We are brought to the question of method. In ancient science the essence of science was demonstration; the life blood of modern science is discovery. In the former, reflective inquiry existed for the sake of attaining a stable subject-matter; in the latter systematized know¬ ledge exists in practice for the sake of stimulating, guid¬ ing and checking further inquiries. In ancient science, “learning” belonged in the realm of inferior being, of becoming, change; it was transitive, and ceased in the actualization of final and fixed objects. It was thought of after the analogy of master and disciple; the former was already in possession of the truth, and the learner merely appropriated what already is there in the store house of the master. In modern science, learning is finding out what nobody has previously known. It is a transaction in which nature is teacher, and in which the teacher comes to knowledge and truth only through the learning of the inquiring student.
Characteristic differences in logic thus accompany the change from “knowledge” whose subject-matter is final affairs to knowledge dealing with instrumental objects. Where the objects of knowledge are taken to be final, perfect, complete, metaphysical fulfillments of nature, proper method consists in definition and classification; learning closes with demonstration of the rational neces¬ sity of definitions and classifications. Demonstration is an exhibition of the everlasting, universal, final and fixed nature of objects. Investigation denoted merely the accumulation of material with which to fill in gaps in an antecedent ready-made hierarchy of species. Discovery NATURE, MEANS AND KNOWLEDGE 153 was merely the perception that some particular material hitherto unclassified by the learner came under a universal form already known. The universal is already known be¬ cause given to thought; and theparticular is already known, because given to perception; learning merely brings these two given forms into connection, so that what is “dis¬ covered” is the subsumption of particular under its universal.
Apart from their theories, or in spite of them, the Greeks were possessed by a lively curiosity, and their prac¬ tice was better than their logic. In the medieval Christian period, the logic was taken literally. Revelation, scrip¬ tures, church fathers and other authentic sources, in¬ creased the number of given universal truths, and also of given particular facts and events. The master-teacher was God, who taught not through the dim instrumentality of rational thought alone, but directly through official representatives. The form of apprehension of truth remained the demonstrative syllogism; the store of uni¬ versal truths was supplemented by the, gracious gift of revelation, and the resources of the minor premise ex¬ tended by divinely established historic facts. Truth was given to reason and faith; and the part of the human mind was to humble itself to hearken, accept and obey.
The scheme was logically complete; it carried out under new circumstances the old idea that the highest end and good of man is knowledge of true Being, and that such knowledge in the degree of its possession effects an as¬ similation of the mind to the reality known. It added to old theoretical premises such institutions and practices as were practically required to give them effect, so that the humblest of human creatures might at least start on the EXPERIENCE AND NATURE road to that knowledge the possession of which is salva¬ tion and bliss. In comparison, most modern theories are an inconsistent mixture; dialectically the modernist is easy prey to the traditionalist; he carries so many of the conceptions of the latter in his intellectual outfit that he is readily confuted. It is his practice not his theory that gets him ahead. His professed logic is still largely that of antecedent truths, demonstration and certitude; his practice is doubting, forming hypotheses, conduct¬ ing experiments. When he surrenders antecedent truths of reason it is usually only to accept antecedent truths of sensation. Thus John Stuart Mill conceives of aninductive logic in which certain canons shall bear exactly the same relation to inquiry into fact that the rules of the syllogism bore to classic “deductive” proof or dialectic. He recog¬ nizes that science is a matter of inference, but he is as cer¬ tain as was Aristotle that inference rests upon certain truths which are immediately possessed, differing only about the organ through which they come into our pos¬ session.
But in the practice of science, knowledge is an affair of making sure, not of grasping antecedently given sureties. What is already known, what is accepted as truth, is of immense importance; inquiry could not proceed a step without it. But it is held subject to use, and is at the mercy of the discoveries which it makes possible. It has to be adjusted to the latter and not the latter to it. When things are defined as instruments, their value and validity reside in what proceeds from them; consequences not antecedents supply meaning and verity. Truths al¬ ready possessed may have practical or moral certainty, but logically they never lose a hypothetic quality. They NATURE, MEANS AND KNOWLEDGE 155 are true if: if certain other things eventually present themselves; and when these latter things occur they in turn suggest further possibilities; the operation of doubt- inquiry-finding recurs. Although science is concerned in practice with the contingent and its method is that of making hypotheses which are then tried out in actual experimental change of physical conditions, its traditional formulation persists in terms of necessary and fixed objects. Hence all kinds of incoherences occur. The more stubbornly the traditional formulation is clung to, the more serious become these inconsistencies.
