Part 4

This is the operation which we have been discussing in the last section. But experience also testifies that the thing suggested is worth attention on its own account. Perhaps we cannot get very readily at the thing which, suggesting flame, suggests fire. It may be that reflection upon the meaning (or conception), "fire," will help us. Fire--here, there, or anywhere, the "essence" fire--means thus and so; _if_ this thing really means fire, it will have certain traits, certain attributes. Are they there? There are "flames" on the stage as part of the scenery. Do they really indicate fire? Fire would mean danger; but it is not possible that such a risk would be taken with an audience (other meanings, risk, audience, danger, being brought in). It must be something else. Well, it is probably colored tissue-paper in strips rapidly blown about. This meaning leads us to closer inspection; it directs our observations to hunt for corroborations or negations. If conditions permitted, it would lead us to walk up and get at the thing in close quarters. In short, devotion to a suggestion, prior to accepting it as stimulus, leads first to other suggestions which may be more applicable; and, secondly, it affords the standpoint and the procedure of a physical experimentation to detect those elements which are the more reliable signs, indicators (evidence). _Suggestions thus treated are precisely what constitute meanings, subsistences, essences_, etc. Without such development and handling of what is suggested, the process of analyzing the situation to get at its hard facts, and especially to get at just those which have a right to determine inference, is haphazard--ineffectively done. In the actual stress of any such needed determination it is of the greatest importance to have a large stock of possible meanings to draw on, and to have them ordered in such a way that we can develop each promptly and accurately, and move quickly from one to another. It is not to be wondered at then that we not only conserve such suggestions as have been previously converted successfully into meanings, but also that we (or some men at least) turn professional inquirers and thinkers; that meanings are elaborated and ordered in related systems quite apart from any immediately urgent situation; or that a realm of "essences" is built up apart from that of existences.

That suggestion occurs is doubtless a mystery, but so is it a mystery that hydrogen and oxygen make water. It is one of the hard, brute facts that we have to take account of. We can investigate the conditions under which the happening takes place, we can trace the consequences which flow from the happening. By these means we can so control the happening that it will take place in a more secure and fruitful manner. But all this depends upon the hearty acceptance of the happening as fact. Suggestion does not of itself yield meanings; it yields only suggested things. But the moment we take a suggested thing and develop it in connection with other meanings and employ it as a guide of investigation (a method of inquiry), that moment we have a full-fledged meaning on our hands, possessing all the verifiable features which have been imported at any time to ideas, forms, species, essences, subsistences. This empirical identification of meaning by means of the specific fact of suggestion cuts deep--if Occam's razor still cuts.

A suggestion lies between adequate stimulation and logical indication. A cry of fire may start us running without reflection; we may have learned, as children are taught in school, to react without questioning. There is overt stimulation, but no suggesting. But if the response is held off or postponed, it may persist as suggestion: the cry suggests fire and suggests the advisability of flight. We may, in a sense we must, call suggestion "mental." But it is important to note what is meant by this term. Fire, running, getting burned, are not mental; they are physical. But in their status of being suggested they may be called mental when we recognize this distinctive status. This means no more than that they are implicated in a specific way in a reflective situation, in virtue of which they are susceptible of certain modes of treatment. Their status as suggested by certain features of the actual situation (and possibly meant or indicated as well as suggested) may be definitely fixed; then we get meanings, logical terms--determinations.[7]

Words are of course the agencies of fixation chiefly employed, though any kind of physical existence--a gesture, a muscular contraction in the finger or leg or chest--under ready command may be used. What is essential is that there be a specific physical existence at hand which may be used to concrete and hold on to the suggestion, so that the latter may be handled on its own account. Until thus detached and refixed there are things suggested, but hardly _a_ suggestion; things meant, but hardly a meaning; things ideated, but hardly an idea. And the suggested thing until detached is still too literal, too tied up with other things, to be further developed or to be successfully used as a method of experimentation in new directions so as to bring to light new traits.

