quality; of (in more psychological terminology) sense-perception and conception; of particulars (parts, fragments) and universals-generics; and also of whatever there is of intrinsic significance in the traditional subject-predicate scheme of logic. It held, less formally, that this view explained the eulogistic connotations always attaching to "reason" and to the work of reason in effecting unity, harmony, comprehension, or synthesis, and to the traditional combination of a depreciatory attitude toward brute facts with a grudging concession of the necessity which thought is under of accepting them and taking them for its own subject-matter and checks. More specifically, it is held that this view supplied (and I should venture to say for the first time) an explanation of the traditional theory of truth as a correspondence or agreement of existence and mind or thought. It showed that the correspondence or agreement was like that between an invention and the conditions which the invention is intended to meet. Thereby a lot of epistemological hangers-on to logic were eliminated; for the distinctions which epistemology had misunderstood were located where they belong:--in the art of inquiry, considered as a joint process of ascertainment and invention, projection, or "hypothesizing"--of which more below.

IV

The essays were published in 1903. At that time (as has been noted) idealism was in practical command of the philosophic field in both England and this country; the logics in vogue were profoundly influenced by Kantian and post-Kantian thought. Empirical logics, those conceived under the influence of Mill, still existed, but their light was dimmed by the radiance of the regnant idealism. Moreover, from the standpoint of the doctrine expounded in the essays, the empirical logic committed the same logical fault as did the idealistic, in taking sense-data to be primitive (instead of being resolutions of the _things_ of prior experiences into elements for the aim of securing evidence); while it had no recognition of the specific service rendered by intelligence in the development of new meanings and plans of new actions. This state of things may explain the controversial nature of the essays, and their selection in particular of an idealistic logic for animadversion.

Since the essays were written, there has been an impressive revival of realism, and also a development of a type of logical theory--the so-called Analytic Logic--corresponding to the philosophical aspirations of the new realism. This marked alteration of intellectual environment subjects the doctrine of the essays to a test not contemplated when they were written. It is one thing to develop a hypothesis in view of a particular situation; it is another to test its worth in view of procedures and results having a radically different motivation and direction. It is, of course, impossible to discuss the analytic logic in this place. A consideration of how some of its main tenets compare with the conclusions outlined above will, however, throw some light upon the meaning and the worth of the latter. Although this was formulated with the idealistic and sensationalistic logics in mind, the hypothesis that knowledge can be rightly understood only in connection with considerations of time and temporal position is a general one. If it is valid, it should be readily applicable to a critical placing of any theory which ignores and denies such temporal considerations. And while I have learned much from the realistic movement about the full force of the position sketched in the essays when adequately developed; and while later discussions have made it clear that the language employed in the essays was sometimes unnecessarily (though naturally) infected by the subjectivism of the positions against which it was directed, I find that the analytic logic is also guilty of the fault of temporal dislocation.

In one respect, idealistic logic takes cognizance of a temporal contrast; indeed, it may fairly be said to be based upon it. It seizes upon the contrast in intellectual force, consistency, and comprehensiveness between the crude or raw data with which science sets out and the defined, ordered, and systematic totality at which it aims--and which in part it achieves. This difference is a genuine empirical difference. Idealism noted that the difference may properly be ascribed to the intervention of thinking--that thought is what makes the difference. Now since the outcome of science is of higher intellectual rank than its data, and since the intellectualistic tradition in philosophy has always identified degrees of logical adequacy with degrees of reality, the conclusion was naturally drawn that _the_ real world--absolute reality--was an ideal or thought-world, and that the sense-world, the commonsense-world, the world of actual and historic experience, is simply a phenomenal world presenting a fragmentary manifestation of that thought which the process of human thinking makes progressively explicit and articulate.

This perception of the intellectual superiority of objects which are constituted at the conclusion of thinking over those which formed its data may fairly be termed the empirical factor in the idealistic logic. The essence of the realistic reaction, on its logical side, is exceedingly simple. It starts from those objects with which science, approved science, ends. Since they are the objects which are _known_, which are true, they are the real objects. That they are also objects for intervening thinking is an interesting enough historical and psychological fact, but one quite irrelevant to their natures, which are precisely what knowledge finds them to be. In the biography of human beings it may hold good that apprehension of objects is arrived at only through certain wanderings, endeavors, exercises, experiments; possibly acts called sensation, memory, reflection may be needed by men in reaching a grasp of the objects. But such things denote facts about the history of the knower, not about the nature of the known object. Analysis will show, moreover, that any intelligible account of this history, any verified statement of the psychology of knowing assumes objects which are unaffected by the knowing--otherwise the pretended history is merely pretense and not to be trusted. The history of the process of knowing, moreover, implies also the terms and propositions--truths--of logic. That logic must therefore be assumed as a science of objects real and true, quite apart from any process of thinking them. In short, the requirement is that we shall think things as they are themselves, not make them into objects constructed by thinking.

