Part 10

In whatever form we hear this question propounded, I think that it always arises from two things, a belief that _causality_ must be exerted in activity, and a wonder as to how causality is made. If we take an activity-situation at its face-value, it seems as if we caught _in flagrante delicto_ the very power that makes facts come and be. I now am eagerly striving, for example, to get this truth which I seem half to perceive, into words which shall make it show more clearly. If the words come, it will seem as if the striving itself had drawn or pulled them into actuality out from the state of merely possible being in which they were. How is this feat performed? How does the pulling _pull_? How do I get my hold on words not yet existent, and when they come by what means have I _made_ them come? Really it is the problem of creation; for in the end the question is: How do I make them _be_? Real activities are those that really make things be, without which the things are not, and with which they are there. Activity, so far as we merely feel it, on the other hand, is only an impression of ours, it may be maintained; and an impression is, for all this way of thinking, only a shadow of another fact.

Arrived at this point, I can do little more than indicate the principles on which, as it seems to me, a radically empirical philosophy is obliged to rely in handling such a dispute.

If there _be_ real creative activities in being, radical empiricism must say, somewhere they must be immediately lived. Somewhere the _that_ of efficacious causing and the _what_ of it must be experienced in one, just as the what and the that of 'cold' are experienced in one whenever a man has the sensation of cold here and now. It boots not to say that our sensations are fallible. They are indeed; but to see the thermometer contradict us when we say 'it is cold' does not abolish cold as a specific nature from the universe. Cold is in the arctic circle if not here. Even so, to feel that our train is moving when the train beside our window moves, to see the moon through a telescope come twice as near, or to see two pictures as one solid when we look through a stereoscope at them, leaves motion, nearness, and solidity still in being--if not here, yet each in its proper seat elsewhere. And wherever the seat of real causality _is_, as ultimately known 'for true' (in nerve-processes, if you will, that cause our feelings of activity as well as the movements which these seem to prompt), a philosophy of pure experience can consider the real causation as no other _nature_ of thing than that which even in our most erroneous experiences appears to be at work. Exactly what appears there is what we _mean_ by working, though we may later come to learn that working was not exactly _there_. Sustaining, persevering, striving, paying with effort as we go, hanging on, and finally achieving our intention--this _is_ action, this _is_ effectuation in the only shape in which, by a pure experience-philosophy, the whereabouts of it anywhere can be discussed. Here is creation in its first intention, here is causality at work.[101] To treat this offhand as the bare illusory surface of a world whose real causality is an unimaginable ontological principle hidden in the cubic deeps, is, for the more empirical way of thinking, only animism in another shape. You explain your given fact by your 'principle,' but the principle itself, when you look clearly at it, turns out to be nothing but a previous little spiritual copy of the fact. Away from that one and only kind of fact your mind, considering causality, can never get.[102]

I conclude, then, that real effectual causation as an ultimate nature, as a 'category,' if you like, of reality, is _just what we feel it to be_, just that kind of conjunction which our own activity-series reveal. We have the whole butt and being of it in our hands; and the healthy thing for philosophy is to leave off grubbing underground for what effects effectuation, or what makes action act, and to try to solve the concrete questions of where effectuation in this world is located, of which things are the true causal agents there, and of what the more remote effects consist.

From this point of view the greater sublimity traditionally attributed to the metaphysical inquiry, the grubbing inquiry, entirely disappears. If we could know what causation really and transcendentally is in itself, the only _use_ of the knowledge would be to help us to recognize an actual cause when we had one, and so to track the future course of operations more intelligently out. The mere abstract inquiry into causation's hidden nature is not more sublime than any other inquiry equally abstract. Causation inhabits no more sublime level than anything else. It lives, apparently, in the dirt of the world as well as in the absolute, or in man's unconquerable mind. The worth and interest of the world consists not in its elements, be these elements things, or be they the conjunctions of things; it exists rather in the dramatic outcome in the whole process, and in the meaning of the succession stages which the elements work out.