Leonardo virtually announced the birth of the method of modern science when he said that true knowledge be¬ gins with opinion. The saying involves a revolution; no other statement could be so shocking to the traditional logic. Not that opinion as such is anything more than opinion or an unconfirmed and unwarranted surmise; but that such surmises may be used; when employed as hypotheses they induce experimentation. They then become fore-runners of truth, and mind is released from captivity to antecedent beliefs. Opinion, in the classic conception, was concerned with what was inherently contingent and variable as to possibility and probabil¬ ity, in contrast with knowledge concerned with the inherently necessary and everlasting. It therefore was as ultimate and unquestionable in its proper sphere as science was in its place. But opinion as a venture, as an “it seems to me probable,” is an occasion of new observa¬ tions, an instigator of research, an indispensable organ in deliberate discovery. Taken in this fashion, opinion was the source of new histories, the beginning of operations that terminated in new conclusions. Its worth lay EXPERIENCE AND NATURE neither in itself nor in a peculiar realm of objects to which it was applied, but in the direction of inquiries which it set agoing. It was a starting point, and like any beginning of any history was altered and displaced in the history of which it was the initiation.
Sometimes discovery is treated as a proof of the op¬ posite of which it actually shows. It is viewed as evi¬ dence that the object of knowledge is already there in full-fledged being and that we just run across it; we un¬ cover it as treasure-hunters find a chest of buried gold. That there is existence antecedent to search and dis¬ covery is of course admitted; but it is denied that as such, as other than the conclusion of the historical event of inquiry in its connection with other histories, it is already the object of knowledge. The Norsemen are said to have discovered America. But in what sense? They landed on its shores after a stormy voyage; there was discovery in the sense of hitting upon a land hitherto untrod by Europeans. But unless the newly found and seen object was used to modify old beliefs, to change the sense of the old map of the earth, there was no discovery in any pregnant intellectual sense, any more than mere stumbling over a chair in the dark is discovery till used as basis of inference which connects the stumbling with a body of meanings. Discovery of America involved in¬ sertion of the newly touched land in a map of the globe. This insertion, moreover, was not merely additive, but transformative of a prior picture of the world as to its surfaces and their arrangements. It may be replied that it was not the world which was changed but only the map. To which there is the obvious retort that after all the map is part of the world, not something outside it, and NATURE, MEANS AND KNOWLEDGE 157 that its meaning and bearings are so important that a change in the map involves other and still more impor¬ tant objective changes.
It was not simply states of consciousness or ideas inside the heads of men that were altered when America was actually discovered; the modification was one in the public meaning of the world in which men publicly act. To cut off this meaning from the world is to leave us in a situation where it makes no difference what change takes place in the world; one wave more or less in a puddle is of no account. Changing the meaning of the world effected an existential change. The map of the world is something more than a piece of linen hung on a wall. A new world does not appear without profound transformations in the old one; a discovered America was a factor interacting with Europe and Asia to produce consequences previously impossible. A potential object of further exploration and discoveries now existed in Europe itself; a source of gold; an opportunity for adventure; an outlet for crowded and depressed populations, an abode for exiles and the discounted, an appeal to energy and invention: in short, an agency of new events and fruitions, at home as well as abroad. In some degree, every genuine discovery creates some such transformation of both the meanings and the existences of nature.
Modern idealistic theories of knowledge have dis¬ played some sense of the method and objective of science. They have apprehended the fact that the object of know¬ ledge implies that the found rather than the given is the proper subject matter of science. Recognizing the part played by intelligence in this finding, they have framed a theory of the constitutive operation of mind EXPERIENCE AND NATURE in the determination of real objects. But idealism, while it has had an intimation of the constructively in¬ strumental office of intelligence, has mistranslated the discovery. Following the old tradition, in its exclusive identification of the object of knowledge with reality, equating truth and Being, it was forced to take the work of thought absolutely and wholesale, instead of relatively and in detail. That is, it took re-constitution to be constitution; re-construction to be construction. Accepting the premise of the equivalence of Reality with the attained object of knowledge, idealism had no way of noting that thought is intermediary between some em¬ pirical objects and others. Hence an office of transforma¬ tion was converted into an act of original and final creation. A conversion of actual immediate objects into better, into more secure and significant, objects was treated as a movement from merely apparent and pheno- mental Being to the truly Real. In short, idealism is guilty of neglect that thought and knowledge are histories.
To call action of thought in constituting objects direct is the same as to say that it is miraculous. For it is not thought as idealism defines thought which exercises the reconstructive function. Only action, interaction, can change or remake objects. The analogy of the skilled artist still holds. His intelligence is a factor in forming new objects which mark a fulfillment. But this is be¬ cause intelligence is incarnate in overt action, using things as means to affect other things. “Thought,” reason, intelligence, whatever word we choose to use, is existentially an adjective (or better an adverb), not a noun. It is disposition of activity, a quality of that NATURE, MEANS AND KNOWLEDGE 159 conduct which foresees consequences of existing events, and which uses what is foreseen as a plan and method of administering affairs.
