trine fell in with the sharp separation made in Christianity for practical moral purposes, between flesh and spirit, sin and salvation, rebellion and obedience. Thus the abstract and technical Cartesian dualism found prepared for it a rich empirical field with which to blend, and one which afforded its otherwise empty formalism concrete meaning and substance.
The formalism and unreality of the problem remains, however, in the theories which have been offered as its “solutions.” Theyrange from the materialism of Hobbes, the apparatus of soul, pineal glands, animal spirits of Descartes, to interactionism, pre-established harmony, occasionalism, parallelism, pan-psychic idealism, epi- phenomenalism, and the elan vital — a portentious array- The diversity of solutions together with the dialectical character of each doctrine which render it impregnable to empirical attack, suggest that the trouble lies not so much in the solutions, as in the factors which determine state¬ ment of the problem. If this be so, the way out of the snarl is a reconsideration of the conceptions in virtue of which the problem exists. And these conceptions have primarily nothing to do with mind-body; they have to do with underlying metaphysical issues: — the denial of quality in general to natural events; the ignoring in par¬ ticular of temporal quality and the dogma of the superior reality of “causes.”
Empirically speaking, the most obvious difference between living and non-living things is that the activities of the former are characterized by needs, by efforts which are active demands to satisfy needs, and by satisfactions. In making this statement, the terms need, effort and satisfaction are primarily employed in a biological sense.
NATURE, LIFE AND BODY-MIND 253 By need is meant a condition of tensional distribution of energies such that the body is in a condition of uneasy or unstable equilibrium. By demand or effort is meant the fact that this state is manifested in movements which modify environing bodies in ways which react upon the body, so that its characteristic pattern of active equilib¬ rium is restored. By satisfaction is meant this recovery of equilibrium pattern, consequent upon the changes of environment due to interactions with the active demands of the organism.
A plant needs water, carbon dioxide; upon occasion it needs to bear seeds. The need is neither an immaterial psychic force superimposed upon matter, nor is it merely a notional or conceptual distinction, introduced by thought after comparison of two different states of the organism, one of emptiness and one of repletion. It denotes a concrete state of events: a condition of tension in the distribution of energies such as involves pressure from points of high potential to those of low potential) which in turn effects distinctive changes such that the connection with the environment is altered, so that it acts differently upon the environment and is exposed to different influences from it. In this fact, taken by itself, there is nothing which marks off the plant from the physi¬ co-chemical activity of inanimate bodies. The latter also are subject to conditions of disturbed inner equilib¬ rium, which lead to activity in relation to surrounding things, and which terminate after a cycle of changes — a terminus termed saturation, corresponding to satisfac¬ tion in organic bodies.
The difference between the animate plant and the inanimate iron molecule is not that the former has some- EXPERIENCE AND NATURE thing in addition to physico-chemical energy; it lies in the way in which physico-chemical energies are inter¬ connected and operate, whence different consequences mark inanimate and animate activity respectively. For with animate bodies, recovery or restoration of the equilib¬ rium pattern applies to the complex integrated course or history. In inanimate bodies as such, “saturation” occurs indifferently, not in such a way as to tend to main¬ tain a temporal pattern of activity. The interactions of the various constituent parts of a plant take place in such ways as to tend to continue a characteristically organized activity; they tend to utilize conserved consequences of past activities so as to adapt subsequent changes to the needs of the integral system to which they belong. Or¬ ganization is a fact, though it is not an original organiz¬ ing force. Iron as such exhibits characteristics of bias or selective reactions, but it shows no bias in favor of remaining simple iron; it had just as soon, so to speak, become iron-oxide. It shows no tendency in its inter¬ action with water to modify the interaction so that con¬ sequences will perpetuate the characteristics of pure iron. If it did, it would have the marks of a living body, and would be called an organism. Iron as a genuine constit¬ uent of an organized body acts so as to tend to maintain the type of activity of the organism to which it belongs.
