tion of the forms of such things as are thus and so usually, now and then, upon the whole, but not necessarily and always. Experience was adequate and final for this kind of thing because it was as much their culminating actual¬ ization as rational thought was the actualization of the forms of things that are what they are necessarily. To Aristotle, the copula was a true verb, always affected by tense. Things which fully and completely are, have been, will be, and now are exactly the same; their matter is completely mastered by form. Concerning them we can say “is” with demonstrative certainty: such things are few, though supremely good, and are the objects of science. Of other things we can only say that they have been and are not at the present time, or that though not existing at the present moment they may exist at some unspecified future time. Of them we can say “is” only with a per¬ haps or a probably, since they are subject to chance. In them matter is not wholly subdued to form. Experience is the actualization through an organic body of just these affairs. Experience was not some person’s; it was nature’s, localized in a body as that body happened to exist by nature.
As was remarked in the introductory chapter one can hardly use the term “experience” in philosophical dis¬ course, but a critic rises to inquire “Whose experience?” The question is asked in adverse criticism. Its implica¬ tion is that experience by its very nature is owned by some one; and that the ownership is such in kind that every¬ thing about experience is affected by a private and exclu¬ sive quality. The implication is as absurd as it would be to infer from the fact that houses are usually owned, are mine and yours and his, that possessive reference so per- EXPERIENCE AND NATURE meates the properties of being a house that nothing intel¬ ligible can be said about the latter. It is obvious, how¬ ever, that a house can be owned only when it has existence and properties independent of being owned. The quali- ity of belonging to some one is not an all-absorbing maw in which independent properties and relations disappear to be digested into egohood. It is additive; it marks the assumption of a new relationship, in consequence of which the house, the common, ordinary, house, acquires new properties. It is subject to taxes; the owner has the right to exclude others from entering it; he enjoys certain privileges and immunities with respect to it and is also exposed to certain burdens and liabilities.
Substitute “experience” for “house,” and no other word need be changed. Experience when it happens has the same dependence upon objective natural events, physical and social, as has the occurrence of a house. It has its own objective and definitive traits; these can be described without reference to a self, precisely as a house is of brick, has eight rooms, etc., irrespective of whom it belongs to. Nevertheless, just as for some purposes and with respect to some consequences, it is all important to note the added qualification of personal ownership of real property, so with “experience.” In first instance and intent, it is not exact nor relevant to say “I experience” or “I think.” “It” experiences or is experienced, “it” thinks or is thought, is a juster phrase. Experience, a serial course of affairs with their own characteristic properties and relationships, occurs, happens, and is what it is. Among and within these occurrences, not outside of them nor underlying them, are those events which are denominated selves. In some specifiable respects and for some specifi- NATURE, MIND AND SUBJECT able consequences, these selves, capable of objective de¬ notation just as are sticks, stones, and stars, assume the care and administration of certain objects and acts in experience. Just as in the case of the house, this assump¬ tion of ownership brings with it further liabilities and assets, burdens and enjoyments.
To say in a significant way, “I think, believe, desire, instead of barely it is thought, believed, desired,” is to accept and affirm a responsibility and to put forth a claim. It does not mean that the self is the source or author of the thought and affection nor its exclusive seat. It signifies that the self as a centred organization of ener¬ gies identifies itself (in the sense of accepting their conse¬ quences) with a belief or sentiment of independent and external origination. The absurdity of any other concep¬ tion appears upon examination of such affairs as are designated by “I do not believe” or “I do not like;” in them it is obvious that a relationship of incompatibility between two distinct and denoted objects is contained.
Authorship and liability look in two different ways, one to the past, the other to the future. Natural events — including social habits — originate thoughts and feelings. To say “I think, hope and love” is to say in effect that genesis is not the last word; instead of throwing the blame or the credit for the belief, affection and expectation upon nature, one’s family, church, or state, one declares one’s self to be henceforth a partner. An adoptive act is proclaimed in virtue of which one claims the benefit of future goods and admits liability for future ills flow¬ ing from the affair in question. Even in the most “indi¬ vidualistic” society some properties remain communal; and many things, like the bowels of the earth and the EXPERIENCE AND NATURE depths of the seas, are unowned by either group or per¬ son. The cogent line of defense of the institution of private property is that it promotes prudence, account¬ ability, ingenuity and security, in the production and administration of commodities and resources which exist independently of the relationship of property. In like fashion, not all thoughts and emotions are owned either socially or personally; and either mode of appropriation has to be justified on the basis of distinctive consequences.
