Such questions are as necessary as they are unanswer¬ able, given the premise which defines knowledge as direct grasp and envisagement. They vanish if the proper objects of science are nature in its instrumental characters. Any immediate object then becomes for inquiry, as some¬ thing to be known, an appearance. To call it “appearance” denotes a functional status, not a kind of existence. Any quality in its immediacy is doubly an appearance. In the first place it appears; it is evident, conspicuous, out¬ standing, it is, to recur to language already used, had. A thing appears in the sense in which a bright object ap¬ pears in a dark room, while other things remain obscure, hidden. The affair is one of physical and physiological limits of vision and audition, etc. We see islands floating as it were upon the sea; we call them islands because of their apparent lack of continuity with the medium that immediately surrounds them. But they are projections of the very earth upon which we walk; the connecting EXPERIENCE AND NATURE links do not ordinarily appear; they are there, but are not had. The difference between the appearing and the unappearing is of immense practical and theoretical import, imposing upon us need for inference, which would not exist if things appeared to us in their full connections, instead of with sharply demarcated outlines due to limits of perceptibility. But the ground of the difference is as physical as that between solid, liquid and gas. The endings of organic events, seeing, hearing, etc. are for the time being, or immediately, endings of the history of all natural events. To re-establish a connec¬ tion of histories within a longer course of events and a more inclusive state of affairs, requires delving, probing, and extension by artifice beyond the apparent. To link the things which are immediately and apparitionally had with one another by means of what is not immediately apparent and thus to create new historic successions with new initiations and new endings depends in turn upon the system of mathematical-mechanical systems which form the proper objects of science as such.
The empirical basis of the distinction between the apparent and the non-apparent thus lies in the need for inference. When we take the outstandingly evident as evidence, its status is subordinate to that of unperceived things. For the nonce, it is a way of establishing some¬ thing more fundamental than it is itself with respect to the object of inquiry. If we conceive of the world of immediately apparent things as an emergence of peaks of mountains which are submerged except as to their peaks or endings, and as a world of initial climbings whose subsequent career emerges above the surface only here and there and by fits and starts; and if we give attention NATURE, MEANS AND KNOWLEDGE 139 to the fact that any ability of control whatever depends upon ability to unite these disparate appearances into a serial history, and then give due attention to the fact that connection into a consecutive history can be effected only by means of a scheme of constant relationships (a con¬ dition met by the mathematical-logical-mechanical ob¬ jects of physics), we shall have no difficulty in seeing why it is that the immediate things from which we start lend themselves to interpretation as signs or appearances of the objects of physics; while we also recognize that it is only with respect to the function of instituting con¬ nection that the objects of physics can be said to be more “real.” In the total situation in which they function, they are means to weaving together otherwise discon¬ nected beginnings and endings into a consecutive history. Underlying “reality” and surface “appearance” in this connection have a meaning fixed by the function of inquiry, not an intrinsic metaphysical meaning.
To treat therefore the object of science — which in effect is the object of physics — as a complete and self-sufficient object, the end of knowing, is to burden ourselves with an unnecessary and insoluble problem. It commits us on one side to a realm of immediately apparent things, the ' socalled perceptual order which is an order only by cour¬ tesy, and on the other to a realm of inferred and logically constructed real objects. These two realms are rivals of each other. If knowledge is possession or grasp, then there are two incompatible kinds of knowledge, one sensi¬ ble, the other rational. Which is the genuine article and which the counterfeit? If we say sensible knowledge is the genuine, then we are committed to phenomenalism of a somewhat chaotic kind, unless we follow Berkeley and invoke deity to hold the immediate things together.
EXPERIENCE AND NATURE If we say rational knowledge is the genuine article, then true reality becomes the reality of materialism or of logical realism or of objective idealism, according to training and temperament. To follow the clues of ex¬ perience is to see that the socalled sensible world is a world of immediate beginnings and endings; not at all an affair of cases of knowledge but a succession of qualita¬ tive events; while the socalled conceptual order is recog¬ nized to be the proper object of science, since it constitutes the scheme of constant relationships by means of which spare, scattered and casual events are bound together into a connected history. These emergent immediate events remain the beginning and the end of knowledge; but since their occurrence is one with their being sensibly, affectionally and appreciatively had, they are not them¬ selves things known. That the qualities and characters of these immediate apparitions are tremendously modified when they are linked together by ‘physical objects’ — that is, by means of the mathematical-mechanical ob¬ jects of physics — is a fact of the same nature as that a steel watch-spring is a modification of crude iron ore. The objects of physics subsist precisely in order to bring about this transformation — to change, that is, casual endings into fulfillments and conclusions of an ordered series, with the development of meaning therein involved.