This revival of realism coincided also with an important movement in mathematics and logic: the attempt to treat logical distinctions by mathematical methods; while at the same time mathematical subject-matter had become so generalized that it was a theory of types and orders of terms and propositions--in short, a logic. Certain minds have always found mathematics the type of knowledge, because of its definiteness, order, and comprehensiveness. The wonderful accomplishments of modern mathematics, including its development into a type of highly generalized logic, was not calculated to lessen the tendency. And while prior philosophers have generally played their admiration of mathematics into the hands of idealism (regarding mathematical subject-matter as the embodiment or manifestation of pure thought), the new philosophy insisted that the terms and types of order constituting mathematical and logical subject-matter were real in their own right, and (at most) merely led up to and discovered by thinking--an operation, moreover, itself subjected (as has been pointed out) to the entities and relationships set forth by logic.

The inadequacy of this summary account may be pardoned in view of the fact that no adequate exposition is intended; all that is wanted is such a statement of the general relationship of idealism to realism as may serve as the point of departure for a comparison with the instrumentalism of the essays. In bare outline, it is obvious that the two latter agree in regarding thinking as instrumental, not as constitutive. But this agreement turns out to be a formal matter in contrast with a disagreement concerning that _to which_ thinking is instrumental. The new realism finds that it is instrumental simply to knowledge of objects. From this it infers (with perfect correctness and inevitableness) that thinking (including all the operations of discovery and testing as they might be set forth in an inductive logic) is a mere psychological preliminary, utterly irrelevant to any conclusions regarding the nature of objects known. The thesis of the essays is that thinking is instrumental to a control of the environment, a control effected through acts which would not be undertaken without the prior resolution of a complex situation into assured elements and an accompanying projection of possibilities--without, that is to say, thinking.

Such an instrumentalism seems to analytic realism but a variant of idealism. For it asserts that processes of reflective inquiry play a part in shaping the objects--namely, terms and propositions--which constitute the bodies of scientific knowledge. Now it must not only be admitted but proclaimed that the doctrine of the essays holds that intelligence is not an otiose affair, nor yet a mere preliminary to a spectator-like apprehension of terms and propositions. In so far as it is idealistic to hold that objects of knowledge _in their capacity of distinctive objects of knowledge_ are determined by intelligence, it is idealistic. It believes that faith in the constructive, the creative, competency of intelligence was the redeeming element in historic idealisms. Lest, however, we be misled by general terms, the scope and limits of this "idealism" must be formulated.

(1) Its distinguishing trait is that it defines thought or intelligence by function, by work done, by consequences effected. It does not start with a power, an entity or substance or activity which is ready-made thought or reason and which as such constitutes the world. Thought, intelligence, is to it just a name for the events and acts which make up the processes of analytic inspection and projected invention and testing which have been described. These events, these acts, are wholly natural; they are "realistic"; they comprise the sticks and stones, the bread and butter, the trees and horses, the eyes and ears, the lovers and haters, the sighs and delights of ordinary experience. Thinking is what some of the actual existences _do_. _They_ are in no sense constituted by thinking; on the contrary, the problems of thought are set by _their_ difficulties and its resources are furnished by _their_ efficacies; its acts are _their_ doings adapted to a distinctive end.

(2) The reorganization, the modification, effected by thinking is, by this hypothesis, a physical one. Thinking ends in experiment and experiment is an _actual_ alteration of a physically antecedent situation in those details or respects which called for thought in order to do away with some evil. To suffer a disease and to try to do something for it is a primal experience; to look into the disease, to try and find out just what makes it a disease, to invent--or hypothecate--remedies is a reflective experience; to try the suggested remedy and see whether the disease is helped is the act which transforms the data and the intended remedy into _knowledge objects_. And this transformation into knowledge objects is also effected by changing physical things by physical means.