My colleague and master, Josiah Royce, in a page of his review of Stout's _Analytic Psychology_[103] has some fine words on this point with which I cordially agree. I cannot agree with his separating the notion of efficacy from that of activity altogether (this I understand to be one contention of his) for activities are efficacious whenever they are real activities at all. But the inner nature both of efficacy and of activity are superficial problems, I understand Royce to say; and the only point for us in solving them would be their possible use in helping us to solve the far deeper problem of the course and meaning of the world of life. Life, says our colleague, is full of significance, of meaning, of success and of defeat, of hoping and of striving, of longing, of desire, and of inner value. It is a total presence that embodies worth. To live our own lives better in this presence is the true reason why we wish to know the elements of things; so even we psychologists must end on this pragmatic note.

The urgent problems of activity are thus more concrete. They are all problems of the true relation of longer-span to shorter-span activities. When, for example, a number of 'ideas' (to use the name traditional in psychology) grow confluent in a larger field of consciousness, do the smaller activities still co-exist with the wider activities then experienced by the conscious subject? And, if so, do the wide activities accompany the narrow ones inertly, or do they exert control? Or do they perhaps utterly supplant and replace them and short-circuit their effects? Again, when a mental activity-process and a brain-cell series of activities both terminate in the same muscular movement, does the mental process steer the neural processes or not? Or, on the other hand, does it independently short-circuit their effects? Such are the questions that we must begin with. But so far am I from suggesting any definitive answer to such questions, that I hardly yet can put them clearly. They lead, however, into that region of panpsychic and ontologic speculation of which Professors Bergson and Strong have lately enlarged the literature in so able and interesting a way.[104] The results of these authors seem in many respects dissimilar, and I understand than as yet but imperfectly; but I cannot help suspecting that the direction of their work is very promising, and that they have the hunter's instinct for the fruitful trails.

FOOTNOTES:

[85] President's Address before the American Psychological Association, Philadelphia Meeting, December, 1904. [Reprinted from _The Psychological Review_, vol. XII, No. 1, Jan., 1905. Also reprinted, with some omissions, as Appendix B, _A Pluralistic Universe_, pp. 370-394. Pp. 166-167 have also been reprinted in _Some Problems of Philosophy_, p. 212. The present essay is referred to in _ibid._, p. 219, note. The author's corrections have been adopted for the present text. ED.]

[86] [_The Journal of Philosophy, Psychology and Scientific Methods._]

[87] _Appearance and Reality_, second edition, pp. 116-117.--Obviously written _at_ Ward, though Ward's name is not mentioned.

[88] [_Mind_, vol. XII, 1887, pp. 573-574.]

[89] _Mind_, N. S., vol. VI, [1897], p. 379.

[90] _Naturalism and Agnosticism_, vol. II, p. 245. One thinks naturally of the peripatetic _actus primus_ and _actus secundus_ here. ["Actus autem est _duplex_: _primus_ et _secundus_. Actus quidem primus est forma, et integritas sei. Actus autem secundus est operatio." Thomas Aquinas: _Summa Theologica_, edition of Leo XIII, (1894), vol. I, p. 391. Cf. also Blanc: _Dictionnaire de Philosophie_, under 'acte.' ED.]

[91] [_Appearance and Reality_, second edition, p. 116.]

[92] [_Kritik der reinen Vernunft, Werke_, (1905), vol. IV, p. 110 (trans. by Max Müller, second edition, p. 128).]

[93] I refer to such descriptive work as Ladd's (_Psychology, Descriptive and Explanatory_, part I, chap. V, part II, chap. XI, part III, chaps. XXV and XXVI); as Sully's (_The Human Mind_, part V); as Stout's (_Analytic Psychology_, book I, chap. VI, and book II, chaps. I, II, and III); as Bradley's (in his long series of analytic articles on Psychology in _Mind_); as Titchener's (_Outline of Psychology_, part I, chap. VI); as Shand's (_Mind_, N. S., III, 449; IV, 450; VI, 289); as Ward's (_Mind_, XII, 67; 564); as Loveday's (_Mind_, N. S., X, 455); as Lipps's (Vom Fühlen, Wollen und Denken, 1902, chaps. II, IV, VI); and as Bergson's (_Revue Philosophique_, LIII, 1)--to mention only a few writings which I immediately recall.

