Then there are philosophers who, like Kant, finding themselves in intellectual difficulties, assert that moral experience reveals things-in- themselves at a deeper level than does science. There are a larger number who look askance upon science, and who claim that religious experi¬ ence penetrates behind the screen that limits the vision of intellect. These apparent exceptions prove the rule. For the claim implies that moral or religious experieii.ce takes the place of knowledge, doing sufficiently, absolute¬ ly, what natural knowledge does only partially and rela¬ tively. The implication is that morals and religion have a direct revelatory worth. Now it is one thing to say that the world is such that men approach certain objects with awe, worship, piety, sacrifice and prayer, and that this is a fact which a theory of existence must reckon with as truly as with the facts of science. But it is a different thing to say that religious experience gives evidence of the reality of its own objects, or that the consciousness of an obligation proves the validity of its special object, or_ the general fact of duty carries within itself any deliver¬ ance as to its source in reality. Helen of Troy, Hamlet of Denmark are instances of things that require as much attention from the philosopher as do molecules and inte¬ gers: but their presence in experience does not guarantee that they are the same kind of things as the latter.
We must conceive the world in terms which make it possible for devotion, piety, love, beauty, and mystery to be as real as anything else. But whether the loved and 18 EXPERIENCE AND NATURE devotional objects have all the qualities which the lover and the devout worshipper attribute to them is a matter to be settled by evidence, and evidence is always extrinsic. Injunctions and prohibitions which are empirically unescapable, may be called categorical imperatives, and their existence may be quite as significant for a just theory of nature as is the law of gravitation. But what sort of objects beyond themselves they give evidence of, whether tribal taboos, a Kantian thing-in-itself, God, a political sovereign or a net work of social customs evolved in the ^effort to satisfy needs, is a question to be settled by the / denotative method^ by finding and pointing to the things in the concrete contexts in which they present themselves.
Even the classic empiricisms of philosophical history have been concerned almost exclusively with experience as knowledge, and with objects as known or unknowable. But, since objects are found and dealt with in many other ways than those of knowledge, a genuine empiricism will set out with all the adjectival groupings of macroscopic experience, starting from them as all upon the same level of worth; subsequent inquiry can review the starting point when it is found necessary. One can be insane without knowing he is insane and one may know insanity without being crazy; indeed absence of the direct expedi¬ ence is said to be an indispensable condition of study of insanity. Adequate recognition of the implications of such a fact as this might almost be said to be the chief contribution which empirical method has to make to philosophy.
than knowing them, in ways never identical with knowing them, exist, and are preconditions of reflection and knowl- PHILOSOPHIC METHOD 19 edge. Being angry, stupid, wise, inquiring; having sugar, the light of day, money, houses and lands, friends, laws, masters, subjects, pain and joy, occur in dimensions incommensurable to knowing these things which we are and have and use, and which have and use us. Their existence is unique, and, strictly speaking, indescribable; they can only he and be had, and then be pointed to in reflection. In the proper sense of the word, their exist¬ ence is absolute, being qualitative. All cognitive experi- _ ence must start from and must terminate in being and having things in just such unique, irreparable and compel¬ ling ways. And until this fact is a commonplace in philo¬ sophy, the notion of experience will not be a truism for philosophers.
Inevitably our argument travels in a circle and comes back to where we started. Modern philosophy is openly, a.nrip.nt. philosophy covertly, a theory of knowledge jtnd of things as known. A theory of knowledge in the sensei t of how to know most economically^ liberally, effectively. '(<•' a technique of instructive and rewarding inquiry is indis¬ pensable. But what has gone by the name of theory of' knowledge has not been such an affair. It has been a^t discussion of whether we can know at all, a matter of ” validating or refuting wholesale scepticism (instead of how to conduct doubt profitably); of how far knowledge extends, what its limits are, limits not at a specific time and place, but inherent and final. What has been said professes to give the explanation of this fact. It is due to failure to take the various phases of experienced things simply, directly, and impartially. Itjsdue to bias of the intellectualist in favor of his own specialized professional experience.
20 EXPERIENCE AND NATURE Bias in favor of things in their capacity of being objects of knowledge, when it is yielded to, renders it impossible to distinguish between being and having things and knowing them. If having sweet, red, hard, pain, etc., is of necessity identical with knowing these things, then the classic problems of epistemology, and the necessity of defending science against wholesale sceptical doubts are inevitable. I mention in illustration the two traditional questions. First, there is the dispute between the episte¬ mological idealist and realist. Are sweet, hard, solid pain, square, etc., psychical or physical? Empirically, the obvious answer is that they are neither. They are the unique qualities which they are, the things pointed to and had. But knowledge involves classification. If to have is also to know, then these things cannot “really” be simply the qualities they are; they must be related, sub¬ sumed, interpreted. And the two most general terms of classificatory knowing are physical and mental. Hence the dispute.
