away stellar systems. It is only a question of how far EXPERIENCE AND NATURE what is “in” its actual experience is extricated and becomes focal.
It is also an obvious empirical fact that animals are connected with each other in inclusive schemes of behav¬ ior by means of signaling acts, in consequence of which certain acts and consequences are deferred until a joint action made possible by the signaling occurs. In the human being, this function becomes language, communi¬ cation, discourse, in virtue of which the consequences of the experience of one form of life are integrated in the behavior of others. With the development of recorded speech, the possibilities of this integration are indefinitely widened — in principle the cycle of objective integration within the behavior of a particular organism is com¬ pleted. Not merely its own distant world of space- time is involved in its conduct but the world of its fellows. When consequences which are unexperienced and future to one agent are experienced and past to another creature with which it is in communication, organic prudence becomes conscious expectation, and future affairs living present realities. Human learning and habit-forming present thereby an integration of organic-environmental connec¬ tions so vastly superior to those of animals without language that its experience appears to be super-organic.
Another empirical fact follows. Strict repetition and recurrence decrease relatively to the novel. Apart from communication, habit-forming wears grooves; behavior is confined to channels established by prior behavior. In so far the tendency is toward monotonous regularity. The very operation of learning sets a limit to itself, and makes subsequent learning more difficult. But this holds only of a habit, a habit in isolation, a non-communicating habit.
NATURE, LIFE AND BODY-MIND 281 Communication not only increases the number and variety of habits, but tends to link them subtly together, and eventually to subject habit-forming in a particular case to the habit of recognizing that new modes of association will exact a new use of it. Thus habit is formed in view of possible future changes and does not harden so readily. As soon as a child secretes from others the manifestation of a habit there is proof that he is practically aware that he forms a habit subject to the requirements of others as to his further habit formations.
Now an animal given to forming habits, is one with an increasing number of needs, and of new relationships with the world about it. Each habit demands appropriate conditions for its exercise and when habits are numerous and complex, as with the human organism, to find these conditions involves search and experimentation; the or¬ ganism is compelled to make variations, and exposed to error and disappointment. By a seeming paradox, increased power of forming habits means increased sus¬ ceptibility, sensitiveness, responsiveness. Thus even if we think of habits as so many grooves, the power to acquire many and varied grooves denotes high sensitivity, explosiveness. Thereby an old habit, a fixed groove if one wishes to exaggerate, gets in the way of the process of forming a new habit while the tendency to form a new one cuts across some old habit. Hence instability, novelty, emergence of unexpected and unpredictable combinations. The more an organism learns-the more that is, the former terms of a historic process are retained and integrated in this present phase-the more it has to learn, in order to keep itself going; otherwise death and catastrophe. If mind is a further process in life, a further EXPERIENCE AND NATURE process of registration, conservation and use of what is conserved, then it must have the traits it does empirically have: being a moving stream, a constant change which nevertheless has axis and direction, linkages, associations as well as initiations, hesitations and conclusions.
The thing essential to bear in mind is that living as an empirical affair is not something which goes on below the skin-surface of an organism: it is always an inclusive af¬ fair involving connection, interaction of what is within the organic body and what lies outside in space and time, and with higher organisms far outside. For this reason, organic acts are a kind of fore-action of mind; they look as if they were deliberate and consciously intelligent, be¬ cause of necessity, intelligent action in utilizing the mechan¬ isms they supply, reproduces their patterns. The evidence usually adduced in support of the proposition that lower animals, animals without language, think, turns cut, when examined, to be evidence that when men, organisms with power of social discourse, think, they do so with the organs of adaptation used by lower animals, and thus large¬ ly repeat in imagination schemes of overt animal action. But to argue from this fact to the conclusion that animals think is like concluding that because every tool, say a plow, originated from some pre-existing natural produc¬ tion, say a crooked root or forked branch, the latter was inherently and antecedently engaged in plowing. The connection is there, but it is the other way around.