[94] Their existence forms a curious commentary on Prof. Münsterberg's dogma that will-attitudes are not describable. He himself has contributed in a superior way to their description, both in his _Willenshandlung_, and in his _Grundzüge_ [_der Psychologie_], part II, chap. IX, § 7.

[95] I ought myself to cry _peccavi_, having been a voluminous sinner in my own chapter on the will. [_Principles of Psychology_, vol. II, chap. XXVI.]

[96] [Cf. F. H. Bradley, _Appearance and Reality_, second edition, pp. 96-97.]

[97] [Cf. above, p. 59, note.]

[98] _Verborum gratiâ_: "The feeling of activity is not able, _quâ_ feeling, to tell us anything about activity" (Loveday: _Mind_, N. S., vol. X, [1901], p. 463); "A sensation or feeling or sense _of_ activity ... is not, looked at in another way, an experience _of_ activity at all. It is a mere sensation shut up within which you could by no reflection get the idea of activity.... Whether this experience is or is not later on a character essential to our perception and our idea of activity, it, as it comes first, is not in itself an experience of activity at all. It, as it comes first, is only so for extraneous reasons and only so for an outside observer" (Bradley, _Appearance and Reality_, second edition, p. 605); "In dem Tätigkeitsgefühle liegt an sich nicht der geringste Beweis für das Vorhandensein einer psychischen Tätigkeit" (Münsterberg: _Grundzüge der Psychologie_). I could multiply similar quotations and would have introduced some of them into my text to make it more concrete, save that the mingling of different points of view in most of these author's discussions (not in Münsterberg's) make it impossible to disentangle exactly what they mean. I am sure in any case, to be accused of misrepresenting them totally, even in this note, by omission of the context, so the less I name names and the more I stick to abstract characterization of a merely possible style of opinion, the safer it will be. And apropos of misunderstandings, I may add to this note a complaint on my own account. Professor Stout, in the excellent chapter on 'Mental Activity,' in vol. I of his _Analytic Psychology_, takes me to task for identifying spiritual activity with certain muscular feelings and gives quotations to bear him out. They are from certain paragraphs on 'the Self,' in which my attempt was to show what the central nucleus of the activities that we call 'ours' is. [_Principles of Psychology_, vol. I, pp. 299-305.] I found it in certain intracephalic movements which we habitually oppose, as 'subjective,' to the activities of the transcorporeal world. I sought to show that there is no direct evidence that we feel the activity of an inner spiritual agent as such (I should now say the activity of 'consciousness' as such, see [the first essay], 'Does Consciousness Exist?'). There are, in fact, three distinguishable 'activities' in the field of discussion: the elementary activity involved in the mere _that_ of experience, in the fact that _something_ is going on, and the farther specification of this _something_ into two _whats_, an activity felt as 'ours,' and an activity ascribed to objects. Stout, as I apprehend him, identifies 'our' activity with that of the total experience-process, and when I circumscribe it as a part thereof, accuses me of treating it as a sort of external appendage to itself (Stout: _op. cit._, vol. I, pp. 162-163), as if I 'separated the activity from the process which is active.' But all the processes in question are active, and their activity is inseparable from their being. My book raised only the question of _which_ activity deserved the name of 'ours.' So far as we are 'persons,' and contrasted and opposed to an 'environment,' movements in our body figure as our activities; and I am unable to find any other activities that are ours in this strictly personal sense. There is a wider sense in which the whole 'choir of heaven and furniture of the earth,' and their activities, are ours, for they are our 'objects.' But 'we' are here only another name for the total process of experience, another name for all that is, in fact; and I was dealing with the personal and individualized self exclusively in the passages with which Professor Stout finds fault.