Another probleinwhich is inevitable is the relation _of immediate or “presentative” knowledge, sensory acquain¬ tance or whatever, to reflective and inferential knowledge, to science_. How is the reality of the proper objects of the latter to be “reconciled” with the reality of the things —whether defined as physical or psychical— of immediate sensuous or presentative “knowledge?” The problem is dialectically attractive, as is shown by the immsnse amount of ingenuity that has been expended upon jt. But no generally satisfactory answer has ever been found and it is predictable that none ever will be. For the prob¬ lem, empirically speaking, is unreal. There are not two kinds of knowledge whose objects have to be reconciled.
PHILOSOPHIC METHOD 21 There are two dimensions of experienced things: one that T ^ of having them, and the other that of knowing about them j: ‘!‘v so that we can again have them in more meaningful and secure wavs. It is no easy matter to know about the things we have and are, whether it be the state, measles, virtue or redness. Hence there is a problem of knowl¬ edge; namely, the problem of how to find out what it is > needful to find out about these things in order to secure, rectify and avoid being and having then}.
But a problem of knowledge in general is, to speak brutally, nonsense. For knowledge is itself one of the things that we empirically have. While scepticism may be in place at any time about any specific intellectual belief and conclusion, in order to keep us on the alert, to keep us inquiring and curious, scepticism as to the things which we have and are is impossible. No one ever frankly engaged in it. Its pretentiousness is concealed, however, by the failure to distinguish between objects of knowledge where doubt is legitimate, since they are matters of inter¬ pretation and classification, (of theory), and things which are directly had. A man may doubt whether he has the measles, because measles is an intellectual term, a classifi¬ cation, but he cannot doubt what he empirically has — not as has so often been asserted because he has an imme¬ diately certain knowledge of it, but because it is not a matter of knowledge, an intellectual affair, at all, not an affair of truth or falsity, certitude, or doubt, but one of existence.
He may not know that he is ailing, much less what his ailment is; but unless there is something immediately and non-cognitively present in experience so that it is capa- able of being pointed to in subsequent reflection and in 22 EXPERIENCE AND NATURE action which embodies the fruits of reflection, knowledge has neither subject-matter nor objective. In traditional epistemologies, this fact has been both recognized and perverted; it is said that while we can doubt whether a particular thing is red or sweet, we have an immediate or intuitive cognitive certitude that we are affected by red¬ ness or sweetness or have a sensation of sweet and red. But as cognized, red and sweet are data only because they are taken in thought. Their givenness is something inputed; they are primary and immediate relatively to more complex processes of inquiry. It required a high degree of intellectual specialization, backed by technical knowledge of the nervous system, before even the concept of sensory data could emerge. It still taxes the resources of investigation to determine just what are “immediate data” in a particular problem. To know a quality as sensation is to have performed an act of complicated objective reference; it is not to register an inherently given property. The epistemological sensationalist and the epistemological rationalist share the same error; belief that cognitive property is intrinsic, borne on the face.
Because empirical method is denotative, it is realistic in the unsophisticated sense of the word. Things are first acted toward, suffered; and it is for the things them¬ selves as they are followed up to tell by their own traits whether they are “subjective” or “objective.” These terms, like physical and psychical, express classificatory discriminations, and there is no presumption of primacy on the side of the subjective. As a matter of historic. fact, the primitive bias of man is all toward objective classifications. Whatever can be denoted is there in fie- PHILOSOPHIC METHOD 23 pendent of volition (volition itself occurring without volition), and its thereness, its independence of choice, renders it, for uncritical man, cosmic and fatgd. Only when vanity, prestige, and property rights are involved does the natural man tend, like Jack Horner with his plum, to employ a subjective or personal interpretation.