If we identify, as common speech does, the physical as such with the inanimate we need another word to denote the activity of organisms as such. Psycho-physical is an appropriate term. Thus employed, ‘ ‘psycho-physical” denotes the conjunctive presence in activity of need- demand-satisfaction, in the sense in which these terms have been defined. In the compound word, the prefix NATURE, LIFE AND BODY-MIND 255 “psycho” denotes that physical activity has acquired additional properties, those of ability to procure a pecu¬ liar kind of interactive support of needs from surrounding media. Psycho-physical does not denote an abrogation of the physico-chemical; nor a peculiar mixture of some¬ thing physical and something psychical (as a centaur is half man and half horse); it denotes the possession of certain qualities and efficacies not displayed by the inanimate.
Thus conceived there is no problem of the relation of physical and psychic. There are specifiable empirical events marked by distinctive qualities and efficacies. There is first of all, organization with all which is implied thereby. The problem involved is one of definite factual inquiry. Under exactly what conditions does organiza¬ tion occur, and just what are its various modes and their consequences? We may not be able to answer these questions satisfactorily; but the difficulties are not those of a philosophical mystery, but such as attend any inquiry into highly complex affairs. Organization is an empirical trait of some events, no matter how specula¬ tive and dubious theories about it may be; especially no matter how false are certain doctrines about it which have had great vogue — namely, those doctrines which have construed it as evidence of a special force or entity called life or soul. Organization is so characteristic of the nature of some events in their sequential linkages that no theory about it can be as speculative or absurd as those which ignore or deny its genuine existence. Denial is never based on empirical evidence, but is a dialectical conclusion from a preconception that whatever appears later in time must be metaphysically unreal as compared with what is EXPERIENCE AND NATURE found earlier, or from a preconception that since the com¬ plex is controlled by means of the simpler, the latter is more “real.”
When ever the activities of the constituent parts of an organized pattern of activity are of such a nature as to conduce to the perpetuation of the patterned activity, there exists the basis of sensitivity. Each “part” of an organism is itself organized, and so of the “parts” of the part. Hence its selective bias in interactions with environ¬ ing things is exercised so as to maintain itself, while also maintaining the whole of which it is a member. The root-tips of a plant interact with chemical properties of the soil in such ways as to serve organized life activity; and in such ways as to exact from the rest of the organism their own share of requisite nutrition. This pervasive operative presence of the whole in the part and of the part in the whole constitutes susceptibility — the capacity of feeling — whether or no this potentiality be actualized in plant-life. Responses are not merely selective, but are discriminatory, in behalf of some results rather than others. This discrimination is the essence of sensitivity. Thus with organization, bias becomes interest, and satisfac¬ tion a good or value and not a mere satiation of wants or repletion of deficiencies.
However it may be with plants and lower animals, in animals in which locomotion and distance-receptors exist, sensitivity and interest are realized as feeling, even though only as vague and massive uneasiness, comfort, vigor and exhaustion. A sessile organism requires no premoni¬ tions of what is to occur, nor cumulative embodiments of what has occurred. An organism with locomotion is as vitally connected with the remote as well as with the NATURE, LIFE AND BODY-MIND 257 nearby; when locomotor organs are accompanied by dis¬ tance-receptors, response to the distant in space becomes increasingly prepotent and equivalent in effect to response to the future in time. A response toward what is distant is in effect an expectation or prediction of a later contact. Activities are differentiated into the preparatory, or antici¬ patory, and the fulfilling or consummatory. The resul¬ tant is a peculiar tension in which each immediate prepara¬ tory response is suffused with the consummatory tone of sex or food or security to which it contributes. Sensitiv¬ ity, the capacity, is then actualized as feeling; suscepti¬ bility to the useful and harmful in surroundings becomes premonitory, an occasion of eventual consequences within life.