As data are signs which _indicate_ other existences, so meanings are signs which _imply_ other meanings.[8] I am doubtful, for example, whether _this_ is a man or not; that is, I am doubtful as to some given traits when they are taken as signs or evidences, but I am inclined to the hypothesis of a man. Having such a tentative or conceptual object in mind, I am enabled to explore economically and effectively, instead of at random, what is present, _provided_ I can elaborate the implications of the term "man." To develop its implications is all one with telling its meaning in connection with other meanings. Being a man means, for example, speaking when spoken to--another meaning which need have been no part of "man" as originally suggested. This meaning of "answering questions" will then suggest a procedure which the term "man" in its first meaning did not possess; it is an implication or implied meaning which puts me in a new and possibly more fruitful relation to the thing. (The process of developing implications is usually termed "discourse" or ratiocination.) Now, be it noted, replying to questions is no part of the _definition_ of man; it would not be now an implication of Plato or of the Russian Czar for me. In other words, there is something in the actual situation which suggests _inquiring_ as well as _man_; and it is the interaction between these two suggestions which is fruitful. There is consequently no mystery about the fruitfulness of deduction--though this fruitfulness has been urged as though it offered an insuperable objection to instrumentalism. On the contrary, instrumentalism is the only theory to which deduction is not a mystery. If a variety of wheels and cams and rods which have been invented with reference to doing a given task are put together, one expects from the assembled parts a result which could not have been got from any one of them separately or from all of them together in a heap. Because they are independent and unlike structures, working on one another, something new happens. The same is true of terms in relation to one another. When these are brought to bear upon one another, something new, something quite unexpected happens, quite as when one tries an acid with which he is not familiar upon a rock with which he is unfamiliar--that is, unfamiliar in such a conjunction, in spite of intimate acquaintance elsewhere. A definition may fix a certain modicum of meaning in the abstract, as we say; it is a specification of a minimum which gives the point of departure in every interaction of a term with other terms. But nothing follows from the definition by itself or in isolation. It is explicit (boringly so) and has no implications. But bring it in connection with another term with which it has not previously interacted and it may behave in the most delightful or in the most disgustingly disappointing way. The necessity for independent terms is made obvious in the modern theory of axioms. It escapes attention in much of the contemporary logic of transitive and non-transitive, symmetrical and non-symmetrical relations, because the terms are so loaded that there are no propositions at all, but only discriminations of orders of terms. The terms which figure in the discussions, in other words, are correlatives--"brother," "parent," "up," "to the right of," "like," "greater," "after." Such terms are not logical terms; they are _halves_ of such terms as "brother-other-offspring-of-the-same-parents"; "parent-child"; "up-down"; "right-left"; "thing-similar-to-another-thing"; "greater-less"; "after-before." They express positions in a _determined_ situation; they are _relatives_, not relations. They lack implications, being explicit. But a man who is a brother and also a rival in love, and a poorer man than his rival brother, expresses an interaction of different terms from which something might happen: terms with implications, terms constituting a proposition, which a correlative term never does--till brought into conjunction with a term of which it is not a relative. To have called a thing "up" or "brother" is to have already solved its import in some situation. It is dead till set to work in some _other_ situation.

Experience shows, moreover, that certain qualities of things are much more fruitful and much more controllable than others when taken as meanings to be used in drawing conclusions. The term must be of a nature to develop a method of behavior by which to test whether it is the meaning of the situation. Since it is desirable to have a stock of meanings on hand which are so connected that we can move readily from one to another in any direction, the stock is effective in just the degree in which it has been worked into a system--a comprehensive and orderly arrangement. Hence, while all meanings are derived from things which antedate suggestion--or thinking or "consciousness"--not all qualities are equally fitted to be meanings of a wide efficiency, and it is a work of art to select the proper qualities for doing the work. This corresponds to the working over of raw material into an effective tool. A spade or a watchspring is made out of antecedent material, but does not pre-exist as a ready-made tool; and, the more delicate and complicated the work which it has to do, the more art intervenes. These summary remarks will have to pass muster as indicating what a more extensive treatment of a mathematical system of terms would show. Man began by working such qualities as hate and love and fear and beauty into the meanings by which to interpret and control the perplexities of life. When they demonstrated their inefficacy, he had recourse to such qualities as heavy and light, wet and dry, making them into natural essences or explanatory and regulatory meanings. That Greek mediaeval science did not get very far on these lines is a commonplace. Scientific progress and practical control as systematic and deliberate matters date from the century of Galileo, when qualities which lend themselves to mathematical treatment were seized upon. "The most promising of these ideal systems at first were of course the richer ones, the sentimental ones. The baldest and least promising ones were the mathematical ones; but the history of the latter's application is a history of steadily advancing successes, while that of the sentimentally richer ones is one of relative sterility and failure."[9]