This theory, explicitly about thought as a condition of science, is actually a theory about nature. It involves attribution to nature of three defining characteristics. In the first place, it is implied that some natural events are endings whether enjoyed or obnoxious, which occur, apart from reflective choice and art, only casually, without control. In the second place, it implies that events, being events and not rigid and lumpy substances, are ongoing and hence as such unfinished, incomplete, in¬ determinate. Consequently they possess a possibility of being so managed and steered that ends may become fulfilments not just termini, conclusions not just closings. Suspense, doubt, hypotheses, experiment with alterna¬ tives are exponents of this phase of nature. In the third place, regulation of ongoing and incomplete processes in behalf of selected consequences, implies that there are orders of sequence and coexistence involved; these orders or relations when ascertained are intellectual means which enable us to use events as concrete means of di¬ recting the course of affairs to forecast conclusions. The belief that these orders of relation, which are the appropriate object of science, are therefore the sole ultimately “real” objects is the source of that assertion of a symmetrical dovetailed and completed universe made by both traditional materialism and idealism. The belief is due to neglect of the fact that such relations are always relations of ongoing affairs characterized by be¬ ginnings and endings which mark them off into unstable individuals. Yet this neglected factor is empirically so EXPERIENCE AND NATURE | pervasive and conspicuous that it has to be acknowledged in some form; it is usually acknowledged in a back- handed way — and one which confuses subsequent re¬ flection — by attributing all qualities inconsistent with nature thus defined to “finite” mind, in order to account for ignorance, doubt, error and the need of inference and inquiry.
If nature is as finished as these schools have defined it to be, there is no room or occasion in it for such a mind; it and the traits it is said to possess are literally supernatural or at least extra-natural.
A realist may deny this particular hypothesis that, existentially, mind designates an instrumental method of directing natural changes. But he cannot do so in virtue of his realism; the question at issue is what the real is. If natural existence is qualitatively individualized or genu¬ inely plural, as well as repetitious, and if things have both temporal quality and recurrence or uniformity, then the more realistic knowledge is, the more fully it will reflect and exemplify these traits. Science seizes upon whatever is so uniform as to make the changes of nature rhythmic, and hence predictable. But the contingencies of nature make discovery of these uniformities with a view to prediction needed and possible. Without the uniformities, science would be impossible. But if they alone existed, thought and knowledge would be impossible and meaningless. The incomplete and un¬ certain gives point and application to ascertainment of regular relations and orders. These relations in them¬ selves are hypothetical, and when isolated from applica¬ tion are subject-matter of mathematics (in a non-exis- tential sense). Hence the ultimate objects of science are guided processes of change.
NATURE, MEANS AND KNOWLEDGE 161 Sometimes the use of the word “truth” is confined to designating a logical property of propositions; but if we extend its significance to designate character of existen¬ tial reference, this is the meaning of truth: processes of change so directed that they achieve an intended con¬ summation. Instrumentalities are actually such only in operation; when they operate, an end in- view is in process of actualization. The means is fully a means only in its end. The instrumental objects of science are completely themselves only as they direct the changes of nature toward a fulfilling object. Thus it may be said intelligibly and not as mere tautology that the end of science is knowledge, implying that knowledge is more than science, being its fruit.
Knowledge is a word of various meanings. Etymologi¬ cally, “science” may signify tested and authentic in¬ stance of knowledge. But knowledge has also a mean¬ ing more liberal and more humane. It signifies events understood, events so discriminately penetrated by thought that mind is literally at home in them. It means comprehension, or inclusive reasonable agreement. What is sometimes termed “applied” science, may then be more truly science than is what is conventionally called pure science. For it is directly concerned with not just instrumentalities, but instrumentalities at work in ef¬ fecting modifications of existence in behalf of conclusions that are reflectively preferred. Thus conceived the char¬ acteristic subject-matter of knowledge consists of fulfilling objects, which as fulfillments are connected with a history to which they give character. Thus conceived, knowledge exists in engineering, medicine and the social arts more adequately than it does in mathematics, and physics.
EXPERIENCE AND NATURE Thus conceived, history and anthropology are scientific in a sense in which bodies of information that stop short with general formulae are not.
