mental phenomena may be admitted in their full empiri- EXPERIENCE AND NATURE cal reality, without recourse to dualistic breach in historic, existential continuity.
When knowing inanimate things, qualities as such may be safely disregarded. They present themselves as inten¬ sities and vector directions of movement capable of state¬ ment in mathematical terms. Thus their immediate individuality is got around; it is impertinent for science, concerned as the latter is with relationships. The most that can be said about qualities in the inanimate field is that they mark the limit of the contact of historical affairs, being abrupt ends or termini, boundaries of beginning and closing where a particular interaction ceases. They are like a line of foam marking the impact of waves of different directions of movement. They have to be noted and accepted in order to delimit a field of inquiry, but they do not enter into the inquiry as factors or terms.
In life and mind they play an active role. The delimi¬ tation or individualization they constitute on this level is not external to events. It is all one with the organiza¬ tion which permeates them, and which in permeating them, converts prior limitations of intensity and direc¬ tion of energy into actual and intrinsic qualities, or sen¬ tient differences. F or in feeling a quality exists as quality, and not merely as an abrupt, discrete, unique delimitation of interaction. Red differs from green for purposes of physical science as that which gives specific meaning to two sets of numbers applied to vibrations, or to two differ¬ ent placements of lines in a spectrum. The difference is proleptically qualitative; it refers to a unique difference of potentiality in the affairs under consideration. But as far as calculation and prediction are concerned these dif¬ ferences remain designable by non-qualitative indices of NATURE, LIFE AND BODY-MIND 267 number and form. But in an organic creature sensitive to light, these differences of potentiality may be realized as differences in immediate sentiency. To say that they are felt, is to say that they come to independent and intrin¬ sic existence on their own account. The proposition does not mean that feeling has been extraneously super- added to something else, or that a mode of extrinsic cognitive access to a purely physical thing has entered intrusively into a world of physical things. “Feeling” is in general a name for the newly actualized quality acquired by events previously occurring upon a physical level, when these events come into more extensive and delicate relationships of interaction. More specifically, it is a name for the coming to existence of those ultimate differences in affairs which mark them off from one another and give them discreteness; differences which upon the physical plane can be spoken of only in antici¬ pation of subsequent realization, or in terms of different numerical formulae, and different space-time positions and contiguities.
Thus qualities characteristic of sentiency are qualities of cosmic events. Only because they are such, is it pos¬ sible to establish the one to one correspondence which natural science does establish between series of numbers and spatial positions on one hand and the series and spectra of sensory qualities on the other. The notion that the universe is split into two separate and disconnected realms of existence, one psychical and the other physical, and then that these two realms of being, in spite of their total disjunction, specifically and minutely correspond to each other — as a serial order of numbered vibrations corre¬ sponds to the immediately felt qualities of vision of the EXPERIENCE AND NATURE prismatic spectrum — presents the acme of incredibility. The one-to-one agreement is intelligible only as a cor¬ respondence of properties and relations in one and the same world which is first taken upon a narrower and more external level of interaction, and then upon a more inclu¬ sive and intimate level. When we recall that by taking natural events on these two levels and instituting point to point correspondence (or “parallelism”) between them, the richer and more complex display of characters is rendered amenable to prediction and deliberate guidance, the intelligibility of the procedure becomes concretely sensible.
Thus while modern science is correct in denying direct efficacy and position in the described sequence of events to say, red, or dry; yet Greek science was correct in its underlying naive assumption that qualities count for something highly important. Apart from sentiency and life, the career of an event can indeed be fully described without any reference to its having red as a quality, — though even in this case, since description is an event which happens only through mental events, dependence upon an overt or actualized quality of red is required in order to delimit the phenomenon of which a mathematical- mechanical statement is made. Qualities actually become specifically effective however, in psycho-physical situa¬ tions. Where animal susceptibility exists, a red or an odor or sound may instigate a determinate mode of action; it has selective power in maintenance of a certain pat¬ tern of energy-organization. So striking is this fact that we might even define the difference between an inanimate body and a vital and psycho-physical one, by saying that the latter responds to qualities while the former does not.
NATURE, LIFE AND BODY-MIND 269 In this response, qualities become productive of results, and hence potentially significant. That is, in achieving effects, they become connected with consequences, and hence capable of meaning, knowable if not known. This explains the fact that while we are forced to ascribe qualities to events on the physical level, we cannot know them on this level; they have when assigned strictly to that level no consequences. But through the medium of living things, they generate effects, which, when qualities are used as means to produce them, are consequences. Thus qualities become intelligible, knowable.