Practically all epistemological discussion depends upon a sudden and unavowed shift to and fro from the universe of having to the universe of discourse. At the outset, ordinary empirical affairs, chairs, tables, stones, sticks, etc., are called physical objects — which is obviously a term of theoretical interpretation when it so applied, carrying within itself a complete metaphysical commit- NATURE, MEANS AND KNOWLEDGE 141 ment. Then physical objects are defined as the objects of physics, which is, I suppose, the only correct mode of designation. But such objects are clearly very different things from the plants, lamps, chairs, thunder and lig fi¬ ning, rocks etc. that were first called physical objects. So another transformation phantasmagoria in the tab¬ leau is staged. The original “physical things,” ordinary empirical objects, not being the objects of physics, are not physical at all but mental. Then comes the grand dissolving climax in which objects of physics are shown as themselves hanging from empirical objects now dressed up as mental, and hence as themselves mental.
Everything now being mental, and the term having lost its original contrasting or differential meaning, a new and different series of transformation scenes is exhibited. Immediate empirical things are resolved into hard sensory data, which are called the genuine physical things, while the objects of physical science are treated as are logical constructions; all that remains to constitute mental existence is images and feelings. It is not neces¬ sary to mention other permutations and combinations, familiar to the student of theories of the possibility of knowledge. The samples mentioned are illustrations of the sort of thing which happens when the having of immediate objects, whether sensible, affectional or ap- preciatoral, is treated as a mode of knowledge.
If objects which are colored, sonorous, tactile, gusta¬ tory, loved, hated, enjoyed, admired, which are attrac¬ tive and repulsive, exciting, indifferent and depressive, in all their infinitely numerous modes, are beginnings and endings of complex natural affairs, and if physical ob¬ jects (defined as objects of physical science) are consti- EXPERIENCE AND NATURE tuted by a mathematical-mechanical order; then physical objects instead of involving us in the predicament of having to choose between opposing claimants to reality, have precisely the characters which they should have in order to serve effectively as means for securing and avoiding immediate objects. Four of these characters may be noted. First, immediate things come and go; events in the way of direct seeing, hearing, touching, liking, enjoying, and the rest of them are in rapid change; the subject-matter of each has a certain uniqueness, un- repeatedness. Spatial-temporal orders, capable of mathe¬ matical formulation are, by contrast, constant. They present stability, recurrence at its maximum, raised to the highest degree. Qualitative affairs like red and blue, although in themselves unlike, are subject to comparison in terms of objects of physics; on the basis of connection with orders of sequence, a qualitative spectrum or scale becomes a scheme of numerable variations of a common unit.
The second character of objects of science follows from this feature. The possibility of regulating the occur¬ rence of any event depends upon the possibility of in¬ stituting substitutions. By means of the latter, a thing which is within grasp is used to stand for another thing which is not immediately had, or which is beyond control. The technique of equations and other functions charac¬ teristic of modern science is, taken generically, a method of thoroughgoing substitutions. It is a system of ex¬ change and mutual conversion carried to its limit.2 The 2 The modern mathematical conception of infinity as correspondence of part and whole appears to represent this function in its generalized form.
NATURE, MEANS AND KNOWLEDGE 143 cognitive result is the homogeneous natural world of modern science, in its contrast with the qualitatively heterogeneous world of ancient science; the latter being made up of things different in inherent kinds and in qualities of movement, such up and down, lateral and circular, and heterogeneous according to periods of time, such as earlier and later. These become amenable to transformations in virtue of reciprocal substitutions.