“Application” is a hard word for many to accept. It suggests some extraneous tool ready-made and complete, which is then put to uses that are external to its nature. To call the arts applications of science is then to introduce something foreign to the sciences which the latter irrel¬ evantly and accidentally serve. Since the application is in human use, convenience, enjoyment and improve¬ ment, this view of application as something external and arbitrary reflects and strengthens the theories which detach man from nature, which, in the language of philosophy, oppose subject and object. But if we free ourselves from preconceptions, application of “science” means application in, not application to. Application in something signifies a more extensive interaction of natural events with one another, an elimination of dis¬ tance and obstacles; provision of opportunities for in¬ teractions that reveal potentialities previously hidden and that bring into existence new histories with new initia¬ tions and endings. Engineering, medicine, social arts realize relationships that were unrealized in actual exist¬ ences. Surely in their new context the latter are under¬ stood or known as they are not in isolation. Prejudice against the abstract, as something remote and technical, is often irrational; but there is sense in the conviction that in the abstract there is something lacking which should be recovered. The serious objection to “applied” science lies in limitation of the application, as to private profit and class advantage.
NATURE, MEANS AND KNOWLEDGE 163 “Pure” science is of necessity relational and abstract: it fulfills its meaning and gains full truth when included within a course of concrete events. The proposition that “pure” science is non-existential is a tacit admission that only “applied” science is existential. Something else than history and anthropology lose all scientific standing when standards of “purity” are set up as ulti¬ mate; namely, all science of existential events. There is superstitious awe reflected in the current estimate of science. If we could free ourselves from a somewhat abject emotion, it would be clear enough that what makes any proposition scientific is its power to yield un¬ derstanding, insight, intellectual at-homeness, in connec¬ tion with any existential state of affairs, by filling events with coherent and tested meanings. The case of history is typical and basic. Upon the current view, it is a waste of time to discuss whether there can be such a thing as a science of history. History and science are by definition at opposite poles. And yet if all natural existences are histories, divorce between history and the logical mathematical schemes which are the appropriate objects of pure science, terminates in the conclusion that of existences there is no science, no adequate knowledge. Aside from mathematics, all knowledge is historic; chemistry, geology, physiology, as well as anthro¬ pology and those human events to which, arrogantly, we usually restrict the title of history. Only as science is seen to be fulfilled and brought to itself in intelligent management of historical processes in their continuity can man be envisaged as within nature, and not as a supernatural extrapolation. Just because nature is what it is, history is capable of being more truly known EXPERIENCE AND NATURE — understood, intellectually realized — than are mathe¬ matical and physical objects. Do what we can, there always remains something recondite and remote in the latter, until they are restored in the course of affairs from which they have been sequestrated. While the humanizing of science contributes to the life of humanity, it is even more required in behalf of science, in order that it may be intelligible, simple and clear; in order that it may have that correspondence with reality which true knowl¬ edge claims for itself.
One can understand the sentiment that animates the bias of scientific inquirers against the idea that all science is ultimately applied. It is justified in the sense in which it is intended; for it is directed against two conceptions which are harmful, but which, also, are irrelevant to the position here taken. One of these conceptions is that the concern or personal motive of the inquirer should be in each particular inquiry some specific practical applica¬ tion. This is just as it happens to be. Doubtless many important scientific discoveries have been thus instigated, but that is an incident of human history rather than of scientific inquiry as such. And upon the whole, or if this animating interest were to become general, the undoubted effect is limitation of inquiry and thereby in the end of the field of application. It marks a recurrence to the dogma of fixed predetermined ends, while emancipation from the influence of this dogma has been the chief service rendered modern scientific methods.
The evil thus effected is increased by the second notion, namely, that application is identical with “commercialized” use. It is an incident of human history, and a rather appalling incident, that applied science has been so largely NATURE, MEANS AND KNOWLEDGE 165 made an equivalent of use for private and economic class purposes and privileges. When inquiry is narrowed by such motivation or interest, the consequence is in so far disastrous both to science and to human life. But this limitation does not spring from nor attach to the conception of “application” which has been just presented. It springs from defects and perversions of morality as that is embodied in institutions and their effects upon personal disposition. It may be questioned whether the notion that science is pure in the sense of being concerned ex¬ clusively with a realm of objects detached from human concerns has not conspired to reinforce this moral de¬ ficiency. For in effect it has established another class- interest, that of intellectualists and aloof specialists. And it is of the nature of any class-interest to generate and con¬ firm other class-interests, since division and isolation in a world of continuities are always reciprocal. The institu¬ tion of an interest labelled ideal and idealistic in isolation tends of necessity to evoke and strengthen other interests lacking ideal quality. The genuine interests of “pure” science are served only by broadening the idea of appli¬ cation to include all phases of liberation and enrichment of human experience.
CHAPTER FIVE CHAPTER FIVE Nature, Communication and Meaning