NATURE AND COMMUNICATION 195 making experiments to introduce an old meaning into different situations and who has a sensitive ear for detect¬ ing resultant harmonies and discords. The most “deduc¬ tive” thought in actual occurrence is a series of trials, observations and selections. In one sense of the ambigu¬ ous word intuition, it is a “series of intuitions,” and logic is ex post facto, expressing a wit that formulates econom¬ ically the congruities and incongruities that have mani¬ fested themselves. Any “syllogism” which is such ab initio is performed better by a machine that manipulates symbols automatically than by any “thinker.”
This capacity of essences to enter readily into any number of new combinations, and thereby generate fur¬ ther meanings more profound and far reaching than those from which they sprang, gives them a semblance of inde¬ pendent life and career, a semblance which is responsible for their elevation by some thinkers into a realm sepa¬ rate from that of existence and superior to it. Consider the interpretations that have been based upon such essences as four, plus, the square root of minus one. These are at once so manipulable and so fertile in conse¬ quences when conjoined with others that thinkers who are primarily interested in their performances treat them not as significant terms of discourse, but as an order of entities independent of human invention and use. The fact that we can watch them and register what happens when they come together, and that the things that happen are as independent of our volition and expectation as are the discoveries of a geographic exploration, is taken as evidence that they constitute entities having subsistent Being independently not only of us but of all natural events whatever.
EXPERIENCE AND NATURE Alternatives are too narrowly conceived. Because meanings and essences are not states of mind, because they are as independent of immediate sensation and imagery as are physical things, and because nevertheless they are not physical things, it is assumed that they are a peculiar kind of thing, termed metaphysical, or “logical” in a style which separates logic from nature. But there are many other things which are neither physical nor psychi¬ cal existences, and which are demonstrably dependent upon human association and interaction. Such things function moreover in liberating and regulating subsequent human intercourse; their essence is their contribution to making that intercourse more significant and more immediately rewarding. Take the sort of thing exemplified in the regulation of traffic. The sound of a whistle is a particular existential event numerically separate, with its own peculiar spatial temporal position. This may not be said of the rule or method of social co¬ operative interaction which it manifests and makes effec¬ tive. A continuous way of organized action is not a par¬ ticular, and hence is not a physical or psychical existence. Yet the consequences of using the method of adjust¬ ing movements, so that they do not interfere with one another, have both a physical and a mental phase. Physically, there is modification of the changes in space which would otherwise occur. Mentally, there are en¬ joyments and annoyances which would not otherwise happen. But no one of these incidents nor all of them put together form the essence or ulterior meaning of the sound of the whistle; they are qualifications of a more secure concert of human activity which, as a consequence of a legal order incarnate in the whistling, forms its signifi¬ cance.
NATURE AND COMMUNICATION 197 Discussion of meaning and essence has reached such an impasse and is barbed with such entanglements, that it is further worth while to suggest consideration of legal enti¬ ties as indicative of escape from the disjunction of essence from existence. What is a Corporation, a Franchise? A corporation is neither a mental state nor a particular physical event in space and time. Yet it is an objective reality, not an ideal Realm of Being. It is an objective reality which has multitudinous physical and mental consequences. It is something to be studied as we study electrons; it exhibits as does the latter unexpected proper¬ ties, and when introduced into new situations behaves with new reactions. It is something which may be con¬ ducted, facilitated and obstructed, precisely as may be a river. Nevertheless it would not exist nor have any meaning and potency apart from an interaction of human beings with one another, an interaction in which external things are implicated. As legal essence, or concerted method of regulated interaction, corporation has its own and its developing career.
Again juridical rule implies jurisdiction; a particular body of persons within a certain territory to whom it applies. The legal significance of an act depends upon where it takes place. Yet an act is an interaction, a trans¬ action, not isolated, self-sufficient. The initial stage of an act and the terminating consequences which, between them, determine its meaning, may be far apart in place as well as in time. Where then is the act? What is its locus? The readiest reply is in terms of the beginning of the act. The act was performed where the agent bodily was at the time of its occurrence. Suppose, however, that before discovery, the agent in a criminal transaction EXPERIENCE AND NATURE changes his abode and resides within another jurisdiction. The need of security leads to the generation, in its union with the conception of jurisdiction, of a new conception or essence, that of extradition, of comity of jurisdictions. New procedures with corresponding new technical con¬ cepts or meanings then develop by means of which a person charged with crime may be requisitioned and removed. The concept of jurisdiction in combination with that of security, justice, etc., deductively generates other concepts.