Excuse for dwelling upon the fact that life goes on between and among things of which the organism is but one is because this fact is so much ignored and virtually denied by traditional theories. Consider for example, the definitions of life and mind given by Herbert Spencer: NATURE, LIFE AND BODY-MIND 283 correspondence of an inner order with an outer order. It implies there is an inner order and an outer order, and that the correspondence consists in the fact that the terms in one order are related to one another as the terms or members of the other order are connected within them¬ selves. The correspondence is like that of various phono¬ graphic records to one another; But the genuine cor¬ respondence of life and mind with nature is like the cor¬ respondence of two persons who “correspond” in order to learn each one of the acts, ideas and intents of the other one, in such ways as to modify one’s own intents, ideas and acts, and to substitute partaking in a common and inclus¬ ive situation for separate and independent performances. If the organism merely repeats in the series of its own self-enclosed acts the order already given without, death speedily closes its career. Fire for instance consumes tissue; that is the sequence in the external order. Being burned to death is the order of “inner” events which cor¬ responds with this “outer” order. What the organism actually does is to act so as to change its relationship to the environment; and as organisms get more complex and human this change of relationship involves more extensive and more enduring changes in the environmental order. The aim is not to protract a line of organic events parallel to external events, but to form a new scheme of affairs to which both organic and environmental relations contribute, and in which they both partake. Yet all schemes of psycho-physical parallelism, traditional theo¬ ries of truth as correspondence, etc., are really elaborations of the same sort of assumptions as those made by Spencer: assumptions which first make a division where none exists, and then resort to an artifice to restore the connection which has been willfully destroyed.
EXPERIENCE AND NATURE If organic life denotes a phase of history in which natural affairs have reached a point in which characteris¬ tic new properties appear, and new ways of acting are released because of integration of fields hitherto unlinked, there does not seem to be anything extraordinary in the fact that what is known about the earlier “physical” series is applied to interpret and direct vital phenomena; nor in the fact that this application does not exhaust their character nor suffice wholly for their description. We cannot direct a course of interactions without count¬ ing and measuring, but the interactions are more than numbers, spaces and velocities. To explain is to employ one thing to elucidate, clear, shed light upon, put in better order, because in a wider context, another thing. It is thus subordinate to more adequate discourse, which, applied to space-time affairs, assumes the style of narra¬ tion and description. Speaking in terms of captions familiar in rhetoric, exposition and argument are always subordinate to a descriptive narration, and exist for the sake of making the latter clearer, more coherent and more significant.
Body-mind designates an affair with its own properties. A large part of the difficulty in its discussion — perhaps the whole of the difficulty in general apart from detailed questions — is due to vocabulary. Our language is so permeated with consequences of theories which have divided the body and mind from each other, making separ¬ ate existential realms out of them, that we lack words to designate the actual existential fact. The circumlocu¬ tions we are compelled to resort to — exemplified in the previous discussion —thus induce us to think that analog¬ ous separations exist in nature, which can also only be got NATURE, LIFE AND BODY-MIND 285 around by elaborate circuitous arrangements. But body- mind simply designates what actually takes place when a living body is implicated in situations of discourse, communication and participation. In the hyphenated phrase body-mind, “body” designates the continued and conserved, the registered and cumulative operation of factors continuous with the rest of nature, inanimate as well as animate; while “mind” designates the characters and consequences which are differential, indicative of features which emerge when “body” is engaged in a wider, more complex and interdependent situation.
Just as when men start to talk they must use sounds and gestures antecedent to speech, and as when they begin to hunt animals, catch fish or make baskets, they must employ materials and processes that exist antecedently to these operations, so when men begin to observe and think they must use the nervous system and other organic structures which existed independently and antecedently. That the use reshapes the prior materials so as to adapt them more efficiently and freely to the uses to which they are put, is not a problem to be solved: it is an expression of the common fact that anything changes according to the inter¬ acting field it enters. Sounds do not cease to be sounds when they become articulate speech; but they do take on new distinctions and arrangements, just as do materials used in tools and machines, without ceasing to be the materials they formerly were. Thus the external or environmental affairs, primarily implicated in living pro¬ cesses and later implicated in discourse, undergo modifi¬ cations in acquiring meanings and becoming objects of mind, and yet are as “physical” as ever they were.