In the higher organisms, those with distance-receptors of ear and eye and, in lesser degree, of smelling, qualities further achieve a difference which is the material basis or substratum of a distinction into activities having pre¬ paratory and having consummatory status. “Ends” are not necessarily fulfillments or consummations. They may be mere closures, abrupt cessations, as a railway line may by force of external conditions come to an end, although the end does not fulfill antecedent activities. So there are starts, beginnings which are in no sense pre¬ paratory, being rather disturbances and interferences. Events of the physical type have such ends and begin¬ nings which mark them off qualitatively and individually. But as such they are not in any true sense possessed of instrumental nor fulfilling character. They neither initiate nor complete. But when these qualities are realized through organic action, giving rise to acts of utili¬ zation, of adaptation (response to quality), they are con¬ verted into a series, in which some acts are preparatory and others consummatory. An original contact-activity (including intra-organic disturbances or needs) renders EXPERIENCE AND NATURE distance receptors open to stimulation; the responses which take place in consequence tend to occur in such a way as to terminate in a further contact-activity in which original need is satisfied.
This series forms the immediate material of thought when social communication and discourse supervene. The beginning not only is the initial term in a series (as distinct from a succession), but it gains the meaning of subsequent activity moving toward a consequence of which it is the first member. The concluding term con¬ serves within itself the meaning of the entire preparatory process. Thereby the original status of contact and dis¬ tance activities is reversed. When activity is directed by distant things, contact activities must be inhibited or held in. They become instrumental; they function only as far as is needed to direct the distance-conditioned activities. The result is nothing less than revolutionary. Organic activity is liberated from subjection to what is closest at hand in space and time. Man is led or drawn rather than pushed. The immediate is significant in respect to what has occurred and will occur; the organic basis of memory and expectation is supplied. The sub¬ ordination of contact-activity to distance-activity is equivalent to possibility of release from submergence in the merely given, namely, to abstraction, generalization, in¬ ference. It institutes both a difference and a connection between matters that prepare the way for other events and the affairsfinally appropriated; it furnishes the material for the relation of thing signifying and thing signified — a relation that is actualized when discourse occurs. When this juncture of events is reached, there comes about the distinction mentioned between sense and signification.
NATURE, LIFE AND BODY-MIND 271 The latter denotes the possibility of a later fulfilling sense of things in immediate appropriations and enjoyments. But meanwhile there is a sentience that has to be trans¬ formed by subordination to the distance-conditioned activity; which till it is thus transformed is vacant, con¬ fused, demanding but lacking meaning. Meanwhile also the distance-conditioned activities acquire as an integral part of their own quality the consequences of their prior fulfilments. They have significance with respect to their consequences; but they have perspicuous and coherent sense of their own. Thus they become final, and the qualities of contact-activity instrumental. In short, hear¬ ing and vision are notoriously the intellectual and esthetic senses — an undeniable fact which throws much light on the doctrine of those theorists about value who attempt to divide thought and enjoyable liking from each other in their definitions of value, and who also — quite logi¬ cally on this premise — sharply separate values into con¬ tributory and intrinsic.
The foregoing discussion is both too technical and not elaborately technical enough for adequate comprehension. It may be conceived as an attempt to contribute to what has come to be called an “emergent” theory of mind. But every word that we can use, organism, feeling, psycho¬ physical, sensation and sense, “emergence” itself, is infected by the associations of old theories, whose import is opposite to that here stated. We may, however attempt a recapitulation by premising that while there is no isolated occurrence in nature, yet interaction and con¬ nection are not wholesale and homogenous. Interacting- events have tighter and looser ties, which qualify them with certain beginnings and endings, and which mark EXPERIENCE AND NATURE them off from other fields of interaction. Such relatively closed fields come into conjunction at times so as to inter¬ act with each other, and a critical alteration is effected. A new larger field is formed, in which new energies are released, and to which new qualities appertain. Regula¬ tion, conscious direction and science imply ability to smooth over the rough junctures, and to form by trans¬ lation and substitution a homogenous medium. Yet these functions do not abrogate or deny qualitative differences and unlike fields or ranges of operation, from atoms to solar systems. They do just what they are meant to do: give facility and security in utilizing the simpler manageable field to predict and modify the course of the more complete and highly organized.
In general, three plateaus of such fields may be dis¬ criminated. The first, the scene of narrower and more external interactions, while qualitatively diversified in itself, is physical; its distinctive properties are those of the mathematical-mechanical system discovered by physics and which define matter as a general character. The second level is that of life. Qualitative differences, like those of plant and animal, lower and higher animal forms, are here even more conspicuous; but in spite of their variety they have qualities in common which define the psycho-physical. The third plateau is that of association, communication, participation. This is still further inter¬ nally diversified, consisting of individualities. It is marked throughout its diversities, however, by common properties, which define mind as intellect; possession of and response to meanings.
