Romanticism has made the best and the worst of the discovery of the private and incommunicable. It has converted a pervasive and inevitable color and temper of experience into its substance. In conceiving that this inexpugnable uniqueness, this ultimate singularity, ex¬ hausts the self, it has created a vast and somnambulic ego¬ tism out of the fact of subjectivity. For every existence in addition to its qualitative and intrinsic boundaries has affinities and active outreachings for connection and intimate union. It is an energy of attraction, expansion and supplementation. The ties and bonds of associated life are spontaneous uncalculated manifestations of this phase of human selfhood, as the union of hydrogen and EXPERIENCE AND NATURE oxygen is natural and unpremeditated. Sociability, com¬ munication are just as immediate traits of the concrete individual as is the privacy of the closet of consciousness. To define one’s self within closed limits, and then to try out the self in expansive acts that inevitably result in an eventual breaking down of the walled-in self, are equally natural and inevitable acts. Here is the ultimate “dialectic” of the universal and individual. One no sooner establishes his private and subjective self than he demands it be recognized and acknowledged by others, even if he has to invent an imaginary audience or an Absolute Self to satisfy the demand. And no person taught by experience ever escapes the reflection that no matter how much he does for himself, what endures is only what is done for others: an observation however which is most comforting when it takes the form of attributing desire to serve others to acts which indulge the exclusive self.
In some form or other, the dualism erected between the ego and the world of things and persons represents failure to attain solution of the problem set by this ambiguous nature of the self. It is a formulated accept¬ ance of oscillation between surrender to the external and assertion of the inner. In science and in art, especially in the art of intercourse, real solutions occur. Private bias manages in them to manifest itself in innovations and deviations, which reshape the world of objects and insti¬ tutions, and which eventually facilitate communication and understanding. Thereby the final and efficient, the limiting and the expansive, attain a harmony which they do not possess in other natural events.
NATURE, MIND AND SUBJECT Thus an individual existence has a double status and import. There is the individual that belongs in a contin¬ uous system of connected events which reinforce its activities and which form a world in which it is at home, consistently at one with its own preferences, satisfying its requirements. Such an individual is in its world as a member, extending as far as the moving equilibrium of which it is a part lends support. It is a natural end, not as an abrupt and immediate termination but as a fulfill¬ ment. Then there is the individual that finds a gap between its distinctive bias and the operations of the things through which alone its need can be satisfied; it is broken off, discrete, because it is at odds with its surround¬ ings. It either surrenders, conforms, and for the sake of peace becomes a parasitical subordinate, indulges in egotistical solitude; or its activities set out to remake con¬ ditions in accord with desire. In the latter process, intel¬ ligence is born — not mind which appropriates and enjoys the whole of which it is a part, but mind as individualized, initiating, adventuring, experimenting, dissolving. Its possessed powers, its accomplished unions with the world, are now reduced to uncertain agencies to be forged into efficient instrumentalities in the stress and strain of trial.
The individual, the self, centred in a settled world which owns and sponsors it, and which in turn it owns and enjoys, is finished, closed. Surrender of what is possessed, disowning of what supports one in secure ease, is involved in all inquiry and discovery; the latter implicate an individual still to make, with all the risks implied therein. For to arrive at new truth and vision is to alter. The old self is put off and the new self is only forming, and the form EXPERIENCE AND NATURE it finally takes will depend upon the unforeseeable result of an adventure. No one discovers a new world without for¬ saking an old one; and no one discovers a new world who exacts guarantee in advance for what it shall be, or who puts the act of discovery under bonds with respect to what the new world shall do to him when it comes into vision. This is the truth in the exaggeration of subjectivism. Only by identification with remaking the objects that now obtain are we saved from complacent objectivism. Those who do not fare forth and take the risks attendant upon the formation of new objects and the growth of a new self, are subjected perforce to inevitable change of the settled and close world they have made their own. Identification of the bias and preference of selfhood with the process of intelligent remaking achieves an indestructible union of the instrumental and the final. For this bias can be satisfied no matter what the frustration of other desires and endeavors.