The individualized self, which I believe to be the only thing properly called self, is a part of the content of the world experienced. The world experienced (otherwise called the 'field of consciousness') comes at all times with our body as its centre, centre of vision, centre of action, centre of interest. Where the body is is 'here'; when the body acts is 'now'; what the body touches is 'this'; all other things are 'there' and 'then' and 'that.' These words of emphasized position imply a systematization of things with reference to a focus of action and interest which lies in the body; and the systematization is now so instinctive (was it ever not so?) that no developed or active experience exists for us at all except in that ordered form. So far as 'thoughts' and 'feelings' can be active, their activity terminates in the activity of the body, and only through first arousing its activities can they begin to change those of the rest of the world. [Cf. also _A Pluralistic Universe_, p. 344, note 8. ED.] The body is the storm centre, the origin of co-ordinates, the constant place of stress in all that experience-train. Everything circles round it, and is felt from its point of view. The word 'I,' then, is primarily a noun of position, just like 'this' and 'here.' Activities attached to 'this' position have prerogative emphasis, and, if activities have feelings, must be felt in a peculiar way. The word 'my' designates the kind of emphasis. I see no inconsistency whatever in defending, on the one hand, 'my' activities as unique and opposed to those of outer nature, and, on the other hand, in affirming, after introspection, that they consist in movements in the head. The 'my' of them is the emphasis, the feeling of perspective-interest in which they are dyed.

[99] [_Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding_, sect. VII, part I, Selby-Bigge's edition, pp. 65 ff.]

[100] Page 172.

[101] Let me not be told that this contradicts [the first essay], 'Does Consciousness Exist?' (see especially page 32), in which it was said that while 'thoughts' and 'things' have the same natures, the natures work 'energetically' on each other in the things (fire burns, water wets, etc.) but not in the thoughts. Mental activity-trains are composed of thoughts, yet their members do work on each other, they check, sustain, and introduce. They do so when the activity is merely associational as well as when effort is there. But, and this is my reply, they do so by other parts of their nature than those that energize physically. One thought in every developed activity-series is a desire or thought of purpose, and all the other thoughts acquire a feeling tone from their relation of harmony or oppugnancy to this. The interplay of these secondary tones (among which 'interest,' 'difficulty,' and 'effort' figure) runs the drama in the mental series. In what we term the physical drama these qualities play absolutely no part. The subject needs careful working out; but I can see no inconsistency.

[102] I have found myself more than once accused in print of being the assertor of a metaphysical principle of activity. Since literary misunderstandings retard the settlement of problems, I should like to say that such an interpretation of the pages I have published on Effort and on Will is absolutely foreign to what I meant to express. [_Principles of Psychology_, vol. II, ch. XXVI.] I owe all my doctrines on this subject to Renouvier; and Renouvier, as I understand him, is (or at any rate then was) an out and out phenomenist, a denier of 'forces' in the most strenuous sense. [Cf. Ch. Renouvier: _Esquisse d'une Classification Systématique des Doctrines Philosophiques_ (1885), vol. II, pp. 390-392; _Essais de Critique Générale_ (1859), vol. II, §§ ix, xiii. For an acknowledgment of the author's general indebtedness to Renouvier, cf. _Some Problems of Philosophy_, p. 165, note. ED.] Single clauses in my writing, or sentences read out of their connection, may possibly have been compatible with a transphenomenal principle of energy; but I defy anyone to show a single sentence which, taken with its context, should be naturally held to advocate that view. The misinterpretation probably arose at first from my defending (after Renouvier) the indeterminism of our efforts. 'Free will' was supposed by my critics to involve a supernatural agent. As a matter of plain history the only 'free will' I have ever thought of defending is the character of novelty in fresh activity-situations. If an activity-process is the form of a whole 'field of consciousness,' and if each field of consciousness is not only in its totality unique (as is now commonly admitted) but has its elements unique (since in that situation they are all dyed in the total) then novelty is perpetually entering the world and what happens there is not pure _repetition_, as the dogma of the literal uniformity of nature requires. Activity-situations come, in short, each with an original touch. A 'principle' of free will if there were one, would doubtless manifest itself in such phenomena, but I never saw, nor do I now see, what the principle could do except rehearse the phenomenon beforehand, or why it ever should be invoked.