In the third place, objects of knowledge as means ex¬ plain the importance attached to elements, or numerically discrete units. Control of beginnings and ends by means is possible only when the individual, the unique, is treated as a composite of parts, made by sequential differentiations and integrations.3 In its own integrity an immediate thing just exists as it exists; it stays or it passes; it is enjoyed or suffered. That is all that can be said. But when it is treated as the outcome of a complex convergence or co¬ incidence of a large number of elementary independent variables, points, moments, numerical units, particles of mass and energy or more elementary space-times, (which in spite of their independence are capable of one to one correspondence with one another) the situation changes. The simples or elements are in effect the last pivots upon which regulation of conditions, turns; last, that is to say, as far as present appliances permit.
3 Leibniz, whose monadism is the first philosophical manifestation of this notion, and the prototype of analytic realism, or theory of external relations, asserted the existence of monads on the ground that every composite implies elements. Surely. But he omitted to note that metaphysically the case was begged as soon as an affair, no matter how elaborate in structure, is regarded as being composite. To be a com¬ posite is one thing; to be capable of reduction to a composite by certain measures, is another thing.
EXPERIENCE AND NATURE Preoccupation with elementary units is as marked in logic, biology, and psychology, as in physics and chemis¬ try. Sometimes it seems to have resulted in taking merely dialectical entities for actual unitary elements; but that is not logically necessary. Such an outcome signifies only that the right units were not found. Serious objection holds when the instrumental character of the elements is forgotten; and they are treated as independent, ultimate; when they are treated as metaphysical finalities, insoluble epistemological problems result. Whatever are designated as elements, whether logical, mathematical, physical or mental, depend especially upon the existence of immediate, qualitatively integral objects. Search for elements starts with such empirical objects already pos¬ sessed. Sensory data, whether they are designated psychic or physical, are thus not starting points; they are the products of analysis. Denial of the primary reality of immediate empirical objects logically terminates in an abrogation of the reality of elements; for sensory data, or sensa and sensibilia, are the residua of analysis of these primary things. Moreover every step of analysis depends upon continual reference to these empirical objects. Drop them from mental view for a moment and any clew in search for elements is lost. Unless macro¬ scopic things are recognized, cells, electrons, logical ele¬ ments become meaningless. The latter have meaning only as elements of. Since, for example, only propositions have implications, a proposition cannot be a mere conjunc¬ tion of terms; terms having no implications, a proposi¬ tion so formed would have no significance. Terms must have a significance and since that they have only in a proposition, they depend upon some prior unity. In NATURE, MEANS AND KNOWLEDGE 145 similar fashion, a purely unitary physical element would have no efficacy; it could not act or be acted upon.
We quote from a psychiatric writer speaking of his own field, in dealing with a particular matter on its own merits. With reference to one stage in the development of the theory of mental disorders, Dr. Adolph Meyer said that “there was a quest for elements of mind and their immediate correlation with the latest discoveries in the structure of the brain. The centre theory and the cell and neuronic theory seemed obligatory standpoints. Today we have become shy of such a one-sided not suffi¬ ciently functional materialism. There is always a place for elements, but there is certainly also a place for the large momentous facts of human life just as we find it. The psychopathologist had to learn to do more than the so-called “elementalist,” who always goes back to the elements and smallest units and then is apt to shirk the responsibility of making an attempt to solve the concrete problems of greater complexity. The psychiatrist has to study individuals and groups as wholes, as complex units, as the “you” or “he” or “she” or “they” we have to work with. We recognize that throughout nature we have to face the general principle of unit-formation, and the fact that new units need not be a mere sum of the component parts, but can be an actually new entity not wholly predictable from the component parts and known only through actual ex¬ perience with the specific product.”4 Lastly, the instrumental nature of objects of knowl¬ edge accounts for the central position of laws, relations.