Analytic reflection shows that the ordinary conception of causation as a trait belonging to some one thing is the idea of responsibility read backward. The idea that some one thing, or any two or three things, are the cause of an occurrence is in effect an application of the idea of credit or blame — as in the Greek curia. There is nothing in nature that belongs absolutely and exclusively to any¬ thing else; belonging is always a matter of reference and distributive assignment, justified in any particular case as far as it works out well. Greek metaphysics and logic are dominated by the idea of inherent belonging and ex¬ clusion; another instance of naively reading the story of nature in language appropriate to human association. Modern science has liberated physical events from the domination of the notions of intrinsic belonging and exclu¬ sion, but it has retained the idea with exacerbated vigor in the case of psychological events. The elimination of the category from physics and its retention in psychology has provided a seeming scientific basis for the division between psychology and physics, and thereby for the egotism of modern philosophy. Much subjectivism is only a statement of the logical consequences of the doc¬ trine sponsored by psychological “science” of the monop- NATURE, MIND AND SUBJECT olistic possession of mental phenomena by a self; or, after the idea of an underlying spiritual substance became shaky, of the doctrine that mental events as such con¬ stitute all there is to selfhood. For the philosophical implications of the latter idea, as far as privacy, monopoly and exclusiveness of causation and belonging are con¬ cerned, are similar to those of the older dogma when it was applied to cosmic nature.
Enough, however, of negation. The positive conse¬ quence is an understanding of the shift of emphasis from the experienced, the objective subject-matter, the what, to the experiencing, the method of its course, the how of its changes. Such a shift occurs whenever the problem of control of production of consequences arises. As long as men are content to enjoy and suffer fire when it happens, fire is just an objective entity which is what it is. That it may be taken as a deity to be adored or propitiated, is evidence that its “whatness” is all there is to it. But when men come to the point of making fire, fire is not an essence, but a mode of natural phenomena, an order in change, a “how” of a historic sequence. The change from immediate use in enjoyment and suffering is equiv¬ alent to recognition of a method of procedure, and of the alliance of insight into method with possibility of control.
The development of the conception of experiencing as a distinctive operation is akin to the growth of the idea of fire-making out of direct experiences with fire. Fire is fire, inherently just what it is; but making fire is rela¬ tional. It takes thought away from fire to the other things that help and prevent its occurrence. So with experience in the sense of things that are experienced; they are what they are. But-their-oocurrence as experi- EXPERIENCE AND NATURE enced things is ascertained to be dependent upon atti-7 tudes and dispositions; the manner of their happening is found to be affected by the habits of an organic individual. Since myth and science concern the same objects in the same natural world, sun, moon, and stars, the difference between them cannot be determined exclusively on the basis of these natural objects. A differential has to found in distinctive ways of experiencing natural objects; it is perceived that man is an emotional and imaginative as well as an observing and reasoning creature, and that different manners of experiencing affect the status of subject-matter experienced. Capacity to distinguish be¬ tween the sun and moon of science and these same things as they figure in myth and cult depends upon capacity to distinguish different attitudes and dispositions of the subject; the heroes of legend and poetry are discrimi¬ nated from historic characters when memory, imagina¬ tion and idealizing emotion are taken into the reckoning. Again, it is discovered that the good of some objects is connected with one way of experiencing, namely appetite, while the acquisition of goodness by other objects is dependent upon the operation of reflection. In conse¬ quence, the experienced objects are differentiated as to their goodness, although good as an essence is unchanged. The importam^_olmo4es--o£_exDeriencin p- for control experienced objects may be illustrated from ernnnmir ihficry. A study of various economic essences or con¬ cepts is possible: definition, classification and dialectical reference to one another of such meanings as value, utility, rent, exchange, profit, wages, etc. There is also possible a positivistic study of existential economic regimes, resulting in description of their structures and NATURE, MIND AND SUBJECT operations. If the presence and operation of disposi¬ tions and attitudes be neglected, these alternatives exhaust the field of inquiry. Neither the study of objective essences nor of objective existences is avail¬ able, however, in problems of polity, in management of economic events. When the “psychological” factor is introduced, say, a study of the effects of certain ways of experiencing, such as incentives, desires, fatigue, monotony, habit, waste-motions, insecurity, prestige, team work, fashion, esprit de corps, and a multitude of like factors, the situation changes. Factors that are within control are specified, and a fuller degree of deliberate administration of events is made possible. The objectiv¬ ity of events remains what it was, but the discovery of the r61e of personal dispositions in conditioning their occur¬ rence, enables us to interpret and connect them in new ways, ways, which are susceptible of greater regulation than were the other ways. Banks, stores, factories do not become psychical when we ascertain the part played in their genesis and operation by psychological factors; they remain as external to the organism and to a particular mind as ever they were, things experienced as are winds and stars. But we get a new leverage, intel¬ lectual and practical, upon them when we can convert description of ready-made events and dialectical relation of ready-made notions into an account of a way of occurrence. For a perceived mode of becoming is always ready to be translated into a method of production and direction.