On the other hand, a consummation or satisfaction carries with it the continuation, in allied and reinforcing form, of preparatory or anticipatory activities. It is not only a culmination out of them, but is an integrated cumu¬ lation, a funded conservation of them. Comfort or dis¬ comfort, fatigue or exhilaration, implicity sum up a his¬ tory, and thereby unwittingly provide a means whereby, (when other conditions become present) the past can be unravelled and made explicit. For it is characteristic of feeling that while it may exist in a formless condition, or without configured distinctions, it is capable of receiving and bearing distinctions without end. With the multi¬ plication of sensitive discriminatory reactions to different energies of the environment (the differentiation of sense- organs, extero-ceptors and proprio-ceptors) and with the increase in scope and delicacy of movements (the develop¬ ment of motor-organs, to which internal glandular organs for effecting a requisite redistributuion of energy cor- EXPERIENCE AND NATURE respond), feelings vary more and more in quality and intensity.
Complex and active animals have, therefore, feelings which vary abundantly in quality, corresponding to dis¬ tinctive directions and phases — initiating, mediating, ful¬ filling or frustrating — of activities, bound up in distinc¬ tive connections with environmental affairs. They have them, but they do not know they have them. Activity is psycho-physical, but not “mental,” that is, not aware of meanings. As life is a character of events in a peculiar condition of organization, and “feeling” is a quality of life-forms marked by complexly mobile and discriminat¬ ing responses, so “mind” is an added property assumed by a feeling creature, when it reaches that organized inter¬ action with other living creatures which is language, communication. Then the qualities of feeling become significant of objective differences in external things and of episodes past and to come. This state of things in which qualitatively different feelings are not just had but are significant of objective differences, is mind. Feel¬ ings are no longer just felt. They have and they make sense; record and prophesy.
That is to say, differences in qualities (feelings) of acts when employed as indications of acts performed and to be performed and as signs of their consequences, mean some¬ thing. And they mean it directly; the meaning is had as their own character. Feelings make sense; as immediate meanings of events and objects, they are sensations, or, more properly, sensa. Without language, the qualities of organic action that are feelings are pains, pleasures, odors, colors, noises, tones, only potentially and prolep- tically. With language they are discriminated and iden- NATURE, LIFE AND BODY-MIND 259 tified. They are then “objectified;” they are immediate traits of things. This “objectification” is not a miracu¬ lous ejection from the organism or soul into external things, nor an illusory attribution of psychical entities to physical things. The qualities never were ‘ ‘in’ ’ the organ¬ ism; they always were qualities of interactions in which both extra-organic things and organisms partake. When named, they enable identification and discrimination of things to take place as means in a further course of inclu¬ sive interaction. Hence they are as much qualities of the things engaged as of the organism. For purposes of control they may be referred specifically to either the thing or to the organism or to a specified structure of the organism. Thus color which turns out not to be a reha- able sign of external events becomes a sign of, say, a defect in visual apparatus. The notion that sensory affections discriminate and identify themselves, apart from discourse, as being colors and sounds, etc., and thus ipso facto constitute certain elementary modes of knowl¬ edge, even though it be only knowledge of their own existence, is inherently so absurd that it would never have occurred to any one to entertain it, were it not for certain preconceptions about mind and knowledge. Sentiency in itself is anoetic; it exists as any immediate qual¬ ity exists, but nevertheless it is an indispensable means of any noetic function.
For when, through language, sentience is taken up into a system of signs, when for example a certain quality of the active relationship of organism and environment is named hunger, it is seen as an organic demand for an extra-organic object. To term a quality “hunger,” to name it, is to refer to an object, to food, to that which EXPERIENCE AND NATURE will satisfy it, towards which the active situation moves. Similarly, to name another quality “red,” is to direct an interaction between an organism and a thing to some object which fulfills the demand or need of the situation. It requires but slight observation of mental growth of a child to note that organically conditioned qualities, includ¬ ing those special sense-organs, are discriminated only as they are employed to designate objects; red, for instance, as the property of a dress or toy. The difficulty in the way of identifying the qualities of acts conditioned by proprio-ceptor organs is notoriously enormous. They just merge in the general situation. If they entered into communication as shared means to social consequences they would acquire the same objective distinctiveness as do qualities conditioned by the extero-ceptor organs. On the other hand, the qualities of the latter are just shades of the general tone of situations until they are used, in language, as common or shared means to common ends. Then they are identified as traits of objects. The child has to learn through social intercourse that certain quali¬ ties of action mean greediness or anger or fear or rude¬ ness; the case is not otherwise with those qualities which are identified as red, musical tone, a foul odor. The latter may have instigated nausea, and “red” may have excited uneasiness (as blood makes some persons faint); but discrimination of the nauseating object as foul odor, and of the excitation as red occurs only when they are designated as signs.