The process does not stop here. An agent implies a patient. Suppose a person in New York State shoots a bullet across the New Jersey line, and kills some one in that State; or sends poisoned candy by mail to some one in California who dies from eating it. Where is the crime committed? The guilty person is not within the jurisdic¬ tion of the State where the death resulted; hence, his crime by definition, was not committed in that State. But since the death did not occur where he was bodily present at the time, no crime occurred in that jurisdiction, locus being defined in terms of the abode of the agent. The essence, extradition, does not apply because there is no crime for which to extradite him. In short, because of the accepted meaning of jurisdiction, no crime has been committed anywhere. Such an outcome is evidently pre¬ judicial to the integrity and security of human associa¬ tion and intercourse. Thus the element of transaction in an act is noted; an act initiated within a given jurisdic¬ tion becomes a crime when its obnoxious consequences occur outside. The locus of the act now extends all the way from New York to California. Thus two independ- NATURE AND COMMUNICATION 199 ent particular events capable of direct observation, to¬ gether with a connection between them which is inferred, not directly observable, are now included in so simple a meaning as that of the locus of an act. In the tradi¬ tional language of philosophy, the essence is now ideal or rational, non-sensible. Furthermore a system of legal meanings is developed by modifying different ones with a view to consistency or logical order. Thus the meanings get more independent of the events that led up to them; they may be taught and expounded as a logical system, whose portions are deductively connected with one another.
In civil cases, however, the concept of locus even as thus extended fails to take care of all the consequences which are found to require regulation, by attachment of rights and liabilities to certain classes of acts. A trans¬ action may concern goods or funds which operate in a jurisdiction different to that of either of the parties directly concerned in it. Its consequences include persons living in a third jurisdiction. The ultimate result is a tendency in some case to reverse the earlier and more immediately physical (or spatially limited) concept of jurisdiction with respect to place. Jurisdiction comes to mean “power to deal legally” with a certain specific affair, rather than an “area within which action has occurred”: that is, area is defined by power to act, which in turn is determined with respect to consequences found desirable, while originally a concept of fixed area had been employed to fix power of legal action. If it be asked, “where” a transaction is located, the only possible answer, on the basis of legal procedure, appears in many cases to EXPERIENCE AND NATURE be that it is located wherever it has consequences which it is deemed socially important to regulate.3 Juridical institutions everywhere embody essences which are as objective and coercive with respect to opin¬ ions, emotions and sensations of individuals as are physi¬ cal objects; essences which are general, capable of inde¬ pendent examination; of fruitful connection with one another; and of extension to concrete phenomena not previously related to them. At the same time the origin and nature of such meanings can be empirically described by reference to social interactions and their consequences. They are means of regulating consequences, through establishing a present cross-reference to one another of the diverse acts of interacting agents. If we bear in mind the capacity to transfer such a regulative method to new and previously unconnected universes of discourse, there is nothing astonishing in the fact that a stain may mean an anatomical structure, a change in the size of a mercury column changes in atmospheric pressure and thus probable rain. There is nothing astonishing there¬ fore in the fact that meanings expressed in symbols are capable of yielding a vast and growing system of mathe¬ matics. An essence which is a method of procedure can be linked to other methods of procedure so as to yield 3 In this respect the actual tendency of law (though not always its doctrinal formulations) is further advanced than are views current among philosophers. Compare the discussions as to “where” an illusion is; or what is the locus of past experience, and “where” unrealized possibilities exist. Some writers find satisfaction in locating them “in” the mind, although they also deny that mind is spatial. Then, realizing that the psychical existence “in” which these affairs are located is itself a present particular existence, they find it necessary to place an “essence” or meaning within the skin of the psychical state.