EXPERIENCE AND NATURE Unless vital organizations were organizations of ante¬ cedent natural events, the living creature would have no natural connections; it would not be pertinent to its environment nor its environment relevant to it; the latter would not be usable, material of nutrition and defence. In similar fashion, unless “mind” was, in its existential occurrence, an organization of physiological or vital affairs and unless its functions developed out of the patterns of organic behavior, it would have no pertinency to nature, and nature would not be the appropriate scene of its inventions and plans, nor the subject-matter of its knowl¬ edge. If we suppose, per impossible or by a miracle, that a separate mind is inserted abruptly in nature, its opera¬ tion would be wholly dialectical, and in a sense of dialec¬ tic which is non-existential not only for the time being, but forever; that is dialectic would be without any pos¬ sible reference to existence. We are so used by tradition both to separating mind from the world and noting that its acts and consequences are relevant to the world- error — aberration and insanity can exist only with respect to relevancy — that we find it easier to make a problem out of the conjunction of two inconsistent premises than to rethink our premises.
Of pure dialectic it is a truism that it is neither mater¬ ially true nor false, but only self-consistent or else self-con¬ tradictory. Were it not for the distorting influence of material bias, of preference that existence be thus and so rather than otherwise, and of desire that other crea¬ tures should believe as we do or should accept our conclu¬ sions, dialectic and calculation would however not be subject even to inconsistency. Some purely logical opera¬ tions are better than others, even as purely logical, for NATURE, LIFE AND BODY-MIND 287 they have greater scope and fertility, but none are truer or more correct than others. Purely formal errors are impossible, so-called formal fallacies to the contrary not¬ withstanding. No one ever actually reasoned that since horses are quadrupeds and cows are quadrupeds, horses are cows. If in some cases, it is made to appear that formal reasoning falls into such fallacies, the reason is that material causes are brought in and their operation is overlooked. Dialectical relations are dialectical, not existential and therefore have no causative power; there is nothing in them to generate misconception. The principle of dialectic is identity; its opposite is not incon¬ sistency to say nothing of falsity; it is nonsense. To say that dialectic as such is infallible is only to say it is truistic.
Nevertheless logic or the use of meanings in a dialectic manner is actually exposed to all sorts of mistakes. For every instance of dialectic is itself existential. Meanings are taken; they are employed for a purpose, just as other materials are; they are combined and disjoined. It is the act of taking which enables dialectic to exist or occur, and taking is fallible, it is often mis-taking. Using meanings is a particular act; into this act enter causative factors, physiological, social, moral. The most perfect structure may be employed for purposes to which it is not apt; wrongly employed for the right purpose, it will buckle or default. Thus in dialectic, reasoning may flag because of fatigue; it may take one meaning for another because of perverse sensory appreciations, due to organic maladjust¬ ments; haste, due to absence of inhibition, may lead one to take a meaning to be clear when it is cloudy or ambiguous with respect to the purpose for which it is used, although EXPERIENCE AND NATURE in itself it is neither clear nor obscure; a desire to show off or to confute an opponent may lead to inconsistency and extraneous irrelevancies. Thousands of things may cause fallacies, when meanings truistically infallible be¬ cause just what they are, are used to reach an end or make a conclusion. Self-contradiction assuredly occurs but it is material and active, not formal and non-exis- tential. We contradict ourselves precisely as we con¬ tradict another person and for much the same reasons.