The qualities of situations in which organisms and surrounding conditions interact, when discriminated, make sense. Sense is distinct from feeling, for it has a recog¬ nized reference; it is the qualitative characteristic of NATURE, LIFE AND BODY-MIND 261 something, not just a submerged unidentified quality or tone. Sense is also different from signification. The latter involves use of a quality as a sign or index of some¬ thing else, as when the red of a light signifies danger, and the need of bringing a moving locomotive to a stop. The sense of a thing, on the other hand, is an immediate and immanent meaning; it is meaning which is itself felt or directly had. When we are baffled by perplexing conditions, and finally hit upon a clew, and everything falls into place, the whole thing suddenly, as we say, “makes sense.” In such a situation, the clew has signifi¬ cation in virtue of being an indication, a guide to inter¬ pretation. But the meaning of the whole situation as apprehended is sense. This idiomatic usage of the word sense is much nearer the empirical facts than is the ordin¬ ary restriction of the word in psychological literature to a single simple recognized quality, like sweet or red: the latter simply designates a case of minimum sense, delib¬ erately limited for purposes of intellectual safety-first. Whenever a situation has this double function of meaning, namely signification and sense, mind, intellect is definitely present.
The distinction between physical, psycho-physical, and mental is thus one of levels of increasing complexity and intimacy of interaction among natural events. The idea that matter, life and mind represent separate kinds of Being is a doctrine that springs, as so many philosophic errors have sprung, from a substantiation of eventual functions. The fallacy converts consequences of inter¬ action of events into causes of the occurrence of these consequences — a reduplication which is significant as to the importance of the functions, but which hopelessly con- EXPERIENCE AND NATURE fuses understanding of them. “Matter,” or the physical, is a character of events when they occur at a certain level of interaction. It is not itself an event or existence; the notion that while “mind” denotes essence, “matter” denotes existence is superstition. It is more than a bare essence; for it is a property of a particular field of interacting events. But as it figures in science it is as much an essence, as is acceleration, or the square root of minus one; which meanings also express derivative characters of events in interaction. Consequently, while the theory that life, feeling and thought are never inde¬ pendent of physical events may be deemed materialism, it may also be considered just the opposite. For it is rea¬ sonable to believe that the most adequate definition of the basic traits of natural existence can be had only when its properties are most fully displayed — a condition which is met in the degree of the scope and intimacy of inter¬ actions realized.
In any case, genuine objection to metaphysical material¬ ism is neither moral nor esthetic. Historically speaking, materialism and mechanistic metaphysics — as distinct from mechanistic science — designate the doctrine that mat¬ ter is the efficient cause of life and mind, and that “cause” occupies a position superior in reality to that of “effect.” Both parts of this statement are contrary to fact. As far as the conception of causation is to be introduced at all, not matter but the natural events having matter as a character, “cause” life and mind. “Effects,” since they mark the release of potentialities, are more adequate indications of the nature of nature than are just “causes.” Control of the occurrence of the complex depends upon its analysis into the more elementary; the dependence of NATURE, LIFE AND BODY-MIND 263 life, sentiency and mind upon “matter” is thus practical or instrumental. Lesser, more external fields of interac¬ tion are more manageable than are wider and more intimate ones, and only through managing the former can we direct the occurrence of the latter. Thus it is in virtue of the character of events which is termed matter that psycho-physical and intellectual affairs can be dif¬ ferentially determined. Every discovery of concrete dependence of life and mind upon physical events is there¬ fore an addition to our resources. If life and mind had no mechanism, education, deliberate modification, recti¬ fication, prevention and constructive control would be impossible. To damn “matter” because of honorific interest in spirit is but another edition of the old habit of eulogizing ends and disparaging the means on which they depend.