EXPERIENCE AND NATURE These are the formulations of the regularities upon which intellectual and other regulation of things as immediate apparitions depends. Variability of elements in mathe¬ matical science is specious; elements vary independently of one another, but not independently of a relation to others, the relation or law being the constancy among variations. It is a truism that mathematics is the method by which elements can be stated as terms in con¬ stant relations, and be subjected to equations and other functions of transformation and substitution. An ele¬ ment is appropriately represented by a mathematical variable; for since any variable falls within some equa¬ tion, it is treated as a constant function of other vari- bles. The shift from variability to constancy is repeated as often as is needed. It is thus only pro forma that the variable is variable. It is not variable in the sense in which unique individualized existences are variable. The inevitable consequence is the subjection of indivi¬ duals or unique modes of variation to external relations, to laws of uniformity; that is to say, the elimination of individuality. Bear in mind the instrumental nature of the relation of elements, and this abrogation of indivi¬ duality merely means a temporary neglect — an abstracted gaze — in behalf of attending to conditions under which individualities present themselves. Convert the ob¬ jects of knowledge into real things by themselves, and individuals become anomalous or unreal; they are not individualized for science but are instances, cases, speci¬ mens, of some generical relation or law.
The difficulty under which morals labor in this case is evident. They can be “saved” only by the supposition of another kind of Being from that with which natural NATURE, MEANS AND KNOWLEDGE 147 sciences are concerned. History and anthropology are implicated in a similar predicament. The former has for subject-matter not only individual persons but un¬ duplicated situations and events. The attempt to es¬ cape the dilemma by recourse to uniform and unilinear laws of sequence or “evolution” is inept; it contradicts the premises assumed, and is not borne out by facts. Contemporary anthropologists have made clear the historical nature of the phenomena with which they deal. Cultures are in many respects individual or unique, and their manifestations are “explained” by correlations with one another and by borrowings due to chance con¬ tacts. The chief, even if not sole, law of their changes is that of transmission from other individualized cultures.
It is no wonder that Historismus has become the pre¬ occupying problem of a whole school of thinkers, many of whom now hold that the only attitude which can be taken toward historic situations and characters is non-intellect¬ ual, being esthetic appreciation, or sympathetic artistic re¬ habilitation. The theory which identifies knowledge with the beholding or grasp of self-sufficient objects reaches an impasse where it comes to deal with histori¬ cal science in contrast with physics. Windelband justly draws the conclusion that Being and knowledge compel “antinomianism,” certain problems inevitably force them¬ selves upon us, but all efforts at solution are hopeless.5 5 “it remains an unsolved problem why timeless reality needs realiza¬ tion in the temporal course of the event or why it tolerates in itself an event in the temporal course of which there is something that differs from its own nature. We do not understand why that which is also has never¬ theless to happen; and still less why something different happens from that which is in itself without time.”
Introduction to Philosophy, English translation, p. 299.
EXPERIENCE AND NATURE Empirically, individualized objects, unique affairs, exist. But they are evanescent, unstable. They trem¬ ble on the verge of disappearance as soon as they appear. Useful arts prove that, within limits, neglect of their uniqueness and attention to what is common, recurrent, irrelevant to time, procures and perpetuates the happen¬ ing of some of these unique things. Timeless laws, taken by themselves, like all universals, express dialectic intent, not any matter of fact existence. But their ultimate implication is application; they are methods, and when applied as methods they regulate the precarious flow of unique situations. Objects of natural science are not metaphysical rivals of historical events; they are means of directing the latter. Events change; one individual gives place to another. But individually qualified things have some qualities which are pervasive, common, stable. They are out of time in the sense that a particular tem¬ poral quality is irrelevant to them. If anybody feels relieved by calling them eternal, let them be called eternal. But let not “eternal” be then conceived as a kind of absolute perduring existence or Being. It denotes just what it denotes: irrelevance to existence in its temporal quality. These non-temporal, mathematical or logical qualities are capable of abstraction, and of conversion into relations, into temporal, numerical and spatial order.* As such they are dialectical, non-existential.
B For a convincing discussion see Brown’s essay, Intelligence and Mathematics, in the volume, Creative Intelligence, especially the section entitled Things, Relations, and Quantities. “Instead of reducing quali¬ ties to relations, it seems to me a much more intelligible view to conceive relations as abstract ways of taking qualities in general, as qualities thought of in their function of bridging a gap or making a transition be¬ tween two bits of reality that have previously been taken as separate NATURE, MEANS AND KNOWLEDGE 149 But also as such they are tools, instrumentalities applica¬ ble historic events to help regulate their course.