NATURE AND COMMUNICATION 201 new methods; to bring about a revision of old methods, and form a systematic and ordered whole — all without refer¬ ence to any application of any method to any particular set of concrete existences, and in complete abstraction from any particular consequences which the methods or logical universals are to regulate. For mathematics, they are as much independent objects as is the material with which a zoologist deals. Comparison with machines like a self-binding reaper or a telephone system is useful. Machines are evolved in human experience, not prior to it or independently of it. But they are objective and compelling with respect to present particular physical and psychical processes; they are general methods of reaching consequences; they are interactions of previously exist¬ ing physical existences. Moreover, they depend for their efficacy upon other and independent natural exist¬ ences; they produce consequences only when used in connection with other existences which limit and test their operation. When machines have attained a certain stage of development, engineers may devote themselves to the construction of new machines and to improve¬ ments in old machines without specific reference to con¬ crete uses and applications. That is, inventors are guided by the inherent logic of existing machines, by observation of the consistency of relationships which parts of the machine bear to one another and to the pattern of the entire machine. An invention may thus result from purely mathematical calculations. Nevertheless the machine is still a machine, an instrumental device for regulating interactions with reference to consequences.
When the “concept” of a machine, its meaning or essence embodied in a symbol, deductively generates plans EXPERIENCE AND NATURE of new machines, essence is fruitful because it was first devised for a purpose. Its subsequent success or failure in fulfilling its purpose, in delivering the desired con¬ sequences, together with reflection upon the reason there¬ fore, supply a basis for revising, extending, and modifying the essence in question; thus it has a career and conse¬ quence of its own. If we follow the lead of empirically verifiable cases, it would then appear that mathematical and moral essences may be dialectically fruitful, because like other machines they have been constructed for the purpose of securing certain consequences with the minimum of waste and the maximum of economy and efficiency.
Communication is consummatory as well as instru- mentalT It is a means of establishing cooperation, domination and order. Shared experience is the greatest of human goods. In communication, such conjunction and contact as is characteristic of animals become en¬ dearments capable of infinite idealization; they become symbols of the very culmination of nature. That God is love is a more worthy idealization than that the divine is power. Since love at its best brings illumination and wisdom, this meaning is as worthy as that the divine is truth. Various phases of participation by one in another’s joy, sorrows, sentiments and purposes, are dis¬ tinguished by the scope and depth of the objects that are held in common, from a momentary caress to continued insight and loyality. When a psychologist like Bain reduced the “tender emotions” to sensations of contact he indicated a natural organic basis. But he failed to con¬ nect even organic contact with its vital function, assimi¬ lation and fruitful union; while (what is of greater import) NATURE AND COMMUNICATION 203 he failed to note the transformation that this biological function undergoes when its consequences, being noted, become an objective meaning incorporated as its essence in a natural physiological occurrence.
If scientific discourse is instrumental in function, it also is capable of becoming an enjoyed object to those concerned in it. Upon the whole, human history shows that thinking in being abstract, remote and technical has been laborious; or at least that the process of attaining such thinking has been rendered painful to most by social circumstances. In view of the importance of such activ¬ ity and its objects, it is a priceless gain when it becomes an intrinsic delight. Few would philosophize if philosophic discourse did not have its own inhering fascination. Yet it is not the satisfactoriness of the activity which defines science or philosophy; the definition comes from the structure and function of subject-matter. To say that knowledge as the fruit of intellectual discourse is an end in itself is to say what is esthetically and morally true for some persons, but it conveys nothing about the structure of knowledge; and it does not even hint that its objects are not instrumental. These are questions that can be decided only by an examination of the things in question. Impartial and disinterested thinking, discourse in terms of scrutinized, tested, and related meanings, is a fine art. But it is an art as yet open to comparatively few. Let¬ ters, poetry, song, the drama, fiction, history, biography, engaging in rites and ceremonies hallowed by time and rich with the sense of the countless multitudes that share in them, are also modes of discourse that, detached from immediate instrumental consequences of assistance and cooperative action, are ends for most persons. In them EXPERIENCE AND NATURE discourse is both instrumental and final. No person remains unchanged and has the same future efficiencies, who shares in situations made possible by communication. Subsequent consequences may be good or bad, but they are there. The part of wisdom is not to deny the causal fact because of the intrinsic value of the immediate experi¬ ence. It is to make the immediately satisfactory object the object which will also be most fertile.
