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 "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.
The objection then to a logic which rules out knowledge getting, and which bases logic exclusively upon the traits of known objects, is that it is self-contradictory. There is no way to know what are the traits of known objects, as distinct from imaginary objects, or objects of opinion, or objects of unanalytic common-sense, save by referring to the operations of getting, using, and testing evidence--the processes of knowledge getting. I am making no appeal for skepticism at large; I am not questioning the right of the physicist, the mathematician, or the symbolic logicist to go ahead with accepted objects and do what he can with them. I am pointing out that anyone who professes to be concerned with finding out what knowledge _is_, has for his primary work the job of finding out why it is so much safer to proceed with just these objects, than with those, say, of Aristotelian science. Aristotle was not lacking in acuteness nor in learning. To him it was clear that objects of knowledge are the things of ordinary perception, so far as they are referred to a form which comparison of perceived things, in the light of a final cause, makes evident. If this view of the objects of knowledge has gone into the discard, if quite other objects of knowledge are now received and employed, it is because the methods of _getting_ knowledge have been transformed, till, for the working scientist, "objects of knowledge" mean precisely the objects which have been obtained by approved processes of inquiry. To exclude consideration of these processes is thus to throw away the key to understanding knowledge and its objects.
There is a certain ironical humor in taking advantage of all the improved methods of experimental inquiry with respect to all objects of knowledge--save one, knowledge itself; in denying their relevancy to knowing knowledge, and falling back upon the method everywhere else disavowed--the method of relying upon isolated, self-contained properties of subject-matter.
One of the points which gave much offense in the essays was the reference to genetic method--to a natural history of knowledge. I hope what has now been said makes clearer the nature of that reference. I was to blame for not making the point more explicit; but I cannot altogether blame myself for my naïveté in supposing that others understood by a natural history of knowledge what I understood by it.
It had not occurred to me that anyone would think that the history by which human ignorance, error, dogma, and superstition had been transformed, even in its present degree of transformation, into knowledge was something which had gone on exclusively inside of men's heads, or in an inner consciousness. I thought of it as something going on in the world, in the observatory and the laboratory, and in the application of laboratory results to the control of human health, well-being, and progress. When a biologist says that the way to understand an organ, or the sociologist that the way to know an institution, resides in its genesis and history, he is understood to mean _its_ history. I took the same liberty for knowledge, that is, for science. The accusation of "subjectivisim" taken in this light appears as a depressing revelation of what the current opinion about the processes of knowledge is. To stumble on a stone need not be a process of knowledge; to hit it with a hammer, to pour acid upon it, to put pieces in the crucible, to subject things to heat and pressure to see if one can make a similar stone, _are_ processes of knowledge.
So is fixing suggestions by attaching names, and so is devising ways of putting these terms together so that new suggestions will arise, or so that suggestions may be transferred from one situation to another.
But not one of these processes is "subjective" in any sense which puts subjectivity in opposition to the public out-of-doors world of nature and human companionship. To set genesis in opposition to analysis is merely to overlook the fact that the sciences of existence have found that considerations of genesis afford their most effective methods of analysis.[10] The same kind of consideration applies to the favorable view taken of psychology. If reference to modes and ways of experience--to experiencing--is important for understanding the things with which philosophy deals, then psychology is useful as a matter of course. For what is meant by psychology is precisely a discrimination of the acts and attitudes of the organism which have a bearing upon respective subject-matters and which have accordingly to be taken account of before the subject-matters can be properly discriminated.
The matter was especially striking in the case of Lotze. He protested constantly against the use of psychology, and yet his own data and procedures were infected at every turn by psychology, and, if I am at all correct, by a false psychology. The particular separation which he made between psychology and logic rested indeed upon a particular psychological assumption. The question is worth asking: Is not the marked aversion on the part of some philosophers to any reference to psychology a Freudian symptom?