There is no problem of why and how the plow fits, or applies to, the garden, or the watchspring to time-keeping. They were made for those respective purposes; the question is how well they do their work, and how they can be reshaped to do it better. Yet they were made out of physical material; men used ready limbs or roots of trees with which to plow before they used metal. We do not measure the worth or reality of the tool by its closeness to its natural prototype, but by its efficiency in doing its work--which connotes a great deal of intervening art. The theory proposed for mathematical distinctions and relations is precisely analogous. They are not the creations of mind except in the sense in which a telephone is a creation of mind. They fit nature because they are derived from natural conditions. Things naturally bulge, so to speak, and naturally alter. To seize upon these qualities, to develop them into keys for discovering the meanings of brute, isolated events, and to accomplish this effectively, to develop and order them till they become economical tools (and tools upon tools) for making an unknown and uncertain situation into a known and certain one, is the recorded triumph of human intelligence. The terms and propositions of mathematics are not fictions; they are not called into being by that particular act of mind in which they are used. No more is a self-binding reaper a figment, nor is it called momentarily into being by the man who wants to harvest his grain. But both alike are works of art, constructed for a purpose in doing the things which have to be done.

We may say of terms what Santayana so happily said of expression: "Expression is a misleading term which suggests that something previously known is imitated or rendered; whereas the expression is itself an original fact, the values of which are then referred to the thing expressed, much as the honors of a Chinese mandarin are attributed retroactively to his parents." The natural history of imputation of virtue should prove to the philosopher a profitable theme. Even in its most superstitious forms (perhaps more _obviously_ in them than elsewhere) it testifies to the sense of a service to be performed and to a demand for application. The superstition lies in making the application to antecedents and to ancestors, where it is but a shroud, instead of to descendants, where it is a generating factor.

Every reflection leaves behind it a double effect. Its immediate outcome is (as I tried to show earlier) the direct reorganization of a situation, a reorganization which confers upon its contents new increments of intrinsic meaning. Its indirect and intellectual product is the defining of a meaning which (when fixed by a suitable existence) is a resource in subsequent investigations. I would not despise the assistance lent by the words "term" and "proposition." As slang has it, a pitched baseball is to the batter a "proposition"; it states, or makes explicit, what he has to deal with next amid all the surrounding and momentarily irrelevant circumstance. Every statement extracts and sets forth the net result of reflection up to date as a condition of subsequent reflection. This extraction of the kernel of past reflections makes possible a throwing to one side of all the consequences of prior false and futile steps; it enables one to dispense with the experiences themselves and to deal only with their _net_ profit. In a favorite phrase of realism, it gives an object "as if there were no experience." It is unnecessary to descant upon the economy of this procedure. It eliminates everything which in spite of its immediate urgency, or vividness, or weight of past authority, is rubbish for the purpose in hand. It enables one to get down to business with just that which (presumably) is of importance in subsequent procedure. It is no wonder that these logical kernels have been elevated into metaphysical essences.

The word "term" suggests the limiting condition of every process of reflection. It sets a fence beyond which it is, presumably, a waste to wander--an error. It sets forth that which _must_ be taken into account--a limit which is inescapable, something which is to ratiocination what the brute datum is to observation. In classic phrase, it is a notion, that is, a _noting_, of the distinctions which have been fixed for the purposes of the kind of inquiry now engaged in. One has only to compare the terms of present scientific discourse with those of, say, Aristotle, to see that the importance of terms as instruments of a proper survey of and attack upon existential situations is such that the terms resulting naturally and spontaneously from reflection have been dropped and more effective ones substituted. In one sense, they are all equally objective; aquosity is as genuine, as well as more obvious, a notion as the present chemical conception. But the latter is able to enter a much wider scope of inquiries and to figure in them more prosperously.

As a special class of scientific inquirers develops, terms that were originally _by-products_ of reflection become primary objects for the intellectual class. The "troubles" which occasion reflection are then _intellectual_ troubles, discrepancies within some current scheme of propositions and terms. The situation which undergoes reorganization and increase of comprised significance is that of the subject-matter of specialized investigation. Nevertheless the same general method recurs within it, and the resulting objects--the terms and propositions--are for all, except those who produce them, instruments, not terminal objects. The objection to analytic realism as a metaphysics of existence is not so much an undue formalism as its affront to the commonsense-world of action, appreciation, and affection. The affront, due to hypostatizing terms into objects, is as great as that of idealism. A naïve realism withstands both affronts.