The saying of Matthew Arnold that poetry is a criti¬ cism of life sounds harsh to the ears of some persons of strong esthetic bent; it seems to give poetry a moral and instrumental function. But while poetry is not a criti¬ cism of life in intent, it is in effect, and so is all art. For art fixes those standards of enjoyment and appreciation with which other things are compared; it selects the ob¬ jects of future desires; it stimulates effort. This is true of the objects in which a particular person finds his immediate or esthetic values, and it is true of collective man. The level and style of the arts of literature, poetry, ceremony, amusement, and recreation which obtain in a community, furnishing the staple objects of enjoyment in that community, do more than all else to determine the cur¬ rent direction of ideas and endeavors in the community. They supply the meanings in terms of which life is judged, esteemed, and criticized. For an outside spectator, they supply material for a critical evaluation of the life led by that community.
Communication is uniquely instrumental and uni¬ quely final. It is instrumental as liberating us from the otherwise overwhelming pressure of events and enabling us to live in a world of things that have meaning. It is final as a sharing in the objects and arts precious to a com- NATURE AND COMMUNICATION munity, a sharing whereby meanings are enhanced, deep¬ ened and solidified in the sense of communion. Because of its characteristic agency and finality, communication and its congenial objects are objects ultimately worthy of awe, admiration, and loyal appreciation. They are worthy as means, because they are the only means that make life rich and varied in meanings. They are worthy as ends, because in such ends man is lifted from his imme¬ diate isolation and shares in a communion of meanings. Here, as in so many other things, the great evil lies in separating instrumental and final functions. Intelli¬ gence is partial and specialized, because communication and participation are limited, sectarian, provincial, con¬ fined to class, party, professional group. By the same token, our enjoyment of ends is luxurious and corrupting for some; brutal, trivial, harsh for others; exclusion from the life of free and full communication excluding both alike from full possession of meanings of the things that enter experience. When the instrumental and final func¬ tions of communication live together in experience, there exists an intelligence which is the method and reward of the common life, and a society worthy to command affec¬ tion, admiration, and loyalty.4 4 Since the above was originally written I have found the following by Dr. Malinowski in Ogden and Richards, The Meaning of Meaning: “A word, signifying an important utensil, is used in action, not to comment on its nature or reflect on its properties, but to make it appear, be handed over to the speaker, or to direct another man to its proper use. The meaning of the thing is made up of experiences of its active uses and not of intellectual contemplation. A word means to a native the proper use of the thing for which it stands, exactly as an implement means something when it can be handled and means nothing when no active experience is at hand. Similarly a verb, a word for an action, re- EXPERIENCE AND NATURE ceives its meaning through active participation in this action. A word is used when it can produce an action, and not to describe one, still less to translate thoughts.” (Pp. 488-9.) I know of no statement about language that brings out with the same clearness and appreciation of the force of the fact that language is primarily a mode of action used for the sake of influencing the conduct of others in connection with the speaker. As he says “The manner in which I am using language now, in writing these words, the manner in which the author of a book or a papyrus or hewn inscription has to use it, is a very far-fetched and derivative func¬ tion of language. In its primitive uses, language functions as a link in concerted human activity, as a piece of human behavior.” (P. 474.) He shows that to understand the meaning of savage language, we have to be able to re-instate the whole social context which alone supplies the meaning. While he lists narrative and ceremonial speech as well as active, he shows that the same principle permeates them. “When incidents are told or discussed among a group of listeners, there is, first, the situation of that moment made up of the respective social, intellectual and emotional attitudes of those present. Within this situation, the narrative creates new bonds and sentiments by the emotional appeal of the words. In every case, narrative speech is primarily a mode of social action rather than a mere reflection of thought.” (P.475.) Then there is the use of language “in free, aimless, social intercourse.” “In discussing the function of speech in mere sociabilities, we come to one of the bed rock aspects of human nature in society. There is in all human beings the well-known tendency to congregate, to be together, to enjoy each other’s company. Taciturnity means not only un¬ friendliness but directly a bad character. The breaking of silence, the communion of words, is the first act to establish links of fellowship.” (Pp. 476-7.) Here speech has both the instrumental use of re-assurance and the consummatory good of enhanced sense of membership in a congenial whole. Thus communication is not only a means to common ends but is the sense of community, communion actualized. Nothing more important for philosophers to hearken to has been written than Dr. Malinowski’s conclusion: “Language is little influenced by thought, but Thought on the contrary having to borrow from action its tool — that is language — is largely influenced thereby. To sum up we can say that the fundamental grammatical categories, universal to all human languages, can be understood only with reference to the pragmatic Weltanschauung of primitive man and that, through the use of language, the barbarous primitive categories must have deeply influenced the later philosophies NATURE AND COMMUNICATION 207 of man.” (P. 498.) He goes on to show its influence in framing cate¬ gories of (nouns) substance, of action centering around (verbs) objects, and spatial relations — prepositions. And he closes with an express warning against “the old realist fallacy that a word vouches for, or con¬ tains, the reality of its meaning. The migration of roots into improper places has given to the imaginary reality of hypostatized meaning a special solidity of its own. For since early experience warrants the sub¬ stantival existence of anything found within the category of crude substance, of Protousia, and subsequent linguistic shifts introduce there such roots as “going”, “rest”, “motion”, etc., the obvious inference is that such abstract entities or ideas live in a world of their own.” (P. 509.) Here we have the source of the classic hypostatizing of essence which is described in the text as due to isolating important meanings of things from their context in human interaction.