This entire discussion has but a single point. It aims to show that the problems which constitute modern epistemology with its rival, materialistic, spiritualistic, dualistic doctrines, and rival realistic, idealistic, represen¬ tational theories; and rival doctrines of relation of mind and matter occasionalism, pre-established harmony, para- lellism, panpsychism, etc., have a single origin in the dogma which denies temporal quality to reality as such. Such a theory is bound to regard things which are causally explanatory as superior to results and outcomes; for the temporal dependence of the latter cannot be dis¬ guised, while “causes” can be plausibly converted into independent beings, or laws, or other non-temporal forms. As has been pointed out, this denial of change to true Being had its source in bias in favor of objects of con¬ templative enjoyment, together with a theory that such objects are the adequate subject-matter of science.
The bias is spontaneous and legitimate. The accom¬ panying theory of knowledge and reality is a distortion. The legitimate implication of the preference for worthy objects of appreciation is the necessity of art, or control of the sequential order upon which they depend; a neces¬ sity which carries with it the further implication that this order, which is to be discovered by inquiry and confirmed by experimental action, is the proper object of knowledge.
things.” P. 159. Thus “terms, (elements) and relations are both (p. 160) abstract replacements of qualitatively heterogeneous realities of such a sort as “to symbolize their effective nature in particular respect.” The word “effective” brings out the agreement of the text with this point of view, for which I am much indebted to Dr. Brown.
EXPERIENCE AND NATURE Such a recognition would, however, have conceded the dependence of the contemplative functions of the leisure class upon the appliances and technique of artisans — among whom all artists were included. And since in olden time the practice of the arts was largely routine, fixed by custom and ready-made patterns, such a recognition would have carried with it the need of transforming the arts themselves, if the occurrence of ends was to be a real fulfillment, a realization, and not a contingent accident. The introduction of inventive thought into the arts and the civil emancipation of the industrial class at last made the transformation possible.
When the appliances of a technology that had grown more deliberate were adopted in inquiry, and the lens, pendulum, magnetic needle, lever were used as tools of knowing, and their functions were treated as models to follow in interpreting physical phenomena, science ceased to be identified with appreciative contemplation of noble and ideal objects, was freed from subjection to esthetic perfections, and became an affair of time and history intelligently managed. Ends were in conse¬ quence no longer determined by physical accident and social traditions. Anything whatsoever for which means could be found was an end to be averted or to be secured. Liberation from a fixed scheme of ends made modern science possible. In large affairs, practice precedes the possi¬ bility of observation and formulation; the results of prac¬ tice must accumulate before mind has anything to ob¬ serve. There is little cause for wonder therefore that long after the objects of science had become instrumental¬ ities rather than things in their own rights, the old theory persisted, and philosophy spent much of its effort in the NATURE, MEANS AND KNOWLEDGE 151 effort to reconcile the traditional theory of knowledge as immediate possession with the terms and conclusions of the new method of practice.
It is characteristic of the inevitable moral pre-posses¬ sion of philosophy, together with the subjective turn of modern thought, that many critics take an “instrumental” theory of knowledge to signify that the value of knowing is instrumental to the knower. This is a matter which is as it may be in particular cases; but certainly in many cases the pursuit of science is sport, carried on, like other sports, for its own satisfaction. But “instrumentalism” is a theory not about personal disposition and satisfaction in knowing, but about the proper objects of science, what is “proper” being defined in terms of physics. ^ The distinction between tools (or things in their ob¬ jectivities) and fulfilled products of the use of tools ac¬ counts for the distinction between known objects on one side and objects of appreciation and affection on the other. But the distinction primarily concerns objects themselves; only secondarily does it apply to attitudes, dispositions, motivations. Making and using tools may be intrinsically delightful. Prior to the introduction of machinery for quantitative production and sale of commodities for profit, utensils were themselves usually works of art, esthetically satisfying. This fact does not however define them as utensils; it does not confer upon them their characteristic property. In like manner, the pursuit of knowledge is often an immediately delightful event; its attained pro¬ ducts possess esthetic qualities of proportion, order, and symmetry. But these qualities do not mark off or define the characteristic and appropriate objects of science. The character of the object is like that of a tool, say a EXPERIENCE AND NATURE lever; it is an order of determination of sequential changes terminating in a foreseen consequence.