Subsequently, reflection attributes occurrences like dis¬ ease, misfortune, and error to the individual personas own doings, instead of imputing them to gods or enemies, or wizardy or fate. There is then an intelligible sense in which these things may be said to have been transferred from an objective to a subjective field. But there is even more sense in saying that they have been given a differ- ent objective reference, in those cases where they are referred to a personal subject as their seat and source. When we say that a man’s illness is due to his own imprud¬ ence and not to a foreign substance magically projected into his interior by a subtle enemy, we are still discoursing within the realm of objective events. The case is not otherwise when we attribute error to something in a man’s own disposition, instead of to the intent of hostile gods to blind him, or to the inherently illusory nature of things. Practically, the distinction thus drawn between subjec¬ tive and objective, personal and impersonal, causation and locus is of immense importance. But for theory, it falls within a continuous world of events.
Most of the things that have been called subjective by philosophers have an even more obvious objective status. Political institutions, the household, art, technol¬ ogies, embodied objective events long before science and philosophy arose. Political experience deals with bar¬ riers, mountains, rivers, seas, forests and plains. Men 24 EXPERIENCE AND NATURE fight for these things; for them they exercise jurisdiction; they obey and rebel. Being and having, exercising and suffering such things as these, exist in the open and pub¬ lic world. As we digest foods derived from the extra¬ personal world long before we study or are aware of pro¬ cesses occurring in our own bodily tissues, so we live in a world of objective acceptances and compulsions longbefore we are aware of attitudes of our own, and of the action of say the nervous system, in bringing us into effective rela¬ tionship with them. The knowledge of our own atti¬ tudes and of the operation of the nervous system is no more a substitute for the direct operation of the things than metabolic processes are a substitute for food mater¬ ials. In one case as in the other we have become ac¬ quainted with an added object; and by means of this added object further active relationships with the extra-per¬ sonal world are instituted.
When we speak of esthetic experience we do not mean something private and psychical- The choir of heaven and the consent of the earth are implicated, as are paints, brushes, marbles, chisels, temples, palaces, and theaters. Appreciation is appreciation of some thing, not of itself. We are lovingly and excitedly aware of the objects long before we are aware of our own attitude; and the acquisi¬ tion of ability to distinguish that attitude marks only an increase of distinctions in original subject-matter. Although contemporary theory emphasizes the psycholo¬ gic and personal aspect of religion, historic religions have always had their holy places, times, persons and rites. One may believe that these objects did not have in the order of objects of knowledge the qualities ascribed to them in belief, but the testimony in behalf of the natural PHILOSOPHIC METHOD 25 objective reference of the subject-matter of experience then becomes only the more impressive. Myths would not be taken to be on a level with physical facts were not the bias of experience toward the objective. Recognition of objects of worship and prayer as ideal or as “essences,” treatment of them as poetic or esthetic, represents a late achievement of reflection, not an original datum. If research into religious phenomena has proved anything it is that acts, rites, cults, ceremonies, institutions, are primary, emotional beliefs then clustering about them. Even religious experience does not escape the objective compulsions which inhere in the more direct experience where man tills the soil with the sweat of his brow and woman brings forth in labor. The objects that are auxil¬ iary and hostile to success in these acts affect the most refined and spiritualized sentiments and conceptions.
The_notion that experience _is solely experience, a succession of personal sensations, images and feelings is wholly a recent notion. There is a genuine and impor¬ tant discovery implied by it. But it may be asserted that no one ever took it literally; it has been only a starting-point for dialectical developments which are suf¬ ficiently interesting to obscure the absurdity of the basic conception. The discovery is important; for it marks the discovery of operation of organic attitudes and disposi¬ tions in the beliefs we hold and the necessity of controlling them if beliefs are to be effectively controlled. The literal isolation of processes of experiencing, as if they were actually something solid and integral, is absurd; because dispositions and attitudes are always towards or from things beyond themselves. To love and hate, desire and fear, believe and deny, are not just states of mind in 26 EXPERIENCE AND NATURE nor states of an animal body; they are active performances to and about other things, — acceptances and rejections, assimilations and forth-spewings of other things, smug¬ glings to obtain and to escape things.
The fact that the characteristic structure and function of these acts, in complexly organized animal forms, can be detected, shown, and in turn made the subject of new modes of responsive action expresses one of the most valuable philosophic uses of empirical method. It under¬ mines rigid dogmatism, while it also changes scepticism from a wholesale and barren possession of a few aloof thinkers into a common and fertile method of inquiry into specific beliefs. The things which a man experi¬ ences come to him clothed with meanings which originate in custom and tradition. From his birth an individual sees persons about him treat things in certain ways, subject them to certain uses, assign to them j^ertain potencies.