CHAPTER SIX Nature, Mind and the Subject Personality, selfhood, subjectivity are eventual func¬ tions that emerge with complexly organized interactions, organic and social. Personal individuality has its basis and conditions in simpler events. Plants and non-human animals act as if they were concerned that their activity, their characteristic receptivity and response, should maintain itself. Even atoms and molecules show a selective bias in their indifferencies, affinities and repul¬ sions when exposed to other events. With respect to some things they are hungry to the point of greediness; in the presence of others they are sluggish and cold. It is not surprising that naive science imputed appetition to their own consummatory outcome to ah natural processes, and that Spinoza identified inertia and momen¬ tum with inherent tendency on the part of things to con¬ serve themselves in being, and achieve such perfection as belongs to them. In a genuine although not psychic sense, natural beings exhibit preference and centeredness.
In regard to the nature of the individual, as in so many other respects, classic and modern philosophies have pursued opposite paths. In Greek reflection, love of per¬ fection, or self-completion, was attributed to Being. The state of self-sufficiency excluding deficiency constituted the individual, significant change being thought of as the coming into being of such a whole. In consequence, in view of the obvious instability of particular existences such as moderns usually term individuals, a species im- NATURE, MIND AND SUBJECT mutable in time and having form was the true individual. What moderns call individuals were particulars, tran¬ sient, partial, and imperfect specimens of the true in¬ dividual. Mankind as species is more truly an indi¬ vidual than was this or that man. Although Aristotle criticized his master for giving Being to the genus or universal separate from particulars, he never doubted that the species was a real entity, a metaphysical or exis¬ tential whole including and characterizing all particulars. A type-form had no separate being; but, being embodied in particulars, it made them an intrinsically unified and marked out class, which as a class was ungenerated and indestructible, perfect and complete.
Modern science has made the conception strange. Yet it was a natural interpretation of things found in ordinary experience. The immediate qualitative dif¬ ferences of things cannot be recognized without noting that things possessed of these qualitative traits fall into kinds, or families. That the family is more lasting, im¬ portant, and real than any of its members; that the family confers upon its constituents their standing and character, so that those who have no family are outcasts and wanderers, represents a notable situation in most forms of human culture. In such a cultural scheme, those peculiar differences that constitute for us personal in¬ dividuality are only accidental variations from the family type, the form which marks a kind enables a particular person to be placed, known, identified. The modern habit of using self, “I,” mind, and spirit interchangeably is inconceivable when family and commune are solid realities. To the Greeks, a kind was an organized system in which an ideal form unites varying particulars EXPERIENCE AND NATURE into a genuine whole, and gives to them distinctive and recognizable character. The presence in things of the generic form renders them knowable. Mind is but the ordered system of all the characters which constitute kinds, differing among men, differing according to dif¬ ferences of organic constitutions. Upon such a view, subjectivity, individuality of mind marks an anomaly; a failure of realization of objective forms on the part of the indwelling family to impress itself adequately, owing to stubborn resisting material constitution. What is prized and exalted by moderns as individual was just the defect which is the source of ignorance, opinion, and error.