Since modern natural science has been concerned with discovery of conditions of production, to be employed as means for consequences, the development of interest in EXPERIENCE AND NATURE attitudes of individual subjects — the psychological inter¬ est — is but an extension of its regular business. Knowl¬ edge of conditions of the occurrence of experienced objects is not complete until we have included organic conditions as well as extra-organic conditions. Knowledge of the latter may account for a happening in the abstract but not for the concrete or experienced happening. A general knowledge of dispositions and attitudes renders us exactly the same sort of intellectual and practical service as pos¬ session of physical constants. The trouble lies in the inadequacy of our present psychological knowledge. And it is probably this deficiency, which renders such psycho¬ logical knowledge as we possess unavailable for technologi¬ cal control, which, joined to spontaneous interest in “inner” life, has set off psychological subject-matter as a separate world of existence, instead of a discovery of attitudes and dispositions involved in the world of com¬ mon experience. In truth, attitudes, dispositions and their kin, while capable of being distinguished and made concrete intellectual objects, are never separate existences. They are always of, from, toward, situations and things. They may be studied with a minimum of attention to the things at and away from which they are directed. The things with which they are concerned may for purposes of inquiry be represented by a blank, a symbol to be specifi¬ cally filled in as occasion demands. But except as ways of seeking, turning from, appropriating, treating things, they have no existence nor significance.
Every type of culture has experienced resistance and frustration. These events are interpreted according to the bias dominating a particular type of culture. To the modern European mind they have been interpreted NATURE, MIND AND SUBJECT as results of the opposed existence of subject and object as independent forms of Being. The notion is now so established in tradition that to many thinkers it appears to be a datum, not an interpretative classification. But the East Indian has envisaged the same phenomena as evidence of the contrast of an illusory world to which corresponds domination by desires and a real world due to emancipation from desires, attained through ascetic dis¬ cipline and meditation. The Greeks interpreted the same experience on the basis of the cosmic discrepancy of being and becoming, form and matter, as the reluctance of existence to become a complete and transparent medium of meaning. Taken absolutely, the interpretation on the basis of opposition of subject and object has no advan¬ tage over the other doctrines; it is a local and provincial interpretation. Taken inherently or absolutely, it has an absurdity from which they are free; for subject and object antithetically defined can have logically no transactions with each other. Taken as a factor in the enterprise of overcoming resistance and reducing the prospects of frustration, statement in terms of distinction of subject and object is intelligible, and is more valuable than the other modes of statement. Objectis, as Basil Gildersleeve said, that which objects, that to which frustration is due. But it is also the object ive; the final and eventual con¬ summation, an integrated secure independent state of affairs. The subject is that which suffers, is subjected and which endures resistance and frustration; it is also that which attempts subjection of hostile conditions; that which takes the immediate initiative in remaking the situation as it stands. Subjective and objective dis¬ tinguished as factors in a regulated effort at modification EXPERIENCE AND NATURE of the environing world have an intelligible meaning. Subjectivism as an “ism” converts this historic, relative and instrumental status and function into something absolute and fixed; while pure “objectivism” is a doctrine of fatalism.