A word more upon the place assigned by the essays to _need_ and _purpose_ and the humanistic factor generally. To save time I may quote a sentence from an early review which attributes to the essays the following doctrine: "If the plan turns out to be useful for our need, it is correct--the judgment is true. The real-ideal distinction is that between stimulus of environment and plan of action or tentative response. Both real and ideal are equally experiences of the individual man." These words can be interpreted either so as to convey the position fairly, or so as radically to misconceive it; the latter course is a little easier, as the words stand. That "real and ideal" are experiences of the individual man in the sense that they actually present themselves as specifications which can be studied by any man who desires to study them is true enough. That such a study is as much required for determining their characters as it is for determining those of carbon dioxide or of the constitution of Great Britain is also the contention of the paper. But if the words quoted suggest to anyone that the real or even the ideal are somehow possessions of an individual man, things secreted somewhere about him and then ejected, I can only say that I cannot understand the doctrine. I know of no ready-made and antecedent conception of "the individual man." Instead of telling about the nature of experience by means of a prior conception of individual man, I find it necessary to go to experience to find out what is meant by "individual" and by "man"; and also by "the." Consequently even in such an expression as "my experience," I should wish not to contradict this idea of method by using the term "my" to swallow up the term "experience," any more than if I said "my house," or "my country." On the contrary, I should expect that any intelligible and definite use of such phrases would throw much more light upon "me" than upon "house" or "country"--or "experience."
The possible misunderstanding is, I think, actual in the reference to "our needs" as a criterion of the correctness of truth of an idea or plan. According to the essays, it is the needs of a _situation_ which are determinative. They evoke thought and the need of knowing, and it is only within the situation that the identification of the needs with a self occurs; and it is only by reflection upon the place of the agent in the encompassing situation that the nature of _his_ needs can be determined. In fact, the actual occurrence of a disturbed, incomplete, and needy _situation_ indicates that _my_ present need is precisely to investigate, to explore, to hunt, to pull apart things now tied together, to project, to plan, to invent, and then to test the outcome by seeing how it works as a method of dealing with hard facts. One source of the demand, in short, for reference to experience as the encompassing universe of discourse is to keep us from taking such terms as "self," "my," "need," "satisfaction," etc., as terms whose meanings can be accepted and proved either by themselves or by even the most extensive dialectic reference to other terms.
Terms like "real" and "ideal," "individual," "man," "my," certainly allow of profitable dialectic (or purely prepositional) clarification and elaboration. But nothing is settled until these discursive findings have been applied, through action, to things, and an experience has been effected, which either meets or evades the specification conceptually laid down. To suppose, for example, that the import of the term "ideal" can be settled apart from exhibiting in experience some specific affair, is to maintain in philosophy that belief in the occult essence and hidden cause which science had to get rid of before it got on the right track. The idealistic misconception of experience is no reason for throwing away its significant point of contact with modern science and for having recourse then to objects distinguished from old-fashioned _Dinge an Sich_ only because they involve just that reference to those experiences by which they were established and to which they are applied that propositional or analytic realism professedly and elaborately ignores. In revenge, this ignoring leaves on our hands the "me," or knowing self, as a separate thing within which experience falls (instead of its falling in a specifiable place within experience), and generates the insoluble problem of how a subjective experience can beget objective knowledge.
In concluding, let me say that reference to experience seems at present to be the easiest way of realizing the continuities among subject-matters that are always getting split up into dualisms. A creation of a world of subsistences or essences which are quite other than the world of natural existences (which are other than natural existences adapted to the successful performance of inference) is in itself a technical matter, though a discouraging one to a philosopher expertly acquainted with all the difficulties which that view has generated from the time of Plato down. But the assistance which such a philosophy lends to the practical and current divorce of the "ideal" from the natural world makes it a thing to be dreaded for other than professional reasons. God only knows how many of the sufferings of life are due to a belief that the natural scene and operations of our life are lacking in ideal import, and to the consequent tendency to flee for the lacking ideal factors to some other world inhabited exclusively by ideals. That such a cut-off, ideal world is impotent for direction and control and change of the natural world follows as a matter of course. It is a luxury; it belongs to the "genteel tradition" of life, the persistence of an "upper" class given to a detached and parasitic life. Moreover, it places the scientific inquirer within that irresponsible class. If philosophers could aid in making it clear to a troubled humanity that ideals are continuous with natural events, that they but represent their possibilities, and that recognized possibilities form methods for a conduct which may realize them in fact, philosophers would enforce the sense of a social calling and responsibility. I do not say that pointing out the continuity and interaction of various attitudes and interests in experience is the only way of effecting this consummation. But for a large number of persons today it is the readiest way.