That an individual, possessed of some mode and degree of organized unity, participates in the genesis of every experienced situation, whether it be an object or an activity, is evident. That the way in which it is engaged affects the quality of the situation experienced is evident. That the way in which it is engaged has consequences that modify not merely the environment but which react to modify the active agent; that every form of life in the higher organisms constantly conserves some consequences of its prior experiences, is also evident. The constancy and pervasiveness of the operative presence of the self as a determining factor in all situations is the chief reason why we give so little heed to it; it is more intimate and omnipresent in experience than the air we breathe. Only NATURE, MIND AND SUBJECT feels unfriendliness among the eternities of sevententh- century thought. The spirit wants to be at home with itself, well-friended in the comprehension of its inner processes. It loves to be confidential in its heart out¬ pourings, keen in its analysis, humane in its attitude toward life.”
We are given to referring the beginnings of subjectiv¬ ism to Descartes, with his pensee as the indubitable certainty, or to Locke with his simple idea as immediate object. Technically or with respect to later dialectical developments, this reference is correct enough. But historically it is wrong. Descartes’ thought is the nous of classic tradition forced inwards because physical science had extruded it from its object. Its internality is a logical necessity of the attempt to reconcile the new science with the old tradition, not a thing intrinsically important. Similarly Locke’s simple idea is the classic Idea, Form or Species dislodged from nature and com¬ pelled to take refuge in mind. For Locke, it is coerced by external existence and remains coercive for all subsequent intellectual operations. The subjective as such is alien to Locke’s way of thinking; his whole bias is against it, and in favor of what is grounded in nature being a matter of relations already established. The “simple idea” is merely man’s available point of contact with the objec¬ tive order; and in this contact resides its whole import.
From the standpoint of “inner life” the simple idea became however, a sensation, that is, a feeling, a state of mind, an intrinsically interesting event having its own significant career. If this were true of such a rudimen¬ tary thing as blue or soft, how much more significantly it holds of imagination and emotion. Inner reveries and EXPERIENCE AND NATURE enjoyments constitute freedom to the natural man. Everywhere else is constraint, whether it be of study, of science, family life, industry, or government. The road to freedom by escape into the inner life is no modern dis¬ covery; it was taken by savages, by the oppressed, by children, long before it was formulated in philosophical romanticism. The generalized awareness of the fact is new however, and it added a new dimension to charac¬ teristically modern experience. It created new forms of art and new theories of esthetics, often promulgated by literary artists who have nothing but contempt for philo¬ sophical theories as such. Mr. Santayana is a thinker whose intent and basis are at one with classic thought. But if we note the importance assumed in his thinking by the “inward landscape,” there is before us a measure of the pervasive influence of the kind of experience that was seized upon by Romanticism as the exclusive truth of experience.
The function of individualized mind in furthering experi¬ ment and invention and the directed reconstruction of events, together with the discovery that objects of senti¬ ment and fancy, although rejected by the order of events in space and time, may form the contents of an inner and private realm, finds its legitimate outcome in the conception of experiencing, and in the discrimination of experiencing into a diversity of states and processes. To the Greeks, experience was the outcome of accumulation of practical acts, sufferings and perception gradually built up into the skill of the carpenter, shoemaker, pilot, farmer, general, and politician. There was nothing merely per¬ sonal or subjective about it; it was a consolidation, effected by nature, of particular natural occurrences into actualiza- NATURE, MIND AND SUBJECT in pathological cases, in delusions and insanities and social eccentricities, do we readily become aware of it; even in such cases it required long discipline to force attentive observation back upon the self. It is easier to attribute such things to invasion and possession from without, as by demons and devils. Yet till we understand opera¬ tions of the self as the tool of tools, the means in all use of means, specifying its differential activities in their distinc¬ tive consequences in varying qualities of what is experi¬ enced, science is incomplete and the use made of it is at the mercy of an unknown factor, so that the ultimate and important consequence is in so far a matter of accident. Intentions and efforts bring forth the opposite of what was intended and striven for, and the result is confusion and catastrophe. Thus we are brought to a consideration of the psycho-physical mechanism and functioning of indi¬ vidual centres of action.