The things are thereby invested for him with certain prop¬ erties, and the investiture appears intrinsic and indis¬ soluble. The^ potency of custom over beliefs never received a fatal wound until physiology and psychology showed how imitation, suggestion, stimulation, prestige, operate to call out certain responses, and how habit confirms and consolidates the responses into apparent matter-of-course unquestioned necessities.
Man lives by expectation, but the content of expecta¬ tion, what is anticipated, depends upon memory; and ^memories are group affairs before they are personal recalls. The tradition that controls belief, expectation and memory, is limited and usually perverted. Not even wood always burns; seeds do not always grow, nor food¬ stuffs always nourish; water in quenching thirst may PHILOSOPHIC METHOD 27 bring a malignant plague. In complex matters the frus¬ tration of conduct based upon expectant belief is stiU more pervasive. The man enmeshed in labor accounts up to a certain point for these unaccountable behaviors of things by noting further qualifying conditions that affect efficacy; soon reaching the end of his tether, he then falls back upon mysterious potencies, concealed personal agencies and magical counteractions. The thinker who enjoys leisure and is removed from the immediate neces-^ sity of doing something about these predicaments, seeks certitude in a higher, more metaphysical realm of Being, and defines as mere “appearance” the region of actual and possible frustrations. Or he turns disillusioned scep¬ tic, and will abstain from all intellectual commitment to objects. The first method creates superstitions; the second is sterile, because it affords no solution of the actual problem, that of regulating specific beliefs about objects, so that they take account of what is ulterior and eventual. The finding and pointing out of the roles of personal atti-^. tudes and dispositions in inference and belief as well as in all other relationships with things (a discovery that constitutes psychology as it becomes systematic), is ap indispensable part of this art of regulating ideas about objects; and this art is an indispensable factor in liberation.
Philosophers however misinterpreted the discovery. The old confusion persisted; the identification of direct having with knowing seemed to be the one sound and permanent part of the classic philosophic tradition. “Hav¬ ing” these personal dispositions being in a sense basic to other “havings”, it was translated into the belief that they were the first and primary objects of knowledge, possessed of the attributes of reality attributed by classic 28 EXPERIENCE AND NATURE philosophy to its prior and primary objects of knowledge. Meanwhile men of science and affairs used the discovery; it was to them an assurance that by taking better care of ■fA the generation and employment of these personal atti¬ tudes, mankind could attain to a more secure and mean¬ ingful regulation of its ineradicable and coercive concern with things of the environment.
Thus the value of the notion of experience, for philo¬ sophic reflection is that it denotes both the field, the sun and clouds and rain, seeds, and harvest, and the man who labors, who plans, invents, uses, suffers, and enjoys. Ex¬ perience denotes what is experienced, the world of events and persons; and it denotes that world caught up into experiencing, the career and destiny of mankind. Na¬ ture’s place in man is no less significant than man’s place in nature. Man in nature is man subjected • nature in man, recognized and used, is intelligence and art. The value of experience for the philosopher is that it serves as a constant reminder of something which is neither exclu¬ sive and isolated subject or object, matter or mind, nor yet one plus the other. The fact of integration in life is_a basic fact, and until its recognition becomes habitual, unconscious and pervasive, we need a word like experience to remind us of it, and to keep before thought the distor¬ tions that occur when the integration is ignored or denied.
The denotations that constitute experience point_to history, to temporal process. The technically expert are aware how much ingenuity has been spent upon discover¬ ing something which shall be wholly present, so completely present as to exclude movement and change. There are phases of things to which this search is pertinent. There are moments of consummation when before and PHILOSOPHIC METHOD 29 after are legitimately forgotten, and the sole stake of man is in the present. But even such objects are discovered to arise as culminations of processes, and to be in turn transitive and effective, while they may be also predictive or cognitively significant. The legitimacy of timeless ab¬ sorption is no argument in behalf of the legitimacy of timeless objects. Experience is history; and the taking of some objects as final is itself an episode in history. The_ testimony of an absorbed consciousness that at last it / rests upon something superior to the vicissitudes of time_ is of no more cognitive worth than the testimony of any other purely immediate consciousness. That is, it is not testimony at all, it is a having* not a knowing. And hence when treated as cognition, it is never natural and naive; it is suborned in the interest of a sophisticated metaphysics. There is no testimony in such moments just because of absorption in the immediate qualities of the object. There is enjoyment and possession, with no need of thought as to how the object came or whither it is going, what evidence it gives. And when it turns evi¬ dence, it always testifies to an existence which is partial or particular, and local.