Much may be said about that other great rupture of continuity which analytic realism would maintain: that between the world and the knower as something outside of it, engaged in an otiose contemplative survey of it. I can understand the social conditions which generated this conception of an aloof knower. I can see how it protected the growth of responsible inquiry which takes effect in change of the environment, by cultivating a sense of the innocuousness of knowing, and thus lulling to sleep the animosity of those who, being in control, had no desire to permit reflection which had practical import. I can see how specialists at any time, professional knowers, so to speak, find in this doctrine a salve for conscience--a solace which all thinkers need as long as an effective share in the conduct of affairs is not permitted them. Above all, I can see how seclusion and the absence of the pressure of immediate action developed a more varied curiosity, greater impartiality, and a more generous outlook.
But all this is no reason for continuing the idealization of a remote and separate mind or knower now that the method of intelligence is perfected, and changed social conditions not only permit but demand that intelligence be placed within the procession of events. An intellectual integrity, an impartiality and detachment, which is maintained only in seclusion is unpleasantly reminiscent of other identifications of virtue with the innocence of ignorance. To place knowledge where it arises and operates in experience is to know that, as it arose because of the troubles of man, it is confirmed in reconstructing the conditions which occasioned those troubles.
Genuine intellectual integrity is found in experimental knowing. Until this lesson is fully learned, it is not safe to dissociate knowledge from experiment nor experiment from experience.
FOOTNOTES: [1] I am indebted to an unpublished manuscript of Mr. S. Klyce of Winchester, Massachusetts, for the significance of the fact that our words divide into _terms_ (of which more in the sequel) and into names which are not (strictly speaking) terms at all, but which serve to remind us of the vast and vague continuum, select portions of which only are designated by words as _terms_. He calls such words "infinity and zero" words. The word "experience" is a typical instance of an "infinity word." Mr. Klyce has brought out very clearly that a direct situation of experience ("situation" as I employ it is another such word) has no need of any word for itself, the thing to which the word would point being so egregiously there on its own behalf. But when communication about it takes place (as it does, not only in converse with others, but when a man attempts a mutual reference of different periods of his own life) a word is needed to remind both parties of this taken-for-granted whole (another infinity term), while confusion arises if explicit attention is not called to the fact that it is a very different sort of word from the definite terms of discourse which denote distinctions and their relations to one another. In the text, attention is called to the fact that the business man wrestling with a difficulty or a scientific man engaged in an inquiry finds his checks and control specifically in the situation in which he is employed, while the theorizer at large leaves out these checks and limits, and so loses his clews. Well, the words "experience," "situation," etc., are used to _remind_ the thinker of the need of reversion to precisely something which never can be one of the terms of his reflection but which nevertheless furnishes the existential meaning and status of them all. "Intuition," mysticism, philosophized or sophisticated monism, are all of them aberrant ways of protesting against the consequences which result from failing to note what is conveyed by words which are not terms. Were I rewriting these essays _in toto_ I should try to take advantage of these and other indispensable considerations advanced by Mr. Klyce; but as the essays must stand substantially as they were originally written, and as an Introduction to them must, in order to be intelligible, be stated in not incongruous phraseology, I wish simply to ask the reader to bear in mind this radical difference between such words as "experience," "reality," "universe," "situation," and such terms as "typewriter," "me," "consciousness," "existence," when used (as they must be used if they are to be terms) in a differential sense. The term "reality" is particularly treacherous, for the careless tradition of philosophy (a carelessness fostered, I am sure, by failure to make verbally explicit the distinction to which Mr. Klyce has called attention) uses "reality" both as a term of indifferent reference, equivalent to everything taken together or referred to _en masse_ as over against some discrimination, and also as a discriminative term with a highly eulogistic flavor: as _real_ money in distinction from counterfeit money. Then, although every inquiry in daily life, whether technological or scientific, asks _whether_ a thing is real only in the sense of asking _what_ thing is real, philosophy concludes to a wholesale distinction between the real and the unreal, the real and the apparent, and so creates a wholly artificial problem.
If the philosopher, whether idealistic or realistic, who holds that it is self-contradictory to criticize purely intellectualistic conceptions of the world, because the criticism itself goes on intellectualistic terms, so that its validity depends upon intellectual (or cognitive) conditions, will but think of the very brute doings in which a chemist engages to fix the meanings of his terms and to test his theories and conceptions, he will perceive that all intellectual knowing is but a method for conducting an experiment, and that arguments and objections are but stimuli to induce somebody to try a certain experiment--to have recourse, that is, to a