To-day there is marked revival of objectivism, even of externalism. The world of physical science is no longer new and strange; to many it is now familiar; while many of those to whom it is personally unfamiliar take it for granted on authority. To a considerable extent its sub¬ ject-matter is taking the place of the subject-matter of older creeds as something given ready-made, demanding unhesitating credence and passive acceptance. The doc¬ trine of the opposition of subject and object in knowledge is fading, becoming reminiscent; that sense of strain which is lacking accompanied transition from one set of beliefs to another very different set. Only in politics and eco¬ nomics is the opposition of subject and institutional object poignant. And even in these fields radical and conservative increasingly appeal to objects which are collective, non¬ individual. The conservative recurs to the objectivism of established institutions, idealized into intrinsic stabil¬ ity; the radical looks forward to the completed outcome of an objective and necessary economic evolution. In spite of the appeal to the catchwords of individualism, pri¬ vate initiative, voluntary abstinence, personal industry and effort, there ismore danger at present that the genuinely creative effort of (the individual will be lost than there is of any return to earlier individualism. Everything makes for the mass. When private property is talked about, the product of individual labor is no longer meant; but a legally buttressed institution. Capital is no longer NATURE, MIND AND SUBJECT the outcome of deliberate personal sacrifice, but is an insti¬ tution of corporations and finance with massive political and social ramifications. Appeals to secure action of a certain sort may use the old words; but the fears and hopes which are now aroused are not really connected with freedom of individual thought and effort, but with the objective foundations of society, established “law and order.”
This resort to an objectivism which ignores initiating and re-organizing desire and imagination will in the end only strengthen that other phase of subjectivism which consists in escape to the enjoyment of inward landscape. Men who are balked of a legitimate realization of their subjectivity, men who are forced to confine innovating need and projection of ideas to technical modes of indus¬ trial and political life, and to specialized or “scientific” fields of intellectual activity, will compensate by finding release within their inner consciousness. There will be one philosophy, a realistic one, for mathematics, physical science and the established social order; another, and opposed, philosophy for the affairs of personal life. The objection to dualism is not just that it is a dualism, but that it forces upon us antithetical, non-convertible princi¬ ples of formulation and interpretation. If there is com¬ plete split in nature and experience then of course no ingenuity can explain it away; it must be accepted. But in case no such sharp division actually exists, the evils of supposing there is one are not confined to philosophical theory. Consequences within philosophy as such are of no great import. But philosophical dualism is but a formulated recognition of an impasse in life; an impotence in interaction, inability to make effective transition, limi- EXPERIENCE AND NATURE tation of power to regulate and thereby to understand. Capricious pragmatism based on exaltation of personal desire; consolatory estheticism based on capacity for wringing contemplative enjoyment from even the trage¬ dies of the outward spectacle; refugee idealism based on rendering thought omnipotent in the degree in which it is ineffective in concrete affairs; — these forms of subjectiv¬ ism register an acceptance of whatever obstacles at the time prevent the active participation of the self in the ongoing course of events. Only when obstacles are treated as challenges to remaking of personal desire and thought, so that the latter integrate with the movement of nature and by participation direct its consequences, are opposition and duality rightly understood.
Existentially speaking, a human individual is distinc¬ tive opacity of bias and preference conjoined with plastic¬ ity and permeability of needs and likings. One trait tends to isolation, discreteness; the other trait to connection, continuity. This ambivalent character is rooted in nature, whose events have their own distinctive indifferencies, resistances, arbitrary closures and intolerances, and also their peculiar openness, warm responsiveness, greedy seekings and transforming unions. The conjunction in nature of whimsical contingency and lawful uniformity is the result of these two characters of events. They persist upon the human plane, and as ultimate characters are ineradicable. Boundaries, demarcations, abrupt, and expansive over-reachings of boundaries impartially and conjunctively mark every phase of human life.
The human individual in his opacity of bias is in so far doomed to a blind solitariness. He hugs himself in his isolation and fights against disclosure, the give and NATURE, MIND AND SUBJECT take of communication, as for the very integrity of existence. Even communicable meanings are tinged with color of the uncommunicated; there is a quality of reserve in every publicity. Everything may be done with this irreducible uniqueness except to get rid of it. The sense of it may add a bitter loneliness to experience. It may lead to restless insatiable throwing of the self into every opportunity of external business and dissipation in order to escape from it. It may be cherished, nurtured, devel¬ oped into a cultivated consolatory detachment from the affairs of life, ending in the delusion of the superiority of the private inner life to all else, or in the illusion that one can really succeed in emancipating himself in his pure inwardness from connection with the world and society. It may express itself in elaborated schemes of self-pity and in bursts of defiant exclamation: Here I stand and cannot otherwise. It may lead to unreasoned loyalty to seemingly lost causes and forlorn hopes — and events may sometimes justify the faith.