This, then, is the significance of our introductory state¬ ment that the “solution” of the problem of mind-body is to be found in a revision of the preliminary assumptions about existence which generate the problem. As we have already noted, fruitful science of nature began when inquirers neglected immediate qualities, the “sense” of events, wet and dry, hot and cold, light and heavy, up and down, in behalf of “primary,” namely, signifying, quali¬ ties, and when they treated the latter, although called qualities, not as such but as relations. This device made possible a totally different dialectical treatment. Classic science operated in terms of properties already attached to qualitative phenomena of sense and custom. Hence it could only repeat these phenomena in a changed vocabu¬ lary; — the vocabulary of sensory forms and forces which were, after all nothing but the already given meanings of EXPERIENCE AND NATURE things reduplicated. But the new dialectic was that of mathematical equations and functions. It started from meanings which ignored obvious characters or meanings of phenomena; hence it could lead to radically new relation¬ ships and generalizations — new in kind, and not merely in detail. No longer was the connection or classifica¬ tion of one color simply with other colors, but with all events involving rhythmic rates of change. Thus events hitherto disjoined were brought together under princi¬ ples of inclusive formulation and prediction. Temporal qualities were stated as spatial velocities; thereby mathe¬ matical functions directly applicable to spatial positions, directions and distances, made it possible to reduce sequence of events into calculable terms. Neglect of temporal qualities as such centered thought upon order of succession, an order convertible into one of coexistence.
All this in effect is equivalent to seizing upon relations of events as the proper objects of knowledge. The sur¬ render of immediate qualities, sensory and significant, as objects of science, and as proper forms of classification and understanding, left in reality these immediate quali¬ ties just as they were; since they are had there is no need to know them. But, as we have had frequent occa¬ sion to notice, the traditional view that the object of knowledge is reality par excellence led to the conclusion that the proper object of science was pre-eminently meta¬ physically real. Hence immediate qualities, being ex¬ truded from the object of science, were left thereby hang¬ ing loose from the “real” object. Since their existence could not be denied, they were gathered together into a psychic realm of being, set over against the object of physics. Given this premise, all the problems regarding NATURE, LIFE AND BODY-MIND 265 the relation of mind and matter, the psychic and the bodily, necessarily follow. Change the metaphysical pre¬ mise; restore, that is to say, immediate qualities to their rightful position as qualities of inclusive situations, and the problems in question cease to be epistemological prob¬ lems. They become specifiable scientific problems: ques¬ tions, that is to say, of how such and such an event hav¬ ing such and such qualities actually occurs.
Greek science imputed efficacy to qualities like wet and dry, hot and cold, heavy and light and to such qualita¬ tive differences in movement as up and down, to and fro, around and around. The world was formulated and explained on the basis of the causal efficacy of these qualities. The scientific revolution of the seventeenth century took its departure from a denial of causal status (and hence of significance for science) of these and all other direct qualities. On account, however, of the con¬ version of this fact about scientific procedure into a denial of the existence of qualities outside of mind and consciousness, psycho-physical and mental functions became inexplicable anomalies, supernatural in the literal sense of the word. The error of Greek science lay not in assigning qualities to natural existence, but in miscon¬ ceiving the locus of their efficacy. It attributed to qualities apart from organic action efficiencies which qualities possess only through the medium of an organized activity of life and mind. When life and mind are recog¬ nized to be characters of the highly complex and extensive interaction of events, it is possible to give natural existen¬ tial status to qualities, without falling into the mistake of Greek science. Psycho-physical phenomena and higher