My interest, however, is not to animadvert upon analytic realism. It is to show how the main tenets of instrumental logic stand in relation to considerations which, although ignored by the idealism which was current when the theory received its first formulation, demand attention: the objective status of data and terms with respect to states of mind or acts of awareness. I have tried to show that the theory, without mutilation or torturing, makes provision for these considerations. They are not objections to it; they are considerations which are involved in it. There are questions at issue, but they concern not matters of logic but matters of fact. They are questions of the _existential_ setting of certain logical distinctions and relations. As to the comparative merits of the two schemes, I have nothing to say beyond what has been said, save that the tendency of the analytic realism is inevitably to treat a difference between the logic of inquiry and of dialectic as if it were itself a matter to be settled by the logic of dialectic. I confess to some fear that a philosophy which fails to identify science with terms and propositions about things which are not terms and propositions, will first exaggerate and then misconstrue the function of dialectics, and land philosophy in a formalism like unto the scholasticism from which the older empiricism with all its defects emancipated those who took it to heart.

VII

Return with me, if you please, to fundamentals. The word "experience" is used freely in the essays and without much explanation. In view of the currency of subjectivistic interpretations of that term, the chief wonder is probably that the doctrine of the essays was not more misunderstood than was actually the case. I have already said something designed to clarify the sense in which the term was used. I now come back to the matter. What is the reason for using the term at all in philosophy? The history of philosophy supplies, I think, the answer. No matter how subjective a turn was given to the word by Hume and Kant, we have only to go to an earlier period to see that the appeal to experience in philosophy was coincident with the emancipation of science from occult essences and causes, and with the substitution of methods of observation, controlled by experimentation and employing mathematical considerations, for methods of mere dialectic definition and classification. The appeal to experience was the cry of the man from Missouri--the demand to be shown. It sprang from the desire to command nature by observing her, instead of anticipating her in order to deck her with aesthetic garlands and hold her with theological chains. The significance of experience was not that sun and moon, stick and stone, are creatures of the senses, but that men would not put their trust any longer in things which are said, however authoritatively, to exist, unless these things are capable of entering into specifiable connections with the organism and the organism with them. It was an emphatic assertion that until men could see _how_ things got into belief, and what they did when they got there, intellectual acceptance would be withheld.

Has not the lesson, however, been so well learned that we can drop reference to experience? Would that such were the case. But the time does not seem to have come. Some things enter by way of the imagination, stimulated by emotional preferences and biases. For _certain_ purposes, they are not the worse for having entered by that gate, instead of through sensory-motor adjustments. Or they may have entered because of the love of man for logical form and symmetry and system, and because of the emotional satisfaction which harmony awakens in a sensitive soul. They too need not be any worse for all that. But surely it is among the businesses of philosophy to discriminate between the kinds of goodness possessed by different kinds of things. And how can it discriminate unless by telling by what road they got into our experience and what they do after they get there? Assuredly the difference is not in _intrinsic_ content. It is not because of self-obvious and self-contained traits of the immediate terms that Dante's world belongs to poetry and Newton's to scientific astronomy. No amount of pure inspection and excogitation could decide which belongs to which world. The difference in status and claim is made by what we call experience: by the place of the two systems in experience with respect to their generation and consequences. And assuredly any philosophy which takes science to be not an _account_ of the world (which it is), but a literal and exhaustive apprehension of it in its full reality, a philosophy which therefore has no place for poetry or possibilities, still needs a theory of experience.

If a scientific man be asked what is truth, he will reply--if he frame his reply in terms of his practice and not of some convention--that which is accepted upon adequate evidence. And if he is asked for a description of adequacy of evidence, he certainly will refer to matters of observation and experiment. It is not the self-inclosed character of the terms and propositions nor their systematic ordering which settles the case for him; it is the way they were obtained and what he can do with them in getting other things. And when a mathematician or logician asks philosophy to abandon this method, then is just the time to be most vigorous in insisting upon the necessity of reference to "experience" in order to fix the import of mathematical and logical pretensions. When students influenced by the symmetry and system of mathematics cease building up their philosophies in terms of traits of mathematical subject-matter in isolation, then empirical philosophers will have less call to mention experience. Meantime, I know of no way of fixing the scope and claims of mathematics in philosophy save to try to point out just at what juncture it enters experience and what work it does after it has got entrance. I have made such an attempt in my account of the fixation and handling of suggestions as meanings. It is defective enough, but the defects are to be remedied by a better empirical account and not by setting up against experience the claims of a logic aloof from experience.