Each of one of these levels having its own characteris¬ tic empirical traits has its own categories. They are NATURE, LIFE AND BODY-MIND 27 3 however categories of description, conceptions required to state the fact in question. They are not “explanatory” categories, as explanation is sometimes understood; they do not designate, that is, the operation of forces as “causes.” They stick to empirical facts noting and denoting charac¬ teristic qualities and consequences peculiar to various levels of interaction. Viewed from this standpoint, the traditional “mechanical” and “teleological” theories both suffer from a common fallacy, which may be suggested by saying that they both purport to be explanatory in the old, non-historical sense of causality. One theory makes matter account for the existence of mind; the other regards happenings that precede the appearance of mind as prep¬ arations made for the sake of mind in a sense of preparation that is alleged to explain the occurrence of these ante¬ cedents.
Mechanistic metaphysics calls attention to the fact that the latter occurrence could not have taken place without the earlier; that given the earlier, the latter was bound to follow. Spiritualistic metaphysics calls attention to the fact that the earlier, material affairs, prepare the way for vital and ideal affairs, lead up to them; promote them. Both statements are equally true descriptively; neither statement is true in the explanatory and metaphysical meaning imputed to it.
The notion of causal explanation involved in both con¬ ceptions implies a breach in the continuity of historic process; the gulf created has then to be bridged by an emission or transfer of force. If one starts with the assumption that mind and matter are two separate things, whiie the evidence forces one to see that they are con¬ nected, one has no option save to attribute the power to EXPERIENCE AND NATURE make the connection, to carry from one to the other, to one or the other of the two things involved. The one selected is then “cause;” it accounts for the existence of the other. One person is struck by such affairs as that when a match is struck and paper is near-by the paper catches fire, whether any one wished or intended it to do so or not. He is struck by a compulsory power exercised by the earlier over the later; given the lighted match and contiguous paper and the latter must burst into flame. Another person is struck by the fact that matches and paper exist only because somebody has use for them; that the intent and purpose of use preceded the coming into being of match and paper. So he concludes that thought, purpose, starts an emission and transfer of force which brought things into existence in order to accomplish the object of thought. Or, if a little less devoted to human analogies, one notes the cunning continuity of nature, how neatly one thing leads up to another, and how ele¬ gantly the later registers and takes advantage of what has gone before, and, beholding that the later is the more complex and the more significant, decides that what goes before occurs for the sake of the later, in its behalf, on its account. The eventual has somehow been there from the start, “implicitly,” “potentially,” but efficaciously enough to attend to its own realization by using material conditions at every stage.
The gratuitous nature of both assumptions is seen if we set out with any acknowledged historic process, -say-the growth from infancy to maturity, or the development of a melodic theme. There are those who regard childhood as merely getting ready for the supreme dignity of adult¬ hood, and there are those who seem quite sure that adult NATURE, LIFE AND BODY-MIND 275 life is merely an unrolling by way of mechanical effects of the “causal” forces found in childhood. One of the theo¬ ries makes youth a preliminary and intrinsically insignifi¬ cant journey toward a goal; the other makes adulthood a projection, on a supernumerary screen, of a plate and pattern previously inserted in the projecting apparatus of childhood or of prenatal condition, or of heredity, or wherever the fixed and separated antecedent be located. Nevertheless the notion of growth makes it easy, I think, to detect the fallacy residing in both views: namely, the breaking up of a continuity of historical change into two separate parts, together with the necessity which fol¬ lows from the breaking-in-two for some device by which to bring them together again.
The reality is the growth-process itself; childhood and adulthood are phases of a continuity, in which just because it is a history, the later cannot exist until the earlier exists (“mechanistic materialism” in germ); and in which the later makes use of the registered and cumulative out¬ come of the earlier — or, more strictly, is its utilization (“spiritualistic teleology” in germ). The real existence is the history in its entirety, the history as just what it is. The operations of splitting it up into two parts and then having to unite them again by appeal to causative power are equally arbitrary and gratuitous. Childhood is the childhood of and in a certain serial process of changes which is just what it is, and so is maturity. To give the traits of either phase a kind of independent existence, and then to use the form selected to account for or explain the rest of the process is a silly reduplication; reduplica¬ tion, because we have after all only parts of one and the same original history; silly because we fancy that we have EXPERIENCE AND NATURE accounted for the history on the basis of an arbitrary selection of part of itself.
Substitute for such growth a more extensive history of nature and call it the evolution of mind from matter, and the conclusion is not different. In the old dispute as to whether a stag runs because he has long and slender legs, or has the legs in order that he may run, both parties overlook the natural descriptive statement; namely, that it is of the nature of what goes on in the world that the stag has long legs and that having them he runs. When mind is said to be implicit, involved, latent, or potential in matter, and subsequent change is asserted to be an affair of mak¬ ing it explicit, evolved, manifest, actual, what happens is that a natural history is first cut arbitrarily and uncon¬ sciously in two, and then the severance, is consciously and arbitrarily cancelled. It is simpler not to start by engag¬ ing in such manoeuvers.