CHAPTER SEVEN Nature, Life and Body-Mind A series of cultural experiences exhibits a series of di¬ verging conceptions of the relation of mind to nature in general and to the organic body in particular. Greek experience included affairs that rewarded without want and struggle the contemplation of free men; they enjoyed a civic life full and rich with an equable adaptation to natural surroundings. Such a life seemed to be upon the whole for those in its full possession a gracious culmina¬ tion of nature; the organic body was the medium through which the culmination took place. Since any created thing is subject to natural contingency, death was not a problem; a being who is generated shares while he may in mind and eternal forms, and then piously merges with the forces which generated him. But life does not always exist in this happy equilibrium: it is onerous and devastat¬ ing, civil life corrupt and harsh. Under such circum¬ stances, a spirit which believes that it was created in the image of a divine eternal spirit, in whose everlastingness it properly shares, finds itself an alien and pilgrim in a strange and fallen world. Its presence in that world and its residence in a material body which is a part of that world are an enigma. Again the scene shifts. Nature is conceived to be wholly mechanical. The existence within nature and as part of it of a body possessed of life, mani¬ festing thought and enjoying consciousness is a mystery.
This series of experiences with their corresponding philosophies display characteristic factors in the problem NATURE, LIFE AND BODY-MIND of life and mind in relation to body. To the Greeks, all life was psyche, for it was self-movement and only soul moves itself. That there should be self-movement in a world in which movement was also up-and-down, to-and- fro, circular, was indeed interesting but not strange or untoward. Evidence of the fact of self-movement is directly had in perception; even plants exhibit it in a degree and hence have soul, which although only vegeta¬ tive is a natural condition of animal soul and rational mind. Organic body occupies a distinctive position in the hierarchy of being; it is the highest actuality of nature’s physical potentialities, and it is in turn the poten¬ tiality of mind. Greek thought, as well as Greek religion, Greek sculpture and recreation, is piously attentive to the human body.
In Pauline Christianity and its successors, the body is earthly, fleshly, lustful and passionate; spirit is Godlike, everlasting; flesh is corruptible; spirit incorruptible. The body was conceived in terms of a moral disparagement colored by supernatural religion. Since the body is material, the dyslogy extends to all that is material; the metaphysical discount put upon matter by Plato and Aristotle becomes in ascetic thought a moral and essential discount. Sin roots in the will; but occasions for sin come from the lusts of the body; appetites and desires spring from the body, distract attention from spiritual things; concupiscence, anger, pride, love of money and luxury, worldly ambition, result. Technically, the frame¬ work of Aristotelian thought is retained by the scholas¬ tics; St. Thomas Aquinas repeats his formulae concern¬ ing life and the body almost word for word. But actually and substantially this formal relationship has been dis- EXPERIENCE AND NATURE torted and corrupted through the seduction of spirit by flesh manifest in the fall of man and nature by Adam’s sin. Add to moral fear of the flesh, interest in resurrection into the next world for external bliss or woe, and there is present a fullfledged antithesis of spirit and matter. In spite of this antithesis, however, they are conjoined in the body of man. Spirit is simple, one, permanent and indissoluble; matter is multiple, subject to change and dissolution. The possibility of the conjunction of two such opposite things formed a problem. But it would have been a remote, technical problem of no interest save to a few speculative thinkers, were it not given concrete¬ ness by the notion of an immortality to be spent in bliss or in woe unutterable, and the dependence of this ulti¬ mate destiny upon a life in which lust of the flesh along with the world of ambition and the devil of pride, was a standing temptation to sin and thereby an occasion of eternal damnation.