The assumption that the ultimate and the immediate object is timeless is responsible for one of the insoluble problems of certain types of philosophy. The past and future are rendered purely inferential, speculative, some¬ thing to be reached by pure faith. But in fact anything denoted is found to have temporal quality and reference; it has movement from and towards within i t; it is marked by waxings and wanings. The translation of temporal quality into an order of time is an intellectual arrange¬ ment, and is subject to doubt and error. Although past- 30 EXPERIENCE AND NATURE ness and futurity are qualities of everything present, such presence does not guarantee the date at which Columbus discovered America nor when the next eclipse of the moon will occur. For these things are matters that require measurements, comparisons, connection with remote oc¬ currences. But objects of present experience have the actuality of a temporal procession, and accordingly reflec¬ tion may assign things an order of succession within something which non-reflectively exists and is had.
The import of these remarks is anticipatory. Their full meaning can be had only when some of the denotations summed up in the notion of experience have been followed out and described. A justification of recapitulation of our prefactory considerations (inf 'the fact that experi¬ ence has so often been employed to designate not a method but a stuff or subject-matter. It then gains a discriminatory and selective meaning and is used to justify, apart from actual experience and antecedent to it, some kinds of objects and to disparage and condemn others. “Experience” becomes a theory, and, like all theories as such, dialectic and a priori. The objection that the alternative notion of experience is so catholic and univer¬ sal in application that it no longer has any distinctive meaning is sound in principle. But in the face of historic philosophies and the reigning tradition, the alternative notion is instructive and useful. It serves as a caution against methods that have led to wrong conclusions, and a reminder of a proper procedure to be followed.
In the first place it guards us against accepting as orig¬ inal, primitive and simple, distinctions that have become familar to us, that are a customary part of our intellec¬ tual inheritance — such distinctions for example as that of PHILOSOPHIC METHOD 31 the physical and mental. It warns us that all intellecof discrimination and classitual terms are fication, and that we must, as philosophers, go back to the primitive situations of life that antecede and generate these reflective interpretations, so that we re-live former processes of interpretation in a wary manner, with eyes constantly upon the things to which they refer. Thus empiricism is the truly critical method; it puts us know¬ ingly and cautiously through steps which were first takep uncritically, and exposed to all kinds of adventitious influence.
In the second place, the notion of experience remindsus ^ that, prior to philosophic reflection, objects have fallen into certain groupings, designated by the adjectives we readily prefix to the word experience: — adjectives like moral, esthetic, intellectual, religious, personal, political. The notion thus warns us against the tradition which makes the objects of a certain kind of experience, the cognitive, the fixed standard for estimating the “reality” and import of all other kinds of things. It cautions us against transferring the qualities characteristic of objects in a certain mode of organization to objects in other modes. Knowledge itself must be experienced; it must be had, possessed, enacted, before it can be known, and the having of it is no more identical with knowing it, or knowing it with having it, than is the case with anger, being ill, or being the possessor by inheritance of an estate. We have to identify cases of knowing by direct denotation before we can have a reflective experience of them, just as we do with good and bad, red and green, sweet and sour.
32 EXPERIENCE AND NATURE y In the third glace, the notion cautions us that we must begin with things in their complex entanglements rather than with simplifications made for the purpose of effective judgment and action; whether the purpose is economy or dialectical esthetic or moral. The simplifications of phil¬ osophic data have been largely determined by apologetic methods, that is by interest in dignifying certain kinds and phases of things. So strong is this tendency that if a philosopher points to any particular thing as important enough to demand notation, it is practically certain that some critic will shift the issue from whether the denoted thing is found to be as he has described it to be, to the question of value. For example, IJmve asserted that all denoted things possess temporal quality. It is reasonably certain that this statement will be taken by some critic to indicate a preference on my part for change over per¬ manence, an implied statement that it is better that things should be in flux. It has been stated that objects are primarily denoted in their practical relationships, as things of doing, suffering, contact, possession and use. Instead of being discussed as a question of denotation, the philosophic tradition is such that the statement will be taken as an eulogy; as implying that practice is better than theory. It is then “refuted” by pointing out the superior charm of the contemplative life.
This bias is so strong and so persistent that it testifies, I suppose, to a fact of importance, to the fact that most philosophical simplifications are due to a moral interest which is ignored and denied. Our constant and inalien¬ able concern is with good and bad, prosperity and failure, and hence with choice. We are constructed to think in terms of value, of bearing upon welfare. The ideal of PHILOSOPHIC METHOD 33