The ownership of meanings or mind thus vests in nature; meanings are meanings of. The existence of error is proof, not disproof, of the fact that all meanings intrinsically have reference to natural events. The ideal¬ ist who employs the existence of error and of detection and possible correction of error as evidence of the existence, of a pre-existent truth in which errors are contained in their total relationship, and hence are not errors but con¬ stituents of truth, are right in the insistence that error involves objective reference. But in the same way diges¬ tion involves food-stuffs; and yet does not prove that there pre-exists a model digestion in which food is perfectly assimilated. Error involves a possibility of detection and corrections because it refers to things, but the possibility has an eventual, not a backward reference. It denotes the possibility of acts yet to be undertaken. Like the criterion of perfect efficiency in respect to machines, the notion of a complete judgment in which errors exist only as a rectified constituent of a perfect truth, is part of the art of examination and invention. Action and reaction are equal, to a hundred percent of equality; but this formal “law” does not guarantee that in any particular system of action — reaction there is contained perfect efficiency.
NATURE, LIFE AND BODY-MIND 289 Similarly the objective reference of meanings is complete; it is a hundred per cent affair; but it takes errors as well as truth to make up the hundred percent, as it takes waste as well as efficiency to make up the perfect equality of action and reaction.
We mark off certain uses of meanings as reveries in order to control better the cognitive reference of other meanings. So we mark off certain meanings as purely rational or ideal, as dialectical or non-existential, in order to control better an eventual existential reference. Mean¬ ing may become purely esthetic; it may be appropriated and enjoyed for it is in the having. But this also involves control; it is such a way of taking and using them as to suspend cognitive reference.1 This suspension is an ac¬ quired art. It required long discipline to recognize poetry instead of taking it as history, instruction and prediction. The idea that meanings are originally floating and esthe¬ tic and become intellectual, or practical and cognitive, by a conjunction of happy accidents, puts the cart before the horse. Its element of truth is that there is genuine distinc¬ tion between having a meaning and using it; the element of falsity is in supposing that meanings, ideas, are first had and afterwards used. It required long experience to 1 This statement does not rest upon a confusion between objects as causal conditions of meanings and objects as cognitively meant. The distinction is a genuine one, not to be slighted. The former connection is antecedent, the latter is subsequential. But meanings or mind have both kinds of connection. Greek myths for example were adequately condi¬ tioned in existence; but they also have a diagnostic status. When not taken as meanings of the behavior of gods, they are taken as meanings of Greek life, just as a hallucinatory ghost when not taken as a spiritual apparition is taken as meaning another event, say, a nervous shock. Having a meaning is not a reference, but every meaning had is taken or used as well as had. “Dialectic” means to take it a certain way.
EXPERIENCE AND NATURE enforce recognition of the distinction; for originally any meaning had, is had in and for use. To hold an idea con¬ templatively and esthetically is a late achievement in civilization.
Organic and psycho-physical activities with their quali¬ ties are conditions which have to come into existence before mind, the presence and operation of meanings, ideas, is possible. They supply mind with its footing and connection in nature; they provide meanings with their existential stuff. But meanings, ideas, are also, when they occur, characters of a new interaction of events; they are characters which in their incorporation with sentiency transform organic action, furnishing it with new properties. Every thought and meaning has its sub¬ stratum in some organic act of absorption or elimination of seeking, or turning away from, of destroying or caring for, of signaling or responding. It roots in some definite act of biological behavior; our physical names for mental acts like seeing, grasping, searching, affirming, acquiesc¬ ing, spurning, comprehending, affection, emotion are not just “metaphors.” But while a burnt child may shrink from flame just as the dog cowers at the sight of a stick, a child may in addition, when the conditions involved have become a matter of discourse and are ideas, respond to the burn-giving flame in playful, inventive, curious and inves¬ tigative ways. He pokes a stick or piece of paper into it; he uses flame and the fact of its painful and burning con¬ sequence not just to keep away from it, but to do things with it in ways which will satisfy his want to have to do with fire but without getting burned. Biological acts per¬ sist, but have sense, meaning, as well as feeling, tone. Abrupt withdrawal having only negative, protective con- NATURE, LIFE AND BODY-MIND 291 sequences is turned into significant and fruitful explora¬ tion and manipulation. Man combines meanings, like fire, nearness, remoteness, warmth, comfort, nice, pain, expansion, softening, so that fire enters into new inter¬ actions and effects new consequences. By an intra-or- ganic re-enactment of partial animal reactions to natural events, and of accompanying reactions to and from others acquired in intercourse and communication, means- consequences are tried out in advance without the organ¬ ism getting irretrievably involved in physical conse¬ quences. Thought, deliberation, objectively directed imagination, in other words, is an added efficacious function of natural events and hence brings into being new conse¬ quences. For images are not made of psychical stuff; they are qualities of partial organic behaviors, which are their “stuff.” They are partial because not fully geared to extero-ceptor and muscular activities, and hence not complete and overt.