As long as the Aristotelian metaphysical doctrine persisted that nature is an ordered series from lower to higher of potentialities and actualizations, it was possible to conceive of the organic body as normally the highest term in a physical series and the lowest term in a psychical series. It occupied just that intermediate position where, in being the actualization of the poten¬ tialities of physical qualities, body was also potentiality for manifestation of their ideal actualities. Aside from moral and religious questions, there was in medieval thought no special problem attaching to the relation of mind and body. It was just one case of the universal principle of potentiality as the substrate of ideal actuality. But when the time came when the moral and religious NATURE, MIND AND SUBJECT of the forms which it has assumed almost unnecessary. Thinkers may start out with a naive assumption of minds connected with separate individuals. But developments soon show the inadequacy of such “minds” to carry the burden of science and objective institutions, like the family and state. The consequence was revealed to be sceptical, disintegrative, malicious. A transcendental supra-empirical self, making human, or “finite,” selves its medium of manifestation, was the logical recourse. Such a conception is an inevitable conclusion, when the value of liberation and utilization of individual capacity in science, art, industry, and politics is a demonstrated em¬ pirical fact; and when at the same time, individuality instead of being conceived as historic, intermediate, temporally relative and instrumental, is conceived of as original, eternal and absolute. When concrete recon¬ structions of natural and social objects are thought of as a single and constitutive act, they inevitably become super¬ natural or transcendental. When the movement ter¬ minates, as in the later philosophy of Josiah Royce, with a “community of selves,” the circle has returned to the empi¬ rical fact with which it might properly have started out; but the intervening insertion of a transcendent ego re¬ mains as a plague. It isolates the community of selves from natural existence and in order to get nature again in connection with mind, is compelled to reduce it to a system of volitions, feelings and thoughts.
It remains to mention another historic factor which helps account for the vogue of subjectivism in art and literature, through which it found its way more or less into common belief. Comte several times recurs to the idea that idiocy represents an excess of objectivism, a EXPERIENCE AND NATURE subordination of feelings and impressions to objects as given, while madness marks an excess of subjectivism. Still more significant is his added remark, that madness has to be construed historically and sociologically. Under primitive conditions all the larger ideas about nature are reveries constructed in the interest of emotions. Myths were fancies, but they were not insanities because they were the only reply to the challenge of nature which ex¬ isting instrumentalities permitted. Assertion of similar ideas today is insanity, because available intellectual resources and agencies make possible and require radically different adjustments. To entertain and believe fancies which once were spontaneous and general is today a sign of failure, of mental disequilibration. Inability to employ the methods of forming and checking beliefs which are available at a given time, whatever be the source of that inability, constitutes a disorientation. These considera¬ tions are not introduced to make the offensive insinuation that philosophic subjectivism is a mode of insanity, and philosophic realism a mode of idiocy. The purpose is to suggest that while the tendency to revery, to intellectual somnambulism, is universal, the use made of revery — which may roughly stand for the subjective element in mind— depends upon contemporary conditions. In one situa¬ tion fancy generates stories which are consistent with desire and are attractive. These are connected with ceremonies to which, in addition to their immediate good, external efficiency is imputed. They become nuclei about which observations and ideas continually gather; they are centres of mental as well as emotional systematizations. It is no wonder that myths long prevail. When the de¬ velopment of industry and tested inquiry makes it evident NATURE, MIND AND SUBJECT that the actual world will not accept them nor stand for them, their actuating springs remain in full force and the river of revery still flows. It may find public or communi¬ cated form in fiction recognized as such, in novel, drama and poetry which are enjoyed, although their objects are not believed in. Or they may remain private, and, with the play of desires and affections that produce them, con¬ stitute a new world enjoyed for its own sake — the “inner life.”