The discussion gives an understanding of the adaptat ion of nature and life and mind to one another. A mystery has not seldom been made of the fact that objective nature lends itself to man’s sense of fitness, order and beauty; or, in another region of discourse, that objective nature submits to mental operations sufficiently to be known. Or, the mystery is conceived from the other end: it seems won¬ derful that man should be possessed of a sense of order, beauty and rightness; that he should have a capacity of thinking and knowing, so that man is elevated far above nature and seated with angels. But the wonder and mys¬ tery do not seem to be other than the wonder and mystery that there should be such a thing as nature, as existen¬ tial events, at all, and that in being they should be what they are. The wonder should be transferred to the whole NATURE, LIFE AND BODY-MIND 277 course of things. Only because an arbitrary breach has previously been introduced by which the world, is first con¬ ceived as something quite different from what it demon¬ strably is, does it then appear passing strange that after all it should b e just what it is. The world is sub j ect-matter for knowledge, because mind has developed in that world; a body-mind, whose structures have developed according to the structures of the world in which it exists, will natu¬ rally find some of its structures to be concordant and congenial with nature, and some phases of nature with itself. The latter are beautiful and fit, and others ugly and unfit. Since mind cannot evolve except where there is an organized process in which the fulfillments of the past are conserved and employed, it is not surprising that mind when it evolves should be mindful of the past and future, and that it should use the structures which are bio¬ logical adaptations of organism and environment as its own and its only organs. In ultimate analysis the mys¬ tery that mind should use a body, or that a body should have a mind, is like the mystery that a man cultivating plants should use the soil; or that the soil which grows plants at all should grow those adapted to its own physico¬ chemical properties and relations.
The account which has been given will be repeated from a more analytic point of view, starting with evident empirical consideration. Every “mind” that we are empirically acquainted with is found in connection with some organized body. Every such body exists in a natural medium to which it sustains some adaptive con¬ nection: plants to air, water, sun, and animals to these things and also to plants. Without such connections, animals die; the “purest” mind would not continue with- EXPERIENCE AND NATURE out them. An animal can live only as long as it draws nutriment from its medium, finds there means of defence, and ejects into it waste and superfluous products of its own making. Since no particular organism lasts forever, life in general goes on only as an organism reproduces itself; and the only place where it can reproduce itself is in the environment. In all higher forms reproduction is sexual; that is, it involves the meeting of two forms. The medium is thus one which contains similar and conjunc¬ tive forms. At every point and stage, accordingly, a living organism and its life processes involve a world or nature temporally and spatially “external” to itself but “internal” to its functions.
The only excuse for reciting such commonplaces is that traditional theories have separated life from nature, -mind from organic life, and thereby created mysteries. Restore the connection, and the problem of how a mind can know an external world or even know that there is such a thing, is like the problem of how an animal eats things external to itself; it is the kind of problem that arises only if one assumes that a hibernating bear living off its own stored substance defines the normal procedure, ignoring more¬ over the question where the bear got its stored material. The problem of how one person knows the existence of other persons, is, when the relation of mind and life is genuinely perceived, like the problem of how one animal can associate with other animals, since other is other. A creature generated in a conjunctive union, dependent upon others (as are at least all higher forms) for perpetuation of its being, and carrying in its own struc¬ ture the organs and marks of its intimate connection with others will know other creatures if it knows itself.
NATURE, LIFE AND BODY-MIND 279 Since both the inanimate and the human environment are involved in the functions of life, it is inevitable, if these functions evolve to the point of thinking and if thinking is naturally serial with biological functions, that it will have as the material of thought, even of its erratic imaginings, the events and connections of this environ¬ ment. And if the animal succeeds in putting to use any of its thinkings as means of sustaining its functions, those thoughts will have the characters that define knowledge.
In contrast with lower organisms, the more complex forms have distance receptors and a structure in which activators and effectors are allied to distance even more extensively than to contact receptors. What is done in response to things nearby is so tied to what is done in response to what is far away, that a higher organism acts with reference to a spread-out environment as a single situation. We find also in all these higher organisms that what is done is conditioned by consequences of prior activities; we find the fact of learning or habit-formation. In consequence, an organism acts with reference to a time- spread, a serial order of events, as a unit, just as it does in reference to a unified spatial variety. Thus an environ¬ ment both extensive and enduring is immediately impli¬ cated in present behavior. Operatively speaking, the remote and the past are “in” behavior making it what it is. The action called “organic” is not just that of internal structures; it is an integration of organic-environmental connections. It may be a mystery that there should be thinking but it is no mystery that if there is thinking it should contain in a “present” phase, affairs remote in space and in time, even to geologic ages, future eclipses and far