Domination by spatial considerations leads some thinkers to ask where mind is. Reserving the discussion of conscious behavior for the next chapter, and accepting for the moment the standpoint of the questioner (which ignores the locus of discourse, institutions and social arts), limiting the question to the organic individual, we may say that the “seat” or locus of mind — its static phase — is the qualities of organic action, as far as these qualities have been conditioned by language and its consequences. It is usual for those who are posed by the question of “where’ ’ and who are reluctant to answer that mind is “where” there is a spaceless separate realm of existence, to fall back in general on the nervous system, and specifically upon the brain or its cortex as the “seat” of mind. But EXPERIENCE AND NATURE the organism is not just a structure; it is a characteristic way of interactivity which is not simultaneous, all at once but serial. It is a way impossible without structures for its mechanism, but it differs from structure as walking differs from legs or breathing from lungs. Prior to com¬ munication, the qualities of this action are what we have termed psycho-physical; they are not “mental.” The consequences of partaking in communication modify organic ways of acting; the latter attain new qualities.
When I think such meanings as “friend” and “enemy,” I refer to external and eventual consequences. But this naming does not involve miraculous “action at a dis¬ tance.” There is something present in organic action which acts as a surrogate for the remote things signified. The words make immediate sense as well as have signifi¬ cation. This something now present is not just the activ¬ ity of the laryngeal and vocal apparatus. When shortcir- cuiting through language is carried as far as limitation to this apparatus, words are mere counters automatically used, and language disappears. The ideas are qualities of events in all the parts of organic structure which have ever been implicated in actual situations of concern with extra- organic friends and enemies: — presumably in proprio- receptors and organ-receptors with all their connected glandular and muscular mechanisms. These qualities give body and stuff to the activity of the linguistic appara¬ tus. The integration of the qualities of vocal apparatus allied through the nervous mechanism with the qualities of these other events, constitutes the immediate sense of friendliness and animosity. The more intimate the alliance of vocal activity with the total organic disposi¬ tion toward friends and enemies, the greater is the imme- NATURE, LIFE AND BODY-MIND diate sense of the words. The nervous system is in no sense the “seat ” of the idea. It is the mechanism of the connection or integration of acts.
“Socrates is mortal” is hardly more than a counter of logical text-books; S is M will do just as well — or better. But not so to the disciples of Socrates who had just heard of his condemnation to death. The connection of the auditory act with the totality of organic responses was then complete. In some linguistic situations, such emphatic immediate presence of sense occurs; language is then poetical. For other purposes, action is served by elimi¬ nation of immediate sense as far as possible. The atti¬ tude is prosaic; it is best subserved by mathematical symbolism; mathematical not signifying something ready made, but being simply the devices by which mind is rigidly occupied with instrumental objects, by means of artificial inhibition of immediate and consummatory quali¬ ties, the latter being distracting for the activity in hand. The consummatory phase cannot be suppressed or elimi¬ nated however; nature pitched through the door returns through the window. And the common form of its return today is falling down in worship or in fear before the resulting mathematico-mechanical object.