The popular factor in subjectivism, that which renders philosophic subjectivism intelligible enough to prevent its being regarded as mere vagary, seems to be a confused union of two considerations. On the one hand there is th e recognition, enforced by the course of events, of the con¬ structive power of mind as individual, its re-creative function in objects of industry, art, and politics. On the other hand there is the discovery and exploitation of the inner life, a new, readily accessible and cheaply enjoyed esthetic field. The tales that will not be believed when they are told and that cannot be told in forms sufficiently artistic to command the attention of others, may still be told to one’s self and afford relief, consolation and thrill. Products of fancy that cannot, because of the advance of knowledge, secure credence as reports of objective events, are castles in the air, but these castles are impregnable inner refuges.
The person who knows nothing of sensations or sensa, as the psychologist and epistemologist talk about them, is nevertheless aware that objects are other than bare things to which beliefs must subject themselves. He is aware that when things escape his power of control, they still generate “impressions” which he can entertain in all EXPERIENCE AND NATURE sorts of enjoyable and annoying ways. If he is devoid of ability to regulate conduct in actual employment of objects, this world of impressions will be one in which he loves to dwell. Its materials are pliable and exact no responsibility. He may be utterly innocent of the reduc¬ tion of objects by theorists into conjoined sensations and images; the notion that his table consists largely of images would be to him a wild vagary, contradictory of common- sense. But he knows very well that the incidents of life may produce fancies in him that are more exciting or more soothing than the incidents themselves. When there is neither the power to renounce revery nor to use it in any objective embodiment, we have a condition in which soil and atmosphere are prepared to find the spirit of subjec¬ tive idealism congenial, even if the technical facts adduced and the dialectic employed in its behalf are beyond reach.
Our statements, however, are one-sided, as far as the full scope of the “inner life” is concerned. It is the home of aspirations and ideals that are noble and that may in time receive fulfillment as well as of figments and airy nothings. It may be charged with infinite humor and tragedy. It affords a realm in which king and court fool, prince and pauper, meet as equals. It is subject-matter for the philosopher as well as for the rebuffed and wistful. Recall the contrast which Royce had drawn between the dominant externalism of the seventeenth century and the spirit of the eighteenth. “It is no matter whether you are a philosopher and write essays on ‘The Principles of Human Knowledge’ or whether you are a heroine in an eighteenth century novel, and write sentimental letters to a friend; you are part of the same movement. The spirit is dissatisfied with the mathematical order, and NATURE, LIFE AND BODY-MIND 251 associations of spirit, soul, and body persisted in full vigor, while the classic metaphysics of the potential and actual fell into disrepute, the full burden of the question of the relation of body, nature and man, of mind, spirit, and matter, was concentrated in the particular problem of the relation of the body and soul. When men ceased to interpret and explain facts in terms of potentiality and actuality, and resorted to that of causality, mind and matter stood over against one another in stark unlike¬ ness; there were no intermediates to shade gradually the black of body into the white of spirit.
Moreover, both classic and medieval thought sup¬ plied influential empirical impetus to the new conception in spite of their theoretically divergent foundation. The old distinction between vegetative, animal and rational souls was, when applied to men, a formulation and justifi¬ cation of class divisions in Greek society. Slaves and mechanical artisans living on the nutritional, appetitive level were for practical purposes symbolized by the body — as obstructions to ideal ends and as solicitations to acts contrary to reason. The good citizen in peace and war was symbolized by the soul proper, amenable to reason, employing thought, but confining its operations after all to mundane matters, infected with matter. Scientific inquirers and philosophers alone exemplified pure reason, operating with ideal forms for the sake of the latter. The claim of this class for inherent superiority was sym¬ bolized by nous, pure immaterial mind. In Hellenistic thought, the three-fold distinction became that of body, mind or soul and spirit; spirit being elevated above all world affairs and acts, even moral concerns, having purely “spiritual” (immaterial) and religious objects. This doc- EXPERIENCE AND NATURE