[103] _Mind_, N. S., vol. VI, 1897; cf. pp. 392-393.

[104] [Cf. _A Pluralistic Universe_, Lect. VI (on Bergson); H. Bergson: _Creative Evolution_, trans. by A. Mitchell; C. A. Strong: _Why the Mind has a Body_, ch. XII. ED.]

VII

THE ESSENCE OF HUMANISM[105]

Humanism is a ferment that has 'come to stay.'[106] It is not a single hypothesis or theorem, and it dwells on no new facts. It is rather a slow shifting in the philosophic perspective, making things appear as from a new centre of interest or point of sight. Some writers are strongly conscious of the shifting, others half unconscious, even though their own vision may have undergone much change. The result is no small confusion in debate, the half-conscious humanists often taking part against the radical ones, as if they wished to count upon the other side.[107]

If humanism really be the name for such a shifting of perspective, it is obvious that the whole scene of the philosophic stage will change in some degree if humanism prevails. The emphasis of things, their foreground and background distribution, their sizes and values, will not keep just the same.[108] If such pervasive consequences be involved in humanism, it is clear that no pains which philosophers may take, first in defining it, and then in furthering, checking, or steering its progress, will be thrown away.

It suffers badly at present from incomplete definition. Its most systematic advocates, Schiller and Dewey, have published fragmentary programs only; and its bearing on many vital philosophic problems has not been traced except by adversaries who, scenting heresies in advance, have showered blows on doctrines--subjectivism and scepticism, for example--that no good humanist finds it necessary to entertain. By their still greater reticences, the anti-humanists have, in turn, perplexed the humanists. Much of the controversy has involved the word 'truth.' It is always good in debate to know your adversary's point of view authentically. But the critics of humanism never define exactly what the word 'truth' signifies when they use it themselves. The humanists have to guess at their view; and the result has doubtless been much beating of the air. Add to all this, great individual differences in both camps, and it becomes clear that nothing is so urgently needed, at the stage which things have reached at present, as a sharper definition by each side of its central point of view.

Whoever will contribute any touch of sharpness will help us to make sure of what's what and who is who. Anyone can contribute such a definition, and, without it, no one knows exactly where he stands. If I offer my own provisional definition of humanism[109] now and here, others may improve it, some adversary may be led to define his own creed more sharply by the contrast, and a certain quickening of the crystallization of general opinion may result.

I

The essential service of humanism, as I conceive the situation, is to have seen that _though one part of our experience may lean upon another part to make it what it is in any one of several aspects in which it may be considered, experience as a whole is self-containing and leans on nothing_.

Since this formula also expresses the main contention of transcendental idealism, it needs abundant explication to make it unambiguous. It seems, at first sight, to confine itself to denying theism and pantheism. But, in fact, it need not deny either; everything would depend on the exegesis; and if the formula ever became canonical, it would certainly develop both right-wing and left-wing interpreters. I myself read humanism theistically and pluralistically. If there be a God, he is no absolute all-experiencer, but simply the experiencer of widest actual conscious span. Read thus, humanism is for me a religion susceptible of reasoned defence, though I am well aware how many minds there are to whom it can appeal religiously only when it has been monistically translated. Ethically the pluralistic form of it takes for me a stronger hold on reality than any other philosophy I know of--it being essentially a _social_ philosophy, a philosophy of '_co_,' in which conjunctions do the work. But my primary reason for advocating it is its matchless intellectual economy. It gets rid, not only of the standing 'problems' that monism engenders ('problem of evil,' 'problem of freedom,' and the like), but of other metaphysical mysteries and paradoxes as well.